A recent book addresses this phenomenon as it applies to writing in the social sciences and,  by extension,  to anthropology.   Learn to Write Badly . How to Succeed in  the Social Sciences   by Michael Billig is not a ‘How To’ book.  Its  a  `How Not To’ book.  But, as the author makes plain, if you don’t write in the way which has become authoritative in your field, even if it entails writing badly, there could be consequences for your reputation if not your career.

Although Billig’s is a book about writing I think that the author’s claims work pretty well for communication in the social sciences more generally. It certainly made me think about how we as anthropologists in academia tend to speak to our audiences whether they are our students or our peers. The formal style of academic presentations in anthropology based on writing rather than on `findings’ prioritizes engagement with other writing over and above engagement with either our audience or our informants. This is quite different to communication in other fields,  within and outside academia. A how to book which you may find useful for engaging with these other fields is Carmine Gallo’s Talk like TED summarized neatly here by Sam Leith of the Financial Times .

Sure,  it’s a manual in self promotion (but lets not kid ourselves that academia is any different). But it also has lots of useful tips about connecting with the audience, making a few key points and giving them something to remember.  And I learned something wholly new, useful and unexpected. That if you press the B or W keys in powerpoint you can suspend the presentation so your audience is focusing on you not the slide until you are ready to show them the next one. Despite the acknowledged allure of  intellectual  posturing sometimes you just cant beat useful practicality.

Conferences are of a very limited utility but a utility nonetheless. You should still go but only to select, useful, and economically fair events. Let’s break it down. There are three economic types of conferences:

1) The first is the “extortion conference” illustrated by research society wide events with hundreds or more participants. The fees are high and the locations are the most expensive in the world. Most graduate students and assistant professors cannot afford these conferences. With limited university support they can attend one of these a year, if that. My call is to cease participation in these types of conferences. They are of a very limited use on the CV, for networking, or experience.

2) The second is the “free conference” with no fee, where you can attend and participate but you are required to pay your travel and lodging. With limited university support you can almost pay for all of the travel and lodging. Attend these conferences only if they provide valuable networking and publishing experience. I only go to these if they are small, defined by less than 40 people and/or have a plan for post-conference publication of a book or special journal edition. Then it is useful for you and you don’t have to pay the extortion conference fee. These conference organizers have done their work finding university patronage to pay for space rental and didn’t pass the cost onto you.

3) Thirdly, there is  the “all expenses conference.” Here the conference organizers will pay travel, lodging, and conference fees. These are rare but if you are patient and continue in academia you can find 1-2 of these a year–which is about all the conferences you need a year. They are small and rewarding and free. It may take them a month to pay you back based on receipts and therefore they leave you with £1000 less for a month, which can be difficult, but the money will return.

The extortion conference system is like publishing in the physical sciences–they will publish your personally subsidized work at a profit only after you pay them. In the social sciences, we rarely encounter a journal requiring payment (except see American Ethnologist) but the system is the same. The extortion conference system, like the proprietary closed door publishing system, thrives on personal economic subsidization and relies upon a now-absent university patronage. Both systems negate open sharing of information. Proprietary academic publishing puts our research behind gates and firewalls and extortion conferences make it economically impossible to share our work in their closed and cold hotel basements. Both systems are economically classed: proprietary publishing and extortion conferences both reward those who can pay to play.

We must break the back of this free labor system. Stop paying conference fees.

Glenn Greenwald’s post offers a good overview:

But in July 2011, Swartz was arrested for allegedly targeting JSTOR, the online publishing company that digitizes and distributes scholarly articles written by academics and then sells them, often at a high price, to subscribers. As Maria Bustillos detailed, none of the money goes to the actual writers (usually professors) who wrote the scholarly articles – they are usually not paid for writing them – but instead goes to the publishers.

This system offended Swartz (and many other free-data activists) for two reasons: it charged large fees for access to these articles but did not compensate the authors, and worse, it ensured that huge numbers of people are denied access to the scholarship produced by America’s colleges and universities. The indictment filed against Swartz alleged that he used his access as a Harvard fellow to the JSTOR system to download millions of articles with the intent to distribute them online for free; when he was detected and his access was cut off, the indictment claims he then trespassed into an MIT computer-wiring closet in order to physically download the data directly onto his laptop.

Swartz never distributed any of these downloaded articles. He never intended to profit even a single penny from anything he did, and never did profit in any way. He had every right to download the articles as an authorized JSTOR user; at worst, he intended to violate the company’s “terms of service” by making the articles available to the public. Once arrested, he returned all copies of everything he downloaded and vowed not to use them. JSTOR told federal prosecutors that it had no intent to see him prosecuted, though MIT remained ambiguous about its wishes.

But federal prosecutors ignored the wishes of the alleged “victims”. Led by a federal prosecutor in Boston notorious for her overzealous prosecutions, the DOJ threw the book at him, charging Swartz with multiple felonies which carried a total sentence of several decades in prison and $1 million in fines.

Lawrence Lessig is similarly outraged. Here’s a sample:

Here is where we need a better sense of justice, and shame. For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor’s behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The “property” Aaron had “stolen,” we were told, was worth “millions of dollars” — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.

JSTOR released a statement:

The case is one that we ourselves had regretted being drawn into from the outset, since JSTOR’s mission is to foster widespread access to the world’s body of scholarly knowledge.

As did MIT, which is reviewing it handling of the case:

“Now is a time for everyone involved to reflect on their actions, and that includes all of us at MIT,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif said in an email sent to the university community Sunday afternoon…

But what led me to write this post is a grassroots movement on Twitter whereby scholars are sharing open-access versions of their papers and marking them with the #PDFTribute hashtag. I’ve earlier tried to encourage more of this kind of sharing by anthropologists and this is a great way to start. Even better, Jonathan Eisen at UC Davis has written a post called “Ten simple ways to share PDFs of your papers #PDFtribute” which should be required reading for every scholar.

UPDATE: pdftribute.net aims to archive every link posted to the twitter hashtag.

True Open Access: These aren’t simply ads for the journal, but links to articles which authors have placed in institutional repositories.

They also have a great blog: [Heh, right now the blog’s homepage is giving error messages, but you can link to the most recent blog posts from the top level of the site.] You can also follow them on Twitter.

Curated collections: “(formerly Virtual Issues) gather together five articles that speak to a particular anthropological or contemporary theme.”

What other AAA journals/sections have great websites that promote open content?

There are opportunities in the apocalypse.  The end of the world has been commodified.  A few are seriously investing in bunkers, boats, and survival supplies. Tourism is up, not only to Mayan archaeological sites, but also to places like Bugarach, France and Mt. Rtanj, Serbia.  But even those of us on a budget can afford at least a book, a T-shirt or a handbag.

There are opportunities here for academics, too. Many scholars have been quoted in the press lately saying that nothing will happen on Dec 21 , in addition to those who have written comprehensive books and articles discrediting the impending doom. Obviously publishing helps individual careers, and that does not detract from our collective responsibility to debunk ideas that might lead people to physical or financial harm.  But neither can we divorce our work from its larger social implications.

It is telling that the main scholarly players in debunking the Mayan Apocalypse in the U.S. are NASA (which is facing budget cuts) and anthropologists.  Both groups feel the need to prove they are relevant because our collective jobs depend on it. I don’t need to go into great detail with this crowd about academia’s current situation. Academia has gone from being a well-respected, stable job to one where most classes are taught by underpaid, uninsured part-time adjuncts, and many Ph.D.s never find work in academia at all. Tuition fees for undergraduates have skyrocketed while full-time faculty salaries have stagnated.

Among the public (too often talked about as being in “the real world,” as if academics were somehow immune to taxes or swine flu), there seems to be a general distrust of intellectuals. That, combined with the current economic situation, has translated into a loss of research funding, such as cuts to the Fulbright program and NSF. Some public officials specifically state that science and engineering are worth funding, but anthropology is not.  To add insult to injury, the University of California wants to move away from that whole “reading” thing and rebrand itself as a web startup.

Articles, books with general readership, being quoted in the newspaper, and yes, blogging are all concrete ways to show funding agencies and review committees that what we do matters. The way to get exposure among those general audiences is to engage with what interests them — like the end of the world.  Dec. 21, 2012 has become an internet meme. Many online references to it are debunkings or tongue-in-cheek. Newspaper articles on unrelated topics make passing references in jest, stores offer just-in-case-it’s-real sales, people are planning parties.  There seems to be more written to discredit the apocalypse, or make fun on it, than to prepare for it.

We need to remember that this non-believer attention has a purpose, and that purpose is not just (or even primarily) about convincing believers that nothing is going to happen. Rather, it serves to demonstrate something about non-believers themselves.  “We” are sensible and logical, while “they” are superstitious and credulous. “We” value science and data, while “they” turn to astrology, misreadings of ancient texts, and esoteric spirituality.   “We” remember the non-apocalypses of the past, while “they” have forgotten.

I would argue that discrediting the Mayan Apocalypse is part of an ongoing process of creating western modernity (cue Latour). That modernity requires an “other,” and here that “other” is defined in this case primarily by religious/spiritual belief in the Mayan apocalypse.  The more “other” these Apocalypse believers are, the more clearly they reflect the modernity of non-believers.  (Of course, there are also the “others” of the Maya themselves, and I’ll address that issue in my next post.)

This returns us to the difference I drew in my first post between “Transitional Apocalyptic Expectations” (TAE) and “Catastrophic Apocalyptic Expectations” (CAE).  I suspect the majority of believers are expecting something like a TAE-type event, but media attention focuses on discrediting CAE beliefs, such as a rogue planet hitting the Earth or massive floods. These would be dire catastrophes, but they will also be far easier to disprove. We will all notice if a planet does or does not hit the Earth next week, but many of us — myself included — will miss a transformation in human consciousness among the enlightened.

By providing the (very real) scientific data to discredit the apocalypse, scholars are incorporated into this project of modernity.  Much of the scholarly work on this phenomenon is fascinating and subtle, but the press picks up on two main themes.  One is scientific proof that the apocalypse will not happen, such as astronomical data that Earth is not on a collision course with another planet, Mayan epigraphy that shows the Long Count does not really end, and ethnography that suggests most Maya themselves are not worried about any of this.  The other scholarly theme the press circulates is the long history of apocalyptic beliefs in the west.  In the logic of the metanarrative of western progress, this connects contemporary Apocalypse believers to the past, nonmodernity and “otherness.”

I now find myself in an uncomfortable position, although it is an intellectually interesting corner to be backed into. I agree with my colleagues that the world will not end, that Mayan ideas have been misappropriated, and that we have a responsibility to address public concerns.  At the same time, I can’t help but feel we are being drawn, either reluctantly or willingly, into a larger project than extends far beyond next week.

Rejecting a paper before peer review is called a “desk reject” and different journals differ in their policies. Some journals reject most papers before they get to peer review, while others send out almost everything. In some cases, it seems, this might be a ploy to boost rejection numbers so as to improve a journals’ ranking, although it isn’t clear that it actually makes a difference (for ranking) how you reject a paper.

From chatting with journal editors on Facebook it seems the most frequent cause for a desk rejection is that an article is obviously inappropriate for that journal. Editors told me of articles sent in the wrong language, or even the wrong academic discipline. Articles that are particularly poorly written might also be subject to a desk rejection.

Yet there are good reasons not to reject too many articles this way. Some articles might be greatly improved by the peer review process and it would be a shame for the journal to loose the article. Editors might also wish to avoid being too heavy handed with their own prejudices. My complaint is that I’ve been sent papers that don’t even meet the minimum standards I would set for a graduate student term paper.

Since peer reviewing isn’t a paid job, we do it for two reasons. One is to learn about new research in our field. The other is as a form of service to our community. When an editor sends out a paper that isn’t ready for peer review, it damages the trust upon which the entire system is built. Some argue that we should “stop giving free labour to publishers that lock research away” in non-open access journals. Considering that there are very few journals in my various areas of expertise which are Open Access, I don’t see this as an option yet. Nor does it address the problem I’m discussing. I’m happy to work for free, even for a for-profit company (just like I do for Facebook and Google), but editors need to make sure that they are making it worth your while and not just using you to boost their rejection rates.

Also see Rex’s post on The five virtues of peer review(ers). And for a good primer on peer review, see this post by BoingBoing’s Maggie Koerth-Baker. Finally, take a look at the archives of the Peer Review Blog.

One of the best parts to me is the online seminar.  Here’s how it all works: basically, when papers are first posted, there is a period of a couple of weeks in which readers are invited to post their thought and comments, and engage in an extended conversation not only with the author of the paper, but also other members of the OAC community and readership.  For me, this is a really valuable way to approach publication and dissemination–readers can post comments and responses directly, and instantly.  I think it makes for a pretty fascinating dynamic, one that is quite different from what we get from traditional print journals.

The latest in the Working Papers Series is Edward F. Fischer’s “The Good Life: Values, Markets, and Wellbeing.”  The online seminar started a couple of days ago, and will run for a couple of weeks.   During this time readers are invited to download Fischer’s paper, give it a read, and then join in the seminar by posting their thoughts and comments.  Here’s a snippet from Huon Wardle’s introduction to the seminar:

Ted Fischer’s paper takes us directly into a topic of increasing importance in development studies and which should be important to anthropologists too. It seems hard to doubt that in every human community there circulate ideas and images of what a good life means. Notions of the good life clearly vary from society to society, from individual to individual and even from moment to moment. Whatever the good life may consist in situationally we can hardly doubt that it is and has always been an object of sustained human thought and aspiration and that what people imagine about it will affect how they act in the world…

The link to the seminar is here.  Fischer’s paper can be downloaded here.  Check it out, take part, comment, chime in with your 2 cents–it’s worth it.  And don’t worry, joining the OAC is free.

Anthropologists are routinely exhorted to make our work accessible to non-academics, to do strident outreach, to engage with the public, and to otherwise not hole up in our academic enclaves. Part of our effort involves fielding inquiries from journalists. We should be happy that writers are interested in talking to us and wish to include our opinions, right? Over the years, journalists have frequently left me telephone messages or sent email along these lines:

Dear Professor,
I’m a writer for Massive News, and I’m currently doing a story on Something Interesting. As you are an expert on Something Interesting, I would greatly appreciate a comment from you. My number is xxx. Since I am on a tight deadline, however, please call me within two hours.
Thank you,
Journalist

I have found that often these journalists simply want to seed their articles with a few canned comments that will endorse their spin, and that they don’t actually care about my ideas. If you work in an academic environment in which you must constantly prove the relevance and worthiness of anthropology, as the majority of academic anthropologists at non-elite schools do, you might give in and provide what you hope will be an innocuous blurb. Although whatever you say is invariably twisted into a shape that will support the ethnocentric, racist or sexist slant the journalist has in their piece, this doesn’t matter at all to your university or your colleagues. All they care about is the Mention (which a university staff member will collect and quantify to demonstrate your Impact Factor). Indeed, universities employ well-paid staff in development offices who work with journalists to produce quick and inoffensive media bites by calling on a stable of faculty willing to be used for just such purposes. We become media whores because donors and administrators like seeing our names in the press. The fact that journalists expect an immediate response to their inquiries also highlights the difference in how academics and journalists do their business. Journalists routinely display as part of their normal behavior an expectation that academics are eager for an opportunity to talk to them just to get their name in the news.

Journalists themselves are under pressure to create catchy headlines, but often the result distorts or jumbles our findings. Here is one that just appeared in the BBC news in August 2012: “English language ‘originated in Turkey,’” in an article by Jonathan Ball. His piece reports on findings that appeared in Science in August 2012 that support the theory of an Anatolian origin for the Indo-European language family. This typically overblown title probably won’t hurt anyone, but in some cases anthropologists have found themselves the target of public anger and even threats when their research is misrepresented in the press. Many anthropologists who have had awful experiences with the press have been brave enough to relate them. Consider some of the revealing chapters in the edited volume When They Read What We Write: The Politics of Ethnography, edited by Caroline Brettell.

Of course, I’ve encountered some good journalists who think about and explore the issues they write about, but usually this was not the case. What I’m wondering is, can anthropologists justifiably decide not to engage with some of these journalistic phishing attempts? Must we respond every time someone wants us to deliver a quote if doing so merely endorses their simplistic ethnocentric, racist or sexist views? And, what about cases where the journalist picks your brain for hours, then uses your ideas and analyses without ever mentioning you after all? Particularly at this time in history, I would be happy to see an anthropological perspective inserted into US debates about sex, gender, women’s bodies, and gay marriage. Perhaps we need to train a new generation of journalist anthropologists?

Ryan Anderson: First of all, thanks for taking the time to do this interview, Tom. Here at Savage Minds we write about Open Access (OA) a lot, and many of our contributors seem to be in agreement about the need to look into alternative publishing options. But not everyone knows about OA or is in agreement with the push to head in that direction, and this includes many people who are well established in anthropology. So, what’s your opinion about OA? Is this an issue that should matter for anthropologists who are already successful within the current publishing regime, for example?

Tom Boellstorff: I think there’s an urgent need to build on the advocacy work a number of people have been doing within and outside the AAA to reach the goal of “gold” OA (meaning that articles are freely available to download online). In my September 2012 “From the Editor” piece in American Anthropologist I try to set out my current thinking in regard to this issue. If I can quote from that piece:

There are three primary reasons why this transition to gold open access is imperative, reasons that are simultaneously ethical, political, and intellectual. First, there is a fundamental contradiction between the often-repeated goal of making anthropology more public and relevant on the one hand, and the lack of open access on the other hand. Second, there is an incompatibility between the broad interest in transnationalizing anthropology and the lack of open access. Third, it is wrong for any academic journal to be based on a model where the unremunerated labor of scholars supports corporate profits. I see no way that the current subscription-based model can be modified so as to adequately address these concerns.

In terms of people not being in agreement to head in that direction, which as you say “includes many people who are well established in anthropology,” I think we need to reach out and work with those folks. The reality is that running a journal well takes money, particularly a larger journal, and I don’t think we want a future where publishing relies on unpaid graduate student labor, farmed-out copy editing, and so on. For me, the issue is that (1) regardless, we need to find a way toward gold OA, and (2) I just refuse to believe that so many smart people can’t find a way to do it.

It may take sacrifice. For instance, I’m not one of those people who hates the AAA meetings. I love them and I think you need to understand the genre. It’s not a small conference where you get to have a focused discussion, but a space of excess where you get to sample cool emerging work, network, meet friends old and new, check out the book exhibit, etc. But what if (and this is just a thought experiment; I haven’t run the numbers) we held the AAAs only every other year, and used that savings to make all AAA journals gold OA? That would be a real sacrifice for me, but it’s one I personally would support. Then in the “off” years, every other year when there wasn’t a AAA meeting, we could schedule all of the section meetings like the AES meetings and the SCA meetings. They would probably get higher attendance that way, so it might benefit the sections too. Once again: I’m not saying this is a solution, because I haven’t run the numbers. What I’m saying is that it might be that kind of real change, real sacrifice, that would be needed to make gold OA financially viable, and I would argue strongly in favor of this particular sacrifice.

We need to have a lot of brainstorming to think about other possible models. What has been less helpful I think is that we’ve seen some AAA surveys and such that ask “if you had to pay $250 more in annual fees for gold OA, would you support that?” (I can’t remember the exact phrasing; that’s just my reconstruction.) If you phrase it that way, of course lots of people will pause and say “no.” The better way to phrase the question is: “how much would you be willing to pay per year to have AAA journals be gold OA?” And then work backwards from there. But also ask other kinds of questions, like “Would you support having the AAA meetings only every other year if this meant that all AAA journals could be gold OA?”

RA: And here’s a related question: What about upcoming anthropologists who are just getting in on the publishing game? Should they be concerned with these debates about OA? I’m thinking especially of graduate students and new PhD’s who are under tremendous pressure to publish in order to “make it” in anthropology. Where’s the time to even think about things like OA?

TB: You raise several really great points here, which I’ll address in reverse order.

First, a huge issue with regard to OA debates is that anthropologists are usually too busy to keep up with the debates or even think clearly about the issues. Certainly in my own case, until I became Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist I had no real engagement with these issues—not because I didn’t care on an abstract level, but because there was just no time. I don’t have a magic answer to this problem of no time, but it is important to try and educate ourselves and build on the great advocacy work our colleagues have done. The publishers think about these things on a more sustained basis, whereas we do it in the nooks and crannies of time we can find, but just coming together every year at the AAA meetings and saying “we should all stay in touch about this” clearly isn’t enough.

Second, in regard to your questions about “upcoming anthropologists who are just getting in on the publishing game.” As you know this is an issue that has been very important to me and I’ve published multiple pieces on “how to get published” and such during my tenure as American Anthropologist editor (with more coming out this December (2012), which will be the last issue of American Anthropologist appearing under my name). As you note, for graduate students and new Ph.D.s there is “tremendous pressure to publish in order to ‘make it’ in anthropology.” But I do think publishing is very important in many ways and isn’t just a game as such. Whether we end up with employment in academia, nonprofits, government, industry, or other venues (and sometimes movement between them), those who hire people have to have a way to calibrate talent and decide who to hire. This is not just a feature of a hard job market or myths of meritocracy narrowly conceived: we always have to make these decisions. Competitive journals are one way of showing that you are seen as a valuable member of your research community. Another is citation patterns: you can have work published in a major venue that isn’t cited much, and work published in venues seen as of a lower status, but that gets cited much more and shapes conversations much more, and that can be taken into account.

Another issue is that for me, publishing is a form of community-building, particularly when conducted through peer review. One reason why the editorship was so exhausting but also gratifying for me was that I spent just as long on my letters of rejection as my letters of acceptance—often they were 15–20 pages long, in many cases longer than the manuscript itself. I once had an article rejected from American Anthropologist but based on the helpful comments, got it published in another good venue (Journal for Linguistic Anthropology). So it is a process and a conversation. That’s one reason I always recommend junior scholars get a manuscript or two under review as quickly as possible after completing the dissertation or even while finishing the dissertation, because this process takes time and you want to get things going.

So graduate students and new Ph.D.s should think about publishing for sure, not just because of the job market but because you can’t just tell people “my work is really great”—if the work is not put into circulation then it can’t contribute to the conversation. It is important for graduate students and new Ph.D.s to learn as much as they can about OA issues, but we really need more senior scholars to take a leadership role because they have the job security and status to do so (even if not as much time as they wish they had!). I became Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist at 38 and a full Professor at 40, so I’ve moved comparatively swiftly in my career: at the ripe old age of 43 I still have trouble thinking of myself as “senior,” but careerwise I am and that’s one reason I’m trying as best I can to keep up with these issues and contribute in any way possible.

RA: I think you make a great point about the importance of “contributing to the conversation.” I want to go back to where you mentioned competitive journals and citation patterns as tools for evaluating the value of a member of a research community—for hiring practices and so on. That’s pretty much the dominant model from what I understand. Where do you think academic repositories—such as something like the Social Science Research Network (SSRN)—could fit into this scheme?

TB: Hmm. That’s a really great question for which I sadly don’t have an easy answer. Put yourself for a moment in the shoes of someone who is writing a recommendation letter for someone coming up for tenure. So if anyone can get their work uploaded onto the SSRN, what I can say in such a letter? I can evaluate the content of the work of course and advocate for the person on that basis. But it’s also very helpful in some cases to say “this person has published an article in a very selective journal,” etc. Repositories like the SSRN are important to scholarly dissemination, curation, and so on, but a repository isn’t the same thing as an edited journal.

What I think sometimes gets missed in these debates is that no matter what model you use, there has to be some way to evaluate people. Sadly, it’s not a world where 100 people apply for a job as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology, and all 100 get jobs as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology. The reality is 100 people will apply for such a job, and 20 or 10 or 5 will get that kind of job. Or a staff job at a nonprofit (my first job was Regional Coordinator at the Institute for Community Health Outreach, a nonprofit based in San Francisco that trained Community Health Outreach Workers in HIV/AIDS prevention, and that was a competitive job to get). Or a job in industry, or at a museum, or whatever. No matter what the venue, there has to be a means of evaluation, and selective publication venues are one way of showing one is a leader in one’s field. Repositories are very important, but by their design they aren’t so effective in this regard.

RA: So, in your view, what is the potential role of the American Anthropological Association when it comes to OA publishing? Is the AAA amenable to OA publishing?

TB: Absolutely. First, let me note that Wiley-Blackwell, our corporate publishing partner, is quite friendly to OA in a limited sense; they have gold OA journals and a “green OA” setup for the AAA journal portfolio that allows authors to circulate “post-prints” of their manuscripts (the final version before it goes into production). Articles more than 35 years old are also gold OA already. So even W-B is quite open, but within the horizon of a corporate model that as I noted above, I don’t see as ultimately viable as it’s currently structured.

Now, in terms of the AAA: AAA staff and leadership in my experience have no problem with OA publishing. They are usually better educated about these issues than the membership. Here is the problem. First, AAA staff and leadership have the responsibility to keep the journals running, and that’s a big burden. The journals were in financial trouble before the move to W-B, and things have been stabilized in a budgetary sense in the wake of that move. We have to understand the pressures AAA staff and leadership face to keep the lights on so to speak, and the reality that the W-B is working very well in that regard—but once again “working well” within the horizon of a model that I and many others do not see as either viable in the long term, or ethical in a fundamental sense.

One key issue is that sometimes AAA staff and leadership think not of anthropology writ large, but just of the AAA. I don’t mean to homogenize; this isn’t true across the board or in every instance, but it can happen. It is understandable because that is, once again, their responsibility. So when at least some of these folks think about these issues, what they are thinking about is the health and flourishing of the AAA. That is understandable, completely. That is why Bill Davis, the Executive Director of the AAA, could state to Congress on January 12, 2012 that “We know of no research that demonstrates a problem with the existing system for making the content of scholarly journals available to those who might benefit from it.” (See my September 2012 “From the Editor” for citations and more discussion.)

The problem here is that we need to be concerned not just about the AAA, but anthropology in the broadest sense. “Those who might benefit” from anthropological research are emphatically not just those persons who are AAA members, or who work at institutions that can afford an Anthrosource subscription. The people we study around the world deserve access to what we write. There is no reason we need to have a discipline of anthropology in the world. It is not inevitable. I for one do not have any particular investments in something called “anthropology” for its own sake. Like basically any academic I ask about this nowadays, my approaches are deeply interdisciplinary (after all, my first degree is in music!). But anthropology has so much to offer—we produce incredibly insightful and creative work—and the more that work circulates, the more we justify our existence and contribute positively to the world. I want anthropological work to be read and cited as widely as possible and read by the most diverse audiences possible. I’ve been very lucky in that regard in my own career, to see my work read and debated, misread and misconstrued, literally remixed and transformed and translated. We want that for everyone.

That doesn’t mean that we always have to write in a manner that is accessible to the general public—genres are a good thing, and the academic article with theoretical “jargon” is very useful for certain purposes. We want to be able to write in multiple voices and genres, and we want all of that work to be available to the widest audiences possible. Ideally, the AAA should play a leadership role in advocating for this kind of OA future. The problem is that we are all so busy and overworked, and we have to find models that are financially realistic. I sometimes joke that I want our model to be “less like HBO and more like CBS,” where income is based not on subscription but some other modality. Of course, we don’t have the benefit of car or soap companies wanting to advertise on our pages! This is the impasse—but also the point of opportunity—at which we currently reside: the point of seeking a path forward that meets our goals but is also realistic. If I had an easy solution to that impasse I would certainly share it with you! But I continue to be optimistic that a path forward can be found, if we all work together and build on our incredible reservoir of talent.

RA: Last question. I want to conclude by talking about the future of publishing and communication in anthropology. Imagine how things are going to look 20 years down the road. Ideally, what would you like to see happen with OA, the AAA, and publishing in the discipline of anthropology? What kinds of things need to happen to make this a reality?

TB: Oh my! I’m not good at these kinds of questions. As I’ve said elsewhere, for an ethnographer like me, the problem with the future is that there is no way to study it. So such future imaginings really are just speculation and say much more about the anxieties of the present. But with that in mind, my ideal future is one where we find production models that support editors and journals in a sufficient manner, but under a gold OA model where our content is freely available and our place on the national and international stage continues to grow. I don’t have an easy way to get there, because my ideal future is one where editors are paid for their work. I emphasize this not just because labor should be remunerated, but because many talented potential editors work in institutions where they can get only minimal support for being an editor. If they had support to buy themselves out of teaching, for instance, this would open the world of editing to a greater presence of those outside major research universities.

I feel bad that I don’t have easy answers or perfect solutions to the problem of how we can successfully shift to a gold OA model. But what I’d like to leave people with is, first, a sense of the fact that some great people have been working for OA for years now, and we should continue to listen to them, learn from them, support them. Second, I set forth the hypothesis that the reason we have not been able to successfully move to a gold OA model is not that it is unworkable, but that we just have not been able to have sufficient conversations and advocacy to discover that viable path forward. I dearly hope that hypothesis is correct!

RA: Ok, I lied. I have one more question, and it’s a lot more grounded than the last one: What’s the next step we need to take to keep moving these conversations forward?

TB: There is a new AAA interest group around OA, the Digital Anthropology Group. We should support this group and get the most diverse set of voices possible involved in it. And we should keep having these kinds of conversations, and above all be gentle with each other. With our fellow anthropologists, with W-B and AAA staff. I have less and less patience for the quick comfort of donning a white hat and placing the black hat on others. If there was an easy answer we would have found it by now. But that does not mean that no answer is out there, not by a long shot.

RA: I definitely agree with you there! I think that’s a good place to leave things for now. Thanks, Tom, for taking the time to do this interview!

If you have any thoughts you would like to share or questions you would like to ask after reading through this interview, we are going to do a follow-up post and address all questions on September 15. Feel free to ask anything! So check out the interview, post your comments, ask questions, and check back in a couple weeks for the follow-up!

Note: updated on 7/26/2012 for clarity.

For this final post in our series, I find myself returning to Carole McGranahan’s post from some weeks ago, going through her very useful 9-point schema to describe what makes things ethnographic these days—realizing that whatever the circumstances of ethnographic production, whatever our definitions of ethnography might be, they always presume the centrality of writing. And that is writing in a particular mould, one that satisfies most, if not all, of the criteria enumerated in McGranahan’s post. Specialized, often lengthy, mono-graphs or variants thereof.

Recipe for Pakistani-style Political Potatoes
[Click on the image for a more readable higher-res version]

Part of me wants to say: But of course, how could it be otherwise? The other part, perhaps handicapped by my present need to cobble together a professional identity while remaking myself in an almost completely new cultural landscape—and finding precious little time to devote to writing, is wondering about ethnographic end-products, and the centrality of conventional writing to the ethnographic enterprise. In this post, therefore, I’d like to think through the prospect of decentering writing [fully aware that writing can’t ever be entirely displaced; that there is an awkwardness to the idea, reflected in this post’s two-ing title].

Think for a moment about the text I’ve helped to draft for the website of the NGO on whose board I serve. Would that count in some measure as ethnography?  There’s history there, some of it detailed, rationale and argument at least for work undertaken, there’s analysis of failure and success, there’s certainly the attempt to articulate native points of view (an appreciation, in fact, of how villagers in the surrounding regions of Pondicherry talk back to social workers, government representatives and others claiming to have the solutions to their problems), there’re individual named people, a focus on ethnographic realities, on life lived; it’s a narrative in clear dialog with issues of pressing local concern. It’s all instrumentalized, yes, but so also was HapMap (my prior research investigating Indian views on genetics for the International HapMap Project), and so really is just about all research if it’s used as a means to career advancement.

But then again: there’s no theory, no. There’s no argument per se—but for a sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit appeal to donors. There’s no reflection on how knowledge was amassed (it’s the work of the organization, after all). And there’s no effort at all to establish the credibility or credentials of the author—in fact, there’s no one person who is formally assigned authorship. I’m not in that project as an ethnographer.

For these reasons, I retain a sense that the work done for the NGO represents something not-quite-ethnographic. But wait. Might it not be possible to think of it as ethnography that is—if I may hearken back to James Clifford’s words from Writing Culture and twist them just so slightly—partial: committed and incomplete?

After all, whoever said it was necessary to find all elements of ethnography only in one place? Our conventional outputs are sites of collection: empirical data, theories, history, context, analysis, critique are all present, and rolled together, ideally coherently. Writing seems inevitable, yes; for many of us, it’s a habit we(‘ve come to) love. But do we really have to do it all in our final outputs? Could it count as ethnography if we didn’t? What if we were to rethink the commitment we have to the “ethnographic monograph as the singular product of merit,” as Lane puts it?

I’ve been suggesting all along that conditions of precarity lead to a cobbling together of what’s available and what’s possible, making ethnographic virtue out of circumstances such as they are. To some extent, I presume this is true of all research—that it’s itself such a process of cobbling-together, and working with the data that is, rather than with the data that ideally should be. The sorts of research questions that can be asked are necessarily curtailed by circumstances; I suspect we all work all the time with stop-gaps and bypasses of one sort or other. [Cori Hayden’s When Nature Goes Public, for all its dense prose, is useful in explicating this aspect of contemporary research realities.]

Now although we acknowledge this reality of research, the point is that the cobbling and corralling of “ethnography” isn’t otherwise really reflected in much of the (specialized) writing we do produce. The “conference paper” reflects the process rather more at times, but then again we expect that because it is, almost by definition, a work in progress. What would it mean to think of conference papers, or the commissioned video ethnographies of which Laurel wrote or breathing practice (Ali’s post) or observational practice (Lane’s) as attuned ways of seeking, comprehending, analyzing that are the here-more-personal there-more-public but always full-fledged ethnographic products? How would such a re-thinking change how, what, for what audience, and indeed how much we write?

Briefly, I’d like to consider the work of blogging. I cannot exactly start in here on what blog writing has done to ethnographic writing; there’s much more to be said about the use of such formats in research and teaching than what I can cover in this post. I’d like to propose, however, that the open-endedness of the blog and the conversational space it opens up is almost perfectly suited to the sort of corralling and cobbling of “ethnography” that I find myself consistently undertaking—especially in the absence of the means or the time to more comprehensively study cultural phenomena. I hear increasingly from colleagues that blogging is now considered industry good practice to promote one’s own research or upcoming book. There’s research and discussion on using blogging as a means to fieldwork/ data collection in the age of online research. Even the group of us posting here on Savage Minds thought of this exercise as a means of testing out ideas for a more conventional edited volume or some other such project.

Such approaches presume still that “ethnography” is happening (primarily? only?) in the conventional elsewheres, and not on the blogs themselves; blogs are after all tools to other (more standard) ethnographic ends. I’m suggesting, however, that blog-like spaces compel us not just to de-center classic ethnographic writing, but also to more fully embrace the notion of ethnography as process rather than (just) product.

My own admittedly fledging venture into blogging was born of a desire to situate myself in Pondicherry, intellectually, gastronomically, aesthetically—albeit without letting go of my anthropological tethers, which appear never really to have left Houston. Pâticheri is an experiment in re-claiming ethnographic voice in the context of repatriation, in a way that melds auto-ethnography with cultural analysis, and representations or performances of (in this case) food practices. It’s actually deeply gratifying that (1) my audience is not only academic, even when academics are readers, and (2) readers have far more participatory room here than in my prior work–indeed the line between those being written about and those reading is almost non-existent, just as “ethnography” is at times quite marginal. Some readers make it into a technical how-to site (which reflects at times just how esoteric aspects of culinary praxis remain): Send a recipe for digestive biscuits! What on earth do you do with this gourd that has these striations on it? How do I cut a mango? Others are gawking at images of food, or drawn to narratives about the repat experience, refracted through food practices. Moms ask about how long you can store homemade playdough; others reference Bourdieu. As with the work with the NGO, not all of it is ethnographic—but some of it explicitly is about thinking through social categories and cultural politics, about the social life of objects, or the major cultural (gender, design, labor) shifts that can be tracked through individual tools or practices.

Here the blog is not so much a tool for data gathering, as a collection site that is sometimes more, sometimes less analytical. It’s a place where ingredients are assembled, where curious juxtapositions can make for analytical opportunities, or in which quotidian (though not necessarily marginal) elements, like snacks, can become clues to understanding wider, more complex, or far-flung phenomena. It’s a place of conversation, a virtual kitchen table even. Writing is still central, but sometimes not as central as other media/ objects: the graphics, a music video produced by three random Pakistani guys, a curious fruit, the experience of a new Indian restaurant, the recipe that caps it all off. After all, we’re told, this is the attention (deficit) economy (see Lane’s post on this also); lengthy writing is less likely to draw people in than other, more visually oriented elements. We’re usually prompted to feel despair at such a state of affairs. But perhaps, just perhaps, some new creative ethnographic spaces might open up as a result?

Food blogs are these days are about as precariously poised as adjuncts: they may get noticed and paid (usually modestly, unless you’re developing iphone jailbreaks on the side or exercising “franchise” options by writing cookbooks or giving talks) or not read at all. But for all that, and especially for me, they’re a space of free play, one whose existence requires only minimal justification in terms of research strategy, and one which can simultaneously engage multiple audiences, both within and without the academy, and that on multiple levels (as parents, cooking enthusiasts or novices, collaborators, students, peers, friends, fellow artists or lovers of food writing and more)—thus being of the field in ways that our specialized mono-graphs and conventional outputs so rarely are. And it’s a work-in-process end-product, unabashedly. In short, it’s everything my dissertation, my book, and just about all the professional outputs I’ve had were not. (What a relief!)

To bring this somewhat meandering discussion full circle, there is this one element of “ethnography” that I’d add to Carole McGranahan’s list: a commitment to process over product, and the decentering of the writing practice that seems the so-natural consequence of all our ethnographic undertakings. Such commitment is perhaps nothing new, but I cannot help but wonder: Would I have been blogging while I was full time faculty—in between administrative meetings, and eternally preoccupied with making a list of work done that could, with self-respect, be presented in my annual reviews—or else? Possibly, many of my colleagues have long been active bloggers, though the ethnography of that blog would have been of entirely another character if I wanted to claim academic mileage out of it. Would I have been able to see figures like Ree Drummond or David Lebovitz as guides and inspirations over, say, Levi Strauss and Appadurai? Ha! Would illustration have been so central? No. That’d have been in the realm of “the hobby,” a cute but extraneous adjunct (I use the word deliberately) to the ethnographic process. Would it have been possible to juxtapose “Aaloo Anday” with Nancy Ries’ “Potato Ontology” with Pakistani political satire and a recipe for Aalu Anday Salan? Sure, but I suspect that would have been better classroom strategy than ethnographic method in its own right.

Not to gloss the fact that financial uncertainties loom as never before, that “fieldwork” is an increasingly absurd demand in new ways, that I’ve no idea at all if blogging is a worthwhile exercise. I’m also not at all sure if what I’m crafting in each successive post counts in anyone’s eyes but my own as “ethnographic” at all. But it sure is fun to pretend. And to explore, in between so many other conventional undertakings, an alternative realm of some modest possibility.

Deepa S. Reddy is Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. She blogs on food, culture, and gastronomical life on Pâticheri: Ethno.graphic.Food