One of the disturbing issues with the press coverage of FaceID during the week of Apple’s announcement, was the limited criticism of what it means for Apple to deploy FaceID, and those who will follow Apple and deploy their own versions. What does it mean to digitize our faces and use the facsimile of our main human identifier (aside from our voices) as a proxy for our human selves, and to pay Apple nearly $1000 U.S. to do so?

FaceID could be considered a gimmick. Apple has the developed technology in hand, and as such, they can then offer this type of “Science Fiction” experience to their phones to give their customers a new way to authenticate their identity. But it isn’t this simple. All new technologies, as with any other new human production, become embedded in society in various ways, used in various unforeseen contexts, and have various unforeseen consequences. Even if Apple is only deploying this technology within the context of its iPhone, they are setting a usage model, and are doing so privately, around the regulation that governs society. This movement from Apple deployed so casually on such a broad scale, may change how we live, and how our faces become used forevermore.

Facial-recognition falls into the category of technology called “Biometrics.” Biometrics is the class of quantification metrics that rely upon some type of bodily feedback to work. Biometrics include digital fingerprint recognition, retinal scans, voice recognition, heat maps, and facial-recognition, among others. Apple has been using digital fingerprint recognition for some time. However, the issues with facial recognition are more complex.

There are several issues with facial-recognition software that have been raised over time, with the idea of algorithmic bias being one of the main ones [1]. Simply put, algorithmic bias exists when algorithms are not able to create complete understandings of a situation or issue. In the case of facial-recognition, algorithmic bias exists because people have different facial features and skin tones, and for humans, particularly those with darker skin tones, facial-recognition software either cannot recognize them, or worse, can recognize a face, but is unable to attribute the recognized face to the person, instead recognizing them as someone different than who they are. This might merely be annoying when the facial-recognition algorithm won’t unlock someone’s iPhone, but can cause severe problems when facial-recognition technology is deployed on a massive scale in various facets of our society. In the future, facial-recognition technology may determine access to the commons, and as such, could easily falsely attribute circumstances and surveillance video “evidence” to the wrong person’s identity, resulting in false accusations at best, and action on false accusations (if we get more automated in law enforcement responses) at worst.

FaceID is automated Artificial Intelligence. This means that there will not be any humans in the process of identification or authentication. Once FaceID is deployed, it will run automatically, identify (or not) automatically, and authenticate automatically. Furthermore, Apple will be using FaceID to unlock the iPhone, for Apple Pay,  iTunes, and other Apple products and services. FaceID will work with other vendors, and share its users’ facial-recognition and authentication with them [2]. This will not be limited to Apple. If we think that having our credit card number being breached is a problem now, what will it mean when our faces are stored insecurely?

Another issue to consider with facial-recognition technology is the idea of what our faces mean to us, and mean to those of us in different parts of the world. For example, in some cultures, tattooing the face is considered to be a stronger taboo, where in others it is a place of honor and prominence. How we use our faces, and choose to use our faces should be considered when technology companies develop facial recognition technologies. Of course, those who are uncomfortable with facial-recognition technology, won’t use FaceID, and for now, while it is still optional, this will not be a problem. However, as FaceID debuts around the world, these issues may be raised, and unforeseen outcomes may emerge.

The technology industry is often criticized for not respecting regulations, or ethics, and as I mentioned in my previous piece [3], much of this comes from not having anyone different on development teams who can raise these issues and questions. Within Apple, there are few Social Scientists, nearly no anthropologists, and with the focus moving towards quantification as a metric for determining feature use and design, few qualitative researchers inputting to products. It might not be that Apple doesn’t care, it might be that Apple truly doesn’t know that it needs to care, or some other reason. As a design focused company, it may be that qualitative research is thought to be something that anyone in design at Apple could do [4] and as such, some of the more pressing social issues surrounding the deployment of FaceID could get lost in the “sci fi” factor or rush to market.

Because we are now on the cusp of biometric facial-recognition being mainstreamed by a private technology company with the decisions for how this will impact all of us in private control, it may be time to consider what governance or ethics review boards would look like for the tech industry going forward—or at the very least, it seems time for private technology companies to hire anthropologists and other social scientists to product teams to create technology products that will adapt to our cultural preferences as humans, while respecting our sense of privacy, our desire for security, and our right to our identities.

References:

[1] Finley, K. 2017. Can Apple’s iPhone X Beat Facial Recognition’s Bias Problem.” WIRED Business. Sept. 13. 2017. [Online]. Available from: https://www.wired.com/story/can-apples-iphone-x-beat-facial-recognitions-bias-problem/ Date assessed: Sept. 17, 2017.

[2] Perez, S. and Luden, I. 2017.  Face ID will work with Apple Pay Third Party Apps. Tech Crunch. Sept. 12, 2017[Online.] Available from: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/12/faceid-will-work-with-apple-pay-third-party-apps/

[3] Applin, S. 2017. Artificial Intelligence: Making AI in our Images. Savage Minds. Sept. 7, 2017. [Online]. Available from: /2017/09/07/artificial-intelligence-making-ai-in-our-images/ Date assessed: Sept. 17, 2017.

[4] Applin, S. 2016. The Automation of Qualitative Methods. EPIC. Jan. 18, 2017. [Online]. Available from: https://www.epicpeople.org/automation-qualitative-methods/ Date assessed: Sept. 17, 2017

This Anthro Life – Savage Minds Crossover Series, part 3
by Adam Gamwell and Ryan Collins

This Anthro Life has teamed up with Savage Minds to bring you a special 5-part podcast and blog crossover series. While thinking together as two anthropological productions that exist for multiple kinds of audiences and publics, we became inspired to have a series of conversations about why anthropology matters today. We’re sitting down with some of the folks behind Savage Minds, SAPIENS, the American Anthropological Association and the Society for American Archaeology to bring you conversations on anthropological thinking and its relevance through an innovative blend of audio and text.

In our third episode of the TAL + SM crossover series, we explored SAPIENS’ approach to producing anthropological content for popular audiences. Ryan and Adam were joined by the digital editor of SAPIENS, Daniel Salas, to discuss the implications of using anthropology to engage the public through journalism. The episode focused on the questions How do you reconcile scientific and anthropological writing, and is this mixture a new genre? Is there a balance to be found between producing timeless “evergreen” stories versus current events focused content for audience engagement?

Be sure to check out the first and second episodes of the TAL + SM collaboration: Writing “in my Culture” and Anthropology has Always Been out There.

What is SAPIENS?

Just over a year old, SAPIENS is a online content producer funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation with the mission to deliver anthropological stories and insights to worldwide audiences. A working collaboration between professional journalists and anthropologists, Daniel describes SAPIENS publications as “webby” kinds of stories that showcase “public anthropology’s footprints across the web”.

The SAPIENS team looks to popular science publication sites like Nautilus, Hakai Magazine, and Aeon as inspiration for how to weave together anthropology and science journalism on their own site. These sites are known for their “influx of content that is intellectual, that is based on scientific reasoning, it is based on offering in depth conversations and dialogues” and, as Adam states, “anthropology is really well poised for these conversations”. As SAPIENS is a relatively new enterprise the team strengthens its base by strategically syndicating anthropology-centric content from other science and political publications including Discover Magazine, Scientific American, Slate, Aeon, and The Atlantic. This also helps clarify SAPIENS target audience.

The editor-in-chief of SAPIENS, Dr. Chip Colwell, describes the work SAPIENS does as creating a “new genre” that incorporates the “key insights of anthropology with the tools of journalism”. The staff of SAPIENS are building this new genre by helping anthropologists and science journalists shape their research and findings into narratives with wide appeal.  

Fact, Fiction, Fidelity and Feeling

Following our conversation with Daniel we were struck by Chip’s concept of “creating a new genre” with anthropology. Now, anthropology is a discipline that dabbles. It’s a creative science that explores the human condition and opens worlds that are at once strange, yet familiar. Any reader of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, for example, or J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings will recognize the deep lore and history contained within the pages of the books. Like these works of fiction, anthropology has the capacity to be both descriptive and generative. Anthropologists combine and contrast deep histories with current events, context with happenings; anthropology describes people’s lives so that we may generate other possible ways of being. Along with field interlocutors and through the course of everyday life, anthropologists generate events that can be ethnographically described, and such events offer us imaginative renderings of past, present and future.

More than picking examples that share in deep expression of complex culture and language, whether of wizards, dwarves, elves, and orcs – these tales captivate us in complex webs of other social realms that capture something real. Illustrated well by Carole McGranahan in Ethnographic Fiction: The Space Between, she writes that, “Fiction, for me, like ethnography, has always melded with a deep desire to understand and explain the world around me.” The line between fiction and ethnography can be fuzzy. In essence, the goal of a novelist and an ethnographer are remarkably similar, to elicit a deep truth about the human experience. Many works of fiction do this inadvertently. Socio-cultural Anthropologist Elizabeth Ferry and Literary Scholar John Plotz have gone so far as to pair readings of the classic ethnographic text by David Schneider, American Kinship with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Oh the window into early 19th century aristocratic courtship!

However, novels tend to make for better reads. During Freethink 4: On Art, Creativity, and Bringing Awe back to Anthropology, Ryan and Adam spoke at length about the novels they’ve encountered, which instilled a deep and formative sense anthropological curiosity in them. For Ryan, Gary Jennings’ Aztec brought Ancient Mesoamerica to life. Even Michael E. Smith has written on the well crafted world imagined by Jennings, applauding his accuracy. For Adam, it’s hard to go wrong with the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, that pulls readers in to care so deeply for a larger-than-life family in the fictional Colombian town of Macondo as if you’ve known them their whole lives.

As Lisa Wynn wrote in Ethnographic Fiction on Culture Matters, “I can only think of a small handful of ethnographies that have affected me in the way that a good novel can.” This sentiment is widely shared. To follow this point, Lisa created an extensive list of ethnographic texts which have captivating qualities, some of which might draw the reader in as well as a novel. An ethnography she points out, Phillippe Bourgois’ “In Search of Respect,” is a rare ethnography that enthralls its readers through gripping emotional complexity and vulnerability that so often characterizes the experience of anyone who crosses a cultural boundary. Yet, many anthropologists write about captivating social experiences, emotional hardships, journeys both external and within. How is it that more ethnographic texts aren’t best-sellers?

Carole McGranahan also poignantly characterizes the writing processes of academics in Genre-bending, or the Love of Ethnographic Fiction. In that post, Carole notes that there are incentivized rewards for particular forms of writing. Perhaps this dynamic is changing (see Getting Credit). But Carole makes the case that ethnographic fictions do more to illicit something deep and real about the human condition that typical ethnography cannot. Carole writes, “In genre-normative ethnography, one can’t invent dialogue or scenarios that never were; one can frame, but not fashion. If I want to relate a conversation, I have to go back to my carefully typed transcripts. In our genre-normative writing culture, there are conventions that require diligence and care. As I write ethnographic fiction, I can transgress those conventions. I can flagrantly put real people in an imaginary situation to envisage an event that probably did not happen.”  This swapping of fact and fiction reveals a generative tension between writing for ethnographic fidelity and evoking feeling.

Ryan was first introduced to Jason de Leon’s The Land of the Open Graves when teaching Latin American Ethnography at Northeastern University. Jason uses ethnographic fiction to tell the harrowing tales of the humans who endured crossing the US Mexican border in the American Southwest. The text, which bounces back and forth between ethnographic and archaeological/or forensic reconnaissance and fictionalized stories, brings the border’s victims to life like a detective discerning crimes from material remains of the victims.

Much like Ed Liebow pointed out in last week’s episode, different career paths have different reward structures. This is worth a deeper reflection when we consider anthropological writing. There is a place for genre bending in anthropology.

Science Journalism, Anthropology, and Delivery

Speaking to anthropology’s genre-bending versatility, Daniel describes anthropology as “a whole universe of little nuggets that can change your perspective of the world and can bring you out of your provincial understanding or conceptions about what people are like, what culture is like, why people believe the things they believe”. Decoupling ethnographic findings from the writing itself, i.e. imagining them as nuggets, helps us conceptualize why anthropology is particularly well-suited for many genres. It’s no secret that data are malleable; the question is how people choose to frame and contextualize them. There’s a reason so many anthropology 101 classes teach Alfred L. Kroeber’s assertion that “anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities”.

As with creative writing, Anthropology employs many techniques that crossover into journalism as well. Like journalists, anthropologists have informants, collect data from the field, and support and contextualize findings with intensive research. In the end it comes down to delivery and time. Sarah Kendzior said it best in an interview with Ryan Anderson of Savage Minds “ethnography is journalism that takes too long. I mean that not pejoratively but as an affirmation of the discipline’s values –– long-term observation; scrutiny of methodological practice; respect for history; commitment to understanding local beliefs and traditions.” And of course upending genre conventions and learning to write anthropological data and insight anew takes work. But, Daniel points out, the most successful pieces on SAPIENS are those based on what anthropology does best: overturning common assumptions.

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Daniel Salas received a BA in Anthropology from New York University and a MA in Anthropology from the New School for Social Research. He joined the Wenner-Gren Foundation in 2011, where he currently holds the title of Communications Coordinator. Daniel has also played a key role in conceptualizing SAPIENS and currently serves as the site’s Digital Editor.

This Anthro Life has teamed up with Savage Minds to bring you a special 5-part podcast and blog crossover series. While thinking together as two anthropological productions that exist for multiple kinds of audiences and publics, we became inspired to have a series of conversations about why anthropology matters today. For this series we’re sitting down with some of the folks behind Savage Minds, SAPIENS, the American Anthropological Association and the Society for American Archaeology to bring you conversations on anthropological thinking and its relevance through an innovative blend of audio and text. That means each week for the month of June we’ll bring you two dialogues – one podcast and one blog post – with innovative anthropological thinkers and doers.

You can check out the the second episode of the collaboration titled: Anthropology has Always been Out There, here.

In the second conversation of the TAL + SM crossover series, Ryan and Adam were joined by AAA Executive Director Ed Liebow and Program Manager for Educational Outreach Leslie Walker. They explored the work of the AAA, the changing natures of work and research today, and critically assessed anthropology in terms of scope and impact.

Be sure to check out the first episode of the TAL + SM collaboration: Writing “in my Culture.”

The American Anthropological Association

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is an association for professional anthropologists that has been active since 1902. Today, the AAA is the largest anthropology organization in the world, encompasses more than 10,000 members, publishes 23 journals, hosts an annual meeting, and advances broad public education initiatives, some of which have notably focused on race and migration. Recently the AAA began an aggregate podcast network, of which This Anthro Life is a founding collaborator.

Ed Liebow was named Executive Director for the American Anthropological Association in 2013 after a long career with the Battelle Memorial Institute, the world’s largest not-for-profit research and development organization. Ed first joined Battelle in 1986, the year he received his PhD in cultural anthropology from Arizona State University. He has conducted research and public policy analysis on a variety of energy, public health, and social policy issues concerning disadvantaged communities. While at Battelle, he rose from the rank of research scientist to project leader to director of research operations in the Seattle office. He maintains a position as affiliate associate professor of anthropology and interdisciplinary studies at the University of Washington. He has been a visiting professor of Applied Anthropology and Comparative Economics at Università Carlo Cattaneo Castellanza, VA, Italy, a Senior Fellow of the Fulbright Commission, and have served on the faculty of the CDC-sponsored Summer Evaluation Institute. He has also served on the executive boards of the AAA, the Society for Applied Anthropology, the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, and the Jack Straw Media Arts Foundation.

Leslie Walker is responsible for managing AAA’s Public Education Initiative (PEI) that includes projects and programming for two important topics, race and migration. Leslie is a cultural anthropologist who previously worked for the National Park Service and taught at Prince George’s Community College. He has conducted research on cultural heritage and environmental justice of Afro-diasporic and Native American communities in the DC Metropolitan area, South Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Anglophone Caribbean. In addition to his work at the AAA, Leslie is an adjunct lecturer at Coppin State University teaching courses on cultural resource management and urban ethnography. Leslie holds degrees in anthropology from St. Mary’s College of Maryland and the University of South Florida. He also holds a specialization certificate in project management from the University of California Irvine, School of Continuing Education

Anthropology has Always been Out There

When asked where public engagement fits in with anthropology as a discipline, Ed pointed out that it is important not to view public and anthropology in binary opposition. The AAA’s tagline, “Advancing knowledge, solving human problems”, highlights the vision that anthropology serves to both mint new and refine existing knowledge while also translating knowledge to actionable insight. Recently AAA members were polled to ascertain whether they felt that their research was directly relevant to public issues. An overwhelming number of those polled said yes. Yet, a key takeaway is that while many anthropologists consider their work to be directly related to public issues, extra work is required to make important findings of research translatable to different audiences. In this regard,  Leslie sees anthropology as a discipline focused on identifying and analyzing patterns in human interaction and organization, past and present. Anthropological insights can be used to increase awareness to those within the discipline, the larger scholarly community, and the public. Anthropological methods and theories are used to highlight how some communities are implicated in social discrimination and injustice. However, he contends, there is a privilege in studying anthropology because students are often first introduced to the discipline at college or university.

How to Impact Public Conversation

The AAA recognizes the profound impact that anthropological research offers in naming problems and issues within society. This recognition of anthropology’s impact on public conversation prompted both members and staff of the AAA to begin developing the Public Education Initiative (PEI) in 2002.

The PEI highlights anthropology’s distinctive and encompassing perspective on human variation, human migration, and displacement, as viewed through the lenses of science, history and lived experience. The PEI has been shaping public conversations with hundreds of thousands of museum-goers and visitors to AAA websites. Leslie ensures that PEI offers guides for classroom teachers, community groups, and curriculum materials on race and migration that they can use to complement their lesson plans and workshop guides.

In 2007, the Association presented its first education project Understanding Race: Are We so Different? The project has had enormous success and since then the AAA has launched another project: World on the Move 100 Years of Migration. Additionally Leslie helps coordinate the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which celebrates living cultural heritage. When reflecting on how these projects draw on and change  how we see anthropology, Leslie said “Anthropology has always addressed contemporary issues within society; but making it noticeable that when there’s issues of race or migration, showing that here are these things that have been constructed through culture and here are the offenses and the abuses of it, but here are the ways that we can undo it, and here we are as anthropologists: solving these issues, or addressing them, or raising recommendations. Highlighting that this is what we do as anthropologists”.

Tracking the Trends in Anthropology

Leslie’s discussion of public education propelled us on a quite productive tangent as we began to reflect on anthropology as practiced outside its traditional educational domain. This raised a host of questions about the where, how, to and by whom anthropology is often practiced, and how the PEI may point to other trends that anthropology faces today. Ed identified three main trends he sees in the discipline:

1. Changing Workforce. One of the major changes of 21st century labor is the rise of the project-based, or “gig” economy. Unlike traditional academic professor-university-student relationships, project-based work is more often characterized by a client-patron relationships with different metrics of accountability and funding. The continuing rise of the gig economy provides a diminished latitude for pure intellectual research because it tends to be based on concrete outcomes for clients. Further, much research, design, and impact-based work are undertaken in multidisciplinary teams, both limiting insider anthropological theorizing and providing an important outlet for anthropological thinking, critique, and ethnographic insight.

2. Changing Nature of Research. More anthropologists are moving away from projects designed to, as Ed says, “scratch their own intellectual itch”, but tailor their initiatives to client based interests. For example, this can be seen in the length of some ethnographic research projects. Whereas graduate students are required to conduct long-term fieldwork, generally for a year or more, client-based observational research could range anywhere from one day to a few months. While long-term ethnographic research is an incredibly formative personal and scholarly undertaking, many anthropologists increasingly characterize it as more of a ‘rite of passage’ than the essential point in which one becomes an anthropologist. These concerns raise the question, what forms of fieldwork are valued as anthropological and by whom? It is worth addressing that fieldwork for anthropologists has largely been valued for its duration rather than frequency. Does conducting a year of fieldwork once (American graduate model) rather than an ongoing series of shorter term observational research stints for a few days, weeks or months (practitioner model) make one more of an anthropologist? On par with the changing nature of the workforce, the nature of research itself is changing to be more impact, assessment, or measures-based. Critically, Ed points out that rather than think of client-based research as diluted anthropology, or ethnographically thin, we need to understand that different career paths have different reward structures.

3. Community Collaboration and Communities of Practice. The model of a ‘lone anthropologist’ is showing signs of aging; not to mention anthropologists have never worked alone. For the last few decades, communities have continued to take more active roles with anthropologists, contributing to shared and collaborative work. Indeed, more and more communities insist on actively participating in research and ensuring accountability for anthropological research. As a new hybrid field, for example, Design Anthropology is premised explicitly on research conducted by multidisciplinary teams and the collaborative formation of issues to be solved. Likewise, many archaeologists working in the Americas collaborate with local indigenous communities who have vested interests in heritage and could be directly impacted by the investigative findings – further pushing research away from simply scratching an intellectual itch or the myth that anthropologists somehow work alone.

The Story Digs Deeper…

These trends are particularly important to think through because, as Leslie pointed out above, anthropology occupies a somewhat privileged niche as most become aware of the discipline for the first time in a university setting, if they encounter it at all.

Ryan helped counter this idea by thinking about the idea of audience: “anthropology’s audience is really everybody. It is our objective to bring our narratives and those of the people we work with together, and to showcase why such dialogue is so important. Anyone can do anthropology and diverse voices add needed value to the conversation”.

Taking into account audience and privilege, Leslie and Ed leave us with two crucial and actionable points: Leslie states anthropologists need to be “reaching outside of the discipline, in sort of the public space, but also out of the molds of who an anthropologist is and what they look like. We need to encourage queer anthropologists, anthropologists of color, indigenous anthropologists, and anthropologists with different abilities.” Second, Ed illustrated that the near-sightedness on the part of mainstream anthropology today is that it doesn’t listen to other channels – where anthropology has always also been and continues to make substantial impacts. Anthropologists working in the grant writing world, National Forest Service and governmental sector, and in cultural resource management all have huge impact and are part of the anthropological conversation. Their voices have value, and like so many others, are needed in the conversation.

Check out episode two of the TAL + SM Crossover here. Stay tuned for next week’s episode where we sit down with SAPIENS and dive into the world of popular science writing and bringing the conversation to ever wider circles. See you next week, same TAL time, same TAL channel.

But in response to the question about the theoretical foundations for all of this, I’m quite ready to go beyond anthropologist and primatologists like Raymond Corbey and Frans de Waal who’ve been making this case for years. I’m more interested in how nonhuman cultures are being documented and analyzed by natural scientists, because their work opens up new spaces for theorizing culture “beyond the human.”

Start with this recent article in Nature: “Experimentally induced innovations lead to persistent culture via conformity in wild birds.” This is such an important, fascinating report because it 1) expands the scope of “cultural species” beyond the primates; 2) shifts the analysis of cultural transmission across diverse taxa from the lab to the wild; 3) underscores the value of the model of sociality formulated by Gabriel de Tarde explicitly to encompass nonhumans, centered succinctly on innovation and imitation.

As always, it matters what species you start with, and for birds, the great tit (Parus major) is it: “known to be highly innovative, opportunistic foragers and to use social information in a wide range of contexts,” this “makes them excellent models for a large-scale empirical investigation of the social processes associated with cultural transmission.” The premise is simple: researches caught and trained two birds to slide open a puzzle book door—left or right—in order to get at live mealworms. Both methods worked equally well, but each bird learned only one technique. Released back into their populations, the birds carried these techniques which then spread as “traditions.” Strikingly, birds that discovered both ways of opening the door preferred to use the behavior that was locally established, conforming to the local foraging practice. So not only does this involve social learning but also aligning with arbitrary, conventional behavior: culture.

Further, as reported in Science Digest, first author of the article, Dr Lucy Aplin of Oxford University’s Department of Zoology, commented, “Even when a great tit already has experience of using one method, if it moves to a new area which favours the alternative solution this bird is likely to adopt the method preferred by its new group. It is as if its own personal experience is being over-written by the majority behaviour.” Again, very succinctly, culture; not just in the plasticity of behavior but the powerful dynamics of belonging and group formation.

There’s much more to consider about the study, particularly the distinctive role of technology in revealing nonhuman culture, and the burgeoning impact of “life histories” approaches in the natural sciences. But for now it’s important to see this work as part of a wave of recent studies, to take stock of these advances. Not to rehearse the case for nonhuman cultures and their importance in advancing multispecies perspective, but just to review the last few months of impressive findings.

Birds are surprisingly prominent in these questions, as in the discussion of bird “song cultures,” reported in “Overtone-based pitch selection in hermit thrush song: Unexpected convergence with scale construction in human music.” Researchers claim their “data provide the most rigorous empirical evidence to date of a bird song that makes use of the same mathematical principles that underlie Western and many non-Western musical scales, demonstrating surprising convergence between human and animal ‘song cultures.’” Another bird—monk parakeets, which have a similar fission–fusion structure to great tits—were featured in a study of vocalization and group formation dynamics. These are both species where groups repeatedly split into separate subgroups, to merge again latter. Parakeets, and parrots generally rely upon learned vocalization to negotiate the dissolution and reformation of groups. This article (“The Socioecology of Monk Parakeets”) concludes by comparatively orienting these cultural dynamic to primates, generally, to heighten attention to cross-species parallels with humans. It’s an impressive array of correspondences:

“Both parrots and primates have similar relative brain volumes, are long-lived, have extended developmental periods, live in complex social groups, and show evidence of advanced cognition. Parrots also share additional characteristics with humans, which display the highest social and cognitive complexity of any species. Parrots are among the few taxa that display vocal learning, which is a defining characteristic of humans but is not widespread in nonhuman primates. The structure of socially learned parrot vocalizations often varies regionally, and social factors are known to have a strong influence on vocal learning. Because vocal learning is fundamentally a socially driven phenomenon, deeper understanding of why parrots learn calls from certain individuals could provide insight not only into factors that affect vocal learning in parrots, but also into the evolution of vocal learning and social complexity. The high fission–fusion dynamics likely present in many parrot species may also more closely resemble the high fission–fusion dynamics of human groups and may provide insight into the selection processes that drive sociality in our own species.”

This list makes me rethink Lévi-Strauss’ analysis of Western naming practices for domesticates, when he deployed the semiotic square in The Savage Mind to delineate the play of symbolic comparison/contrasts with birds, dogs, horses, and cattle, via metaphor and metonymy (1966: 204-210). In this play, “birds are given human Christian names…because they can be permitted to resemble men for the very reason they are so different.” This assumption certainly distorts the resemblances and commonalities highlighted in this list.

Following on the theme of learned vocalization (regionally varied, socially informed), cetaceans come to mind. Not just because some of the best evidence for culture in cetaceans includes songs and vocal practices linked to foraging techniques, but because their cultures are becoming the focus on conservation strategies. As The Dodo reports:

“The Convention on Migratory Species (CMS ), a United Nations backed treaty that aims to protect wildlife and habitats around the globe, has agreed at its latest meeting that whale and dolphin culture should be taken into consideration when the conservation of these amazing creatures is discussed in future.”

The assessments of this report are incisive:

REPORT OF THE CMS SCIENTIFIC COUNCIL WORKSHOP ON THE CONSERVATION IMPLICATIONS OF CETACEAN CULTURE “One aspect of social complexity which may have particular significance for conservation efforts is culture. Since culture may influence how a particular social group, or cultural unit responds to specific anthropogenic threats, or conservation measures, it is important that for groups exhibiting culture this aspect of their lifecycle be taken into consideration when evaluating conservation management options.”

We come full circle here in regards to recent discussion of the Anthropocene, as cetacean culture is envisioned as a resource against “specific anthropogenic threats,” to be tapped by conservation efforts.

The importance of recognizing culture here is that it exactly mitigates against a reduction of conservation to a means of preserving genetic diversity principally: “Current international and domestic efforts to conserve biodiversity focus almost exclusively on maintaining genotypic diversity, whereas sociality and behavioural diversity may also constitute an important aspect of the viability of individuals, social groups, populations and species.”

Here we have culture of nonhumans as means of expanding the scope of conservation from a matter of counting and managing numbers, to considering what we recognize with humans when we invoke the concept: a milieu, the viability of which depends on the volume and strength of social interactions—not “bare life”!

In the decades since the idea of nonhuman cultures was broached, the notion has taken hold through recognitions that they also learn and transmit social knowledge. As Andrew Whiten and Kevin Laland et al explain, the presence of social learning as well as “traditions and other culturally related phenomena” among nonhumans has “proved to be far more widespread across the animal kingdom than imagined a half-century ago and more complex in their manifestations” (2011: 938). That’s partly because the list of such creatures is sprawling: numerous vertebrates—horses and hyenas, bats and crows, dolphins and dogs, all kinds of cats and rodents, and of course, our closest cousins, the primates—and the most globally dominant invertebrate genera: ants and termites, bees and wasps, and even some spiders. But this also reflects shifting sensibilities among researchers, that what we observe other species doing is not a matter of anthropocentric projection but rather a fairly accurate perception of homologous activities.

Thinking this way requires a simple, mobile analytic that applies widely across species and foundationally to humans, as well. Gabriel de Tarde’s work, which has seen a recent surge of new interest, is useful because he equates the social with two basic capacities: innovation and imitation. These are also the two prominent units of analysis for considering nonhuman forms of culture today (Lehmann et al, 2010). Mimesis, that long running concern in cultural analysis, is directly applicable as a trans-species dynamic; the question is largely, what are the mediums through which imitation both operates and is socially transmitted? The answer is ready at hand: researchers working with nonhumans tend to focus on vocalizations (as communicative systems) and foraging (behavioral interactions with a larger environment).

There is increasing evidence that these are learned and passed on within certain species. Many cetaceans (like dolphins and whales) as well as birds develop “local” dialects—patterned forms of vocalization that help groups cohere and reproduce, and that are not inherited nor transmitted biologically. These calls or sounds are acquired by conspecifics and play a role in where and how groups forage. Their vocalizations convey patterns of information acquired from and applied to environmental settings. Presumably, such communication also involves an interpretive dimensions, both by interpreting environmental contexts and conspecifics interactions with that same context. But as this brings us close to meaning, does this perspective, in focusing so keenly on modes of communication, rely upon or risk inscribing an anthropocentric definition of culture?

The answer will depend on how all of this works vis-à-vis biology, that long-running foil for articulating the social and our well-ensconced domain for identifying the real. What matters here is the realization that culture—which we’ve largely equated with the generation of symbolic thought and the operation of meaning, in a mentalist-bound sensibility—may be far more deeply entangled with biology than the “mind” imagined. Think of the various “turns” today in—ontological, affect, non-representational: none of them open up the biological in the way that culture potentially can when viewed in this trans-specific frame. But the capacity for doing so is where cultural anthropologists may get squeamish. Underlying all this research on the culture of nonhumans is an evolutionary notion of culture, one that “recognizes and exploits parallels between biological and cultural change,” a “rigorous science of culture” that draws upon evolutionary biology yet is directed at “the specific and unique processes of culture” (Whiten and Laland 2011:939). But wait, isn’t “culture” that which separated humans from determinate forms of biology and that freed us from strictures of natural selection? Maybe not. But if not, the gain from this line of thought is a much more plastic—that is, less deterministic sense—version of either biology or evolution.

The possibilities and options for thinking and deploying culture across species lines are just too many and too generative to foreclose by maintaining the uniqueness of humanity through retention of culture as a singular possession. What do recognitions of nonhuman cultures allow us to think? Many things, in tandem. First, it presents a means of regarding nonhumans as part of a continuum we share with them, of greater and lesser degrees of enculturation. Second, this is an opportunity to think comparatively about the capacity of culture both to respond to and to alter ecologies and biologies. In breaching the “golden barrier” that construes culture as a unique possession of humans, we can begin to think more broadly about the power and pervasiveness of culture—that force or condition that has altered the globe, as seen in the emergence of the Anthropocene. Together, these reasons generatively combine to give social theorists a means and cause to reconsider culture, as something more than that befuddling medium through which ideology operates.

The gain for cultural analysis is that we begin to get at something that has bedeviled social theorists for decades: how do you succinctly define culture? Culture generates adaptive behaviors that have the power to transform environments (“niche construction” or place-making), but that also can funnel the flow of genes in a species through mating rituals and kinship dynamics. In this formulation, we also gain a view of culture that is not formed principally by an anthropocentric attachment to meaning. In this view, Laland explains, “Animal culture is much more than a window onto humanity: it is an evolutionary player”. Studying “cultural processes in a broad range of animal species exhibit a number of properties that change the evolutionary dynamic, including detaching the behavior of animals from their ecological environments, generating geographical patterns in phenotypic characters, allowing arbitrary and even maladaptive characters to spreading, influencing evolutionary rates and trajectories, and modifying selection to precipitate and direct evolutionary events.” Not only is this an important insight, it is also an impetus to take culture more seriously among humans as well. We need to know more about this powerful dynamic or capacity, and we are best served if we open up the inquiry beyond the human.

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” — H.L. Mencken

In a recent blog post, Paul Krugman argues that economists and policy makers have deliberately mystified the current economic situation for political reasons and that the solution to our current woes is actually very simple: we need more government spending to boost demand. He plays off the above Mencken epigram, saying “For every simple problem there is an answer that is murky, complex, and wrong.”

It is interesting to compare the kind of economic fear mongering discussed by Krugman with the role of culture in Ebola fear mongering. In a recent interview with medical anthropologist Theresa MacPhail she criticizes that “horrible and racist Newsweek” cover story on Ebola for the way it blames the spread of the disease on African “culture.”

Burial practices, wild meat consumption, and local reactions to quarantine and isolation have all been described as “cultural” problems that promote the spread of Ebola. As an anthropologist, I think that journalists should be careful when they use “culture” as a rationale. Culture is not an explanation. It’s something that needs further examination. Culture should not be a cudgel used to blame the victims of Ebola for their own suffering.

What struck me about these two discussions is the fact that, when seen side-by-side in this way, they highlight how willingly journalists (and the public) accept the economy as something which is complex and difficult to understand, but treat culture as a kind of self-evident set of practices and beliefs which, once identified, need no further explanation. As such, public intellectuals in economics (like Krugman) spend a lot of time trying to convince the public that economic problems are easily understandable, while a lot of the work we do as public anthropologists goes into trying to make complex what people believe they already intuitively understand.

Thinking about this led me to make some further disparate observations on complexity and public anthropology/economics which I gave up trying to work into a coherent narrative and instead present to you here in this handy list form:

1. While both the mathematical tools used by economists and the theoretical tools used by anthropologists appear as a foreign language to the untrained eye, there is a certain willingness to accept the necessity of translating human behavior into math while there is a strong negative reaction to the use of anthropological jargon.

2. Economic fear mongering can also take the form of simplistic economic truisms, such as the false analogy between national debt and household debt. But there is a difference between arguing that something is counter-intuitive and arguing that it is complex. I think Krugman does a good job of showing that the truism is wrong without resorting to a complexity argument.

3. Often the complexity that anthropologists want to talk about involves the impact of political-economic factors upon culture. This means that we are often arguing against our own particular claim to expertise (insofar as people see anthropologists as experts on “culture”). I think that one reason for Jared Diamond’s success is that (as Rex so eloquently discusses in his article in The Appendix) this is not a handicap for him since he isn’t really interested in “culture” in the first place.

Wisconsin and the Amazon

RG: Thanks so much for agreeing to talk. I really enjoyed How Forests Think. When I started it I was a little on the skeptical side, but I ended up thinking it was a mind-blowing book. I thought we could begin by discussing the background for the book and your training. I see the book as mixing biology, science studies (especially Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour), and then some sort of semiotics. It seems like there are a lot of influences there. You got your PhD at Wisconsin, so how did that work out? Can you tell me a little about your background?

EK: The way I got into anthropology was through research, by which I mean fieldwork.  And I was always trying to find ways to do more fieldwork. I saw Wisconsin as an extension of this. When I was in college I did some field research in the Ecuadorian Amazon, I had a Fulbright to go back and do research after college, and only then did I go to grad school.   Although How Forests Think aims to make a conceptual intervention in anthropology, I think of our field as a special vehicle for engaging intensely with a place in ways that make us over and help us think differently. The preparation I got at Wisconsin was geared toward that. It immersed me in area studies in the broadest and most positive sense of the term. My advisor Frank Salomon is well versed in many facets of Andean history, prehistory, and ethnography, as well as in the Quechua languages including those spoken in Ecuador (where they are known as Quichua). I worked with, among others, the tropical botanist Hugh Iltis, the Latin Americanist geographers Bill Denevan, and Karl Zimmerer, the Latin American historian Steve Stern, and I studied Ecuadorian Quichua with Carmen Chuquín. There was a real sense that I was preparing myself intensely for an engagement with the field in terms of a multifaceted project which was going to include ecology, anthropology, history, and a serious appreciation for local languages. Of course I had graduate training in social theory and the history of anthropological thought, but I wasn’t trying to get training in a particular body of theory, it was more that I was trying to engage with a place.

I was also inspired by the way my advisor approached scholarship –particularly his sensibility to language; his sensibility to writing; how one can find ways to see the world afresh and capture that in writing. For example, he is very conscious not to adopt rhetorical styles, theories, or jargon from other people and he consciously tries to use writing as a way to create his own sort of engagement.  He’s a poet. I was very much influenced by this.

RG: I had no idea that Wisconsin had such a specialty in your area. Could you tell me more about your advisor’s work?

EK: Frank Salomon is a historical anthropologist with a broad specialty in Native Andean worlds and their relation to the colonial encounter. I knew him through his archival and ethnographic work in Ecuador (I had actually met him in Ecuador when I was a child and he was a PhD student!). Most of his work is now in Peru on khipus (knotted cords) and other non-written forms of representation.

RG: I thought perhaps there was some influence on your work there, in his work on unfamiliar forms of representation and your work on semiotics?

EK: There is, but when I was at Wisconsin in the early 90s, one of the big turns was historical anthropology and I was working with a historical anthropologist. Marshall Sahlins’ Islands of Histories had just come out. This was the thing to do, and I was doing it. I ended up having to choose between two field sites: one was in a cloud forest area that had a tremendously interesting colonial history, a history that was visible in oral traditions (and I was fascinated by the connections between those stories and the past). The other was an ecological project in the village where I ended up doing the work that became How Forests Think. It was Frank Salomon who said “Look, your heart is in this ecological stuff.” Frank is an historical anthropologist, you’d think he’d want to train his students in his thing. But he recognized that my real passion was for the forest and he allowed me to see that that’s where I really wanted to go.

RG: I’m not sure that every advisor would be so generous to a student.

EK: It was a real gift. He allowed me to do my thing, and ultimately this is what I try to give to my students. We’re motivated in the work we do by passions we don’t fully understand, and part of what we need to do as advisors is to allow our students to tap into that without losing a sense of what others around them are doing and thinking.  Frank got what I was into, and he saw that even in my historical work I was trying to answer the same fundamental question: I’ve always been dissatisfied with the culture concept, broadly defined, and I’m always trying to find ways to get beyond it without losing a sense for the reality of culture. All my projects have had that as their focus, and this concern has just been growing more explicit, which has forced me to be much more precise conceptually about what I’m doing.

The problem with culture

RG: I have to say, How Forests Think is theoretical and abstract at times, but there’s a clear awareness of history and of colonialism in the book, which is not necessarily what you would expect from high Francophone theory. It was refreshing to see you foregrounding colonial processes, especially towards the end of the book, where they became central to your argument. Could you tell me a little bit more about that critique of culture? How does that work? What makes you unhappy about culture?

EK: Some of my French colleagues think that they’re beyond culture and have never had to deal with the problems that the American culture concept has created; they feel that they can sidestep it completely. But what I mean by “culture” is a much broader thing and it applies to just about every approach in the social sciences. The social sciences as we know them are based on what I would call a “linguistic turn” (though it isn’t always explicitly phrased as such).

Think of Durkheim (who wasn’t especially oriented towards language).  Society for him was a relational system: One institution can only be understood in terms of another; social facts are to be understood only in terms of other social facts; you can’t, for example, explain social reality psychologically. The Boasian approach of course is much more overtly linguistic. But in both you get a system with the same kinds of properties. Certain things can only be understood in terms of their contexts.

I was just rereading Boas’s famous article “On Alternating Sounds,” which was published in American Anthropologist in 1889.  It’s a brilliant essay in which he says, “look, philologists think Native American languages are primitive because their speakers use different sounds when pronouncing the same words.” And he was able to go back and say, “You can see that this is actually the effect of a lack of training in specific Amerindian languages.  The philologists are perceiving the sounds not based on the native phonemic context, but in terms of the languages they already know.”  Boas is making a profound argument about context.  We only “hear” those sounds that fit the phonemic contexts we know.

The goal of linguistic anthropology for Boas was to learn to get these contexts that are not necessarily our own.  And of course you can extend this argument to cultural and historical context as well.   And then, if you think about Saussure and the influence he had on structuralism and post-structuralism, and combine that with Durkheim and Boas, you get just about everybody who’s doing social theory in some way or other informed by concepts that have to do with how language works. The special realities that we’re dealing with in anthropology and related fields are relational ones, they’d say, and you can only understand them in terms of the complex networks that make them what they are. So any kind of relatum, whether we are talking about a social fact or cultural meaning –or even an actor in Actor Network Theory– is the product of the relationships that make it.

RG: Right. In the case of sounds, phonemic contrast is the result of the phonemic structure of the whole language, and it is internal to those structures. In Saussure, each sign has its meaning in relation to other signs, rather than anything outside the system.

EK: Yes. All of these approaches hold that the fundamental human reality is symbolic thinking, it structures our world, and it’s different from all the other things that one might study. It requires its own kind of science, a human science. This is not biology, and it’s not chemistry.

This is all good.  But the problem is that there’s no way to understand how these kinds of relational systems connect up to things that are not like them. That’s the big question: how are these open to the world? My engagement with culture is about addressing this problem. The STS literature, the animal studies literature and multispecies ethnography are all wonderful and profound, and are obviously finding ways to get outside of culture. But they often fall back analytically on something that I would still call “culture” in a formal sense. That’s clearest in Actor Network Theory. The relata may happen to be material things, but the formal system that’s mapped out, the network and the ways in which entities are made through the relationships that emerge there – well, no surprise, it exhibits the relational properties of human language.

My goal is to try to leave the human, to try to get beyond that kind of thing. So when I say “culture” I refer not only to the traditional anthropological concept but also to the sets of assumptions about relationships that inform Foucault, so much of Science Studies, as well as other posthumanist approaches.  They all explore the properties of what I would call culture in this formal sense even when they aren’t dealing explicitly with humans or the culture concept.

RG: It’s interesting you should mention Boas. I would just note that for some Boasians, culture is a unique object, which requires a unique science. That’s Kroeber’s argument. But that’s not the argument of Sapir, and it’s not the argument of Boas. I think it’d be interesting if we focused a little bit more on the Sapirian alternative, which is to understand science as defined by its level of particularity, rather than its object of study. Boas also takes this line in The Study of Geography: He doesn’t think that there’s something called “culture,” and we have a unique science, which must study it. He’s doing something much weirder. I feel like we should take a look at this again.

EK: You’re absolutely right. I didn’t get into the technical semiotic stuff until my post doc. Before that one of the major sources for me to get outside language (along with the work of the anthropological linguist Janis Nuckolls) was Sapir. He’s got these beautiful essays on sound iconism. He would interview children about invented words and ask “which of these refers to the big table and which refers to the little table?” And words that have very elongated vowels would invariably be linked to the larger object.  And of course Sapir was interested in poetics. Boas, on the other hand, took evolution very seriously. I remember in grad school I wrote an essay about Boas as an evolutionary anthropologist, and one of my teachers criticized me: “How can you say that! He was fighting against scientific racism!” But Boas clearly was in profound ways dealing with humans as biological organisms, and I appreciate that tradition.

But the Boasian legacy as it’s been taken up has ended up moving from a focus on a context that includes the environment to studying contexts that are much more restricted to humans, like meaning systems.  And then you get Margaret Mead’s concept of culture, which we still adopt, even when we reject her approach, or when we bring in historical process.

RG: I think that’s really true, and it speaks to the kind of fieldwork that gets done. Maureen Molloy points out that Mead was one of the first problem-based fieldworkers. Her ethnographies were not appreciated by Kroeber because they weren’t particularistic. She would go into a place, do the ethnography, move somewhere else. You kind of wonder, maybe if she’d hung around a little bit longer she would have started asking “what are these bugs?”

Anyway, you were just now talking about how you got interested in biology. Was that as a post-doc?

EK: I’ve been apprenticing myself to tropical biologists since I was in college. I did a tropical ecology graduate course in Costa Rica as part of my graduate training. I took plant systematics classes and forestry statistics. I was always interested in finding ways to get into forest ecology without necessarily going through humans.

RG: Your book doesn’t speak the language of evolutionary biology, but it seems informed by a deep awareness of the forest that comes both from doing fieldwork with Runa people and having that science background. It’s necessary for your project.

EK: And different projects require different kinds of skills, but yes, that’s what I needed for this project.

Terrence Deacon and Charles Sanders Peirce

RG: The work of Terrence Deacon is a major influence on your book. How did you come across him? Was that during your post-doc?

EK: Basically, I’d done this research in the Amazon. I wrote a dissertation, got thinking about articles, and was formulating an article that was to stake out what I would be doing in the book.   This was “How Dogs Dream,” which came out in American Ethnologist in 2007. I was working on that at Berkeley, and the year that I came there Terry arrived from the Boston area and we had offices right next to each other. We started talking. I would go into his office at four in the afternoon and come out at nine at night…

Terry’s life project has been to understand the origins of mind. His first book was about the evolution of symbolic capacities in humans and his most recent book Incomplete Nature is about the emergence of mind from matter.  So when I was at Berkeley I got very much involved with that, and it was the most intellectually exhilarating thing I’ve ever done.   Academically, that is.  Of course doing fieldwork in the tropical world was exhilarating in its own right.  But in terms of the academic world, I’d never been exposed to such an interesting set of ideas that was so new to me but that fit so completely with what I was already doing. I don’t get to California that much, but he has an ongoing seminar and whenever I can, I try to participate in it and it’s still very exciting to me.

RG: Peirce is a major part of your book. I think of Peirce as someone who informs semiotic anthropology, for instance the circle that includes Michael Silverstein and others. But you don’t let Silverstein own Peirce, you’re drawing on… Deacon talking about Peirce? Is that where you got him? Or do you read Peirce alongside Deacon?

EK: Deacon has been thinking about Peirce for a long time. When anthropologists use Peirce they tend to collapse certain things and not deal with certain elements of Peirce, like his interest in evolution, and they tend to frame a lot of his work in terms of something you can think of as culture.

RG: For people who aren’t super familiar with Peirce’s biography, he was a favored son of Boston Brahmins and then ended up going off on his own way, and I think at one point had to earn a living by drawing mazes for people to do in the back of newspapers. He had a very strange life. His work is really a whole philosophy of the universe, it’s not just about language, it’s very philosophical and I guess bizarre in some sense.

EK: It’s an architecture of the universe. It’s a huge opus.  He’s got 80,000 manuscript pages out there. But there are some really consistent questions that come up over and over again. He has a “continuist” framework, so he thinks that everything in the universe is related to everything else and philosophical frameworks that posit radical breaks are problematic. Dualisms of all kinds are problematic. So any attempt to understand humans without relating humans to other entities that aren’t human is a problem for Peirce. He’s worked out all sorts of ways to move across those kinds of boundaries.

The other thing that’s really important is that his philosophy is directional. By which I mean that he sees certain processes as nested within other more basic processes.  And this is very problematic for us as anthropologists because we want to see complexity and freedom and indeterminacy. Peirce also makes space for spontaneity, but he’s very much interested in the formal qualities of things. One of the places to see the nested nature of his approach is in his semiotics. You can have indexical reference without symbolic reference (as is manifest in the biological world) but you can’t have a symbolic system without indices. Symbols are nested within indices, and a Peircean framework can allow you to see that. These are the kinds of things that are unpopular. In fact, they get collapsed in a lot of the ways in which Peirce is used in anthropology. Anthropologists tend to think about icons and indices within the context of cultural systems.  Now, of course you do get iconic and indexical processes that are framed within historically contingent systems, but what’s interesting to me are the things that can move in and out of symbolic systems, and how outsides connect to insides.

So when I was at Berkeley I was reading a lot of Peirce, and I was talking about it with Terry but also with Bill Hanks, Lawrence Cohen, and others. The standard way to domesticate Peirce is: “Peirce, he’s your theoretician, you apply him to your field site.” Or you say, “Oh yeah, Peirce, he had his own social context just like everybody else.” Both of these statements are true, but Peirce is also in some ways more like a mathematician. He is extracting things from properties in the world and he’s predicting formal properties that the world will exhibit. If he’s correct you will see these properties in the world. And in fact what happened is that I realized that the ethnographic problems I had isolated were already semiotic problems and they were also about the connections we humans have with processes that are not fully circumscribed by humans. The Runa were dealing with other kinds of communicative worlds, the worlds of spirits and animals.  This is a problem for them as it was for Peirce. The material I was dealing with was semiotic. The reason why Peirce and the Runa meet is because they’re being made over by the same world.

RG: So you’re doing explanatory work in two directions: first, you’re using Peirce to explain the Runa. But you also use Runa ethnography to help explain Peirce as a thinker. One of the things you’re doing in the ethnography is saying: “All of that stuff in Peirce that we had to ignore in order to make him a linguistic theorist, it makes sense and can be used.” The book helps us see Peirce as a complete figure and makes sense of him intellectually rather than just having a massive part of him that we ignore or that we don’t find interesting or think it’s too weird to deal with.  You give us a more complete picture of him.

EK: That’s right. In fact, one of our colleagues at the University of Toronto, Alejandro Paz, calls this other part, “the weird Peirce.”

The other thing that’s interesting is how concepts can acquire lives of their own.  For example, go back to Darwin. Darwin had profound insights about how you get designs without a designer. It doesn’t matter whether or not he believed in God. It doesn’t matter if he didn’t understand genetics or got some things wrong. It doesn’t matter because he discovered a property of evolutionary dynamics that has a life of its own.

You can say the same thing about Peirce. Somebody can say, “you see, Peirce thought that crystals think’” or whatever. And he may have said that. But I can show you in Peircean terms and on Peircean grounds how that doesn’t necessarily make sense. He’s no longer the owner of these concepts. I don’t want to out-Peirce Peirce. There’s a lot of stuff about him that I don’t understand, and there are many experts on him, and I’m not necessarily one of them. But there’s a way in which there’s a fundamental logic about certain things I can get because the world is doing it, and Peirce was able to tap into that and I’m also able to tap into that. What we’re tapping into exceeds both of us.

RG: Right, and the animals tap into that as well, and plants tap into it too. I was so surprised at the end of the book to find that you were critical of the culture concept. I thought: “This is it! This book provides a scaffold to understand how culture articulates with biology and biological science, and it provides an argument about the reality of cultural phenomena even though they’re immaterial.” So much of our idea of reality is tied up in materiality, right? There are things that are real and emergent (for instance form, or what Sahlins would call structure) even though they don’t have physical bodies. That is a powerful way to talk about culture as a force without reifiying it as a substance.

EK: I am not anti-culture. I think culture is a real thing. But there are two problems with how we deal with culture. First, it’s very difficult to see how culture relates to the non-cultural. Second, we tend to make culture the only domain where generality and abstraction occur. What I’m trying to show is that there are other areas where generalities are produced. This is an anti-nominalist book. Humans are not the only producers of generals in the world. It doesn’t mean that culture isn’t a unique phenomenon that creates unique realities and unique kinds of structures and categories. But I don’t think that, for example, these spirits of the forest who I discuss in chapter six are necessarily only cultural phenomena. In some ways they’re a product of culture, but they’re an emergent product of other things, including the semiosis of the forest, which is not fully subsumed by a cultural or symbolic framework.

RG: And you have a way to understand culture as real without having to fall back on some weird 19th-century spiritualist position. You connect it with the framework of modern biology.

EK: I lay this out in the first chapter. It’s called “the open whole,” in contrast to the traditional Tylorian definition of culture as a “complex whole.” I want to say, yes, it’s a complex whole, but it’s also an open one. That opening is what’s so interesting to me. Culture has the real effect and property of closure, but it’s also open, and how this works is one of the things I’m trying to write about in the book.

RG: You mentioned the masters of the forest in chapter six. I would gloss them as a structure of the longue durée that exists at the conjuncture of a bunch of different causal forces that include things like the natural environment –the stuff colonialism just kind of gets sucked into. Since, you know, colonialism is only 400 years old.

Theory, fieldwork, and ethnography

One of the things that strikes me about you in the course of this interview is that you’ve really learned and grown and developed throughout your intellectual career. You’ve taken on new influences at times when some other people would say, “I have my framework and I’m done.” Do you have any tips for students about how to stay active intellectually and remain able to embrace new ideas when the ideas that you already have might seem good enough for you?

EK: I think one of the things that helped, and this was a real luxury and it’s difficult for me now because I can’t do the kind of fieldwork I used to do, is to have ethnographic problems that are interesting to you, that you can’t fully resolve, that force you to ask questions.

That’s the beauty of our field that somehow it’s the ethnographic work that is making us over, and we then develop theories that might help us. We have problems that trouble us, and we don’t know how to talk about them, but we know that they’re important. I was interested in the human-animal relationships in the forest and all of a sudden I was then involved in this multi-species turn and having conversations with people like Donna Haraway. But I wasn’t a savvy graduate student, I didn’t even know who Donna Haraway was when I was in the field! I didn’t know what the trends were.  It was the world that eventually led me to Donna Haraway, not the other way around.

It’s the same with the “ontological turn.” It’s my work that leads me to pose questions ontologically (at a moment when people happen to be doing this) rather than a current trend driving my work. This is the advantage that we have as anthropologists. We are thinking with the world. That’s what’s going to keep our thinking fresh. What’s difficult for me now is that I need to go back and think with the world myself.

RG: I think there is something strange about the structure of our anthropological careers: there’s a period of intense immersive research, and then teaching and family, and then never going back to the field again. Sometimes, it feels like no matter how hard you try, that’s the sort of political economy of the professoriate. I think it has a tremendous effect on how anthropological theory works. When you can’t get back to the field, suddenly you’re interested in elaborating coherent theoretical frameworks from the top down, since you don’t have fresh data to lead you from the bottom up, like you were saying.

Is How Forests Think an ethnography? Is that the genre?

EK: That’s a great question. It’s not the standard ethnographic monograph –it’s not bounded by the Runa.  It’s not about getting their context.  So, it’s not an ethnography in that sense. Although after reading it I hope you do get some sense of having had an ethnographic immersion. But it doesn’t have that kind of boundedness in the sense that my concerns are not necessarily their concerns. My analytical framework is not restricted to their analytical framework. It’s not that mine is bigger, but just that my project only partially intersects with theirs. In that sense it’s not an ethnography.  Although it is a form of thinking that grows from ethnography.  And so it is empirical, or experiential.  So in this sense it is extremely ethnographic.

RG: I’m just trying to understand whether you’re using the ethnography to elaborate the theory, or using the theory to elaborate the ethnography. What’s the relationship between the theoretical intervention and the descriptive material?

EK: In the actual writing there’s a lot of back and forth. If one were to look at my dissertation, which has none of the theory, no engagement with semiotics, no engagement with multispecies ethnography or any of that stuff, one would find many of the same examples that I’m dealing with in the book as conundrums that allow me to explore the larger question of how to situate the human in some sort of larger non-human domain.

It really is driven by ethnography in that sense.  Ethnographic problems suggest a certain kind of conceptual thinking. But there were also moments in writing the book when I had an idea that grew out of a non-ethnographic settings, and I was like, “let me find an ethnographic example to illustrate that.” So there is a certain amount of artifice in crafting something like this, where you tack back and forth. But the general movement of this book is that the ethnography is demanding a certain kind of conceptual framework, and the ethnography and conceptual frameworks are coming together because they’re drawing on a shared world.

Is theory political?

RG: A lot of anthropologists in the States would insist that there has to be a political intervention in ethnography. You close the book making the argument that Michael Scott and other thinkers, like Latour, would make: that it’s politically important to think outside of our established frameworks. I just imagine there are anthropologists out there who would say, “that’s the lousiest definition of politics that I’ve ever heard!” How would you respond to that kind of position?

EK: There’s a passage in Marilyn Strathern’s The Gender of the Gift where she says that radical politics is always linked to intellectual conservatism because to act radically you have to have agreement on what you’re taking a stand on, and radical intellectual thought creates a certain kind of political conservatism because once you’re taking all sorts of things apart, it’s very hard to act based on shared established categories.

It’s a real problem. On the one hand I feel I can isolate ways of thinking about political agency that are different. I can contribute to conversations about things like resistance, and I can think about problems of environmental politics in different ways, but ultimately, I’m not necessarily doing a kind of political work like….

RG: …Terry Turner?

EK:  Yes. Or some form of witnessing a kind of injustice to which I have to find some way to attend. I’m not doing that.  Yet, the question for me politically is, how are we going to create an ethical practice in the Anthropocene, this time of ours in which futures, of human and nonhuman kinds, are increasingly entangled, and interdependent in their mutual uncertainty? This is where I’m headed.  And in the book I begin to think about this political problem.  But how does that articulate with what’s happening on the ground in terms of environmental politics? Who might be doing something like this? I don’t know. It’s very abstract right now, but that’s where the political part of this would go.

RG: It’s funny, I can’t remember who said this; I think it was June Jordan? She said that the way that it works is that you do the activism first, and then the theory comes afterward –that the theoretical work comes out of the concrete political work of activism and social change. That position sounds Peircean to me, Eduardo Kohnian to me, because it emphasizes the process of being in the world, and is committed to the idea that praxis leads to theoretical innovation. That claim, I think, may run counter to the idea that there’s something intellectually conservative about radical politics.

EK: I like your formulation. There is some way in which I share affinities with activism, in the sense that I’m being made over first by the world and then finding ways to account for that, but it doesn’t necessarily fall into the category of politics in terms of addressing oneself to social injustices, per se, as the central focus.

RG: What are your future projects?

EK:  Well, thinking about an ethical practice in the Anthropocene through the logic of thinking forests is one. I plan to work with Amazonians but also with environmentalists, lawyers and biologists in Ecuador, and I don’t know where that will go. We all share this problem of how to live in the Anthropocene, how to reorient our lives with respect to this. But I don’t know what that means on the ground.

The other project I’ve been working on –and this is with Lisa Stevenson– is also related to thinking forests. Well, for me at least.  Lisa is coming to it from a different place and she’s been working on it for much longer than I have.   But in terms of my work on thinking forests I’m interested in forms of representation that are non-language-like and non-symbolic. One of the areas where this crops up is in forms of ethnographic representation that are non-language like.  I’ve always been interested in photography (you can see a bit of this through the images in the book) and I’ve become increasingly interested in ethnographic film.  We’ve been working together on a few films that are trying to bring out some of this non-discursive representational logic and this is one of the directions I find the most inspiring at the moment.

RG: Right, Eduardo. Thanks very much for this interview!

EK:  Thank you!

Now it seems the company is in discussions to purchase a London start up which has expertise in online payments. And it is this creeping interest in financial technologies that should worry us more than drones or our friends turning our chats into their virtual reality.

If everything goes to plan, Facebook users will apparently be offered the chance to store and transfer money on the site, rather than having to use a service like PayPal.

Facebook reps are said to have been in talks with several London-based peer-to-peer money services that could make Facebook payments a reality. One of these is Transferwise, a company that recently hit a quintessential target for a scaling tech company when it announced that it had processed £1 billion in user payments. Another possible candidate, Dublin-based CurencyFaire, has also hit the billion mark, albeit in dollars.

The convergence of social media and financial services should be seen as a profound shift in how people view, save, use, and are freed of their capital. And Facebook’s interest could mark a tipping point. Social media is being used as agateway drug to get users hooked onto much more pernicious forms of socio-technical circuitry and economic capture.

Why would Facebook sell vague social analytics about our activity to advertisers when it could go directly to our wallets? This is the ultimate “disintermediation” or cutting out of the middleman.

Capitalism requires fluidity – the transformation of static objects into cashable objects. By making money social and digital it becomes more fluid.

And since social media corporations are already learning how to turn individual users into liquid assets, the mix is all the more potent. Fluid money and personal data pools in centralised servers owned by the millionaires and billionaires of Facebook and Google.

Facebook apps for asset management will not be designed for the financial elites whose wealth is already governed by a well-paid professional managerial class. While the discourse is about empowering the working and immigrant poor to be able to send money home without costly fees, it is really about financialising a new market, the formerly private acts that are being unlocked by social media.

The privatisation of our lives is already booming. Visit AirBnB to rent out your home, Girl meets Dress to rent someone else’s high-end clothes, WhipCar to borrow someone’s car, Rent My Items to get your hands on their power tools, or Microworkers to rent minutes of your day to do small time work for menial pay.

This is financialisation masked as the “sharing economy” but at least we get to rent a nice dress or go on holiday as a result.

Facebook has been successful in inviting us to volunteer our free digital labour in producing one of the world’s most valuable companies. Some lovingly call this “participatory culture” while I and others call it exploitation.

Facebook can capture additional users by raining down wifi from drones and by making a scroll through bachelor party pictures more immersive with 3D goggles, but these markets will be small time in comparison to the financial market of online payment and banking.

This is an explicit attempt to transform the means of our digital sociality, our online public sphere and agora into a mall, a bank, a bazaar. If Facebook is successful, users will rarely leave the site. They will forgo the dangers of the wider internet for the safe comforts of our gated virtual community where we are safe to self-promote and shop till we drop.

Or worse, this is an attempt to “gamify” money management. It will be Farmville for personal finance or 3D Candycrush for cash. This sounds stupid because it is. It represents the transformation of a complex system into a simple one. The more our social life is monitored and then digitised, the easier it is to hoard, gamify, and monetise any profitable crumbs.

This will not result in more agency but less. Banking is based on hard-to-understand calculations but it is regulated. Add complex filtering algorithms and financial technological derivatives to the picture and no sane person will understand what is happening to their money.

Online payment isn’t the problem. Facebook, Google, and others who monopolise and monetise our digital lives on closed centralised systems are. The financialisation of our private lives as well as unwarranted, indiscriminate, illegal, bulk surveillance flourish in these spaces where corporations and governments gain direct access to our private lives.

What we need is a social movement to demand an information commons, decentralised servers, and digital literacy along with so-called financial literacy. We don’t need to hand Facebook yet another key to our private spaces.

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.

In my first post, I proposed that anthropology might be particularly well suited to thinking through the concept of empathy. In North America, “empathy” has come to be a prominent term across the caring arts. In areas ranging from self-help to health care, empathy seems to be something that can and should be cultivated. In 2006, President Obama declared that an “empathy deficit” was more pressing than a federal budgetary deficit. The scale of this claim reflects an increasingly popular view of empathy as producer of solutions to large, complex issues. In his 2010 bestseller Empathic Civilization, American social theorist Jeremy Rifkin argued that “global empathic consciousness” could restore a global economy and solve climate change.

Last weeks’ commentators aptly pointed out that “empathy” has become a gloss for broader concerns. Its implementation from the perspective of those of you working with social workers, health care professionals and so on made it clear that institutionalized empathy is a downloading of problems onto already thinly stretched personnel. As a former pubic schoolteacher, I can agree that it is tempting to dismiss empathy as a smoke screen for troubles of our times. Yet, I keep coming back to anthropology’s shared principles with empathy—specifically perspective taking, withholding judgment, and dwelling with the people we work with. I am not arguing ‘for’ or ‘against’ empathy. Frankly, I am curious. What meanings has this term come to hold in the context of North America, and what very real kinds of ways of relating to Others has empathy been trying to capture but somehow can’t?  Puzzled by the empathy boom, I went to a good friend for insights. As an analytic philosopher specializing in emotions and emotion history, she had a lot to teach me about the crooked conceptual path of the term. She was so generous in sharing what she knows, I thought I’d share what I’d learned here. From Einfühlung to Empathy

In 1909, Edward Titchener coined the English “empathy” while working on the psychology of perception at Cornell. “Empathy” was a translation of the German “Einfühlung,” and Titchener’s account of the term is quite convoluted.  Einfühlung had been used since the second half of the 18th century to explain how spectators perceive aesthetic objects.  The idea was that aesthetic perception involves projection of the spectator’s kinaesthetic experience into the object of perception.  As in, as I approach a mountain, I experience sensations of rising and expansion, and project these feelings into the mountain.

The 19th century German psychologist Theodor Lipps provided the most thorough account of Einfühlung.  Lipps was a translator and fan of the work of 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, which includes some of the most well known writing on sympathy in Western intellectual history.  Although Lipps’ account of Einfühlung does not refer directly to Hume, it is hard to deny a connection. Lipps first used Einfühlung to theorize optical illusions, but extended the concept to interpersonal perception.  For example, as I see you extend your arm, I might experience a sensation of forward movement, and project that feeling into you.

The concept of Einfühlung has influenced thought on a variety of intellectual problems, in a variety of contexts, but in most cases has not inspired the kind of grand claims we see in contemporary talk about empathy.  Early 20th century phenomenologists invoked Einfühlung to address the philosophical problem of solipsism: How do I recognize that there are minds besides my own?  Einfühlung also played a role in the development of the hermeneutic tradition in the human sciences.  In these and other discursive contexts, Einfühlung has been a source of fruitful ideas, but has not generated grand claims.

Empathy’s Clinical Crossover

Grand aspirations for empathy seem tied to more recent developments in Anglo-American psychology. Freud greatly admired Lipps, and initially discussed Einfühlung to explain the psychology of jokes.  Later, Freud viewed Einfühlung as central to rapport in clinical contexts.  The idea of empathy as useful to psychotherapy developed importance, notably through Carl Rogers after the 1930s and Heinz Kohut after the 1960s.  Both use the English “empathy” to describe a principle that facilitates helpful response to emotional suffering.  However, for Rogers, empathy is tied to unconditional positive regard.  Kohut, on the other hand, vehemently criticizes equation of empathy with kindness or love, arguing that, although empathy is the root of good, it can equally be used for ill.

We are now closer to the views of empathy in Brown, Obama, and Rifkin. In Anglo-American psychology and neuroscience of the past 60 years, we find the following:

• The idea of empathy as a general principle of positive relationships. From the 1960s onward, developmental psychologists have promoted the biologized psychoanalytic idea that the quality of infants’ interactions with caregivers predicts normal development.  Positive quality includes perspective-taking and emotional attunement, now considered basic components of empathy.

• The idea of empathy as a principle of helping. From the 1980s onward, some social psychologists have defended the controversial theory that empathy makes altruistic motivation possible.

• The idea that empathy is brained-based.  In the early 2000s, neuroscientists discovered the “mirror neuron,” and presented it as the basis of empathy.  Although disputed within neuroscience, mirror neuron theory is widely endorsed in other academic domains and in popular culture.

Brown, Obama, and Rifkin rely on ideas that present empathy as a biological human capacity, associated with concern for distress, connection, and helping. But such ideas are neither ahistorical nor universal, and they do not reflect the entire conceptual history of empathy.  What then are the contexts of contemporary Western assumptions around empathy, and how could they lead to grand claims and phrases like “empathy deficit” and “global empathic consciousness”?  These questions seem appropriate to anthropology. As a discipline that hinges on things like attunement and perspective taking, I think we may have something valuable to add to these conversations.

Wondering what to wear to the AAAs? We’ve got you covered. For women: throw a few scarves in your suitcase, a suitable range of black clothes, a kick-ass pair of shoes or boots, and some anthropological “flair,” and you should be good to go. Men need to pack their nice jeans, a good buttoned shirt, and the pièce de résistance: a stylish jacket. Unless you’re an archaeologist. Then all you need are jeans.

Anthropologists around the world are packing for the annual American Anthropological Association meetings (“the AAAs”) being held this year in balmy Chicago from November 20-24. What, you might wonder, are they packing? What look do anthropologists go for at the AAAs where thousands of anthropologists gather each year? We’ve turned to our social media networks to find out, posting this question on Twitter and on multiple Facebook accounts to learn just what fashion choices anthropologists are making this week.

We’ve identified six categories of anthropological fashion and/or fashion concern:

• Wearing one’s fieldsite, or, the “anthropological” flair requirement.
• Looking professional, but not too formal or business-y.
• Capitalism, consumerism, & fashion for the critical anthropologist.
• Stages of one’s career: from grad student to job market to professor.
• Differences across the subdisciplines.
• Scarves. (Yes, scarves get their own category.)

Here’s what our friends and colleagues had to say about all of these:

ANTHROPOLOGICAL FLAIR

I dress like my people even though they don’t dress like this. This is the anthropological fashion credo as witnessed by Ken Wissoker, Duke University Press editorial director, and veteran of more academic conferences than he can count.

Academics, according to Ken, have different disciplinary standards when it comes to conference fashion. Artists and art historians have the edge over the rest of us with their “ability to align colors and patterns far above the average scholar.” But, he cautions, a hip and spectacular wardrobe does not necessarily indicate interesting scholarship. Given the longstanding anthropological tendency to “wear something signifying their fieldsite” and the “change in what sort of ethnographic locations are worth thinking about,” Ken predicts things are about to get more interesting in anthropology—in both fashion and scholarship.

How do we signify our fieldsites? “Anthropological pieces of flair!” one female postdoc exclaimed on Facebook. Her response was echoed again and again. As she explains it, “You’re required to have at least one piece of flair, but the more pieces the better. The catch is that you can’t actually go all out in ‘ethnic wear.’ Just pieces of flair.”

Carefully curated markers of where one does research were frequently mentioned: “I don’t want to be a walking stereotype of what other people think anthros look like (wearing black with huge ethnic jewelry) but I want it to have some anthro-flavor—whatever that is.”

Jewelry is a big part of the “flair” category, and for many anthropologists, carries deep meaning. As one grad student explained, “When giving papers, I always wear this power necklace I made” that brings together different symbols from my fieldsites. Having clothes and jewelry from our fieldsites on our body while we are presenting our research is a tangible form of memory, and for some, power.

DRESSING UP FOR ANTHROPOLOGISTS

The AAAs: the one time each year where anthropologists can get dressed up in front of each other without being made fun of. Instead, as one tenured male professor shared, it’s fun to dress up for the AAAs.

Anthropologists, one now-tenured female professor was told as a grad student in the 1990s, always have good shoes. This reputation continues today, at least among anthropologists as we talk about ourselves to ourselves. As one male professor offered, “To my eyes, for the ladies, it is all about the boots/shoes. The guys, it is all about the jacket.” Finding the right jacket is key as one anthropologist lamented: “I never feel like my clothes fit the bill. I either feel overdressed (black pants and dress shirt) or underdressed (jeans and dress shirt). I am missing the perfect jacket that distinguishes those jeans and dress shirts enough to elevate me from slacker to professional.”

Despite the overwhelming response that a jacket was the “It” item among male anthropologists, there were some dissenters. One professor stated that he “leans ‘teaching casual’: jeans or cords and a collared shirt with no coffee stains. No blazer, no tie.”

No tie. It seems redundant to even mention that.

Color also matters. Black. Shades of the earth. Bright colors. These are what we think of when we think of anthropology. Some anthropologists’ wardrobes reside in just one color family, others traverse the rainbow. Yet, there are still rules, as one male professor who does research in Central America offers:

“One thing I learned flying in from the tropics for several years was that my bright colored shirts were definitely not the norm. Blacks and browns dominate (reflecting Grandma’s admonition to not wear bright colors after Labor Day … Summer’s over). As well, I would say that bourgeois, urban intellectual rules the roost. Nice enough to distinguish, not so nice that you look like a suit.”

But color rules are cultural. One American teaching in Europe wrote that “Last year I dressed as a “Danish” anthropologist: that meant jeans, t-shirt, bright shoes, sport coat all in the style of the type of hipster outside a gallery in Chelsea or Williamsburg.”

What it means to “dress up” is, of course, not singular. One European correspondent advocated the acquisition of classic pieces, including suits although perhaps worn as separates (as well as a tending to the physical self): “Be fit, then the secret is in the classics. Invest in high quality shirts. White and light blue. English derby shoes. A Zegna suit. A pair of nice dark denim jeans (i.e., Diesel) and a quality shirt. Also a good quality peacoat shines everywhere. A grey cashmere scarf lasts a lifetime.”

The classic look trends more male than female in anthropology. As one female grad student put it: “I do think there is pressure to look professional (as in, you have to demonstrate that you want to be there and that you respect everyone else enough to not wear jeans and a t-shirt on Thursday) but you can’t look like you put too much money or effort into it. Hence the trend towards “ethnic flair” – it comes from a place that is important to you and is a little different from what’s mass produced at most US clothing stores.”

“There is a way in which disheveled chic is the perfect style for anthropologists. It can match any situation.”

CAPITALIST CRITIQUE: WHAT’S A STYLISH ANTHROPOLOGIST TO DO?

You don’t have to be a Marxist to have issues with fashion. Here are two anthropological takes on this:

“I do think that we struggle probably more than most disciplines with the contradictions of capitalism – it is nearly impossible to put together a professional looking outfit that isn’t causing some kind of damage, somewhere, whether it’s to the environment or to workers. Maybe you could do it for a day (especially if you were wearing clothes that you got somewhere else) but for five days I wouldn’t know how to do it. Hence the shabby chic – because you bought secondhand, so at least the damage is already done, or because you’re broke, or because you don’t want to look like you spent a ton of money on your clothes even if you did. There’s a very real financial pressure. But there’s also a social pressure to downplay how much money you spend on material objects, whether it be your phone or your clothes or your bag. For example, the only people I know who are proud of not owning smartphones are anthropologists – it’s like a badge that you’re not buying into conspicuous consumption.” (female grad student)

“The question you might want to ask is: do anthropologists know the conditions under which their clothes were produced? Go to the MLA or ASA meeting and you will see serious high-end brand names, extreme fashion consciousness, and clothes pretensions all around. That this really doesn’t happen at AAA to any really noticeable degree is one of the more refreshing aspects of these gargantuan gathering of the tribes. Besides most of us are already dropping $1200 or so to attend, not including registration and membership fees. Perhaps I will walk around the meetings and query people if they know where their clothes were made and how much they spend on them. Do you think they would throw me out?” (male tenured professor)

No, we don’t. Most anthropologists are on this, we think; we have our students do projects on consumption and conditions of production and discuss it in our classes, but how far are our collective critiques going? Here are two more grad student perspectives:

“There are subtle clues about class and region. People pretend to want to hide upper class, but want others to notice their expensive shoes and other articles.”

“I feel like I am a radical. I go to figure out how to challenge and change the system. I feel like I need to look a certain way to fit in. And then I feel like they do change the way I am a little bit, they assimilate me.”

FASHION OVER THE COURSE OF ONE’S CAREER: Grad Students

How do you dress like an anthropologist when you don’t have any money? Shop second-hand stores and/or buy your clothes in the field are the most common strategies.

“Being a poor graduate student, almost everything I wear is second hand. … I was reflecting recently that I think it has been a lack of money for new, high-end brand clothes that has allowed me to develop a sense of personalized style because having a wardrobe full of odds and ends from different eras and designers means that you develop a sense for creative combination.”

“The trick is to look like you are wearing different clothes everyday, while actually wearing much of the same.”

Grad students attending the meetings for the first time might be interested to learn that the AAA actually has a dress code! What? A dress code? Who knew?

“Is there a dress code?
The AAA Annual Meeting is a professional academic conference. Business casual attire is strongly recommended, particularly for those presenting research during the meeting.”

But, should you wear business casual? Some say yes, depending on what your goals are at the conference and who you’re going to be meeting with. Others say, “Business Casual? I’m not sure what that is, but I don’t think its anthropological.”

Many students go for the Teaching Casual look. What you wear to teach often works well at the AAAs. As one grad student explains it, she wears her teaching clothes and then steps it up the day she is presenting her paper: “The day I present I usually dress up a little more—pants that have to be dry cleaned, possibly heels—partly because people have to stare at me for an hour and a half and dressing up in my power heels makes me feel more confident. By Sunday I have definitely switched to jeans. If I could wear my Merrell mocs the entire time, I would do it. I’ve given up on trying to wear impressive shoes and go for comfort instead.”

In the field, many of us wear clothes different from those we wear at home. In India, skirts are worn at longer lengths than is common in the USA, and in Cuba, skirts are much shorter than those worn in the States. In other fieldsites, anthropologists need to budget for clothes into their dissertation research grants as Gina Athena Ulysse did when she was a grad student doing research in Jamaica in the 1990s. She had to dress properly and learned quickly that her grad school wardrobe did not suit the professional researcher image she needed in the field. Instead, as she discusses in her book Downtown Ladies, she had to “cross-dress across class.” This disjuncture between how one dresses “at home” versus in “the field” trends both up and down, depending on one’s research and fieldsite. A male anthropologist also spoke about his need to trend up in the field:

“I’m a post-fieldwork student going [to the AAAs] for the first time to “network” and hopefully find an outside reader for my dissertation. As an anthropologist, I’m hyper-aware of the ways in which sartorial choices are gendered, raced and classed. Coming from a position of relative privilege, I’m trying to look professional while maintaining some deference to Mary Douglas’ observation that academics belong to the “shaggy professions.” The two things I want to avoid are 1) looking like an avatar of white male privilege who is oblivious to the ways in which the clothing of certain kinds of people is highly policed while others can wear whatever suits their notions of comfort and individuality, and 2) looking like a very lost Mormon missionary. To me, that implies khakis, collared shirts, leather shoes, and sweaters–all clean and neat but not pressed. Ironically enough, this is a step down in formality from much of my fieldwork, where I would not dream of showing up at an office in the Arab world in anything less than a pressed shirt and trousers (perhaps even a suit) and freshly shined shoes.”

FASHION OVER THE COURSE OF ONE’S CAREER: Being on the Job Market

What to wear to your job interview? This is the million dollar question: will your outfit make or break your interview? Here’s our advice: wear something you feel great in, look great in, and in which people would look at you and say, “Yes, s/he is an anthropology professor.”

Don’t lowball it. Wear something nice. That said, do not dress in a corporate style. Retain an anthropological sensibility but shoot for one rung higher than the outfit you would wear when you present your paper. If you are too casual, they will notice, potentially think you are not that interested in the job, and possibly be annoyed. If you are too professional, they might think you are nervous and/or not well advised on job interview attire. Which side would you want to err on?

(For more on what to wear—or not—to your job interviews, check out the fabulous information from anthropologist-turned-academic consultant Karen Kelsky at The Professor Is In.)

FASHION OVER THE COURSE OF ONE’S CAREER: Postdocs and Professors

Post-PhD—and especially post-tenure—fashion starts to involve more comfort. It’s all about looking good, looking your rank, and being comfortable.

From correspondents:

“I shoot for “nicer than everyday” outfits; not formal but not informal. My go-to conference outfit is usually a nice shirt, skirt, tights, and boots/nice shoes. With all that said, my #1 outfit requirement in comfort. If it ain’t comfortable, I don’t wear it. Period.” (female postdoc)

“My conference-wear is pretty commensurate with my teaching-wear: Presentable enough not to be mistaken for a grad student; not so formal as a corporate type” (female professor, untenured)

“Its going to be 20 degrees over there [in Chicago]. It’s all about comfort in my happy gear splashes of colorful sweaters. Leggings abound and the same darn black boots. Hoodies galore, gotta keep me ears warm in the Windy City.” (female professor, tenured)

“I’m going to wear cowboy boots. Because I’m 45 and sure enough of myself to wear what I like.” (female professor, tenured)

ARCHAEOLOGISTS

“I try to dress well enough so that no one will guess I’m an archaeologist.” (female archaeology professor)

Archaeologists are the most challenged in discerning between a fieldsite and a meeting site. According to our archaeology informants, archaeologists do spruce up some for the AAAs as compared to the SAAs. Yet, as one archaeologist put it, “While making your way through crowds of anthropologists may feel like a jungle, it is actually not necessary to wear hiking boots and Royal Robbins pants to successfully navigate the crowds. This bit of wisdom has not been widely circulated among some colleagues.”

Then again, as one archaeology grad student confessed, “Part of choosing to be an archaeologist is a commitment to not being fashionable. We do our best to uphold this historical standard.”

SCARVES

The only place that scarves are more popular than at an anthropology conference was at an airline hostess convention in the 1970s.

Scarves received more commentary than any other fashion item. Here are some gems:

“I refer to the AAAs as The Scarf Show. It seems like everyone wears scarves, wraps, and the like. Very chic, very anthro.”

“Yes, some form of ethnic scarf is a requisite for the ladies (and many of the men).”

“There is a difference between functional scarves and silky scarves that float around every which way.”

“Scarf culture is attached to coast elite academic culture.”

“I just don’t understand the scarf obsession. I want to want to wear scarves, but I [really] just want to wear jeans.”

“I’m also ambivalent about the scarf–they’re so cliché for anthropologists, but they are warm and pretty and useful and I have a lot of them, so… it will be a game time decision.”

“I have a collection of probably not so PC “hand made” cotton and wool scarves—made in India, bought in Rome, a few from Tibet. The wannabe hipster male needs a scarf!”

“The unisex pan-ethnic scarf is a must.”

“As a biocultural anthropologist is it appropriate for me to wear scarves?”

“This conversation proves (yet again) that I am the only anthropologist who does not wear/own any scarves.”

“Only cultural anthropologists maybe. Biological anthropologists are not as scarf and ethnic jewelry focused.”

And, a final paean to archaeologists: “NB: Dear Archaeology Male, a bolo tie is not a scarf. Sartorially yours, Archaeology Female.”

AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL COUNTERPOINT TO ALL THIS FRIVOLITY

In conclusion, we turn now to anthropologist of fashion Carla Jones for some insights into our disciplinary clothing fetishes:

“I suppose it is unsurprising that anthropologists are invested in what we wear at AAA, after all this is our social community. Who better than we understand that social meaning is generated through symbols? Who else understands our specific cues and clues? We are the ones who have worked so hard to explain the importance of culture, ritual and human bonds to those outside our field.

What is surprising is that we somehow persuade ourselves that because we analyze symbols, we see through them. Nowhere is this more apparent that anthropologists’ ambivalence towards their own clothing. We deny that clothing matters even as we know it does. Why else insist on wearing jeans, the ur-garment of working classes, even as we expect those jeans to be a respectable (i.e., expensive) make that most working class people couldn’t afford? Why else eschew clothing that accountants might wear, unless we appear like capitalist tools or lacking individual genius? Why else expect accessories to do all our stylish heavy lifting, conveying cosmopolitaneity, political consciousness, and personal good taste at once? Such familiar, modernist anxieties lurk under our carefully chosen scarves and jackets, worrying that by acknowledging the importance of surfaces we are therefore superficial, which must mean we aren’t intelligent. The bigger the earrings, the smaller the brain, so we seem to think. Georg Simmel was on to something when he claimed that adornment is the bridge between the general and the intimate. He argued that fashion concentrates an individual personality into a “radiance…as if in a focal point, (which) allows the mere having of the person to become a visible quality of its being,” and it does this not in spite of the fact that style is about surface but because it is. When we get dressed, we aren’t just differentiating ourselves among finely shaded distinctions of cultural capital, or protecting ourselves with the use-value of garments against the freezing Chicago winds, we are being human.

I suppose it would be easy to say that all our curated outfits at AAA are tentative borrowings of others’ ethnic or class identities or worrisome avoidances of other identities. Another, more charitable, interpretation would be that they are so many security blankets, mediating our ambivalence between surface and depth. No wonder the stakes seem so high!”

AND REMEMBER…

One nickname for Chicago is The City of Big Shoulders which brings us to our final piece of fashion advice: When in Rome…. Or as a grad student put it: “Oh. And shoulder pads. Always accessories and shoulder pads—80s armor for the academic battle field.”

Another, of course, is The Windy City. This does not refer only to its politicians and it is not an exaggeration. Plan your hair and jacket options accordingly. Hold on to your scarves.

Trouillot’s chapter on culture is incredibly relevant these days.  Especially considering the fact that the concept has taken on endless new uses and meanings.  These varied uses often rankle anthropologists, who feel that the concept is somehow theirs and that there must be some way to right the wrongs that have been done to their blessed theoretical child.  Trouillot basically smashes this sort of thinking.

I read through this chapter the other day and it also reminded me of some of the issues that came up in Jason’s recent post about gang culture and court room anthropology.  What happens when people start using the idea of culture to make warped arguments about human behavior?  How can anthropology be used to counter these kinds of arguments?  Trouillot gets right into these issues and arguments in his chapter.  But I think people can easily misread Trouillot’s argument as some sort of dismissal of the culture concept.  However, that’s not what he’s doing–he makes a crucial argument about getting back to the “conceptual kernel” of the culture, basically what those early 20th century anthropologists were  trying to do with it in the first place.  In essence, get back to the point.  Get back to what they were trying to address with that concept.   This is fundamental.

I think that sort of move makes a lot more sense than trying to go around correcting the entire world for “getting it wrong” when it comes to culture.  How effective is it, really, to respond to a twisted use of culture with a lecture about the supposed “right” way to think about the concept??  It’s a dead end.  And nobody is going to listen.  I have been guilty of that sort of thing and it truly leads nowhere.

We as anthropologists–of all people–should know that ideas, words, and concepts shift in meaning–and how they are deployed for social, personal, and political purposes.  The concept has taken on a different life, and now has a range of (often very political) meanings that were not part of the original conception.  We should probably stop being surprised or taken aback by it all, and figure out another strategy.  Instead of doubling down (as Jason says) on the one that got away and trying to take back something that we can’t really own.

I also think Trouillot’s argument about the relationship between culture, race, and racism is of utmost importance, especially in instances when people start talking about “gang culture” or “black culture” or a “culture of poverty.”  Culture, as formulated by the Boasians, was meant to combat warped views about human race (and racism) that were rampant in the early 20th century.  We can all argue about the overall success of Boasian anthropology in this regard, but the point here is that culture had specific meanings that challenged race-based (and racist) ideas about humanity.

These days, however, the concept has sort of gone off the tracks (“out of orbit” as Trouillot says) and is often used in ways that are, basically, akin to racialist/racist thinking.  In short, it’s used to support thinking that is the polar opposite of what Boas and company were going for.  When someone like David Brooks argues that people in Haiti are poor because of the CULTURE, it’s pretty clear that the whole idea has gone off the deep end.  Trouillot mentions folks like Lawrence Harrison,  Sam Huntington, and Charles Murray, who are all making similar sorts of twisted arguments about culture (all tinged with various biased/racist assumptions).

But, as Trouillot says, all is not lost.  He says it’s a waste of time to go around trying to tell the world the “right way” to think about culture.  Instead, get back to the primary ideas behind the concept, and push forward in defense of THAT.

It’s a powerful argument.

But I have a feeling this won’t go over too well with a lot of cultural anthropologists here in the US (for obvious reasons).  Yet I’d argue it’s vital to really think through the implications of and reasons behind Trouillot’s argument.  Especially since anthropology seems to have so much trouble getting a foothold in the public sphere, and we often complain about how wrong certain pundits (and others) get it when they talk about human behavior, culture, and so on.  Maybe we need another strategy besides telling wider audiences that they “just don’t get it” when it comes to some of our core ideas.  I think Trouillot provides a way out of some of these dilemmas…if we’re open to his argument.

PS: Interestingly and coincidentally, reading this chapter also lead me back to Ingold’s arguments about anthropology and ethnography.  Jason brings Ingold into the argument as well.  Hmmm.  Serendipity I think not.

First of all, this sort of reaction to breastfeeding is not uncommon.  It reminds me of this cartoon, which points out some of the deep hypocrisy that pervades this whole issue, especially here in the US.

Second, this is obviously about cultural norms–and this includes ideas about what is and what is not considered “indecent” in public settings.  Part of the issue is who defines norms, and how certain activities (or parts of bodies) are deemed either acceptable or not.  The whole conversation about breastfeeding is entangled in all kinds of social and cultural ideas about human nature, sexuality, and how we think about individual human bodies in relation to the larger social body.  When a lot of people think about breasts (this includes men and women), they automatically think SEX.  As if that’s their primary reason for existence.

That’s pretty much the heart of the matter: women’s breasts are often defined as sex objects–and not much more.  And since sex is basically taboo in the public realm, breastfeeding ends up being perceived as some sort of indecent, out-of-bounds behavior.  When these sorts of culturally-based ideas about women’s bodies get codified and/or backed by laws, well, that when things can get worse.  Read: discriminatory.

Of course, Rachel Rainbolt isn’t alone here.  Just about a year ago anthropologist Adrienne Pine found herself caught up in her own breastfeeding controversy.  Pine’s decision to feed her child during a class lecture was met with charges that her behavior was “unprofessional,” among other complaints.  See Pine’s response to the incident on Counterpunch here.  I remember reading about that when it happened, and being surprised at just how upset some people were about the entire subject.  Talk about striking a chord.  Clearly, breastfeeding exposes some sensitive cultural boundaries–but why?  As the ironic cartoon points out above (here’s the link again), it’s pretty hilarious that Victoria’s Secret can display boobs in public and everyone is ok with it, but when a mother has to feed her kid in a public place it’s potentially a grave social offense.

Hmmm.

Anthropologically speaking, all of the negative reactions to breastfeeding are interesting in and of themselves.  Where do these reactions come from?  What fuels them–and what makes them so prominent?  Why and how did breastfeeding become so…taboo?  It’s important to look deeper at these kinds of social (and public) fault lines and ask ourselves what’s going on.

This led me to some of the work of anthropologists who take a closer look at breastfeeding and why it’s such a controversial and touchy issue for some folks.  Katherine Dettwyler has written a lot about the subject, and some of her commentaries are accessible online.  In one piece about the “cultural context” of breastfeeding in the US, she writes:

This isn’t a male versus female issue; most of the outspoken critics of breastfeeding in public, and breastfeeding older children, are women, just as women are the ones clamoring for their right to have their breast size increased through surgery. Likewise, some researchers have suggested that breastfeeding advocacy represents a call for women to return to their “traditional,” circumscribed roles as housewives and mothers. In this chapter, I explicitly reject this interpretation. Women should not have to choose between nurturing their children in the best possible way and pursuing other interests outside the home. Just as an earlier generation of women thought that they had to choose between having a family and having a career, today’s generation of working mothers often think they must choose between breastfeeding their children and having a career, but it doesn’t have to be that way.  It is up to us to change the cultural context of breastfeeding, and of work, in the United States, so that breastfeeding is compatible with the modern workplace. Rather than concluding that an advocacy of breastfeeding means a return to the days of “a woman’s place is in the home,” one can argue that an advocacy of breastfeeding means a change in a culture’s valuation of child rearing as an activity, and a change in the valuation of the important contributions that only women can make to the social reproduction of a society.

Dettwyler makes several strong points, and also helps add a wider perspective to the whole issue.  Specifically about the notion that breasts are simply objects of sex and desire, she writes:

I am not suggesting that it is wrong or immoral or perverted to experience sexual pleasure from manual or oral manipulation of the breasts as part of sexual behavior. I am insisting, however, that we recognize this as learned behavior, learned in a particular cultural context. I am not suggesting that men and women in any culture should give up this aspect of their sexuality; I am suggesting that they should recognize this role of the breasts as a very distant, secondary lagniappe. Can’t we “have our cake and eat it, too?” one may ask. Perhaps, I would respond, but with caution. Perhaps, but only to the extent that using our breasts for these purposes doesn’t lead to the excesses represented by female mammary mutilation, widespread dissatisfaction among women with the way their bodies look, men who judge a woman’s value on the size of her breasts, and widespread misunderstanding of the primary function of women’s breasts, which leads to breastfeeding being defined as sexual behavior. The costs of these cultural beliefs, in terms of women’s physical health and self-esteem, and children’s health, are, it seems to me, too high a price to pay.

It is a high price.  And it’s ironic that the simple human act of breastfeeding can stir up such controversy.  All of this makes me want to look further into when, why, and how cultural attitudes about breastfeeding shifted in the US, and how those changes are linked to the prominence of bottle and formula feeding.  It makes you wonder.

PS: Please post any related links or citations you have in the comments section.   I know there has to be a lot of lit out there about this, so please share any recommendations or suggestions. Thanks.

Ryan Anderson is a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky.  He is currently in Yucatan, Mexico with his family splitting his time between writing his dissertation and being on baby duty.  He is the editor of the anthropologies project and also blogs at Anthropology in Public.  You can email him at: anthropologies project at gmail dot com, or find him on Twitter (@publicanthro).

Victor Turner and others (including Arnold Van Gennep, Mary Douglas, Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel) have suggested that the analyst can best get to know a particular society / culture by focusing his attention on events that challenge or disrupt the normal arrangement and flow of social life. Rather than describe in meticulous detail the intricate way in which social things fit together (in tidy four-ply Parsonian boxes), one takes a close, dispassionate look at how things fall apart, at how, sometimes just for a moment, sometimes for an extended period, sometimes, in the case of revolution, forever, the fabric of society is torn and thereby reveals the separate threads of its composition. I think this approach is particularly well-suited to the cultural analysis of contemporary American society, for its 24/7 cable news networks have the nearly magical power to single out an isolated event and magnify it instantly to national or even global proportions.

It is this orientation, a predisposition to attend to the edges or boundaries of social phenomena, that fired my interest in the spectacular event of Lance Armstrong’s confession on a January 2012 airing of The Oprah Winfrey Show. Armstrong admitted the truth of long-standing allegations that he had used “performance enhancing drugs” during multiple Tour de France races. That confession, made before the millions who watch Oprah, triggered an avalanche of commentary, almost all of which was in the vein of hand-wringing, soul-searching despair and outrage: We, the great American public, had been lied to, deceived by a son of the soil whom we had elevated to the status of hero. A small army of lawyers and government agents rushed in to redress the grievous wrong with lawsuits, penalties, revocation of awards. Surveiller et punir; monitor and punish.

My essay argues that the public outcry should be regarded as a lens through which the dispassionate observer may identify and explore the basic values of American society that underlie the outpouring of righteous indignation. In the course of that cultural analysis, those values are found to be shot full of contradiction and ambivalence. Seen in this light the Lance Armstrong affair exposes deep, and largely irreparable fault lines in American society. Particular loci of those fault lines are spectator sports and the recent phenomenon of reality television.

Drummond’s paper is here.  So head over to the OAC, read the paper, and jump on in to the discussion.  You have 8 more days to get in on the action.

Here’s a confession. I not only grew up watching Star Trek, but I also grew up being spoon-fed that same version of modernity at school. I went to the United Nations International School for both middle school and high school, and I helped organize a series of student-run conferences on development related issues at the UN. But then I became an anthropologist. As an anthropologist, reading the likes of James Ferguson, James Scott and Arturo Escobar, one becomes a little skeptical about modernity’s “unfinished project.” It was for this reason that I found myself watching this nearly flawless recreation of the original Star Trek series and wondering: what’s the point? I loved it and will continue to watch any new episodes, but I also found it disturbing to have this outmoded vision of modernity preserved so uncritically.

It is like someone designing, in 2013, a building in the style of brutalist architecture from the sixties. I can admire some of these buildings and can even see the argument for preserving the greatest examples of brutalism, but would you really want to make a new building in this style? Perhaps the problem is that we still don’t really have a good alternative? It seems that a lot of science fiction these days is dystopian, zombie movies abound, but there there are very few movies or TV shows that see modernity as something positive. I understand the appeal of the enchanted vision of modernity that Star Trek gave us, but rather than forever try to recapture our lost-innocence, to finish a project which can never be finished, maybe it is time to tell a new story about modernity?

• Star Wars, of course, is set in the past.