The question, ‘what is that we can do together?’ — whoever and wherever that ‘we’ may exist — is largely a question of what is in-between us; what enables us to reach toward or withdraw from each other. What is the materiality of this in-between — the composition and intensity of its durability, viscosity, visibility, and so forth?  What is it that enables us to be held in place, to be witnessed, touched, avoided, scrutinized or secured?  Infrastructure is about this in-between. 

Infrastructure exerts a force — not simply in the materials and energies it avails, but also the way it attracts people, draws them in, coalesces and expends their capacities. Thus, the distinction between infrastructure and sociality is fluid and pragmatic rather than definitive. People work on things to work on each other, as these things work on them.

                                                                                                                –AbdouMaliq Simone (2012)

There are many anthropologists who can lay claim to dual sensibilities in art and anthropology. I’m not one of them. Nevertheless, for the past two years I’ve been doing a visual-making experiment about arctic urban infrastructure in friction with artists Jesse C. Jackson and Tori Foster, I use ‘friction’ in Anna Tsing’s metaphorical sense, to gesture a rubbing together of two distinct modes of working, seeing and being, which produces movement and often heat. I am motivated by an interest in the methods of these two artists, and by what they might offer my own thinking, writing and representing. I was especially interested in their practices for exploring the consistent patterns and anomalous curiosities that define urban landscapes. They have worked in cosmopolitan cities, like Toronto, Los Angeles and Beijing. I asked them to join me where I’ve long worked, in a small town of 4000, just above the 60th parallel in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Hay River is a peri-urban transportation town and a key node in arctic extractive networks: it’s a staging area for moving resources, goods and labour in, out and around the region. When I conducted my first stretch of extended fieldwork in 2008, diamonds were the region’s largest export commodity.

We forged this collaboration without expectation or pretense that my art colleagues and I would adopt one another’s modalities. Ultimately, they aren’t working to take on anthropology’s concerns, and I’m not en route to becoming a media artist. At times, I sense that they are exhausted with my ‘humanistic’ impulses. I’m easily frustrated by their attention to the technological. ‘Friction’ is the correct word. Nevertheless, we are drawn into each other’s orbits, and are finding ourselves part of the swelling artistic and scholarly interest in resource extraction—its cultural geographies and the infrastructures that support it.

Last week, Rhizome published an editorial called ‘How to See Infrastructure: A Guide for Seven Billion Primates’. The piece holds that ‘Infrastructure is drastically important to our way of life, and largely kept out of sight’. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s writing, the piece moves on to suggest that what is needed are ‘situated knowledges that teach us what is underneath our society, rather than simply metering information as commodity through more optic tubes’. The piece highlights several artistic and ethnographic interventions that do the work of making certain kinds of infrastructure visible. The text presents infrastructure and invisibility as deeply interrelated. The joke, or so I am told, is that you don’t notice infrastructure until it is broken. The issue seems to be one of awareness and patterns of attention, rather than ‘visibility’ per se. I always have a thumb, but once I break it, I understand more profoundly what it does for me. That said, some people are likely deeply attuned to thumb-ness (a pianist, a rock climber). I am without those habits of attention.

Part of our experiment has left me thinking about how to attend to modes of attending, through visual practice and ethnographic writing. Sometimes, I gain ground for thinking about this in unexpected ways. Most recently, it was at the airport in Yellowknife. Jesse and I were just arriving for summer fieldwork. He took a photo of a taxidermy polar bear with the sign for the airport’s Quiznos sandwich shop in the background. The bear is mounted in the middle of the sole luggage carousel, displayed with a seal diving through a white velvet iceberg. When you arrive, you inevitably stand facing the charismatic megafauna* as you wait for your checked items.

Jesse’s photo intended to subvert the clichéd dead-on snapshot of the installation. While he was taking it, many people around us were taking the quintessential Yellowknife airport picture. Even locals snap them. They post these photos to social media to let their families know they are near home. I have several iterations in my own collection. The photo isn’t part of Jesse’s art practice. He mostly wanted to make his wife and me laugh by suggesting the bear had a taste for Quiznos. However, we began talking about the construction of the airport, the increased flight traffic in the last ten years, and the prominent-in-airports phenomenon, beaver modernism (modern construction as a platform for expressing Canadian nationalism). Trained as an architect, Jesse could contextualize the taxidermy as part of a larger project. At the same time, I was deeply engrossed by different local and global accents, by the men and women looking around for the shuttle to the diamond mine’s private hangar, by parents picking up children who have been at university for the year, by the plastic Tupperware bins stuffed with consumer goods unavailable in the more remote communities.

As we moved from around the capital city and on to the transportation town of Hay River, we came across more polar bear / infrastructure and kept a record. Polar bears are both expected and out-of-place in most parts of Denedeh. The Great Slave Lake region is Dene territory and known for excellent fishing. There are bison, caribou and moose but no polar bears. Polar bears are much further north on both sides of the Beaufort Sea. The polar bear works as an icon of arctic-ness, among other things. Our images of polar bears, artistic castaways of sorts, were beginning to help me articulate the dual, sometimes competing impulses of arctic infrastructure. There are the habits of meaning and overt expressions of the local (e.g., polar bear iconography that some people are structured to stare at while waiting in an airport or eating in a hotel) held in the same frames as everyday elements that shape how people, goods move in and out of the region in ways that seem ordinary (e.g. plastic Tupperware). My priority isn’t to ‘reveal the invisible’, but rather to attend to the pronounced and the subtle unfinished systems that enable circulation of goods, knowledge, meaning, people and power. More than just creating an account of such systems, I’m trying to understand how differently situated groups learn to attend to some elements more so than others.

This summer I am directing my reading, writing and friction-practice towards thinking about how digital and art-based methods of data collection and output assist or hinder the task of understanding the shape, experience and ways of attending to resource extraction and infrastructure. As a group we are consistently confronted with the question, ‘What is that we can do together?’  In a later post, I will say more about what it is we have done. Spoiler, it doesn’t involve polar bears. 

* For more on the anthropology of charismatic megafauna see the work of Hannah Voorhees (polar bears) and that of Danielle DiNovelli-Lang (Alaskan brown bears). For a look at the seemingly less charismatic, but no less significant, species of fish in the NWT, see the work of Zoe Todd. For Alaksan slamon, see  Karen Hébert’s excellent piece in American Anthropologist.

**If you haven’t yet read Lisa Stevenson’s Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic, run don’t walk. Thoughtful responses to it are on Somatosphere. There is an excellent curated collected of essays on Infrastructure on Cultural Anthropology. 

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 a recent contribution to this writers’ series, Michael Lambek offered some reflections on the virtues of “slow reading.” In an era of rapid-fire online communication, when images increasingly substitute for text, Lambek argues we would be well served to revel in the quiet interiority and reflective subjectivity made possible by long-form reading.

In this post I would like to think more carefully about this claim and to consider whether we might want to make a similar argument regarding the shifting pace of academic writing. If, as Lambek and others suggest, the temporality of reading has been altered by the digital age, can the same be said for research and writing? How have new digital tools, platforms, and shifts in technological access transformed the temporality of ethnographic writing, and is this something we necessarily wish to slow down?

I recently had occasion to experiment with sped-up academic pacing when offered the opportunity to contribute a piece to American Ethnologist about the protests surrounding the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. In brainstorming our article, my co-author Jonathan Rosa and I asked ourselves hard questions about what we could contribute to the unfolding discussion about Ferguson. Both of us had produced academic “slow writing”— the product of years of careful research, analysis, drafting and editing. We had also engaged in some forms of “fast writing.” For example, I had published journalistic pieces on social movements in Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe. But these pieces focused on events not being covered in the mainstream media and for which informed journalism was necessary. The same could not be said of Ferguson. Despite an initial lag in journalistic coverage, by the time we were drafting our article, Ferguson had reached a point of media saturation, indeed it had become a challenge to keep apace with the numerous thought pieces and editorial columns emerging at a feverish pace during this time.

Image from the Ferguson newsletter

In plotting our article we thus asked ourselves: how can we contribute to this fast moving conversation while still producing a piece that might hold up over time? That is, how could we produce something fast but not ephemeral?

The result was an exercise in mid-tempo research and writing. It was not the product of long-sustained fieldwork, and was very much written “in the heat of the moment,” but it nonetheless tried to anticipate how anthropologists might look back on Ferguson over time—how they might use this event to teach and write about broader issues of racialization, longer histories of race-based violence, the racial politics of social media, and the shifting terrain of contemporary activism.

This process forced us to think about the challenges of being not just fast writers but fast ethnographers. How can we speak to fast moving stories while still retaining the contextualization, historical perspective, and attention to individual experiences characteristic of a fieldworker? Also, how can we engage with emerging digital platforms like Twitter with the comparative and ethnographic perspective characteristic of our discipline?

The latter requires us to take seriously the narrative genres and political possibilities afforded by new forms of digital communication without assuming that their speed robs them of their social complexity. For example, while some might see the prevalence of “memes” and the seeming dominance of image over text on the internet as an inherently negative development, as anthropologists we are well poised to recognize that shifts in communicative practices are neither inherently virtuous nor corrosive. Rather, they speak to, and are themselves generative of, a new set of social and political possibilities.

Photograph from the Ferguson newsletter

In the case of Ferguson, the fast-moving pace and ease-of-access afforded by Twitter helped activists and supporters bring heightened awareness to what would have otherwise been an under-reported story. Moreover, it allowed many individual users for whom slow writing is not a possibility or a desired practice, to engage in forms of creative expression and reflective activity that could challenge, contest, and contextualize mainstream print narratives in which they rarely see themselves adequately represented. The tweets, images, memes, and hashtags that circulated during this time (and which continue to circulate) should thus not be seen as cheap and fast substitutes for artisanally crafted modes of personal reflection. Instead, they need to be understood as complex texts, worthy of the same kind of close-reading and critical analysis scholars usually devote to long-form prose.

Ethnography in the digital age requires us to avoid conflating the fast with the ephemeral or the vacuous. The aggregative and cumulative dimensions of social media, as well as their far-reaching scope, force us to re-think what constitutes an enduring or transformative social action. Moreover, attention to these practices also requires us to think more carefully about how we, as academic writers, can contribute to fast moving conversations without giving short shrift to the historical and analytical contextualization that is often absent in quick moving public debate. These challenges require us to move quickly when we feel something is worth attending to while still rallying in those quick moments the kind of critical perspectives that can only be honed slowly, accumulatively, over time.