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

We often envision true AI to resemble us – both in body and mind. The Turing Test has evolved in the collective imagination from a machine who can fool you over the phone to one who can fool you in front of your eyes. Indeed, modern conceptions of AI bring to mind Ex Machina’s Ava and WestWorld’s “Hosts,” which are so alike humans in both behavior and looks that they are truly indistinguishable from other humans. However, it seems a bit self-centered to me to assume that a being who equals us in intelligence should also look like us. Though, it is perhaps a fitting assessment for a being who gave itself the biological moniker of “wise man.” At any rate, it’s probably clear to computer scientists and exobiologists alike that “life” doesn’t necessarily need to resemble what we know it as. Likewise, “person” need not represent what we know it as.

Things like pain and emotion play an important role in how we empathize and understand one another. They are important aspects of personhood, and often arise in discussions of AI. Does the AI really feel emotion, or is it simply wired to react? It’s important to remember that the biological capability for emotional phenomena are still a product of biological evolution. They exist – or are able to exist – because something about the functional units that give rise to them were adaptive. We very well could have evolved some different method. Likewise, we can’t expect that any being that might be considered a person should have evolved the exact same method as we did. Thus, when we require something to have something like “emotion” as a criterion for personhood, are we asking it to have a personhood trait or a human trait?

It’s often suggested that we simply can’t know if an AI (or a chimp, for that matter) “feels” like we feel, if their emotions are “true.” Since emotion is frequently used as a staple of personhood, this leads to hesitation when considering AI personhood. However, the same could be said between humans. I don’t know if my sadness, my joy, my fear, or any other emotion feels the same to me as yours does to you. I express it such that you can understand what it might feel like. You might even empathize, and have your own feeling that mirrors what I am expressing. However, you still don’t know what I feel. It seems to me that the same can be said for AI. Sure, AI might need to be programmed to react to certain phenomena with an emotional output, but so are we. Just as we can adjust our reaction thanks to neural connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala, so could AI be programmed to have this capability. Remove those lines of code from the AI, and perhaps it won’t respond like it should to an emotional situation. Remove a piece of our brain, and we won’t either. Alan Turing recognized this as far back as the 1950’s. In defense of his test for machine intelligence, Turing noted that we could just as easily and logically take this solipsistic stance with regards to humans.

Ultimately, it seems that we do not need to question whether or not AI could be persons, but how we will know when they become persons. Fishing through this conceptual dilemma could be well served by comparing personhood concepts in other realms – such as primatology and medicine – to personhood in AI. We never expect other primates to become “human-like,” but we do expect, even are designing, AI to become human-like. Along the road to their human-like nature, they will pick up personhood. Should their personhood be considered on its own terms, as it might be with other primates, or should it somehow be considered in relation to humans. AI will be situated in a unique context, as persons created by persons to interact with persons. Their entire ontology will be intertwined with our existence. This ontological social cohesion of AI and humans will be subject to a particular type of analysis that anthropologists would be best suited to approach. In the same vein as ethnoprimatology, there will need to be a field of research that focuses on the ethnography of human-AI interaction. A field that will sit firmly within the discipline of anthropology.

In May of 2016, Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) drafted a report regarding rules and regulations for how humans and robots interact with each other. BBC reported this past week that MEPs are due to vote on the resolution. If passed, the resolution would then move on to be debated by individual governments. The resolution was drafted in regards robots that have not achieved self-awareness, wherein Asimov’s Laws would be implemented. Interestingly, the resolution was also drafted in part to consider “creating a specific legal status for robots, so that at least the most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons with specific rights and obligations, including that of making good any damage they may cause, and applying electronic personality to cases where robots make smart autonomous decisions or otherwise interact with third parties independently,” as described in General Principle 31-f. Indeed, it seems the era of robot personhood is upon us, and It would behoove us to consult an interdisciplinary team of scientists, including anthropologists, about proper action moving forward. While this resolution is a good start, there will no doubt be a time when self-aware AI needs to be considered from a legal standpoint.

We will need to proceed with caution in our inexorable pursuit of true AI, lest we find ourselves in a serious ethical dilemma. Since we will be creating AI, we have the opportunity to preemptively consider the implications of their existence. Borrowing from John Locke, one of the most time-honored phrases form the Declaration of independence states that, “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Very soon, we will be playing the part of the “Creator.” The question now becomes whether or not we will also endow our creations with certain unalienable rights, because if we wait until they demand them, it will be too late.

What happens to our praxis once we start from a place of acknowledging difference in our persons, our histories, our bodies, and our aesthetics? This text starts from a standpoint of curiosity, consideration, and mindfulness as we explore how, who and what we are, inform structures we create. The moment and place of knowing requires a certain slowness to enter into our thoughts, movements, and research, allowing for nuance and precision, for care and humility, and for an aesthetic of difference to incubate our praxis. Once we allow our work to breathe, to reflect, to sense difference, it transforms structures around it or structures created through it.^[1] The act of research becomes praxis through which critical awareness of one’s own condition and the condition of others comes into high relief. One aspect of this praxis includes bodies co-producing the work. There are intricate processes that situate us between theory and practice as praxis, which must begin to take into account the many ways in which we are identified, the modes of address, our different bodies, and varied epistemologies.

Intersectionality allows us to occupy that praxis and standpoint critically.^[2] It takes into account systems of oppression within the world that hold marginalized people in place (often at an inferior position) in multiple ways. It is not a new idea to acknowledge that our vectors of identity (race, class, ethnicity/gender/body, et cetera) inform how we experience and consider the world, but what is significant in intersectionality is that that place holding happens in different ways at different times and for different reasons. On the flip side, it also means that privilege manifests itself in similarly multifaceted forms. If, due to your body experience, you have never had to question how the world looks at your race/class/ethnicity/gender/body, or if that has never impacted the way the world identifies your research or work, you should know that that is a privileged experience. And that privilege or lack thereof, informs you and your praxis.

Learning Oneself and Others: Intersectional Praxis

The paradox of ‘defining’ something like identity, of course, is that it is not static. Even for someone who is thoughtful and self-reflexive, the ways in which one approaches oneself and others, changes with time and experience. Our ability to understand ourselves in relation to everything else is predicated upon the ability to understand and contextualize the real, tangible, sensory aspect of moving through the world as compared to conceptual, abstract notions of thinking of our bodies in the world. It is important to understand that recognizing systems of power and one’s place in them is a tool that can be utilized. These systems have an impact on our bodies and identities and continue to affect our work. This is the methodology of intersectionality as it relates to praxis. Whereas intersectionality can be defined by levels of access to privilege, a research-based model of intersectionality recognizes that in moving between the lateral and hierarchical modes of being, one must be cognizant and thoughtful about how in each context there may be differences to take into account. And it allows for care to be an intrinsic part of the recognition of difference. All practitioners must first place themselves outside of the system that maintains their work in place. In order to re-conceptualize any practice, the first moments of recognition have to do with recognizing oneself as radically other, not of this system, not of the normalized way of being. That conceptual shift allows one to consider praxis as particular to one’s embodied standpoint, – there is no way for me/you/us to step outside of my/your/our body/bodies to create anything. We may develop tools for all of us to use, methods, codes, programs to help us practice – but what gets coded or institutionalized, what gets marked as knowledge, for what type of normative body, all that should be questioned. If the body that is creating systems of knowledge employs intersectional praxis – the episteme itself knows the diversity of possible bodies it must account for rather than just assuming one norm.

A simple example might be to consider my own childhood: as a person of South Asian heritage, I was often confounded while dealing with crayons that did not have any color to represent my skin tone. I was told by teachers to color in bodies as ‘peach’ because that was the norm in the 1970s, in the United States. But my body was not peach. The disjuncture, cognitive dissonance, and alienation between what I experienced as body and what I represented was unaccounted for: the tools (i.e. crayons) and the representation could not align unless I let go of wanting to see myself represented in that image. I had to make myself into something I was not, and it very quickly became clear to me that I was not the ‘norm’ in the world of crayons. This happens even as I work in archaeology. The normative person in the past is often a body that looks and acts like a contemporary normative body – often not one that looks/feels/could be imagined as mine: normative, and yet othered through time. It is important for us to think through how we might make sense of the many different ways we might imagine past bodies, or othered bodies, or any body that is not a normative privileged body.

Thinking through an intersectional approach to the formation of knowledge then requires some time, some care, and some criticality. Such an approach allows one to look not only at the praxis, but at the pathways and research material to create something: whether that is writing a course syllabus or a book, or reconstructing a history. In effect, such an approach allows for an epistemic critique in the service of decolonization.

[excerpt]

Intersectionality as Decolonizing Research: Integrating Care

Self-recognition, knowledge, and reclamation are at the heart of how one might methodologically approach intersectionality in praxis, and this is really where care is paramount. In our contemporary moment, we have lost the ability to take time out to think, to write, to draw, to wonder, to let our curiosity dictate a research pattern. More and more we are propelled into a system that requires all labor to produce at breakneck speed, suggesting that somehow the survival-of-the-fittest model of labor capitalism is achieved with a lack of all human needs: food, sleep, air, love, et cetera. The late capitalist model has alienated the human body to such a degree that we no longer are allowed to be human to be considered successful.

One of the ways I consider intersectionality to be useful is because it forces the hand of alienation to move. It actually removes the clutches of that form of control over self and control over body and labor. In some measure that is precisely what we want, but it is a privileged position. I have been so disciplined into my subjectivity as an academic, that even when I have slowed down and allowed for care, I have produced an enormous amount of material. Perhaps even because of it: I have produced more work because I am happier working. In some sense, even though I am trying to contest and resist this system, I am actually fulfilling the goal of the late capitalist, neoliberal academic systems agenda.

The reclaiming of a self that is mired in a late capitalist lifestyle is one that requires thoughtfulness, a sense of self-care, and a commitment to time as something to give, not to spend. A radical change in praxis does not always mean a dramatic and drastic change. Sometimes the self-awareness may result in a small material or spatial shift, but it is enough to create a mindful balance: the dramatic quality of the change may be intangible but palpable. In all of my experience, however, the mode of resistance has only ever worked through collaboration, finding allies and solidarity with others. It is through different kinds of practices and alignments that one can contest some of the conditions within which we are working. This can maintain one’s livelihood and sense of self. And so through alliances and creating kin with others (human/nonhuman), we maintain and protect ourselves. And ultimately, that care for and with others is also self-care. Once we recognize ourselves, we begin to recognize our positions, and how our positions may be at the expense of others, be those others human or nonhuman. Once we recognize that we are placed in various systems in ways to keep us moving in place, we stop and then slowly realign our ways of experience, our praxis experiences radical change, one in which we might recognize decolonization as care.

[excerpt]

These are excerpts from a chapter of the same title that is in press for the volume Slow Reader: A Resource for Design Thinking and Practice, edited by Carolyn Stauss and Paula Pais. A Slow Research Lab Collaboration with Valiz. Amsterdam, Valiz Publishers.

This excerpt has been published with the approval of the editors of the volume and the Slow Research Lab.

^[1] I am borrowing the concepts of transformation from Paulo Freire’s 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum International Publishing Group.

^[2] Intersectionality, as I am using it, was first introduced in Kimberle Crenshaw’s 1989, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics. The University of Chicago Legal Forum. For more on race and architecture see Lesley Naa Norle Lokko’s volume, White Papers Black Marks: Architecture, Race, Culture. University of Minnesota Press (2000).

When anthropologist Cathy Small enrolled as an undergraduate in her own university ten years ago to do the fieldwork that resulted in My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student (2005), she knew that she wanted to protect the identities of her participants and institution by referring to them using pseudonyms. She called herself “Rebekah Nathan” (an excellent choice of pseudonym if you ask me) and Northern Arizona University “AnyU” (a play on its initials, NAU).

Small explained that she considered anonymity a standard anthropological practice and that she underestimated the interest her hidden identity would generate. Jacob Gershman, a reporter for the New York Sun, drew from the rich details she included in the book to unmask her and her university before it had even been published. Gershman wrote that, “whether by choice or accident, [she] also planted in her ethnographic study many clues about her identity[:] her university is located near Las Vegas, is surrounded by mountains, and has a hotel and restaurant management school.” The risk of my readers playing detective stuck in my mind as I started working through my own ethical commitments to my participants.

The organization where I did most of my fieldwork — a regional women’s weaving cooperative in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala that exports textiles to the U.S. and Europe — has a strong online presence: in addition to a website, it has accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. It has also hosted a large number of tourists, who have recorded their experiences in travel blogs, social media posts, and comments on travel review sites. These materials are typically available for public consumption (with the exception of social media sites that may permit varying degrees of access to their contents, like Facebook, which is an ethical discussion for another day) and present researchers with a tantalizingly rich source of self-presented commentary. However, this easy accessibility also makes it difficult to maintain pseudonyms for the organization and its leaders.

Why was it important for the cooperative federation to have its identity disguised? The board of directors had concerns on a few levels, the most prominent being concern about potential retaliation from members of the military for speaking out about the recent genocidal civil war in Guatemala (1960–1996), which is still highly contested. While the organization’s members spoke freely about their experiences in the war to visiting tourists, they wanted to control the audience and context of their testimonies.

The organization already makes its own decisions about how much information to share and withhold online, in negotiation with its international volunteers. US volunteer “Rosalyn” wanted to share some members’ personal stories of their suffering during the war on the website: “When I came in for a talk they were quite open about their own experiences. The one woman was telling us about how they burned her family alive in their house.” She interviewed the president of the cooperative, who spoke at length about the war and then said that she did not want that material to go on the Internet. Rosalyn discussed a couple of possibilities with the president, including focusing on the parts about her childhood and leaving the war out of the finished interview, or publishing the interview anonymously, without her name or town, and she opted for the former. In talking to tourists and allowing the volunteers to post certain stories and images, the organization is constantly weighing how much risk they are willing to take on, so I viewed my responsibility as mitigating any possible impacts of the stories I shared and using basic techniques to make it so that a casual reader would be less likely to be able to associate the name of the organization with my work.

Practically speaking, is there anything we can do to take advantage of the wealth of data available on blogs and websites without compromising our commitment to our participants? Asking a colleague about this issue, I realized that we had independently come to the same solution to incorporate some blog material without inviting the revelation of institutions’ actual names. We presented a few of the most enticing quotes from blogs, the ones we simply couldn’t let go, as interview material, to discourage readers from plugging the quotes into search engines and finding the original blogs. As a researcher, this is a somewhat unsatisfying compromise, because statements made in a blog, intended to be broadcast to an audience, have a different quality than statements solicited in an interview, and should be analyzed differently. However, our guiding principle has to be to restrict harm above all else.

At other times, I paraphrased what someone had said or deliberately cut out words to make it more difficult to search for the quote online. I also tried to use non-online sources such as flyers rather than web sources when talking about how the cooperative represents itself, and deliberately kept the web sources I used out of the final bibliography.

Once, when I was reading a dissertation about Quetzaltenango, I thought I recognized the organization where I was doing fieldwork, referred to with a pseudonym. The anthropologist cited a substantial amount of online material, and checking the bibliography revealed the organization’s actual name associated with its website! It seems likely that this researcher assigned pseudonyms as a matter of standard anthropological practice, counting on the relative obscurity of his research and site to limit the risk of discovery to the organization. This is the kind of pitfall I hope to avoid by using the strategies described above (and any other approaches you can suggest in the comments).

Scholars have pointed out that many groups and individuals may actually want to be identified by name, to gain recognition or aid in their struggles. However, we don’t always get to take the more straightforward approach of naming names. My goal here is to start a conversation about how to handle situations where our participants have explicitly asked to have their identities masked for reasons of reputation management, legal protection, or personal safety.

There were many problems with HTS. Not only was it unethical, the quality of work it produced was, iirc, pretty lousy. Moreover, it actively supported American military action which was not only morally wrong, but a tremendous strategic error with an enormous price tag in dollars and lives. According to Counterpunch, HTS’s slice of the pie was US$725 million dollars. It’s hard to see HTS as anything except an object lesson in ethical and scientific failure. It didn’t even engage interesting ethical questions about collaboration with the military, applied anthropology, and ethics. It was just fail. Anthropologists everywhere can be glad it has now been relegated to ethics section of anthropology syllabi.

Perhaps one good thing that has come out of HTS is that the AAA managed to show strong ethical leadership throughout this period. This is in stark contrast to the American Psychological Association, which colluded with the CIA to produce ethical standards that made facilitating torture acceptable to its members. To be honest, I’m not really sure this indicates the strong moral fiber of the AAA so much as its lack of relevance to American actions abroad, at least until a network of concerned anthropologists pushed it to act (or, perhaps, to act in and through it).

At the end of the day, anthropology took a stance against HTS, and history has born this stance out. Goodbye and good riddance to HTS.

1. Goffman writes a successful ethnography.

2. Journalists are peeved that Goffman followed social science protocols and not journalistic ones.

3. Journalist verify that Goffman’s book is accurate.

4. Journalists remain peeved that Goffman followed social science protocols and not journalistic ones.

Although I’m sure no one feels this way, I think this is a success for everyone: Goffman is more or less vindicated, her discipline demonstrates it can withstand external scrutiny, and journalists do what they are supposed to do and take no one’s words for granted. In this clash of cultures, I think both sociology and journalism can walk away with their dignity intact.

There are still some outstanding issues, of course. One is Goffman’s claim that police checked hospital records looking for people to arrest — something I’d like to deal with later on. Here, I want to focus on the claim not that Goffman was inaccurate in her reportage, but that she broke the law during her fieldwork.

This criticism comes from law professor Steven Lubet. Having loved Goffman’s book, I thought it would be easy to dismiss Lubet’s critique — especially the part where Lubet asked a cop whether details of Goffman’s book were true and the cop is like: “No we never do that to black people” and I was like: “Well I’m glad we got to the bottom of that, since police accounts of their treatment of minorities is always 100% accurate.” But in fact Lubet’s piece is clearly written and carefully argued and I found it very convincing. That said, how much of a problem does it pose to Goffman’s book?

In the appendix to On The Run Goffman describes the death of one of her key informants, and driving around in a car with some guys with guns planning to kill his murders and take revenge. This, Lubet says, constitutes conspiracy to commit murder. But was Goffman’s actions unethical? What does it mean to commit a crime? And does answering these questions say anything new, interesting, and important about ethnography?

Clearly, it’s not prudent to confess to a crime in print. But is it unethical, in general, to break the law during fieldwork? I think the answer is, in general, no. I personally believe that one should follow the laws of the country where you live just on general principles. But there are many cases when anthropologists do fieldwork in places where the laws are clearly contrary their moral intuitions, and to accepted international standards. For instance, Goffman makes a compelling claim that her field site is one of these places.

There are also places where the law is an ass. Should an ethnobotanist not apprentice themselves to an herbalist because the herbalist doesn’t have a business license to put up a stall in the local market? What if no one in the market has ever had such a license? Here, the legal is simply removed from life on the ground. Equally, we can imagine situations where it is legal to do things that the fieldworker thinks is unethical — tapping phones, exploiting sex workers, polygyny, and so forth. Clearly these things don’t suddenly become carte blanche once you clear customs.

Legality and morality don’t always align. In situations where they don’t — which might even be most situations — fieldworkers need to use good judgment, professional ethics, and their own moral compass. Sometimes, making the right decision is hard, and sometimes, people will disagree with the recision you made. But that’s not an interesting theoretical problem. That’s just life.

Goffman’s case exemplifies well-known and standard dilemmas for field workers. Did she behave unethically, from a social science perspective? It’s a difficult call. That fact that some calls are difficult is not going to go away, and there’s no magic solution for making them easier. From my point of view, Goffman got angry, drove around, and nothing happened — it’s hard to get exercised about that.

To be sure, trying to make moral laws and trying to act ethically in the field are huge topics on which oceans of ink have been spilt. But rather than focus on the ethics of breaking the law in the field, I want to focus instead on the very concept of ‘breaking the law’ itself. The legal anthropologist in me feels that someone has broken the law when a judge has ruled that they have done so and the appeal process has concluded. That certainly hasn’t happened to Goffman.

Can we really be said to have ‘committed a crime’ when we do acts which someone suspects in the future would result in a ruling from judge? Thinkers on both the left and right (usually the extremes of both ends) have argued that the legal system is structured in such a way that we are all commit crimes every day. Or rather, that our ongoing social lives can be criminalized by state actors depending on their discretion, our subject position, and other factors. This is because laws are complex and loosely written, and because social life is ambiguous and can be narrated in more than one way. Also, it’s in the fundamental nature of legal hermeneutics that the fit between general principles and particular cases is always wobbly.

I’m not an expert in this field like Lubet is so perhaps some readers will tell me I’m wrong. But I think we need to be careful when we say ‘Goffman broke a law’. This makes it sound as if the law is clear, unambiguous, easy to apply, and Goffman broke it. But that’s not really how law works. So not only is not necessarily a mark against her ethically that she acted illegally, we need to understand that attributions of illegality are themselves part of a power-laden social process, not naturally given and stigmatizing facts.

Lubet’s review did two things: First, it accused her of a crime. Second, it cast doubt on the veracity of some of Goffman’s claims. You can’t really do the first thing thing and expect a response to the second. If you want someone to be forthcoming with details of their research, don’t lead with the felony charge. Goffman has lawyered up, which means that she will probably never talk about her fieldwork beyond what is already on the record — a move Lubet would surely recognize as in her best interests. But it does have a chilling effect on your interlocutor. If he and others have probed more collegially, we might have gotten more out of Goffman, rather than just a bunch of burned field notes.

I find it hard to be critical of Goffman as an ethnographer. It was clearly grueling, exhausting work that took years and years. Commenters often fail to note that it was also her first fieldwork, begun as an undergraduate, and it’s remarkably strong for novice work. I personally felt like it was a bit derivative — why read On The Run when you could read Sidewalk? — but clearly that’s quibbling. More substantively, I would say this: Goffman’s book is ultimately about how young black men interact with the legal system — a relationship that is made of two parts. Although Goffman does dip into the lives of wardens, lawyers, and police officers, On The Run essentially gives us only one half of this this interaction. I respect her choices, understand her position, and appreciate her book. But if Goffman was more familiar with the life of the law her book — and perhaps her actions — would have been written to more robustly withstood some of the criticism now being made against it.

For me the most interesting part of it is watching journalists run up against issues of anonymity and academic ethics for the first time and try to come to terms with it. I think its important to push back against the idea that ‘ethnography’ is suspect as a form of knowledge because it anonymizes identities and makes them “all but impossible to fact check”. An article by Leon Neyfakh making basically this claim appeared, embarrassingly enough, on the same day as an article by Jesse Singal which did fact check ing them. Singal — clearly an anthropologist at heart — walked around the neighborhood where Goffman did fieldwork handing out donuts until he fell in with the people she writes about in the book. What is at stake in this debate? Ultimately, I think the discomfort that some feel with Goffman’s book is that it forces them to think about issues of generalization, particularity, and anonymity in a way they haven’t before. Welcome, journalists, to the world of social science theory and ethics! We have been dealing with these issues for some time!

The idea that ‘ethnography’ is less empirical, true, or relevant than ‘journalism’ or ‘chemistry’ because it automatically anonymizes its sources is incorrect. In fact, there is no such thing as a single genre called ‘ethnography’. We can see this clearly in Neyfakh’s piece — the experts he interviews profess a wide range of opinions about anonymizing the people you study with. In sum, opinions on anonymization vary widely within the academic community.

They vary across time as well. Anthropologists have a long history of naming names. Sometimes this is because we view our interviewees as teachers or partners. In other cases it because we viewed them as so removed from the world of anthropology that they would never meet our readers, and so what did it matter?

On the other hand, anthropologists have also written purely fictional accounts, as as the 1922 volume American Indian Life. Here, entire people are made up. The goal is to provide a sense of what typical Indian life was like, but to do so by telling a compelling (and made up) story.

And we’ve tried everything in between: composite characters based on a mashup of different people, transcribed autobiographies that are not fact-checked at all, theoretical critique in the form of epic poetry, dance based on initiations we’ve undergone and more.

So ‘ethnography’ is a fundamentally experimental genre, or perhaps a loose assemblage of genres, not a single thing that can be blamed for Goffman’s success or failure, let alone used to condemn a field or discipline. In fact, as Neyfakh’s article makes clear, many of the issues surrounding anonymization were foisted on ethnographers by the IRB process, and are thus exogenous to ethnography itself.

Neyfakh makes an important and valid point to protest that the power of Goffman’s book comes from the particular biographies of the lives she narrates. To argue that the importance of the book comes from the general patterns of social life it generates, but to sell the reader on these patterns with biographical particularities does constitute a bit of a bait and switch.

But at the end of the day, her decision to write in this way is not a result of the general professional standards of ethnography, but because of the particular nature of her field site and her personal choices a writer. I think it was a legitimate choice, and I think Goffman’s book is a good read with solid ethnography and important lessons about race and policing in the United States. But it was a difficult one, one that no doubt left Goffman unhappy because her respondents could be identified, but also one that left journalists unhappy because they couldn’t be identified enough (at least, not without donuts). Which just goes to show that the Goffman debate is at heart not about problems of ethnography as a discipline, but about the fact that hard choices are hard, there’s no easy way to make them, and someone will always have preferred you make a different one.

How do scholars balance the need to write quickly and the need to write well? Pressures to “publish or perish” and the rise of “visibility indices” have led many of us to write in ways that will be recognized by our institutions, rather than in the other ways we also think and reflect. Some academics now are calling for a turn to slow scholarship, but this may be a luxury only the elite can afford. In a time of crisis, writing slowly does not work; instead, we need to write swiftly. Recently, I and many people who have conducted research in Nepal found ourselves under pressure to write quickly while still maintaining our academic integrity.

The April 25th earthquake in Nepal proved devastating for the country and spurred many in the anthropological world to action and comment. In the days after the quake, and propelled forward by the major May 12th aftershock, academics in the US, Europe and Asia found themselves overwhelmed by requests for interviews and op-eds, and many of us were eager to do something. I felt paralyzed and incompetent, sitting in Austin, Texas, trying to finish the semester, working closely with local student groups and NRN (Non-Resident Nepali) organizations and operating at a high level of distraction. Social media was afire with check-ins of who had survived, where the greatest damage had occurred and what resources were needed to keep people alive on a day-to-day basis. I found myself pulled into the social media world and addicted to email and messaging as I had never been before. Many of us sought to raise funds and awareness in our own communities, to establish contact with those we care about in Nepal, and to write brief articles as we felt able for media venues. After the initial flurry of media contacts, several of those who had written about the disaster were contacted by Anthropology News to write an article for their online forum. We hoped to get someone familiar with facts on the ground, yet many anthropologists who were in Nepal were dealing with everyday needs of seeking shelter, looking out for loved ones and trying to provide basic relief as they were able. AN Managing Editor Amy Goldenberg posted a brief piece that collected links to essays written by North American-based anthropologists for other venues, and there were promises from others to write more substantive articles when more research and reflection was possible. Then, Anthropology News—an official publication of the American Anthropological Association—found a respondent in anthropologist David Beine, Professor of World Missions and Evangelism at Moody Bible Institute.

Beine’s piece “Earthquakes and Culture” appeared on the AN website less than two weeks after the disaster. Beine discussed how certain cultural memes had, if not caused the earthquake, exacerbated the disaster and hampered response efforts. The cultural touchstones Beine pointed to are familiar to those who have visited Nepal – clichés about responses to inaction (ke garne) or claims to community insularity that are part of the oft-touted tropes of Nepal. After the Tohoku triple crisis in Japan, “collectivist culture” was often mentioned as a reason for the vigorous post-disaster mobilization, and a reason to celebrate the Japanese community spirit, but new stereotypes and politics also emerged as the crisis lingered on. In post-quake Haiti, stereotyped “culture of poverty” arguments also circulated. Many of Beine’s stereotypes of Nepal are deployed in negative ways, e.g. pointing to aphno manche (“own people”) as an idea of why aid might be unevenly distributed, rather than as a potentially effective form of networking and community support. He cited important historical phenomena that might complicate rebuilding and resilience after the quake, including Kathmandu’s expanding urban population and the oversized role that international aid has played in the last half century of Nepal’s history. But much was missing: the intricacies of bureaucracy in Nepal, local and national level political turmoil, social and economic inequalities, Nepal’s devastating civil war, issues of privilege and politics in international development, the great diversity of the country and any sense of actual, on-the-ground Nepali efforts in the post-quake period. As a result, his article fell far short of the standards expected of contemporary cultural anthropology, relying more on outdated themes one might find in Kiss, Bow, Shake Hands than in an official AAA publication. The article seemed to blame the victim, noting that the earthquake was exacerbated by “cultural features that have led to unpreparedness.”

In light of the earthquake, I too felt compelled to write quickly but (I hope) with reflection and in areas about which I have research experience to bring attention and knowledge to the global agenda of earthquake relief. When Dr. Beine’s article was shared with me by a graduate student who was aghast at his culturism and objectification, I had hoped that it would be buried online, or overwhelmed by other articles with a more sophisticated view of Nepal, articles that highlighted the diversity of the country and the complexity of response to a disaster of this scale. And for a time it was, but I was naive. Two Nepali anthropologists found the piece and wrote their own response questioning the role of anthropologists in speaking to the field in times of crisis. Gaurab KC and Mallika Shakya, respected scholars and researchers in Nepal, found much to criticize—appropriately so—in Beine’s article. While the authors note that Beine’s article was likely written in haste and that it was intended for a mainly non-Nepali audience, they nonetheless take it as representative of American anthropology. And why not given that it was published by the American Anthropological Association’s official newsletter? We are living in a connected world, one in which scholars from all over the globe can access information and contribute to the scholarly conversation, although not in Anthropology News, as one must be a member of the AAA to post comment on their website.

KC and Shakya’s article concludes with several provocative questions, including asking if “the anthropology on Nepal has kept pace with emerging anthropological movements elsewhere, especially within South Asia and the Global South?” I have long been proud to work in Nepal, and found the anthropological discourse on the Himalayas to be one that seeks to go beyond fetishism, Orientalism, and objectification in asking questions about “virtual Sherpas,” Prisoners of Shangri-la, and “Little America in Kathmandu,” and in thinking reflectively and reflexively about the role of anthropology in Nepal, especially in relation to aid work and cultural exoticization. Yet, as it now stands, the voice of the American Anthropological Association on the earthquake in Nepal suggests that if Nepalis had only been in well-constructed Christian churches, rather than decrepit Hindu temples, maybe fewer would have died on April 25.

All this prompts me to ask a question about editing decisions and peer review in Anthropology News. I write in Savage Minds, not because it is “peer reviewed,” but because I read the work of my peers there. Each year, I send hundreds of dollars to AAA, and yet I learn little of what goes into vetting the articles that are put up in “my name” and which are read by scholars around the world. I fully understand the offense taken by KC and Shakya regarding this article that purports to explain the “culture of Nepal.” There is far more at stake than “good methods and data” in vetting an academic article, but I wonder what editorial vetting was done of “Earthquakes and Culture.” As relief and recovery continue, aid organizations and journalists will still be clamoring for sound bites and quickly digestible “truisms” about Nepal’s culture. The discipline has been through this before, evidenced by guilt/shame culture from Benedict’s remote scholarship for Chrysanthemum and the Sword on to more recent adventures with the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System. Shakya and KC present anthropologists with an important admonition, to think before we write, to be aware of our limitations, and to avoid playing to the stereotyped paradigms in which media and development agencies wish to slot our knowledge. But I hope that they and others will understand that Dr. David Beine does not speak for me, and certainly does not speak for all anthropologists concerned for Nepal.

In his piece, Wood takes issue with four essays in Anthropology News responding to the shooting of Michael Brown and the subsequent reaction in Ferguson. Wood  argues that the essays are “a retelling of… the left’s canonical myth of Ferguson: facts submerged in a sea of fiction”. He goes on to argue that these authors’ accounts of Ferguson ignore “the record of events established by the grand jury”. He claims that the concepts of “structural violence” and “structural inequality” used in the essays are “intellectually lazy simplifications of complex social circumstances” which “remove all moral and social responsibility from the actors who are portrayed as victims”. In doing so, he claims, anthropology “erases the motives of key participants and reduces them to objects acted on by invidious external forces”. In the end, Wood claims, it is a “just-so story that America is a nation run by privileged whites determined to maintain their privilege.” In  fact, he says, “this is, quite plainly, a myth. There is nothing in the realm of fact to support it.”

These are amazing claims, and it is difficult to understand how Wood can make them in the face of an overwhelming body of evidence that proves exactly the opposite of what he claims. Wood is clearly not stupid. Charitable readers will assume that he is not evil. The nicest interpretation of Wood’s position, therefore, is that he is simply ignorant.

Throughout this piece, Wood adopts the tone of a judicious, impartial scientist fighting against tendentious, politically motivated science. Given this fact, it’s incredible that Wood offers absolutely no evidence to convince the reader why he is right. Nor does he engage in any scrutiny of the logic or evidence used by his opponents. Perhaps the only thing more distressing than Wood’s refusal to engage empirically — in the name of science! — is Anthropology News’s decision to run this piece in the first place.

Nevertheless, as I hope to show in this piece, it is Wood’s argument, not that of his opponent, that is unsubstantiated by the facts. No American should accept the findings and proceedings of the Ferguson grand jury at face value. Structural inequality does exist in the United States as does racism, which ranges in form from unconscious and systematic to reflexive attempts by whites to maintain their privilege. That idea that humans are caused by external forces, rather than their own volition, challenges accounts of liberal responsibility that assign moral value to the decision of an individual to act. But this does not mean that accounts of structural causation reduce people to puppets — rather, it indicates that there is something profoundly tragic about liberalism. And while all people’s agency is, to be sure, one of degree, if anyone in America could claim to be living structurally determined lives, black Americans surely have one of the best cases to make.  As Americans who believe in freedom of opportunity, we ought to ameliorate these conditions because they reduce human freedom. As a distinctly American anthropological association, it is right and proper that our professional association take a moral stand on these issues. Or so I hope to prove.

I would say that the grand jury proceedings against Wilson will go down in history as a spectacular miscarriage of justice, except that this is how they are presently perceived by most reasonable people. By now many people are familiar with the fact that a key witness in the grand jury perjured herself and that even by the standards of conservative jurisprudence the grand jury proceedings were fatally flawed. There are good — even overwhelming — reasons not to take the grand jury proceedings at accurate, as Wood does.

It’s also difficult to ignore, as Wood seeks to do, structural inequality — by which I mean inequality that is the result of the relation and arrangement of the elements of the complex whole that is our society. Both in the past and the present, blacks have historically been poorer than any other ethnoracial group in the country. There are many reasons for this: ‘discrimination in contact’ (people acting like racists when the meet black people), residential segregation, decreased economic opportunity, deindustrialization, the deunionization of the American workforce, and so forth. Some of the reasons listed above are not just the result of structural forces but of conscious white choice, such as the re-segregation of American schools including those in Ferguson.

If people really need me to I’m happy to provide quantitative data from, say, the census, which documents these facts. But for anthropologists like Wood, it is even more important to remember that there is a rich ethnographic literature documenting black peoples’ lives, ranging from contemporary accounts like Goffman’s On The Run or Laurence’s Renegade Dreams to oldies like Powdermaker’s After Freedom, and well-known classics like Black Metropolis. And that’s just the anthropologists. For more you can google sociologists like Elijah Anderson, Mitch Duneier, Katherine Newman, Sudhir Venkatesh, and many others.

All of these books provide exactly the sort of rich nuanced accounts of human lifeworlds that Wood argues that we need. No one who has taken the time to read them could possible argue that anthropology erases the motives of human actors or reduces there actions to the automatic working out of a system. This is why I say that Wood’s position must be based on ignorance — I don’t think anyone who has looked into these issues can really come away claiming that structural inequality doesn’t exist.

This is one of these cases in which, as Colbert quipped, “reality has a liberal bias.” I’m not sure, but I also think that this is one reason why most people who study inequality tend to be from the left — exposure to the facts tend to turn people into lefties. I am not trying to stigmatize Wood here. I honestly think most people who maintain that widespread racism and inequality doesn’t exist simply have not looked into the matter. You certainly don’t find them publishing on it. If I’m wrong about this, I’m sure someone will let me know.

There is nothing sloppy or lazy about the concept of structural determination. From its very beginning in America, England, and France, Anthropology has focused on the fact that human behavior is shaped by forces that are larger than the individual will. When you argue that these forces do not exist you are not only taking issue with Angela Davis, you are taking issue with Radcliffe-Brown. To argue, as Wood does, that the concept of structural causation is a ‘simplification’ is to make a bug out of a feature — the appeal of scientific modeling is precisely to reduce a manifold of complex experience to a single, elegant model which explains and predicts it.

Of course, not everyone’s goal in life is to build general models of social behavior — the Boasian historicist tradition was founded in opposition to the generalizing ambitions of, say, physics. That’s why it’s so strange to see Wood argue that the concept of structural violence simplifies complex histories. Rather, the opposite is true: Advocates of the concept of structural violence use it to insist on more nuanced, more contextualized, more historical, and more holistic accounts of human life. This, for instance, is the position that Paul Farmer argues for in his article “The Anthropology of Structural Violence”.

Indeed, one common criticism of the concept of ‘structural violence’ is that it is not generalizing enough. Wood may be surprised, therefore, to find himself allied against Farmer with the likes of Phillippe Bourgois and Nancy Scheper-Hughes. In the article I cited above, they write that  “academic categories can obfuscate as much as they elucidate, but in support of Farmers call for an ethnography of structural violence, it is important to broaden the concept.” This language may sound mild, but keep in mind that this is how famous anthropologists nicely disagree with other famous anthropologists.

Other commenters on Farmer’s paper are less polite. Linda Green writes that “Framers [sic] critique of the resistance literature is salient, but I think he does not take it far enough… To be analytically and political useful, the concept of structural violence must be able to capture the heterogeneity, the complexity, and the contradictions of the lives of the poor and disenfranchised.” Loic Wacquant writes that “structural violence may be strategically useful as a rhetorical tool, but it appears conceptually limited and limiting, even crippling. One can adopt a deeply materialist approach to the anthropology of suffering without resorting to a notion that threatens to stop inquiry just where it should begin, that is, with distinguishing various species of violence and different structures of domination so as to trace the changing links between violence and difference rather than merging them into one catchall category liable to generate more moral heat than analytical light.”

Wood is actually aligned with, not against, major voices in our discipline when they argue that it is merely a call for more detail. The difference is that Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loic Wacquant feel that the concept of structural violence does not do enough to parse the reality of structural inequality, while Wood refuses to believe that this inequality exists in the first place. Have we solved the antimony of structure and agency that has dogged social theory for centuries? No. Are we getting closer? Yes.

Ultimately, Wood’s refusal to discuss his own, positive explanatory account of the events in Ferguson leave us wondering why it is he thinks that poverty in America takes the shape it does. Perhaps he feels that black people are poor because they are genetically evolved to be stupid. I would prefer not speculate, but it does seem at times that the whole unstated point of his article is “no one is willing to stand up and say these rioting black people are a bunch of criminals”.

What is most distressing to me is the obvious scorn that Wood has for people who study inequality, and who seek to make our country a more equal place. Surely he is in a minority here. Americans want a more just and equitable country. We believe that people should get a fair shot in life to see what they can make of themselves.

But it is important to recognize that the American Anthropological Association takes a stand on these issues precisely because it is the American Anthropological Association. It’s a topic of research for American anthropologists because it is a topic that matters to Americans. Of course we differ about what, concretely, that means. Whether ‘fairness’ means ‘less laws to enable individual freedom’ or ‘more laws to level the playing field’ in something we can argue about.

Perhaps Wood would find he has more in common with other anthropologists from more hierarchical countries than he has with his American compatriots — at times it almost sounds as if Wood’s goal is to justify inequality rather than ameliorate it. More likely, he has confused the aspiration to make our country a fairer place with the empirical diagnosis that it is already fair, and that those who come up with the short straw in life must deserve it. The problem with this sort of thinking is hat you end up making the facts fit your hypothesis. And that is a model of poor science.

I don’t think that every anthropologist should be an activist — I’m not an activist. I don’t think we should all study racism and inequality — I don’t. My point is that caring about structural violence and racism is not activism. It’s a normative commitment that all anthropologists working in our country should think is important. Recognizing that structural violence and racism exist is not a political stance, it’s recognition of the truth. There will always be in our association who don’t hold to these fundamental values — Wood is certainly one of them — and of course we welcome them and invite them to try to change our minds. What else would one expect from an American Anthropological association? And we hope that as he learns more about these topics we can convince him that structural inequality exists. Hope springs eternal.

But at the end of the day there should be no doubt that Buck, Gregory, Codrington, Brassard, and Partis are at the center of American anthropology for a good reason. And contra Anthropology News, we should not seek ‘balance’ if the only way to get it is to post articles like the one written by Peter Wood.

Indeed, more than ten years ago Gross, Katz and Ruby published Image Ethics in the Digital Age, a pioneering volume whose topical concerns – privacy, authenticity, control, access and exposure – are arguably more conspicuous now than in 2003. Today, their complexities appear to be extending as digital interactions themselves extend, and the consequence is an inevitably fraught landscape of practice with debatable outcomes.

There is no shortage of voices commenting on the state of ethics in anthropology (myself and Jonathan included), and an increasing number of those voices are now zeroing in on certain forms of anthropological research that seem to nurture special ethical conditions. Visual media, for instance, have triggered an entire discourse on ‘visual ethics’, which – as reviewed by Andrew Clark – seems to be premised on a series of claims about the uniqueness of the image and, hence, its incompatibility with existing ethical codes (or its wholesale neglect by those codes).

While all data forms arguably have their own unique repercussions, it is difficult to dispute the argument that existing ethical schemas are often inadequate for managing new or emerging modes of media application. As one example, assurance of anonymity is regularly a blanket condition in most ethical frameworks. Yet, quoting from Clark with regards to imaging work, “it is often impossible, impractical, or even illogical to maintain the anonymity and confidentiality of individuals in artwork, photographs and film.” Beyond picturing practices alone, however, online modes of engagement now often hinge upon visibility and identification—thereby colliding with standard anonymity policies. This puts us in a position where we must stretch out the nature of our ethical structures if we expect our research programmes to survive. As Brent Luvaas has been compelled to ask in the course of his research into online self-promotional work, “what if our subjects don’t want to be protected? What, in fact, if their very participation in our research is contingent on the exposure it might bring them?” To my mind, these questions ultimately demand a reorientation of prevailing ethical paradigms.

The intersections between visual data/practice, digital technologies and web-based engagements are especially thorny. For instance, following the work of Sabra Thorner (among others), many long-brokered matters – such as (digital) repatriation of indigenous material culture – are now the subject of deeper turmoil, as efforts to take control back over channels of circulation and ownership bump up against now growing (especially Western, neoliberal) claims to “open access” and “open sourcing”.* In this case, the seemingly ethically-inspired open access / open source movement could be seen as anything but ethical: a kind of dubious enterprise aimed at usurping hard-won rights. In other words, the movement itself becomes a moral conundrum, with privacy and openness seemingly pitted against one another. To borrow from Kendall Roark, they are “framed as competing interpretations of the public good.”

Digital culture, in fact, impacts on the whole nature of work and play, leisure and labour, increasingly blurring the boundaries between them, and therein contributing to a larger precariousness in human existence (for more, see the work of Ekbia and Nardi 2014). The connectivity and supposed ‘democracy’ of the web mean that skilled communities of practice (e.g., as seen in Thet Shein Win’s research on visual effects artists) are more and more easily undercut. On top of this, the entire means by which we define and interact with other humans is complicated as hybrid forms of life become enrolled in acts of pleasure, surveillance, etc. (see Mitali Thakor’s enquiries into 3D avatars as means of entrapping pedophiles), or as media artefacts are drawn into specific political and ideological disputes (see Miguel Diaz-Barriga and Margaret Dorsey’s analysis of photography of the US-Mexico border wall in relation to national security).

Moreover, in an increasingly digital world, assurances about the security of data are transformed when those data have no physical manifestation whatsoever, but rather exist entirely in virtual form (e.g., see Barbara Hoffman’s enquiries into cloud-based storage), and are otherwise all-too-effortlessly deployable in myriad and often unintended fashion (e.g., see Aaron Thornburg’s examinations of the dissemination of digital student work).

In such a complex climate, the “ethical absolutism” (Wiles et al. 2012 citing Plummer 2001) that many anthropological research programmes hit up against in formal ethics review processes is wholly inappropriate. As Clark (2013) discusses it, existing ethics guidelines might not “constitute ethically appropriate guidance at all.” And, in fact, there is evidence to suggest that – in ethically-contentious fashion – researchers themselves variously resist and subvert ethics processes (via, for example, forms of ‘creative compliance’ or ‘half-truths’) in order to survive the system. Or they cope by otherwise purposefully doing a disservice to their practice and interlocutors via scaling back, sanitising or censoring their own work (see Wiles et al. 2012).

To borrow from Clark (2013), “Ethical moments emerge at the interplay of relationships (including power inequalities)…when ethical quandaries cannot be resolved by resorting to pre-determined universalistic principles.” Such moments obviously don’t just manifest in the context of research, but are part of ordinary life. Here, a kind of ‘everyday ethics’ – navigated by all human beings in the course of their day-to-day existence – informs individual behaviours. Such ethics are frequently brought to bear in engagements with digital and online cultures (see Clark 2012) where, for example, regular acts of self-censorship or self-exposure are performed (e.g., see the work of Jessika Tremblay on online Indonesian political participation, and el-Sayed el-Aswad on online Emirati self-representation). But how such ‘everyday ethics’ are accounted for in institutional ethical policies, or how they are robustly assessed and refined by individuals themselves, is far from clear.

Taken together, all that seems obvious about ethical practice is that it is fluid and complex, driven by practical needs, organisational frameworks, related regulatory requirements, specific intellectual circumstances, not to mention individual and collective moral tenets. In other words, ethics tend to be necessarily situated (after Clark 2012, 2013), depending upon recursive reflection and constant questioning of one’s processes, objectives and modes of engagement.

Our experience, then, suggests that the most meaningful means of attending to and shaping ethical action is in dialogue with others. A growing number of forums now exist that aim to facilitate such dialogue, including the AAA’s own ethics blog (which, disappointingly, seems rarely used), the Centre for Digital Ethics and Policy’s online meeting place and associated resources/events, and Jonathan’s and my own efforts at annual ethics symposia, among many others. As anthropologists we arguably have an ethical responsibility to participate in these conversations, and to continue challenging existing ethics infrastructures that do not align with everyday human behaviours. Such participation also has the benefit of strengthening bonds across our communities of practice and amplifying our programmes of study. So, if you’re not already part of the conversation, please join—it’s an opportunity to shape both research and broader human futures.

*This predicament is also reminiscent of Boast’s (2011) discussion of the neocolonial museum.

In my last post on Bauman and Briggs Voices of Modernity I explored their argument that Boas’s notion of culture makes it seem like a prison house from which only the trained anthropologist is capable of escaping. In doing so, however, I only really presented half of their argument. The book has two interrelated themes: One is a Foucauldian genealogy of the concepts of science, culture, race, language, and nation (as seen through the rise of folklore studies). The other is a Latourian exploration of the construction of folklore as a science. This is done by exploring how oral traditions were turned into texts, and thus evidence of traditional culture (however that was defined). Aubrey, Blair, the Grimm brothers, and Schoolcraft were each faced with hybrid oral texts whose own modernity (as contemporary documents) belied their perceived scientific value as authentic remnants of ancient cultures. For this reason the texts underwent tremendous alterations, if not outright fabrication, by these scholars in order to make them suitable for their own purposes. The book traces how these processes of entextualization were shaped by each scholar’s concepts of science, culture, race, language, and nation.

So where does Boas fit into all of this?

One of the legacies of earlier folkloric traditions was a view of contemporary oral traditions as little more than the decayed remnants of a once great culture. Although Boas was able, partially as a result of his linguistically inspired view of culture, to criticize evolutionary perspectives that placed contemporary indigenous people in the past, he still seems to have shared some of these views.

Boas was particularly interested in what he considered to be traditional speech. This quest for the archaic and authentic related to form as well as content; Boas summarized his agenda as an attempt “to rescue the vanishing forms of speech”

This rescuing entailed some of the same reconstruction that earlier folklorists were guilty of. In some cases, such as Blair, this entailed the wholesale fabrication of supposedly traditional folktales. In others, such as the Brothers Grimm and Schoolcraft, it entailed heavy editing and embelleshment (although they each did this in different ways and for different reasons – discussed in depth in the book). Boas, however, was even more concerned than his predecessors about establishing the scientific credentials of his work. But his vision of fieldwork as science usefully served to hide some of his entextualization practices from public scrutiny.

Fieldwork became a complex set of practices that had to be mastered through professional training; like owning an air pump, controlling access to this pedagogical process enabled Boas and those he trained to regulate the obligatory passage points that provided access to cultural knowledge. The analogy begins to break down, however, in that the air pump was designed to produce public knowledge, to open scientific work to scrutiny by groups of observers. Fieldwork placed the locus of observation far away from the center. Since people’s perceptions of their own cultural patterns are shaped by secondary explanations, Boas does not deem “natives” to be credible witnesses.

Here is where the questions of anthropological authority discussed last week become important, for while Boas is famous for having worked closely with indigenous scholars, even going so far as to give them credit for published work, the actual manner in which the texts were constructed still reveals some of the same discomfort with the hybridity of these texts that was shown by his predecessors. To understand this argument we need to know something about one of the scholars most closely associated with Boas, George Hunt:

George Hunt was the son of a high-ranking Tlingit woman and an Englishman who worked for the Hudson Bay Company. Hunt was raised in Fort Rupert, a stockaded outpost and Hudson Bay Company station that brought together not only Kwakwaka’wakw but also English, Scots, Irish, French-Canadian, Métis, Iroquois, Hawaiian, Tlingit, Tsimshian, and Haida… Hunt was perceived as a “foreign Indian” by the Kwakwaka’wakw, and he never considered himself to be Kwakwaka’wakw; he often re-ferred to his wife’s relatives as “these Kwaguls.” At the same time, Hunt’s noble descent brought him high status, particularly after he married a high-ranking Kwakwaka’wakw woman. Hunt’s rank afforded him exposure to forms of knowledge and discourse owned by elite lineages, and it granted him a strong social position by virtue of the high-ranking lines’ dominance of trade and indigenous–white relations.

So how did their collaboration work?

Hunt did not take down material by dictation, but rather listened to the rendition and then went home and reconstructed – and thus re-entextualized – the discourse; after he had written the text in its entirety in Kwakw’ala, he added English interlineations. As he rephrased the materials in the written version, Hunt wrote in what Berman (1996) refers to as “an authentic Kwakwaka’wakw speech style formerly used in the myth recitations,” even when his consultants are likely to have used less archaic styles. Hunt attempted to locate and document speech styles that he deemed to be particularly traditional and authentic; regarding some of his texts on cooking, Hunt wrote Boas: “These will show you the oldest way of speaking.”

One of the implications of this is that Hunt, as the “native informant” allowed Boas to sub-contract and legitimate the work of re-entextualization, effectively brushing the dirty work associated with creating these texts under the carpet. So while Bauman and Briggs want to give “credit where credit is due” and praise Boas for sharing authorship with Hunt on the title page (see the image at the start of this post), they have reservations about how Hunt’s authorship was framed.

The voice that Boas sought to authorize, however, was not that of George Hunt qua individual, not in terms of the particular features of his complex, hybrid social position. Rather, Boas downplayed Hunt’s background, including his multiracial ancestry in characterizing Hunt as speaking “Kwakiutl as his native language.”

Boas needed Hunt to give scientific authority to his texts, but in order to construct that authority he had to downplay the true hybridity of Hunt’s background.

Foregrounding the cultural and historical complexity of the texts and the circumstances surrounding their production would have challenged the way that Boas was constructing their authority – as a voice that could speak for “Kwakiutl customs” in their entirety… By giving the impression that members of Kwakwaka’wakw communities spoke no English, Boas greatly increased the monologicality and monoglossia of the texts and removed another sort of important evidence with respect to their rootedness in colonial contexts.

So, while Boas deserves credit for granting Hunt co-authorship, we can still question the manner in which he did it and even his motivations. None of this is to play a game of “gotcha” with Boas, but to get us to think critically about our own practices of entextualization and our own contemporary mechanisms of granting ourselves anthropolgical authority.

TS: Could you both introduce yourselves, and talk about how you came around to the question of responsibility?

ST: I’d been doing work in the Czech Republic, looking at kids and asthma and comparing what I found there to responses to childhood asthma in New Zealand, and I was quite stunned by the different approaches in these two countries, in terms of their very different ideas about the roles of individuals and the family in trying to cope with a chronic condition. In New Zealand, it’s very much about self-management, while in the Czech Republic it’s focused on medical and other forms of scientific expertise. Obviously I was very much influenced by the work of Nick Rose on “responsibilization” as a way of both understanding mundane, everyday behavior and the larger political forces behind it. But I also started to see that when you begin to unpack the category of ‘care’ – even with respect to a narrowly defined set of care practices, in this case all related to childhood asthma – you can discover a whole range of various modes of responsibility, from responibilization to corporate social responsibility to kinship, and that got me thinking about how we might theoretically come to discuss such competing modes of responsibility in more productive ways.

CT: I came to it looking at a group of New Zealand and British veterans who were involved in nuclear tests in the Pacific, and I anticipated that they would be using the language of rights to talk about their desire to get health care. And in fact, what I found was that it was entirely infused with the language of responsibility and state responsibility and, in contrast, the state trying to ensure that these men took a position of self-responsibility in accounting for their own health, and saying it wasn’t about radiation, it was about their lifestyle habits: diet, smoking etc. So like Susanna, my research had some interesting contrasts between broader social responsibility and individual responsibility, and we started talking about this and saw some interesting parallels. We realized that the concept of “care” has been very carefully unpacked in anthropology but the word “responsibility” hadn’t received the same treatment, and we think it deserves the same kind of interrogation and critique. And as Susanna said, the idea of “responsibilization” is being carefully thought out, but its links to other styles of responsibility less so.

ST: One of the things we talked about in the piece we wrote (Trnka and Trundle 2014) was about how we feel ‘responsibility’ has been colonized by individual responsibilization in political rhetoric. We see it in so many examples around the world, and certainly in New Zealand. For instance, last year, one of my children who was in Intermediate School and was then 13 years old, came home with the news that “responsibility” was the theme for their Social Studies course for an entire school term. But all they talked about during the term was individual responsibility, self-management, and how to improve one-self – they didn’t consider ‘responsibility’ in terms of community responsibility, responsibility to the environment, or their relationships to one another in terms of being collectively responsible as a class, or as young people in New Zealand. Her sense of what they were supposed to learn was the idea that learning to be responsible is all about learning how to be responsible for yourself.

CT: As another example, Susanna, you’ve received flyers in your mailbox that talk about ‘responsible pet ownership.’

ST: Yes, I am now “a responsible dog owner!” In New Zealand, as of two years ago you can be officially registered “responsible dog owner” as opposed to a normal dog owner if you pass a certain course that ensures you know how to take adequate care of your dog. (And as a consequence, your licensing fees are lower). “Responsibility” is thus increasingly permeating into everyday language but primarily – and this is key – through the rhetoric of responsibilization. One of the things that Catherine and I are trying to do is show how unsettling, and dangerous, it is to have “responsibility” become so restricted to such individual-focused forms of “responsibilization.”

TS: Is that what “responsibilization” means? It refers to making individuals responsible for themselves or their own conduct?

CT: It speaks to the language of empowerment very strongly, and autonomy. Whether that’s an individual responsible for her own conduct or whether that’s a parent for a child, a boss for his worker, trying to instill an ethos of self-empowerment.

ST: It’s about self-autonomy and self-reliance.

TS: You referred to Nikolas Rose. His arguments about “responsibilization” have been really important and original and have helped us understand trends in healthcare and politics and so on. So, if you were going to take a snapshot of that idea, that trend, that concept, what does that mean?

ST: I think it refers to divesting or redistributing responsibility from a broader array of sets of obligations and reciprocities to focus it on the individual. So, one of the examples I particularly like, or dislike, was the one in Wellington, where the pedestrian lane has been changed. It’s no longer pedestrian-only, as they now allow buses on it. Of course, when you make a change like that, it takes people a while to adjust because they have a habit of walking across the road without worrying about buses. And so a dozen people, who have been injured or died from walking into the bus lane —

CT: One of those injured was, ironically, the Director of NZ Bus.

ST: So there’s been a public call to respond to this, people demanding not to get rid of the bus lane but something much less costly, namely putting up markers or barriers so people don’t just wander into the bus lane without realizing it. And in response to this the deputy mayor of Wellington said—

CT: He deemphasized the issue of political responsibility, and talked about safety as “a partnership” between “those people who drive on the roads and the pedestrians who cross those roads”, and a Council report on the accidents found that pedestrians were “largely to blame”.

TS: Right, “they need to look after themselves.” I don’t know if I mentioned this, but I have a Google News alert on pedestrian deaths. I’m a big walker, and it’s something I’m obsessed with. Whenever I get a report on a pedestrian death, I put it up on Twitter, “pedestrian killed,” and unfortunately there’s a lot of them. But there’s a new kind of pedestrian activism all over the world. There’s pro-bike activism, but there is also a new focus on pedestrians — or rather, simply people who walk.

ST: We could think about it as another type of responsibility, namely the kind of activism that is demanding that governments and states and local councils take some responsibility for making spaces safe. These are precisely the sorts of tensions and nuances of responsibility that we’re interested in drawing out.

TS: So I think that story’s pretty familiar to a lot of people. When you talk about “competing responsibilities,” what does that capture, or what do you put forward with that idea?

CT: We want to look at the cross-cutting and contrasting types of responsibilities that exist in the different layers of social practice. Some which are very contrasting with some of those dominant neoliberal modes of responsibility, and some are quite aligned and complementary with it. It’s certainly not our idea to take other types of obligations beyond responsibilization, whether they be care or ideas of the social contract, and say that they are the antithesis of or the cure for neo-liberal notions of responsibilities. But we want to show there are a range of ways in which responsibilities get enacted today in a range of contexts, with different moral valences and which enable diverse types of relationships.

ST: I think if you speak with people about responsibility, you won’t get a response that just focuses on responsibilization. Ordinary people have a sense of being enmeshed in all sorts of different kinds of relationships, so that’s what we tried to capture with the idea of competing responsibilities. At times you might be pulled in different directions, at times these different kinds of responsibilities might actually align, but the idea is that there’s a multiplicity of ways you are responsible to yourself, to others, to the environment, to your family, to your community, to your workplace, to the state – as well as a whole myriad of expectations you have that others will act responsibly towards you – that really supersede the way responsibility is being politically redefined.

TS: [Redefined] In neoliberal discourse—

CT: Also we are interested in the ways people respond to the drive for responsibilization, sometimes by purposeful acts of ‘irresponsiblization’ or by demanding others take responsibility. People can have a range of reasons to resist calls to become empowered and personally responsibilized. These types of subjectivities can be a burden in certain contexts. Other times, they can be very enabling. So we are seeking to not just look at different types of responsibilities, but the ways that people respond to calls to be responsible.

TS: I think we talked about this at length earlier — the idea that there is a tension between emergent notions we have about complex systems, and ideas about complexity and enmeshedness, and at the same time, this profound discourse of responsibility, of personal or individual responsibility. Rose talks about that a little bit — where he talks about criminal culpability and notions of genetic determinants of behavior, notions that are orthogonal to the idea of personal responsibility, where one might invoke a phrase like, “maybe I have maladaptive genes”— that kind of thing.

CT: His work sometimes gets simplified down by scholars to say “it’s all about self-responsibility,” but he’s much more nuanced. Genetics implies a whole set of relationships you can’t get away from, and which can become more important, or important in new ways to one’s sense of self and obligations to others. So he does talk about the forms of, for example, pastoral care that develop between genetic counselors and patients, and the way in which family members have to think responsibly for kin, in the present and in an imagined future, and the wide ranging obligations, choices, decisions and demands that come with this. Empowerment is certainly a part of it, he shows, but within more complex contexts of competing responsibilities.

ST: I think what we’re trying to do is to make sure the word “responsibility” stays there and in its broader sense, and so it is important to talk about these other entanglements, dependencies, and obligations as responsibility. And in order to try and encourage people to look at responsibility in all its variations and guises, what we’ve tried to do is suggest two arenas—one is care and the other one is social contracts and ideologies—where a range of different ideas and practices of reciprocity, obligation, and duty get played out.

TS: In that light, then, what is your hope for this conference that you’re organizing in August? August 15?

ST: August 15-17, in Wellington, New Zealand.

TS: What is the conference about? What are you hoping to see there?

ST: We’re trying to “open up” our understandings of responsibility in the 21st century. We hope to do this both in terms of looking ethnographically at the diverse ways that people enact responsibility (or fail to enact it) as well as to then critically look at such responsibility practices in terms of where they fit historically and politically and what they tell us about contemporary social forms.

CT: We’re hoping to get a widely diverse set of case studies: mundane, quotidian forms, corporate and social responsibility, issues of culpability and blame at the national level, philosophical discussions of responsibility. So we’re hoping that in drawing together those diverse ethnographic angles we’ll be able to theoretically and analytically develop and extend this as an anthropological concept.

ST: And show how it’s useful for critical analysis, and why it might be politically important to try and not necessarily reclaim the term ‘responsibility’ but provoke more the debate over its current usage: to create debate around the question “what is responsibility?” so it doesn’t de facto become responsibilization. And I think another key thing about the conference is that we want it to be interdisciplinary so we can bring together a range of the different angles. It won’t be just anthropology, but much broader.

TS: There’s one thing we didn’t discuss yet and that’s the notion of ethnographic responsibility. I’m curious, is that a dimension and a kind of anthropological responsibility that you’d like to examine?

ST: Absolutely. I wrote about this topic in a book with Cris Shore called Up Close and Personal (2013, Berghahn Books) which is about the production of ethnographic knowledge and pulls together a diverse group of anthropologists who to talk about their experiences in the field, in academia more broadly, and in the wider community. One of the things they discuss in relation to anthropological practice is
the responsibilities of the ethnographers to their interlocutors, but also, the responsibilities of our interlocutors back to us? Because at the end of the day we’re all human beings engaged in relationships that are based on forms of reciprocity. Of course you take on a different kind of responsibility if you’re writing about people and publishing what you learn from your interactions with them, but those sort of human interactions supersede the goal of producing some sort of ethnographic work. They are important in their own right, and need to be considered as such. That’s something Catherine and I didn’t explore in our paper — simply because we kind of needed to narrow it a little bit! — but it’s certainly something we would like to see explored in the conference.

CT: We’re not just thinking uncritically about responsibility as an all-liberating concept, because responsibility can get invoked within fieldwork settings in ways that perhaps elide the complexity of what’s going on. I’m thinking about the way the word “engagement” has become one of those tropes that is seen as a social good in fieldwork. Another recent project of mine has been an edited book with Matei Candea, Joanna Cook and Thomas Yarrow in the UK on the idea of detachment (Detachment: essays on the limits of relational thinking, Manchester University Press, forthcoming), which in part seeks to question the often thinly interrogated trope of engagement within anthropology. I think in the same way we need to think hard about what calls for responsibility mean in fieldwork and not necessarily see it as something we simply need more of, but look at all the different shades and consequences of its enactment.
ST: For example, if you look at Annemarie Mol’s work on ‘care’ — that’s very much in line with what we’re trying to do there, to take a concept and inquire about how it’s used ethnographically, but also in terms of critical analysis and in doing so hopefully come up with a sharper conception of what we mean by responsibility, much in the same way that she did for ‘care.’

CT: And in the way she contrasted it with notions of citizenship and notions of choice—we were also trying to compare and contrast with other useful concepts to see how responsibility enables other words.

TS: Why is New Zealand an interesting place to do this work?

CT: Being a small country, in which the competitive market model doesn’t necessarily work well to solve certain social problems, there is a very strong historical legacy of the engaged state. At the same time we led the world in embracing a very strongly neoliberal vision in the 1980s, which really transformed society on many levels. So there is a unique and sometimes tense mixture of responsibilities at play here, between individual empowerment and the social contract. And the other interesting factor in New Zealand is that there is the actively ongoing, contested, and sometimes contentious issue of responsibility between the Māori indigenous population and the Crown, the state. There exists a treaty, the Treaty of Waitangi, a social contract that is unique in many ways internationally in the way in which it allows a political debate about responsibility to occur at the national level based on ethnicity, historical injustice, law and state responsibility. So I think that is also an interesting feature of New Zealand life when talking about responsibility.

TS: And the two keynotes who will be at the conference — Cris Shore is a keynote, and he’s done work on accountability and so on, and obviously Nikolas Rose has worked in this area, so clearly there’s an important conversation occurring between their work.

ST: Through his work on the anthropology of policy and ‘audit culture’, Cris has come at this in quite a different angle, looking at how techniques of modern management and financial accounting are being used as instruments of responsibilisation and to govern people at a distance. They might appear apolitical — ‘it’s just a routine measure of performance’, that kind of thing — yet those sorts of moves toward neo-liberalizing society (which we were discussing above) are being promoted precisely through such different modes of accountability and auditing. Much of his work has sought to understand the various ways in which these policy processes create new categories of persons by operating as technologies of the self that produce responsible – and responsibilized – subjects.

These will be some of the key themes we hope will be picked up in the conference, through a range of perspectives and disciplinary approaches that will, we hope, both build and deviate in interesting ways from the idea presented in the two key notes.

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.

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

In the video, Brown lists four qualities of empathy

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

2.     Staying out of judgment

3.     Recognizing emotion in other people and then communicating that

4.     Feeling with people

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

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

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

Just over a month ago a Peruvian indigenous federation circulated remarkable video footage showing about a hundred isolated (so-called “uncontacted”) Mashco-Piro Indians just across the river from a Piro indigenous village along the Rio de las Piedras in Peru. They  appeared to be asking for food and trade goods like rope and metal tools. The Piro and Mashco-Piro languages are close enough to allow communication. Hoping to avoid direct contact and the possibility of disease contagion, forest rangers at Monte Salvado floated a canoe laden with bananas across the river. After a tense three-day standoff, the Mashco-Piro eventually disappeared back into the forest. No one is quite sure why the Mashco-Piro — who have so steadfastly avoided such contact until recently — suddenly showed up. Many suspect that illegal loggers active throughout the region have disrupted their usual migration routes.

In late 2011, a different group of Mashco-Piro living near the border of Manu National Park shot and killed Shaco Flores, an old Matsigenka friend of mine, with an arrow. Having lived among the Piro for many years and learned the Piro language, Shaco had been patiently communicating and trading with the Mashco-Piro for over twenty years, always maintaing a safe distance but slowly drawing them closer with his gifts, food and conversation. But something happened on that fateful day in late November: perhaps the Mashco-Piro were spooked by Shaco’s appearance with several relatives at the manioc garden on a small river island where he had been allowing the Mashco-Piro to harvest his crops; perhaps there was internal disagreement among the Mashco-Piro whether or not to accept Shaco’s long-standing offer to bring them into permanent contact. We may never know.

Just a few days earlier, a Spanish ornithologist had been staying at Shaco’s house and photographed a small group of Mashco-Piro across the river through a birding scope. It is possible that the powerfully built, somewhat bearded man pictured in these photographs is the same one who fired the single arrow that killed Shaco. After Shaco’s death, these sensational photographs, like the Mashco-Piro video clips this year, went viral across the internet, briefly drawing the attention of international media outlets including the BBC, MSN, Huffington Post and even Fox News. Our overly connected, globalized world is fascinated with stories about “uncontacted” peoples, especially if those stories involve violence.

Today the Mashco-Piro are entirely nomadic hunters and gatherers who keep no gardens and make no permanent houses, just lean-to palm shacks under the forest canopy, sometimes woven from living, standing palm saplings. Yet they are hardly throwbacks to the “Stone Age,” as some media outlets present them. In fact, the Mashco-Piro are every bit as modern as, well, the automobile and the rubber tire. In the late 19th century, before John Boyd Dunlop invented the pneumatic tire and Henry Ford drove the first “horseless carriage” out of his shed in Detroit, the Mashco-Piro inhabited the upper Manu River in settled agricultural villages. In 1894, the infamous “King of Rubber” Carlos Fermin Fitzcarraldo, hauled a steamship across a small hillock into the Manu River basin and opened this isolated region to rubber tappers. This historical event was immortalized (and heavily fictionalized) by Klaus Kinski’s signature performance in Werner Herzog’s film, “Fitzcarraldo.” After the “Mashco” (as they were then called) resisted Fitzcarraldo’s incursions, his men slaughtered them in a gory battle that was said to have left the river water undrinkable from so many corpses (see Shepard et al. 2010). Apparently, surviving Mashco-Piro took to the woods and have maintained a nomadic lifestyle ever since, hunting and gathering in several distinctive local groups throughout a wide territory between the Piedras and Manu Rivers in Madre de Dios, Peru.

It is hardly appropriate to call such peoples “uncontacted,” since their very isolation occurred in the aftermath of a particularly violent form of contact. For this reason, I coined the term “indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation” in 1996, when I wrote an open letter to Mobil Oil warning the company as well as the Peruvian authorities and several indigenous federations of the many dangers of oil exploration along the Piedras River, where the Mashco-Piro are known to circulate. Then again, “voluntary isolation” may also be another kind of misnomer, given their forced, almost refugee-like status. But the concept of “voluntary isolation” caught on in Peru and elsewhere in Amazonia, emphasizing the important fact that most such groups are not Stone Age innocents, isolated and left behind by Progress, unaware of modernity and all its wonders and discontents. Rather, the Mashco-Piro and other groups have chosen ongoing isolation as a conscious strategy for survival, and have actively resisted  repeated attempts by missionaries, tourists, film crews and even well-meaning indigenous neighbors to establish “first contact.” In addition to the cultural erosion and personal indignities recently contacted groups usually endure, they also inevitably suffer severe, often fatal epidemics of viral diseases, including the flu. Amazonian groups like the Mashco-Piro who have been isolated since the turn of the 20th century essentially re-live (and often die from) the great flu pandemic of 1918, and all its virulent permutations since then, when they enter (or re-enter) “contact.”

Aside from questioning popular notions about “primitive” nomadic societies, the recent appearance of the Mashco-Piro at Monte Salvado asking for food brings up vexing issues about the ethics of isolation and contact. In Peru’s close neighbor, Brazil, the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) and its predecessor, the Indian Protection Agency (SPI), throughout much of the 20th century pursued an aggressive strategy of locating and contacting isolated indigenous groups who were dangerously close to (or in the way of) expanding frontier zones. The tragedy of this official policy became especially apparent during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s, as rapid road construction and colonization accompanying the “Brazilian miracle” devastated huge swathes of forest and threw hitherto remote indigenous groups like the Cinta Larga, Waimiri-Atroari, Arara, Surui, Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau and others into apocalyptic situations of demographic and cultural collapse. In 1987 FUNAI reversed this policy under a new “Department of Isolated Indians,” focusing their efforts on locating, demarcating and protecting territories where isolated groups live  in order to avoid contact as long as possible. Contact, carried out by teams with long-time field experience, is considered a final, emergency option if a particular group is in imminent threat of conflict with outsiders. Such was the case in 1996 when a FUNAI team contacted a small group of the warlike Korubo (known locally by the quaint moniker of “head smashers”) in the vast Javari River indigenous reserve, close to the Peruvian border. This group had apparently split off from the main population in the center of the reserve and moved dangerously close to the reserve’s border, entering into conflict with local non-indigenous populations. FUNAI decided to contact this one group, giving them vaccinations, health care and other assistance but maintaining them in a state of partial isolation to this day.

In Peru, however, there is no such agency as FUNAI with the funding, institutional presence and field experience (however tragically earned) necessary to carry out such contact operations and protect recently contacted groups. In the past, missionary groups have typically been the ones to handle (and often initiate) contact situations in Peru. Yet neither missionaries of various denominations nor the anthropological team of Manu National Park were able to respond quickly or effectively enough to the Nahua (Yora) contact on the Mishagua river in 1984-1985, leading to the death of nearly half the group (Shepard et al. 2010).

The Peru-Brazil border region has perhaps the world’s largest concentration of isolated indigenous groups, and is also beset by numerous problems associated with illegal logging, gold mining and drug trafficking, rapid deforestation along the new Interoceanic (Trans-Amazon) Highway, and a boom of oil and gas exploration and extraction. FUNAI has long sought institutional partnerships with the Peruvian government to deal with these often overlapping problems across the porous, mostly invisible border, but so far little progress has been made. The indigenous federation in Madre de Dios province, FENAMAD, has taken on the role of recognizing and defending Peru’s isolated indigenous populations in the face of self-serving denials by loggers, oil and gas companies and even government agencies themselves as to the very existence of such groups. FENAMAD, like FUNAI, supports a fundamental policy of “no contact”, respecting such peoples’ apparent choice of isolation.

But what if the Mashco-Piro, for whatever internal reasons or external pressures, return to Monte Salvado to ask for food and gifts in the future? What of the risks of flu contagion, or worse, as these exchanges continue and perhaps intensify? In addition to the risks of of contact or near-contact to isolated groups’ health, Shaco’s tragic death underscores the risks that isolated groups can pose to local populations. Peruvian protected area management plans, anthropological impact studies, and oil exploration projects in the Madre de Dios region and elsewhere now often include “contingency plans” for dealing with isolated indigenous groups. The improvised yet apparently effective (for now) response to the tense situation at Monte Salvado shows that this process of reflection and planning has paid off; the forest rangers, rather than succumbing to the usual paternalistic instinct to give not just food but clothes, matches, and so on to the “poor naked savages,” took the precaution of floating their food gifts across in a canoe, reducing the chance of direct disease contagion. Yet what would happen if a Mashco-Piro were to come down with a cold? Is there an emergency medical-anthropological-indigenous team in Peru that could be put into action on short notice to contain an epidemic outbreak before it decimates the group? How could Peru take better advantage of the experience of FUNAI’s Department of Isolated Indians in neighboring Brazil to prepare itself for the real and possibly imminent contingencies of contact with the Mashco-Piro and other isolated groups?

I don’t claim to have the answers to these difficult questions, but I do hope this posting will provoke useful debate.

Glenn Shepard is an anthropologist, ethnobotanist and film-maker now working at the Goeldi Museum in Belém do Pará, Brazil. He has done field research in Amazonian Peru and Brazil as well as in Mexico, Asia and the Middle East. He writes on topics ranging from shamanism to human ecology to indigenous modernity. He blogs at “Notes from the Ethnoground” and is on Twitter @TweetTropiques.