Tag Archives: Field Reports

Blogging ethnographic fieldwork.

How to spot a Chhara

Last night, sitting in Roxy Gagdekar’s house in Chharanagar, I asked him a question that I have been asked at nearly every screening of Acting Like a Thief: namely, how are people able to identify Chharas?

Beyond the historic injustices Denotified Tribes (DNTs) faced during the British Colonial period, Chharas (and other DNTs) continue to suffer from ethnic discrimination. Stigmatized as thieves, it is difficult for them to get legitimate jobs in mainstream society. As a last resort, they turn to criminal activity. It is a vicious circle from which only a few are able to escape.

But how do people know they are Chhara? They don’t look noticeably different from the rest of the population, and even if they did, they could easily be from a neighboring state. They speak their own language (Bhantu), but they can speak Gujarati as well as anyone else.
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What now?

Or, Anthropology for Old People.

So, with the AAAs in the air and most young anthropologists’ thoughts turning to interviews and how to sum up their thesis research in a boffo mini-paragraph, this might not be the most apropos time to discuss What Lies Beyond. But we here at SM shrink from no grim task.

A question likely to echo down the hotel hallways next week, and certain to rustle among the leaves of the groves of academe during next spring’s campus interviews, is what today’s tesista (this word should exist in English but unfortunately “thesist” sounds religious, “thesiser” sounds like a made-up title for a minor nobleman in a fantasy fiction novel, and “writer-upper” is plainly hopeless) plans to do as her Next Project.

One option that comes up often enough to perhaps warrant being considered a pattern is the young anthro — returned from a doctoral project carried out at a field site accessible only by ice ax, dugout canoe, or 20 mule team equipped with propeller hats — who suddenly evinces a serious interest in the same themes as those of the original research — say, exchange rituals — but in a rather more comfortable setting — say, upscale organic grocery stores located in periurban North America. Sometimes in a tone of mild moral umbrage about giving exoticism a poke in the eye.

I for one always felt certain I’d have none of that. No, I’d stay in the South American heartland, polishing my hard-won though still pretty pathetic Guarani language skills and ultimately dying, slowly, of Chagas’ disease as befits any Chaco dweller worth his salt. Neither bug bites nor saddle sores nor sulfurous ground water would stand in my way.

But that was me talking the talk. This fall, walking the Next Project walk (with a visit to my old field site along the way), I’ve discovered the Paraguayan Chaco (my previous work was in the Bolivian Chaco). A good portion of the Paraguayan Chaco has been settled by Mennonites and is, astonishingly, a Chaco with grocery stores, a Chaco with air conditioning, a Chaco with swimming pools (well, one anyway). My anti-colonialist spirit tells me it is wrong wrong wrong for me to want to take a swimsuit next time, while my sensualist flesh says it is oh so RIGHT.

So, I’m wondering (in a self-exculpatory sort of way) — am I just succumbing to the inevitable? Apart from all the condemnations of exoticist exploitation that are heaped upon old-fashioned, out-in-the-impoverished-Otherish-boonies fieldwork, how much of a role does the fact that anthropology is no longer a young upstart discipline, but one with lots of comfy established practitioners, play in the shift of what kind of ethnography “counts” for our collective purposes?

Look on the bright side of life?

I haven’t followed the case so I don’t know its outcome — perhaps some UK commentators can update us? — but an anthropological essay I find I have on the brain a lot these days is one written in 1999 by British anthropologist Alison Spedding. The full reference is at the end of this post; it was in Anthropology Today and I am not sure how to provide a universally accessible link.

At any rate, Spedding was writing from a Bolivian prison where she had been incarcerated (for 6 months at that point) on drug charges. Somehow under the conditions she managed to produce an amazingly thoughtful piece on the peculiarities of fieldwork. She writes of the “screen personality” we tend to adopt in the field — eating lamb flaps we don’t like, going to religious services we don’t believe in, nodding sympathetically to accounts of gender relations we’d condemn if they came from friends back home — and how impossible it was for her to maintain such a screen while in prison.

From there, she goes on to discuss the standard modality of ethnographic explanation: that “the apparent superstition is a reasonable way to understand the world, that what seems irrational is in fact entirely rational when one comprehends its context”. At the time of her writing, this mode wasn’t really working for her — when her fellow prisoners spent money on llama sacrifices and the like to influence the outcomes of their trials instead of using whatever funds they possessed to hire lawyers, she couldn’t help feeling it was basically counter-productive. And when women prisoners eagerly participated in the gender regimes of the prison routine she couldn’t help finding it, well, upsetting. The article ends on a rather despairing note (understandably). I can’t recreate its whole arc in this space but I highly recommend it.

So anyway — I thought about this article occasionally when I was writing my thesis, especially the bits on witchcraft. For all the structural rationales I could tease out about witchcraft discourse in the Bolivian community in which I carried out fieldwork, part of what motivated it seemed to be a kind of malicious glee. But mostly I ended up in the standard anthropological mode of explaining its relationship to social structure and so forth. Whatever, right? In the end I didn’t live in Isoso and neither I nor my loved ones would ever face witchcraft accusation.

However, living in the States the past few years I’ve started to get a bit of that ol’ Bolivian prison feeling. Of course my existence is quite cushy. But I mean in terms of hearing and being forced to live with rhetorics, discourses, regimes, practices — the lot — that I don’t want merely to understand/explain/analytically dissect. I don’t have a “screen personality” here — I’m me, and a lot of what is around me looks like flat-out meanness and stupidity. Are anthropologists allowed to say that? and having said it, then what?

article ref: Dreams of Leaving: Life in the Feminine Penitentiary Centre, Miraflores, La Paz, Bolivia, by A. L. Spedding
Anthropology Today (1999)

A field guide to anthrobloggers

It isn’t often you get to see anthrobloggers in their natural habitat. I just happened to meet Marc Joseph Francois Jacquin last week while visiting his fieldsite.

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He is working towards his master’s degree, spending the summer as a research assistant for Scott Simon. Scott is an old Taiwan hand, having now written a couple of books on Taiwanese female entrepreneurs and the leather industry. Now he is researching the movement to create an Aborigine autonomous region.

Mark is documenting his research experiences on his blog. It is something of a letter home to his loved ones, but there are some genuine anthropological insights as he discovers, like this one about how Aborigine culture is genuinely different:

The point here is that one of the issues that exists between this indigenous community and the outside world is that the way of life here is seen as a ‘problem’ by outsiders. Working to have enough food to treat your family (extended family in Western terms) and then having nothing is perceived as irresponsible by us Westerners. In their culture, it’s the way things work: you work to have enough to survive from day to day with your family. If you suddenly come into a lot of money from the sale of livestock or land, it is understood that you will share that ‘success’ with those upon whom you have depended in the past or will depend in the future. The situation is thus that one culture’s lifestyle doesn’t jive with the majority’s concept of how to live..so we call them poor (though they would say they are not suffering) and lazy when they refuse to take a full time job – many who don’t could because they have a solid high school education, probably equal or better than in Canada.

In a followup comment he clarifies the difference between this way of living and “insurance”:

It is also different from insurance because money does not often come into the equation. Exchange labour refers to actually going to someone’s home and helping them do something (example: building an extension on their house for a day or two, or helping a kid in the family with school work). It’s as if time, energy and labour power were flowing from people to people within the group….a very interesting way of living.

Two Anthropologists, One Piece of Meat

A “while back”:/2005/06/14/cores-peripheries-and-bridges/#comment-301 Nancy wrote that:

A bridge is a bridge in a very concrete way, [and] social and cultural elements are not necessarily as tangible. The anthropologist is not just learning about an unchanging and concrete thing when s/he is learning about a social phenomenon. S/he is interpreting it as s/he is observing it and learning about it so that the very entity that s/he presents as “fact” or “reality” is already affected by her assumptions… Two people trying to understand the same social structure will understand it differently because of their assumptions.

Just how different do two anthropologists interpret ‘the same social structure’? At the time I thought this maybe wasn’t quite right (not that Nancy was mistaken somehow, just that the issue was more complex than the comment indicated). On the one hand, I felt that it was obvious that your research interests shape your focus, so of course two people with different focuses will look at the same thing differently. On the other hand, I strongly feel that cultural systems are sufficiently stable and coherent that they can be studied without giving into some sort of wishy-washy postmodernism on the one hand or vulgar positivism on the other. Culture isn’t as tangible as a bridge, but I still think it’s tangible enough — it’s telling, for instance, that refering to two interpretations of ‘the same’ social structure implies there is one ‘thing’ there.

This is a real issue for me — I did fieldwork at the exact same time with (roughly) the same ethnic group as as another anthropologist, my good friend “Jerry Jacka”:http://sasw.chass.ncsu.edu/s&a/faculty/jacka/jacka.html (who appears here with his permission). At first I think Jerry and I were a little nervous about this since this sharing a fieldsite can sometimes lead to trouble and strife so intense it is spoken of only in hushed tones over beer at hotel bars during AAAs. Lucky, Jerry and I got on famously and are good friends, and the only tales of fieldwork rivalry we talk about over beer are other people’s.

In fact, Jerry and I were often relieved to find out that we had discovered similar things about ‘our culture’ independently of one another. Although untangling the outlines of cultural structure in the field is hard (in our case only one other anthropologist had done fieldwork in our area) it was really gratifying to find the way we both came to recognize the prevailing themes in our area. “Did you ever hear about these spirit women?” I’d ask him. “Yu Angini Wanda? Oh yeah, people won’t stop talking about them. Have you run across these hired assasin/berserker types?” “Akali peyapeya? Sure.” This sort of thing.

So — just how different do two anthropologists (in roughly the same demongraphic, to be sure) interpret ‘the same social structure’? Well recently one of my “ASAO”:http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/asao/pacific/hawaiki.html homies asked members of our email list to describe their experiences in Papua New Guinea with lambflaps, cheap cuts of meat from a sheep’s belly that are sold throughout the country. Jerry and I both replied to her independently of each other, without knowing what the other had written. This makes an excellent example of how anthropological accounts of the same thing observed at the same time in the same place (more or less) differ.

Here’s what Jerry wrote:

I have a lot to say about lamb flaps as I initially found them revolting (not being used to eating mutton), particularly the boiled variety, but within months developed an insatiable craving for fried ones.

Lamb flaps (or sipsip as they are known in Tok Pisin) have taken on a huge significance in the Seventh Day Adventist community in eastern Porgera where I worked. As John Finch noted, they allow SDAs to engage in pig-like exchange functions and SDA celebrations/marriages use both sipsip and chickens to replace pork.

Ipili women have created a cottage industry out of selling raw and cooked lamb flaps. Early every morning Dyna trucks leave Mt. Hagen with boxes of frozen lamb flaps (at least women told me they came from Mt. Hagen, they may be coming from Wabag) and stop at places along the highlands highway where women buy the boxes and carry them back to their home communities, some as far as 10 km into the bush. I think the standard box is about 25(?) kilos and makes for a rather unwieldy trek through the forest as the boxes are shallow and wide and women carry them in netbags across their foreheads.

Around May or June of 1999, the boxes sold for K65 apiece (exchange rate then was about 33 cents for one kina), but in July of 1999 they shot up to K90 apiece. Women weren’t sure why the price went so high in one month, but most of the women I interviewed averaged K20 to K70 profit per box, so for some of them, they had a very restricted profit margin (if any at all) after this raise. Interestingly enough, prices didn’t change for the consumer.

Cooked sipsip, either boiled with watercress or fried, had a fairly standard size for price ratio. A 50 toea piece was about one and a half inches by one and a half inches, and one kina pieces were about twice as large. At the sipsip shacks alongside roads and in hamlets, these are the standard sizes/prices. At tradestores one can buy larger pieces that have been cooked for more money.

Women will also sell larger hunks of raw meat for people to take home to cook. A K5 piece was about 8 inches by 8 inches (around 5 or 6 rib pieces). People tended to buy these rather furtively so that others wouldn’t know they were intending to have meat at home as you’re obligated to feed people that drop by during dinner time. As you can guess, I was pretty unsuccessful at being unobtrusive while buying sipsip and inevitably had someone come by to “story” with me shortly after buying meat.

Children, from what I could tell, would spend every last toea they could wheedle from anyone on lamb flaps. SDAs don’t have a lot of chances to eat meat (chickens sold for K20 per chicken) so the ability to get at least a little bit of meat for 50 toea was very significant. I can attest, as others have, that lamb flaps don’t have much meat, but people didn’t care as the fat seemed to be relished just as well. In fact, the fat comes off in a nice strip, crispy on one side, juicy on the other, which you can eat and then gnaw on the bone to get what little meat there is.

Women that had successful sipsip shacks on two occassions were targets of accusations of menstrual blood poisoning. In both cases, younger, unmarried women were alleged to have cooked sipsip while menstruating thus making men ill. One of the women had to pay K20 to the person who accused her and I don’t know the amount the other one paid. Far worse than the fine was the public shaming they received and neither one of them cooked sipsip for some time afterward.

And here’s what I wrote:

In Porgera — at least the bit where I lived — lambflaps were ubiquitous. As mentioned elsewhere, they were used by SDAs and tref-avoidant anthropologists like myself in group mumus they wanted to participate in, but without eating pork. They were more popular than slaughtering a goat. Most people found goats scary.

Whole cases were available for purchase at large stores at the government station, after having been shipped in via truck from Lae. Typically they were still more or less frozen when they got there. Individual tradestores with refrigerators would also sell ‘racks’ of unsliced lamb flaps to women. They then cooked individuals slices slowly in large low sided pans around the edge of the village square (ama). They thus fell into the same category as ‘palawa’ (flour — fried dough pancakes right out of Grapes of Wrath), betelnut, single cigarettes, and home made popsicles — pre-cooked food that women (often from migrant families) sold when they felt like it. It wasn’t something you’d get in a tradestore (which were more or less run by men, although there were exceptions). People would occasionally buy lamb flaps to eat at home when they had more money than a can of tinpis cost, but not enough for a whole chicken. Occasionally after very long and cold walks or trips (very common in Enga) we would buy lamb flaps to eat to get some energy into us ‘or else we’ll die’. Of course, at that point, the last thing I wanted were lamb flaps. There are ways to make virtue a necessity, but it is a very poor cut of meat for straight frying. Nevertheless, I ate them frequently since they were the only readily available meat I could eat, and it was common for people walking with friends to buy small things such as this for each other.

I suppose if your kink is liquified or semi-liquified pig fat, then lambflaps would seem a natural substitute for pork and quite tasty. If your idea of fun is a hanger steak with béarnaise sauce and a nice robust Bordeaux, they’re not really for you 🙁

What does this show? Well first, thre is probably a lot of stuff in there (Wabag, K50, etc.) that only make sense if you already know a lot about Papua New Guinea. But overall it seems to me that our accounts are remarkably similar. On the other hand, there are differences of style and approach. I was going to comment on what they were, but as I read through our responses I see that I don’t have the distance necessary to pull back and compare them – I’m too close to my data. So let me post it as a question instead — what are the differences in style, interpretation, and emphasis that you see in these two responses?

Albanian Anthropology

Smoki Musaraj is a graduate student doing research in Albania. I have been fascinated by Albania ever since I read a news story about how, at the end of the cold war, there were signs that Albania was “opening up” because they didn’t execute victims of a shipwreck who washed ashore (as they had done previously).

In a recent post Smoki explains why there are no anthropology departments in Albania.

I asked [the director of the National Albanian State Archive] why there is no Anthropology Department in the Academy given that there are so many ethnographers whom I am starting to discover through various institutes. He explained that while ethnography and ethnology were always part of the History Department, Anthropology as a discipline, according to the Communist academic doctrine was considered as an “American invention. Given that America, he said, was considered as a country without a history, Anthropology [always according to this official interpretation] was invented and fetishized to make up for the lack of culture and ethnos”.

Although there is no clear “about” page or individual author bios, it seems that blog.newanthro.net is another anthropology group blog of some kind, so add it to your bookmarks!

Image Ethics

Anthropologist Karen Nakamura, who writes the Photoethnography Blog, has posted a photo essay about a disability protest in Japan to her web site gallery. While I loved the essay, as a good pro-sharing netzen I naturally questioned her decision to use a restrictive license on her photos. Here is her license:

All of the photographs on this site are copyright 2005 Karen Nakamura and cannot be used without prior written permission.

In response, I wrote:

Karen, Why did you choose to use such a restrictive license for your work? There are many other options, which allow people to use your work without getting written permission as long as they give you proper aknowledgement, don’t use it for commercial purposes, and use the same license that you have chosen. Otherwise you are treating anyone who e-mails one of your pictures to a friend, or downloads one to their desktop, or posts a copy to their blog, as a criminal unless they go to the extraordinary step of contacting you first. Since you would presumably give permission for anything which fell within “fair use” you could easily provide a creative commons lincese which stated all this explicitly and has the full force of US copyright law behind it, but avoids the problems associated with restricting all use outright.

To which Karen then replied:

Good question. I want to protect my informants right to control how their image is used. The Creative Commons license protects against commercial re-use but not against non-commercial but still malicious re-use.

For example, there is nothing in the Creative Commons license that would prevent one of the photographs in my blog being used in another blog with a derogatory caption; or re-used in other non-commercial ways that would upset the people who I work with.

I prefer to err on the side of requiring re-use consent be given so that I can control how the images are used. If this blog were just photos of Minnesota mosquitoes (our state bird), it would be licensed differently.

This is something I have not seen Free Culture types discuss. It isn’t an attempt to limit copyright for commercial profit, but in order to protect her informants images from being misused. While I wonder if it is truly possible to limit such “malicious re-use” in the sense that Karen discusses, I understand her motivations in seeking to do so. I would very much like to see more discussion about how anthropologists might put work into the public domain, or Creative Commons, without reneging on our responsibility to protect our informants and ethnographic collaborators.

Yanomami Fatigue

I am stepping from the shadows. I will be silent no longer. Today I stand tall, hold my head high, and speak the truth to the tenured powers-that-be: I’m just not that interested in talking about the Yanomami anymore.

The debate is well-known. Patrick Tierney wrote “Darkness In El Dorado”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393049221/102-6229466-0987309?v=glance, a book documenting the misconduct of various outsiders who visited the Yanomami in their hyperbolically ‘last unknown’ Amazonian rainforest home. He was particularly critical of James Neel (a geneticist) and Napoleon Chagnon and Jacques Lizot (anthropologists). The initial draft of the book circulated widely and drew a lot of criticism. By the time the book appeared in print Chagnon had been down-graded from a pathologically evil criminal to just a bad person who was a mediocre anthropologist guilty of ethical violations. There were great cries of condemnation, resulting in an inquiry undertaken by the AAA. There was the roundtable on the report. There was the draft report. There was “the final report”:http://www.aaanet.org/edtf/index.htm. There were the “many”:http://members.aol.com/archaeodog/darkness_in_el_dorado/index.htm “many”:http://www.tamu.edu/anthropology/Neel.html websites. There was “the book about the controversy”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0520244044/ref=pd_sim_b_5/102-6229466-0987309?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance. Then there was “the website about the book about the controversy”:http://www.publicanthropology.org/yanomami/main.php?module=root&page=login. Then some people didn’t like the report, so they wanted to have a referendum. So then there were the commentaries on the referendum. Then there was the “website on the commentaries to the referendum”:http://www.publicanthropology.org/forum/. And now, as Inside Higher Ed reports, “we finally had the vote on the referendum”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/05/23/anthro.

Is the Yanomami incident an important part of anthropology’s history that needs to be understood? Yes. Are there valuable lessons on research methods and ethics to learn from it? Absolutely. Am I looking forward to the commentaries on the referendum on the report from the recommendations from the committee on the allegations in the book? No.

It’s not that I don’t think it’s important. It’s just that I’ve got Yanomami fatigue.

But it is also more than that. Here are some reasons why I am not (even though I admit I ought to be) interested in talking even more about the Yanomami:

First, I’ve never read Napoleon Chagnon’s book about the Yanomami. I think I’m the only anthropologist who hasn’t. I think all of my teachers had figured out it wasn’t very good even before all the hullabaloo. Frankly, I had no idea he was American until the book came out. I thought he was a minor student of Louis Dumont. My bad.

Second, ‘recently contacted’ people are my stock in trade. I work in highlands Papua New Guinea with a group that was first contacted by the ‘outside world’ (as the Australian Government liked to style itself) in 1938-1939 and where there was no permanent government presence until the mid-1960s. I’ve talked with guys who can remember the first time they saw metal. I have an Amazonianist on my committee, and I’ve always been interesed in comparison between the two areas because of the similarities in their culture and history, but the Yanomami have never stood for ‘the last stone age people’ for me.

But thirdly and most importantly, the Yanomami controversy doesn’t speak to the issues that matter to me the most. At its root, it raises ethical questions about a world in which the people who anthropologists write about are not the people who read their books. On this side of the millennium, anthropologists have to deal with a situation in which they are answerable to their informants. Informed consent and scrupulous, fair research is still important of course. But my issues — and, I suspect, the issues of other graduate students entering the discipline these days — focus on what it means to take one’s research subjects as genuine interlocutors. We are increasingly faced with the demands for answerability that journalists, for instance, have had to grapple with for years. This is more than ‘collaborative research’ in one’s fieldsite — it is a question about relationships at all level. How do I, as a Jewish intellectual from California, teach ethnographies about ‘their own culture’ to my Native Hawaiian students? What are the appropriate “decolonizing methodologies”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1856496244/qid=1116905553/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-6229466-0987309? Why should they be interested in anything that anthropologists have anything to say anyway? What if (gasp!) there are people from your fieldsite who have a Ph.D. in anthropology? How much of anthropology’s authority is based on the fact that for decades and decades we were had a monopoly on writing about certain areas of the world? “Who owns native culture”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674011716/qid=1116906069/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-6229466-0987309?

I’m interested in these questions because I’m very optimistic about what anthropology can do and what it can teach people — I am not interested in ‘destabilizing’ anything (well, ok, sometimes — and then mostly just for kicks). I’m interested in critically examining the bases of my discipline to make sure that we as anthropologists put forward our best possible face when we stand up in public and speak with authority and mean it.

The Yanomami debate is important. It is interesting. It is relevant. But I have trouble mustering much enthusiasm anymore — at some level, I think the Yanomami controversy is one of the most important ethical debates of the last century, not the coming one.

Armchair Anthropology in the Cyber Age?

The just-so story we tell to all first year anthropology students is that the modern anthropology emerged largely as a result of Malinowski’s desire to stay away from Europe during the First World War. As a result, he “discovered” the ethnographic method and “participant observation.” While Malinowski was certainly not the first writer of ethnographies, nor even the first to get involved with his subjects, we can certainly give him credit for the popularization and institutionalization of this methodology. To this day, participant observation is a ritual that nearly every anthropologist must complete in order to secure a place in the discipline.

When I initially described the work I wished to do to my committee they objected that it was not “anthropological” since it was too historical or theoretical. When I pointed to successful works by anthropologists which were both historical and theoretical in focus, it was pointed out to me that these were largely second books. The first one is usually an ethnography. I relented and, in the end, I am happy that I undertook participant observation. While my dissertation did end up having a strong focus on theory and history, it would not have been the same if I hadn’t spent so much time in the field, absorbing Taiwan through the pores of my skin. I’m not sure I was successful in articulating how the ethnographic process influenced the final work, but there is no doubt in my mind that it was absolutely essential.

It is largely for this reason that I head back to Taiwan next week. As I figure out how to proceed with publications, post-doctorate applications, and my career, I don’t feel I can do this in the vacuum of my own own home – even with the internet. Face-to-face interaction does bring something intangible. I’m not sure what it is. Perhaps it is simply all the down-time. On the internet you only pay attention to what you want to pay attention to. I’m even pretty effective at eliminating any annoyances from SPAM or internet ads. While I do have e-mail and voice-chat with friends from Taiwan, when you sit with someone in a cafe drinking bubble tea, or in a restaurant drinking Taiwan Beer, things happen that are random and unexpected. All those off-stage actions we usually ignore, and which we can filter out on the web, suddenly grab our attention. And there is the powerful force of serendipity, making unexpected connections for us which can only be discovered “in the field.”

And yet … And yet the web is changing. Folksonomy is creating new forms of serendipity. Video chat is leaking us more off-stage information. And the ubiquitous presence of wireless and broadband access is perhaps even giving us more opportunity for down-time observation.

But, and I always seem to get to my point late in the game, I think the web is going to change anthropology in another way. I predict that we will slowly see the return of the “armchair anthropologists” Malinowski so famously dethroned. Armchair anthropology was a colonial endeavor. Missionaries and colonial officers collected data in the field (often following manuals detailing how such data should be gathered), and scholars back in England compared and collected this data from all over the empire. Such broad synthetic studies are largely out of favor in Anthropology today (as came up in the comments to my last post). Sure, there are a few people, like Jack Goody, but they are largely exceptions.

I predict that will change.

For one thing, the web offers a tremendous, and ever growing database of lived experience. One need only look at the ways in which Google has already been leveraged by linguists to study language change. This past semester I had my students use Flickr as a source of ethnographic data for one of their papers. As more and more of people’s lives are lived online, it will become possible to not only conduct cyberethnographies of online communities, but leverage the power of social tagging, Google, and other such tools to conduct broad synthetic studies of the kind anthropologists have not done in some time.

The problem, of course, is the tremendous digital divide. Anthropology is no longer a discipline that only focuses on “those people,” the traditional subjects of colonial inquiry, and yet anthropologists are more aware than most of the importance of not excluding huge swaths of humanity from our analysis.

It is here that the work of Ethan Zuckerman enters the picture. He has been working hard to encourage blogging in developing nations. Ethan argues that “bridge bloggers” (a term coined by Hossein Derakhshan) can cross linguistic, cultural, and digital divides, and has set up several projects to do just that.

One of these projects is the Global Voices Aggregator, a public bloglines reading list of blogs from around the world. (Ethan is working on a high-powered replacement which can handle the huge number of feeds.) As Ethan points out that there is hardly a region of the world where there isn’t somebody blogging.

In other countries, where blogging is less widespread, we sometimes discover that there are only one or two bloggers talking about the country. Sometimes that person is an expatriate aid worker, like Yvette Lopez in Somaliland. Other times it’s a non-resident expert, like Nathan Hamm of Registan.net. A Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan until 9/11, Nate speaks Uzbek and Russian and is able to contextualize and translate events in Central Asia for a global audience.

These accounts are important – but they are perhaps not yet the stuff of anthropology. Many of them are focused on news, politics, human rights, and other pressing matters, but do not necessarily provide the kind of data which would be necessary for a modern day armchair anthropologist. However, if someone were really motivated to do a massive synthetic study collecting data from around the world, these bridge bloggers could function in much the same way as nineteenth century missionaries did for the first anthropologists.

I know putting it that way sends chills up the spines of most anthropologists, but I am not proposing a colonial endeavor. I’m not proposing anything in fact. I’m just pointing out that the capabilities exist to do this kind of study, and predicting that anthropologists will eventually figure out how to make use of it. I’m also hopeful that the de-centered nature of modern networks will mean that such future studies are conducted in an open and transparent way.

I’m off to Taiwan next week for some important face-to-face time with my friends, contacts, and informants. I don’t think ethnography is dead. But I do think that Anthropology will change yet again, and armchair research will not be disparaged as much as it once was.

Vox Populi

Do you remember the story of Greg Packer? In 2003 Ann Coulter suggested that the New York Times had made him up because she found over a hundred posts where he was quoted “as a random member of the public.” Well, it turned out that he is in fact a real person, and that getting quoted by the press is his hobby. NPR’s show On the Media interviewed him this past weekend, and he still seems to be doing the same thing, despite a memo by the Associated Press management telling their reporters to avoid him.

It made me think about ethnographic Greg Packers. Like reporters, anthropologists often end up speaking to those informants who like speaking to us. I know that some of my informants have since ended up meeting other anthropologists working in the area, although I don’t know if they ended up in their dissertations or not. I have also twice had the experience of suddenly recognizing the description of another anthropologist’s informant as a mutual friend. (Taiwan is a small island with lots of anthropologists!)

I have never much cared for the use of vox populi in journalism. Not because I devalue the opinion of the “man [or woman] on the street” – far from it; but because such sound bites are merely a ritual which serves to lend an aura of authenticity to the journalists report. There is no denying that it often functions in much the same way in anthropology. This isn’t to deny the validity of the whole ethnographic enterprise, like good reporting, good ethnography brings you inside a whole community and doesn’t just rely on sound bites. I’m more interested in it as a general phenomena. Because anthropological sources are usually pseudonymous, it isn’t possible to trace our Greg Packers across ethnographies, so we’ll never know how many of them there are.