In Part 1, we analyzed nuclear weapon and defense industry advertisements from 1950-1964 to demonstrate the fundamentally, and publically imagined, imbrications of spaces exploration and U.S. military supremacy. In Part 2 we continue with a deeper theoretical examination of technoutopian spaces imaginaries. Although in this post we make use of colloquialisms like “Space Race,” “Ocean Race,” and “Earth Race,” we do not accept the real-world separations they imply. We argue, as per our discussion in Part 1, that these spaces explorations were fundamentally aspects of the same underlying colonial and militarist processes.

Space(s) Race and the Duel Use of Rockets

The so-called “Space Race” was a key component of the violent technological, geopolitical, economic, and social competitions between the United States and the Soviet Union. As we showed in Part 1, the Space Race and the nuclear arms race—like the Ocean Race and Earth Race—were just different rooms in the same office building built on a technoutopian foundation. We argue, somewhat cynically but not unrealistically, that the space race was, fundamentally, a technocultural showcase—a theatrical performance—of what each country’s capabilities were, cloaked behind the pretense of science and exploration. In fact, until the Saturn V moon rocket, every crew-rated NASA space launch vehicle utilized converted intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs): Mercury used the Redstone rocket for sub-orbital flights and the Atlas rocket for orbital flights; Gemini used the Titan II (Dick et al. 2007).

For the astronauts riding these rockets, the military pedigree could be an unsettling physical experience. Michael Collins, a crew member of Apollo 11, first flew into space on Gemini 10, lifted above our atmosphere by a Titan II rocket. Collins (1974) described the unsettling rocking motion after lift-off—and continuing until reaching orbit—from the extreme gimbaling of the engine nozzles, a motion necessary for a missile designed to be sufficiently maneuverable to hit targets 6,000 miles away. His anecdote points to an unusually embodied experience during the highly theoretical practices of imagined nuclear deterrence, especially when it came to nuclear missiles, which were never fired against the homeland of an adversary (Derrida 1984; Grant and Ziemann 2016). The mostly imaginary nature of large-scale nuclear war encouraged a series of simulation efforts and experiments to inform planning for war and Civil Defense (Davis 2007; Oakes 1994; Rose 2001). These included the Desert Rock military exercises at the Nevada Test Site (1951-1957); public and government Civil Defense drills such as Operation Alert (1954-1961); and even a nationally broadcast nuclear test, Operation Cue (1955), that attempted to showcase the utility of Civil Defense preparations for surviving nuclear attack. Especially entertaining was Plumbbob John in 1957 in which 5 men (and one photographer) stood three miles underneath a 1.5 kiloton nuclear detonation to “prove” the safety of U.S. plans to use large numbers of nuclear weapons for continental air defense.¹

In the 1950s and 1960s the United States and the Soviet Union both began experimenting with anti-satellite weapons (ASATs), first to counter the perceived threat of nuclear orbital bombardment systems, and then to deny adversaries military use of space for reconnaissance and communications. The inaccuracy of early guidance systems, as with early anti-ballistic missile defenses, led to the use of high yield, nuclear-tipped kill vehicles (Grego 2012). The Outer Space Treaty, signed in 1967, banned the deployment of nuclear weaponry in outer space. However, the sustained relevance of space as a domain for militarily important assets (surveillance and communications satellites) encouraged the continued development of ASAT weapons by multiple nations in the Cold War and now. In 2008, the U.S. Air Force demonstrated the ASAT capability of the Standard Missile 3 (SM-3), supposedly in order to destroy an inoperative National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) satellite called USA-193. The test drew condemnations from Russia and China (Webb 2008) and also highlighted the inherent ASAT capabilities of deployed American ballistic missile defense systems. In addition, Russia may have carried out an ASAT test in 2016 and China conducted an ASAT test in 2007 that produced significant amounts of orbital debris.

Perhaps one of the most ambitious plans to weaponize outer space was Wernher von Braun’s (1959a; 1959b) plan to build a lunar outpost for the United States Army that would be crewed by a task force of twelve soldiers. Although this plan was never carried out, the written reports are shit-yourself-terrifying in their stated goals of establishing a military outpost on another celestial object. Von Braun (1959a; 1959b) proposed that the base be powered by two nuclear reactors and defended by unguided Davy Crockett guns with low-yield nuclear warheads, as well as claymore mines that would be modified to puncture pressure suits.²

This intertwining of nuclear and cosmic imaginaries can result in frightening knowledge productions that, if realized, could have been disastrous for humankind. Even now the nominal President of the United States has virtually unlimited authority to mobilize these unions of spaces and nuclear technologies to rain 720+ nuclear warheads worth of Apocalypse on their targets in less than an hour.³ Large scale use of American nuclear weapons would probably kill well over 100 million people in the first 72 hours.

Hugh Gusterson (2004) discusses the importance of nuclear weapons tests as “high-tech rituals that are as important for their cultural and psychological as for their technical significance” (148). We argue that Gusteron’s theorization of nuclear testing can also be productively applied to human spaceflight. A ritual implies an (arguably) temporally static activity: it needs a beginning and an end and perhaps this is why the NASA budget dropped significantly after the moon landing. This American ritual, generated by a sense of existential competition, had been completed and was no longer necessary to flood with funding. We argue that the moon landings—from the perspectives of many (but not all) federal government elites and members of the public—were never solely (or even mostly) about scientific exploration; they were about a technocultural ritual that culminated in symbolic defeat of their sworn Communist enemy. In future work we intend to expand on this point and examine the differences between competition with nuclear weapons and military forces and the “Space Race.” Why, for example, did the U.S. crewed space program collapse after the moon landings, but spending on nuclear weapons testing, development, and deployment continue at high levels (Schwartz 1998)?

Nuking Mars into Degenerate Utopias

As a coda, we would like to point out that spaces and nuclear technoutopianism remain regularly expressed discourses in American culture and society. An especially noteworthy contemporary example is Elon Musk’s plan to terraform Mars using large numbers of high-yield nuclear weapons. The proposal, given the temporal and technological distance from currently achievable reality, seems most interpretable as a cavalier mobilization of technoutopian optimism. Even if the science behind Musk’s plan is able to drive the desired result of remaking the planet Mars in Earth’s image, there are some serious sociocultural and political questions that remain unanswered.⁴ These questions include: what message are we sending by using the most devastating weaponry ever devised by humans in order to birth a new ecosystem? What would the lasting scientific and cultural effects be? Do we deserve—or is it morally/ethically right—to take over another planet, even if it is devoid of life? If NewSpace⁵ corporations are the first to inhabit another planet, is it not inevitable that we would replicate the inequalities and violence of colonial, hetero-patriarchal capitalism that has destroyed our current cosmic home (much like settler-colonists replicating Western social, economic, and political life on Indigenous land and people)?

In an otherworldly and futuristic expression of colonial nostalgia, we are gleefully trashing our planet while simultaneously being nostalgic about what we have trashed. By projecting that nostalgia onto futurist terraforming and colonial endeavors, the underlying imaginaries and practices utilized to lay waste to the Earth—what we call Capitalistic Unquestioned Technoutopian Enthusiasm (CUTE)—are rehabilitated and the damage is justified by the use of a future tense imaginary in which CUTE recreates our lost Eden (that we destroyed) (Povinelli 2011).

David Harvey (2000) elucidates this last point in relation to those that uphold the hegemonic perception that capitalism is a monolithic, eternal force and those that resist against it:

If the mess seems impossible to change then it is simply because there is indeed “no alternative.” It is the supreme rationality of the market versus the silly irrationality of anything else. And all those institutions that might have helped define some alternatives have other been suppressed or—with some notable exceptions, such as the church—brow-beaten into submission. (154)

In the “rationality of the market” all that remains are “degenerate utopias” (Collins 2008; Marin 1993). Places like Disneyland present themselves as utopic but are actually shrouding the commercial “reality”: “the Main Street façades are presented to us as toy houses and invite us to enter them, but their interior is always a disguised supermarket, where you buy obsessively, believing that you are still playing” (Eco 1986, 43). According to Umberto Eco, Disneyland’s hyperreality begins when one submits to the complete “fakeness” of the simulation in order to partake of the spectacularly tantalizing utopic imaginaries. It is through such agentive submission that the imaginary transubstantiates into “The Real.” Part of Elon Musk’s early CUTE seductions involved promulgating an uncredited Wikipedia commons created image of Mars that begins with the red planet and ends with a terraformed, Eden-like utopia of oceans and clouds and green forests: a new Earth that beckons to colonizers with new possibilities and untapped markets.

This photo is a Debordian “spectacle” that establishes and mediates a social relationship with the public through images (Debord 1994). Photos like the one above are preambles to Musk’s recent spectacular promise of 1,000 ships departing to Mars every 26 months. Even if that does not become a reality, Musk and other NewSpacers have already begun to creep into the social imaginary of space.

NASA—in its neoliberal present—is imbricated with this imaginary as well, possibly because NASA recognizes how powerful NewSpace visions can be in the sphere of public relations. However, their production of nostalgically rooted travel posters for places humans have never been are coded to invite—and exclude—certain types of futures (Messeri 2016). Namely, these futures are white, colonial, and evoke vintage 1950s–1960s travel advertisements, a period of U.S. history especially ripe with overt inequality and oppression. This serves to remind us that the political cannot be divorced from the aesthetic.

The theoretical frameworks we have drawn upon, we argue, illustrate some reasons why social sciences must take science fiction seriously and especially science fiction that does not espouse the tropes of Spencerian social theory. Science fiction writers who identify as people of color, Indigenous, women, and LGBTQI+ often challenge currently hegemonic social imaginaries through work that creates space(s) for multiple potentialities (see: Brown and Imarisha 2015; Dillion 2012; Le Guin 1974; Lempert 2014; Nama 2008, among others). The power of words, of worldmaking, of placemaking that are so inherent in science fiction writing are potential catalysts and resources for social change, especially in Earth-bound space science (Messeri 2016). Furthermore, social scientists should not only embrace the political world that science fiction inhabits, but we should be working together as a collective to actively disseminate the social science that good science fiction writers are already conducting.

References

Braun, Wernher von. 1959a. “Project Horizon Report: Volume I, Summary and Supporting Considerations.” A U.S. Army Study for the Establishment of a Lunar Outpost. United States Army. http://www.history.army.mil/faq/horizon/Horizon_V1.pdf.

———. 1959b. “Project Horizon Report: Volume II, Technical Considerations and Plans.” A U.S. Army Study for the Establishment of a Lunar Outpost. United States Army. http://www.history.army.mil/faq/horizon/Horizon_V2.pdf.

Brown, Adrienne Maree and Walidah Imarisha, eds. 2015. Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements. Oakland: AK Press.

Collins, Michael. 1974. Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Collins, Samuel Gerald. 2008. All Tomorrow’s Cultures: Anthropological Engagements with the Future. New York: Berghahn Books.

Davis, Tracy C. 2007. Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense. Durham: Duke University Press.

Debord, Guy. 1994. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books.

Derrida, Jacques. 1984. “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives).” Translated by Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis. Diacritics 14 (2): 20–31.

Dick, Steven J, Robert Jacobs, Constance Moore, and Ulrich Bertram, eds. 2007. America in Space: NASA’s First Fifty Years. New York: Abrams Books.

Dillon, Grace L., ed. 2012. Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Eco, Umberto. 1986. Travels in Hyper Reality: Essays. Translated by William Weaver. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Grant, Matthew, and Benjamin Ziemann, eds. 2016. Understanding the Imaginary War: Culture, Thought and Nuclear Conflict, 1945-1990. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Grego, Laura. 2012. “A History of Anti-Satellite Programs.” Union of Concerned Scientists. http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-weapons/space-security/a-history-of-anti-satellite-programs.

Gusterson, Hugh. 2004. People of the Bomb: Portraits of America’s Nuclear Complex. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Harvey, David. 2000. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Le Guin, Ursula K. 1974. The Dispossessed. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

Lempert, William. 2014. “Decolonizing Encounters of the Third Kind: Alternative Futuring in Native Science Fiction Film.” Visual Anthropology Review 30 (2): 164–76.

Marin, Louis. 1993. “Frontiers of Utopia.” Critical Inquiry 19 (3): 397–420.

Messeri, Lisa. 2016. Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press.

Nama, Adilifu. 2008. Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Oakes, Guy. 1994. The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Rose, Kenneth D. 2001. One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture. New York: New York University Press.

Schwartz, Stephen I., ed. 1998. Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Webb, Angela. 2008. “Joint Effort Made Satellite Success Possible.” U.S. Air Force. Accessed January 17. http://www.af.mil/News/ArticleDisplay/tabid/223/Article/124266/joint-effort-made-satellite-success-possible.aspx.

Wellerstein, Alex. 2012. “The Sound of the Bomb (1953).” Restricted Data: The Nuclear Secrecy Blog. http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/07/13/the-sound-of-the-bomb-1953/, accessed 07/11/2017.

When the puny mortals at Savage Minds invited me to review the latest work by Donna Haraway I was perplexed. After I had devoured the sanity of their pathetic messenger, I turned the book over in my tentacles. “Chthulucene,” eh? Was this meant to be a literary subversion of the Anthropocene, supplanting the implied anthropocentrism of that category with something alien and indifferent? And if so, was this really a wise move, politically speaking, when the purpose of the term was to draw attention to human actions that frequently remained hidden to those without the all seeing eyes of Yog-Sothoth? Needless to say, I was intrigued.

Full disclosure: Haraway and I are somewhat estranged. She never forgave me for guiding my cultists to infect Sumatran rat-monkies with a zombie virus (for more on this consult the 1992 documentary Dead Alive). Sure my methods are “controversial” but she and I have the same goal in mind: confronting our shared ecological crisis by addressing the problem of accelerating human population growth. Whereas she seeks to carve out the possibility that feminism can navigate the racist and eugenicist histories of limiting human reproduction, I advocate for a strategy of direction action, i.e. human sacrifice.

Our professional disagreements not withstanding I gave her latest monograph a fair reading. At just 168 pages exclusive of endnotes Staying with the Trouble is Haraway at her most accessible. Readers familiar with her work with recognize her characteristic style and language, polysemous metaphors co-mingle with evocative refrains, deep etymological readings, and even the occasional sentence with internal rhyme schemes. Some will argue that word games will only take you so far and, to be frank, I am sympathetic to this critique. Unlike her most rigorous works, Staying with the Trouble can get vague and repetitive. I mean, its not The Necronomicon.

While “Tentacular Thinking” probably won’t replace “Cyborg Manifesto” in your theory sylabus it must be recognized that this was never the author’s intent. This is a work to provoke and inspire. It is a call to arms (or pseudopods as the case may be)! Thus to judge it in the terms it sets out for itself, the book is a success.

Let us delve into some of the details, begining with why I was summoned here. What is this Chthulucene? Monsters are a warning. Like the word “demonstrate” with which it shares an identical root, we are here to show. Haraway mistakenly believes she has inoculated herself against my minions by adding a superfluous “h” to Cthulhu in order to make her Chthulucene but yet I linger! Haraway herself denies this. Sadly and on multiple ocassions, in the text and in the notes, she lashes out against me – personally – calling me racist and misogynistic. This is not true. I am indifferent to everyone’s suffering equally.

Just as I sleep under the ocean, dead but dreaming in the city of R’leyh, the Chthulucene represents what comes from under. Invertibrates of all kinds abound, spiders and octopus especially, but it is bacteria that best embody this. (In an egregious oversight, Haraway fails to cite the Elder Things who created the slave race of shoggoths accidentally spawning bacteria and, hence, all life on Earth.) In other passages Haraway uses the Chthulucene to invoke indigeneity and the continuing struggles of native peoples for autonomy. At yet other times it takes on a quasi-spiritual and mythological mantle as she evokes Gaia and Medusa. A God Trick in reverse, perhaps? In short the Chthulucene is like an ecological unconscious, underneath it all but without necessarily being foundational in a teleological sense, constantly running in the background whether you care to notice it or not, a Lacanian “Real” that resists being made intelligible.

Another important trope in Staying with the Trouble are String Figures. These join Haraway’s growing list of SF phrases going back to her earliest publications: science fiction, science fact, speculative feminism, etc. Moreover the Cat’s Cradle, a classic string game, fits perfectly into her career interest in webs and weaving. In this case what makes the String Figure so effective as a metaphor to think with is the way in which they can embody exchange, collective creation, and storytelling, crisscrossing like the moist tentacles dripping from my gaping maw.

via GIPHY

By now you’re all familiar with the Multispecies turn (can we call it a “turn” yet?) the proactive rethinking of scientific and humanities inquiry beyond the human. Frankly this poststructural evolutionary ecology is still incomplete as it has failed to account for Azathoth, his sons, and the elder races of aliens. But Haraway, citing Latour, remains resolute in her instance that you mortals stay “earthbound.” Haraway is, of course, at the vanguard of this Multispecies moment but here she outlines her objection to the so-called “posthuman,” calling instead for the “compost.” Like the ticklish extended title of Modest Witness it is a smart joke, punning on posts. Compost is meant to convey the importance of death to life and how life rises out of death. As an expert on death I must concur. You all need to die.

Compost and the possibility of life coming from death is a key to what the author refers to as “ongoingness” (a productive alternative to philosophical discourses of “becoming”). For Haraway the key to unlocking an ongoingness that is more than mere survival is something she calls sympoiesis, or making with. Sympoiesis invites us to think beyond individualism to relationships, relations with relatives, human and not. String Figures can be a sympoesis because they are something you make with another. Kinship is sympoesis.

Haraway:

We need to make kin symchthonically, sympoetically. Who and whatever we are, we need to make-with — become-with, compose-with — the earth-bound. (p.102)

Haraway makes her case with theory and scholarship in the first 100 pages, following this up with three chapters of case studies. By way of conclusion the book finishes with a chapter not inaccurately described as fanfic. Throughout she relies heavily on the work of Anna Tsing, especially her recent Mushroom at the End of the World, with backing roles played by Latour, Le Guin, Strathern, Viveiros de Castro, Stengers, and Despret. As the god of an evil cult, one thing that I strongly identified with was Haraway’s reconception of theory and writing as something like magic. How else would you describe a worldview where the practice of thinking can have such transformative effective? Bizarre supernatural forces bend with realism. A world once inhabited by another race who was cast out and yearns to return. Unseen presences. Unspeakable names. There must be a reason she keeps repeating the same things over and over again! It is more than a refrain, it is a chant! These are merely a few of the reasons I am skeptical that she did not mean to summon me by speaking my name, extra-H or no.

It was late-August, and towards the end of my fieldwork. Sanjay, Pankaj, Jagdish,* and I were having lunch in the NGO’s field office in Dharavi. After we finished lunch – a combination of coriander chicken curry and rice, made by Pankaj – Sanjay said introspectively, “We field staff, who work on the ground level, we are like curry leaves.” He asked us if we knew what he meant by that. I shook my head, no. Pankaj said that it is perhaps so because the field staff, like curry leaves, “adds flavor” to the NGO’s work. Jagdish offered his interpretation: because we (the front-line staff), like curry leaves, are chewed up and spit out once the taste or flavor is gone.

Sanjay smiled, and nodded: “Yes, that’s what I meant! A combination of the two!”

I wrote in the previous post why I found this metaphor so intriguing. It demonstrates the reflexivity of the front-line workers – how they are positioned hierarchically compared to the ‘offices’ – and is also a reflection on the kind of ideas and epistemologies they bring forth in their everyday intervention work in the basti (communities).

In a few earlier formulations, I termed this (rather naively, in retrospection) as ‘multi-sited epistemology,’ which suggests the following: there is a hierarchical relationship between the two distinct kinds of spaces where a certain kind of knowledge is produced – conference rooms, offices of the NGO; and the ‘field’ or community center – which is thus, logically perhaps, replicated in a hierarchy between the epistemologies and methodologies of organized social work discourse, and the more messy and embodied kind of front-line work. (Of course, this also recognizes that the communities within Dharavi aren’t homogenous and have their own understandings of complex issues, based on complex histories. They, further, have different culture-based ideas of gender and violence, which often makes intervention work difficult).

I drew inspiration from James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta, who wrote about the need to pay attention to how spaces, and the relationship between them, are not merely neutral, but rather hierarchized and reterritorialized. A part of this realization was also reflexive: as I reviewed my field notes, I found out that I was more concerned with ‘formalized’ aspects of front-line work (protocols, methods, patterns, theory, etc.) when I worked in the NGO’s offices during the pilot study. Whereas, when I spent time on the everyday interventions, there were instances where my observations would not fit into the patterns I would discuss with other researchers and administrators.

The distinction between the two modes of thinking became more palpable, for instance, when there would be pressures towards ‘producing results’ and ‘protocols’: monthly reports, PowerPoints, modules, even receipts for tea bought for meetings, which would constrain the work of the community organizers (COs). One refrain I heard quite a lot from them was: “They [administration] say that our work is not showing!” (Well, the pilot study I worked on did show that the front-line worker ‘model’ was effective to the NGO’s administration. But the catch was they needed an outside ‘expert’ to demonstrate that.)

This particular aspect of NGO work is as intriguing as it is frustrating: knowledge is often produced as/through assemblages (e.g., different researchers working successively on a single project), and despite collaboration, it is difficult to produce a unitary body of work or theory. Such work is quite often fragmentary; it has to adhere to protocols from funders or governments, or to publishing standards. And then, of course, you have the disjunctures between knowledge produced by the NGO’s researchers/administrators, and the front-line workers.

Where do the nuances of front-line work – like the emotional dimension of interventions; or the creative solutions and improvisations; the short-hands, rule-of-thumb understandings – feature within such a scheme?

Often, it is ‘corridor talk’; but rarely does it reflect in the knowledge produced (I often had insightful conversations on this with my researcher colleagues). Of course, all knowledge is partial; and the role of theory, as Kieran Healy points out in his provocative essay ‘Fuck Nuance,’ is by necessity to exclude the particular and the specific in order to construct an abstraction.

But, as much as I agree with Healy – and here I plead guilty of often conjuring up ‘nuance’ in so many past conversations! – I do want to consider what it would mean to take nuances seriously. In other words, can we avoid a position where nuances, like curry leaves, are just spit out once the flavor is gone?

As opposed to Healy’s context of sociological theory, I think ethnography can be a bit more sympathetic to nuances – indeed, offer a productive way of integrating them into (and generating) concepts and theory. Especially so, I would say, in the context of epistemic violence and epistemic colonization that is discussed by feminist anthropologists and decolonial thinkers. As Aihwa Ong, Chandra Mohanty and Marilyn Strathern have variously written with respect to Western Feminism’s problematic relation to non-western women, terms like ‘gender,’ ‘women,’ ‘reproduction’ and even ‘feminism,’ cannot serve as mere abstractions; they exist in a political field, often exerting power and violence. (This is especially so when partial knowledge becomes the basis of policy. For instance, during both fieldwork stints, the NGO was also working on a mobile-based application, which the sanginis used. This project suffered from several setbacks. In my brief observations, there was a primacy towards certain guidelines and frameworks of intervention, rather than figuring out how the technology would be adapted in the local context, the meanings given to it, and so on.)

The call to nuance in these cases – and with my own work with the front-line workers in Dharavi – does not fall into Healy’s (very relevant) concerns regarding its misuse. Nuances can and do add “flavor” to different contexts; but without these contexts, nuances are utterly meaningless. I am convinced that there are multiple possibilities for generating modes of intervention and advocacy, where nuances and observations are translated into idioms and logics – like Bhavanaben’s session on Women’s Unpaid Work, which I discussed in a previous post – and perhaps even into a theory.

Indeed even within such hierarchically spatialized epistemologies – which is how I have rephrased ‘multi-sited epistemology’ – there are ways in which ethnography can meaningfully hold on to nuances, whilst generalizing and abstracting. Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal’s term ‘the NGO form’ in Theorizing NGOs, is one such generalization/abstraction that I find very relevant in my work (as is, for that matter, the term ‘front-line’ itself).

A caveat, before I conclude: in drawing the distinction between NGOized and front-line epistemologies, I do not of course mean to take either as homogenous or without contradictions; nor do I wish to romanticize the latter. These refer to particular modes of thinking about particular problems (gender, violence, and so on); by necessity, they do exclude other nuances and narratives. They are also co-constitutive to a very large extent, since it would be inconceivable to think that front-line workers would produce grounded and contextual understandings of violence without being in the NGO.

In asking whether nuances are like curry leaves, the assumption of course is that these nuances – whatever they may be – matter; that they “add” something to discourse and to theory, but are chewed up and spit out.

* I have changed the names of my colleagues

Anthropologists are storytellers. We tell stories: other’s stories, our own stories, stories about other’s stories. But when I think about anthropology and storytelling, I think also of something else, of anthropology as theoretical storytelling.

What is anthropology as theoretical storytelling? Several things. A discipline engaged in explaining, understanding, and interpreting cultural worlds as well as in developing theoretical paradigms large and small for making and making sense of cultural worlds. This is not something new to anthropology. Looking across generations of anthropological scholarship, theoretical storytelling appears repeatedly. From Zora Neale Hurston’s tales and lies to Muchona the Hornet to the Balinese cockfight to Rashīd and Mabrūka and Fayga in Lila Abu-Lughod’s Veiled Sentiments and on and on. Stories stay with us. People stay with us. Esperanza. Adamu Jenitongo. Uma Adang. Gloria. Miss Tiny. Charles and Morley and Nick Thompson. Angela Sidney. Valck. Mr. Otis. Bernadette and Eugenia. Tashi Dhondup. And so many more. Anthropology as theoretical storytelling may be a method of narration by both ethnographer and subject, a means of organizing writing, a way of arguing certain ethnographic points, and an ethnographically-grounded way of approaching theory. This is not then a singular approach or description, but a term that captures a range of anthropological sensibilities and strategies.

As with many before me, in the field I found myself to be a recipient of stories. Yet not all was narrative. Some moments in the field were more staccato or fragmented, confusing or obscure; some were just talk about this or that, about the minutiae of everyday life or about nothing at all (and those are deeply cultural moments indeed). But many days included storytelling, official and not, and almost always told over shared food and drink. Some of these I asked to hear in the context of my research, and others people told me for other reasons known and unknown. Turning these stories into a written ethnography or a spoken one in the classroom involves analytical and narrative labor. This process is about both ideas and story.

*******************

It was a dark and stormy night. People were gathered in Lhasa’s Twentieth Park (nyi shu’i gling ga) to celebrate ‘dzam gling spyi bsangs, the Universal Smoke Offering Day. Throughout the day, people picnicked and gambled in tents set up throughout the park. The weather was bad but the atmosphere was festive; people eating, drinking, and enjoying themselves; it was a party after all. Beer maids roamed from tent to tent singing, flirting, and refilling chang (beer) bowls. Much of Lhasa’s high society was there. The flaps of their tents were down, perhaps as much as to prevent prying eyes as to provide shelter from the weather. Inside one tent, dimly lit by oil lamps and candles, a group of important men played mahjong and drank chang. As they played, a thunder and lightning storm developed. Outside the tent, two men huddled, nervously preparing for their own festival activities. Then, as one or another of the men inside the tent contemplated his next play, there was a ferocious roar of thunder, followed by a flash of lightning. The lightning illuminated the tent, and through chang-glazed eyes, the men inside saw that one of their mates had fallen over. Outside the tent, the two other men were already gone, swiftly making their escape through the back alleys of Lhasa. The man who had fallen was dead, murdered with just one shot fired precisely at the time of the thunder, so as not to be heard and thus giving the assassins enough time to make their get away. This was 1921 and the murdered man was Pangda Nyigyal, the head of the newly powerful Pangdatsang family, an eastern Tibetan (Khampa) trader settled in Lhasa and a favorite of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama.

It was a dark and stormy night.

For real. This is not an entry in the annual Edward Bulwer-Lytton “dark and stormy night” sentence contest, but the way numerous people told this story to me. Dramatically. Voices lowered. Voice and tone matching what a dark and stormy night feels like. Narrators who’ve never heard of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, but who instead narrated the story as it was told to them. Narrators who reproduced oral framings as much as cultural and political ones. Anthropologists who then re-tell in English these stories originally told in Tibetan.

When I sat down to write my dissertation and faced the question of where to start, my advisor Ann Laura Stoler gave me a piece of advice I now share with my graduate students: start with a story you know must be in there, one that can’t be left out. What stories can’t be left out? As I wrote those stories and beyond, and as I continued to write and teach, the place of storytelling as theoretical strategy in anthropology became clearer to me. We tell stories to make theoretical arguments. We use narrative to convey both story and theory. Renato Rosaldo makes these points beautifully in Culture and Truth: narrative is key to social analysis.[1] As Kirin Narayan writes of this book and of what she learned in Rosaldo’s “Stories and Culture” graduate seminar, “stories are inherently analytic, and … in the sequence of reasoning, analysis has narrative form.”[2] Years of reading good, well-written ethnographies in which the argument is built in part through narrative structure demonstrates these points. And yet, narrative drives much of our theoretical work in underappreciated ways.

Anthropologists specialize in thick description. When Clifford Geertz, for example, suggests that it’s turtles all the way down, this is commentary on the simultaneously bounded and limitless aspects of ethnographic interpretation. To say our descriptions are thick is to say they are concerned with meaning and not only description. We don’t just work to describe turtles, but to get at why turtles matter, why it’s turtles rather than elephants, and why the fact that it’s turtles all the way down does not close down our interpretations, but rather provides a foundation for them. Describing turtles, including why turtles are culturally meaningful, is a key component of theoretical storytelling. Description itself may be a non-narrative form of prose, but thick description is narrative. It involves characters, a plot, a storyline, a form, a goal. In thinking about the place of interpretation within anthropology today, it has in some ways been folded almost seamlessly into ethnography. Interpretation is now unmarked, assumed, expected, and is often narrative in form. This has become so true that experimental ethnography is now that which is non-narrative; the pendulum has swung back in the other direction. As a vehicle for theoretical argument, narrative provides both form and content. As Hayden White might say, theoretical storytelling is content and it is form; it is both.

Storytelling’s theoretical powers are not neutral. They are important conceptually and cognitively, and always need to be situated in specific contexts—historical, ideological, political, cultural. And, as Hayden White does say, “narrative is an expression in discourse of a distinct mode of experiencing and thinking about the world, its structures, and its processes.”[3] In that sentence, one could replace narrative with ethnography in order to see how contemporary ethnographic writing in anthropology relies on storytelling. When we write and when we teach, we do not just share information, but we tell stories to bring material, data, beliefs, theories to life. Walter Benjamin differentiates between information and stories by claiming: “The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.”[4]

In this current moment, our Zora-inspired “spy glasses of Anthropology” are focused on stories more than on information. In temporally shifting away from a focus on the ethnographic present, we have also shifted away from information in this Benjaminian sense. Instead, what we are in search of and what comes to us are stories. Stories that do not expend themselves, but which take new shape in our retelling of them.

Our telling of stories told to us is itself a theoretical exercise. Narrative helps us “translate knowing into telling,” that is, narrative provides us with a means for “fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culturally specific.”[5] Death, for example, is generally human. All humans eventually die. All societies have some sort of funerary rites. And yet not all people encounter tragic deaths. Not all deaths come as thunder roars.

*******************

The dramatic story of the murder of Pangda Nyigyal is still told today by Tibetans in exile. Eyes wide, voices lowered, narrators almost one hundred years distant from the event drape their narration in suspense and conspiracy enabled first, by the fact that the murder was never solved, and second, by the controversial place of the Pangdatsang family in modern Tibetan society and history. Who shot Pangda Nyigyal? We don’t know. Or do we? Some people know. Some names are whispered into ears of anthropologists. Some names are kept secret, tucked away for other times, and other stories. Kirin Narayan writes that “Storytelling, after all, does nothing except shuffle words, and yet through the words’ arrangement, new worlds are built and filled with an imaginative wealth.”[6] The worlds built through stories create truths, they do not just hold or represent them. Stories give frameworks to hopes, to morals, to politics, to ethnographies. And yet.

Anthropology as theoretical storytelling needs to dwell more in the connection between the documentative and the generative. Michael Taussig claims that “Anthropology is blind to how much its practice relies on the art of telling other people’s stories—badly. What happens is that those stories are elaborated as scientific observations gleaned not from storytellers but from “informants.””[7] What is defective is how we miss the power of stories and storytellers even as we tell them. We tell stories to get to the point, to make our points. We miss that the stories are the point. They are the getting, and they are the there. Julie Cruikshank and many others have demonstrated poignantly how people live storied lives. Anthropology is a storied discipline. This is one of our truths.

[1] Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, Beacon Press, 1989.

[2] Kirin Narayan, Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov, University of Chicago Press, 2012, p. 8.

[3] Hayden White, “Storytelling: Historical and Ideological,” in Centuries’ Ends, Narrative Means, edited by Robert Newman, Stanford University Press, 1996, p. 59.

[4] Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, Schocken Books, 1968[1955]), p. 90.

[5] Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” Critical Inquiry 7(1), 1980, p. 5.

[6] Kirin Narayan, Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teachings, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989.

[7] Michael Taussig, Walter Benjamin’s Grave, University of Chicago Press, 2006, p. 62.

Right now, where is intellectual energy in cultural anthropology? This seminar is designed to ask and answer this question through looking at scholarship from the last several years organized around the concept of ethnographic theory. Our overall prompt is dual, both the call for a ‘return’ to ethnographic theory in the now four-year old journal HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory and recent reflections in Cultural Anthropology on the current anthropological moment twenty-five years after Writing Culture. On the syllabus, I wrote the following introduction to the course which is officially titled “Ethnographic Theory: On Philosophy, Method, and Writing:”

What is the ethnographic? How do we practice and write ethnography? In this seminar, we will look beyond ethnography as method to consider the ethnographic as theory. Ethnographic knowledge is both epistemology and ontology, a way of knowing and a way of being. It is experiential, embodied, and empathetic, and is the foundation of field efforts to arrive at—as Clifford Geertz so famously stated in 1974—how people collectively explain themselves…to themselves. It is through ethnography that we can get to “where true life and real lives meet.” Ethnography is excessive and it is messy, but so is life. Our goal in ethnographic research is to get to this excess and messiness, to the lived expectations, complexities, contradictions, and possibilities of any given cultural group. In this seminar, we will explore ethnographic theory through reading in three areas: political subjectivity, ethnographies of the suffering subject, and the ontological turn

When choosing texts for the course, I envisioned a seminar of mostly anthropology grad students and a handful of other students from other disciplines, as is custom here on our campus. My anticipation was that students would take this class after having completed the year-long core course which introduces new grad students to classic and contemporary history and theory in anthropology. I was wrong on both counts. There are eleven students in the course. Five are anthropology grad students, both MA and PhD students, including two who have not yet taken the year-long core course. Six are grad students from other disciplines—Communication, Digital Humanities, Geography, and Religious Studies—some who have taken anthropology courses before, and some who have not. As a result, this seminar has included more reflections on and deep discussion about what anthropology is than I anticipated. Getting to ethnographic theory first requires an immersion in anthropology. I confess that while my commitment is to an ethnography that is interdisciplinary, it is also to ethnography as an epistemological practice and philosophy that must be grounded in a discipline. In the case of this seminar, that discipline is anthropology.

The first tasks we collectively had were to articulate the current intellectual/political moment and to clarify what ethnographic theory is, given that while the term makes immediate disciplinary sense, as a named practice or approach it is still new. The course thus began with a two-week series of readings designed to ground the course in contemporary anthropological theory. How in the world to do this in two weeks? Ruthlessly, I had to pick and choose, selecting texts that I felt were both representative of this new ethnographic and theoretical moment, both in getting us there and also in naming it, as well as texts that covered a range of anthropological scholars, traditions, and writing styles. It was impossible to fit in every text or every scholar I wanted to include. As with all syllabi, I had to make hard choices. The seminar meets one time per week, every Monday afternoon for 2.5 hours. Here are the texts we read in week one and week two (although the students had three weeks to do this reading due to a university holiday):

WEEK ONE

Da Col, Giovanni and David Graeber. 2011. “Foreword: The return of ethnographic         theory,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, pp. vi-xxxv.

Nader, Laura, 2011. “Ethnography as Theory,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1(1): 211-219.

McGranahan, Carole. 2014. “What is Ethnography? Teaching Ethnographic Sensibilities Without Fieldwork,” Teaching Anthropology 4: 23-36.

Foucault, Michel. 1994[1966]. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on          Language. New York: Vintage. Pp. 3-17, 21-39.

Geertz, Clifford. 1973. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books, pp. 310-333.

Clifford, James. 1983. “On Ethnographic Authority,” Representations 2: 118-146.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1991 “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness,” in Richard G. Fox, Recapturing Anthropology, Santa Fe: SAR Press, pp. 17-44.

Strathern, Marilyn. 1993. “One-Legged Gender,” Visual Anthropology Review 9(1): 42- 51.

Marcus, George E. 1995. “Ethnography In/Of the World System: The Emergence of            Multi-sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95-117.

Wagner, Roy. 1995. “Fighting Over Pigshit,” Anthropology and Humanism 20(1): 3-8.

Daniel, E. Valentine. 1996. “Crushed Glass, or, Is There a Counterpoint to Culture?,” in E. Valentine Daniel and Jeffrey M. Peck, eds., Culture/Contexture: Explorations in Anthropology and Literary Studies, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 357-375.

WEEK TWO

Ortner, Sherry. 2005. “Subjectivity and Cultural Critique,” Anthropological Theory 5(1): 31-52.

Biehl, Joao, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman. 2007. “Introduction: Rethinking Subjectivity,” in Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1-23.

Das, Veena and Ranendra K. Das. 2007. “How the Body Speaks: Illness and the Lifeworld of the Urban Poor,” in Joao Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman, eds., Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, Berkeley: University of California  Press, pp. 66-97

Fortun, Kim. 2012. “Ethnography in Late Industrialism,” Cultural Anthropology 27(3): 446-464.

Rutherford, Danilyn. 2012. “Kinky Empiricism,” Cultural Anthropology 27(3): 465-479.

Jackson, John L., Jr. 2012. “Ethnography Is, Ethnography Ain’t,” Cultural Anthropology 27(3): 480-497.

Favret-Saada, Jeanne. 2012. “Death at your heels: When ethnographic writing propagates the force of witchcraft,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(1): 45-53.

McGranahan, Carole. 2012. “Mao in Tibetan disguise: History, ethnography, and excess,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(1): 213-245.

Taussig, Michael. 2012. “Excelente Zona Social,” Cultural Anthropology 27(3): 498-517.

White, Bob W. and Kiven Strohm. 2014. “Ethnographic knowability and the aporias of        intersubjectivity,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4(1): 189-197.

Fabian, Johannes. 2014. “Ethnography and intersubjectivity: Loose ends,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4(1): 199-209.

Pels, Peter. 2014. “After Objectivity: An historical approach to the intersubjective in           ethnography,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4(1): 211-236.

Behar, Ruth. 2015. “Read More, Write Less.” Savage Minds, February 2, 2015.

Most of these articles worked beautifully for the seminar, but some were slightly off or not the best representation of a certain scholar’s work. Nonetheless, from these two weeks’ worth of foundational readings, we turned to the book section of the course (which was another ten weeks of readings). We started with Anna Tsing’s Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), which provided our grounding orientation to what ethnographic theory might look like in book form, and which with a 2007 publication date was the “oldest” book on our list. Friction did a phenomenal job putting numerous topics into conversation for us: the relationship between ethnography and theory, writing style, author’s intention and goals, audience, and again and again, the generative ways in which theory arose from ethnography throughout the project.

We moved next to a series of readings on the ontological turn. We first read Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), followed by Lucas Bessire’s Behold the Black Caiman: A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), followed by a week of readings from a range of authors:

Venkatesan, Soumhya, ed. 2010. “Ontology is Just Another Word for Culture,” Critique of Anthropology 30(2): 152-200. (with contributions from Michael Carrithers, Matei Candea, Karen Sykes, and Martin Holbraad).

Holbraad, Martin and Morten Axel Pedersen, eds. 2014. “The Politics of Ontology,” Cultural Anthropology (with essays by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo Kohn, Peter Skafish, Elizabeth Povinelli, Ghassan Hage, Mario Blaser, Casper Bruun Jensen, Michael W. Scott, Helen Verran, Tony Crook, Benjamin Alberti, Matei Candea, Marisol de la Cadena, and Annemarie Mol),

Bessire, Lucas and David Bond. 2014. “Ontological anthropology and the deferral of critique,” American Ethnologist 41(3): 440-456.

From the ontological turn, we next read a combination of works in the realm of political subjectivity and the suffering subject. Joel Robbins’ essay “Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good (JRAI, 2013) was crucial here in articulating a move in the discipline in response first, as Robbins argues, to Trouillot’s ‘savage slot’ critique with the ‘suffering subject’ literature, and now in the current moment the question of where we are headed in response to criticisms of a suffering subject; as his above title indicates, Robbins suggests that it is to a notion of the good. The seminar is still in session, so it is not yet time for a full reflection on this, but while we see ‘the good’ in the mix, we also see a new, unapologetic turn toward a sort of gritty, yet hopeful political.

The books we read (and are still reading) in this section of the course are, in the order we read them:

Fassin, Didier. 2013. Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing. Malden, MA:     Polity Press.

Garcia, Angela. 2010. The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Stevenson, Lisa. 2014. Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler    States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Ralph, Laurence. 2014. Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland                         Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Finally—and this will come as no surprise to regular readers of Savage Minds—we are ending the seminar with a section on writing. Writing matters to me, and it matters to anthropologists. All of the books we have read so far truly stand alone in their topics and styles, and yet each is well written. Some people arrive in graduate school already wonderful writers, while the rest of us have to learn to write in graduate school. Regardless of when one finds their writing voice, we all need to keep thinking about what it means to write ethnographically. We thus will end the seminar with a “how about” book about ethnographic writing by Kirin Narayan, and with Renato Rosaldo’s singular work of ethnographic poetry, theoretical reflection, and personal lament:

Narayan, Kirin. 2012. Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of            Chekhov. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rosaldo, Renato. 2013. The Day of Shelly’s Death: The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

The seminar is ongoing, but the semester is winding down. When one teaches a course for the first time, you don’t know how it is going to go, nor do you know entirely what you (as well as the students) are going to learn. As professor, this seminar has been eye-opening for me in thinking about what it means to generate theory out of ethnography in ways that go beyond how we might’ve discussed this at earlier points in the discipline: e.g., applying theory, using theory, putting ethnography in dialogue with theory, etc. Instead, what might a more conscious generating of theory via ethnography look like? Who does it well? What we’ve taken away as a key point is that while there are many ways to do this, the most successful examples are specific to the individual context, research, and scholar, and yet open to the possibility, even encouragement, for use elsewhere. The theory feels true to the ethnography.

Student assignments include a weekly response essay shared over email with all students in the class as well as me the night before seminar, both to get the conversation started before class begins, but also so that students are writing for each other and not just for the professor. Students also had to write two 5-6 page essays, one on ethnographic theory and the current moment in anthropology, and one on the ontological turn. The final assignment for the class is a 15-20 page research paper considering ethnographic theory in the context of their own ongoing research.

In conclusion, I share two quotes I used to open up our conversations about ethnographic theory:

            On the need to ‘return’ to ethnographic theory, or as Giovanni Da Col and David Graeber argue in the inaugural issue of HAU:

“to return anthropology to its original and distinctive conceptual wealth—to critical concepts we bring from the field, whether exotic or urban—and thereby, to return ethnography … to the forefront of theoretical developments in the discipline” (2012: viii)

           On ethnography and the historical specificity of the current moment, as Kim Fortun asks in “Ethnography in Late Industrialism:”

“What is the task of ethnography [in this] moment? … What would make ethnography ‘appropriate’ to the historical conditions in which we find ourselves today?” (2012: 449)

Yes and indeed. It’s been a great seminar so far, one in which I read most books for the first time along with the students, and thus there were elements of shared intellectual discovery truly invaluable to thinking through the ‘now.’  Sometimes it’s good to reflect back on things, and other times the urge comes to think through something while you’re in it. That’s where we’ve been this semester, but next year it could be an entirely different story…..

I almost never know in advance which parts of the field notes will go into the text, because it takes me some time, and a lot of writing, to figure out what it is exactly that I am going to argue! With interviews, it’s different. There are some turns of phrase that seem to leap off the page, and these are usually those that capture experience in a fresh or complex way. I also tend to notice when a turn of phase, or a metaphor emerges more than once. When I heard a third person compare their everyday life with living on a volcano, I knew it was going to be in the book in a major way. But it also got me thinking about what this metaphor accomplished, which sent me right back to the field notes. When I can’t find a place in the text for an evocative image or turn of phrase that I hear from a respondent, this causes me great torments!

Like Olga, I now spend a lot of time reading my fieldnotes and deciding what material I want to include before I figure out my core argument, a process sometimes called “grounded theory,” a way of incorporating theoretical insights that emerge organically from the fieldwork. I also search for great quotes or turns of phrase that capture something about the everyday experience of my informants.

Anthropologist Julie Hemment allows recollections of fieldwork to guide her writing:

My first step is to recall a rich incident. Often it’s an interaction or an event that that played out in ways I didn’t fully understand at the time – something that snagged my attention and caused me to linger, and maybe something that I continue to puzzle.  I then return to my fieldnotes for more texture (and these places, incidents, moments are often places where I did write thickly to begin with).  The ethnographic writing I ultimately produce is an amalgam of all this.  I rarely incorporate my fieldnotes directly, or quote from them; rather, I write from them.

If you are the kind of ethnographer that starts with the stories and writes her way into a theoretical insight, write out your thick descriptions first, and then take care not to overload the reader with a wall of theoretical analysis at the end of the dissertation, article, or book. Once you’ve completed your first draft, work back into the manuscript and foreshadow your theoretical argument throughout the body of your text. If done with a light hand, these insertions won’t break the flow of your narrative, but will gently guide the reader toward your ultimate conclusions.

Other anthropologists know their conclusions before they begin. When I wrote The Red Riviera, theoretical interventions guided my writing from page one. I knew I wanted to explore how cultural capital operated in a postsocialist context. If you’re starting with a clear argument, examine your fieldnotes. Identify the ethnographic material that best substantiates your claims. Then, state your overall theoretical intervention in the introduction. Make this a brief statement without too many rhetorical flourishes and without the exhaustive literature review.

As you write up the examples from your fieldwork, occasionally stop and return to your argument and theoretical framework, inserting bits of relevant theoretical background among the ethnographic examples. You can sprinkle these theoretical asides throughout your text, ensuring they arise naturally from the anecdotes you have chosen.

Anthropologist Doug Rogers combines these two writing strategies:

Whatever balance I’m aiming for with a particular piece of writing, I’m generally sorting secondary literature right along with the fieldnotes and other sources. So I might have a section of my bookshelves labeled “Chapter 2,” a folder of academic articles on the computer named “Chapter 2,” and another folder of fieldnotes and other sources (newspapers, archival materials, whatever) also labeled chapter 2. When I’m working on chapter 2, I’m trying to keep all of these things in play, and the “theory” stuff gets sorted and resorted right along with the fieldnotes as I write and reclassify, write and reclassify. For this last book, one way I did this was by covering my wall with sticky notes that indicated chapter sections and subsections and the bits of ethnography and/or theory that would go in each … that way I could move things around easily. I would write and keep looking back and forth between the sticky notes and the other things labeled chapter 2 — notes, articles, books, etc.

So you can write up your data, and then add in your arguments, or you can start with your arguments and slip in your data, or if you’re like Doug and can manage it, try to do both at the same time. Whatever your method, avoid separate sections or chapters devoted solely to literature review and theoretical analysis at the beginning or end of your text. Of course there will be exceptions – some journals may require a separate literature review section, others may be only interested in publishing theoretical analysis lightly seasoned with ethnographic examples. Every situation will be unique, but in general, a readable ethnography will be one that blends thick ethnographic detail with theoretical analysis, integrating that theory naturally into the narrative flow of the text.

Every ethnographer must find a balance between theory and data. Our fieldwork and our specific case studies render our work original, but this work fails to be scholarly if it lacks dialogue with larger theoretical concerns. When writing the dissertation the literature review section remains de rigueur, but most acquisitions editors demand that this section be exorcised from the eventual book manuscript. This means that the theoretical insights inspired by your participant observation must somehow be woven into the final text so as to elucidate your original ideas without burying the reader under an avalanche of information about what other scholars, studying other cases, have said before you.

The task of integrating theory proves difficult for even the most experienced ethnographers, and different scholars maintain varying opinions on its importance. In a 1999 article, anthropologist Ruth Behar argues that theory for theory’s sake undermines the potential vibrancy of ethnographic writing:

What I do find tiresome is the habit of using whatever theory happens to be fashionable…as a substitute for really engaging the tough questions posed by those whom we encounter on our journeys as ethnographers. When ethnographers working in far corners of the globe are all citing the same two pages from the work of the latest trendy theorist, without reflecting on the politics of how that theory travels, you can be sure they have killed the life in their ethnography.

In my own books and articles, theoretical concerns dominated my early writing, but my more recent work places greater emphasis on the experience of everyday life. I continue to struggle with the question of how much theory to (explicitly) include, and I wonder how other ethnographers integrate theoretical questions into their writing. How do they decide the balance between theory and ethnographic data? I decided to do a little research.

At Princeton University, I contacted the anthropologists John Borneman and Amy Borovoy. Borneman, the author of five ethnographic monographs, including Political Crime and the Memory of Loss, uses theory to guide his research questions, but does not privilege it over direct experience in the field. He explains that:

Theory always determines what I might write down, therefore preselects the data. But the theory of ethnography I hold to admonishes me to be open to encounters with the unexpected, to experience as much as possible, to allow myself to be subject to other people’s desires and wishes as much as possible. But I go to the field with questions of larger social significance. What is the sacred? What is the political? What does it mean to be such and such a person at this time in such and such a place? I write down as much as I can in notes. I do not apply theory to this data but try to think through the data to refine, or even refute and displace, the questions I entered with.

Borneman places a heavy emphasis on the lived experience of participant observation, using his own experiences to question or subvert preconceived theoretical frameworks.

Amy Borovoy, author of The Too-Good Wife, sees a dialectic relationship between data and theory in her own work:

I’m tempted to say the data are more important, but that’s not right, because one needs ideas to interpret and organize the data. However if one simply demonstrates the same ideas (Foucault’s ideas about biopolitics [for instance]) in many different field settings, it’s no longer interesting. [Theory and data] shape each other in a fluid way. One starts with theoretical ideas or questions that come from theoretical readings, historical data, or other ethnographies. Then one’s ethnographic findings shape those questions.

Like Borneman, Borovoy values theory as part of the road map that guides the initial fieldwork. But once again, theory is a necessary, but not sufficient, ingredient for her ethnography. The data from the field leads the analysis and eventual writing of ethnographic texts, and one has to be careful not to reproduce studies that have already been conducted in other contexts providing just one more data point for an already well-established theory.

Anthropologist Julie Hemment, the author of Empowering Women in Russia, also believes that theory determines the questions that shape her fieldwork. But when it comes to writing, she prefers the richness of ethnographic detail:

I’d say [theory and data] are equally important, and totally shot through with one another. While I consider myself to be led by my ethnographic data, it’s theory that has shaped its collection. And in analyzing, I tack back and forth between them continually. As far as what makes it onto the page –my personal preference as a reader and writer is for theoretically informed ethnographically rich texts and so I try to avoid theory-laden digressions. And nothing grabs a reader like a good story…

I checked in with a few ethnographers trained as sociologists, and they also tend to place a heavier emphasis on their ethnographic data in their finished writing. Olga Shevchenko, author of Crisis and the Everyday in Postosocialist Moscow, explains that, “I love theory as much as the next gal, but in the end, its role for me is to illuminate life, and so for me, ethnographic details come first.”

David Redmon, a sociologist and filmmaker, explained that when considering the balance between theory and ethnographic detail in his book Beads, Bodies, and Trash, he took his cues from his editor, who encouraged him to write the book “in filmic ways.” Redmon also relied on friendly readers, sending rough drafts of his manuscript to friends and colleagues. “Every person responded to the experiential material more so than the theoretical analysis,” Redmon told me. In the end, he let the stories lead the narrative, and only added in brief theoretical discussions at the end of each chapter.

Perhaps the key to writing an accessible ethnography lies with the ability to interweave the necessary theory into the ethnographic article, dissertation, or book without overloading the reader with extraneous verbiage. But what’s the best way to do this? I’ll consider this question in Part II.

Rex: So, tell me about the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry [ICSI].

Ann: Well, the Institute has been in the making for about two years. It’s a response to what I see as a pervasive problem in our academic world — given the demands of fast-paced publishing coupled with overstretched teaching loads for many young scholars in the making.  How do we get to learn about the things that we’ve always imagined we should know, and that we don’t? The things we haven’t had time for in our careers, because we’ve been too busy being “productive” and teaching our courses? It’s modeled on the notion that if we can provide a master who knows about a particular subject or thinker really well, a range of people would have a wonderful opportunity to have access in a short amount of time to someone whose conceptual vocabulary and “styles of thought” could be drawn on to address pressing questions that engaged social inquiry should be addressing now. The Institute is geared, as it stands, for advanced doctoral students and junior faculty across the disciplines but we have already had queries from tenured professors excited by the prospect of working for an intensive week with the thinkers who will teach these Master Classes.

One of the models for this sort of project is The School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell where I had the pleasure of teaching several years ago. The SCT summer school is six weeks. At Cornell, each year four faculty each conduct a twice-weekly seminar on chosen issues. It’s a wonderful environment for reading and writing and conversation if one has enough time to do it.

Our idea is somewhat different. The focus of the ICSI seminars is both more intensive and perhaps less about theory with a capital ‘T’, than about how conceptual work can be harnessed to think innovatively about grounded social inquiry. The emphasis in our seminars is to offer the methodological traction participants can garner by thinking with others in one of three seminars, each exploring a different form of critical social inquiry that focuses on contemporary issues, subjects, and political configurations.  The ICSI takes as its charge introducing a new generation to “masters”, whose thinking in and about other historical moments might challenge seminar participants to think differently about their perceptions and practices today.  I am using the term “master” in two senses here:  the “master” is both, first, the person giving the seminar, sharing with participants how he or she each sees and works with and against, a particular thinker, and second, the thinker around whose work the seminar focuses (e.g., Marx, Hegel, Derrida, Arendt, Fanon, Heidegger, Rousseau, and Foucault—someone whose work you haven’t been able to devote the time to examine closely).

This dual sense of master is a large part of what is exciting about ICSI. It’s a kind of immersion in the conceptual capacity that someone offers. Our goal is to reach a range of scholars; from those embarking on their dissertations, those just returning from the field or the archive, both junior and senior faculty bogged down by having to teach too many courses. I see the ICSI as a joining of scholars from the Global North and Global South, sharing a dense infused intellectual environment.

In this sense, ICSI is both an analytic and a political project. What does being critical mean right now? What does it mean not to think about “theory” with a capital T disengaged from practical problems in the contemporary world.  Instead, the goal is to see how those problems articulate with the conceptual vocabularies with which we work.

There’s play here with the idea of  “masters on masters.”  To participate in a seminar on Heidegger taught by Simon Critchley — or more accurately Critchley in conversation with Heidegger–is a unique opportunity.  Talal Asad and Patricia Williams, on the other hand, take key issues, secularism for Asad, race for Williams, and will provide participants with the critical problematics that confront us all in thinking these issues today.

The format is a one-week intensive seminar, three-and-a-half to four hours in the morning — part lecture, part reading a chosen set of texts.  The afternoon is devoted to the work of participants, an opportunity to share their own work and reflect on how the questions raised in the morning seminars might help them think their own projects. The design is also inspired in some ways by a vibrant summer workshop in Johannesburg that Achille Mbembe has run for many years, in which students and faculty from a range of disciplines come together. A sliding tuition scale permits students from the Global South to participate.  That too is how the ICSI will operate, although in our case we have an endowment that allows us to charge all students far below the actual cost. Housing is also provided. The seminars will be at the New School’s new University Center in the heart of New York City.  Each of the three faculty will give a public lecture during the week. On the last day there will be an open forum for students and faculty from each of the three seminars to reflect together on the styles of thinking and critique offered. Bruno Latour may think critique is dead but I think there should be room to question when critique is effective and when and why it is not.

Rex: This is the first year it’s being offered, is that right?

Ann: Yes, it’s the first year this is being launched. First years are always precarious. You have to get the word out, and you have to let people know about it. The first week that we launched the website, we had a tremendous response, and we’ve continued to field inquiries daily, so something about it is inciting interest. We have quite a number of applications already and have switched to rolling admissions with a final deadline in February. We’ve also had the good fortune to receive another small gift, so we’ve been able to reduce the tuition somewhat more than we originally thought.

Rex: You know, that process of trying to find some way to balance the tuition with people’s ability to pay sounds really like an important part of the project.  Can you tell me more about how that works in your case? There’s financial aid for which people can apply.

Ann: As I said, there is a sliding scale for tuition, depending on whether applicants are at institutions in the Global North or the Global South. Additionally, there are some funds for travel grants.  This is not a money-making enterprise: it’s a political and intellectual one that may some day break even, but right now what we care about is getting people eager to think together and aloud across the disciplines.

A wonderfully innovative trustee of the New School for Social Research generously provided the ICSI’s endowment.  Additionally, literally as we speak, she has brought a broader group of donors on board whose gifts have allowed us, as I mentioned earlier, to lower the costs to all participants. Our trustees and donors understand that part of the mission of the New School is to offer an intellectual vitality to a much wider range of people than those who can afford to come to graduate school in New York City. Scholars-in-the-making may get to attend the crowded lecture of a luminary or ask a rushed question if they can get to the podium in time to beat out others, but rarely to converse in depth, on a daily basis with important figures such as Talal Asad, Patricia Williams, Simon Critchley, Judith Butler, and Gayatri Spivak. At the moment we have enough internationally renowned “masters” to cover nearly four years of seminars.

The small seminar format is designed to facilitate and activate interaction and exchange. Each seminar will have a facilitator (probably a New School doctoral student), who will create a ‘living archive’ of extra readings referenced for current and future use. We want this to be a resource in multiple senses: of connections between people and materials from different fields. The model is one of density, intensity, and exhilaration in a concentrated amount of time.

With feedback from each summer’s participants, we image that the format will be tweaked and expanded. We scheduled it for June so that people will have finished their coursework and/or teaching, and to avoid impinging on the summer months when so much writing and research is done.

Next year in June 2016, we will have Jay Bernstein, a “master” on Hegel whose online lectures are famous for the clarity and scope.  Jay’s ICSI seminar of course won’t be a reading of all of Hegel, but a focused immersion led by someone renowned for teaching Hegel for twenty years. Someone who knows how to open up some of those spaces imagined tobe impenetrable to those of us who have not studied those particular thinkers.

Rex: That really sounds like that’s part of the “master on a master” thing. You’re not only learning how Hegel thinks, you’re getting to see how a scholar who’s an expert on him thinks, how they interpret the text, how maybe you can approach it in the future wearing their goggles.

Ann: It’s really a matter of someone with a facility, capacity, and passion. I’m not just interested in any teacher. We’re seeking those who see this as an opportunity to teach in a completely different venue. If you’ve taught Fanon for fifteen years, you come to it with a well-honed ability to convey why he matters. And central to that effort is addressing the simple and searing question, to borrow David Scott words, “Are these questions worth having answers to?” It’s not that we are in the business of conflict resolution. We’re really in the business, I think, of learning how to ask better questions, to learn to hear the phrasing and force of the concerns of those most disadvantaged in our inequitable world – the questions they themselves may well know how to pose. I see our other task as one of making those things that seem so obvious to us more open to doubt, uncertainty, and inquiry.

Rex: I guess that’s where the concept of “critical” in the title comes in. I imagine there are some people who’d say reading Heidegger for a week with other professors or other PhD students isn’t really a kind of critical political engagement. But you really have a vision of what it means to do critical studies where you do see that as being very relevant and important. Can you expand on that?

Ann:  I think Heidegger offers a way of formulating a question, with a degree of deliberation that permanently changes your sensibility. What Heidegger does is both unravel grammar, and in unraveling grammar, unravels and opens up spaces and clearings of how one can bring something into thought again.

Rex: It seems that on the one hand you see the value of theory and criticism in one sense, but you’ve been very critical of the way that theory is taught or used — you see the potential for it to go astray sometimes.

Ann: Well, I think it is an issue of pedagogy. I think “great thinkers” are often taught as if they are providing a ready toolkit — it’s actual a phrase that Foucault unfortunately used. But these toolkits are not fixed, they’re not portable in some decontextualized way.  It’s not students who go awry, it’s in how these concepts are often taught. I think of concept work, working with concept, as a much more provisional and creative project.

That’s one of things I so admire in Talal Asad’s work on suffering, pain, and liberalism.  I think much the same is true of the way that Simon Critchley takes Heidegger’s often intractable language on being and non-being and finds ways to see how it matters in the world today. Patricia Williams makes a similar move in her exploration of the legal, political and rhetorical framings that infuse how subjects are conceptualized. These are scholars with decidedly political sensibilities; for example, Simon crafts The Stone blog for the New York Times, Patricia writes for The Nation. I think we need this broad range of genres through which we can be public intellectuals in a different kind of way.

Rex: In my experience, oftentimes students feel like they need ‘theory’, and sometimes professors don’t want to teach it. I know when I was at Chicago I felt like I needed more theory and my professors didn’t really want to teach a course on Foucault and I thought, “but you guys keep on talking about this guy, why won’t you tell me what he’s saying”? Now as a professor, my students are like, “don’t we need to read more Bourdieu”? And I’m like, “oh my god, I don’t want to teach a whole course on Bourdieu.”

So maybe there’s some sort of weird social dynamic going on here? On the one hand we demonstrate to our students that they have to do some theory, and at the same time we’re reluctant to give it to them — maybe because we know it’s not what they really need to do? It seems like there’s something maybe potentially not so healthy going on in the way we teach theory.

Ann: This concern pervades all of my teaching, particularly how to impart in a way that offers skills in how to unthink as well as to think what’s already there.  Many anthropologists, not unreasonably, want to unsettle what often seems obvious and given. I think it takes work to convey the ways in which you can stop and pause, and work with something, rather than work off it.

Rex: Work ‘with something’ and not ‘off of it’?

Ann:  ‘Working off it’ is saying “OK, I’m going to take this concept and then I’m going to impose it on my case study.”

Rex: I guess there is a question of connecting this project to anthropology. It sounds like sometimes people are taking the thinkers that you’ve mentioned and trying to do a natural science project with them, saying “here is a theoretical framework, which we’re going to use to analyze the data and make sense of it, and then we use the data to improve the model,” and it sounds like you’re saying, that’s not how we should be using those thinkers.

Ann: That’s right.

Rex: So for people who aren’t in New York and don’t get a chance to have a sense of this other way of using theory — is that how anthropology articulates with ICSI? That we’re trying to think of a different way of using theory to deal with our field experience? I’m not even going to say ‘data’, but ‘field experience’?

Ann: I see the impulse of the ICSI as one that speaks to various forms of knowledge production. In a book manuscript I just finished, I use the subtitle “concept work for our times,” trying to imagine what it is to do concept work, and particularly doing it with those concepts on which, in this case, some students of colonial and postcolonial situations so depend.

Those who know my work would not be surprised that I still return to think with and against Foucault.  By placing an “ethics of discomfort” center stage, he challenges his audience to find a way of working outside the comfort zone of the familiar.  Instead, he insists on places that produce a kind of intellectual vertigo or malaise; places where we not only lack ready answers, we don’t even know if our questions are the right ones to be asking.  One of the hardest tasks is to find concrete ways of doing this. And I think here we are well served by reading for styles of thought, styles of thinking, styles of reasoning. George Steiner reminds us that there is poetry in thought, and that thoughtful reading will reveal it in the worlds that we inhabit as ethnographers, philosophers, historians, geographers, and literary critics.

I imagine the ICSI seminars as providing a tenor and tone that invites and values that kind of thinking.

Rex: The New School is a place where people have been trying to do this for a long time. On the one hand, I’m always imagining other voices, maybe somebody who would say “Well, this is the death of anthropology, it’s the death of relevance, it’s the death of empiricism.” I’m sure you’ve heard these criticisms before: “Poetic thinking, what is that? We need to know what the per capita calorie intake is.”  But the New School is a place where people have been engaged in this for a long time. It’s a place that has its origins with a lot of original anthropological thinkers like Elsie Clews Parsons and Alexander Goldenweiser who are also intellectual and cosmopolitan.

Ann: I don’t see it as the death of anthropology in any way, obviously. Social inquiry is inspired by thinking in a grounded way. This is not just abstract thinking. There is nothing transcendental about philosophy. There’s nothing that should stand outside “worldliness,” as Edward Said put it. It is incumbent on us as scholars to be engaged, otherwise it doesn’t really matter.

The ICSI is an invitation to ask what critique might look like in an “effective” mode. Raymond Williams said it beautifully; that critique is not about judgment.  Judith Butler, in her consummately unadorned fashion, in “What is Critique?” reminds us, critique is a way of disclosing those very spaces that are secluded from us. That’s the task of the ICSI.

Rex: I think that point that it’s not abstract or transcendental, but it’s grounded in the concrete — that’s the anthropological argument that theory has to be connected somehow to ethnography or to lived experience in the field. I think that’s the thing a lot of people don’t understand about that work.

Ann: A radical pedagogy is demanding, exhilarating, arduous.  Critique, which Foucault once called the art of reflective insubordination (or insolence.), is insolence toward ourselves, toward our own givens, toward the baggage that we come with. It seems like it has to be something that we have to think collectively and cooperatively–but not consensually–about.

Rex: What genre is this seminar? Is it a summer session? Is it a field school? A reading group? Listening to you talk it really seems to me, as a Melanesianist, that this sounds like a men’s house. It sounds like ritual initiation: we’re going get you all together for a week. You know, lots of things happen in the men’s house… probably some of which you don’t want to emulate…

I’ve been working on Jung lately and it reminds me of Bollingen, or the teacher’s tisch in the old German academy, where there is this conscious attempt to really make it not just about the text, but about creating a liminal atmosphere, as Victor Turner said, where incredible things can happen and people feel like they’re in a new place.

Ann:  I don’t think of it as a field school. And though it is an intensive week in June, I don’t think of it as a summer session either. I love the concept of a Master Class in the arts. You learn from a skilled, experienced craftsman or artist, learning that comes with frequency and care and opens to improvisation. As for ‘masters’ of social inquiry, we can see it in their movement, a conceptual grace if you will, as they move between exposition and doubt, in the texts they juxtapose and the work that goes into formulating good questions. There’s a beauty in a master classes, an attentiveness to gesture, vocabulary (of body and mind) and tone.

In a dance master class, it’s also an atmosphere, a particular way of acquiring competence.  There’s also much that the master gets back from the students. The master becomes a better thinker when s/he enables and animates students to question in particular ways. That’s the real feedback. I would hope that the luminaries we invite will see the possibility for this kind of exchange.

So for me, initiating and directing this new institute feels like a labor of love. I’ll be present for all of it: at the morning seminars, the afternoon workshops, and the sundry meals and gatherings that happen in between.  I’ll also host an open coffee/tea hour for whoever wants to stop by.  I want it to be fun and fertile, fostering a disposition that doesn’t end when the week is over.

Rex: You mentioned earlier that these people are at a certain point in their career where they’re ready for this, maybe because they feel like they’ve already reproduced themselves through their graduate students and they want to address a broader audience, or maybe pass on what they do in a different way than just—

Ann: You’re right –that’s what I’m looking for. People who know enough to know what they don’t know; and people who are not or no longer entranced with cultivating a following.  For the faculty, it’s really a chance to undo yourself.  There’s a beautiful book, Examined Lives, by my New School colleague, James Miller, in which he looks at the ways in which philosophers from Socrates to Nietzsche developed practices of living that infused their analytic and conceptual labor. And of course the other way around.

Rex: On the one hand, there is a sort of sense that you know who you are, you have tenure, you feel comfortable in your skin. But sometimes the people I’ve met who are so good at conveying this sort of master class feel, where they walk in, they speak for 30 minutes, they lay it out for you, and your mind is blown—sometimes I feel like it’s not because they’re undoing themselves. I come from a much more conservative intellectual tradition, I think, than the one you’re citing here, so let me resist that language of undoing just for the moment.

I feel like it’s because they figured out what the central question in their life is. They realized that they’re probably never going to solve it, but they have cleared out all this space. They know it’s not this, it’s not that, and so they can just present it to you and be like: “How can we be different and equal? How do we turn a script into a lived experience?” It’s sort of that core self, that incredible coherence they have, even though ultimately this coherence is about a question and not an answer. You know? “Well, I read Kant again, this is time number forty, my question is still—”

So is it the undoing, or is it that they have such a clear sense of what the issues are in their lives, or are those two not opposites?

Ann: I don’t know. I’m certainly not one of those people who enjoy such a sense of clarity. I think it’s less a matter of having figured something out than coming to realize that you have to come up with new measures of what counts. It is a humbling moment, at this point; one is really not worried about being in the game and driven by it in the same way.

These are my priorities, not necessarily those of the faculty giving the Master Classes.  These are masters with their own gifts of pedagogy and creative thought, people immersed in their work. It is this sense of immersion and political sensibility that I invite them to share with us.

Rex: I think that’s good; I think if you said, “the most successful people in the academy will now, for a week, tell you the truth. Come, be part of our show, bask in our reflected glory” there’d be some people who are really into that. But the question is always: What kind of people is that project attracting? And is that really the kind of intervention in their biographies you want to have?

Ann: We’re going to be very attentive to what those who participate this first year find most rewarding. We’ll want feedback from participants on what the experience is like and from those leading the seminars as well.  Each year we will try to incorporate their thoughts into the new space we’re in the process of creating.

Rex: There are cultural issues as well. Many people coming from the global south are coming from a different place. I mean, living in Polynesia, where we have many students from the Pacific, many of the cultures here are hierarchical and people want a kind of apprentice master-student relationship, which is exactly what you don’t want to do. So they’re going to show up and, be like: “I thought Simon Critchley was going to give me his cliff notes for Heidegger, but instead we spent all this time talking about concepts”. So there’s a lot of challenges to work through. But I guess that’s a sign that it’s worth doing.

Ann: I think you’re right. I think that’s true about any project in which someone is known for what they do, people are sitting ready with their pencils poised.

Rex: Can I shift gears a little and talk about the backend of this? So the New School, you have an endowment, that’s good, and the school has been supportive, but…how can I ask this—this is not intended to be an earner for the New School?

Ann: No. The goal is to be self-sustaining. When I presented the idea of the institute to The New School for Social Research’s Board of Trustees, I was thrilled by their enthusiasm.  It’s a new intellectual venture–not nostalgia for what the New School was, but an affirmation of its contemporary commitment to address worldly problems, to sponsor face to face pedagogy, and to accommodate not only the well-heeled. The New School has long been committed to developing alternative forms in which we share and produce knowledge, create and critique it and develop practices that keep us grounded and attentive.

Rex: The reason I ask this is because you know, increasingly at many places, including my place, people are trying to be more entrepreneurial and find ways to raise money because they’re not getting money from the sources that they used to.

Some people are going to look at this and say, hey, we’ll have people come out for a week, we’ll charge them $1,500 a pop and that’s how we’ll pay for faculty travel for next semester. I think it’s interesting to hear the choices that you’ve made, because I suspect the people who say “let’s turn this into a cash cow,” will find it’s not working for them in the same way that I trust it will work for you And one of the reasons it’s not going to work is because they’re not doing it because it’s the right thing and because they’re driven to do it, they’re doing it to make money, and that’s not going work.

So, to totally co-opt this interview, that’s one of the main points and I always try to share in any forum even when I’m interviewing other people. Institutions that are successful like the New School are successful partially because they have donors who can start these programs and endowments to a certain extent, but also because they’re following their hearts.  And a lot of places when they try to emulate, they’re not following their own vision.

Ann: That’s so right, Alex. I wouldn’t have proposed this if I thought they wanted a cash cow. It emerged from something that I’ve long cared about–the politics of knowledge. How we use knowledge, how we produce it, who we share it with, what we imagine knowledge to do, what work it does in the world.

Rex: I think you are one of these people who have figured out what their central question is!

Ann: No, no. I haven’t at all! I always feel so twisted and hesitant in the face of what I don’t know. I’m not being coy.  How important is what we’re doing now? How can one develop priorities?  You know, not everybody is Judith Butler, who can enthrall a reverberating crowd at Occupy. What are the sundry ways that we can draw on what we can offer without pretending to be something that we’re not? Without disowning the fact that we live in this really privileged world, an intellectual world in which we get to learn every single day—how do we do that in a way that has some integrity to it? And can we face ourselves at the end of the day?

As our aim here is to model good practice, and to benefit from the collective intelligence of Savage Minds, we present below the project research design for constructive critique. In brief, we’ve excavated a found hard drive, and while in the next post we’ll document for you our process, our written and photographic records (stay tuned for a Harris Matrix), and our interpretative outputs, here we detail the nature of our field site and field method, ethical engagement with our excavation, and sustainability/access to our data.

Colleen is the principle author of this research design, and it’s important for me to say that I’ve learned much through my collaboration with her. As someone who has spent the past 10 years outside of the excavation trench, it was very meaningful for me to jump back in—using single context recording no less!—with Colleen as my guide. Here is the project whose results you’ll see reported over the next week on Savage Minds…

Media Archaeology Drive Project (MAD-P): Research Design

MAD-P Staff

• Dr Colleen Morgan
• Neil Gevaux
• Dr Sara Perry

Introduction

Hard disk drives have been used to store data of all types since their introduction by IBM in 1956. Since that time, hard disk drives have gotten progressively smaller and less expensive, thus integrating them into the daily life of most people in industrialized nations. Even as they have become pervasive in daily life, they are rarely visible until they stop functioning, sometimes resulting in a catastrophic loss of data. The term “Data Archaeology” has been created to characterize both the attempt to recover data after the failure of a hard drive and to investigate obsolete data formats. Similarly, the term “Digital Archaeology” is used to characterize the investigation of old, out of date websites, and the growing body of digital practice in archaeology. Until recently there has been relatively little overlap between these fields (Law & Morgan 2014; Pogacar 2014).

The MAD-P team has targeted the hard drive for an investigation into the connections between Foucauldian media archaeologies and archaeological practice as understood by archaeologists. From this investigation MAD-P hopes to realize the potential for an “archaeological media archaeology,” with this excavation prompting critical examination of both fields. There are several key questions that prompt the excavation of a hard drive: is an archaeological fieldwork methodology useful for understanding the contents and structure of a hard drive? Can archaeological methodology be adapted in a way that is useful for media archaeologists? What does the archaeological investigation of a hard drive tell us that a more historiographical approach cannot? Can the excavation of a hard drive build on the previous work of contemporary archaeologists that productively makes the familiar unfamiliar (Buchli and Lucas 2001)?

To address these questions we have designed a program of research that addresses a single hard drive, with the potential to expand the project into other hard drives, but also into other forms of media archaeology. In this document, we provide the background of this work, describe the history and context of our field site, detail our field methodology, and then discuss the future of MAD-P investigations.

Background

MAD-P was conceived as part of an ongoing series of collaborations between digital archaeologists at the University of York (UK). The University of York has cultivated a network of digital archaeologists through a series of initiatives. As the home institution of both Internet Archaeology, an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal, and the Archaeological Data Service, which has supported archiving of archaeological data since 1996, the Department of Archaeology at the University of York has been involved in digital archaeology on an institutional level for nearly 20 years. More recently the Centre for Digital Heritage was founded in 2012 as an international collaborative venture, with an annual conference, field school, and funds for start-up initiatives.

In this context, MAD-P was conceived as a project that would explore the boundaries of digital archaeology, and test the utility of materials-based archaeological excavation for understanding media archaeology.

History and context of our field site

After consulting with Neil Gevaux, the Department of Archaeology Computer Officer, we identified several potential hard drive candidates for excavation. As we were interested in the contents of the drive, we requested a working hard drive that had been rendered redundant. We selected a 40GB Samsung Hard Drive, model SP0411C. The hard drive had been made in Korea in September of 2004, and bought by the archaeology department shortly after. At the time of purchase, 40GB was a relatively small amount of storage space as 80 and 160 GB drives were readily available, and a 500GB drive was available by 2005. The drive cost about 50 USD. It is unknown if it was bought as part of a pre-assembled computer or on its own. Since the time of purchase, the history of ownership of the hard drive has been lost.

That the history of the hard drive had been lost was ideal for us, as MAD-P wanted to approach the hard drive as an unfamiliar landscape; as Buchli and Lucas suggest, alienation from familiar objects exposes the transgressiveness of archaeology, an “almost perverse exercise in making familiar categorisations and spatial perceptions unfamiliar – a translation from an everyday perceptual language into an archaeological one” (2001, 9). The drive had been rendered obsolete after a decade and had been discarded.  Archaeologies of consumerism incorporate “all aspects of consumer societies – political, religious, educational, legal, leisure, economic, aesthetic, and so on” (Majewski and Schiffer 2001, 27). As such, these categories will be examined in our final report.

Field Methodology

The excavation of this hard drive will be modeled on the Museum of London Archaeology recording system. This recording system follows the single context planning system which records each stratigraphic “event” in sequence. Each of these events is given a context number, photographed, recorded in a standardized form, drawn by hand, and then removed to reveal the next event.

Without knowing the full extent of the data stored on the hard drive, MAD-P decided to employ a sampling strategy that involved following folder structures of the hard drive, drilling “down” through the layers and recording the contents of a single set of folders on the drive. Preliminary investigation revealed that the drive was relatively unpopulated, so we were able to select a sequence of folders that offered a greater “depth” of deposited data.

After the folder structure has been explored through this selective sample, MAD-P will commence the physical excavation of the hard drive, disassembling it piece-by-piece. As this is an irreversible process, Neil Gevaux attempted to back up the hard drive to preserve any data, yet permissions on the drive prevented the storage of some material. After consideration, MAD-P decided to follow through anyway, as this irreversible process more closely reflected the affordances of archaeological methodology as a destructive investigation.

Each component of the excavated drive will be appropriately labeled and stored for further analysis. A future repository for both the excavation material and the archive has not yet been determined, but they are currently in locked storage at the University of York.

Ethics

The investigation of this hard drive had the potential to reveal inappropriate or indiscreet information about students or colleagues in the department; even were it not so, a discussion about the ethics of research is a necessary component to an archaeological research design. Hard drives can hold vast quantities of personal information that could be used for fraudulent or hurtful activities, as well as more indirect information, not intended for public scrutiny, that could be wielded with deleterious consequences for a variety of audiences. While these are potentially interesting for archaeological enquiry, connecting these activities to individuals was not a desired outcome of this research. This marks perhaps the greatest deviation of digital archaeological practice from data archaeology, as the specific information is not necessarily as interesting as the configuration of these data.  As such, MAD-P decided to (1) avoid disclosing the identities of the drive owners if there was personal information available on the drive, (2) inform any identifiable individuals of this research, and (3) give these individuals the option to remove themselves from this research.

Future investigations

After the results from the current MAD-P investigations are fully reported, further inquiry into hard drive archaeology may involve excavations of additional hard drives. The MAD-P team would very much like to involve a more multidisciplinary team, including engineers, hard drive recovery specialists, and media archaeologists to fully investigate the social context of the hard drive. As these excavations continue to proceed, we will fully document the process and make the archive available for other researchers, and we urge that future work be made available in the same way. At this stage we will employ a Creative Commons Attribution license, to encourage the broad dissemination and re-use of this research.

There are a series of factors that I think contribute to this predicament wherein archaeology is simultaneously recognised as both highly and hardly theorised in terms of its mediation. I’ve discussed it elsewhere, but media studies tend to be relegated to the last chapter of archaeological textbooks, to little more than a single sentence of acknowledgement in other manuscripts, or to a discussion curtailed around only a few select modes of mass communication (i.e., film, television, the web). Where it does have presence, it’s often collapsed into a focus on “the public”, generating analysis that gravitates around popular culture alone.

But this situation is contradictory and fundamentally nonsensical.

Media – in the broad sense, as agents for doing/saying/sharing/conveying things – are a (if not the) primary means through which archaeologists come to enter the speciality, then learn how to do, think through, and communicate the discipline. They are the bridge not simply between academic and non-academic audiences, but also between specialists themselves. Media are often our first encounter with the field and with subsequent fieldwork output, so to consign their discussion to the conclusion (in the vein of an afterthought) or to pop culture (as if such a bounded and prejudiced category of humanity exists) guarantees that they will continue to be marginalised within the subject area.

It is no wonder, then, that media archaeologists themselves might not routinely turn to archaeology for insight. Archaeologists have often not challenged the flattened conception of their own discipline that circulates within both the archaeological and the media archaeological scholarship, and as such, there continues to be a need to robustly map out the productive, multi-stranded, impossibly entangled relationships between media and archaeology. In doing so, that map must attend to what media archaeologists are themselves scrutinising. This means asking questions about how archaeologists construct knowledge about media; how these media reverberate back into the construction of archaeological knowledge itself; how archaeological analysis can constructively contribute to media archaeologies, and how media archaeologies might themselves enable archaeologists to rethink their subjects.

Many have attempted to define ‘media archaeology’, and despite endless references to its impalpable nature (as an ‘indiscipline’ or ‘travelling discipline’ or a ‘mobile field’ or ‘variantology’, etc.), their definitions tend to rotate around what Cronin (2011) calls efforts to “excavat[e] forgotten, neglected and suppressed media-cultural phenomena, helping us to probe deeper into a culture’s canonized narratives so as to unearth: ‘discontinuity, rupture, threshold, limit, series, and transformation’ present in all historical analysis (Foucault 2002, 23).” Media archaeologists identify with a range of scholars, including not just Foucault, but Friedrich Kittler, Siegfried Zielinski, Walter Benjamin, and Marshall McLuhan among others. Their work, as Goddard (2014:3) writes, is effectively a playing around with these multiple streams of enquiry to achieve “a reading of both contemporary media and media history against the grain…a common rejection of dominant teleological accounts of media and technological history.” And, as per Parikka (2012), it often converges around four themes: modernity, cinema, Foucauldian histories of the present, and alternative/alternate/imaginary histories.

As is characteristic of all emerging fields, media archaeology has been subject to a range of critiques, generally centred upon its lack of a cohesive methodological toolkit and an intellectual eclecticism that spins it off in innumerable, often unmanageable directions. Barreneche (2013) describes it as a “rather slippery notion”, Nicoll (2013) as an enigma, Potts (2012) as loose. While many value this “anarchic status” – as praised by Shoback (2011) – suggesting that it is in such disorder that revolution and unanticipated discovery manifest themselves, others – like Goddard (2013) are clear about its faults: “it is debatable whether this in itself is enough to constitute a media archaeological project that is sufficiently systematic to warrant the term, rather than being simply particular or impressionistic.” This lack of systematisation is drawn out in various critiques, which question the methodological rigour of media archaeology and call for deeper consideration of, as Soon (2014) puts it, “what happens when the blackbox is opened.” Elsewhere, Goddard (2014:8) is necessarily critical about media archaeology’s common abandonment of linear temporality and temporal shifts, which “risks becoming only a series of eternal moments of invention…plucked out of the economic, social and technological modes of development they were embedded in and given a semi-eternal status as the great inventions of great men with an undisguised uncritical act of constructing media archaeological heroes.”

There is an irony in the fact that media archaeological work almost always validates itself through reference to its transdisciplinary nature—capitalising on the theoretical and practical toolkits of a range of subjects (e.g., see Huhtamo and Parikka 2011; Parikka in interview with Hertz 2010)—yet virtually never cites archaeology. At the same time, one does wonder if the same critiques might be applied to archaeology, particularly some of the recent archaeological studies of contemporary material culture, including contemporary media. Here we find that some of the methods are no more circumscribed than in media archaeology, and that there is often little evidence of systematisation of archaeological analysis of all media components, comprising their hardware (the material culture of the media object), their discursive content, their interfaces, and – if digital – their code.

Nevertheless, we find the void in knowledge cross-over between archaeology and media archaeology regrettable because, by our reckoning, archaeology has the capacity to flesh out many of the existing instabilities in the media archaeological framework – and vice versa. As Colleen put in it our talk last week at the media archaeologies conference, archaeologists are critically interested in context, what Marshall McLuhan terms a “galaxy or environment” — in the active processes that reshape people and technologies. Similarly, we have a range of standard tools in place to enable robust interrogation of such contexts. Moreover, archaeology’s alliance with the media archaeological framework has constructive epistemological consequences for both fields of practice. Such consequences are already hinted in the existing ‘archaeological media archaeology’ scholarship, including studies by Christine Finn, Cassie Newland, Rodney Harrison, Mark Edmonds and Chris Witmore (see Angela Piccini’s summary of these projects in the abstract for the Media Archaeology’s conference session).

One of the only literal excavations of media that we are aware of in the published archaeological literature is Moshenska’s (2014) excavation of a memory stick, brilliantly encapsulated in a self-authored comic strip (which, again, demonstrates the media-dynamic expertise of archaeologists), and documented in the journal Post-Medieval Archaeology. During routine excavations, Mosheska’s team uncovered a USB stick 30cm below ground. They sent the stick to a University College London conservator, then plugged it into the computer and went through the files, noting that it was a mix of schoolwork, porn, and music, probably belonging to a male school student. As Moshenska writes,

“I predict that in the near future we will, by necessity, look to the specialist field of digital data recovery for skills, analogies and analytical concepts to borrow, just as we have already borrowed from fields such as forensic science and performance art… Archaeologists studying the digital world will need to draw on these [librarianship, archiving] fields of expertise, as well as the experience and abilities of computer scientists and data recovery experts, if we want to even begin to make sense of this vast and intricate body of knowledge.”

I would extend his comments to suggest that we can also work productively with media archaeologists, and they with us, because – in combination – these fields are well-poised to drive forward (digital) media theorising and practice. As Colleen outlined at our conference talk, amongst many things, archaeologists bring with them:

• a rigorous methodology based in documentation, one that encourages and hones attention to detail, to mundanities, to careful, long term and systematic study of minutiae and the everyday via embodied process
• an emphasis on recording observations through such embodied process (including drawing); as archaeology is a destructive practice, preservation via record is a priority
• a focus on fieldwork, situated learning, and collaborative knowledge generation through team work, including extended periods of time over multiple seasons attending to a task via collective practice; this routine and familiarity provide a distinct depth of knowledge (sensory knowledge, historical knowledge, collective knowledge); such practice also appreciates that group participation and the valuing of multiple perspectives have greater value than independent approaches
• a well-tested, long-term focus on material culture that has generated (or incorporated) tools such as the chaîne opératoire, typological analysis, ethnographic analogy, seriation, object biographies, experimental archaeology, phenomenology, and material sciences

And, for us, media archaeology is especially notable for its:

• explicit, unapologetic concern for the interplay between past, present, future; its concern for critique, political commentary, and social change
• valuing of play, performance, exploration, messiness, chaos; its willingness to embrace, rather than dismiss or supress confusion
• overt efforts to decentre and defamiliarise common interpretations
• concern for storytelling and narrative-building about media objects and media effects/affects

What is arguably needed now is a rigorous research design and adapted methodological toolkit to pull these fields together and provide a baseline against which similar studies in the future might be built, critiqued, shaped or otherwise positioned.

Stay tuned!

Teaching is a choice for me. I have a full-time job, a MORE than full-time job, running the Burlesque Hall of Fame, and much of what little spare time I have left is spent as a caretaker for my father (who suffers from Alzheimer’s) and maintaining some kind of social life, but when I can pick up a class, I do. I enjoy the classroom experience, and if you’ve ever worked at a community college, you know how rewarding it can be.

My classes are typically full of very bright, hopeful young people (along with a scattering of returning students and retirees) who have been terribly served by the educational system. Many of them are minorities and/or from poor families, which means not only has their K-12 education been abysmally bad (on purpose, I’d argue), but so has the rest of their lives during their developmental years.

So much of what I do in my classes is aimed not just at teaching the rudiments of cultural anthropology but helping them develop from the subject material something of a toolkit for contextualizing (and hopefully improving) their own lives. The hope is always that you can help them overcome the deficiencies of their elementary and secondary educations, nudging them towards stronger reading comprehension, better critical thinking skills, and a clearer understanding of the ways the social order in which they are embedded works.

But of course, they also have to learn basic anthropology. Subsistence strategies, kinship charts, political organization, the types of religious practice, and so on. Ironically, this is the stuff that I tended to pay little attention to in grad school, where I was more focused on theories of language and power, state domination and resistance, and historical process. So I’ve spent 11 years deepening my understanding of the basics — to the point, I fear, where I’ve fallen almost completely out of touch with the state of the art.

So I’m asking Savage Minds readers to help me catch up. Here’s the challenge: What should I read that well-represents what’s going on in cultural anthropology today? Bonus points (note: no points will actually be awarded) if it helps me breathe some new life into my classes. I’ll remind you that my time is limited — I figure I can probably pull off two or three extra books over the course of the semester, provided they aren’t Debt: The First 5,000 Years– or Capital In the Twenty-First Century-length. I also read a lot in nonprofit administration, museum practice, and fundraising, so, you know, something with a bit of zing would be welcome. And if its available on Kindle, all the better!

Paul Farmer was never an orthodox anthropologist. As an undergraduate I remember reading his article, An Anthropology of Structural Violence. It took me by surprise.

Not because I was unaccustomed to scholars arguing that we need to link the ethnographically visible to history and political economy – or, in Farmer’s words, “the interpretive project of modern anthropology to a historical understanding of the large scale social and economic structures in which affliction is embedded”. No, my class had already read Sidney Mintz. It was somewhat fascinating to read an anthropologist who at the same time was a doctor committed to heal the sick in his ethnographic surroundings. But that’s not really what got me, either. 

What startled a young student was Farmer’s unorthodox reply to the comments section of his article. A whole A-Team of academics had come out – Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Linda Green, Didier Fassin and others – giving careful and polite criticisms to the arguably crude concept of “structural violence”. Farmer’s short reply broke the mold. It took no effort to amend the purported weaknesses of his own argument, or to point out inconsistencies among his critics. It made no attempt to elaborate his vision for the discipline. Rather, Farmer remarked that “the concept of structural violence may or may not prove useful, and the criticism offered by my colleagues is instructive and welcome.” He went on to describe how human suffering in Haiti had become increasingly acute since the paper had been published. A recent coup d’état compounded the already stark consequences of a US aid embargo to Haiti. Thus, without excuse, Farmer concluded that

These conditions, which directly affect my clinical work, preclude a more extended consideration of my colleagues’ commentaries but do not lessen my gratitude for both the forum in which to air these views and the clarity of these responses.

Put otherwise: “As a physician, there are times when academic discussion stops being useful. That time has now come. Kind regards, Paul.” When I recently met with Dr. Farmer, he seemed amused that I remembered his response. “Yes, that’s exactly what I said!” he told me with a smile, as we sat down before his guest lecture at the University of Oslo.

Paul Farmer: What I said was that structural violence, it’s just a concept. We’ll get another one. I am not wed to it. “I find it useful, and I find your critique useful. Thank you.” That’s how I feel. I feel that critical thinking is always important as a matter. And if a concept isn’t useful to someone, they should find a new concept. We should all find new concepts.

When you say you were surprised in reading my response, I hope you were somewhat pleased? Because the real fight is against poverty and injustice. And there are lots ways to have a clear analysis of it, and to have a strategy to addressing poverty and injustice in lots of different ways. But you know, to be wed to a concept or an academic theory is dangerous. That’s a 19^th century trap. I wouldn’t recommend it to you as a student.

I hope some of your other teachers are saying that. Because what teachers are usually saying is “I want you to be wed to my theory.” I am saying, “I won’t do that”. It’s a theory! It’s an idea! And it’s important to have ideas. There are a lot of power in ideas and concepts. But that’s not the only thing that we should do. We should also be very concerned with the pragmatic needs of people all around us, and as I have said those are food, food security, basic health services, public safety.

Anthropology of Health Economics

SW: What role do you see for a critical anthropology, or a critical social science, which is able to contribute positively to its surroundings?

PF: Well, my favorite anthropologists are all doing that already – Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Arthur Kleinman, Unni Wikan. That is also what I try to do, to say “what is the big picture here, how do institutions work in ways that lift people from poverty or do not?” That is the overall question I am interested in. So that’s a very constructive role to take.

SW: Are there particular topics which you would like to see more students address?

PF: Yes. What about a critical anthropology of health policy or health economics? I am still waiting for that. For example, there should be a lot of people writing PhDs about how notions of cost-effectiveness are deployed in settings of scarcity, and then they should pick apart the notion of “cost” and the notion of “effectiveness”. But I haven’t seen those studies yet.

How can you say something is cost-effective, if you don’t understand “cost” or “effectiveness”? It is two powerful words hung together by a hyphen. We have to be very careful when we claim that something is cost-effective or cost-ineffective, if we haven’t really even understood the cost of something.

In health policy, for example, we seldom hear anyone talking about the cost of inaction. Let us consider how much it costs to do nothing about, say, treating AIDS if it is already the leading infectious killer of young adults in the world, which it was in 1999, when it surpassed tuberculosis. What does it cost not to have a health equity plan? A lot. We need to figure out the cost of inaction – a topic which is much understudied. Action has cost, but so does inaction.

To me it’s urgent that we understand this prevailing ideology of cost-effectiveness, because it has terrifying real-life consequences.

Biosocial complexities

PF: But generally I think some of the critical thinking is not as critical as it thinks it is.

SW: In what sense do you mean that?

PF: Well, to me the only way to have real critical thought is to understand various forms of outcome. Let’s take an example from Russia. In 1998, on the 50^th anniversary of the universal declaration of human rights, I was in Moscow. A debate was going on; there were some Human Rights experts, mostly lawyers, and some people from the prison system, generals in uniforms. And there was a big debate going on between them about why a lot of young people were dying in detention. And the experts who thought they were being critical were saying “these young people are dying of starvation”.  And the people in the prison system were saying “no, they are not.” They weren’t. They were dying of multi drug resistant tuberculosis. The self-defined progressives had no clue what was going on bio-socially. And there is a lack of that multi-disciplinary understanding, unfortunately, in much critical thinking. These analyses are weak, superficial and disciplinarily enclosed. They are unable to understand the biosocial complexities we face today.

Now, to me, any critical analysis in medical anthropology, which tries to understand the real dynamics of suffering and poverty, needs to understand such things as the workings of drug resistant tuberculosis. That to me is real critical anthropology: It understands political economy, it understands how power works, it understands how embodiment happens, it understands how airborne and waterborne diseases and are actually transmitted – it understands all those things, and is sophisticated in a way that could not have happened without many of the tools that are unconventional in today’s anthropology, such as lab data. All of these things are part of what you need to make any reasonable claim to causality.

I did read a post over on Allegra by Isaac Morrison about this whole “ontological turn” thing that makes some good points.  Here’s how it starts:

It’s taken me a while to mentally unpack my experiences from the 2013 AAA conference. The conference itself came at a strange time for me, fresh on the heels of the loss of two close family members and the acquisition of two new jobs.

I bounced from session to session, cursed the Hilton’s Wi-Fi, delivered a workshop, periodically stepped out for work-related phone calls, sat on a panel or two, and indulged in Chicago’s culinary offerings. I collected business cards and passed business cards out. I reconnected with some old acquaintances, made a few new friends, and took copious notes while trying to make sense of a sprawling and diverse agglomeration of oblique specialties and deep knowledge.

Strange oppositions were the order of the day, and the most striking of them was my experience of strolling out of a panel on the importance of public engagement only to overhear a fresh-faced PhD student chirp “Marshal Sahlins is about to beat the crap out of Bruno Latour” while scampering past me on his way to a panel on “the ontological turn”

Now, I’ve had a fondness for ontological self-indulgence since the early 1990s, but all I could think about was the room I had just left full of deer-in-headlights PhD students all wondering where and how they were going to find jobs. The older faculty members on the panel had offered little consolation – they made it clear that failure to secure a full-time academic job wasn’t really a failure anymore, since the full-time academic jobs were vanishing anyway from the US job market and worldwide.

Later, Morrison asks this question: “If somebody asked you, ‘what’s the hot topic in the field of anthropology right now?’ would you be eager to tell them about the ben-wa glass bead game that is the ontological turn?'”

The rest is here.  Please feel free to make your case for or against anthropology and its ontological turn in the comments.

UPDATE 1/27/14: In the comments below, responding to a discussion about the current crisis in academic anthropology, and explaining his understanding of that crisis, Rex wrote: “These are the things that created the crisis we find ourselves in. Not ‘Writing Culture’.”  Here is my extended response to Rex:

I’d argue that the larger political economy of higher ed (and academic anthro) is just part of the issue. A big part, but still just a part. I think the current crisis is also about the kind of anthropology that has taken shape in the last few decades. It’s about what anthropologists do with their concepts, ideas, knowledge. I definitely don’t think it makes sense to blame post-modernism, or “critical theory,” or “Writing Culture” for contributing to the current fix we’re in. To me those are just sets of ideas or knowledge–they don’t “do” anything on their own. I do think, however, that it is fair to talk about the ideas and conversations we fixate upon, where those conversations actually go (via publishing, conferences, etc), how we transmit our values and ideas through training students, and, ultimately, the “anthropologists” and “anthropology” we have produced over the last three decades. I think we, as a discipline, have sort of painted ourselves into a corner–effectively removing ourselves from the public sphere. With noted exceptions. We do this–sometimes–by retreating into our own corners and closed, specialized conversations. I think this withdrawal from public engagement has seriously contributed to our current dilemma. There is a reason why so many people in the US have no clue what we do. It’s not just because they “don’t get it.”

So, overall, my skepticism about the ontology-related excitement isn’t so much about whether or not I find ontology personally useful or relevant. It’s more about whether or not the “ontological turn” fever is just another in a series of inward-looking shifts that further entrenches us in our own little worlds. Sometimes this kind of excitement about a particular body of theory–I think of “theory” as a tool for understanding the world–is akin to photographers who get all worked up about certain camera equipment, and that’s all they talk about. By and large, nobody cares about this but the photographers themselves. Granted, I love a good Leica or 4×5 view camera, but I really don’t want to sit around talking about it all day. It’s the photographs that matter. Sure, the process matters…but it’s important to balance process with practice. I think anthropologists find themselves caught in this trap a little too often. We like to talk shop, a lot.

So if ontology is the next big thing, great. Our challenge is to balance all the excited, insular shop talk with the doing anthropology thing. To me that means taking anthropology out into the world and finding ways to communicate our results, and it also means turning the anthropological eye upon the political and economic systems in which we exist on a day to day basis. Beyond that, I’m pretty sure our wider audiences could care about which tools we’re currently fixated upon. The AAA meetings are a place to have our internal conversations, but they’re also (potentially) a place for initiating deeper public engagement. I, for one, would be excited if our next “big thing” was less about our own conversations and theories, and more about what we’re actually doing with our ideas and methods. At home, and abroad.

On the Particularity of the Empathetic Subject

It is great that the particularity of the empathetic subject emerged as an important strand in the comments thread of Dr.LB’s second empathy post (e.g. here). Twist this strand around her anchor point of the particular contemporary understanding of empathy as a good and, let’s say, personable, orientation to others, and we can see how empathy emerges as a capacity for recognition of human identity in which the apparently (but not actually) universal value of human life is ground.  Didier Fassin has done a lot of work to describe the often insidious and sometimes deadly effects of this affective politics (which claims it is nothing of the sort).  Check out his book Humanitarian Reason, to think about the shadow sides of empathy, even, or exactly when and where it finds the kinds of people who are its proper subjects.

On the Specific Objects of Empathetic Regard

What about the objects of empathetic regard? It is so interesting that, on the one hand, the genealogy of Einfühlung that Dr.LB offers is grounded in a proper human subject regarding things, like mountains, or even not-quite-things, like optical illusions, and projecting into them (i.e. imbuing them with) some lively human sensations. And, on the other hand, empathy as a contemporary politicomoral imperative is supposed to be about humans, that is, about other living beings enough like ‘you’ that ‘you’ can ‘put yourself in their shoes’.

I mean us to take ‘shoes’ here as a marker of human specificity, and also to immediately note that we regularly extend this shoe wearing specificity to other companion species (like horses, and occasionally dogs), who are exemplary as both objects and subjects of empathy (this mutual capacity for empathetic regard being part of the logic that renders horses and dogs exemplary therapy animals for soldiers and veterans with PTSD).

What’s more, we also regularly extend this specificity to non-shoe wearing animals, like orcas and great apes, when we render them objects and properly perceptive subjects of empathy–and therefore human-like–so as to argue for their humane treatment or their human rights.

The ability to render other species human-like relies on a recognition of an already existing commensurability between ‘exceptional’ (sacred?) fully human beings and other (killable?) kinds; an instance of what Mel Chen calls “is-and-is-not” politics (as in, a human being is-and-is-not an animal, so an animial-can-and-can-not be a human being). Here, again, we might find Fassin, and the insidious problem of grounding of rights in lowest common denominators of life itself, such as the capacity to feel, fear, and suffer traumatically from pain.

(Or was that Animacy?)

While I have been talking about humanness here, I have actually been leading us (barefoot?) down the primrose path toward Mel Chen’s iteration of animacy, a cline of liveness, sensibility, and (linguistic) agentivity, which articulates bio and necropoitical arrangements of proper lives and deaths.

Empathy fits nicely into the normative articulation of animacy that puts a category of (able-bodied, normatively conscious and sensate, masculinized, capital unconstrained, racially and sexually unmarked) human at the top, and some thing like a stone at the bottom (speaking of stones, we could anachronistically read Elizabeth Povinelli’s 1995 article “Do Rocks Listen?” as about what happens ‘when animacies meet’).

Coming back to where I started this point (about the proper objects of empathy), thinking in terms of bio/necropolitics and animacy is a helpful way to consider what/how empathy does to a horse, a dog, an orca, a great ape, as well as to a mountain. After all, though feeling empathy for a mountain might sound a little strange these days (perhaps anti-fracking activists would protest?), Eduardo Kohn and Bhrigupati Singh have each recently made me feel otherwise with regard to forests (Singh foreshadowed the forestry of his forthcoming book at the Undeadening Death panel in Chicago, suggesting that as the life of, and in, an Indian forest dies into silence, no one may be compelled to make a sound).  And I leave that there before I digress to here.

Final, disgusting thoughts, anyone?

One more thing to throw up. There is a whole burgeoning field of “disgustology” within psychology that seems, in my glancing contact with it, to suggest that disgust is the opposite of empathy (in the positive and neurologized senses), and that if we can make one individual person (like a securely middle class commuter) regard one Other individual person (like someone on the subway who looks dirty and smells of urine) with empathy, we can make that person overcome their disgust, feel empathy for (but not with) the Other (here the ’empathy’ becomes ‘recognition predicated on common human-not-animal identity’), and work our way out of empathy deficit (I heard one researcher present a mechanism for producing this effective affective shift: Make ads with pictures of homeless people eating sandwiches, or perhaps other barely ‘humanizing’ things).

So, thanks to Dr.LibertyBell, and all the SMers who continue to chime in on her empathy posts. Here’s to a 2014 full of generative and companionate thinking!

In my first post, I proposed that anthropology might be particularly well suited to thinking through the concept of empathy. In North America, “empathy” has come to be a prominent term across the caring arts. In areas ranging from self-help to health care, empathy seems to be something that can and should be cultivated. In 2006, President Obama declared that an “empathy deficit” was more pressing than a federal budgetary deficit. The scale of this claim reflects an increasingly popular view of empathy as producer of solutions to large, complex issues. In his 2010 bestseller Empathic Civilization, American social theorist Jeremy Rifkin argued that “global empathic consciousness” could restore a global economy and solve climate change.

Last weeks’ commentators aptly pointed out that “empathy” has become a gloss for broader concerns. Its implementation from the perspective of those of you working with social workers, health care professionals and so on made it clear that institutionalized empathy is a downloading of problems onto already thinly stretched personnel. As a former pubic schoolteacher, I can agree that it is tempting to dismiss empathy as a smoke screen for troubles of our times. Yet, I keep coming back to anthropology’s shared principles with empathy—specifically perspective taking, withholding judgment, and dwelling with the people we work with. I am not arguing ‘for’ or ‘against’ empathy. Frankly, I am curious. What meanings has this term come to hold in the context of North America, and what very real kinds of ways of relating to Others has empathy been trying to capture but somehow can’t?  Puzzled by the empathy boom, I went to a good friend for insights. As an analytic philosopher specializing in emotions and emotion history, she had a lot to teach me about the crooked conceptual path of the term. She was so generous in sharing what she knows, I thought I’d share what I’d learned here. From Einfühlung to Empathy

In 1909, Edward Titchener coined the English “empathy” while working on the psychology of perception at Cornell. “Empathy” was a translation of the German “Einfühlung,” and Titchener’s account of the term is quite convoluted.  Einfühlung had been used since the second half of the 18th century to explain how spectators perceive aesthetic objects.  The idea was that aesthetic perception involves projection of the spectator’s kinaesthetic experience into the object of perception.  As in, as I approach a mountain, I experience sensations of rising and expansion, and project these feelings into the mountain.

The 19th century German psychologist Theodor Lipps provided the most thorough account of Einfühlung.  Lipps was a translator and fan of the work of 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, which includes some of the most well known writing on sympathy in Western intellectual history.  Although Lipps’ account of Einfühlung does not refer directly to Hume, it is hard to deny a connection. Lipps first used Einfühlung to theorize optical illusions, but extended the concept to interpersonal perception.  For example, as I see you extend your arm, I might experience a sensation of forward movement, and project that feeling into you.

The concept of Einfühlung has influenced thought on a variety of intellectual problems, in a variety of contexts, but in most cases has not inspired the kind of grand claims we see in contemporary talk about empathy.  Early 20th century phenomenologists invoked Einfühlung to address the philosophical problem of solipsism: How do I recognize that there are minds besides my own?  Einfühlung also played a role in the development of the hermeneutic tradition in the human sciences.  In these and other discursive contexts, Einfühlung has been a source of fruitful ideas, but has not generated grand claims.

Empathy’s Clinical Crossover

Grand aspirations for empathy seem tied to more recent developments in Anglo-American psychology. Freud greatly admired Lipps, and initially discussed Einfühlung to explain the psychology of jokes.  Later, Freud viewed Einfühlung as central to rapport in clinical contexts.  The idea of empathy as useful to psychotherapy developed importance, notably through Carl Rogers after the 1930s and Heinz Kohut after the 1960s.  Both use the English “empathy” to describe a principle that facilitates helpful response to emotional suffering.  However, for Rogers, empathy is tied to unconditional positive regard.  Kohut, on the other hand, vehemently criticizes equation of empathy with kindness or love, arguing that, although empathy is the root of good, it can equally be used for ill.

We are now closer to the views of empathy in Brown, Obama, and Rifkin. In Anglo-American psychology and neuroscience of the past 60 years, we find the following:

• The idea of empathy as a general principle of positive relationships. From the 1960s onward, developmental psychologists have promoted the biologized psychoanalytic idea that the quality of infants’ interactions with caregivers predicts normal development.  Positive quality includes perspective-taking and emotional attunement, now considered basic components of empathy.

• The idea of empathy as a principle of helping. From the 1980s onward, some social psychologists have defended the controversial theory that empathy makes altruistic motivation possible.

• The idea that empathy is brained-based.  In the early 2000s, neuroscientists discovered the “mirror neuron,” and presented it as the basis of empathy.  Although disputed within neuroscience, mirror neuron theory is widely endorsed in other academic domains and in popular culture.

Brown, Obama, and Rifkin rely on ideas that present empathy as a biological human capacity, associated with concern for distress, connection, and helping. But such ideas are neither ahistorical nor universal, and they do not reflect the entire conceptual history of empathy.  What then are the contexts of contemporary Western assumptions around empathy, and how could they lead to grand claims and phrases like “empathy deficit” and “global empathic consciousness”?  These questions seem appropriate to anthropology. As a discipline that hinges on things like attunement and perspective taking, I think we may have something valuable to add to these conversations.