Even more interesting discussion on this topic at: /2005/09/25/is-anthropology-averse-to-o […]

Rex at Savage Minds seems to have taken personally my recent criticism of his focus on the products of anthrop […]

Why does open source work for Linux programmers and not for anthropologists? The Linux programmers have (1) a shared project to which they are all contributing, making Linux a betteer operating system, and (2) an ideology strongly opposed to the notion that knowledge is private property. Anthropologists have (1) a jumble of private projects and (2) an insistence on personal ownership of intellectual property. One system encourages cooperation, the other discourages cooperation.

P.P.S. I say this not to condemn anthropology—a hobby of which I am, I must confess, inordinately fond—but to urge younger anthropologists to take up the task of elaborating theories that actually attempt to explain something in unexpected, interesting, and verifiable ways.

The grand narratives of yesteryear were, if nothing else, good marketing tools for the discipline. We have yet to find their replacements.

Nice allegory.
Latour 1997 said in a nettime interview with Geert Lovink, openness would be a complete nightmare for scientists and that small isolated niches were the ultimate condition to produce scientific knowledge.

As a field we are caught in a system highly analogous to that which Clifford Geertz desecribes in Agricultural Involution, his study of Javanese peasants trapped in a vicious cycle of cultivating ever more intensively smaller and smaller plots of land. Arguably, then, what we need is a shakeout, with most of us going off to do other things, leaving behind the enterprising consolidators who will reshape the field into larger, more valuable chunks. I’m not saying that we need to pursue a monoculture agribusiness model—that would be utterly tasteless. But some big family farms growing organic produce—that might be interesting.

I am working on a research team studying kids’ informal learning with digital technology. Like Rex we’re also worried about our work not being ready for primetime, but we’re committed to open sourcing our process as much as possible in order to develop a community of ‘developers’ and ‘consumers’ around our work. So we’re doing it in stages:

-We use site-specific wikis to share fieldnotes and other research documents within the various working groups.

-We use a private blog to share research memos and links, and to discuss relevant literature amongst the larger research team.

-We’re talking about sharing informal reports on our findings and developing themes on a weekly basis via our website (not yet up…).

Why shouldn’t more anthropologists be opening up their process the way we’re trying to – and the way the FOSS community has? In The Cathedral and the Bazaar Richard Stallman laid out many of the principles that make open source work – principles that could work for anthropology as well. Let’s drawn an analogy, for example, between debugging code and analyzing ethnographic data (‘debugging culture?’). Stallman says ‘parallel debugging’ (thousands of developers simultaneously working to identify and fix problems in the code) is essential to the open source process because, as Linus Torvalds said, every problem is bound to be transparent to somebody. I’d say the same for the task of analyzing ethnographic data. Sometimes we miss the forest for the trees. Sometimes we can’t see the obvious because we’re too entrenched in the data. Sometimes a colleague or an informant has just the right knowledge and context to provide that ‘ah hah’ moment.

I’m not saying it’s the sort of thing that all anthropologists ought be doing, but rather that it’s the type of thing that would truly constitute open source anthropology. In a nutshell it’s this: adopting open access publishing models is about the product, but debugging culture is about the process, which is where the open source model really hits its stride. Could anthropology be open to this? Yes, I’d like to think so, but maybe not anytime soon. (See previous argument)