This Anthro Life – Savage Minds Crossover Series, part 3
by Adam Gamwell and Ryan Collins

This Anthro Life has teamed up with Savage Minds to bring you a special 5-part podcast and blog crossover series. While thinking together as two anthropological productions that exist for multiple kinds of audiences and publics, we became inspired to have a series of conversations about why anthropology matters today. We’re sitting down with some of the folks behind Savage Minds, SAPIENS, the American Anthropological Association and the Society for American Archaeology to bring you conversations on anthropological thinking and its relevance through an innovative blend of audio and text.

In our third episode of the TAL + SM crossover series, we explored SAPIENS’ approach to producing anthropological content for popular audiences. Ryan and Adam were joined by the digital editor of SAPIENS, Daniel Salas, to discuss the implications of using anthropology to engage the public through journalism. The episode focused on the questions How do you reconcile scientific and anthropological writing, and is this mixture a new genre? Is there a balance to be found between producing timeless “evergreen” stories versus current events focused content for audience engagement?

Be sure to check out the first and second episodes of the TAL + SM collaboration: Writing “in my Culture” and Anthropology has Always Been out There.

What is SAPIENS?

Just over a year old, SAPIENS is a online content producer funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation with the mission to deliver anthropological stories and insights to worldwide audiences. A working collaboration between professional journalists and anthropologists, Daniel describes SAPIENS publications as “webby” kinds of stories that showcase “public anthropology’s footprints across the web”.

The SAPIENS team looks to popular science publication sites like Nautilus, Hakai Magazine, and Aeon as inspiration for how to weave together anthropology and science journalism on their own site. These sites are known for their “influx of content that is intellectual, that is based on scientific reasoning, it is based on offering in depth conversations and dialogues” and, as Adam states, “anthropology is really well poised for these conversations”. As SAPIENS is a relatively new enterprise the team strengthens its base by strategically syndicating anthropology-centric content from other science and political publications including Discover Magazine, Scientific American, Slate, Aeon, and The Atlantic. This also helps clarify SAPIENS target audience.

The editor-in-chief of SAPIENS, Dr. Chip Colwell, describes the work SAPIENS does as creating a “new genre” that incorporates the “key insights of anthropology with the tools of journalism”. The staff of SAPIENS are building this new genre by helping anthropologists and science journalists shape their research and findings into narratives with wide appeal.  

Fact, Fiction, Fidelity and Feeling

Following our conversation with Daniel we were struck by Chip’s concept of “creating a new genre” with anthropology. Now, anthropology is a discipline that dabbles. It’s a creative science that explores the human condition and opens worlds that are at once strange, yet familiar. Any reader of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, for example, or J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings will recognize the deep lore and history contained within the pages of the books. Like these works of fiction, anthropology has the capacity to be both descriptive and generative. Anthropologists combine and contrast deep histories with current events, context with happenings; anthropology describes people’s lives so that we may generate other possible ways of being. Along with field interlocutors and through the course of everyday life, anthropologists generate events that can be ethnographically described, and such events offer us imaginative renderings of past, present and future.

More than picking examples that share in deep expression of complex culture and language, whether of wizards, dwarves, elves, and orcs – these tales captivate us in complex webs of other social realms that capture something real. Illustrated well by Carole McGranahan in Ethnographic Fiction: The Space Between, she writes that, “Fiction, for me, like ethnography, has always melded with a deep desire to understand and explain the world around me.” The line between fiction and ethnography can be fuzzy. In essence, the goal of a novelist and an ethnographer are remarkably similar, to elicit a deep truth about the human experience. Many works of fiction do this inadvertently. Socio-cultural Anthropologist Elizabeth Ferry and Literary Scholar John Plotz have gone so far as to pair readings of the classic ethnographic text by David Schneider, American Kinship with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Oh the window into early 19th century aristocratic courtship!

However, novels tend to make for better reads. During Freethink 4: On Art, Creativity, and Bringing Awe back to Anthropology, Ryan and Adam spoke at length about the novels they’ve encountered, which instilled a deep and formative sense anthropological curiosity in them. For Ryan, Gary Jennings’ Aztec brought Ancient Mesoamerica to life. Even Michael E. Smith has written on the well crafted world imagined by Jennings, applauding his accuracy. For Adam, it’s hard to go wrong with the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, that pulls readers in to care so deeply for a larger-than-life family in the fictional Colombian town of Macondo as if you’ve known them their whole lives.

As Lisa Wynn wrote in Ethnographic Fiction on Culture Matters, “I can only think of a small handful of ethnographies that have affected me in the way that a good novel can.” This sentiment is widely shared. To follow this point, Lisa created an extensive list of ethnographic texts which have captivating qualities, some of which might draw the reader in as well as a novel. An ethnography she points out, Phillippe Bourgois’ “In Search of Respect,” is a rare ethnography that enthralls its readers through gripping emotional complexity and vulnerability that so often characterizes the experience of anyone who crosses a cultural boundary. Yet, many anthropologists write about captivating social experiences, emotional hardships, journeys both external and within. How is it that more ethnographic texts aren’t best-sellers?

Carole McGranahan also poignantly characterizes the writing processes of academics in Genre-bending, or the Love of Ethnographic Fiction. In that post, Carole notes that there are incentivized rewards for particular forms of writing. Perhaps this dynamic is changing (see Getting Credit). But Carole makes the case that ethnographic fictions do more to illicit something deep and real about the human condition that typical ethnography cannot. Carole writes, “In genre-normative ethnography, one can’t invent dialogue or scenarios that never were; one can frame, but not fashion. If I want to relate a conversation, I have to go back to my carefully typed transcripts. In our genre-normative writing culture, there are conventions that require diligence and care. As I write ethnographic fiction, I can transgress those conventions. I can flagrantly put real people in an imaginary situation to envisage an event that probably did not happen.”  This swapping of fact and fiction reveals a generative tension between writing for ethnographic fidelity and evoking feeling.

Ryan was first introduced to Jason de Leon’s The Land of the Open Graves when teaching Latin American Ethnography at Northeastern University. Jason uses ethnographic fiction to tell the harrowing tales of the humans who endured crossing the US Mexican border in the American Southwest. The text, which bounces back and forth between ethnographic and archaeological/or forensic reconnaissance and fictionalized stories, brings the border’s victims to life like a detective discerning crimes from material remains of the victims.

Much like Ed Liebow pointed out in last week’s episode, different career paths have different reward structures. This is worth a deeper reflection when we consider anthropological writing. There is a place for genre bending in anthropology.

Science Journalism, Anthropology, and Delivery

Speaking to anthropology’s genre-bending versatility, Daniel describes anthropology as “a whole universe of little nuggets that can change your perspective of the world and can bring you out of your provincial understanding or conceptions about what people are like, what culture is like, why people believe the things they believe”. Decoupling ethnographic findings from the writing itself, i.e. imagining them as nuggets, helps us conceptualize why anthropology is particularly well-suited for many genres. It’s no secret that data are malleable; the question is how people choose to frame and contextualize them. There’s a reason so many anthropology 101 classes teach Alfred L. Kroeber’s assertion that “anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities”.

As with creative writing, Anthropology employs many techniques that crossover into journalism as well. Like journalists, anthropologists have informants, collect data from the field, and support and contextualize findings with intensive research. In the end it comes down to delivery and time. Sarah Kendzior said it best in an interview with Ryan Anderson of Savage Minds “ethnography is journalism that takes too long. I mean that not pejoratively but as an affirmation of the discipline’s values –– long-term observation; scrutiny of methodological practice; respect for history; commitment to understanding local beliefs and traditions.” And of course upending genre conventions and learning to write anthropological data and insight anew takes work. But, Daniel points out, the most successful pieces on SAPIENS are those based on what anthropology does best: overturning common assumptions.

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Daniel Salas received a BA in Anthropology from New York University and a MA in Anthropology from the New School for Social Research. He joined the Wenner-Gren Foundation in 2011, where he currently holds the title of Communications Coordinator. Daniel has also played a key role in conceptualizing SAPIENS and currently serves as the site’s Digital Editor.

After scrupulously refusing to retweet non-news about the site, I was quit curious to see what final form Sapiens would take. So, is Sapiens worth the hype? Has a new day in public anthropology arrived? Can all other anthropology blogs now End? The short answer is that Sapiens is a major new voice in online anthropology, with a bucketload of skilled staff, quality features, and gorgeous web design. But if the Sapiens staff are hoping to transform how the public understands anthropology, they may be disappointed — this website is just one more voice in an already crowded online space. That said, with funding, legitimation, and editorial freedom from Wenner-Gren, Sapiens could make an impact in an already-crowded field.

At the moment the site is pretty straight forward — a slate of regular bloggers produce themed content, while features run under section names like ‘in flux’ ‘lost in translation’ ‘cultural relativity’ and other tag-like categories. Apparently there is more in the works (for instance, podcasts and videos) but at the moment the genres at play are are pretty straightforward.

I personally am glad that Sapiens is not trying some radical experiment in hypertext or something like that. The content up so far is very strong. The featured piece by Brendan Borrell describes a rare breed of flower and in Brazil and the political conflicts that occur between grassroots people who rely on selling the flower, and conservationists who seek to protect it. By now, this sort of conflict is old news to anthropologists. But it isn’t to the general public, who frequently imagines grassroots/indigenous types to be allies of conservationists against the state/oppressive capitalism. Borrell’s well-written (and, I suspect, well-edited) piece provides non-experts with a clear sense of the contours of these debates. At almost 4,000 words it’s long by journalism standards. I personally would have led the piece with “conservation politics: a surprising new angle!”, but that’s probably why I’m not on the Sapiens staff. If this is the kind of content Sapiens will regularly produce, more power to them!

It’s good — even better than good. But is it the type of thing that will transform how the public understands anthropology? The Internet is chockablock with quality blog posts and feature pieces. Is Borrell’s piece really that different from, say, popanth’s story on U900? Is Sapien’s archaeology blog really going to outshine middlesavagery? Admittedly, I can’t wait for Yolanda Moses to blog on race, or for Hugh Gusterson to blog on… well… the things that make Hugh Gusterson angry. Those will be awesome. But transformative? Hmm…

So I’m glad to have Sapiens join the online anthropological scene, but I think the site is late to market, not early. To me, Sapiens’s desire to commit anthropology in public seems to be driven less by a realistic assessment of how much anthropology is out there, and more by anthropology’s perennial anxiety that it is not relevant enough. Indeed, being late to the game has served Sapiens well, because it had a roadmap to follow — Sapiens’s carefully-scripted social media blitz clearly demonstrates that. As a result, the site will not make the missteps of some earlier, less successful group blogs that reared their heads back in the days before twitter. I will spare you the details of, for instance, the AAA’s initial blogging attempts. Just trust me: I’m glad Sapiens launched in 2016 rather than 2010!

Not new, radical, or different, then. But Sapiens does have the potential to make an impact. The blog has a clear vision and the means to pursue it. It represents what you might call the institutional core of american anthropology: Four field, and focused on social justice and diversity. It’s a school of thought that has long dominated institutions like Wenner-Gren and the AAA, but which often gets overlooked in some of the more heady theory-heavy top-shelf cultural anthropology departments which dominate the academic job market. The AAA has produced a lot of good works in this area, but has trouble getting eyeballs. I think Sapiens could be a new and effective center for getting this message out.

Borrell’s piece has all the hallmarks of this approach — it focuses on anthropology outside of the United States (‘world anthropology’), rather than within it. The anthropologist featured in the story is a woman, not a man. Her work has concrete policy outcomes, is empirical, and connects with local communities. The tone is noticeably different from, for instance, Cultural Anthropology’s rather more baroque “Lexicon For An Anthropocene Yet Unseen“.  Both these approaches belong in our discipline, to be sure, but Sapiens now offers a voice for the ‘institutional core’ view.

Sapiens will ultimately rise and fall on the quality of its content and it’s ability to draw eyeballs. With an actual budget, it will be able to edit and hone. With a strong social network, I am sure that Sapiens will be more able to get a mention in Slate or the New York Times than, say, Geek Anthropologist. These tools may help move its four field, institutional vision back to the center of the blog world. But at the end of the day there is no substitute for quality authors — Sapiens ability to recruit and keep those will end up being central. Which I’m sure they already know.

Institutionally central, using familiar methods to popularize established positions, and well-executed, Sapiens seems less a novel or transformative venture than an exceedingly conventional one. This claim may rankle the higher-ups at the W-G, but I mean it as a complement — and I look forward to more high quality work from Sapiens in the future.