Tag Archives: Ethnography

News from Lloyd Park

[The post below was contributed by guest blogger Lane DeNicola. It is the second in a series on the relationship between academic precarity and the production of ethnography, introduced here. Read Lane’s previous post here.]

In his late 19th Century sci-fi classic News from Nowhere, Arts & Crafts figurehead William Morris posited an agrarian utopia in which private property, centralized government, money, prisons and many other modern institutions were non-existent.  The work was intended to respond to a common criticism of socialist projects: the “innately human” lack of incentive to work in communitarian societies.  While some socialist advocates sought to deal with this issue by reducing the menial labor of humans via technology and industrialization, Morris’ work is predicated on the idea that most if not all work could and should be creative and pleasurable, with the introduction of machinery being reserved only for those rarer instances where not just labor but painis to be reduced.  For all its romantic pastoralism, Morris’ works (and this idea in particular) seem compelling to me in the context of ethnographic work “on the sidelines.”

The erosion (in the Digital Era) of the Industrial Era segregation of play and labor has been a regular theme in UCL’s Digital Anthropology programme, but even more immanently I’ve been thinking about the ways that fieldwork, writing, and all the other activities comprising the best ethnography are as much play as they are work. Take the advantages of long-term participant-observation as an example.  The likelihood of experiencing events or observing patterns impossible to plan for or foresee is increased, and all those “artificially-induced formalisms” that can plague interviews or other highly-structured modes of data-gathering are gradually relaxed with the passage of time and greater familiarity between researchers and informants.  The ethnographer relies, that is, on contingency–the unforeseen and serendipitous, the “possibility that things might have been otherwise” (Malaby 2007)–and informality.  Both conceptually underpin play.  The outcome of games, for example, must be indeterminate, and some of the most important aspects of gameplay come not in the form of rules but in what we learn or negotiate around the rules.  Obviously ethnography entails bothlabor (or maybe more appropriately “struggle”) as well as pleasure and creativity, but for a variety of good and bad reasons we talk about it principally as a work activity. Continue reading →

Anthropologists for Hire

[The post below was contributed by guest blogger Deepa S. Reddy, and is part of a series on the relationship between academic precarity and the production of ethnography, introduced here. Read Deepa’s previous post here.]

Note: post updated for clarity

Fieldwork is one of those extraordinarily-difficult-to-bracket experiences, as it blithely ignores any sort of compartmentalization of practical issues, professional demands, family, work, even time. Most conversations I’ve had about the hardship of fieldwork have invariably been cognizant of the sorts of practical-professional-personal negotiations involved—which often can become frustrating, overwhelming. In this post, I consider how such circumstances compel certain sorts of research decisions, serving as the often unspoken frameworks for the questions we ask and the projects we choose.

Fieldwork for my dissertation research followed a fairly classical/conventional trajectory, but for the break I took at the 6-month mark so as not to be away from my husband for a continuous year. India was far, tickets were expensive, but this was workable, still. I lived in Hyderabad, studying women’s activist organizations and their responses to Hindutva. I thoroughly enjoyed the vagrancy that fieldwork in an urban setting demands—and realized it was easiest to do this sort of work when one was away from family, so that it was informants and leads that set my pace and defined my agendas, not the realities of child- or parent-care. But it took the year and much stubbornness and persistence besides to move out of what Geertz has called one’s “ghosthood” into a more recognized position in a network, from which information was more accessible, and fieldwork as an experience much more enjoyable.

Our first baby arrived on the heels of the tenure-track job at a teaching-focused institution with a 3-3 load and neither research money nor any assured sabbaticals, but with research requirements to meet at tenure review nonetheless. Summers were all the dedicated time there was, but summers are hard in India, India was half the world away, childcare was not ever easy to organize, and getting there and back in time to teach again with research planned in between was beginning to sound exhausting, near-impossible, and almost not worthwhile. Continue reading →

Selling Out

[The post below was contributed by guest blogger Nathan Fisk, and is part of a series on the relationship between academic precarity and the production of ethnography, introduced here.]

Over the past year, I’ve had to carefully consider the meaning of “selling out”.

Of my blogger colleagues, I’m probably the farthest removed from academia – or, at least I’m moving in that general direction. This certainly does not mean I’m abandoning research, quite the opposite in fact. It does, however, mean that I’ve all but given up on the idea of staying in academia and searching out a tenure-track position. For the time being, anyway. Instead, I’m looking to transition into the corporate world, but ideally in a way which would allow me to still do interesting ethnographic research. But, before I get ahead of myself, let me explain a little bit about my background and current position.

In 2011, I wrapped up my doctoral degree in STS – the first to graduate from my program under the soft four-year deadline slowly hardening under increasing institutional pressures. For years, I had labored, perhaps delusionally, under the hopes that if I was working on a “hot” and highly visible topic a job would simply materialize by the time I reached the end of the doctoral plank. For me, that topic was youth Internet safety. I developed my dissertation research with jobs beyond academia in mind, and deliberately built into the project opportunities to meet with school administrators across New York, in the hopes of expanding my contact network for eventual consulting work. I envisioned possibilites in state government, doing technology policy work. I thought I could even keep writing, given the two freelance books already under my belt.

The imagined job never really materialized. Between the economic downturn and my failure to anticipate what I’ve come to describe and recognize in others as post-dissertation slump, things simply stalled out. My dissertation research panned out in a way that made consulting difficult – schools want someone to come in and talk to kids about cyberbullying, not so much someone to tell them that the idea of cyberbullying is fundamentally problematic. State positions dried up during budget cutbacks, and I never really figured out how to get into a position that would allow me to write policy briefings. In terms of more writing, merely considering the idea of returning to Internet safety issues after almost a decade of research on the topic made me nauseous.

Continue reading →

Fluidity, Multiplicity, Contingency: The Shifting Sands of Knowledge Work

[The post below was contributed by guest blogger Laurel George, and is part of a series on the relationship between academic precarity and the production of ethnography, introduced here.]

In this discussion by and about anthropologists working at the boundaries of academia, a reasonable place to start is with a statement of academic situatedness.  But in academia today—and especially on its sidelines—talking about situatedness can be tricky business.  In the traditional U.S. academic trajectory with a tenured academic position as the ultimate goal, a simple name, rank, and affiliation answer was sufficient and expected. Moreover, that small piece of information could offer a good amount of information about one’s intellectual pedigree and leanings, relative degree of success, and likely fields of expertise. For so many today, though,  both within academia in contingent positions and those working outside of academia, describing one’s institutional situadedness requires qualifiying language of  temporality, multiplicity, and fluidity. These qualifications we make, offered apologetically or not, stem, I believe, from the gap between the reality of academic careers in the U.S. today and the ideal(ized) traditional tenure-track career trajectory, which we still hold as the norm.  This despite the fact that those with tenure and on the tenure-track comprise a distinct minority of faculty in U.S. colleges and universities. Recent statistics and studies indicate that somewhere between 65% and 75% of all faculty in U.S. colleges and universities are in part-time or adjunct positions while only 25%-30% are tenured or on the tenure track. And these numbers do not account for those who went into academe aspring to careers that looked like those of their own professors and mentors, but who now work fully or partly outside of academia. The next few weeks will take up these issues as they pertain to the field of anthropology and the practice of ethnography, and in doing so will offer ideas about centers and margins, success and failure, and tradition and innovation.

First, though, a quick look to my academic and professional trajectory, offered as a kind of case study.  After getting an undergraduate degree in anthropology (with a big dose of dance thrown in), I decided to work for a year or two before going for my doctorate in anthropology.  At the encouragement of an esteemed professor, I applied to work in the Dance Program at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), attracted by the possibility of immersion in a completely different world. Months went by with no word from the NEA. I took that as a sign that I’d better get on with the grad school plan without the detours,  so I applied to doctoral programs in anthropology.  Mere days before replies were to go out from graduate programs and almost a year after applying to the NEA, I was called down to Washington, D.C. for a job interview.  I was offered and accepted the job, deferred my acceptance into Rice University’s Cultural Anthropology Ph.D. program, and stayed at the NEA for a year and a half. It was the right move—not only did I learn about arts funding, concert dance in the U.S., and how to work outside of an academic environment, I also gathered information for my eventual doctoral disseration, a multi-site ethnography on contemporary dance in the U.S. which included the NEA as one of the field sites.  (The other field sites were dance organizations and communities of dancers in New York City, where I moved to do fieldwork  in 1997 and have never left.)

Continue reading →

Transnationalism, Interdisciplinarity, Collaboration (Or, A Few First Words on Ethnography On/From the Sidelines)

[The post below was contributed by guest blogger Aalok Khandekar, and is part of a series on the relationship between academic precarity and the production of ethnography, introduced here.]

My scholarly trajectory leading up to these series of posts on an anthropology blog is perhaps somewhat unconventional, and yet, also more straightforwardly located within the aspirational tenure-track model of the academy than some of my fellow contributors here—for the moment, at least. Even though I have worked closely with anthropologists since the earliest days of graduate school, been associated with Cultural Anthropology in good measure (c.f. here), my graduate degree—like quite a few contributors to this series—is in Science and Technology Studies (STS). And my university education prior to that was in Electrical Engineering: at Mumbai University (India) at the Bachelor’s level, and at Pennsylvania State University at the Master’s level. My dissertation research, in turn, went on to investigate the conditions of transnational mobility for Indian engineering students and professionals (between India and the United States): it was designed as a multi-sited ethnography with fieldwork components in Mumbai and in parts of the United States (more on that in my upcoming posts). I received my Ph.D. in STS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Aug 2010, after which I worked as an Adjunct Professor at my graduate department for a year, and since July 2011, I have been based at the Department of Technology and Society Studies at Maastricht University in the Netherlands: first as a post-doc, and currently in the capacity of a Lecturer.

So, what does doing ethnography on/from the sidelines mean for me? What exactly do the “sidelines” look like when viewed from behind my work desk? In many ways, the sidelines, at present, do not relegate me to the margins of the academic hierarchy. Sure, I did was a freshly-out-of-school looking-for-jobs adjunct at my graduate department for a year. But since, I have been fortunate to find a position, which albeit temporary, affords me all the benefits of a full-time academic scholar: I have a (small) personal research budget, a printing-and-copying budget, regular library access, I don’t have an overly demanding teaching load (my time is evenly split between research and teaching), and I have access to a wide array of institutional resources including research funding specialists and a range of administrative support staff. There are certainly ways in which academic hierarchies do matter, but often, these are equally issues of navigating through a new work environment with a significantly different organization of higher education. My position at present, that is, is hardly anything that can be termed precarious.

Continue reading →

Dude, Where’s My Fieldsite?

[The post below was contributed by guest blogger Lane DeNicola]

This post is part of a series on the relationship between academic precarity and the production of ethnography, introduced here.

Last month I was involved as a planning committee member for a neat little event, the annual Anthropology in London Conference.  Each June the anthropology departments at SOAS, Goldsmiths, LSE, UCL, Brunel, and UEL (and occasionally the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) come together as a community for a full day of talks and panels by doctoral students, academic staff, and anthropologists at large (mostly but not exclusively based in London).  Unsurprisingly, the planning committee had wanted the theme for the event to somehow reflect both the current atmosphere of the discipline but also of London, the confluence of the 2012 Summer Olympics, the European economic crisis, and the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts. The theme we settled on—Certainty? (with a question mark)—struck a resonant and suitably interrogative chord.

If the waxing and waning drive for “certainty” deeply frames the academic profession (e.g. the tenure-track as canonical objective) I suppose I’ve had to contend with only a typical overall level of it, but it rarely feels that way.  When I slid from technical employment and a BS in physics and computer science into the social sciences, it kicked off a cognitive and professional butterfly effect I couldn’t return to order even if I wanted to.  Though several of my graduate mentors were anthropologists, I came not out of an anthropology program but rather a program in science & technology studies.  I suspect that many here would concur with my own (mercifully limited) experience as an STS-person the academic job market: the thaumatrope-like character of the field is usually received within more conventionally-disciplined departments as either powerfully “interdisciplinary” or suspiciously “everywhere and nowhere at once.”

Even my dissertation fieldwork—nine months in north India—largely took the form of participant-observation within a school, specifically an institution for the training of satellite image interpreters.  Most SM readers will be familiar with the often dicey proposition of having to explain their fieldwork to funding organizations or governmental agencies charged with evaluation, auditing, or border control.  It may well be that you can’t throw a rock in South Asia without hitting an anthropologist, but throw satellite images and “school as fieldsite” into the mix and you’re pretty much guaranteed to confuse people before you’ve really gotten anywhere.  If I’d had to choose a one-word theme for that work, Uncertainty! (with an exclamation point) might have worked fairly well.

Continue reading →

Going Adjunct, Or: A Picture of Precarity

[Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Deepa S. Reddy]

This post is part of a series on the relationship between academic precarity and the production of ethnography, introduced here.

It is said that when the Indian cricketer “iron man” Sunil Gavaskar announced his retirement in 1987, he observed that it’s nicer by far to quit when people still ask “why?” instead of “why not?”

I’d like to think that I quit the tenured position that I’d held for a decade at a similar juncture. Not simply because my research and career trajectories were pointing upwards, but because institutionally things were stable—or should I say, stable enough. Anthropology was accepted as a valued service department key to maintaining multiculturalist credentials; our graduate program was growing organically—enough to justify a new faculty line. And yet it was on a crisp sunny fall 2008 day that a container with most of our belongings left our home in Houston for Pondicherry; the implications of the subprime mortgage crisis were just beginning to manifest themselves, though an increasingly anxious buzz was the only sound on the airwaves. Our Dean was soon to retire, and with him was to go the system of benefaction we’d so long worked with just fine. Big changes were ahead, though we could hardly have predicted their impact at the time: close-to-bone cuts in legislative funding, new initiatives to measure faculty productivity both within and without, new drives to measure the value of service programs like Anthropology by majors enrolled rather than by semester credit hours taught, an apparently new proactiveness from State educational policy-makers that determined, more than ever before, the fates of individual programs.

These are not just idiosyncratic details, specific to our school or to Texas, but rough measures of the sort of dubious “stability” that exists within the public university and that creates spaces for scholarship: “secure” only until the next (financial) crisis or push to fiscal efficiency. This is a condition that probably doesn’t need much elaboration for Savage Minds readers, but I want to pin it as a point of contrast to what we see then as life off the precipice, in the abyss of adjunctdom. The fear of falling, as Barbara Ehrenreich might have described the feeling one gets looking down.

Continue reading →

Ethnography on/from the Sidelines: A Quick Introduction

[Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Deepa S. Reddy]

Note: Updated on 7/27/2012 with links to all posts contributed as part of this series; please see below. With thanks to Savage Minds admins and readers for a fantastic four weeks.

The idea for this group guest blog on Savage Minds began serendipitously, as I suppose many projects do, with random conversations in hallways or after talks—this time, after a talk I’d just delivered at Rice University’s Department of Anthropology. I’d been asked for material by which to introduce me anew in the place where I grew (professionally) up, to the new students and faculty who had joined after I’d left. I offered the following bits, alongside my CV: after 10 years as tenure-track and then tenured faculty at UH-Clear Lake, I relocated to India in 2008; I continue to work for the University of Houston, however: I teach as an adjunct online and I serve as UH’s liaison in India in an administrative/ counseling/ recruitment-oriented role; I look increasingly to collaborations as the means to make ethnographic research viable, from where I now am situated. A series of conversations with friends and colleagues ensued, face-to-face and virtual, each considering situations such as my own as raising important and increasingly relevant questions about the production of ethnography in the intellectual spaces that line the margins of the academy.

Humph, I remember thinking, but of course. I’d been so immersed in making this relocation to India work as smoothly as it would with a husband still in Houston and a family to care for on my own in India, suddenly a single parent of a sort keeping my professional connections alive and my own research going—so much a participant in this process had I been, I’d neglected any observation/ reflection on what sort of intellectual space it was that I was now occupying, even myself creating, and within which I was attempting to (re-)create “ethnography.” And not just me, but so many colleagues and friends, people I knew and those I’d heard about, who’d left the academy but kept tethers to it, or who’d finished graduate studies and were struggling to get back in on firmer, more independent footing. What might a wider conversation on the precarities of the discipline look like—particularly when we think about just what sorts of intellectual spaces of production are produced as a result? What would ethnography produced from such spaces come to look like?

And so was born, longer story cut short, the conversation to unfold on Savage Minds all July.

Continue reading →

Prey into Hunter? Thinking (temporarily) Like a Neoliberal

Matt’s recent post about  the survival of disciplines like anthropology in the post neo liberal future was, like all the best sci- fi stories, simultaneously fun and scary with distinct elements of , if not truth exactly, possibility.  We recognise the narrative and see ourselves in it because of  how we are experiencing these kinds of changes in our respective locations. These are not merely geographic, although place becomes increasingly important, but encompass  our situation within the global political economy of knowledge  production and reception, and the global  education market place.

The extent to which the scorched earth scenarios will actually unfold is uncertain. The mass expansion in higher education globally over the past decade, not just in the global north,  is after all a combined product of private and public spending.  What the sector is experiencing is, as Matt shows,  increasing differentiation.

The niche occupied by anthropology is changing. Some of this is cataclysmic, as departments shrink and others are faced with closure. But anthropology  and ethnography are struggling to find  new territories outside the academy and at different sites within it.  This is of course leading to debates about what `real’ anthropology is – that is the extent to which anthropological knowledge should stay as inaction research constituted from a position of criticism.

Such refrains may be  muffled  in the longer term by the roar of rising water over the sinking ship.  One  established  version of  what we think of as social anthropology evolved in the nineteen thirties and forties and  was distributed widely through the expansion of academic posts and departments in the nineteen sixties and seventies.

The objects of study have changed  radically since then, of course, but  the ways in which the knowledge categorised as anthropological is organised and obtained hardly at all.  At the same time, cognate disciplines, human geography for example,  claim to use ethnography as one among many methodological possibilities while also being open to more explicit modalities for the  co-production of  disciplinary knowledge, not only with colleagues within the discipline but actively with informants.

Something is lost as well as gained through such endeavours.  The paradigmatic ethnographic research experience  of working through interpretive frames of emergent understanding is  not only unique to  a particular way of doing anthropology. It  yields unique insights.  It is also ethically problematic.  Debating its limitations as well as potentialities  is urgent, as is the rethinking of new approaches to  ethnographic practice and to anthropology.  If,  as we reiterate endlessly to our readers and students, culture and social practice are constituted relationally, we should pay more heed to how the relations within which we are embedded are changing and to our possible role in effecting their transformation. As, Matt suggests, resistance is  a strategy but it is not the only one.   In the game like scenario he outlines, some communities carve out new spaces for themselves and adopt new weapons and strategies for survival.

Whether the game of academic survival is more analogous to Pokémon, with its public private partnerships providing health resources to the battling creatures  under the supervision of titled professors,   or to  the blood and thunder of World of Warcraft,  probably depends where one is situated.  In the UK, teetering on the brink of economic crisis amid huge cuts in public spending and a government imposed value for money  agenda through which all spending is assessed, the pressing issue is not  simply the marketization of higher education, but what level of  public investment can be justified.  In this climate, it is not surprising that disciplines like ours feel extremely vulnerable.

At Manchester, we are exploring ways of addressing  the changed situation by actively engaging  it.   Instead of simply bemoaning neo-liberalisation, although we do that too, we  perceived it  as an opportunity. If neo-liberalisation has changed our universities and the kinds of students we attract, what could this mean for our discipline?   How could  we  generate demand and attract different kinds of students to our courses?    One experimental answer was to offer a different kind of course aimed at a different kind of student.

Our first year course in business anthropology is designed  to be accessible and relevant for  undergraduate students taking degrees in business and finance disciplines.  It attracted several hundred students in its first year of delivery, students who would not normally have selected an anthropology option.   Trying to think in market terms enabled us to situate ourselves differently but it also placed us in a  relation of competition with other departments from whom potential students were drawn.  Responding to markets may in practice mean shifting the burden of vulnerability.  We as a formerly protected species are being  forced out of the reserve. Is there an alternative to this world of Prey into Hunter?  What other options might we  have as anthropologists working in and outside the academy to  restructure this particular conjuncture?

What Makes Something Ethnographic?

How do you know when you are reading an ethnography? What makes a book or article ethnographic? This past semester I taught a new undergraduate course titled Reading Ethnography in which the students and I asked these questions as a means of appraising the specificity and content of ethnographic knowledge. Our first challenge was to articulate what the term “ethnographic” meant. What are those qualities that make a piece of scholarship ethnographic rather than simply descriptive or anthropological?

Etymologically, the ethnographic comes from ethnography. Following from its Greek origins, ethnography is the writing of people, of society, of culture: ethnos means “folk/the people” and grapho is “to write.” In noun form, ethnography is no longer tethered just to writing. Instead, it is often used to refer to a type of research; it is not only non-anthropologists who use the term this way. We do it too. We talk about “doing ethnography,” using it as a shorthand for fieldwork, saying ethnography when we mean ethnographic research. Continue reading →

Another Occupy is Possible

A guest post by Levi Jacobs.

black marker, brown cardboard, red flags, blue jeans

sage, cigarettes, sweat mix with city smog and fried food:

in a circle we stand, breaths fogging, arms raised,

lie fragile under layers of tarp, blanket and winter night,

layers of poverty, police, and political scrutiny–

the sun sets fire to polluted streams, raises

factory stacks like charred fingers clutching sky:

powerlessness and power war in the returned Gaze of the cops,

antipathy, anger, appreciation in the honks of passing cars,

(never) doubting a small group of people can change the world.

Occupy is on our minds. With the May issue of American Ethnologist featuring articles on Occupy, and the New York Times noting recent social science interest in the movement, Occupy seems back on the anthropological radar—just as it is dropping off many screens outside academia. While this may just be a symptom of the speed with which our research and publishing tends to move, I’d argue there’s a better reason why anthropologists are researching and writing on Occupy. Early on, we maybe all felt we knew what it was about: economic inequality, the bailout of the rich, the newly-homeless foreclosed-on middle class and a permanent protest of all this, starting with Zucotti Park. As Occupy encampments sprung up nationally, then internationally, then started to get closed down, many of us became less and less certain of what Occupy is really about—homeless issues? Direct democracy? The banking system, or capitalism in general? Reform or revolution? It’s difficult to get a read on Occupy, not only because the interests of ‘the ninety-nine percent’ seem so broad, but also because there are multiple ninety-nine percents, with each Occupy locality made up of local people working autonomously on local issues, as well as translocal ones they might share with the larger Occupy movement. Is it even a movement? Towards what? Even locally, the diversity of concerns, goals and people involved in Occupy make this a hard question to answer. Continue reading →

Being there, in the field, with and without internet

Another update from the trenches of fieldwork.  This one is brought to you by the sweet, streaming, wireless connection of an internet cafe that’s about 45 minutes from my fieldsite.  It’s the bloggers version of an oasis to find these sorts of places, especially when there’s a breakfast special that includes coffee with the juevos rancheros.

First of all, I’ll admit that I was pretty spoiled during the first few months of fieldwork because I had WIRELESS INTERNET access anytime I wanted.  That’s right, a wireless connection right in my room.  Madness, I know.  This was definitely not the case when I was here in 2009 and 2010 doing prelim work for my dissertation.  I had no problems with my fantastic and luxurious internet situation…until it evaporated like spilled gasoline.

Gone. Continue reading →

Mediating the Real I

Whenever I mention that one of my primary areas of anthropological research is media, the question I come across on a recurring basis is the following: How will you be able to pursue that through ethnographic fieldwork of everyday activities? My sense is that such a response comes from the view that media are disembodied and deterritorialized objects or processes, or that they operate at a pace that is difficult to engage through participant-observation. In response to such concerns much work in anthropology has sought to “ground” media by focusing on production or reception practices, or occasionally both. However, I consider this kind of question crucial to think through during my exploratory fieldwork and research design phase.

A similar issue has arisen in anthropological research on Muslims in North America. In the conclusion to Katherine Pratt Ewing’s edited volume, Being and Belonging (2008), Andrew Shryock called for greater attention to “the immediate and mediated worlds…articulated in everyday life” (206). So, how should one strike a balance between studying media and the everyday? One could study the everyday dimensions of production practices, or how the reception of media is incorporated into people’s everyday lives, or how and why media producers construct the everyday in certain ways. Continue reading →

Sideways: from who and what to how

[This is a guest post by Garrison Doreck. He is a graduate student in Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine.]

I stumbled upon the sideways issue in some of the readings I will discuss below. Initially, I read laterality and sideways discussions to be the equivalent of the keystone anthropological activity of cutting across social spheres. It is only after hearing about the Sideways conference this past Fall at UC-Irvine that I decided to take a second look and try to think it through a bit more. And, this is a wonderful venue to hopefully hear back from many of you who have been thinking about this issue in more depth and at greater length than I have at this point.

Last year Julian discussed projects of studying up or sideways as hinging on how “ethnographers relate to their interlocutors, as well as different degrees of “identity overlap” between ethnographer and subject.” In another post, Dorien Zandbergen took issue with such “identity overlap,” by claiming that the sideways concept “suggests that there is some kind of plane that is shared by particular kinds of people, who can move ‘sideways’ to have a peek into each other’s affairs.” It is thus by paying careful attention to similarities that Dorien was able to identify issues where “such similarities appeared only superficial,” as differences emerged. However, Julian addressed the issue, as well, by looking at how such research is “differentiated on several axes: of political sympathy, of shared knowledge, of power relations, of informants’ reflexivity, and of socio-cultural belonging, to name a few.” Within these posts the matter of studying sideways, or up, involved drawing a connection between self/other (i.e. who) and similarity/difference (i.e. what). Continue reading →

Digital Money, Mobile Media, and the Consequences of Granularity

Nicholas Negroponte famously insisted that the dotcom boomers, “Move bits, not atoms.” Ignorant of the atom heavy human bodies, neuron dense brains, and physical hardware needed to make and move those little bits, Negroponte’s ideal did become real in the industrial sectors dependent upon communication and economic transaction. In the communication sector, atomic newspapers have been replaced by bitly news stories. In the transactional sector, coins are a nuisance, few carry dollars, and I just paid for a haircut with a credit card adaptor on the scissor-wielder’s Droid phone.

The human consequences of the bitification of atoms go far beyond my bourgeois consumption. This shift, or what is could simply be called digitalization, when paired with their very material transportation systems or networked communication technologies, combines to form a powerful force that impacts local and global democracies and economies.

What are the local and political economics of granularity in the space shared between the fiduciary and the communicative? To understand the emergent political economy of the practices and discourses unifying around mobile media and digital money we need a shared language around the issue of granularity. Continue reading →