Many of you already know about “the bomb STS wiki”:http://en.stswiki.org/wiki/Main_Page at UVA but I recently came across another bomb wiki — the “UC STS Wiki”:http://symptom.ucdavis.edu/stsnet/index.php/Main_Page. It has a “terrifying number of facinating syllabi”:http://symptom.ucdavis.edu/stsnet/index.php/Syllabi including one on “the work of Marilyn Strathern”:http://symptom.ucdavis.edu/stsnet/index.php/Ethnographies_of_Relation:Readings_in_the_work_of_Marilyn_Strathern by Cori Hayden which is — wait for it — the _bomb.
Tag Archives: Technology
Anthropology does IPR, Part 2
A curious development in the struggle to protect traditional knowledge (TK) from unwanted exploitation by outsiders is a strategy called “defensive publishing.” This largely applies to the realm of the patent, not copyright or trademark, because patents are supposed to be granted only for processes, substances, or devices that are truly novel. (There are other criteria as well, but they needn’t concern us here).
If you can prove that something isn’t novel, that it has been known and used for a long time, then it can’t be patented.
To defend traditional knowledge from exploitative patenting, then, there are two basic and fundamentally opposed choices under existing law: define it as a trade secret or protect it in plain view. The goal of the latter is to establish that patent applicants who make use of this information fail to meet the novelty standard.
Although the trade-secrets approach sounds promising, and some legal scholars argue that it’s the way to go for the protection of traditional IPR, it has certain problems. For one thing, a lot of TK isn’t especially secret. It is, almost by definition, in wide circulation within a society. Trade-secrets laws typically say that anyone who can duplicate trade secrets independently–say, through reverse engineering–is free to use them. Still, one can argue that the Aboriginal “keeping-places” emerging in Australia, repositories for TK that have strict rules of access, follow something like a trade-secrets approach. To a more limited extent, protocols for the use of Native American TK in American archives are moving in a similar direction.
The plain-view approach has been adopted in a few important cases–notably, that of Ayurveda, which is documented by the Indian government in the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library. (Site is publicly accessible but requires a simple registration.) The idea is to establish “prior art” and therefore refute claims of novelty.
Yet as the sociologist Sita Reddy has argued in a provocative essay, “Making Heritage Legible,” just published in the International Journal of Cultural Property, the conversion of Ayurvedic tradition into a database generates all manner of contradictions and conflicts.
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MMOG as Genuine Reality
Over at Terra Nova Jen Dornan is wondering whether “mmogs are rituals”:http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2007/02/mmo_as_ritual.html. Like the question ‘are video games art’, posing the question this way has the drawback relying on the idea that ‘mmog’ and ‘video game’ are somehow moving targets in a way that ‘art’ and ‘ritual’ aren’t. However I do think that Jen’s question does allow us to think a little bit more fully about how moogs serve, as William James would put it, as a ‘genuine reality’ for their players.
To a certain extent the fate of ‘ritual’ as a topic was one of gradual decline. Attempts to describe exactly what ‘ritual’ was and how it differed from every day interaction foundered on the fact that practically everything seemed to be ritualistic — our everyday lives were, Goffman wrote, Interaction Rituals. Then we had Moore and Myerhoff’s book Secular Ritual. Today we see the classical work that ritual does — moving participants from one social role to another — as an aspect of all language use.
But the real question of how Worlds of Warcraft can count as ritual comes not from this take on ritual as a means of structuring social interaction but on an older sense of ritual as a form of embodied experience which appears, at first glance, to be distinct from the ‘disembodied’ experience of playing Worlds of Warcraft. How can you get the thrills and chills of real ritual when you are just sitting there staring at people do things on a screen? That our country’s anglo-protestant majority could make this sort of objection has always boggled me, since the vast majority of churches that I have been to involve, well, congregations that just sit there staring at people who do things on an altar.
Anthropology does IPR, Part 1
I’m flattered to have been given a guest-worker permit at Savage Minds. I was invited to comment especially on the intersection of anthropology and intellectual/cultural property. But since my work is now moving in new and different directions, I’ll also have a few posts on other issues before management yanks my login rights toward the end of the month.
The more I track anthropological work in intellectual property rights (IPR), the more it seems that as a discipline we’ve leveraged ourselves into a strange and contradictory place. On the one hand, many of us enthusiastically support the idea of open access (see Rex’s recent post, for example, or check out the website of the Alexandria Archive Institute). On the other, anthropologists are collaborating with indigenous organizations to create more robust controls over access to indigenous knowledge in the interest of discouraging various forms of cultural appropriation (often described as creating a form of “cultural copyright”). Those controls are likely to have a profound impact on how and what we publish–they already have, in fact–and even on the accessibility of work published decades in the past.
In theory, the two opposed goals are not irreconcilable. In practice, I’m not so sure. After reading Jeffrey Toobin’s recent New Yorker article about Google’s ongoing efforts to upload millions of books to the web, I trolled Google Book Search (still way in beta) and was blown away. I typed in “Moyobamba,” the name of a Peruvian town not far from where I did fieldwork in the 1970s and 80s, and immediately found a half dozen travelers’ descriptions of the town from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. OK, most of these works are obscure for good reasons, but I might never have encountered them otherwise. Once every ethnography is available to everyone with a computer, what chance do indigenous people have of limiting access to information increasingly defined by them as “sacred” or “sensitive”?
The bio-cultural imperialism of Sid Meier’s Civilization
Oh yes, you heard me right: The bio-cultural imperialism of Sid Meier’s Civilization.
Say it louder: “The bio-cultural imperialism of Sid Meier”:http://www.focaal.box.nl/previous/Forum%20focaal39.pdf. It had to be written. Somewhere out there in the collective conscience there was an anthropological analysis of Civ and now I have found it. And I rejoice in this knowledge.
Better yet, Kacpar Poblocki’s piece is a lovely cultural-studiesy rant about the Deleuze ‘body without organs’ piece of wet-ware that our bodies become when we exist in the state of “becoming-state” — that is to say, when we play too much Civ. Simply critiquing Civ’s obviously crude teleology would be too simple. No, as Poblocki insists, what we have here is “no blunt propoganda but instead Althusserian unconsciou manifestations of cultura lclaims, of which Meier may well not be aware”. The result is a game in which
Civilization offers an opportunity, literally and in the absolutist sense, to become the state… the state that we become at the same time comes to itself by means of a not always precisely formulated yet salient Hegelian dialectic waltz of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, very much _a la_ Fred Astaire, i.e. up a stairway: e.g. mysticism and the code of laws lead to a more advanced monarchy
There have been other pieces on Civ (including one by David Myers, who has made his “work available for all”:http://www.loyno.edu/%7Edmyers/research_goals.html) but none manage to combine withering post-modern critique with hours and hours of game play like this wonderful little out-of-the-way piece.
The Savage Minds Widget
Nuclear/National Intimacies
More than just a detector, the NukAlert™ is a patented personal radiation meter and alarm. Small enough to attach to a key chain, the device operates non-stop, 24/7 and will promptly warn you of the presence of unseen, but acutely dangerous levels of radiation.
A little ‘uncanny’ that I encountered the ad for the above product just after having finished reading Joseph Masco’s captivating The Nuclear Borderlands. Masco describes ‘the bomb’ as a ‘national fetish’ — a sort of subject/object that becomes an intense focus of quasi-sacred patriotic awe even as it conceals its own mechanisms of production. Technologies and institutions built to produce nuclear weapons, Masco argues, not only reconfigured American culture, they have literally transformed nature globally (by polluting it with contaminants that will be around for hundreds of thousands of years). And yet, partly because of U.S. government protocols of secrecy (that verge on the hilariously absurd), the actual operations of nuclear weapons research and production have remained largely concealed from public view. Thus, in the national-cultural consciousness, the nuclear, the atomic, the subterranean (literally) plutonium economy leaks into awareness as the uncanny return of the repressed. As for example, in the mobilization of cold war fears in the service of the ‘global war on terror.’ Masco writes:
Many Americans, for example, were gripped by an experience of the nuclear uncanny following the September 11 terrorist strikes, intuitively understanding the attack on New York and Washington, D.C., through a nationalized notion of violence developed during the Cold War nuclear stand off. One of the most powerful effects of the bomb, I believe, has been to nationalize a sense of apocalyptic violence in the United States, unifying the nation through images of its own end. The cultural effects of the Cold War nuclear standoff — the decades of life situated within the thirty-minute temporal frame of a nuclear war that may have always already started — has produced a new kind of psychic intimacy with mass violence. (pg. 334)
One has only to think of ‘ground zero,’ as Masco notes. And not just psychic: these days, you can wear that ‘new kind of intimacy’ in your pocket — with Nukalert.
Masco’s ethnography had me thinking about the forces behind contemporary globalization, and especially about John Kelly’s argument that rhetorics of ‘modernity,’ ‘the nation-state,’ and ‘American empire,’ conceal the unique and historically-specific circumstances that account for the shape of global relations today: viz., American military power deployed in specifically anti-imperial forms to secure access to and remunerative exploitation of global markets. (I hope to initiate a discussion of this argument in future posts.)
In any case. What forms of intimacy with violence does American global hegemony generate? There is the unthinkable (extraordinary rendition, followed by [by what? torture? that’s a secret…]), and the mundane (your toothpaste confiscated at a small airport in the Arctic Circle). We are invited to imagine disaster, we are interpellated as subjects of terror, in innumberable and everyday ways. But we have our keychains to protect us.
PLoS One, Stanley Milgram and the CAVE
This is rich. The online open access jounal Public Library of Science (PLoS) has just launched PLoS One–an experiment in post-publication peer review. Rather than extensive peer review prior to publishing research, articles submitted to PLoS One will be reviewed by one editorial board member for primarily “technical rather than subjective” concerns (I think they mean technical rather than substantive… or maybe they don’t). Then the published articles are opened up for peer review by readers–through annotations, discussion and ratings systems. I think this is the future for scholarly peer review, especially in fields where competition is stiff and time to publication is important (i.e. less so for anthropology than for computer science, but still)–and so long as these articles are primarily annotated, discussed, and rated by people who actually have some knowledge of the given field or topic, it could become a system that moves people towards a kind of research publication spectrum (multiple, frequent reports on a research project) and away from the kind of secretive, report-it-all-in-one (or get rejected) Important Journal. The idea of “open access” is here not just about making research available, but also about staking out research territory in a public way, testing research questions in a public forum, and hopefully, raising the bar on the kind of research that is reviewed by the Important Journals.
What I love even more about this is that the first article I looked at is a fascinating replication of Stanley Milgram’s famous Obedience experiments from the 1960s, in which research subjects thought they were participating in an experiment about learning, but actually it was about obedience to authority. The replication takes place not with real people, but with virtual humans generated in an immersive environment and seeks to study emotional and physiological response to the administration of painful shocks to a character that the subjects know to be “virtual”–though they interact with it through vision and speach (and through text in the control). Apparently, people get a bit shaken up by torturing virtual humans. Not a surprise really, but a very clever experiment.
Indigenous Cultural/Intellectual Property News RSS Feed
Michael F. Brown’s web site, Who Owns Native Culture, has been mentioned on Savage Minds on several occasions. Each time I visit the site I see his wonderful, blog-like list of “news stories, articles, and reports” about indigenous cultural/intellectual property issues and bang my head against the wall because there is no RSS feed for this valuable source of information. I know there are several sites to create RSS feeds for sites which don’t have them, but I’d never been able to make any of them work. Then I happened to stumble upon this excellent tutorial for Feed43.com. Within minutes I had a working feed set up. Here is a direct link to the XML feed (Note: This will look like gibberish in your web browser, as it needs a feed reader to parse the data. I highly recommend Google Reader).
Another possible use for this service would be to make an RSS feed to alert you whenever a scholar’s list of publications is updated on their homepage, giving you a direct link to the PDF. If you create any anthropology related RSS feeds please share them in the comments.
Open Access Anthropology Blog
We got scooped by Peter Suber and Lorenz before we could announce it ourselves, but several members of the Open Access Anthropology group will now be blogging at the newly formed Open Access Anthropology Blog.
There are already three posts up, so go check it out!
2006 Margaret Mead Film Festival
Boas Blog has the highlights of the 2006 Margaret Mead Film Festival.
I thought it was interesting that video games are being featured in the festival this year!
Geotagging Ethnographic Photos – Informed Consent?
The New York Times has an article on geotagging, which is a good introduction to the topic and what technology currently exists to implement it. It seems that we are just a few years away from having GPS devices pre-installed in all our cameras (the new chips just cost $4 a pop).
Having recently spent a some time trying to dig through photo archives, I can easily see the advantage of having photos searchable via a map. Looking for pictures from your fieldsite? Just look it up on Google Earth!
There are, of course, privacy concerns. It is hard to keep an informant’s identity secret if the photo you have of their dog shows their exact address. But then, a lot of anthropological practices concerning keeping informants identities under wraps need rethinking in the digital age. It has never been particularly hard to track down an informant if one was sufficiently motivated. Now Google makes it that much easier.
If you really want to get freaked out about privacy issues … the technology already exists to identify the same people across multiple photos, by matching their faces. One could presumably have a map which traces one person’s movements around the world from all the public photos in which she appears.
Makes you think twice about what “informed consent” means when you start thinking about it…
On a related note, you might wish to read Ethan Zuckerman’s description of Hasan Elahi, a conceptual artist whose decided to post his every movement (along with photos) so that the FBI won’t think he’s a terrorist.
Google Anthropology Blog Search
Via Lifehacker I discovered that Google has a new “roll your own search engine” service. I played with Rollyo before, but that was Yahoo, not Google. Also, Google’s search has a the wiki-like ability to allow other people to edit the search engine. (I hope this doesn’t mean that spammers will be adding their own sites to the list.)
Anyway, I’ve created a search engine for all the anthropology blogs listed in the Authoritarian Academic Blog Wiki (AABW – see here for some background). If you want to add your own blog to the mix feel free to do so (as long as its anthropology related).
I’ve also created a search engine for the “Anthropology web” which is for non-blog sites (or should it include all the blogs as well?). Right now it only includes the AAA web site and AnthroSource, but feel free to add other sites here as well.
Anthro Gear: Field Recorder
Karen Nakamura, who was recently interviewed on WNPR about her upcoming documentary film and the Margaret Mead Film Festival, has a tip on her blog about some cool new gear for audio recording in the field.
Gizmodo blogs about the new Samson Zoom H-4 field recorder, which seems extremely promising. At only $300, it is less expensive than either the Edirol R-09 (which is what I have) or the Microtrack 24/96 (which is very popular). The interface for the Samson looks absolutely fantastic and it has two XLR balanced inputs, which none of its competitors have.
My students all have tiny MP3 recorders that are the size of portable USB drives. While the sound quality and battery life is lacking on these, the big advantage is that you are never caught unawares if the opportunity for an interview arises. But for serious field recording, especially for linguistic anthropology research, something like the Samson Zoom H-4 seems really promising!
Savage and Tripping Minds
I just had the extraordinary pleasure of seeing longtime friend and fellow-traveler Richard Doyle give a talk at Rice called “Just Say Yes to the Noosphere.” Rich is the author of On Beyond Living and Wetwares; we met at MIT; his advisor at Berkeley had been Evelyn Fox Keller who had moved to MIT. Rich is a rarity in academia: a kind of contemporary Bateson who insinuates himself into all kinds of interesting research projects; he’s just as willing to run a composition and rhetoric program as he is willing to be the American representative to the International Electrotechnical Commission’s Joint Standards Committee on Bio-Telemetrics. Rich’s talk was about the 20th century history of psychadelics research, and especially, research in unlikely places: like AMPEX, for instance (the inventor of magnetic video-tape), whose engineers experimented with LSD. It’s no secret how widespread the experimentation and research on psychadelics was from about the 1930s into the 1960s. After that, however, hysteria served to associate the research and on psychadelics with 1) drugs 2) bad graphics and 3) pseudo-science and new age mysticism.
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