In this blogging miniseries, some of the officers of the AAA’s Archaeology Division (AD) have been outlining what makes the AD unique and important, as well as some future plans to increase our reach, as well as our member numbers. As noted earlier by both Jane Baxter and Patricia McAnany, the AD may not be the primary organization for most archaeologists, but it is the place where we can best bridge archaeology and other parts of anthropology.

Since 2013, my focus within the Archaeology Division has been on publications. But, as of the AAA meeting last week, I have come to the end of my tenure as Publications Director of the Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association. We are back on track, healthy, and publishing some great articles. Our publication – AP3A – is different than most AAA journals: it comes out only once a year, and the articles are submitted as a group with a guest editor. The volume is peer reviewed at several levels, and we don’t accept individually submitted articles. This has been the structure of the journal since its beginnings almost 30 years ago, and because each issue has a specific focus or theme, many scholars use the volumes for both research and teaching. Indeed, articles from AP3A are often also included in other anthropological collections focused on related topics. The journal has relatively small circulation numbers, but it is available in most libraries, and faculty often assign articles in their classes. Now that AnthroSource has been improved and the journal is digital only, anyone with full access to AnthroSource has access to the journal.

Are there ways that the AD can increase the influence and discussion that AP3A volumes produce? If the journal really focuses on broad theoretical and topical issues, shouldn’t more AAA members be interested in its content? If the impact can be increased, it would be to the benefit of the authors, the journal, and the members. Can we leap the divide and encourage other types of anthropologists to read AP3A? Certainly, with AnthroSource, accessibility is easy, but most people are busy and look only at those things they know. How do we get folks to take advantage of their easy accessibility to AP3A, and move us toward better integration of anthropology?

Blogging is one obvious way that we could increase interest in the journal, and we think that it might be a way to keep the issues of the AP3A active and relevant. If we regularly blog about the topics in the issue, more people would become engaged in the discussion, and more people would link back to the original articles.

Although I may be sounding crass, this strategy is not really about numbers – it is a discussion that the AD is having in an attempt to try and make its content more accessible, relevant, and part of larger anthropology conversations.

Many of us are rethinking publications and what they mean. If you work at a university, you are likely being evaluated and measured based on your Google Scholar scores or other such measures. The number of citations you have is seen as a measure of your influence in the profession, and while there are many, many problems with the calculation of such measures and what is included, it is also clear that these so-called “objective” measures will not go away. Universities like to use what they see as objective numbers that someone else calculates, and pushes by faculty to change their use will likely succeed only at the margins.

But I am talking about something else here. We have the technology and capacity to change the way we use and apply publications in our research and teaching. Once something is published, it should not be considered “done.” Why not regularly and actively focus a discussion on the published piece or pieces in a blog related to the publication? Discuss the article(s) and implications for current and/or future research. Highlight things that might be significant or interesting to a broader range of scholars, or to the general public. And, in addition to blogging, promote the discussion in other forms of social media. This is the kind of approach that the AD is discussing to make its work more visible, more accessible, and more relevant to a much broader range of people, whether they ever become members or not. We can have threads that focus on each issue, yet overlap and make broader points, develop arguments for and against specifics, and represent a real discussion of the topics.

What do you think? Would you participate in such discussions? Would it make you rethink your current or former opinion of the AD? Let us know. Of course, we are always open to other ideas too!

Yesterday, the media widely reported the discovery of 850,000 (or so) year old footprints at the British seaside village of Happisburgh. This media coverage coincided with the publication of an article in the open access, peer reviewed journal PLoS ONE, and the announcement that the footprints will be featured as part of an upcoming exhibition called, “Britain: One Million Years of the Human Story” at the Natural History Museum in London.  While the AP story can be found through your media outlet of choice, you also can read a bit about the find through the British Museum blog by curator Nicholas Ashton, who was involved with the project.

The Allure of Footprints

This discovery has generated a good deal of enthusiasm among the general public.  As some small measure of this excitement, I can report six students in my World Prehistory course (of 40 students) emailed me with links to news coverage about the find in a single day. This is not typical, and such news sharing is not required or even necessarily encouraged as part of the course. Archaeologist Clive Gamble, quoted in the AP article, explains why this discovery has such a popular appeal. “This is the closest we’ve got to seeing the people,” he told the AP. “When I heard about it, it was like hearing the first line of [William Blake’s hymn] ‘Jerusalem’ — ‘And did those feet, in ancient time, walk upon England’s mountains green?’ Well, they walked upon its muddy estuary.”

And, he’s right. Footprints (and handprints) are archaeological traces of bodies that point directly to those living in the past. Footprints are different than other traces of the body, particularly skeletal remains, as skeletons serve as such a poignant symbol of human mortality and the finite nature of existence. Hamlet holds Yorick’s skull in his hand and contrasts vibrancy in life to the grim image of death. Medieval monks kept human skulls in their chambers as meditative devices and reminders to live each moment faithfully. The artistic genre of vanitas (still life with skull) from the 16^th and 17^th century symbolized the transient nature of worldly goods and the meaninglessness of earthly existence.

Footprints in the earth or handprints on the walls of caves are direct traces of people acting, doing, moving, and otherwise engaging in the material world. These traces are not static artifacts, but rather a dynamic presence on the landscape- a landscape we share with them in the present. These footprints are an asynchronous brush past another in a particular place, much like following a set of footprints on a secluded hiking trail or a busy, snowy urban sidewalk. These encounters facilitate a connection to those who walked before us, and offer an opportunity to ponder or to imagine who they might have been, and what life must have been like long ago.  It’s no coincidence that we often use the idea of walking in someone’s footsteps or walking a mile in someone’s shoes as a way get to know them in a more intimate, meaningful, and empathetic way.

Footprints and Families

Beyond presenting this close encounter with some of our ancestors, the AP article also highlights, in a typical “biggest, best, brightest” fashion, that these are the oldest footprints ever found outside of Africa. The archaeological significance of the find is also articulated as a unique opportunity for understanding migration and adaptation at what was then the edge of the “inhabited” world. Based on the sizes of the footprints, the social composition of the group is suggested to be one or two large adult males, at least two or three adult females or teenagers, and at least three or four children. Isabelle De Groote, who did much of the analysis on this project, describes the group as likely foraging together along the water, and is quoted by the AP as saying, “These individuals traveling together, it’s likely that they were somehow related.”  The AP story also states of their interview with De Groote, “She said it wasn’t too much of a stretch to call it a family.”

In the case of these footprints, and for whatever reason, “being somehow related” certainly became family to reporters. The AP story led, “They were a British family on a day out- almost a million years ago.” Many headlines for the story are, “A Million year old family?” Reports of the footprints on blogs, Twitter, and other social media sites include descriptions of the footprints as representing a family on an outing, a family on a picnic, a family on a “beach romp,” an “extended family” or as a group of “ancient sunbathers.” Perhaps the most elaborate interpretation of the family at Happisburgh comes in an artist’s depiction published with the story in the Daily Mail.

Six individuals are depicted in the image. Three males are in the foreground (one represented only by a hand holding a stone tool) processing a slain deer. Another male is holding two large denuded branches and is aggressively defending the group and its food from a hyena-like animal. A female sits on the ground watching the man and hyena scenario, and appears concerned while she cares for a child seated beside her. A second child plays in the reeds, seemingly oblivious to the activity around him/her. This tableau of our ancestors takes place in a landscape that, to my eye, is uncomfortably crowded with a menagerie of wild animals.

Seeing this image made me immediately think of perhaps the most famous ancient footprint find of all time: those from the site of Laetoli in Tanzania.  Mary Leakey excavated the Laetoli Footprints in 1978, and at approximately 3.6 million years old these footprints are some of the best definitive evidence for early bipedalism among our Australopithecine ancestors. The Laetoli footprints are in two tracks, and it is believed three, or perhaps four, individuals made them. While scholars have stated it is impossible to know the age and sex of the individuals who made the footprints at Laetoli, they too have been interpreted as representing the movements of a family comprised of a mother, father, and youngster.  Like the Happisburgh footprints, this earlier find inspired artistic interpretations of family life in the past.

One image in the National Museum of Tanzania (and on the Internet in a variety of places) depicts the Australopithecine family of Laetoli walking past a grazing giraffe and a flock of large birds, with a volcano ominously on the verge of eruption in the distance. The male is out in front with wooden or bone tools in each hand, and the female walks behind carrying a child. They don’t seem like a very happy family.

A slightly different interpretation of the Australopithecine family at Laetoli appears in a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History. Here, two of our ancestors are seen strolling leisurely together; Australopithecine male has his arm in a casual (romantic?  proprietary? protective?) gesture, draped over Australopithecine female’s shoulders as she looks away (At a giraffe? At a volcano? At the Australopithecine she’d rather be strolling with?). 

Footprints and Fallacies

The Happisburgh footprints provide a great example of how despite taking great care in speaking about social organization in the past archaeological interpretations often become simplified using modern terms. “Footprints as families” offer a compelling way for media, museums, and artists to connect a contemporary public to the prehistoric past. Imagining a group of our ancestors walking as a family is a powerful, emotional, and alluring image in a contemporary world where so many cultures hold the idea of family in such high esteem. But, then it gets tricky. Family is a concept that is realized with incredible diversity in the contemporary world, and issues around what and who constitutes a family is not without considerable controversy. Exactly who is that prehistoric family, and whose idea of family are we imprinting on the past? And, how does that projection obfuscate the unique social configurations that may have existed in prehistory?

Scholarship about artistic depictions of prehistory in textbooks, in museum displays (dioramas and paintings), in fiction writing, and at archaeological sites have all reached similar conclusions: by projecting modern concepts onto the past, current social norms are naturalized, normalized, and made universal. (See sources) Prehistoric children play, learn, and are cared for by women, but are never depicted working, producing, or helping adults- roles that are well documented in contemporary, historical and ethnographic studies of childhood. Prehistoric women stay at home, take care of the children, prepare and cook food, engage in domestic chores, and spend a good deal of time sitting.  Prehistoric men go to work: they build, they hunt, they butcher kill, they protect, they make, and they explore. No one seems to live long enough to get old in the past either, as there are rarely elders depicted as members of prehistoric families. No one in prehistory has two mommies or two daddies, there are rarely grandparents helping in intergenerational households, and very rarely does a prehistoric person take a chance and defy a conventional, modern gender or age role. These characterizations are not contradicted by the depictions of the “families from footprints” at Happisburgh or Laetoli. It is notable that despite the widespread discussion and circulation of ideas about projecting the contemporary into the past, the ancestors illustrated in 2014 share nearly all the artistic characterizations of Laetoli and other such sites that spawned this critical scholarship in the first place.

One final note worth mentioning is how these “archaeological desires” (see Dawdy and Weyhing 2008) to connect with the past in particular ways can shape academic inquiry as well as media characterizations of prehistory.  One of the primary assumptions about the Laetoli footprints that persisted for decades was that they were made by a group of individuals walking together. A recent reanalysis of Laetoli (2011) suggests that the footprints were not made by a group of travelers, or a family, but rather by a series of independent travelers who chose the same path at different times.  Why that path?  Why no return? And, whom were they imagining when they walked in another’s footsteps? 

Sources

Adovasio, J.M., Olga Soffer, and Jake Page (2007) The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory.  Harper Collins, New York.

Dawdy, Shannon Lee and Richard Weyhing (2008) Beneath the Rising Sun: “Frenchness” and the Archaeology of Desire.  International Journal of Historical Archaeology 12:370-387.

Kamp, Kathryn A. and John C. Whittaker (2002) Prehistoric Puebloan Children in Archaeology and Art. Children in the Prehistoric Puebloan Southwest, K. Kamp (ed.). pp 14-40  University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.

Jane Eva Baxter is a historical archaeologist and an Associate Professor of Anthropology at DePaul University in Chicago, IL USA.

This past year, I had two conference experiences that offered me a chance to reflect on what it means to be an anthropologist/archaeologist in the 21^st century.  These experiences allowed me to consider the dynamic shifts in anthropological inquiry that move us beyond historical visions of and for the discipline.  Simultaneously, these encounters got me thinking about identities within anthropology, and how we connect, disconnect, and reconnect to the particular cultures of our own subfields.  Perhaps most interesting, was the realization that boundaries of practice are shifting with a different pace and rhythm than our own identities as anthropologists, or archeologists, or linguists, or…   In other words, these experiences gave me an opportunity to reflect upon a very active set of incongruities around traditional characterizations and boundaries of practice, the realities of what we actually do now as members of a particular anthropological subfield, and the ways we choose to identify ourselves within the incredible diversity of anthropology/anthropologists today.

Who’s an archaeologist, and what do we do?

It’s pretty easy to identify some traditional and conventional characterizations of archaeologists.  For the public, we are the diggers.  We study the past.  We try to ruin shows like “American Diggers” for everyone and keep all the digging to ourselves.  We are associated with adventurous travel, tombs, and treasures largely because of popular media.  In many cases, we make local history a tangible, accessible, and meaningful experience.  But mostly, we are the diggers. It is astonishing to many of my students*, for example, that I study contemporary things, work with contemporary communities, and straddle the past and present in practical, intellectual, and pedagogical ways.

Within anthropology, we are still the diggers and the ones who study the past, but the social contexts shift.  We’re the anthropologists who hang out in packs.  We go into the field in (dis)functional groups. We work together to collect our data and divvy up the analysis so we can collectively grapple with the meanings of our findings.  We are the anthropologists who have the regularly scheduled drinking outings to somewhat disreputable bars on Fridays.  We are the shabby dressers at conferences.  Some of us are a bit slow to catch up with contemporary thought in anthropology as a whole and cling to paradigms and theories that are as dated as our discoveries.

While we can argue about why these characterizations are good or bad or incomplete, or why they are the way they are, or how the stereotypes aren’t really true, none of these statements about archaeologists are being mentioned for the first time here. For me, many of these aspects of archaeology (digging, traveling, socializing) were what attracted me to the discipline in the first place- and I am not alone. (See the Special Forum “I love archaeology because” in The SAA Archaeological Record http://onlinedigeditions.com/publication/?i=160407).  These are also aspects of archaeology that sustain my identity as an archaeologist, and help me to define what I consider archaeology to be- despite experiences that call these very characterizations into question.

Challenging Identities and Boundaries- Recent Experiences

At the SAA Annual Meetings in Honolulu, I was a discussant for a session on the Bioarchaeology of Childhood.  Given my writing on the archaeology of childhood, this wasn’t a surprising invitation. But, it was unexpected that the session organizers felt I’d be a good choice because I was “an outsider,” and it would be useful and interesting to have someone offer “an outsider’s perspective.” At the time, I knew that bioarchaeology traced its history back to the 1970s, and I realized that in the past decade or so bioarchaeology had gained a new prominence in anthropological scholarship.  However, I hadn’t ever really imagined bioarchaeology to somehow exist completely outside the archaeological umbrella, and I certainly didn’t see it as its own independent field of which I was not at all a part.  Superficially, I didn’t see the difference. You dig- I dig.  I study the past- you study the past.  Archaeology is a team sport because individual practitioners possess particular expertise in analysis that they bring to the project as a whole (e.g., ceramics, lithics, paleobotany, fauna, GIS, skeletal analysis). If I was an outsider, why are we often working shoulder to shoulder on the same projects?  And, how did one type of expertise make someone a non-archaeologist while the other material experts stayed within the disciplinary confines of archaeology?

Once I reviewed the papers, however, I realized the organizers were right.  I absolutely was an outsider. The way I put it in my comments was, “I study dead children, but you study dead, dead children. This is not the same thing.” Bioarchaeologists are looking at skeletal remains first and foremost, so they are looking at children who died and were commemorated in the past: “dead dead kids.”  I, and other archaeologists are interested in what children (now dead) were doing in the past before they died- how they shaped social communities, developed identities, and acted in the material world of the living. I  study objects and spaces of past children, while bioarchaeologists study children who are visible in the past because they died in the past.  They saw little bodies and I saw little people in very different ways, and that informed the questions we asked, the analyses we performed, the literature we engaged, and the vocabulary we used. I didn’t find many of the questions or answers in the papers satisfying as an archaeologist, but I could see how they were interesting and important in bioarchaeological conversations.  It also was clear that this was a different disciplinary community altogether, with unique ways of knowing and speaking, and it’s own membership. They were not archaeologists who studied skeletal remains. They were not really archaeologists at all.  So, I came away from this experience with two things.  First, bioarchaeologists have shifted their identity away from archaeology and created an entirely new community of anthropologists (thinking a bit along the lines of Etienne Wegner’s “Communities of Practice”- 2000). Second, a significant part of traditional archaeological inquiry (all or in part) has been removed from the purview of archaeology.

The second experience was attending the Contemporary Historical Archaeology in Theory (CHAT) Conference at University College London in November (http://www.contemp-hist-arch.ac.uk/conference2013).  Here, archaeologists presented their insights on contemporary places and objects, from private homes, to tourist resorts, to war memorials, to artists’ studios. The archaeologists at this conference all worked alone, or at most with one other researcher.  They took field notes and spent long hours in participant observation. They said things like, “You know when we work in contemporary communities we can and should talk to people.” And, some actually did.

Arguably, there has been a significant convergence among subfields in recent years as cultural anthropologists increasingly tune in to the material world and archaeologists move their inquiries into the present. Despite these reconfigured boundaries, contemporary archaeology is still tied firmly to the intellectual constructs of archaeology in general, keeping it a distinct way of studying the present.  The idea that archaeologists and cultural anthropologists can simultaneously study the same events in the present and draw different, independent conclusions can be seen in certain collaborative endeavors. For example, see the well known Burning Man Project: http://www.unr.edu/anthropology/research/burning-man.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of participating in CHAT was seeing how new forms of archaeological practice were paired with a tenacious retention of practitioner identity, expressed in tacit and explicit ways.  The archaeologists at the conference all identified as archaeologists. A few people mentioned in casual conversation that they are sometimes mistaken for cultural anthropologists when doing their contemporary archaeology projects, and they always take the time to correct that erroneous assumption.  They may be working in the present, and alone, but they are still archaeologists. Being identified as something else isn’t acceptable. I am one of those archaeologists, and I am not sure why it is so troubling to be mistaken for a cultural anthropologist when working on a contemporary project, or why I need to emphasize my relationship to archaeology, but I do.

And so…

We are still in many ways practicing anthropology within the categorical confines of a Boasian, four-field anthropology.  Our educational structures, our professional organizations, our textbooks and courses, and our points of reference for strife and argumentation owe a great deal to the historical forces that brought us together.  Simultaneously, it’s important to engage the dynamism of anthropology in the now, and realize in many ways these redefined boundaries and new and enduring identities are the realization of what a four-field anthropology can be and do in the present.

Jane Eva Baxter is an anthropologist, historical archaeologist, and student of contemporary material culture – and an Associate Professor of Anthropology at DePaul University in Chicago, IL USA.

• I generally consider my students to be a particular segment of “the public” until they’ve spent enough time in anthropology to identify as anthropologists in some way.

I am not a specialist in the anthropology of emotions, nor am I a psychological anthropologist. Yet, for some time I have been preoccupied by the concept of empathy. I want to thank the SM community for engaging with me in this think-out-loud. I am grateful that Zoe Wool has thrown away our shoes so that we may continue to wander/wonder about this topic.  In this last post, I share the motivations for my curiosities.

I came to my concern for/with empathy in much the same way many of us writers-of-real–lives-lived do, ethnographically. My work revolves around dramas of national obligation as they unfold in northern Canada. Specifically, I write about the intersections of race, gender, citizenship and political economy that belie a region marked by high natural resource revenues (diamonds, oil, gas) and substantially uneven distributions of social harm between Aboriginal people and Others. I write about enduring optimism and continued faith in extractive capital, despite its record of impermanence and destruction in the area. When I was working on my dissertation, I had all the usual writing woes around the politics of representation. Pile those on top of that concerns for narrative and style and you have a perfect storm for paralysis. I took my fears to weekly writing workshops with fiction writers. I floated my ‘scenes’ to the group to see how, or if, they were working.

A bit of back-story may help here. My work is based in a multi-ethnic community in the Northwest Territories. My writing is primarily about how the town’s residents, indigenous and not, understood the boom and bust of the Canadian diamond industry (2007-2009). The industry doubled the region’s per capita GDP in very short time. However this growth and decline were not evenly experienced by residents. Race, gender and citizenship came to configure how uneven development was experienced, often in ways that Aboriginal-Settler binary can’t account for. I use equal parts history and ethnography to show how social harms come to pass in resource rich regions, and how people make meaning in the face of everyday difficulties.

One thing that struck me in my time in the writers’ group was that no matter how hard I tried to paint pictures that revealed structural elements of my interlocutors’ distress, readers would be drawn to individuals’ stories. After reading my work, they would give their feedback and usually conclude with something like, “It’s so sad for them.” Then there would be a kind of outrage of the “something-must-be- done!” variety. Some of this was my writing (I do have a penchant for dark drama), yet some of it was a reflection of the structures of expectation that are built up around Indigeneity in Canada. Here, as in other liberal-settler states, concerns about Indigenous populations and their injuries are touchstones for settler national identity (same can be said in Australia, see work by G. Cowlishaw, T. Lea and E/B. Povinelli to this effect).

The reactions of my writing mates troubled me. I was concerned I had rendered the people I work with proper objects of empathy. And as Didier Fassin and others have shown, there are insidious effects of these affective politics—or, as Tania Li has called them, “make live” projects. My dissertation was a case study in this very point. In Canadian public culture, eclipsing the everyday to spotlight difference and inequality actually comes to fuel resource development. More plainly put, Aboriginal social suffering enlivens development even as it threatens to undermine it. If there is a shadow side of empathy, then Indigenous-state relations in Canada are akin to a lunar eclipse.

Ethnographic writing has the capacity to elicit emotion. That is precisely why I turned to anthropology from Sociology/Linguistics. Anthropological writing registers truths in subtle and poignant ways, yet few of us would say we aim to elicit sympathy from our readers. However, the presentation of “real people doing real things” in writing seems to allow for emotional lives of texts that defy our intentions. The tendency for humanistic writing to elicit empathy (at least on the part of Canadian readers) leaves me (and my writing) in a bit of a lurch. Perhaps then, I should continue to think about ethnography of empathic regard? What say you Savage Minds?

Our #1 audience is in the U.S.A. While this is no surprise, the global list of readers does include some surprises, and offers a particularly situated view into who is reading anthropology around the world—from Argentina (#35 on our list) to Zambia (#113).

Savage Minds’ Top Ten readership by country:

1. the U.S.A.
2. the U.K.
3. Canada
4. Australia
5. Brazil
6. Germany
7. Japan
8. Spain
9. France
10. the Netherlands. This list—which includes countries in North America, Europe, South America, and Asia—is somewhat similar to the next ten countries:
11. Norway
12. India
13. Sweden
14. Taiwan
15. Finland
16. Peru
17. New Zealand
18. Denmark
19. Italy
20. Hong Kong

The next cluster #21-25 includes the first countries in Africa on the list: the Republic of Korea, Mexico, the Philippines, South Africa, and Israel. All of these countries have in the thousands of visits to the Savage Minds site over the past year, and some in the tens or hundreds of thousands. But what about those countries sending visitors in the hundreds or the dozens? Or even in single digits?

Indonesia (787) and Belgium (780) sent roughly the same number of readers, as did Pakistan (343) and Serbia (330), Chile (226) and Croatia (227), and Bhutan (89) and Guatemala (88). Kyrgyzstan and Jamaica each had 36 visits, Mongolia and Nicaragua both had 35, while Uzbekistan and Martinique each sent 3 readers to Savage Minds.

Following South Africa and Israel, readership throughout Africa was high to low as follows: Egypt, Morocco, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Malawi, Senegal, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Benin, Zambia, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Liberia, Algeria, Rwanda, Sudan, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Lesotho, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Cape Verde, and Niger. Libya, Gabon, and Gambia each had one check-in on the Savage Minds site

The Occupied Palestinian Territories, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Venezuela, and Qatar all had 51 readers which tied them for the #90 spot. Right behind them was the trio of Myanmar/Burma, Kuwait, and Iraq, each with 48 visits.

Cuba had no visits registered, nor did North Korea. Vietnam had several hundred readers, but the People’s Republic of China registered only eighteen visitors, the same number as from Nambia and Panama. Given the cyber-gymnastics readers in China have to do to get around the Great Firewall, it is impossible to know many actual readers of Savage Minds there are in China.

While the U.S.A. is our top ranking audience, our current site host WordPress conveniently provides separate statistics for U.S. imperial territories: Puerto Rico had 112 visits to the site (ranking #79), the Virgin Islands had thirteen visits, Guam had twelve, the Northern Mariana Islands had two, and U.S. Samoa had one.

Finally, Papua New Guinea, one of the most iconic sites of anthropology, had forty-four visits to the Savage Minds website.

To our readers from around the world, thanks for visiting and here’s to 2014!

In the last few weeks, social work scholar turned pop-psychology web superstar Brené Brown came out with a short animated video summarizing much of her writing on empathy. It opens by drawing a distinction between empathy and sympathy.  According to Brown, empathy fuels connection while sympathy drives disconnection. For those of you who are expert in the area of the anthropology of emotions, I am guessing it would be fairly easy to come up with cross-cultural scenarios that put this pop-psych in its place (and please do!). That sympathy has become the bad guy in US self-help genres isn’t all that surprising.  In psychology and analytic philosophy, empathy and sympathy are part of a larger cohort referred to as “other regarding emotions”. Debating the appropriateness of the other regarding emotions—from pity to compassion to sympathy to empathy—lends itself to prescriptive ways of being the world.  This short video presumes that we can know what will feel good to others. In this case empathy feels good, and sympathy feels bad.

In the video, Brown lists four qualities of empathy

1.     Perspective taking, recognizing that someone else’s perspective is their truth

2.     Staying out of judgment

3.     Recognizing emotion in other people and then communicating that

4.     Feeling with people

The empathy list above implies concepts of the self, society and personhood that we may not like. Yet, these list items do seem to be part of the anthropological tool kit. As people who excel in perspective taking, I wonder what anthropology might make of a growing interest in empathy?  Anthropology seems to me to be great place to think through empathy’s merits and limits.

In the worlds of counselling, education and social work, empathy is experiencing a mini boom. Brown’s video is only a snippet of the empathy industrial complex. Ok, that is gratuitous use of ‘industrial complex’, but hear me out. A good philosopher/friend of mine recently took a job with a non-profit that purports to bring lessons in empathy to schoolchildren across Canada and increasingly around the world. The program rests on the premise that developing empathy is a universal human trait, which reduces conflict. Indeed, the program is typically promoted in terms of its self-identified power as a “universal preventative intervention.” However, it gained international attention when, following the London riots, Cameron’s Tory government responded by stating that rioting was a result of a “lack of empathy”. He quickly moved to introduce a pilot version of the empathy curriculum in the city’s “troubled” neighbourhoods.

I will share my own thoughts and struggles with empathy in a subsequent post. To start, I will say that I sometimes wonder if the current ontological questions are meant to unshackle us from the empathy anchor. Anthropology is other-regarding. Its emotional state is far less clear. Is anthropology with or without empathy?

Savage Minds Occasional Paper Series #7: Anthropology and the Humanities by Ruth Benedict, edited and with an introduction by Alex Golub

Lawrence of Arabia (LoA, henceforth) does this because it is a great film. It is huge in every sense of the word, telling a long story that stretches across vast amounts of space without losing the audience. It is also startlingly beautiful, even when viewed on a television screen (as most people see it these days). I had a chance to attend a screening once in the original format and aspect ration — larger than a normal movie, iirc — and it is even more amazing in that form. Its sounds silly, but I walked out of the theater thinking: “you could really see the camels.”  The film is monumental.

But beyond the quality of the production itself, the movie works because it draws on a deep orientalist strain in the culture that produced it. LoA is just one in a long time of products ranging From Burton’s Book of a Thousand Nights and One Night to The Desert Song that white people have used as fantasy material. Indeed, LoA is about the many people who have attempted to perform those fantasies by ‘becoming one’ with The Arab. At times the relations between fiction and reality become vertiginous: Omar Sharif plays the noble Sharif Ali in LoA, whereas 15 years earlier he was the Head Boy at Victoria College, where his abuse of Edward Said no doubt played its part in the life experiences that would cause Said to write Orientalism. 

A well-executed production with deep cultural roots, LoA also refused to tell the story about Lawrence that Lawrence himself tried so hard to live. In the film, Lawrence’s ability to immerse himself in Arab culture seems premised on his own deep alienation from those around him. He dreams of intimacy with his newfound hosts, and also of the power to shape their destiny. At first, they are willing to indulge him, and perhaps even grow a bit credulous. But in the end, Lawrence ends up being a pawn on a chessboard controlled by much larger imperial players (I give props to David Lean for making Prince Feisal one of them, but  then immediately withdraw props for having him portrayed by in brownface, even by someone as excellent in the role as Alec Guinness).

It’s not a typical fieldwork story (I mean, its typical for my fieldwork but that’s just me). Not all anthropologists are white people from the center who study brown people in the periphery. But a lot of them are, and even the ones who aren’t constantly fight a disciplinary narrative which tells them that all anthropology is a version of  Seven Pillars of Wisdom, or ought to be. The genius of LoA is the way it shows the messy political and emotional dynamics that come with the process of fieldwork. Every anthropologist should see this movie and imagine themselves as Lawrence. Because in some ways, they already are.

That’s all for now. Tune in next week, when I discuss the lessons “The Lion in Winter” can teach faculty about choosing a new department chair.

Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Lindsay A. Bell

I recently became the Associate Editor of North American Dialogue (NAD). Part of the AAA Wiley-Blackwell basket of goodies, NAD is the peer reviewed journal of the Society for the Anthropology of North America (SANA). I was brought on to help with the journal’s “brand issues”; namely its recent conversion to a peer reviewed publication and its history as being, um, well CUNY-centric. I am pretty excited about working with SANA on NAD. As a relatively recent section of the AAA, SANA has done much in the way of establishing anthropologies of North America as politically and theoretically important. As the incoming Associate Editor, I am hoping to pick your savage minds about publishing, social media and related issues. In particular, for those of you whose work is North American (and we mean that as broadly as possible), what would you like to see from this publication? From the digital gurus in the crowd, I want to hear about how or if social media should be used to draw a broader public to scholarly work?

The good news is the journal is open access and fully digital. With relatively low costs associated with publishing, we aren’t under the same pressure as other smaller sections/publications to prove our sustainability over the next few years. Even if we are not in jeopardy of foreclosure, for intellectual, political and financial reasons, we would love for NAD to be more widely read and cited.  Your musings on the matter are thus most welcome.

A bit of backstory on SANA may be useful for those unfamiliar with this section of the AAA. In 1990, a Society for the Anthropology of the United States and Canada (SAUSC) was founded. After the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was passed, the geographic limits of the section expanded to include Mexico. When the section formed, it was estimated that 50% of US anthropologists were working “at home”, yet the section’s founding members expressed that their work was often marginalized, under-funded and considered “too applied” to be of theoretical significance.

North American Dialogue was created as nascent section’s newsletter and was initially a forum for anthropologists both inside and outside of the academy to exchange ideas and focus the agenda for domestic research.  Flash-forward to the 2000s and the section has grown from 150 members to around 400 (small if you consider how many of us work on the continent). The newsletter moved to a peer-reviewed format in order for writers’ contributions to be acknowledged by their institutions and for their pieces to find wider readership.

In my first SM post, I don’t want to open the entire Future of Scholarly Publishing can of worms. I am too new to these debates to have a firm position. My ambitions for exchange are rooted in more immediate concerns. As we wade our way forward, we want to know more about ways of making social media do “more work” without making too much work for our mini editorial team (ok, there are two of us). After interrogating some of the good people over at Cultural Anthropology, it seems that social media can and does do a good job of directing traffic to their site and publication. They have a much broader reader base to draw from than NAD and a nicely organized editorial Intern Program to help with the labour of online additional content. We wonder what strategies might be particularly useful for smaller sections?

If you are reading this, the chances are high that you are pretty skilled with the Internets and may have some hot tips that I don’t. Our questions are basic, like: Should we bother with facebook/ twitter or should the articles “speak for themselves”? Do we “need” a website? Is the website the horse and social media the cart? Or is it the other way around? While I try and figure out how to best harness social media, you can follow NAD on twitter (@AnthroNAD) and “like” us on Facebook (www.facebook.com/SANAAnthro). You can read our most recent issue HERE.

When you publish with Elsevier, you sign an agreement with them called a ‘copyright transfer agreement’. Guess what it does? That’s right: It transfers control of your creative work to them. In many important ways, your work no longer belongs to you. You may be the author, but you are no longer the owner. In saying this I am condensing a lot of complex argumentation about what constitutes ownership, authorship, and so forth. But you get the picture. When Elsevier tells you you can’t post your own work on Academia.edu or anywhere else, they are only exercising the rights that you gave them.

So far, Elsevier and other publishers have quietly tolerated the tremendous traffic of PDFs that happens both in public and private on the Internet. Doing so is in their own best interest — if most people realized the way they had signed away their rights to publishers, the open access movement would double or triple in size overnight. At the moment, exercising these rights seems a bonehead play because it wakes academics from their dogmatic slumbers and gets them pissed off. But is it really a dumb play? Perhaps this is the first step in a gradual process of acclimatization in which publishers slowly send more and more take down notices, getting us used to the idea that we can’t control our own work. Perhaps Elsevier did the numbers and decided it was better to increase sales, even if it comes at the expense of their public reputation. Who knows? Maybe they’ve decided we can’t hate them anymore and just said ‘to hell with it’.

But you can’t blame them for seeing clearly the nature of the game we play with them. When was the last time you watched Jaws and thought to yourself: “It’s not fair! That shark isn’t supposed to eat people!”  The crazy guy with the stitched up face and the chainsaw? What did you think he was doing here in the same creepy mansion with you? And are you really surprised your cell phone doesn’t work in here?

The world of scholarly communication is deeply screwed up. Most people don’t notice, most of the time. But there are a lot of ways to make it less screwed up. You can publish in fully open access journals. You can publish in green OA journals that allow you to post preprints of your work. You can alter the terms of your author’s agreement (many authors do this successfully) to make your work more accessible. Or if you are on the road to tenure or a job, you can just say “grub first, then ethics” and publish away, knowing that you’ve made a deal with the devil. I understand that sometimes these deals have to be made.

But there’s one thing I don’t think it is fair for us to do: complain about the way the world is because we lived under the impression that it was something else. Especially if we are actively engaged in reproducing it. So if you are pissed off about the Elsevier takedowns, then please join our rebel alliance now — because guess what? Darth Vader actually is out to get you.

Savage Minds Occasional Paper Series #6: Culture in the Melting-Pot by Edward Sapir, edited and with an introduction by Alex Golub

“Culture in the Melting-Pot” is hardly Sapir’s definitive answer to this question. Rather, his full treatment of this topic is his paper “Culture, Genuine and Spurious” (SMOPS #5). Instead, “Culture in the Melting-Pot” is one Sapir’s earliest attempts to combine anthropology with cultural criticism. In it, he responds to a piece by John Dewey (a leading thinker and philosopher of education) which itself deals with these topics. I’ve chosen to republish this short piece because it is difficult to find (it has been reprinted only once since 1916, in the very important but prohibitively expensive Collected Works of Edward Sapir); it is a lovely little piece that deserves a wider readership; and finally, because Sapir demonstrates the relevance of Boasian anthropology to contemporary political debates, he provides a nice illustration of the main ‘theoretical moves’ that Boasians make.

Contra Dewey, Sapir insists that it is wrong to assume that European culture must be extirpated from American lifeways in order to produce an authentic American culture. Culture traits, he emphasizes, flow across political borders, and are rarely congruent with them (Ira Bashkow’s article on Boasian concepts of culture boundaries (2004) is excellent on this point). It is wrong to assume that one nation equals once culture.

For this reason, Sapir argues, creating a genuinely American culture would be part of a wider project of reforming the entire culture area America in embedded in — the “Occidental world” as Sapir calls it. It would, for instance, mean supplanting English as the primary language of Americans. It is hard to tell whether Sapir find such a radical project congenial (as many would today) or believes its scope signals its impracticality.

Just as national boundaries are not coterminous with cultural boundaries, so too does Sapir argue against the idea that nations are not ‘organisms’ whose parts are functionally connected. This is in stark contrast to structure functionalism, which makes just the opposite assumption. The explanation for a culture trait, says Sapir, is the history that produced it and not its function in society. For this reason, we should not insist that culture ‘adapt’ to industrialism. If anything, Sapir seems to thinks it should be the other way around. Like Weber, Sapir believes that the growth of culture is the result of a complex history of interacting factors, and is suspicious of ‘monistic’ worldviews that reductively see one aspect of reality (genetics, the environment, the mode of production) as the cause of the all the others.

In the end, then, Sapir does not believe that America will develop a culture free of external influences. He does not believe the development of an American culture will happen automatically. His vision for America is one of, if not shreds and patches, a messy process of diffusion, integration, and (perhaps) functional coherence.

In conclusion, I should say that there is a lot not to like about Sapir’s arguments. Like those of other intellectuals in the period, it seems completely impossible to him that a uniquely American culture could involve the influence of Native Americans — something that seems particularly jarring given his own extensive work with Indians. Just as his arguments are relevant to today’s arguments, so too are his exclusions still with us in public discourse — an absence that should be noted.

Much has been written about Edward Sapir and I’ve learned a great deal by the scholars who specialize in his work. In particular, I’d recommend the work of Richard Handler (2005) to those interested in learning more about Sapir as a cultural critic.

This version of “Culture in the Melting Pot” has been transcribed form the original article that appeared in The Nation. It has been very lightly edited. I hope that this paper, like the others in this series, will help present early anthropological theory in a form that is accessible to everyone. There is today a tremendous amount of material which is open access, but it is difficult to find, inconvenient to read, and many people do not know where to start looking for it. By curating a selection of important open access work, I hope to make open access resources better known and to raise awareness of the actual history of anthropological theory.

Bibliography

Bashkow, I. 2004. A Neo-Boasian Conception of Cultural Boundaries. American Anthropologist 106 (3): 443-458.

Handler, Richard. 2005. Critics Against Culture: Anthropological Observers of Mass Society. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press.

Culture in the Melting-Pot,

“The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.”

—Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism

Sarah Kendzior’s interview from the summer over at PolicyMic started making rounds again on my facebook feed recently. If anything, it seems to resonate more now.

I spent this past Thanksgiving with a bunch of orphaned activists and grad students. At some point, I foolishly started asking people for advice on grad school, assuming I’d find similar sympathies with more perspective. But I was shocked: several people told me it wasn’t that bad, that they enjoyed it, that it was better than anything else they could be doing—and even that finding jobs wouldn’t be that much of a problem.

I pressed: 76% of professors are now non-tenure-track, and nearly 45% are adjuncts—the fucked-of-the-fucked—making $10,000/year. I love the work, but the thought of subjecting myself to 6 or 7 years of a meager stipend while my undergraduate loans blossom into forever debt—all so that I can become an adjunct while hoping I win the tenure-track lottery—sounds like the worst idea in the world.

At this point, a currently-teaching professor seemed to simply lose interest in the conversation. A grad student with over 100k in debt became suddenly very depressed and asked to change topics. I appreciated his honesty and felt like an ass.

But I was also pretty upset.

Among my friends, this has become known as the Absent Future conversation. At some point in just about every night, we’ll end up talking about the jobs that are not out there, the death trap of academia, the terrifying insurmountability of debt and internships. It’s impossible to make real plans for the future, to choose to live with your friends or follow a partner or even think much about finding meaningful work. Finding even liveable work feels like a bit of a joke sometimes, and more friends than I’d care to count have disappeared and moved back in with their parents. The ones whose parents who can pay their bills work internships and and hope for a job after a year or two. It doesn’t always happen. Most of my friends with elite liberal arts degrees serve food.

One afternoon last semester, my advisor turned to me and told me give up and be a plumber. At least you’ll have stable employment, they can’t outsource it, and you can be an intellectual on your own time, he said. Another professor fiercely protested: you have to go to grad school, she told me. What else would you do? Miss out on all those jobs you’ll get? For five years at least, you’ll have enough money to starve, read books, and fight in the streets.

These were rare moments, though. Most of the time, the reactions I get from professors fall into one of two categories. The first is simple disagreement. It’s not that bad, says the tenured baby boomer professor. You’ll scrape by for a year or two, but there are jobs, and the economy will get better. The other reaction, more common, is sheer disbelief. Can it really be that bad, asks the tenure-track anthro professor who studies neoliberalism for a living? How are all my best students living with their parents and waiting tables?

And here is the crux of my anger: these are not professors I dislike. These are people I respect, teachers who’ve mentored me, whose opinions matter to me and who in many ways have made me who I am. They are also the people who were supposed to look out for us—and when it comes to our futures, they failed.

There are exceptions. Some professors really do realize that teaching is not a clean hands profession, that universities now run on the mortgaged futures of their students, that this is a society that eats its young.

But most of the time, the only people who seem to know how bad things really are are the visiting professors passing through on yearly contracts. My school pays them unusually well, but they know it’s only for a year or two, and after that, it’ll probably be adjunct-poverty work again. A few have gotten lucky, and most have not. And they are bluntly honest: don’t do it. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, how much you nurse the dream that you are brilliant enough to rise above the competition and overcome the economy. Some of the best never make it. It is a trap.

My question here is a simple one. Why do professors still tell their students to go to grad school?

Of course, in a way, I’m asking the wrong crowd. This is the discipline that produced David Graeber’s Debt, and this insurgent corner of public anthropology is by far the least out of touch. And yet still I find myself wondering at the professors I know personally, so many of whom are too busy with their own research and teaching duties to realize that the ship is sinking.

Anthropology, as a discipline, has built perhaps the most open access scholarly infrastructure I know of—not merely excellent open access journals like Hau, but open intellectual communities like the Open Anthropology Cooperative. But the transition from some open access projects to a discipline free from the debt-walled cities of academia is not a simple one, and I don’t know how many, even here, would agree with me that we should abandon ship, not because it is sinking but to make it sink. Last summer, when Sarah Kendzior’s first essay broke the silence, n+1 issued a call to burn the “the diplomas that paper over the undemocratic infrastructure of American life. A master’s degree, we might find, burns brighter than a draft card.”

But what if we burned the university, too?

Steven Tran-Creque (@strancreque) studies anthropology at Bard College, has written for Anthropologies and the Bard Center for the Study of the Drone, and fights in the streets with Strike Debt.

The term was not everywhere at the AAAs, but it was used consistently, ambitiously, audaciously, and almost totally unironically to offer anthropology something that it (supposedly) hasn’t had in a long time: A massive infusion of theory that will alter our paradigm, create a shift in the field that everyone will feel and which will orient future work, and that will allow us, once again, to ask big questions. To be honest, as someone who had been following ‘ontological anthropology’ for the past couple of years, I was sort of expecting it to not get much traction in the US. But the successful branding of the term and the cultural capital attached to it may prove me wrong yet.

In fact, there were just two major events with the world ontology in the title: the “Politics of Ontology” roundtable and the blowout “The Ontological Turn in French Philosophical Anthropology”. But these events were full of ‘stars’ and attracted plenty of attention.

Will this amount to anything? What is ontology anyway? Were there other themes that were more dominant in the conference? I don’t have any answers to these questions yet, but I hope to soon and will let you figure it out when I do. If you get there before me, then fire away in the comments section and we’ll see what people think.

Scott repeats several common criticisms of Diamond in his review: he likes Diamond’s discussion of endangered languages and is disappointed by how obvious Diamond’s advice on how to live is. It is the final third of his review which really shines.

Scott’s first argument will be familiar to anyone who has read Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History: Diamond’s “fundamental mistake,” Scott writes, is to try to “triangulate his way to the deep past by assuming that contemporary hunter-gatherer societies… show what we were like before we discovered crops, towns, and government.” Rather, he argues,

The inference of pristine isolation, however, is completely unwarranted for virtually all of the 35 societies he canvasses [Scott excepts PNG]. Those societies have, for the last five thousand years, been deeply involved in a world of trade, states and empires and are often now found in undesirable marginal areas to which they have been pushed by more powerful societies… So thoroughly have they come to live in a world of powerful kingdoms and states that one might call these societies themselves a ‘state effect’… Contemporary foraging societies, far from being untouched examples of our deep past, are up to their necks in the ‘civilised world’ (this quote and all others are from Scott’s review)

This is an important point for people to realize: the people Diamond discusses were not on pause until The West showed up with a giant remote control labelled “colonialism” and pressed its play button. They are the results of colonial history, not something that proceeded it. Every single one of them (Papua New Guinea included).

Scott’s second point deals with the idea that “maintenance of peace within a society is one of the most important services that a state can provide” and that people naturally chose to live in them for the security they provide. Scott disagrees. First, he points out that the state centralizes violence, rather than curbing it. Second, and more importantly, Scott points out that, frankly, it sucked to live in an early state. Reading Diamond’s account, Scott writes, ” one can get the impression that the choice facing hunters and gatherers was one between their world and, say, the modern Danish welfare state. In practice, their option was to trade what they had for subjecthood in the early agrarian state.” This included a world of slavery, patriarchal authority, wars and rebellions, and labor exploitation. Diamond argues that the ever-present threat of violence in ‘traditional societies’ led people to embrace living in states. But in fact, Scott argues, hunter gatherers had many methods to avoid violence such as compensation and migration — methods which, I might add, Diamond himself praises at great length in his book. Their diet was healthier (another Diamond point) and their lifestyle was as well — Scott points out the dangers of germs (another Diamond favorite) in large, unhygienic early cities. “It’s hard to imagine Diamond’s primitives giving up their physical freedom, their varied diet, their egalitarian social structure, their relative freedom from famine, large-scale state wars, taxes and systematic subordination in exchange for what Diamond imagines to be ‘the king’s peace’.” Scott concludes.

Furthermore, Scott points out that violence in ‘traditional societies’ the Diamond examines is the result of living in “a world of states,” not living in one free of them. Much ‘tribal fighting’ is the result of non-state people scrambling to access the rare goods that state-dwellers desired but non-state people had access to: ivory, pelts, and so forth.

Those familiar with Scott’s work will not be surprised to see the angle of approach that he takes in this essay. Those who are familiar with the critical reception Diamond has received in the blogosphere will also see that Scott’s points have been made before, most especially in a post on Jason Antrosio’s Living Anthropologically blog. Still, it is nice to have these points made by a ‘big name’ in a ‘real publication’ and in under 4,000 words. To some — for instance: me — the idea of James Scott criticizing Jared Diamond for writing a big-picture book about that falls apart when subject to scrutiny by specialists will seem a little ironic. But this is a worthwhile review that deserves wide readership.

I’ve been turning this question over since October 2009 when I found myself at CIA Headquarters. Two weeks before, a mysterious envelope arrived in my on-campus mailbox in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado. The return address read “CIA Fine Arts Commission.” I remember looking around the office to see if this was a joke. The CIA Fine Arts Commission? For real? The CIA had an art department? It didn’t help matters that the envelope looked sort of homemade, as if someone had printed the mailing and return addresses on a home laser printer. Perhaps they had. At any rate, I opened the envelope up in the main anthropology office, thinking it was somehow safer to open it there rather than alone back in my own office.

There was no explosion. Phew.

Instead, inside was an invitation. I was being invited to the unveiling of a painting titled “The Secret PLA Pouch Heads to K Building.” That might sound cryptic—this is the CIA we’re talking about, after all—but I knew exactly what it referred to: a Chinese PLA commander’s pouch that Tibetan resistance soldiers had captured in the 1960s and sent to the CIA. I knew this because I had spent the last decade and a half conducting research with and about the independent Tibetan resistance army who had been trained and funded in part by the CIA from 1956 through 1967. I had written about the pouch in my then-forthcoming book Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War. Presented with an invitation to now go to the CIA for an event commemorating the Tibet operation, I immediately sought security clearance and bought a plane ticket. A discussion of this ceremony as well as a photograph of the painting with the artist and donor was the last material I added to the manuscript right before Duke University Press published the book in 2010. But now it is time to tell the part I did not include in the book.

The audience for the unveiling ceremony was a mixed group—retired CIA officers who had worked on the Tibet operation, family members of those retired CIA officers, one of the Tibetan translators who had been part of the operation (but not his wife who, it turns out, had not been officially invited and thus did not have security clearance; she waited outside in the guard station), current CIA officers, the British military artist Keith Woodcock, and me. The audience assembled, speeches were made, and then the painting was unveiled. Following this, a woman stood up and invited all of the guests to head to our left, to the gift shop.

The gift shop? Once again, I was floored. The CIA had a gift shop?

Indeed it did. A classic gift shop even, one stocked with all manner of doo-dads, clothing, and highball and shot glasses emblazoned with the CIA logo. I knew I needed to buy something—The novelty of it! The confirmation that capitalism is at the heart of it all!—but what? “Future Spy” t-shirts for my kids? A CIA ornament for my Christmas tree? I settled on golf balls with the CIA logo on them, but it wasn’t until I found the CIA coffee mugs that I hit the jackpot. I picked one up and turned it over to check the price. Aiya! Right there on the bottom of the mug were the words: Made in China.

Made in China?!

The CIA gift shop sells things made in China? If I had been drinking coffee from said mug, I would’ve spit it out in disbelief right about then. Anti-communism had been one of the CIA’s signature issues since its formation. What’s more, I was at the CIA to commemorate one of their supposed anti-communist, anti-China operations. It was ironic, it was sublime, and I thought it couldn’t get any better than this—a CIA logo mug that says ‘Made in China’ on the bottom. I was wrong about that. It could get better. It did get better.

I walked over to the cash register to pay. There it was: The Sign.

“Don’t forget! If you are undercover, you cannot charge! It will blow your cover.”

Undercover CIA officers need to be reminded that they are undercover. Do not use your credit card! Your cover will be blown! But, what dangers loom if your cover is blown? Revelation? Recognition? Revenge? The invisibility of being undercover rests on presumptions and calculations of what is visible. Both are situated in historical, political, and social contexts. Who sees which guises, and who knows what secrets, is never only about a politics of access or knowledge. It is about politics and power, about secrets, and about defacements in Michael Taussig’s sense.

Everyone knows the CIA conducts covert operations and has undercover agents, but this knowledge is strategic rather than revelatory. For example, even now if I request CIA documents related to Tibet, they will come heavily redacted. Whole sentences, paragraphs even, blacked out. Identities, ideas, projects hidden five, six decades later. The secret of the CIA’s relationship with Tibet is out, but the substance, the body, the force of these secrets are not yet fully revealed.

The gift shop offers an ethnographic in-road to CIA subjectivities beyond the assumed or the proclaimed. This is more than just kitschy or banal consumer capitalism. Or is it? One thing is for sure: the gift shop is disarming. CIA headquarters provide a safe haven (of sorts) for an undercover officer but the gift shop disrupts this, pulling an agent back into an undercover world, then conscientiously providing a reminder of this very act: “Don’t forget!” Other messages are embodied in the goods for sale. This is where the gift shop relocates ideology from an anti-communist or anti-China stance, and instead domesticates these relationships in the name of empire. Fighting communism is part of building empire and making the world safe for U.S. political and business interests. At the CIA gift shop, ideology is a coffee mug made in China. Identity is a credit card with a spy’s undercover name on it. Capitalism is the highest form of imperialism, indeed.

As I continue to think ethnographically about 1960s CIA worlds, I am struck by just how many ways there were—and weren’t—to be undercover. Not all covert selves moved in the same mysterious ways. Nor were all politics, then or now, transparent. With regard to Tibet, it has become commonplace to say that the CIA didn’t “really” care about Tibet, but were instead acting against communism and China. They were, and yet that wasn’t the entirety of their covert Tibet operations or the sentiments attached to them. “Care” was involved in both surprising and expected fashions. Care for Tibet, and care for self. Both of these matter and yet have been kept undercover.

Empire needs to be a more prominent part of conversations about the CIA. As Ann Stoler has so convincingly argued, empire is as much an affective project as it is an economic or political one. This is the direction in which an anthropology of the covert needs to move.

Stay tuned for more.

Carole McGranahan is a pseudonym for Carole McGranahan, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado.