Continuing themes raised in my previous post, I’d like to present another riddle of rationalization and reflect on its meaning and impact.

As part of the planning process for the building project in which I’m involved, I joined my colleagues in various fieldtrips to other institutions. In the course of those travels I saw and heard about many odd cases in which codes of various sorts, complicated by their local interpretation, had a significant role in shaping architectural decisions. The example that I wish to consider could have happened anywhere, so its precise location doesn’t matter. All you need to know is that the buildings in question are located at an American institution of higher education.

The institution built an addition that links two late 19th-century buildings. At the time of construction, local authorities said that only two of the four entrances on one side of the complex had to meet the accessibility standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Since the average distance between the entries is only slightly more than 50 feet, this seemed sensible. Adding two more large ramps would raise costs significantly and, more important, deface the historic buildings. (Although they are historic, they aren’t on the state or federal historic register, an issue I’ll get to in a second.)

A couple of years after the building was opened, though, the local code official, apparently under pressure from higher-ups elsewhere, reversed the earlier decision. Now all four doors either had to be made ADA-compliant or the two non-compliant ones had to be decommissioned as public entries.

The institution, like virtually all American colleges and universities, is committed to the letter and spirit of the ADA. But absent a budget for the addition of two substantial concrete ramps and a willingness to compromise the look of handsome old buildings, the institution removed exterior handles from the doors in question.

If you think about it, this is an absurd resolution to the code problem. It provides no benefit to motor-disabled people but inconveniences everyone else. In fact, by forcing everyone to use the same entrances at times of peak traffic, it probably reduces accessibility for the disabled. I was told that in nice weather, students engage in petty acts of resistance by jamming the two handle-less doors open so that they can enter more conveniently. The situation does little more than encourage grassroots contempt for the law, including the ADA.

Now if the original buildings had been entered into the Historic Register–itself a complex bureaucratic process–they might have been exempted from such a high level of ADA compliance. But entering the Register gives government authorities considerable power to determine how the buildings can be used and modified, something that the owner seeks to avoid if possible, if only because it adds another layer of paperwork to future decisions about campus buildings.

So there we are: one of those “death of common sense” cases that we’re all accustomed to trading with friends. Its practical impact ranks only slightly above trivial, but if you multiply this situation tens of thousands of times, you start to understand some of the reasons why great swaths of America are architectural wastelands. It’s vastly easier and cheaper to tear down old buildings and replace them with generic boxes that are known to be in full compliance with every relevant code, at the cost of visual interest. Similar logics get applied in realms like health care, education, and criminal justice, where the stakes are dramatically higher and the results more dehumanizing. The modern world is constructed by situations like this, one tiny piece at a time.

Affluent and educated people usually find ways to dodge bureaucratic roadblocks. The poor, the linguistically challenged, the socially marginal–they either find themselves crushed by regulations or forced to work outside them.

As I asked in the earlier post, where is power in this story? Whose interests are being served? It’s hard to figure that out. Codes may reflect public pressure for greater safety and for accommodation of the disabled. They force people to implement energy-saving technologies, which is good for Planet Earth. They may also feather the nests of particular building trades and especially for consultants who make their living by explaining insanely complex regulations to clients. They raise construction costs, which probably affects the working- and middle-class disproportionately.

Where is an anthropology that would give us purchase on these phenomena, which are at least as relevant to everyday experience as the (utterly predictable) race-class-gender mantra that defines contemporary work? Such an anthropology would have to integrate complexity theory with Weberian and post-Weberian work on bureaucratic structures, rationalization, and the sociology of expert knowledge. You can find shreds and patches of this in STS, hints of it in the recent AE issue dealing with Institutional Review Boards. But there’s a big space available for ambitious thinkers looking for something fresh and important to work on.

This post brings to a close my month as a visitor at SavageMinds. I’d like to thank the SM team for their hospitality and express my appreciation to those of you who chose to comment –approvingly or not–on my contributions.

I’m grateful for Strong’s post calling attention to David Graeber’s recent Malinowski Lecture on bureaucracy and power. These issues have been much on my mind in recent months.

Some personal background: One of the challenges (and very occasionally, pleasures) of working at a small college is that faculty members are often given administrative tasks that transcend the usual chairing of departments and programs. Where I teach, most of the top administrative officers are working academics, a situation that sets a tone for the rest of the faculty. Since 1998, I have been involved in a large building project that by 2012 will have encompassed the construction of three major buildings–two faculty office buildings and a new college library–and the remaking of a core part of the campus. I share chairing duties with the College Librarian, but in reality my co-chair and I have little latitude to make key decisions. Most of the time, we herd cats and serve as institutional memory for a multi-million dollar project that, when completed, will have taken nearly 15 years from initial conceptualization to the ritual cutting of the last ribbon.

For an anthropologist, architecture and site-planning are a real-world test of social analysis–it is, as they say, where the rubber meets the road. Architecture on college and university campuses is inevitably a form of social engineering, with all the possibilities (and delusions) that this entails. But even the most laudable goals–e.g, “creating a lively environment that facilitates teaching and learning”–must be weighed against such factors as cost, aesthetics, building codes, and unknown but presumably radical changes in IT in the coming decades. Fortunately, we’ve been working with a team of gifted architects with considerable experience in how buildings and people interact.

So where’s the anthropology in this? To design and construct buildings today is to wrestle with all the contradictions of modernity–in particular, what is often called the “irrationality of rationality” as manifested in risk-management, “accountability,” “due diligence,” and bureaucratic proceduralism.

Here I refer not to the college bureaucracy, which is minimal, but to the various and vast regulatory regimes that one deals with to build anything in America today.

In his Malinowski Lecture, Graeber leaps from a consideration of bureaucratic obtuseness, where his observations are right on target, to power and “structural violence.” Without questioning the importance of structural violence, I would insist that it is peripheral to a discussion of bureaucracy as such. Structural violence doesn’t need bureaucracy (although it often uses bureaucracy) and bureaucracy isn’t invariably in the service of structural violence. Where bureaucracy is concerned, in fact, invoking power doesn’t explain anything because power is what needs to be explained. (Was it Marshall Sahlins who quipped, “Power is the new functionalism”?)

Consider an example that arises directly from Graeber’s talk. He mentions that access to many college libraries is limited to patrons with proper IDs. Failure to abide by the ID-only rule may evoke violence in the form of physical expulsion by campus security personnel. One might conclude that this exclusionary policy exists to separate the faculty, staff, and students of elite institutions from contact with social undesirables, however defined. There is doubtless some truth in this. But from the institution’s perspective, failure to provide adequate security makes the institution vulnerable to post hoc claims that it “failed to demonstrate due diligence” should something unfortunate–rape or homicide, say–occur on its premises. The institution may therefore feel compelled to err on the side of caution in matters of library security even if the objective risks are small.

Far more common (if less obvious to ordinary building patrons) are expensive efforts to meet or exceed other kinds of safety codes. The driving force behind these may be less the absolute risk of injury in the event of a fire, say, than it is the extraordinary financial disaster that could befall the institution if a tragic accident could plausibly be attributed to a failure of due diligence.

This sounds like an observation about American’s tort crisis, but I see the tort issue as a symptom rather than a cause. Deeper historical factors include the collapse of broadly held theodicies that can account for misfortune, the rise of an instrumental rationalism focused on control and the calculation of what Giddens calls “risk profiles,” and, closely related to the latter, the growing pervasiveness of rhetorics of accountability. (BTW, for a lively history of the notion of risk, I recommend Peter L. Bernstein’s Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk.)

So who’s wielding power here? Is it the state lording it over the private sector? Is it the general public forcing institutions and businesses to honor the greater good? Is it (barely) middle-class code enforcers busting the chops of the wealthy? Clearly, simplistic notions of power don’t do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon.

The only anthropological work with which I’m familiar that gets close to this ubiquitous element of modernity is the literature on “audit culture,” mostly coming out of the UK and focused on increasing “accountability” in higher education, a movement that is growing in the US as well. (See this and this from Inside Higher Education.) Audit culture is linked to Thatcherite politics, but it is easy to find similar demands for accountability coming out of the progressive end of the political spectrum.

So I find myself in agreement with David Graeber that this is an under-analyzed set of issues in anthropology. To do justice to it, however, we must dial back our current and, to my mind, deeply problematic commitment to power as an explanatory concept, in favor of a more open-ended consideration of how bureaucracy works to create, mobilize, redirect, and confound power through logics and rhetorics of accountability, risk management, and the like.

I welcome suggestions from readers about recent work that grapples with facets of this broad issue in case I’m missing critical pieces of the puzzle, which is entirely possible.

Next time: Some thoughts on how risk-management, code compliance, and accountability play out in planning and architecture.

Some experts close to the process see this as a good thing. Their argument is largely a pragmatic one: at least the world is talking about this stuff and finally taking measures to protect heritage from IP piracy. If you want to get the general flavor of this, click here to read about South Korea’s current efforts to define and preserve whatever it defines as its cultural heritage.

Although I’ve met many people involved with heritage protection and generally find them smart and motivated by the best of intentions, I’m a heritage protection skeptic, which puts me in good company. For a bracing critique full of tart humor, check out David Lowenthal’s article “Heritage Wars,” published in a UK online magazine last year. Other recent contributions to the skeptic’s position include Rob Albro’s 2005 essay “Making Cultural Policy and Confounding Cultural Diversity,” as well as a recent essay by Dorothy Noyes called “The Judgment of Solomon: Global Protections for Tradition and the Problem of Community Ownership,” accessible here.

Among the points made by these critics: (1) the current passion for heritage protection gives the state increased formal control over heritage and the definition of heritage; (2) the inevitable bureaucratization of heritage tends to provide employment to elites rather than the grassroots communities ostensibly being helped; (3) state control is likely to encourage less heritage diversity rather than more; and (4) by ossifying heritage and treating it as if it were a national resource subject to rational management, heritage legislation may kill, or at least significantly distort, the very thing it attempts to protect.

As a topic for anthropological research, this is obviously the mother lode, at least for fieldworkers who can manage to stay awake during endless, highly legalistic conversations about how best to manage culture and heritage. (Oh, and they’d better have big expense accounts,too, since so much of the policy debate takes place in New York, Paris, and Geneva.) It is clearly only one expression of a larger social process of rationalization to which I’ll turn my attention in my last comments as a carpetbagger at SM.

But one has to ask: In an era when anthropology has dedicated itself to ceaseless moralizing, where should we stand on the issue? It would be hypocritical to reinvent it as just another “social problem” for dispassionate research, since anthropologists themselves were instrumental, first, in defining culture, and second, in raising a hue and cry about the commodification and theft of cultural elements via the global IP system. It’s an interesting dilemma.

(BTW, the organigram above is an edited version of a real organizational chart from a Ministry of Culture (or was it Tourism? I can’t recall) cribbed from the website of an eastern European republic that will remain anonymous. Truth really is stranger than parody.)

If you’re interested in how images move and morph in a digitally linked world, check out a recent essay in Harper’s about “Molotov Man,” who was born in a photograph taken by Susan Meiselas in revolutionary Nicaragua in 1979. (Work by Meiselas can be seen in the website of the photo agency Magnum.) It was subsequently appropriated for artistic and political purposes in Nicaragua and beyond.

Molotov man is the subject of the Harper’s article “On the Rights of Molotov Man:
Appropriation and the Art of Context,” by Susan Meiselas and Joy Garnett, published in the February issue. It also figures in the multimedia record of an NYU conference, Comedies of Fair U$e,” held in April 2006. The conference attracted such fair-use heavyweights as James Boyle, Lawrence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Jonathan Lethem.

Does anyone know of specific indigenous images that are this well-traveled?

If you can prove that something isn’t novel, that it has been known and used for a long time, then it can’t be patented.

To defend traditional knowledge from exploitative patenting, then, there are two basic and fundamentally opposed choices under existing law: define it as a trade secret or protect it in plain view. The goal of the latter is to establish that patent applicants who make use of this information fail to meet the novelty standard.

Although the trade-secrets approach sounds promising, and some legal scholars argue that it’s the way to go for the protection of traditional IPR, it has certain problems. For one thing, a lot of TK isn’t especially secret. It is, almost by definition, in wide circulation within a society. Trade-secrets laws typically say that anyone who can duplicate trade secrets independently–say, through reverse engineering–is free to use them. Still, one can argue that the Aboriginal “keeping-places” emerging in Australia, repositories for TK that have strict rules of access, follow something like a trade-secrets approach. To a more limited extent, protocols for the use of Native American TK in American archives are moving in a similar direction.

The plain-view approach has been adopted in a few important cases–notably, that of Ayurveda, which is documented by the Indian government in the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library. (Site is publicly accessible but requires a simple registration.) The idea is to establish “prior art” and therefore refute claims of novelty.

Yet as the sociologist Sita Reddy has argued in a provocative essay, “Making Heritage Legible,” just published in the International Journal of Cultural Property, the conversion of Ayurvedic tradition into a database generates all manner of contradictions and conflicts.

(A PDF of Reddy’s paper can be found here, the website of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.) What Reddy calls “state-based cultural documentation” has the effect of producing “new cultural objects that transform the nature of knowledge, and new cultural subjects–or ‘biological citizens’–who transform the politics of knowedge through contested claims of ownership.” She doesn’t claim that all the effects of the TKDL are negative, only that in the course of protecting Ayurveda from predation they also change it in complex ways. This echoes the assertion of Madhavi Sunder, the legal scholar, that “the concept of traditional knowledge, too, is a modern invention.”

What about the broader implications of reinventing TK and cultural heritage as a resource that should be subject to rational, bureaucratic management, much like energy or water? That’s the subject of my next post.

The more I track anthropological work in intellectual property rights (IPR), the more it seems that as a discipline we’ve leveraged ourselves into a strange and contradictory place. On the one hand, many of us enthusiastically support the idea of open access (see Rex’s recent post, for example, or check out the website of the Alexandria Archive Institute). On the other, anthropologists are collaborating with indigenous organizations to create more robust controls over access to indigenous knowledge in the interest of discouraging various forms of cultural appropriation (often described as creating a form of “cultural copyright”). Those controls are likely to have a profound impact on how and what we publish–they already have, in fact–and even on the accessibility of work published decades in the past.

In theory, the two opposed goals are not irreconcilable. In practice, I’m not so sure. After reading Jeffrey Toobin’s recent New Yorker article about Google’s ongoing efforts to upload millions of books to the web, I trolled Google Book Search (still way in beta) and was blown away. I typed in “Moyobamba,” the name of a Peruvian town not far from where I did fieldwork in the 1970s and 80s, and immediately found a half dozen travelers’ descriptions of the town from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. OK, most of these works are obscure for good reasons, but I might never have encountered them otherwise. Once every ethnography is available to everyone with a computer, what chance do indigenous people have of limiting access to information increasingly defined by them as “sacred” or “sensitive”?

The currently fashionable proposal for dealing with this is to insist that the world defer to “traditional law”–to let the rules of each indigenous group determine how its cultural productions will be used (or not), and by whom. There is an undeniable feel-good quality to this approach. It appears respectful of local values and local sovereignty. It thumbs its nose at the universalizing pretensions of social science and, more important, global capital and the IPR system on which it increasingly depends. It rightly questions simplistic claims about the world’s cultural commons and the moral standing of the public domain as it currently exists.

By and large, though, the IPR problem exists not within the sovereign space of communities, which are mostly free to control information as they see fit, but in the global “space” of the internet and mass media. So how are the traditional laws of hundreds of different micro-nations supposed to be applied in this unruly zone? This is never adequately explained. And it ignores the still more difficult issue of how groups establish that a given cultural element is theirs in the first place.

I’m reminded of a story in Sabina Magliocco’s fine ethnography of American pagans, Witching Culture, in which Lakota elders take it upon themselves to chastize a group of Wiccans for committing an act of cultural appropriation against the Lakota by worshipping in a sacred circle. To which the Wiccans are obliged to reply, respectfully, that the sacredness of circles is not a belief limited to or invented by the Lakota.

A more imaginative approach is woven through recent work coming out of PNG–notably, the essays in Hirsch & Strathern’s Transactions and Creations. Instead of focusing on local sovereignty rights, contributors to the Hirsch and Strathern volume ask, among other things, whether the rest of world can learn useful things from the ways people in PNG approach creativity, intangible property, and transactions involving both.

It’s an intriguing question. Whether the rest of the world is prepared to learn from PNG or anywhere outside of corporate boardrooms is another matter, of course. But I’m cautiously optimistic that change–albeit modest and slow–is in the wind. You can get hints of it from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which has shown considerable interest in questions of traditional cultural and intellectual property.

Next time: Dilemmas of protecting traditional cultural property in plain sight