Thanks very much for your blog, I really enjoyed reading it. From my own observations of social media I got the sense that many people are learning a great deal from the protests – without even being there. I’ve watched some fascinating and educational debates pass across Facebook and Google+. I was joking to someone the other day that the protests should continue because ‘the longer they go on, the more I’ll read of my backlog of books about the GFC’.

One of my ex-students is currently researching Occupy Rio and kindly wrote this blog for me: http://erinbtaylor.com/excavating-ocupa-rio-i-we-are-the-99/

I was wondering if you know of anyone else on the ground at any of these protests who is doing ethnographic-style research? I’d love to be able to make a comparison.

All the best
Erin Taylor

http://kenyonfarrow.com/2011/10/26/occupy-wall-streets-race-problem-my-piece-for-american-prospect/

Whose subject position is theorizing ‘the public’ and is understood as academically/anthropologized to speak, be believed and listened to?

I wonder if the experience in question can be described as if it were a single state. My memories of the anti-Vietnam War movement include a variety of feelings and relationships covering the whole spectrum from collective excitement (Dukheim’s “collective effervescence”?) to fatigue and mutual irritation. If one-day actions contain more of the former, I suspect that sustained efforts like OWF include a great deal of the latter.

Michael Warner’s work on publics and counterpublics has a line at one point about publics by necessity consisting of “stranger sociality,” and that this is, for him, one of the defining elements of “modernity,” that this sort of sociality exists and tends to be the default.

Contrast this with stateless societies or societies more heavily organized around kinship, where the sort of “ownership” of the everyday practice of relating with others, recognizing their identities, roles, representations of themselves, is situated in each person, in day-to-day activity, and less situated in law, institutions, enforcement, etc.

If Graeber & Warner are right, do less individualist-oriented societies have a “public sphere?” What would it mean for Graeber’s comment about anarchism to be true, and for a different sort of sociality to win out? Would it involve fundamentally relating differently to others, with a lot more cultural value placed on practicing communication, listening, and respecting the ad hoc subjectivity of others? I think about these things a lot these days.

Thanks for this post – I know the #occupiers aren’t all anarchists, but since the roots are there, I wonder about people’s experiences of interacting with other humans “differently” during the protests, and if a reduction of that “stranger sociality” is being experienced for some. Is solidarity, as a feeling, something of an opposite?

Non-market non-state actions tend to exist outside the mainstream, and if they become mainstream they formalize their structures and change. This seems to have happened to everything from sports (amateur soccer associations morph into FIFA), to waves of music (which get commercialized rapidly) to digital technologies and their associated cultures.

I do have a problem with contrasting two-way digital culture with one-way mass media, which I think you do in your penultimate paragraph. There have been many two-way and participative forums for activist groups, and I am not convinced that such groups find a wider audience through Twitter than through the older methods, except in that the mass media amplifies Twitter by reporting it – which is a temporary response to its newness.

Anyway, that’s all a bit rambling, but it’s a thought-provoking post. Thanks.