Monthly Archives: July 2008

Transhumanism vs. Anthropology

In my ongoing quixotic attempt to highlight places where anthropology should be and isn’t, I thought I would bring up the issue of transhumanism, once more with feeling.
Over the years of being a participant-observer amongst geeks, I’ve repeatedly found myself amongst transhumanists. I’ve even written about it a bit, though only as a kind of limit case for certain understandings of history. The only good scholarly work on transhumanism I know of is by Richard Doyle (which is to be distinguished from scholarly work BY transhumanists, which is actually remarkably common if you cast a wide net). I’m a bit gun-shy from trying to engage experimental philosophers, but I’ve often wondered why there is so little interest from anthropologists in this brand of scientific-cum-theological thinking—or vice versa. It seems to me that crap like Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near is pretty bad press for this group—worse in any case than Ted William’s freezing his head, which is just the kind of creepy shit the press loves. There are a lot of interesting variations on transhumanism, from your basic immortality by downloading consciousness onto silicon, to more probable concerns with alteration of the human body through drugs, surgery, or bionic additions. This is just to say that like any ism, it’s pretty hard to pin down.

So I was happy to see that a publication I had never heard of before— “The Global Spiral: A Publication of the Metanexis Institute”— has published a series of articles by scholars in science studies, philosophy and literature (Andy Pickering, Don Ihde, Katherine Hayles and others) about transhumanism (volume 9, Issue 3). Unfortunately, they are all pretty un-anthropological in their approach, preferring to criticize transhumanism rather than engage it. I know why… extreme versions of transhumanism can be pretty unctuous, raising specters of race-purity, eugenics, bad technological determinism etc. However, I for one am pretty surprised by the continued growth of this “movement” (what makes it a movement?) and lately, I’ve started to think that it might well move into a more mainstream light as there are people like Nick Bostrom (an Oxford Ph.D.) and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies gaining attention and authority… Wait a minute, ethics and emerging technologies? Isn’t that what I study?!? Quick, freeze my head!
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How to do research – special free sample

Soon I will be teaching my department’s ‘professionalization seminar’ — a course for grad students about the ‘secular’ aspects of being an academic and getting a job both within academia and without. This has meant a lot of stepping back and trying to formulate what it is that I do when I do professor stuff, as well as trying to explain to myself and others that while of course we have specialized skills, much of what we do is also valuable to people who don’t go on to purely academic professions.

This morning I was checking my email like usual, writing a blog entry and so forth, when I suddenly stopped and realized ‘hey, I should lecture on what just happened.’ So here is a rough draft of what I’ll do in class for people who aren’t at UH, a sort of free sample for everyone out — hopefully it will be worth more than you paid for it!

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Anthropology as personal transformation

I’ve just got back from vacation — sorry for the radio silence — and have been thinking about anthropology as personal transformation. There is a long and deep current of feeling in anthropology which sees doing anthropology as something that changes the person who does it and argues, in various ways, that this change itself is worthwhile, or a form of knowledge in itself, or philosophically or ethically important. Often this is framed in terms of fieldwork, and the way that long-term immersive fieldwork (often in ‘another culture’) transforms the person who undergoes it.

I’d like to write a series of posts exploring the different ways in which this current or impulse presents itself in anthropology and how it is often in conflict with another deep current in anthropological thought: the idea that anthropology ought be objective, and anxiety that our methods and writing are not objective enough.

Uh… whether I actually write that series of posts remains to be seen but in the meantime… anyone else have ideas about this topic?

Around the Web

To the Trees! Ted McIlwraith at fieldnotes ponders in a short post whether environmentalists will come into conflict with indigenous communities in British communities British Columbia now that the latter have invested in logging companies.

Cooking for Peace: L.L. Wynn at Culture Matters spotted a book on Cuisines of the Axis of Evil, written with the goal of fostering better international relations through learning about America’s “enemies.” Wynn writes the book might apply to a class she teaches on Food across Cultures. But I wonder if there were a book for the class she wants to teach on Sex across Cultures (say Sex in the Axis of Evil) that this might foster even more cultural understanding.

Materiality and Photography: This post by Haidy L Geismar at Material Culture provides a broad survey of online resources on photography and invites comments for more suggestions. As Haidy notes in the introductory comment, there is a great deal of work out there on the materiality of photographs, which makes the online discussion of photographs all the more interesting.

It may be a favorite pastime of American graduate students to complain about the academic job market and worry about finding a job. Well, the good news is we’re not alone. Apparently, Japanese students and recent PhDs have the same problem.

Cheering Out of Place: Anne Applebaum’s article on slate on the international composition of ostensibly local sports teams offers an interesting case to think about a potentially emergent group of transnational elites and changing expressions of nationalism.

ARC seeks passengers and drivers

One of my various projects is looking for new blood: the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory is looking for people to help with the management of the project. As a collaboratory, it’s intended to be an umbrella for different kinds of research projects that work together on problems and concepts in a loosely defined, geographically and academically dispersed way. The current research has settled into two major research projects. The first is a project on critical infrastructure protection or “Vital Systems Security” organized by Andy Lakoff and Stephen Collier. The other is a project on the ethics and politics of synthetic biology and nanotechnology that includes myself, Gaymon Bennett and Paul Rabinow.

We use a simple WordPress installation to coordinate our research, and much of the discussion over the years has been about how to improve the specifically academic modes of interaction we are accustomed to (i.e. email and sharing documents for review and critique) to take advantage of new software tools and new kinds of research, much of which is frequently discussed here. Right now, I’m the main “technical” person, but I’m looking for people (especially graduate students) who might want to participate in this project and help make the tools more effective, figure out how to manage a collaboratory (i.e. herd cats), or contribute to these research projects or even start a new one. This potentially includes one or more paid positions, but that depends on how much work required or desired. If anyone is interested in participating at any level, please contact me (ckelty at rice dot edu)

Around the Web

iPhone Brings People Together: danah boyd at apophenia wrote a piece on whether iPhone could become a wide-spread enough platform to create new social clusters (which, interestingly enough, should be distinguished from both networks and communities).

Archaeology as Anthropology: cfeagans at Hot Cup of Joe gives a nice summary of Lewis Binford’s classic 1958 essay.

Don’t Quote Me: diende at Neuroanthropology traced the popular press coverage of a recent article from the American Sociological Review. The journal article suggested that genetic factors may be one of many variables in male delinquent behavior. The resulting Reuters title read: “Study finds genetic link to delinquency.” diende concludes:

So, to sum up, we get the reductionism and determinism tied into biology, all with a look at what might count as popular—biological explanations for behavior, drug interventions, genes-made-me-do-it defenses. The social science side is treated as “specific” and secondary. In other words: there is still a lot of work for the critical neurosciences and every other related field to do.

Anthropology’s Renaissance: Although I didn’t know the discipline was in the dark ages, Ken Banks writes that the recent of some sociocultural anthropologists towards technology studies has produced a mini-renaissance and taken away the ‘mystery’ that obscures anthropology from the public.

Repatriating American Remains: In a nice twist of fate, the U.S. is asking Mexico for the remains of several American soldiers found in a grave dating to 1856 from the Mexican-American War.

The New York Times published an obituary on Penn-State archaeologist William T. Sanders, which includes the following:

Late in his career, Dr. Sanders achieved a degree of popularity as a co-host of a PBS series on ancient cultures. But in the field of Mesoamerican archaeology, he was best known for a landmark survey of central Mexican sites in the 1970s.

They Studied Man

My vacation getaway bookstore has a glorious anthropology section. This is my favorite so far:

by Abram Kardiner and Edward Preblle

Kardiner was a sort of well-known psychoanalyst who wrote about anthropology and psychoanalysis. Preble was at the time “studying first law, and then philosophy and anthropology. During this same period he was also a high school science teacher and worked as a professional tennis player during the summers.” Who does that any more? Along with the passing of the golden age of anthropology (and I note the book refers to anthropology as a science throughout without batting an eye, thank you very much), I guess the golden age of part-time professional sports is over too. Sigh.

Free Software and Free Services

I don’t usually write here about this kind of issue, but things are slow, obviously (and it’s something I care a lot about). The lessons of Free Software are important ones, but they are also lessons from an era when everyone installed software on their own personal computer. Each new user needed a copy of Microsoft Word, or an audio/video editing program. But today, we live in an era of increasingly common “software services” or web applications–ranging from Web 2.0 services like flickr or de.licio.us to Google’s attempt to own your desktop with web-based versions of every application you used to buy (Google Docs and so on). What does Free Software mean in this context, when one company owns the servers via which thousands or millions of people access their software?

The answer has been hard to formulate, and has been one of the key struggles around the creation of the GNU GPL version 3 (and it’s variant, the AGPL)— the most commonly used free software license (the history of which is in chapter 6 of my book). Now a group of people associated with the Free Software Foundation have finally started to organize and evangelize around this issue. Autonomo.us is a group of Free Software activists who have penned a “Franklin Street Statement” that tries to get at some of the principles people might employ to bring the lessons of Free Software from the PC era to the web apps world.

Why does this matter for anthropologists? Well for one thing, we talk a lot on this blog about all the cool tools that anthropologists might use to make their work more effective. Whether that’s Google Maps mash-ups or collaborative editing via Google docs, they all raise an important issue: who owns your data? Ask any longtime “anthropology and computing” person about data formats and you’ll get an earful of spew about incompatibilities, mouldering data tapes and belly-up businesses whose applications are no longer supported and probably lost to the mists of time. Free Software is one possible way to deal with this threat to your data. It’s not a panacea, of course, but it’s important both technically and politically— free software means free data formats and the legal and practical ability to salvage your data and applications from obscurity. But it also means a commitment to freedom of a different kind: freedom to innovate the tools we use. I don’t bother with Atlas Ti or any other proprietary coding tool for exactly these reasons: I don’t own my data format, I don’t have the right to change it, I can’t add extensions and share them with my peers and so forth. The same thing is set to happen with most web-based applications, and it’s important not only for developers to think carefully about how software services enhance rather than limit freedom, but for users as well to consider these issues.

I’d like to see anthropologists being a lot more technically innovative—but it comes with a risk. The ease of use that is valued in Google docs comes with the risk that Google will slowly lock down the freedom it currently provides. The same thing is clearly also true at the level of our publishing infrastructure–whether that is Wiley-Blackwell’s secret corporate content managing borg matrix, or our once beloved AnthroSource, which is itself set to be “re-designed” (and I’ll bet my farm the “re-designers” have none of the principles of Autonomo.us in mind). It’s something worth thinking about.

AAA Conference Call on Minerva

(Update 2008-07-18 8:28 PT): This is apparently a “media release” not a “member release” meaning that the conference call is for members of the media (which is why SM, via Strong, received it). I guess that means that all you members planning on participating better beg off, unless you are members of the media as well, as those of us at the elite Savage Minds Headquarters are. But seriously, don’t call in and grief. Give the AAA and Dr. Low your attention and your respect if you do.

Strong forwarded this email yesterday on an AAA to discuss ethical and intellectual standards for Project Minerva. Imagining the variety of perspectives and disagreements (and as Culture Matters points out, people may be calling in from different time zones around the world), a conference call seems like a pretty difficult medium to handle so many people waiting to speak. Should the moderator allow for questions that is.

Anthropologists Critique Pentagon’s ‘Minerva’
Conference Call July 31, 2-3 pm

For Immediate Release:
July 16, 2008

Anthropologists have a long and, at times, troubled history of working with the military during times of conflict—from World War II to the present-day war on terror.

Recent controversies surrounding the Pentagon’s Human Terrain System, a $40 million program that embeds cultural advisors in combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan, have spilled over into new anxieties surrounding the Pentagon’s ‘Minerva’ program, a Defense Department
initiative to fund social science and humanities research in Pentagon-designated national security-related areas, including terrorism, religious fundamentalism and Chinese military and
technology.

Following a speech on April 14 by Defense Secretary Robert M Gates announcing his vision for Minerva, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) issued a letter from its president to address some concerns about the program. The letter called for a redirection of program management to external organizations that have extensive experience in peer-review and are familiar with the ethical standards and concerns of the anthropology discipline.

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Around the Web

Although I hate to change the topic…

Turn Your Canopeners into Plowshares: In an ongoing series about the global food crisis, National Geographic reports that the South African government is encouraging the rural and urban poor to return to subsistence agriculture. Not mentioned, of course, was just how to ‘return.’ National Geographic did not report on any government initiative to distribute seeds, topsoil, or farming knowledge. And correct me if I am wrong, but aren’t many traditional South African societies cattle-based?

Open-Access Objects: Reuters reported on the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology’s plan to digitize and make an accessible catalog of their entire collection.

Peer tested, journal approved: Tony Waters at ethnography.com shares with the reader some of the more colorful peer review comments he received on a recent article and discusses the benefits and drawbacks of the system.

The New York Times posted the obituary of Ruth Cardoso, urban anthropologist and former first lady of Brazil.

New Digital Divides: French blog Internetactu (English translation here) interviews Japanese sociologist Mito Akiyoshi on growing forms of inequality via moblie technology. Akioshi explodes the myth of the techno-overloaded Japanese citizen. Meanwhile, the Miami Herald wrote on the family remittances of migrant-worker that are fueling a mini technology boom occurring in Maya communities in Chiapas, Mexico. [Thanks to Neuroantropology for spotting the Akioshi interview).

“We’re Quite Comfortable with Our History:” Quote by a member of the Accohannock tribe in the U.S. midatlantic. The Accohannock are petitioning the state of Maryland for official recognition, but have been accused of fraud on their tribal website.

Archaeological Crime Scene: Earlier this year, the FBI barred archaeologists from the Bureau of Land Mangement from participating while the crime agency excavated the remains of a recently-discovered 100+ year-old corpse. According to the article in the Utah Daily News, the FBI are investigating the case for undisclosed reasons.

Web 2.0 Lecture on Web 2.0: Michael Wesch posted a video of a talk he gave last month in Mantioba. Like the review says, grab an iced coffee and enjoy.

Philosophers Discover Lost Tribe in Jungles of Free Will

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of responsibility, and this has necessarily entailed (determined even) my encounter with contemporary (mostly American) moral philosophy. It’s not a domain I would ever seek out, being much more comfortable in the idioms of social theory and continental philosophy, but it’s hardly alien. However, a funny thing happened on my way to the agora, which is that I discovered that a small selection of philosophers have recently gone “experimental.”

Apparently, making broad claims about “what a person would naturally think” have finally become so insupportable that even philosophers have started exploring the possibility of actually talking to people. Experiments measuring “folk beliefs” about whether our world is deterministic or not, or whether free will can exist if the world is deterministic, are intended to settle claims that begin “most people believe that…” Settling such claims is necessary in the domain of moral philosophy, because a concept like responsibility is fundamentally tied to what people do in “everyday” circumstances. If it is not possible to start from some kind of claim about whether (to say nothing of why) people make ascriptions of praise and blame in the same way, then, arguments about free will and moral responsibility start to seem like the proverbial and much-maligned mass and extension of angels living on pins.

Burning ArmchairEnter “X-Phi” — a contingent of young whippersnappers bent on making names for themselves by shaking up some methodological verities in their discipline, “trailing blogs of glory” (as K. A. Appiah deligtfully characterized it) and sporting a burning arm-chair as their logo. You can get a T-shirt, here. You can befriend Experimental Philosopher on myspace here (you’ll be in some rocking company). Or read about them in Slate.

Needless to say, and I speak on behalf of all of us here, This Rocks. Continue reading →

Around the Web

The Moderate Menace: Patricia Cohen at the New York Times writes about the graying of 60’s era radical American faculty and the new generation of politically heterogeneous (but altogether moderate) professors. The article considers whether the shift in faculty values is the result of a pure generational shift or the increase in corporatization of the university forcing junior faculty to be more career-oriented.

UC Press Only Gets Better with Age: UC Press is moving aggressively into the wine publishing market, releasing six wine books in 2008 alone. Could an ethnography of wine culture be far off?

The Death of Life-Writing: Some may consider it the antithesis of ethnography, but this Guardian article on the academic, literary, and market troubles facing biography proves an interesting commentary on the ups and downs of a non-fiction genre.

Slot Machines Destroy Your Mind: No kidding? Lorenz at antropologi.info comments on Natasha Dow Schull’s piece in the Washington Post warning readers about the antisocial effects of slot machines.

You Too Can Edit an Open Access Journal: L.L. Wynn at Culture Matters published the spam letter she received inviting her to be the editor-in-chief of “The Open Demography Journal.” One little problem. Wynn isn’t a demographer. For more on Bentham Science, publishers, the organization that sent Wynn the email, read this interview.

The Opposite of Anthropology?

Christian Lander, originator of Stuff White People Like, is profiled in the Los Angeles Times today. It’s bad enough, of course, that we’ve already had an extensive discussion of whether or not it’s about race or class (Lander claims the latter), or whether or not it’s funny or lame (i think the consensus was more the latter); now it seems that he is One Of Us. That is, anthropologist (not freak). “Christian Lander, anthropologist of Stuff White People Like” reads the headline, “Christian Lander has turned his popular blog into a satiric ethnographic book.”

It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the intuition that makes “anthropologist” work in this way. It’s obviously not Margaret Mead or Indy, our more conventional betes noires. In fact, there is something strangely on-target in this usage: the idea that anthropologists cleverly reveal the deep structure of the seemingly close at home or obvious. I’m not sure whether we should induct Lander or not… but if we had a real professional society representing us, maybe they would seize on this and leverage it something funny… maybe something about first contact with an isolated tribe of academics?

What counts as ‘first contact’? An example from Papua New Guinea

What does it mean for a group to be in ‘contact’ with the ‘outside world’? Can there ever be a ‘first contact’ between peoples? Is anyone truly ‘isolated’? I’d like to try to answer these questions by providing an example from my own area of expertise, Ipili speaking people from Porgera district, Papua New Guinea (I’m traveling and don’t have my library so the facts will have to be from memory — sorry if I get some of them wrong). Porgera is in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, which is well-known for its famous first contact in 1933 when Australian explorers walked over a mountain ridge thinking they would discover a rugged central mountain range with a few scattered populations, if anything. Instead they found huge flat valleys with a population of roughly 1 million people. They had a camera and you can watch the footage or read the excellent book about this even called First Contact and the documentary that accompanies it, or even the flickr stream (for more details you can see the syllabus of my course on first contact which is not the most recent version but there you go). If we want to talk about first contact, the PNG highlands is the perfect example — it is both a dramatic moment of culture contact and exhaustively documented.

My own area of expertise is Porgera District, which is far west of the original 1933 contact took place. The Porgera first contact took place in 1938-39, when an exploratory patrol led by Jim Taylor and James Black entered the valley (Bill Gammage has written Sky Travellers, a book about this patrol. It is my favorite book about Papua New Guinea. Superb. Also hard to find.) Pretty much everyone agrees this was Porgera’s ‘first contact’ and marked the beginning of Australian control of the valley, the first time people saw metal or cloth, and so forth. So if you ask me, Porgera had first contact 1938-39.

But was it?
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Are there ‘uncontacted tribes’? The short answer: No.

As some of you know, one of my areas of expertise is first contact in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, and in the course of my fieldwork I was lucky enough to speak with a few of the people who remembered the first couple of Australian patrols into the area where I worked in Papua New Guinea. So although I am critical of exoticised stories of ‘first contact’ I do think in certain situations using the term ‘uncontacted’ or ‘first contact’ is appropriate.

But not all situations, and especially not the case of “lost tribe that wasn’t” which our own Jay Sosa “mentioned on SM”:/2008/06/29/around-the-web-19/ recently. This topic was also covered on my colleague “Jamon Halvaksz’s blog”:http://politicsofnature.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/not-so-lost-tribes/. A member of Survival International then left a comment on Jamon’s blog defending the article (see this “press release”:http://www.survival-international.org/campaigns/uncontactedtribes and their own “blog entry”:http://www.survival-international.org/blog/2008/06/23/lost-uncontacted-tribe-knew-exactly-where-they-were/) and directing readers to their “page on uncontacted tribes”:http://www.survival-international.org/campaigns/uncontactedtribes.

So what do anthropologists who specialize in first contact say? Are there ‘uncontacted tribes’? The short answer is ‘no’, and while I appreciate SI’s work on behalf of ‘tribal’ people, I find it disappointing to find that they still use this sort of language. Any one who reads the material on their web page will see that by ‘uncontacted’ they actually man ‘frequently in contact with, and victimized by, outsiders’. Let’s take a look at the evidence from SI’s website.
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