Tag Archives: Theory

Anthropological “isms,” post and otherwise.

Bound by Recognition

A few weeks ago I finished “Patchen Markell’s”:http://home.uchicago.edu/~pmarkell/index2.html book “Bound by Recognition”:http://www.citeulike.org/user/rex/article/241984 . In my opinion it is utterly superb — and those are not words that I use often. The book has many things to reccomend it but what I like so much about it is the way Markell is able to describe a skepticism about the moral certainty that prods to action which I have long felt inarticulately. In other words the book is not just good, but it snaps neatly into a missing space in the puzzle of my own personal philosophy.

Given the somewhat lefty circles I run in, my friends are often surprised at how unwilling I am to engage in denouncing those who hold political positions antithetical to mine. Those who have never met me in person have perhaps seem the recent discussions comments on the various “posts by Oneman”:/author/oneman/ and the seemingly interminable threads that emerge from them. My hesitancy to speak the anthropological truth to the public — to “make the world safe for difference” — is not due to some sort of cryptoconservatism or cryptoscientism but rather from what I might call a certain ‘Burkean existentialism’ that Markell (drawing on Sophocles rather than Burke and Arendt rather than Sartre and hence probably terrified by this characterization) outlines so well in his book.

Those who advocate anthropology’s ability to command both factual and ethical assent from its ‘public’ also typically imagine the readers of their work to be a different set of people from their research subjects and worry about it’s ‘relevance at home’. Historically, this has been the case — as Pacific Islander scholars often point out, Coming of Age in Samoa wasn’t written for Samoans (and don’t even get me started on Sex and Temperment!). But my concern, like that of many anthropologists, is what it means to be an anthropologist when the people portrayed in my books are the people who are reading them (for more on this see why I think “the Yanomami thing is overdone”:/2005/05/23/yanomami-fatigue/). As several of the commentors pointed out in a very fruitful and insightful discussion in response to “one of Nancy’s posts”:/2005/06/24/perceptions-of-anthropology/, anthropology’s moral certainty and need for self-assertion starts looking less and less pretty the further it gets from home. At its best this sort of anthropology adopts a slightly farcical “my name is Luke Skywalker, I’m here to rescue you” sort of air when applied in the field, and at its worse the ease with which it wears its expertise can be both paternal and colonial as anthropologists begin lecturing local people about what their culture is like and asking who needs to be saved from globalization. Thus the distaste for the moral imperialism that often arises when ‘doing right by the other’ is still in my mouth when I contemplate my ‘relevance at home’.

The usual way to steer the course between ‘relevance at home’ and ‘doing right by the other’ is to adopt the old anthropological tactic of drawing a line between ‘your culture’ and ‘their culture’ and then respecting external difference while being critical of internal disagreements, which results in a situation where ritual homosexuality needs to be understood, but Republicans need to be stamped out. For me, the easy answer of being critical of ‘my culture’ while ‘respecting theirs’ doesn’t work because it relies on a bright and clear boundary dividing ‘one culture’ from ‘another’ that doesn’t exist and which (pace Markell’s understanding of ‘the anthropological notion of culture’) probably never has. As someone who studies mining in Papua New Guinea, my research subjects includes corporate executives and indigenous negotiators. Both have lawyers. My accounts of my fieldsite could very well be used as ‘expert evidence’ in their own endless legal wranglings like the work that my colleagues have written. Moreover, as a settler on O’ahu I find myself a participant in debates about who gets to speak about and for ‘traditional Hawai’ian culture’ in which anthropological authority has been substantively and importantly challenged. The situation is complicated by the fact that Hawai’i is a place which began producing indigenous scholars just as soon as the alphabet was introduced. How can I teach native Hawai’ians about ‘their culture’, and how do I engage in scholarly debate with indigenous scholars about it?

These are the sorts of issues that Markell’s books can speak to. While the majority of the book is concerned with technical issues in the political ontology of agency and identity which, despite how luminously well written it is, will be slow going for people who can’t immediately jump into discussions of Arendt, Hegel, Herder, and Taylor, the chapter on multiculturalism is perhaps the easiest way in to the argument for nonspecialists. Here his focus is on the politics of recognition (think Charles Taylor, Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth, Will Kymlicka, etc.). The politics of recognition has emphasized the way in which recognition and affirmation of one’s identity and culture is itself a social good which ought to be recognized in multicultural liberal states, and particularly Canada (home to Taylor and Kymlicka). However, Markell argues that this aspiration to mutual recognition is appealing but ultimately unsatisfying and even incoherent.

In general, Markell is critical the idea that people can come to have a ‘sovereign’ knowledge of themselves — that identity can in principle become a settled thing. Thus while the politics of recognition demands that others “recognize us as who we already are. Invoking ‘identity’ as a fait accompli precisely in the course of the ongoing and risky interaction through which we become who we are (or, more precisely, who we will turn out to have been).” But this attempt to achieve an “independent and masterful agency” papers over “our basic condition of intersubjective vulnerability” — in fact, our very desire for self-certainty often ends up displacing our the burden of bearing an unsought identity onto other sectors of social space, making the project of recognition itself a medium of injustice and people become ‘bound’ by recognition as we displace our uneasiness and make them bear the weight of our self-confidence.

Drawing on Povinelli’s account of settler guilt in Australia (which I’ve always felt was better-executed “here”:http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/issues/v24/v24n2.povinelli.html rather than “here”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0822328682/qid=1120508674/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_ur_1/002-3949094-5952040?v=glance&s=books&n=507846), Markell points out how multiculturalism is often figured as “a moment of redemption” that can “salve liberal anxieties.” For liberals in multicultural societies seek both “redemption from their past” and its history of injustice as well as “their lingering discomfort with the exercise of power in the present.” But not any sort of redemption will do. As Markell writes “the imagined prospect of an ‘infinite’ emergence of new groups and new demands would prolong the process of atonement, never quite releasing these liberals from the obligation and discomfort in their own historical skin… perhaps even more threatening than the prospect of a permanent stain on the historical record is the possibility that the wrongs in which liberal societies are implicated are not just past but present and ongoing… and that justice might therefore require sacrifices that cut deeper than the explicit renunciation of the acts of past generations.” Thus demands which are not ‘appropriate’ and “are phrased in ways that restore the liberal agent’s sense of sovereign agency” are labeled radical and inappropriate. In Hawai’i, for instance, teaching Hawai’ian culture in primary school in the form of myths and legends is appropriately ‘multicultural’ but “pursuing land restitution for indigenous people through international law”:http://www2.hawaii.edu/~anu/index.html is labeled “a dangerous scam”:http://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/fraudperfecttitle.html. The very recognition that multiculturalists believe to be so empowering turns out to empower them, while those who are ‘bound’ by the limits of their recognition are only allowed to be different in safe and nonthreatening aways.

In contrast to this approach, Markell points out that “the weight of history” does not “always come tidily packages in rules and prescriptions for action.” Following Arendt, he argues that our identities are the “results of action and speech in public, through which people appear to others and thereby disclose who they are.” It is only in the moment of applying the lessons of the past to the present that who we are is established. Following Sahlins, we might want to call Markell’s approach an ‘ethics of the structure of the conjuncture.’ Markell calls this fact tragic because it creates in us a “constitutive vulnerability” — who we are is the result not of the past that lies at our backs, but in our openness to a future that we cannot control because of the ‘impropriety’ of our action: “the very conditions that make us potent agents also make us potent beyond our own control, exposing us to consequences and implications that we cannot predict and which are not up to us. Our acts, you might say, are always improper in the sense that they are never our property — neither as choosers, nor as the bearers of identity.” This “constitutive openness of action to worldly contingency” is demonstrated again and again as our actions have consequences that we did not anticipate, and are subject to interpretation that we cannot control by the people we share our lives with.

Thus our identities are always simultaneously predicated on our actions, but slip beyond our control and the idea of a “democratic justice” which requires “that all people be known and respected as who they really are” aspires to a project which not only binds its interlocutors in a recognition which, ironically, was meant to liberate them, but is incoherent because it is based on a theory of agency and identity which is incorrect. This is not to suggest that we ought to live in a “spirit of resignation” but rather, to undertake a ‘politics of acknowledgment’ in which “no one be reduced to any characterization of his or her identity for the sake of someone else’s achievement of a sense of sovereignty.” Such a politics “demands that each of us bear our share of the burden and risk involved in the uncertain, open-ended, sometimes maddeningly and sometimes joyously surprising activity of living and interacting with other people.”

I like Markell’s account because it speaks to “many other”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1580230113/qid=1120510130/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_ur_1/002-3949094-5952040?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 approaches to “human life”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0942299795/qid=1120510169/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_ur_1/002-3949094-5952040?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 that mean “so much”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0226733580/qid=1120510196/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_ur_1/002-3949094-5952040?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 to me and that focus on the relation between tradition, innovation, and the human experience of novelty. But what is important for my purposes here is the way it suggests anthropologists personally (not professionally) deal with their research findings. Typically, when an anthropologist begins dealing with someone else our first reaction might be to avoid making assumptions — rather than tell a Papua New Guinean ‘what their culture is’ and how we might help them ‘defend it’ we might wait and see what they want and need. For our part, we might reciprocate in turn by some sort of self-disclosure in which we articulate to them who we are ‘honestly’ are so they could become aware of our ‘biases’ and how terribly terribly upset we are when brown people like themselves are trampled underfoot by the ‘bad’ white people who have so little in common with us ‘good’ white people. But the ‘acknowledgment’ in Markell’s politics is not an acknowledgment of the other, but about how little self-knowledge we are capable of. Identity is retrospective, which means in the present one can only know that in the future they will turn out to have been someone. Thus acknowledgement is “self- rather than other- directed; its object is not one’s own identity but one’s own basic ontological condition or circumstances, particularly one’s own finitude; this finitude is to be understood as a matter of one’s practical limits in the face of an unpredictable and contingent future, not as a matter of the impossibility or injustice of knowthing others; and, finally, acknowledgment involves coming to terms with, rather than vainly attempting to overcome, the risk of conflict, hostility, misunderstanding, opacity, and alienation that characterized life among others.” Whatever you think of this argument more generally, it captures for me perfectly the experience of culture shock that one is undergoing when entering a foreign fieldsite and making introductions when (in my experience at least) you have already begun a transformative personal experience and have lost your moorings, identity-wise.

I also like this approach because it describes how I attempt to deal with people who live on the island to which I have just moved. My first step when meeting Pacific Islanders is not to explain to them how anthropology can help them, how I am ‘an expert in their culture’, or to explain how terribly, terribly sympathetic I am to people with brown skin. It is to realize that I don’t even know how much I don’t know. I try to live with them as we negotiate who we will both become. I am not quite sure who I am going to be in this situation. An expert? A colonizer? An ally? An absurd clown? (my favorite is the first and last options combined). I try to approach people with a strong sense that we are going somewhere together, but our destination is not something I can know before hand. Hence the ‘Burkean Existentialism’ I mentioned above. This approach keeps me both humble and prudent — two virtues that I admit are not exactly my speciality. It reminds me that anthropology makes me a “hedgehog rather than a fox”:http://www.cc.gatech.edu/people/home/idris/Essays/Hedge_n_Fox.htm — I know one trick, and it’s a good one. I do a certain kind of research that is good at describing certain sorts of things, and answering certain sorts of questions that have developed over the course of my discipline’s intellectual history. But what good does this do for others? How could I possibly know when I am not sure who I myself am becoming as I immerse myself deeper and deeper into the lesser works of Rodney Needham? Neither politically quietistic nor overly self-assured in my opinion of what people need to learn from me, I have tried to live a life which “does not promist the pleasure of sovereignty” but provides what Markell has called “the less grand and more tentative pleasure of potency — simply having (and being carried along by) effects in the world.”

Cultural Evolution For Sale! New! New! New!

PLoS has published an essay by biologists Paul Ehrlich and Simon Levin telling us what for in the matter of cultural evolution. While the tone is genial (social scientists and biologists should work together!) and it pulls the rug out from under some of the worst forms of cultural evolutionary ballyhoo (memes, ma, memes), I still can’t help but feel like this is an example of the incredible hubris scientists develop in approaching problems outside their field. It used to be that physicists were the ones who did this regularly (Heisenberg on “What is Life”? Von Neumann on, well, on everything, etc.), but now biologists seem much more likely to do so. Anthropologists, it seems, should be front and center in assessing such articles… is this new cultevo wine in old bottles, or vice versa? And what shall we make of sentences like this:

There is a long-recognized need both to understand the process of human cultural evolution per se and to find ways of altering its course (an operation in which institutions as diverse as schools, prisons, and governments have long been engaged).

Journal Club

Something I have thought about since leaving graduate school is how theorists and ideas become influential. How, for example, did Taussig sweep the discipline in the late 80s and early 90s? How did that behemoth of a snowball get rolling? I wonder, because an odd feature of my graduate training was how little formal structure was in place to make sure we apprentice anthropologists were reading the current literature. Perhaps it was just me, but I felt that a lot more credit was awarded both in seminars and at parties for being able to trot out points from, say, the minor essays of Rodney Needham than for having something to say about the latest issue of AE. And again, it may just have been me but I only started paying close attention to disciplinary journals and the differences between them toward the end of my grad school sojourn — that is, as I started to think about trying to publish myself. I definitely felt that I had to figure a lot of it out on my own — what it meant for something to be a “Cultural Anthropology” sort of an article and so forth.

It’s made me remember something I used to hear about as an undergrad bio major: “Journal Club”. No, the first rule of Journal Club was not don’t talk about Journal Club 😉 I never went, but it seemed to be something that grad students had to attend — ie, though it was called a “club” it was a formal part of their training — and at which what they did was discuss the latest articles in the major journals. Doesn’t seem like such a crazy idea, and I wonder why we anthros don’t do it (or maybe other schools do, and only mine didn’t). It seems peculiar, in retrospect, that this kind of thing — the peer-reviewed best of our own collective research results, hot off the presses — wasn’t more at the heart of our formal training. So my queries are: is it a formal part of trainng at other schools? If not, why not? And, to return to the start, how does new research and how do new researchers become “hot”?

Straight Pride in Canada’s North: a Case Study of the Politics of Power and Privilege

It was the moment heterosexuals in Canada’s north had been waiting for. Yellowknife, N.W.T., was to have its first ever “Heterosexual Day”:http://north.cbc.ca/regional/servlet/View?filename=gay-pride-day-250252005 on June 9, 2005. This was a direct reaction to the celebration of Gay Pride Day (which I think should be Queer Pride Day but that’s another story) planned for June 10. The latter event has been celebrated in Yellowknife since 1998.

The people who called for this “alternative” day to celebrate the contributions of heterosexuals to their community claimed that they should have as much right as homosexuals (and others unacknowledged queers) to be recognised. Many other people, including some heterosexual queer allies, feel that every day is Heterosexual Day, just like every day is a day of privilege for the members of various privileged groups within society (French and English Canadians, men, etc). Continue reading →

Theoretical Core?

Oneman recently asked anthropologists to think about the moral core of the discipline. I’d like to ask anthropologists to look at our discipline’s theoretical core. Do we have one? Or is it just a jumble of empirical issues and methodological approaches tied together by a few catch phrases which pass as theory?

To ask the question in another way, are anthropologists collectively working together to construct a theory of human society, or are we just, as the anthropos-lab folks put it, “a multiplicity of heterogeneous discourses and practices which put anthropos in question”?

I would argue, using similar phrasing to that used by Oneman, that implicit in every ethnography is a theoretical model trying to get out. But that raises the question: What are the theoretical models at the heart of contemporary ethnography?

Global Assemblages

I just heard Aihwa Ong talk at a conference here in Taiwan on transnationalism. She was drawing on her MacArthur funded research into “how neoliberal forms are taken up in the transformation of East Asian cities.” These ideas are presumably also discussed in her contribution to a new edited volume: Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems.

Her talk started off in a rather funny manner. Her microphone didn’t work and nobody could hear her, but the Taiwanese audience was too politely reverential to tell her. They tried rigging up a microphone stand, which didn’t work. Then they decided to send a woman on stage with a chair to sit next to Dr. Ong and hold a microphone for her. It was at this point that she began to realize that nobody could hear her, and she took up the microphone in her own hand, clearly freaked out by the idea of having someone sitting there holding it for her.

Even with the microphone, however, Aihwa Ong is still difficult to understand. I don’t believe that academic discourse need always be understandable to the non-initiated, but I do believe scholars should make an effort in that direction. Academic jargon and neologisms can be useful short-cuts for complex ideas, but they can also short-circuit the analytical process by allowing one to avoid critically reexamining certain key assumptions. Fortunately, once she moved from theory to the specifics of her research, her main argument became much more comprehensible.

At its core, Ong is applying the analytical techniques of governmentality to the discourse of management “gurus” in Shanghai and Singapore. That is to say, she is looking at how American management companies and experts attempt to reengineer the behavior of white collar workers in order to better align them with the needs of global capital. Central to this is the ideology of neoliberalism, which Ong defines as the promotion of self-governing rationality and entrepreneurial risk-taking.

What particularly interested me was the comparison between Shanghai and Singapore. In China the state remains officially critical of neoliberal ideology, even as it encourages the forces of neoliberalism, while Singapore openly embraces neoliberalism. In particular, the Chinese state counters neoliberalism with nationalism, while Singapore, Ong argues, is moving away from the ethnic state. Ong discussed how Singapore is actively encouraging expatriates and global talent, throwing out the “Asian values” rhetoric of the 90s.

In discussing the rhetoric of foreign management gurus in Shanghai, Ong said that any behavior which deviated from the standards of American corporate culture was treated as irrational, and blamed on “Chinese culture.” Workers were seen as lacking motivation, not identifying with the company, and lacking the communication and self-presentation skills necessary to function in a global economy. At the same time, Ong also made it clear that the workers resented the different pay scales awarded to foreign and local workers, and explained that many workers saw corporate work as a way of gaining the necessary knowledge to go into business for themselves, with no long term plans to remain within the corporation.

Ong seemed to take the ideological rhetoric of neoliberalism at face value. As her own account seems to make clear, these management gurus are not actually interested in producing rational self-motivated individuals. They want a disciplined white-collar work force. These workers “irrationality” is in fact rational and entrepreneurial. They would rather go into business for themselves than be treated as second class workers in the corporate hierarchy. Just as the Bush administration selectively invokes neoliberal ideology to promote its own agenda, quietly abandoning neoliberal principles whenever it suites them, so too do Shanghai’s management gurus seem to invoke neoliberal values in order to produce team-players willing to subordinate individual gain to corporate interests. It is when they act rationally in their own self-interest that they are somehow being “Chinese.”

Despite my reservations, it was a thought provoking talk, and I will definitely be checking out Aihwa Ong’s new book. Hopefully I might have a chance to meet her before she leaves the country, and maybe even discuss this further.

Nothing Is Just

Last night, I had the last session of class for this semester. Since students have already finished their finals (a take-home essay test), their brains are pretty much not accepting new information during the last class, so I use the last period to get some feedback about my course (and hopefully sneak in some “words to grow on” in my responses). We were discussing a film we had watched the week before, and I mentioned that there was one scene that really bothered me.

The film, Slavery: A Global Investigation, details instances of modern slavery around the world. The segments I show describe slavery in the cocoa plantations of Cote d’Ivoire, and in the housekeeping staff of World Bank employees in Washington, DC. In the cocoa segment, there is a scene which includes 19 young men and boys recently freed and staying with the Malian ambassador while arrangements are made for them to return home. Some of the boys and men are covered with scars, the result of the slaveholder’s efforts to “soften” them until they accepted their fate. “How would they beat you?” the filmmakers ask. One of the men, an unnofficial spokesperson for the group, demonstrates, pulling the shirt off of one of his comrades and forcing him to the ground. The camera cuts to a close-up of the “victim”, his face in the dirt. Whack! Cut to the first man, a belt held high over his head, and then whack! And again, whack! The scene is staged so that it appears that he really is beating the other young man with his belt. After seeing the segment 5 times, I still cringe a little, and my students gasp at the first strike. It is not until the 6th whack! that the camera pulls back and we see that he is beating the ground, although of course a part of us must have known that was the case.

I told my class that I felt this was unethical, a filmmaker’s ploy to pull the heartstrings of the Western viewer. It is an incredibly effective scene, but I can’t help thinking, “how effective?” How effective was it for the 19 young men, recently saved from bondage, when the filmmaker said, “Show me. Show me how he beat you.” When, for my students’ edification, this young ex-slave forced his fellow ex-slave to the ground and began pulling off his belt? There’s an element of “guilt porn” in it — show our viewers how you suffered so they can feel guilty and yet absolved by their concern.

So I’m explaining this and one of my students says, “I never knew there were ethics in filmmaking, I thought it was just making movies.” If anthropology had to choose a single message as its central lesson, this is what I would choose: Nothing is Just. Filmmaking isn’t “just” making movies. Marriage isn’t “just” a marker of committment. Family isn’t “just” the people you are related to. Giving gifts isn’t “just” a form of exchange. Earlier in the semester, we had read an essay on American football, and the student who had chosen to present it had disagreed with some of the author’s conclusions. “Football is just a sport,” he said. But it’s not — it’s a means of enculturation (why are so many parents happy to see their kids go out for football?), it’s a way of expressing and containing aggression, it’s a symbol (and also a referent) of American masculinity, it’s a ritual of American social solidarity (never short of war are more Americans focused on the same thing than on Super Bowl Sunday — which is, if you think of it, a kind of war in itself).

I could see the “aha moment” coming, so I pressed my case. Of course there’s an ethics of filmmaking. There’s an ethics of everything. Journalists have a code of ethics. Anthropologists have a code of ethics. Heck, even librarians have a code of ethics. (Here I must admit I got sidetracked on the greatness of librarians, even to the point of urging my students to go talk to their librarians next time they were in the library and tell them “thank you” for all they’ve done for the rest of us.) Although formalized ethical codes can be problematic, they at least point to an underlying concern with how to act ethically in a given field of practice. And they indicate the always-present possibility of abuse — every field of practice gives its practitioners some kind of power, and all power is subject to abuse.

Which is why no field is “just” itself — but it’s also why no field is “just”. That is, no field of practice inherently produces justice or can wholly forestall the possibility of injustice. The condition that we might feel is “just” is the outcome of a whole raft of choices — and subject to differing opinions as to its “just-ness”. As a teacher of introductory anthropology, this is by far the hardest thing to teach — that what we feel and experience as the best way of doing things (when we think of it at all, when it’s not “just” living) is as culturally constructed, as historically contingent, and ultimately as deep-down weird as the Sambian ritual of oral insemination of young boys to make them into men. As I pointed out last night, the Sambians must look at us and shake their heads and think how disgusting it is that none of us cares enough about our sons to make men out of them through ritual oral insemination (yes, Virginia, we are talking about blowjobs here). When Catholic missionaries show up and ask the natives to eat their Lord and drink his blood, it is eminently reasonable to say, “No thank you, we’re civilized here and do not do such things. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a meal to prepare for my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s spirit.”

I guess you could say it was a “teachable moment”.

Armchair Anthropology in the Cyber Age?

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

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

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

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

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

I predict that will change.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commodity Fetishism

The New York Times has begun a three part series on “Class in America” with a discussion of income mobility. The big news, that income mobility has declined in recent years, was discussed by Paul Krugman last December in The Nation. It is good to see the Times picking up on this story, but it is disappointing that it conflates class with consumption practices.

Because the cost of consumer goods has been steadily driven down, the average worker today can enjoy all kinds of consumer goods that were not available fifty or a hundred years ago. Liberals (in the classical sense of the word) like this definition because it makes it possible to argue that inequality doesn’t matter. After all, who cares if a few people have gotten super-rich, when the poorest members of our society can afford a CD player, if not an iPod?

In fact, there are a surprising number of people in America who have to choose between putting food on the table and getting the cheapest CD player you can buy in Chinatown. But the argument for the importance of looking at inequality does not depend on such depravation. I wrote the following in my blog last February:

As Nobel Prize winning economist and philosopher Amartya Sen argues, it doesn’t matter if the total bundle of goods received by the poorest is getting larger if, at the same time, social inequality is increasing. That is to say, it is harder to function as a poor person in a rich society than in a poor one, even if you have more material possessions. An argument borne out by the fact of lower life expectancies amongst poor and minority populations in industrialized nations when compared with materially poorer populations in developing nations.

Sen’s point is different from that made by Brad DeLong, who conflates power with prestige.

To the extent that goods are valued not for the services they provide by themselves but as indices of exclusivity, it is pointless to produce them for more people because then they become less exclusive and so less valuable.

Exclusivity is not why the underprivileged of the industrialized world live shorter lives than those who can purchase a much smaller bundle of goods and services in the developing world. The difference is power. (What Sen confusingly refers to as “freedom.”) Power means control over your own life. Risk management is one way to talk about such control. Daniel Davies discusses a

project that has been going on since the Thatcher-Reagan years; the attempt to load risks on to the working class which have historically been borne by the owner class

And Peter Gosselin wrote a three part series for the L.A. Times about how this increased burden has affected even comfortably middle class Americans. (Here’s a link to Gosselin on Now.)

Much of the conservative agenda is precisely about shifting the burden of risk on to those members of society who are least able to handle that burden: bankruptcy reform and privatizing social security are two prime examples.

At the heart of Marx’s contribution to social theory is his effort to shift the study of economic behavior from the arena of exchange relations and consumption to the social relations of production, where power relations matter most. At the same time, he showed that the very structure of capitalist exchange serves to obscure the social relations of production:

Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer’s labour does not show itself except in the act of exchange.

Marx drew upon contemporary anthropological theory in terming this “commodity fetishism.” Unfortunately, today’s anthropologists seem to be increasingly fetishizing the commodity. There are lots of reasons for this, studies of consumption offer a useful way to explore how local cultures are affected by the processes of globalization. Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia is a wonderful example of such scholarship. Studies of consumption are also popular with students. However, I worry about this growing emphasis on consumption, especially as such studies can obscure the very nature of social inequality which is about much more than what we can consume.