Tag Archives: Public Anthropology

Something to Laugh About: A Few Thoughts on Humor in Post-Earthquake Haiti

[This is a guest post by Laura Wagner, and is part of our series Reflections on Haiti. Laura is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.]

“Humor is one of the fugitive forms of insubordination.”
– Donna Goldstein, Laughter Out of Place

It is January 12 again. This week is making everything feel raw again. What’s an anniversary, really? Why should the 365-day cycle back to a calendar date, an orbit around the sun, have anything to do with anything? But then, January 12 — douz janvye — like 9/11 for Americans, has become a symbol in its own right. The date is more than just the anniversary of the quake. Douz janvye 2011 means that the international community’s eyes are on Haiti again. Journalists and camera crews are back and asking “How is Haiti doing, a year after the quake?” And the strange thing is, it might be the one week when no one wants to answer that question, when people just want to have the space to remember or to avoid their ghosts.

Today there will be stories about the ongoing failure of international aid, the undisbursed promised donor funds, the decay and absence of the Haitian state. There will be stories about dreadful conditions in the camps. There will be the predictable half-hearted attempts at writing something with a positive spin – a few tired human interest stories premised on “hope” and “resilience.” I want to write something different. I’m supposed to write about the anniversary, but I want to write about jokes.

Haitians are very funny. (How’s that for anthropological nuance?) They like to tease. They like jokes—silly, raunchy, or political. The observation that hardship and humor go hand-in-hand is hardly novel or original; it borders on cliché. Yet humor is something that doesn’t come through in most mainstream media and humanitarian depictions of Haiti, which largely focus on those details of life that are deemed most immediate and newsworthy: the earthquake; the spread of cholera; the ongoing plight of people living in the camps, coping with loss and deprivation and faced with eviction; unfolding political upheaval. All those things are important to know and to act upon, to be sad and enraged about. At the same time, collectively these kinds of news have a flattening effect, rendering individual Haitians exemplary victims who can represent the majority of victimized Haitians, but erasing the kinds of details that make them recognizable, relatable and…human.

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Mobiles, Money and Mobility in Haiti

[This is a guest post by Heather Horst and Erin B. Taylor, and is part of our series Reflections on Haiti. Heather is an Associate Project Scientist at the University of California, Irvine. Erin is a Lecturer at the University of Sydney Department of Anthropology. For more on their collaborative efforts, click here.]

Just over a year ago on January 7th, 2010, Erin Taylor (see www.erinbtaylor.com) and I received notification that our proposed project on money, migration and mobile phones on the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic (link) had been officially funded by Bill Maurer’s Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion. Excited by the prospect of conducting new research, Erin and I exchanged emails and set a date to begin to plan what we anticipated would be a small, one-year project that explored the movement of people, currencies and mobile phone signals across the border (and by the same company, Digicel, who radically transformed the Jamaican telecommunications market in the first half of the decade). Five days later, on January 12, 2010, the 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti.

Within days of the earthquake I received an email from an administrator at UC Irvine asking if we still planned to go to Haiti. Since our start date was still a few months away, we saw no reason to cancel our project but recognized that it would likely take on new dimensions as the daily life of Haitians – even in the distant region we planned to work – were transformed by the event and its aftermath. As distant observers, it was impossible not to pay attention to the reports of aid sitting and waiting transport, the use of mobile phones to ‘text’ donations and the non-stop stories circulating via mainstream media, twitter and a range of other social media. Money, mobile phones and (im)mobility seemed to be front and center. A few months later (with additional support from IMTFI), we decided to team up with Espelencia Baptiste (Kalamazoo College), an anthropologist who was spending her sabbatical outside of Port-au-Prince, to begin to look more systematically at what was happening on the ground.

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On Community and Inequality in the Haitian Earthquake

[This is a guest post by Chelsey L. Kivland, and is part of our series Reflections on Haiti. Chelsey is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Chicago.]

January 12, 2010 was a beautiful day. It had been the fourth day in a series of such beautiful days, sunny but not too hot with a cool breeze that gained strength in the evenings, ensuring a set of restful nights. Early that morning, I left the house I shared with a friend and fellow anthropologist and a Haitian couple in the middle-class neighborhood of Lalue, and made my way to Bel Air, an impoverished neighborhood in the center of Port-au-Prince. I had been visiting Bel Air for some four years now to study why their concentration of Carnival performance associations, known as bann a pye (literally, “bands on foot”), had gotten so involved in community politics. Since 2004, they had been attempting to transform their associations into recognized civic organizations in order to stake claims on the multiple agencies that performance governance in Haiti, from governmental ministries to NGOs. They characterized their demands for funds for their performances and for the various social projects they executed in the community as a means of holding those who govern accountable to the standards of respect and equality they sought in and by democracy. That morning I was headed to Bel Air because a group of ti bann, “small bands,” was holding a meeting in order to strategize a plan to get the mayor’s office to recognize them as real bands. This was the first of two such meetings I had scheduled that day, and the only one I would finish.

I was awaiting the second one when, at 4:53 PM, the earth started to shake. I was in the best of possible places—in an open courtyard with only the bright sky and some clouds overhead. I was seated at a round table in the back of an old, wooden, French colonial house that had been converted into the mayor’s cultural offices and an outdoor restaurant and performance space that hosted weekend concerts. Claude, the representative of the Federation of Bann a Pye, and I were awaiting the start of a planning session of the Carnival Committee. Unlike other days, when the committee met around a wooden table inside the house, everyone gathered outside today. From the looks of it, people just wanted to take advantage of the soft sunlight with a cool beer at the bar. Agreeing, the committee chair soon told us that we’d just meet outside today. But we did not hurry to gather the tables together. Claude and I continued to debate about whether or not the mayor’s office would be able to verify that the bands had actually performed the past Sunday, their first scheduled performance of the year. He was telling me how the office hadn’t followed through on their plan to send scouts to check on the bands when a train, or so I had first thought, passed under my feet. Within seconds, I locked eyes with Claude. As the vibrations intensified, voices began to fill the air: “Tremblement de Terre,” Earthquake! Earthquake!
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Reflections on Haiti…

It has been one year since a 7.0 magnitude earthquake decimated Haiti on January 12, 2010.  In the weeks after the original tremors, many if not all of us read, watched, and listened to reports of the aftershocks—seismic and social—that turned Haiti into one of the worst disasters on record.  On the anniversary of that tragic event, the SM team invited new contributors Heather Horst, Erin Taylor, Chelsey Kivland, and Laura Wagner to reflect on their time in Haiti and reactions to the earthquake.  The responses ranged from the first-hand accounts to meditations on structural challenges.  Over the course of the day, we will be posting these contributions.

Are You an Expert?

A comment of mine on the LINGANTH listserv inspired Mark Allen Peterson to write a post on the Society for Linguistic Anthropology blog, encouraging linguistic anthropologists to promote themselves (or at least their Google page rank) in order to promote the discipline.

One thing is painfully clear: Linguistic anthropology has a public relations problem. The media does not come to linguistic anthropologists. Our expertise on language, collective and individual, is not established. What do we do about this?

Many of us have found letters to editors and producers ineffective. Most media organizations choose letters from the topics that attract the most interest. More importantly, media organizations rarely choose experts from letter writers.

Media organizations get their “experts” primarily from three sources: people with whom they’ve worked before, people recommended, like by university public affairs offices, and by searching the Internet

Kerim Friedman, writing on the Linganth listserv, suggested an experiment: “pick five or six keywords related to your research and try searching for them on Google. Be sure to use search terms that a non-specialist would use to find information on this topic. Do you see your name on any of the top search pages?”

If not, there are fixes. Google and other search engines are not magic. They prioritize hits on the basis of very specific criteria.

He goes on to list some specific actions anthropologists can take. Read the whole thing.

Bourdieu vs. “The Total Intellectual”

Below is a repost my contribution to the ongoing series of posts on public anthropology over at the Anthropology and Publicity blog, a special blog set up by Martijn de Koning for a seminar being held in the Netherlands,. Other contributors include names I think many of you will know, including Lorenz Khazaleh, John Postill, and Daniel Lende. In this piece I make reference to a collection of essays by Bourdieu Political Interventions. I have a full review of that book coming out in Capital and Class sometime next year.

The culture that Europe needs, for itself and the world, and particularly the world’s third estate, will not emerge from the negotiations of experts or the discussions of technocrats. The question is to make the rigorous use of reason, and thus of language, a political virtue, indeed the first of all political virtues, and thus to give intellectuals the sole power that they have a right and a duty to claim, that of exercising a ceaseless and effective vigilance against the abusive words – and grand words most of all.

– Bourdieu, Political Interventions. 2008. p. 219

Bourdieu’s statement is striking for two reasons. The first is that his notion of the power of intellectuals is remarkably circumscribed. Elsewhere in this posthumous volume of political writings he repeatedly attacks the notion of the “total intellectual” as embodied by figures like Sartre whom, Bourdieu felt, seemed to stand apart from the world, claiming a special status for the knowledge they produced. Bourdieu insists that intellectuals can best use their knowledge to attack “grand words” through the “rigorous use of reason.” At the same time, however, Bourdieu claims that this is not simply a “right” of intellectuals, but “duty” as well. It almost sounds as if Bourdieu is arguing that all intellectuals should also be bloggers!

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Breaking Ranks

Since we’ve just entered the 10th year of U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan (well, 10 years this century) it seems a good time to say a few words about Breaking Ranks: Iraq Veterans Speak Out Against The War (University of California Press 2010) co-authored by Matthew Gutmann and Catherine Lutz.

Breaking Ranks recounts, largely through interview excerpts, the stories of six Iraq War veterans who became involved with Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) and other military anti-war organizations and participated in the larger GI Rights Oral History Project. It takes us from their decisions to join the military, through combat, anti-war epiphanies, homecomings, and involvement in anti-war activism.

The patchwork composition of the book reflects the veterans’ attempts to piece together a narrative of their lives defined by the watershed of their experiences in Iraq. While book’s overall structure parses these experiences into a general arc of life—from enlistment, to the shock and fog of war, to political awakening, to struggles with trauma, to activism—it doesn’t smooth over the rough edges of these experiences or impose too clear an order on the muddle of reflexive memories that the soldiers offer.

As the authors note in the introduction, the book is an account of how these six people (five men and one woman; three soldiers, one sailor, one Marine, and one National Guardsman) found their way to a public, anti-war position and of “the striking and original ideas each developed to understand the war and what it meant. Their critiques are not simple matches to those of the civilian antiwar movement or to our own as authors” (8). Thus Breaking Ranks suggest that while it is possible to speak of a single anti-war movement, that singularity subsumes a multiplicity of different meanings and the ones we hear here are not always foregrounded.

Gutmann and Lutz’ Zinn-ian project of documenting the grassroots critiques so often written out of American History is well complemented by their anthropological attention to the little details of daily life (in the military, at war, and after) that aggregate into feelings of frustration and individual acts of political resistance, suggesting the complex and divergent paths through which soldiers come to, as they say, “speak out”.

Thought the text of the book is devoted to six stories, it is also peppered with facts and events that position these very diverse lives within a single post 9/11 historical moment which is also linked, by both the authors and the subjects, to the American legacies of the Vietnam War and its contemporary anti-war motifs.

In their curation of the stories, Gutmann and Lutz also demonstrate the ways that war insinuates itself into civilian life in America, making military service seem like the best possible option for many Americans whose lives are made hard or unstable by the exigencies of family expectations, national pride, poverty, and youth. The Introduction and endnotes are also full of data and resources for further reading about the ‘dark side’ (as Alex Gibney might say) of America’s war in Iraq.

Lately, ‘the good war’ in Afghanistan is consuming more and more of America’s attention and resources and, in the months since Breaking Ranks was released this summer, American combat operations in Iraq have been declared over (again) and the ‘draw-down’ of combat troops and ‘civilian surge’ there have begun. In this context, we can read in Breaking Ranks deeper questions about the different justifications for American military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq at the level of individual experience and public discourse alike, as well as about the fundamental nature of wars in which nation-states confront non-state entities through the sanctioned, violent acts of their citizens. As our attention, and perhaps attitudes, to America’s two main post-9/11 military operations seems to be shifting, Braking Ranks can help readers think about how things have (and haven’t) changed in military life and policy at home and down range.

In addition to being a powerful documentary record and conversation starter about the Iraq War, Breaking Ranks strikes me as an important, accessible, and eminently teachable book that speaks of the conflicted experiences of soldiers in war, the political failings of America’s doctrine of pre-emptive war, and the contingent evolution of personal conflict into political action. It would be well suited to undergraduate classes on war, trauma, social movements, public or activist anthropology, and—given its format—methods courses that discuss life-story interviews and practices of ethnographic writing.

[A bit of full disclosure: Royalties from Breaking Ranks are being donated to IVAW; an organization with which I did some fieldwork in 2008 and which I’ve personally supported]

Understanding the Current Future of the AAA

The AAA’s section assembly recently called on a set of advisors (principally editors of section journals) to write memos to the Committee on the Future of Print and Electronic Publishing (CFPEP) that would make recommendations about the future of publishing in the AAA. As is the way of governance, these memos by advisors will go to the section assemblies who will read them and decide whether to make recommendations to the Executive Board who will make a final and official decision which the staff of the AAA will “execute” (I love that word).

I’ve read a handful of these memos, most of which seem to say something like “our section is still alive, so we have no complaints.” This is kind of worrying, since a bunch of memos recommending no action will lead to no action by the Section Assembly, no decisions by the Executive Boards and no executions by the Staff.

One memo stands out though: the one by Kim Fortun, which she wrote as an advisory member and outgoing co-editor of Cultural Anthropology. [Full disclosure: yours truly and the debates on this site are cited several times within. She sent it to me for review, and I’ve posted it here with her permission]. Kim’s memo could be a handbook for understanding the current crisis and politics of scholarly publishing in general, and the promises, fulfilled and unfulfilled, of the AAA’s union with Wiley Blackwell, in particular. It is incredibly detailed, well-sourced, well organized and throughtful–far beyond the call of duty of a memo. I hope all the section assembly advisors get a chance to read it, as well as all the Section Assembly representatives and as much of the membership as possible.

At stake immediately is the question of renewing our contract with Wiley Blackwell, something I personally consider a done deal because of the lock-in and sunk costs of the initial switch. Switching at this point in the state of publishing will just be way too costly, but i’d love to be proven wrong by a really detailed analysis of the costs and practical challenges of switching to something else.

In a more longterm sense, however, at stake is the very definition of what AAA’s roles and duties are vis-a-vis multiple different stakeholders–not only members, but readers, authors, editors, universities, librarians, students, and reviewers. Fortun’s memo outlines responses and ideas communicated with respect to all of these stakeholders.

If you feel at all in sympathy with what Fortun’s memo advises (keep in mind she is acting as an advisor, not a member of the SCA, which will have its own ideas about this), but you are not a member of SCA, then I urge you to communicate your thoughts to the members of your section(s). As I say, it appears from a cursory glance that not all the sections see the same problems, and that might just be because you aren’t talking about it. So forward this post and the memo, and talk it up, please. The current future of the AAA is too bleak, it’s time for a different one.

Digital Media Firms as Cultural Systems

Working with digital media producers for the past few years I’ve begun to confuse their language with my other professional nomenclature, that of an anthropologist. Is this indeed confusion or a result of finally doing my job of seeing broader cultural systems in those practices?

Here’s the deal. Digital media firms using experimental methods with emergent technologies in indeterminate market systems use words that can model the stuff anthropologists care about. I’ll compare terms platform to culture, application to subculture, beta to process, and privacy to power.

Is Platform to Culture as Application is to Subculture?

Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Apple’s iPhone are platforms on which whole networks or galaxies of different social and economic systems flourish. These companies’ platforms are becoming the broadest cultural ecosystems within which all other digital social activity exists.

Like culture there is constraint and agency on the platform. The constraint comes from the terms of service, the affordances of the online architecture, and the rights given by the platform holder. Platforms are almost universally proprietary—privately owned. The overall platform itself cannot be adjusted except by holy command from the CEO. Giving a cut to the CEO, developers can make applications on platforms. The ability to development on the platform is the agency, as is the ability to surf, scam, and surveil on the platform. Developers have the capacity to transform the mechanics of a proximal space of the platform via application programming interfaces (APIs). People come into contact with the app–be it a game, a badge of identity, or a little tool–and their digital social lives are slightly adjusted.

Humble scholars desiring to say something about the platform:culture should begin by studying the practices occurring on apps:subcultures. Zynga—the makers of apps:subcultures Farmville and Mafia Wars, two games on Facebook with millions of gamers, is a more manageable research project with discrete parameters, practices, and ideology, than studying the platform:culture of Facebook or Google head on, which like culture is always in flux.

Culture is Permanently Beta

It isn’t news that culture is not static. Sociologists Neff and Stark studied New York City digital media firms during the Web 1.0 bubble, claiming these companies were in a state of “permanent beta”—never finished and therefore responsive to the chaos of the market and the unforeseen on the technological horizon.

Gmail is an outrageously successful application designed by Google for the Google platform. It has been around for years and it is still in beta. In What Would Google Do? journalist Jeff Jarvis makes the point that Google takes the risk of releasing their products in beta and achieves corporate transparency and greater social activity by letting the user in on the preliminary R&D experience. Is Google a bellwether for larger cultural processes of which platforms and beta releases are quintessential qualities of this emergent cultural system?

“Permanent beta” is an apt anthropological description of historically situated cultural activity. I don’t need to remind anthropologists or SM readers that beta is a description of culture itself that is always in process, historically variable, emergent, etc.

Is Culture Open or Private?

Several overlapping ideologies from the historical development of the internet highlight the importance of collaboration, openness, and transparency as preemptive measures to check the centralization of information power. In all cultural formations, those good things must be vigilantly monitored and fought for. I’d argue that collaboration and openness as corporate principles is new and may suggest that the technological affordances of digital technologies make less openness in social technology less profitable. If richly communicative social practices require open systems, and these digital firms are in the business of digital sociality, it behooves these CEOs to create decentralized and open systems. We see some of this openness and collaborative spirit in Google and Facebook as platforms and beta systems—despite their indifference to corporate transparency and their antagonism against what they see as provincial notions of personal privacy.

So how do the trends towards more personal transparency and less privacy fit into this theory of culture as a digital system? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg really thinks the world will be more communicative and therefore more peaceful and mutually forgiving if only more people were less secretive and more honest about who they are. Protecting and respecting individuals’ private rituals, sentiments, and remarks is a primary objective of anthropological methods. Much important cultural work is done opaquely through symbols, in the depths of kivas, and behind closed doors. Does this sense of culture as a beta platform that is historically agitating towards greater openness and individual transparency give credence to Zuck’s algocratic design for world peace?

One problem with the theory that culture is like a digital system is that this platform:culture is corporately designed. The API may provide developers agency akin to social contracts. The digital firm may be motivated less by profit making and more by mission motives. But doesn’t the fact that the entire ecosystem is proprietary trouble the notion of platform:culture? Nobody owns the protocols—the total realm of possibility within cultural systems—like Zuck does Facebook or Jobs does Apple. Platforms may be like culture but unlike culture you can pull the plug on the platform should it cease to be profitable or fun for the shareholders. And yet, aren’t firms, platforms, and applications populated by people constrained and enabled by the same processes that exist outside of their digital systems?

Savage Minds in American Anthropologist

Today I woke up to the usual quarterly flow of new journal alerts into my inbox and was surprised — delighted, really — to see a very complimentary article in the latest American Anthropologist on Savage Minds, Zero Anthropology, and the AAA blog. In another proof of its incredible capacity to do the work of our association, AnthroSource has the article behind a paywall while Wiley-Blackwell has it available for everyone to read (here is the abstract and you can download the PDF here sorry here is the actual link). GG AAA.

It is really a pleasure to be called “bright, engaged and [especially these days] young”. SM has been maturing over time and I think the unstable salad mix of career goals that created the blog has slowly separated out into the oil of a career outside the academy and the vinegar of life inside the ivory tower. Increasingly for many of us Savage Minds has become ‘something we are guilty we do not spend time on now that we have a career’. We are looking to take a producer’s credit on this one — if you’d like to do Public Anthropology in this space… let us know!

I’m glad that we are getting some recognition but I feel a little leery about being labeled ‘public anthropology’ since I think public anthropology is an activity that a) a small group of people have always been doing and b) a thing a much larger group of people constantly talk about doing but never get around to doing –as if just talking about it were enough. I’m hoping my Warcraft book will be ‘public’ — even ‘popular’ — but I can’t really claim to have done a lot of actual anthropology in public, although I do spend a lot of time going on about it.

If you care, however, let me state some theses, or better, hypotheses, about what public anthropology could and should be based on my experience at Savage Minds:

We are the bar at the conference, not the conference

It is the informal discussion that makes conferences interesting, not the presentations. We aim to be that informal conversation.

Public Anthropology is not simplified anthropology, it is good anthropology

I’ve often heard it said that anthropologists must learn to reduce, simplify, water-down, etc. their work if they want outsiders to read it. The assumption seems to be that 1) you know what the public wants and 2) you have a pretty low opinion of them (or alternately, a good dose of self-hatred at the obfuscation inherent in your discipline).

SM has always operated on an opposite set of principles. We’ve argued that

1) we do what we want to do for ourselves and for the work. This seems to be working ok for us so far.

2) People want the real thing. Just because you’re not a professor of anthropology doesn’t mean that you aren’t interested in anthropology like the real deal anthropology, not some fake-o anthropology. It’s insulting to tell readers we will give them simplified snippets of our work but hide the real thing behind a pay-for-content firewall. People tune in because they want to be dealt in. Public anthropology gives them a place at the table, not a view of the game from the back of the room.

3) Anthropologists like well-written pieces that are insightful and to the point just the same way that normal people do. I hear people often complain that they must write obtuse, jargon-laden prose to be successful as an academic. Really? Which one have you read more often, “Balinese Cockfight” or Kinship in Bali? Is it really the quantitative analysis or the sterling prose that drives people to read “The original affluent society”? Where is the jargon-laden theoretical prose in In Search of Respect? I admit there are authors like Foucault and Appadurai whose prose seems stylish to anthropologists and occult to others. But let’s face it, anthropologists  don’t need to write differently for a public audience, they need to write better for all of their audiences.

In sum, I think what non-anthropologists want to read is good anthropology. Is that really that surprising?

Recovering from Darcy syndrome

For years anthropologists have been caught in a dilemma: our work is so relevant, so important to today’s world and yet so few people want to read it. How can we make them see the truth? This sort of attitude reminds me of certain evangelical Christians who think that the reason Jews haven’t joined the one true church is that somehow over the past nineteen centuries we’ve somehow just never heard about Jesus. Let’s call this ‘Darcy syndrome’  — the idea that we are the most perfect companion to the public’s Elizabeth Bennett and they just haven’t realized it yet because they’ve been swept off their feet by the twin Wickhams of rational choice theory and sociobiology.

But are we Darcy, or Wiggins? Anthropologists need to take a step back and start assuming that the public knows something about us that we don’t.  We must not turn popularizing anthropology into a merely technical problem, the literary equivalent of those scary “how to seduce women through hypnosis” books that Amazon tells you you are interested in because you’ve also purchased some Foucault. Real relationship, healthy relationships, involve listening.

What if we stopped assuming that people needed to know what we wanted to tell them and attempted to disprove our hypothesis: if we recast the narrative of public anthropology as one in which we were totally superfluous, how much violence would this reading do to the ethnographic facts before us?

I’ve gone on for a while, but I think you get the point: in my opinion (which is just my opinion) public anthropology is good anthropology which is sensitive to its audience. It is something we ourselves would like to read, and something we can recognize as our own. And above all, it is something that we need to stop talking about and start doing. Good luck!

Anthropology Journalism HOWTO

It’s like public anthropology week here at SM! Joana and Pal are writing fascinating stuff about engaging beyond academia. And just to keep the discussion going, I wanted to re-post a comment offered by Brian P (science journalist) which is like a HOWTO for anthropology journalism. I hope he doesn’t mind my shameless re-purposing, but it’s some truly excellent stuff. AAA publicity folks, please take note. My comments are interleaved.

If the field wants more attention from the press, here are some ideas:

1) Hire good science writers to write and distribute press releases. Believe me, there are plenty of quality science writers looking for work. Journals could easily pay a few of them to write press releases on the top two or three papers per issue. Current Anthropology does this and I’m grateful for the service. Not many journalists (probably almost zero) read the primary anthro journals, let alone secondary journals in the field. We need to be led to the fountain.

  • “good science writers” might include all those anthropology MAs and PhDs who didn’t end up going into academia for whatever reason. There are a lot of people on this blog alone who just enjoy keeping up with anthropology and who might have the skills to do just this. unfortunately, the part about hiring them seems pretty unlikely. Editors of AAA journals aren’t even paid, to say nothing of science writers. So this task falls to us (see #4 below) and if I were editor of a journal, I would make it a priority to find people willing to do this task on a volunteer basis–or maybe for a free subscription if they happen to be unaffiliated? If Current Anthropology can do it, why can’t the AAA?

2) Post those press releases on Eurekalert.org, which is run by AAAS, and on other services science reporters scan for news, such as Newswise.

  • this seems like a no-brainer. But upon looking, the only alerts are from Current Anthropology. In order to post an alert you need to be a “public information officer” for an organization of some kind. Does the AAA even have a “Public Information Officer”? A subscription to Eurekalert? I might be willing to renew my membership to the AAA if I knew some of the money went to hiring science writers to promote our research on sites like Eurekalert.

3) When preparing press releases, try to relate the work to current events. Make it relevant.

  • I would return here again to my point about temporality. Anthropologists work slowly, but that can be an advantage. It means that a longer term sense of what counts as “relevant” and how to connect current problems that seem new to long-standing structural and cultural transformations is a great way to do exactly what Brian suggests. Just because our work analyzes a time and period that is now outside of the current news-cycle attention span does not mean that it cannot be made relevant to what’s going on today. Figuring out how to stake this claim is intellectually challenging work, not just publicity pandering.

4) If you have the aptitude and inclination to write for a popular audience, DO. Write and submit opinion pieces for national newspapers, Nature, Scientific American, and Science. We read these. New Scientist and Scientific American and Scientific American Mind run articles written by researchers (usually they are heavily edited). It’s cheap labor for magazines to do this, and more and more of them are probably heading in that direction.

  • I’m not sure I fully agree with this one. On the one hand, those who can and want to should, and will. On the other hand, maybe it only means talking with someone who does like to write for a popular audience about current research, or sending alerts to those who do like to write such things. If I got an email box full of eurekalerts about recent research in cultural anthro, I might read some and write about some on SM. As it stands, I just have an email box full of requests to review such research, which means I can’t write about it, even if it’s interesting. I’d be happy to trade in half my peer review requests for “publicize it” requests. The fact that very few of the leading lights of cultural anthropology deign to do exactly such a thing cannot be good for our business.

– Prepare for some disappointment. Yes, some journalists will get it wrong. Sometimes you won’t like our pithy language or our need to strip away the caveats and get to the heart of the issue. Well, that’s the price of admission.

  • well said, sir brian. Indeed, if obscurity and widespread public ignorance of anthropology is what we want, we’ve already got that in spades, so we can feel free to ignore these suggestions and happily avoid any disappointment.

– Let me say it again. FIND WAYS TO MAKE YOUR WORK RELEVANT. What does it tell us about something happening now that’s important to large groups of people? What currency does the work have? I once wrote about some studies of infanticide in baboons – and the researcher was willing to draw inferences about human behavior from his work. That made the work newsworthy and interesting.

  • and let me say it again: cultural anthropology has a different temporality than journalism, even though they often cover very similar topics. So the art of “making it relevant” is also the art of seeing cultural change and significance at different scales, connecting the just-forgotten with the all-too-present. A lot of what cultural anthropology has to offer is the re-framing of persistently polarized debates. Ours is not a logic of discovery, but one of assertion and reorientation.

Writing Together

We’d like to take this opportunity to reflect on authorship in anthropology. The overwhelming majority of anthropology books are written by a single author. This is understandable if you look at the conventions of fieldwork, as well as the hiring processes of universities, for which co-authored works weigh far less than single-authored ones. Yet to us, this seems a real pity, as our experience has been that co-authorship has a number of great advantages.

Increased productivity
Although we both have very different careers – Pál being a full-time university professor and Joana being a „free-lance anthropolgist“ and running an internet start-up – we have (in addition to many single-authored works) over the last 10 years written dozens of articles and three books together, as well as devised e-learning courses and workshops. One of the reasons for our large output has been that we were able to cover very different audiences in a few strokes. Not only has nearly all our writing been published in both German and English, we also wrote up different versions, one academic, the other targeting a general audience.

With different audiences in mind and living in different social spheres we had access to a large pool of research ideas, thus Pál made us study the lifeworlds of Soviet theoretical physicists and Chinese migrants in Eastern Europe and Italy, whereas Joana got us into the comparative study of mass tourism and pushed our exploration of the pervasive uses of culture outside of anthropology, which would eventually lead to Maxikulti and Seeing Culture Everywhere. Pál was sceptical at first – is this academic enough? Is this interesting enough? – but never regretted having been persuaded. Not all of our ventures ended up in serious research or writing – trips to a monastery in Serbia and to a Mennonite farm in Belize yielded only titbits and a trip to the Turkish coast to study Russian tourists, only a car accident. But they were all fun.

Reaching a larger audience
With access to different networks, we published in academic journals such as Current Anthropology and  Development and Change, as well as in mainstream German newspapers and magazines, such as business monthly brand eins, Geo and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Writing together also counterbalances our weaknesses: Pál‘s tendency to write too densely and Joana‘s inclination to overgeneralize.

How do you write a book together?
Many people ask: „How does writing together actually work?“ Except for a short while, when Pál was at the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin, we have never lived in the same city. Instead we have met in dozens of different countries. When Pál is doing fieldwork, Joana might join him for a few days to get the feel for the place necessary to write about it. We also travelled to many places together, from Central America via Eastern Europe to Russia and China, doing „fieldwork light“ along the way.

When our writing is not based on detailed fieldwork by Pál, we usually devise an outline together. Then it is Joana’s task to collect and aggregate the relevant theses and case studies, as she – as a generalist — has a better overview of relevant anthropological material. After this we meet (in Budapest, Sydney, Nice,  Berlin or Luang Prabang to name just a few of the places) for two or three weeks of intensive writing, both sitting in front of one laptop, with Joana often proposing a general structure of the argument and Pál argueing against or refining it and coming up with the final formulations. Back in our respective homes Joana starts the first revision, sending it back to Pál for a final edit. Thus it is a real joint venture and we feel that very few, if any of our output could have been written by one of us a alone.

And last but not least, one of the main rewards for co-authorship is the fun and inspiration we get from working together.

Why is there no Anthropology Journalism?

I feel like I hear a lot these days about anthropology’s need to be more engaged, more accessible, more readable and more relevant. There are obviously many different motives behind these concerns, from seeking attention to raising the prestige of the discipline to creating a public anthropology to being true to the concerns and needs of our subjects and collaborators.

But one thing I don’t hear people say is that we need more “Anthropology Journalism.” I mean that primarily on analogy with (or as a subset of) science journalism. It is a very rare experience to open up the Tuesday NY Times and see an article about recent research in anthropology–to say nothing of rags like scientific american, Wired, Discover or the New Scientist. Of all the “news alerts” I get, or the RSS feeds I browse from journalistic outlets, few to none ever report new findings, controversies, or questions coming out of the discipline. And I get more news alerts and RSS feeds than I could possibly read in ten lifetimes.

Two qualifiers: first, I mean linguistic and cultural anthropology specifically. Archaeology gets some love, though usually only when the findings are narrativized in a story of human origins or change, or when something truly rare is discovered. Biological anthropology gets perhaps a bit less love than archaeology, though certainly more than cultural or linguistic, and only when it is clearly identified with another discipline (evolutionary psychology, behavioral ecology, evolutionary theory, etc). Jared Diamond, it appears, gets the rest of the attention.

Second, it’s not a total lack. A few weeks back the NY Times magazine ran a story about the Americanization of global mental illness. That article had everything good and bad about science journalism going for it: it reported on recent research, digested it and used to to paint a compelling picture, but it also took liberties with the subtlety of the claims to make an overly broad argument in order to be provocative, and to sell more copies of the journalist’s book. A few years back, Dan Everett got a full profile in the New Yorker. Tracy Kidder recently devoted a whole book to Paul Farmer (though interestingly the publicity only refers to him as a doctor, not an anthropologist). And speaking of Haiti, I’ve heard more anthropologists interviewed in the last two weeks than in the whole of 2009. But basically there is no anthropology journalism to speak of. Why not?

There are a few arguments that are always used to explain why there may be science journalism but no anthropology journalism. The harshest of these is that there is simply no interesting (or objective, or reliable, or novel) anthropology to report on. The argument has a Glenn Beck feel to it, suggesting as it does the decline of western civilization and values and the destruction of all that is Good and Right by the scourge of French philosophy, postmodernism and dissolute tenured radicals. Whatever.

Slightly less annoying is the frequent argument that our writing is inaccessible, jargon-laden, pretentious, or needlessly over-written. This argument fails on the simple grounds that most scientific papers are totally inaccessible to a general audience. Science journalism by journalists trained in science is absolutely essential to communicating what the vast majority of things scientists and engineers are up to today. I won’t defend the wealth of bad writing in anthropology, but nor will I defend it in psychology or chemistry or engineering. Have you read a conference paper in computer science lately? Not only is it likely to be totally inscrutable to you non-computer scientists, but it is also very likely to be extremely poorly written, badly punctuated, and generally abusive of the English language–though very prettily formatted using LaTeX

So let me propose three reasons that people don’t usually seem to offer for why there is no anthropology journalism: Continue reading →

‘Life at the Googleplex’: Corporate Culture, Transparency, and Propaganda

How the hell am I going to get access to study these uber-elite media companies? In my desperation to find ethnographic facts about ‘corporate culture’ at the new media conglomerated behemoths I am viewing these reflexive industrial videos Google and its subsidiary YouTube upload about themselves. What are these things? Part recruitment propaganda to solicit CVs from the world’s top engineers, part PR-campaign to provide proof of its post-China ‘do no evil’ mantra, part braggadocios chest bump and back slap these videos must have some information that can provide evidence for the ‘real’ internal values and dynamics that influence the 20,000 employees and the 100s of millions of networked people that use their digital tools daily.

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But before I begin this bite-sized Youtube videothon I want to query if anthropological tools exist for such research. First, how would an anthropologist contextualize and categorize these videos? Reflexive, check. Industrial, check. Commercial, probably. They are not viewer-created but they have the amateur aesthetic. Textual studies of reflexive and industrial media and websites in anthropology is under-developed. In that historic genre, ‘ethnographic film,’ there were calls for greater reflexivity. And there are ethnographic investigations into the social life of social media. Patricia Lang, danah boyd, Heather Horst, and Mimi Ito can be consulted for this. And I am sure that there are numerous anthropological studies of race/class/gender as exhibited on Youtube. Alexandra Juhasz and Michael Wesch use YouTube as a pedagogical tech. But as far as I am aware, nobody has thought to look at how governments, corporations, and other institutions self-visualize a public persona. Secondly, who has analyzed the particular limitations and possibilities of this new platform for cultural expression? There is more cultural material on YouTube than in anywhere in the world. We must be able to incorporate this data.
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The first order of analysis would be to use a political economic widget to find out what they hope to get out of this video. Usually, saying something about increasing profit and consumption is enough here. The second order would be to use textual analysis to look for accidental data points. Start with the simple realization that you are seeing into the company, notice the use of space, of the personalization of cubicles, etc. Thirdly, mix these two approaches, political economy and cultural studies, to read the subtle cues and beyond the avowed interview revelations. Pretend you have ethnographic free-reign, knowing that would always be partial even with clearance. As partial and incomplete as these video documents are a conjunctive approach will be necessary. My girlfriend suggested to me that a corporation’s IPO documents are usually remarkably honest and revealing. Also high-tech investment firms/websites such as Techcrunch keep publically available data on acquisitions, investments, and other reflexive materials. Ken Auletta’s book, Googled: The End of the World as we Know It, is incredibly revealing about Google corporate culture but is based on only a few interviews with Page, Brin, and a number with CEO Eric Schmidt. My point is that much can be done with little if the right tools are used.
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The take-away nugget is that the internet provides tools and reasons for greater corporate transparency. Some corporations answer these calls to use the web to exhibit their tax records and to incorporate users/viewers/participants into internal and external regimes of governance and profit-generation. Other corporations expose their chain of production and distribution and how it misses layovers in child labor farms or despotic regimes and ecological disasters. This is all quite wonderful. But along with greater awareness and transparency is also greater capacity for manipulation of the veneer of transparency. So we must be vigilant in our textual readings of corporate transparency practices and perceive beyond the public persona to the numerous motives, values, and metrics for success that corporations deploy. We must figure out sophisticated techniques to study these powerful institutions. Textual study of the secondary and third order of values encoded in publically available online documents is one way. Even if new media corporations isn’t your anthropological fetish, it is certain that some strangely useful video about your fieldsite or subject exists on Youtube and you are going to have to explain your justifications for using it in your research.  I invite us to co-develop these tools.