tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53668445213149883142024-03-05T01:03:50.376-08:00All Tomorrow's CulturesOccasional posts on anthropologically interesting science fiction, anthropological futures and my own future as an anthropologist.Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.comBlogger128125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5366844521314988314.post-9446680829977042662024-01-30T06:09:00.000-08:002024-01-30T06:09:07.468-08:00Anthropology's Seen and Unseen<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcu_VauruZn89jg-tm7XNSmqUmL5Y3EDtjOtOI2MpQ0xocDIK-nKt9Bq2z9-zAbNbUYVsf7RkUcg4JS0Vom6FDhNnYKG6RYEBsnvUeQCtAAMBxpA9E5lfXJltGbSKrLRyo7c30IkGtrcLHzn64C_HGYKP_GyE4pDLsHhDVMKx8APGsEWUTdavOn7DTeKc/s559/%D0%90%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B8-%D1%81%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D1%84%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%84%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%91%D1%83%D0%B3%D0%B5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="559" data-original-width="450" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcu_VauruZn89jg-tm7XNSmqUmL5Y3EDtjOtOI2MpQ0xocDIK-nKt9Bq2z9-zAbNbUYVsf7RkUcg4JS0Vom6FDhNnYKG6RYEBsnvUeQCtAAMBxpA9E5lfXJltGbSKrLRyo7c30IkGtrcLHzn64C_HGYKP_GyE4pDLsHhDVMKx8APGsEWUTdavOn7DTeKc/s320/%D0%90%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B8-%D1%81%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D1%84%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%84%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%91%D1%83%D0%B3%D0%B5.jpg" width="258" /></a></div><br /><p><br />
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">In
1866, Alfred Russel Wallace sent a breathless letter to his friend and
colleague, Thomas Huxley, inviting Huxley to join him in exploring a “new
branch of anthropology”: Spiritualism. Based on the explosive growth in seances
in Europe and North America, Spiritualism conjured a world beyond the grave
where the dead continued to learn and improve themselves while enjoying each’s
ghostly society. When the dead deigned to visit the living, it was typically to
help and to advise: “this haunting could teach the living how to build a more
perfect society in the here-and-now” (Forbes 2016: 445). So, for Wallace, this
really was a new direction for the field–an inquiry into the unseen and,
simultaneously, into a future that awaited humanity, both in the afterlife and
in the perfection of human life on this planet.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">To
give away the ending, Wallace was not successful in establishing his “new
branch of anthropology.” Huxley wasn’t buying it, and other anthropological
colleagues eventually turned against him as well. After wavering a bit through
his own field investigations of London seances, E.B. Tylor weighed in against
Wallace, relegating Spiritualism to a “survival” from more “primitive” times.
But Spiritualism held some fascination for Tylor as well, even as he tried to
distance anthropology from it. In the end, though, what would become
“anthropology” as we know it would only engage with Spiritualism as a symptom
of something else, in the same way that magic, religion, and ritual would yield
to an understanding of deeper truths. Or is there something more? As Pels and
others have argued, this episode reveals something more about the way anthropology
regards its object.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">On
one hand, the two couldn’t seem more different. On the other, anthropology and
Spiritualism–both middle-class endeavors arising in the context of 19th century
empire, suggest a variety of homologies. The most salient, perhaps, is the idea
of culture itself. Yes, “culture” surrounds us in countless material forms–but
at the same time, it does not. A behavior, an object–to be sure, these are
“cultural,” but where is that “culture”? As Delaplace points out, “</span><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Describing
“culture” should also include an actual account of its “wholeness”: the
invisible thread, as it were, which bundles up these cultural components into a
totality” (2019: 37). In other words, “culture” is the results of the
anthropologist’s revelation, the end results of an analytical process that
renders an unseen world of connections and isomorphisms visible to the
anthropologist’s audience. Spiritualism would make the same claims–the
technologies of the seance were precisely those revealing a concealed world:
spirit rapping, table levitation, automatic writing, spirit photography. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">And,
like Spiritualism, anthropology also involves concealment. During the 19th
century, the Spiritualist medium utilized a number of contrivances–dimly lit
rooms, screens, capacious tablecloths. Whether or not you believed in
Spiritualism, these were the preconditions for the spiritual knowledge. For
anthropology, the trick of culture was the revelation of relevant behavior and
the concealing of what was considered extraneous. In photography, for example,
“the epistemic virtue of ethnographic photography entailed the ability to hide
certain things” (Delaplace 2019: 39). Franz Boas and George Hunt would work to
(playfully) conceal the evidence of settler colonials from their portraits of
indigenous life. And Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead would both conceal
the impact of evangelical Christianity on people at their fieldsites, all with
the ultimate goal of representing “authenticity” in native life. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This
kind of concealment, of course, is no longer part of anthropology. Or is it?
When we look back at the prevalence of reflexivity in late twentieth century
anthropology, we might be led to believe that anthropology had gone all-in on
revelation. Anthropologists located themselves amidst intersectionality and
intersubjectivity, lifting the curtain and turning on the lights, as it were. There
were still concealments, however. Or, to be more exact, the revelations of
reflexivity facilitated other dimensions of the unseen. Consider, for example,
the dominance of a handful of elite departments in producing the vast majority
of academic anthropologists, and the embeddedness of those universities in
structures of US empire (Speakman et al 2018). Or, alternately, the similarities
between anthropological work and extractivist industries commodifying indigenous
knowledge and practices for a rapacious capitalism transforming all life into
exchange value. These undercurrents are concealed, as the precondition,
perhaps, for the revelation of other anthropological “truths”. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">There
is, therefore, a dynamic in anthropology that we can trace from the 19th
century–one that extends between the seen, the unseen, revelation, concealment
and, as Taussig had written, “the skilled revelation of skilled concealment”
(Taussig 2003: 273). To be sure, this configuration changes over the course of
anthropology's history. But it’s the imbrication of anthropology in this
dynamic that betrays anthropology’s embeddedness in capitalism and western
imperialism as a whole for, as an economic system, capitalism depends on
concealment for its strength: the alienation of labor, the destruction of the
global south and, ultimately, the untimely end of human life on this planet.
All of these must be concealed for the revelation of value and the novelty of
production. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Marx,
of course, realized this at the fore, and his Capital contains references to
the very same Spiritualist practices that perturbed Wallace and Tylor in the
1870s. A table is “just” some wood joined together, he explains:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes
into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on
the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head,
and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if
it were to begin dancing on its own free will. (Marx 1990: 163-164)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This
was, of course, an allusion to the “table lifting” practices in seances. The
commodity itself issues from the dialectic of revelation and concealment, and
the 19th century’s human sciences soon craft their own “dancing tables”
discerning culture, society and the psyche through the very same
transformational calculus. Yet even in this critical revelation, we would be
wise to think about the concealments that enable this insight. </span></p>
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</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination: none;"><span lang="EN">Communication
without Control: Anthropology and Alternative Models of Information at the
Josiah Macy, Jr. Conferences in Cybernetics </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination: none;"><span lang="EN"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination: none;"><span lang="EN">Samuel Gerald
Collins</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination: none;"><span lang="EN">Towson University,
USA</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination: none;"><span lang="EN">scollins@towson.edu</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">The
characteristics of our digital world—algorithms, virtual reality, AI,
cryptocurrency, etc.—were largely formulated during the Josiah Macy, Jr.
Conferences on Cybernetics, held between 1946 and 1953. The concept of reducing
the world to flows of information is one of the legacies of these meetings,
with all of the alienation and ideological work that “the digital” has
perpetrated. Yet there were anthropologists at the Macy Conferences as well;
Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson attended every meeting, and recent
scholarship (e.g., Geoghegan 2023) has shown how anthropological thought
contributed to the formation of our digital world through the reduction of
culture and social life to codes and feedback loops. Yet there were also
alternative models proposed during the Macy conferences, e.g., an embodied
model of information championed by Donald MacKay (Hayles 1999). This paper
looks to another alternative, one based in misunderstandings at the Macy
conferences themselves. In practice and in discourse, Mead and Bateson held
very different ideas about what “information” could mean—ideas diverging from
the “command and control” model that would predominate. Despite those
differences, though, the Macy conferees could communicate with one another and
even plan projects together. This is their model of information—communication
without reduction and without perfect understanding—interfacing rather than
dominating. Anticipating the work of British cyberneticist Gordon Pask, this
model of anthropological cybernetics opens the possibility of a communicative
informatics without control, where interaction can develop without reduction
and understanding without domination.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">The Josiah Macy,
Jr. Conferences on Cybernetics (1946-1953) were borne on the a crest of Unity
of Science discourse in the United States, and sought to bring together the
social sciences with the physical and material sciences through the development
of a “new lingua franca” where, as Kline writes, a “universal language of
information, feedback, and homeostasis” could “model all organisms from the
level of the cell to that of society” (Kline 2020: 13). The meetings were
remarkable for many reasons, not the least of which was the active
participation of the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson. It was
one moment where anthropologists would speak as equals to their hard science
counterparts in a nationally prominent forum. That was the promise of
cybernetics for anthropology–a place at the table to shape the direction of
scientific and technological development in the age of American empire. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">However, in all
these endeavors, cybernetics failed. After percolating through multiple
disciplines and through popular culture, cybernetics–perhaps, as Geoffrey
Bowker has termed it, through a process of “legitimacy exchange”--lost currency
as scientific discourse (Bowker 1993). By the 1980s, very little in the
sciences and social sciences was being produced under the auspices of
cybernetics, and most new research (along with this paper) represents
historical analysis rather than new applications of, as Wiener called it, the
“the science of control and communications in the animal and machine” (Wiener
1948). In anthropology, there was very little mention of cybernetic theory in
anthropological work after the 1970s, even as anthropologists began to turn to
considering the digital life of the cyborg. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">And yet, there’s
also ample evidence that cybernetics succeeded–too well, as it turns out. All
of the ideas that catalyzed the Macy Conferences: game theory (von Neumann),
neural nets feedback and circular causality (Wiener, Rosenbluth and Bigelow)
and information as a ratio of signal to noise (Shannon)–have led to the triumph
of the virtual and reduction of the world to digital flows of variously
commodified information. In no small part, we can credit the Macy Conferences
for a world where teaching is reduced to the digital delivery of content, a
world where AI agents proliferate in our lives, threaten our careers and prompt
our constant<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Turing suspicions” that
the people with whom we digitally interact may be artificial agents instead. As
Bateson suggested later, “cybernetics” has taken on the association of
“control” at the expense of communication (Bateson 1991). It has become the
blueprint of our digital domination; whoever controls the information controls
the world. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">And it was
successful in another, more covert sense. Geoghegan’s recent book, Code,
eloquently follows the break-up the Macy Conferences into its constituent
disciplines, with the triumph of information leading anthropologists down a
road to semiotics and structuralism, while circular feedback underlies the
continued popularity of Cognitive behavioral therapy (Geoghegan 2022). As a
potent, generative metaphor, “code” has structured the ways we relate to the
world and each other, but in ways that have ironically widened the gulf between
disciplines. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">There were, of
course, alternatives expressed at the Macy Conferences. As many theorists
(including Gregory Bateson, Niklas Luhmann, Humberto Maturana, Franciso Varela
and others) have noted, second order cybernetics grows out of the unanswered
questions about the role of the observer in the system, while Hayles (1999)
looks to Donald MacKay’s more embodied understanding of information as an
anodyne to the digital’s hostility to the physical world of nature and bodies. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">Yet, despite
Mead’s and Bateson’s prominence in the Macy conferences and to cybernetics in
general, there has been little explicitly anthropological about the ways our
digital lives have developed, even as anthropology has turned to the study of
those lives as objects of our research. But it’s not for lack of trying. The
Macy Conferences transcripts (however spotty and incomplete) show Mead and
Bateson engaging in the work of the anthropological gadfly–tempering the
strident parochialism of the Macy attendees with exceptions drawn from the
anthropological record. As Mead sagely notes to Lawrence Kubie’s universalist
proclamations on the role of the unconscious, “If you look at some other
cultures, you don’t necessarily find that same contrast” (Pias 2016: 426). But
the exception rarely derails the Mcy conferees who are, after all, busily
re-mapping the world in the context of the post-War US empire. So while Mead
and Bateson contributed commentary, central ideas (neural nets, information as
signal) escaped the Macy conferences as universals unhindered by ethnographic
exception. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">Nevertheless,
there are unacknowledged anthropological contributions, and this paper concerns
one of them: the role of misunderstanding. At first glance, this is not a very
promising alternative–it seems antithetical to the whole point of the
conferences, after all. The lingua franca of circular information, circular
causality and neural nets was supposed to unify knowledge by describing
universal processes as characteristic of chemical reactions as they were of
human culture. And yet there were many misunderstandings. For example, Ralph
Gerard was, reportedly, “intensely frustrated by the perpetual tangents to
tangents that developed during a meeting and the rare satisfaction of
intellectual closure and completion of any line of thought or argument” (quoted
in Hayles 1999: 73). For their part, Mead and Bateson pilloried the obstinacy
of their fellow conferees in a 1976 interview with Steward Brand: “”So we used
the mode “feedback,” and Kurt Lewin–who didn’t understand any known human
language, but always had to reduce them to concepts–he went with the idea of
feedback as something that when you did anything with a group you went back and
told them later what had happened [ . . . .] So the word ‘feedback’ got
introduced incorrectly into the international UNESCO type conference where it’s
been ever since” (Brand 1976: 5). </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">This paper is
concerned with something I’m calling misunderstanding - not as the failure of
cybernetic communication, but as its precondition. Anthropologists play the
role here of not reducing things to her underlying code, but of facilitating
interaction between different ideas without introducing a third term. Perhaps
re-framing is a better word? After some examples from the Macy Conferences
transcripts, the paper develops an alternative model of communication
resembling Andrew Pickering’s emphasis on performative ontologies. I preface
this by noting that these exchanges are, in many ways, what critics of the Macy
Conferences found most irritating: the digressions and non sequiturs of
meetings that went frequently off the rails yet were still preserved in
transcription. Or, not all: Hayles notes that Teuber blocked publishing the
transcriptions of the final meeting in 1953, “noting that the discussions were
too rambling and unfocused; if published, he said, they would be an
embarrassment” (Hayles 1999: 76). This does not mean, however, that the other
transcripts were tightly focused. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">Two examples: </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">In the 1949 Macy
Conference, Lawrence Kubie gives his paper, “The Neurotic Potential and Human
Adaptation.” Later discussion prompts Kubie to ascribe neurosis to all forms of
symbolic communication: “The capacity to communicate by means of language symbols,
and the capacity to become neurotic are very close together” (76). Mead, in her
capacity as anthropological elder, shifts the conversation to culture and
learning processes: “These expectations may be different from another culture
which expects another area of behavior to be subject to learning: in any given
society the particular acts, the particular behavior in which conscious and
therefore flexible learned behavior is to play a given role may vary” (76).
Kubie seems unsure of Mead’s point, and reiterates his initial claims, but this
seems to only draw out discussion to the possibility that autonomic responses
could constitute an unconscious, or that societal expectations for
communication constitute what we regard as neurotic. Eventually, a frustrated Kubie
continues trying to wrest the conversation back from culture and statistical
modeling to the primacy of the psychological. “I am puzzled here because I am
not quite sure how this confusion has arisen. Let me retrace my steps for a
moment” (80). A bit later, Kubie’s colleague, Henry Brosin, gives him “a chance
to catch his breath”--and we can imagine, perhaps, an apoplectic moment for the
orthodox Freudian (82). </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">Another example,
following on J.C.R. Licklider’s 1950 paper, “The Manner in Which and the Extent
to Which Speech and Can Be Distorted and Remain Intelligible.” Licklider’s
contribution is really a paper on sound engineering–with multiple graphs
illustrating sound clipping and frequency. Wiener brings up the problems of
translation between human and machine: “I<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>am considering, for example, the remote-control substations for
hydraulic power, where the power dispatcher has to get messages to the machine
and where the machine has to inform the power dispatcher about significant
facts. Now there again you have the same translation problem. (227)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">Mead, however,
picks up the question in terms of human communication, and other conferees
follow with their own anecdotes. Can people communicate across languages in a
related family and across dialects? Her question: “I should like to get back to
the question: Is this translation or isn’t it? What is translation?”
(237).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is, Mead concludes, “a
question of framing. Some people frame all European languages together, so that
the idea of learning any Indo-European language is regarded as just another
language to be learned; the idea of learning Hawaiian or Japanese, however,
would be regarded as something quite different. What is translation for one
person is not translation for another” (237). Other examples follow, turning to
physiology, to psychology, to hypnosis, speech pathology, etc. Finally, with a
series of anecdotes about memorizing strings of characters through song,
discussion ends–some distance from the sound engineering where it began. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">Discussion</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">Anyone who has
been to an academic conference will recognize these in these transcripts
characteristic verbal interactions: questions that are really comments,
critiques that are little more than self-aggrandizement. What makes them
different here is their relationship to the goals of the Macy Conferences. Each
of the concepts that fuels these cybernetic meetings–neural nets, feedback and
information–is taken up again and again by conferees, where conversation spins
them into unexpected and occasionally refractory directions. Attendees are
talking, but they are not moving towards a consensus. This would be a searing
critique of the Macy Conferences, if, indeed, the point was to create
consensus. But if achieving consensual understanding was not the point, than
what was? </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">A later example:
the second-generation cyberneticist Gordon Pask built an installation called
the “Colloquy of Mobiles” involving five robots (two “male” and three “female”)
rotating towards each other on the bases of lights and sounds. What marks this
off from other cybernetic machines, though, is its performative dimension. Pask
meant for humans to interact with the Colloquy. As he wrote, “the mobiles
produce a complex auditory and visual effect by dint of their interactions.
They cannot, of course, interpret these sound and light patterns. But human
beings can and it seems reasonable to suppose that they will also aim to
achieve patterns which they deem pleasing by interacting with the system at a
higher level of discourse” (Pask 1971, quoted in Pickering 2010: 359-360).
Eventually, human visitors to the Colloquy began using small mirrors to reflect
lights back to robots in order to evoke a response. Not “communicating” with
the machines in the sense of a shared message but interacting with the Colloquy
in order to produce light and sounds that the human visitors found pleasing.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">Was the purpose
of the Macy Conferences to reduce the world to processes of information and
circular feedback? Or were there other more interactive and less dominating
alternatives? </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">Another moment in
the conferences, this one in the wake of Bateson’s 1952 paper, “The Position of
Humor in Human Communication.” By now, random asides are no strangers to these
proceedings, and many of the conferees take a moment to tell their own bad jokes.
John Bowman then suggests that humor could be produced in a machine using a
simple circuit: “A circuit of that type may have two stable states. If it is
put in any state, it will asymptotically approach one of the two stable states
and stay there. On the other hand, with the same components in slightly
different values of the circuit constants, it can oscillate” (548). To which
Bateson replies: “I am always prepared to say that an electronic buzzer is
laughing” (548).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">Does Bateson mean
that both circuit and the human are laughing? Is he suggesting that laughter is
nothing but the oscillation of circuits? Or that it is the confusion of signals
resisting homeostasis? One of the legacies of the Macy Conferences has been precisely
that: the reduction of physical to the information that lies beneath. This is
also, as Geoghegan notes, the underlying mechanism in the reduction of social
and cultural life to its semiotic exchange. There are, however, other
possibilities. What if the “laughter” in the person and the “laughter” in the
circuit weren’t equivalent, after all? And what if the oscillation in the
circuit was not the oscillation in the neural stimulus? What if that was just
something we were calling laughter and oscillation in order to create an
interactive bridge between two dissimilar systems? This is certainly more
likely than Bateson becoming a reductive materialist, and moreover anticipates
the work of Gordon Pask and other second-order cyberneticists. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">Figure 1</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-no-proof: yes;"><img height="333" src="file:///C:/Users/scollins/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_image002.gif" width="625" /></span><span lang="EN"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">(Figure 1: Shows
two systems interacting without a) dominating each other; or b) being subsumed
under a third term)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">This sense of
cybernetics acknowledges a world that is not reducible to defined quanta, yet
one in which we very much need to interact in order to live. And this is the
world of the Macy conferences, where conferees, perhaps, have little to show
for their efforts after 10 years of meetings and endless conversations. And yet
they still had those 10 years and endless conversations, despite their
intractable differences between their disciplinary homes. In what Mead later
summarized–rather unhelpfully– as ”microevoltuion,” “The conversation would
come to an end and be resumed. There would be freedom to talk and freedom to
listen, and the web of meaning would be woven as we talked, making a new
pattern before our eyes” (Mead 1964: 301). </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">In other words,
this cybernetics as a means of interaction across difference–however defined.
As Pickering writes, “the cybernetic sense of control was rather one of getting
along with, coping with, even taking advantage and enjoying, a world that one
cannot push around in that way” (Pickering 2010: 383). </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">At present, we
are living in just such a world, one where countless nonhuman and multiagent
systems seem to go their own way despite our efforts. Those agents may be
variously intelligent. With generative AI, we have agents that simulate human
conversation, so it is easy for people to (mis)understand their agency. Most
algorithms, however, toil in the background, running checks on our job
applications, checking purchases against credit history, touching up
photographs. Yet in all cases, it is not so easy to understand how multiagent
systems make decisions. Large language models, for example, are unable to tell
us which sources they’ve consulted in their replies, and text-to-mage
generation has notoriously surreal moments. We may describe those systems according
to a number of anthropomorphic metaphors, and, similarly, ascribe any number of
information processing functions to ourselves in return. But, to be clear,
neither of these is an accurate representation. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">This is the world
we live in now, but it is not a “post-human” one in the sense of a reduction of
human life to manipulable flows of data. Instead, we find ourselves enmeshed in
interactive systems that can’t be reduced to information quanta–even if powerful
organizations strive to do so. Amidst these heterogeneous systems,
communication may be an impossibility; instead, coordination may be the optimal
outcome. The basis of that coordination is the questions: who defines the field
for interaction? Will everything be subtended to profit? State surveillance?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">On the other
hand, we might strive towards making these systems explicable and more
predictable, more interactive, more responsive and more grounded in the
experiences of diverse communities: “Explainable artificial intelligence.”
“community robotics,” community-based design. Anthropologists are uniquely
poised to consider these networks of humans and non-humans as they interact
together to create their world. They are also uniquely positioned to insist
that non-human agents need not only serve the whims of capital, and that
rejecting information as “command and control” means opening up recombinatory
possibilities.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">More than this,
what does it mean to interact with the multiagency around us as an equal
partner? What does it mean to describe the give-and-take of a horizontality in
cybernetics? </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN">References</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">Bateson, Gregory
(1991). A Sacred Unity. NY: HarperCollins.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">Bowker, Geof
(1993). “How to be Universal.” Social Studies of Science 23: 107-127. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">Brand, Stewart
(1976). “For God’s Sake, Margaret.” Co-Evolution Quarterly (Summer): 32-44. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">Hayles, N.
Katharine (1999). How We Became Post-Human. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">Kilne, Ronald
(2020). “How disunity matters to the history of cybernetics in the human
sciences in the United States, 1940-80.” History of the Human Sciences 33(1):
12-35. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">Pias, Claus, ed.
(2016). Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences, 1946-1953. NY: diaphanes.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">Pickering, Andrew
(2010). The Cybernetic Brain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12.0pt;"><span lang="EN">Wiener, Norbert
(1948). Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the
Machine. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN"> </span></p>
Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5366844521314988314.post-33521443604649441442023-08-30T18:50:00.000-07:002023-08-30T18:50:04.816-07:00Science Fiction’s Emergent Anthropologies. SF Beyond Anthropological Science Fiction<p> My <a href="https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.48272/107946">contribution</a> to a really interesting issue on science fiction and the future in <a aria-label="Vai alla pagina della rivista Rivista di antropologia contemporanea" class="fw-500" href="https://www.rivisteweb.it/issn/2724-3168" title="Vai alla rivista">Rivista di antropologia contemporanea</a> (2023). <br /></p><p>Abtsract: <br /></p><p>Science fiction and anthropology are separate projects, each developing
according to its own logic, but there have been cross-hatchings where
they have met and influenced each other. The late Nineteenth century,
for example, saw both an anthropology and a science fiction in service
of colonialism and racism through unilinear evolutionary tropes. SF and
anthropology in the twentieth century, on the other hand, explored
different configurations of cultural relativism as ways of not only
understanding culture, but of exploring its future. The twenty-first
century has also been generative of crossings between SF and
anthropology, a «speculative anthropology» that promises to re-make both
</p>Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5366844521314988314.post-50669666637666437602023-08-18T10:02:00.002-07:002023-08-19T07:03:19.188-07:00SETI: Signs in space/ Enacting space<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQzTA56lcvSo-ImcdwyIIOLOlwZsA-VwlsTEbTMNYhQmsjgdBXjZ1nm4hKneVi2iPu22zCLumn5zvn5SEQpwSrJq9_8ehtJmOdNWMFKih681oCMNOHzdsLAgmsvjW9Dt3pZgSV_6dgq_BXH8fzss64jQuRAh_YZFBqasJXUEc9We7kTHCOtzwo53iDVpI/s2880/Screenshot%202023-07-30%20at%204.11.18%20PM.png" style="display: block; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1800" data-original-width="2880" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQzTA56lcvSo-ImcdwyIIOLOlwZsA-VwlsTEbTMNYhQmsjgdBXjZ1nm4hKneVi2iPu22zCLumn5zvn5SEQpwSrJq9_8ehtJmOdNWMFKih681oCMNOHzdsLAgmsvjW9Dt3pZgSV_6dgq_BXH8fzss64jQuRAh_YZFBqasJXUEc9We7kTHCOtzwo53iDVpI/w400-h250/Screenshot%202023-07-30%20at%204.11.18%20PM.png" width="400" /></a></div><p>
[From the SETI project, "A Sign in Space" (<a href="https://asignin.space/">https://asignin.space/</a>)] </p><p>“To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings,’ Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation </p><p>In May, the SETI Institute Artist-in-Residence initiated a piece of collaborative performance–the decoding of an “alien” message, transmitted from the European Space Agency's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO). “A Sign in Space” is a simulation that enlists ordinary people in the work of “decoding” an alien message–one that you can download yourself. Along the way, SETI has hosted a series of workshops (including one from anthropologist <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKY9Epgte34&t=273s">Willi Lempert</a>) designed to help participants through the decoding process–including hints on avoiding ethnocentric (and anthropocentric) assumptions about what this communication could be and what the intentions of extraterrestrial intelligence might entail. </p><p>I am a very enthusiastic SETI advocate, but I wonder if “decoding” is really the best we can do here. I’m not entirely alone–the very lively <a href="https://discord.com/invite/2upxzmZkqY">Discord</a> discussion around this project has included many, philosophical tangents that have questioned what exactly “interpretation” might mean in this context. On the one hand, semiotics (in that broader, Peircean sense) is something that all of us living creatures do. As Kohn writes, “All living beings sign. We humans are therefore at home with the multitude of semiotic life” (Kohn 2013: 42). All life as we know it is in communication with its environment–many of us living creatures along multiple semiotic levels. So it is certainly reasonable to assume that other life will also be involved in sign-making. </p><p>But what about “decoding”? “Decoding” has a distinctly different valence than sign-making. It conjures up secrets: military maneuvers, economic competition, Incan quipu, Julius Caesar’s cipher, Alan Turing toiling over the Enigma Machine. The age of the internet is also the age of cryptography–the logical extrapolation of a digital capitalism. And decoding is also a kind of violence: decoding the secrets of nature, of the universe, of life itself. Something that will not yield its meaning readily, that will only succumb to force and intellect. </p><p>More broadly, current approaches to coding/ decoding owe their existence to insights in and around the Josiah Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, a series of meeting held from the 1940s into the 1950s, and to which we owe much of our current understanding of information, neural networks and even natural language processing. The dream of the conferences was to provide a “lingua franca of science” where “not only scientific problems but even questions of art and human freedom could be treated in computational terms” (Geoghegan 2023: 23). </p><p>In that, the Macy Conferences seems to have succeeded, and our whole world seems reducible to flows of code. Yet there were other possibilities raised in those landmark meetings on cybernetics, and reduction of the world to code is only one, at the expense of the alternatives. One example: the second-generation cyberneticist Gordon Pask built an installation called the “Colloquy of Mobiles” involving five robots (two “male” and three “female”) rotating towards each other on the bases of lights and sounds. What marks this off from other cybernetic machines, though, is its performative dimension. Pask meant for humans to interact with the Colloquy. As he wrote, “the mobiles produce a complex auditory and visual effect by dint of their interactions. They cannot, of course, interpret these sound and light patterns. But human beings can and it seems reasonable to suppose that they will also aim to achieve patterns which they deem pleasing by interacting with the system at a higher level of discourse” (Pask 1971, quoted in Pickering 2010: 359-360). Not “communicating” with the machines in the sense of a shared message but interacting with the Colloquy in order to produce light and sounds that they enjoy. </p><p> This version of cybernetics offered up a Situationist vision, where non-representational play would result in the emergence of new behaviors conjoining people with machines in cybernetic assemblages. In Pask’s models, performance would bring together all these agents in the space of cooperative assemblage, without the reduction of one or the other to codes. As Pickering explains (2010” 31-32), “The entire task of cybernetics was to figure out how to get along in a world that was not enframable, that could not be subjugated to human designs–how to build machines and construct systems that could adapt performatively to whatever happened to come their way.” </p><p>On the one hand, it’s clear that “code” still has primacy: our lives are explicable to coding/decoding in more ways than ever before–from our biology (through genetics) to our social lives (through network analysis) and our physical well-being (through quantified self technologies). On the other hand, we are surrounded by a number of variously lively, nonhuman agents with which we interact without actually decoding. In fact, we have little sense of how algorithms that increasingly interpenetrate our lives even operate. Hidden behind proprietary training data, we cannot be sure why our job application was rejected, or why one YouTube video was recommended over another. Yet we performatively interact every day. </p><p>In Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” heptapods hover over the Earth engaging humans in conversation. What is their message? There is, really, none. They come with neither threat nor scientific salvation. They only bring their language, which, in the spirit of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, alters Louisa Banks’s sense of time and causality. “For the heptapods, all language is performative. Instead of using language to inform, they used language to actualize” (Chiang 2002: 138). The meetings with Banks–that was the message, and Banks “cracks” the code of language, but not the message of the visit. </p><p>This, undoubtedly, is the point of SETI’s message as well. The “decoding” here is less important than the performance of decoding–the enlistment of global experts and ordinary people working together in (relatively) non-hierarchical ways. </p><p> Perhaps in the future we will discover a signal or an artifact. Will the point be to interpret meaning and intention? Or something else? Like the “Colloquy of Mobiles,” we humans might interact with the artifact and with each other without “breaking” the code of alien intelligence—which could have been the point all along. </p><p>References </p><p>Chiang, Ted (2002). “Story of Your Life.” In Stories of Your Life and Others. NY: Tor Books. </p><p>Geoghegan, Bernard Dionysius (2023). Code. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. </p><p>Kohn, Eduardo (2013). How Forests Think. Berkeley: University of California Press. </p><p>Pickering, Andrew (2010). The Cybernetic Brain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
</p>Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5366844521314988314.post-70777088380147721332023-07-03T07:52:00.000-07:002023-07-03T07:52:15.076-07:00Agan, the Macy Conferences on CyberneticsHere's a recent conference abstract submission, prompted in large part by Geoghegan's 2022 "Code: From Information Theory to French Theory" (Duke, 2023).
The characteristics of our digital world—algorithms, virtual reality, AI, cryptocurrency, etc.—were largely formulated during the Josiah Macy, Jr. Conferences on Cybernetics, held between 1946 and 1953. The concept of reducing the world to flows of information is one of the legacies of these meetings, with all of the alienation and ideological work that “the digital” has perpetrated. Yet there were anthropologists at the Macy Conferences as well; Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson attended every meeting, and recent scholarship (e.g., Geoghegan 2023) has shown how anthropological thought contributed to the formation of our digital world through the reduction of culture and social life to codes and feedback loops. Yet there were also alternative models proposed during the Macy conferences, e.g., an embodied model of information championed by Donald MacKay (Hayles 1999). This paper looks to another alternative, one based in misunderstandings at the Macy conferences themselves. In practice and in discourse, Mead and Bateson held very different ideas about what “information” could mean—ideas diverging from the “command and control” model that would predominate. Despite those differences, though, the Macy conferees could communicate with one another and even plan projects together. This is their model of information—communication without reduction and without perfect understanding—interfacing rather than dominating. Anticipating the work of British cyberneticist Gordon Pask, this model of anthropological cybernetics opens the possibility of a communicative informatics without control, where interaction can develop without reduction and understanding without domination. Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5366844521314988314.post-91090223033233529622022-07-16T11:48:00.009-07:002022-07-16T11:53:02.041-07:00Book Review: Played Out – Difference and Repetition in Classic Board GamesI published this review with "TheGeekAnthropologist" - such an interesting, important blog! Please click on the link to see the review in its entirety.
<a href="https://thegeekanthropologist.com/2022/07/14/book-review-played-out-difference-and-repetition-in-classic-board-games/" target="_blank">Book Review: Played Out – Difference and Repetition in Classic Board Games
</a>
<br>
<br>
Patkin, Terri Toles (2021). Who’s in the Game? Identity and Intersectionality in Classic Board Games. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland.
After taking a beating from video games, table-top games have made a startling come-back over the last twenty years, buoyed by a strong growth of Eurogames, imaginative indie titles and by a gaming world looking for variety. In academics, table-top games studies has also experienced sharp growth – albeit with a time lag. Like tabletop games themselves, the academic explosion of interest in tabletop gaming builds (at least partly) on the institutionalization of digital game studies in the academy (Booth 2021; Woods 2012). And, like their digital counterparts, indie games have received considerable academic attention focused on cultural significance, design, writing and narrative, and educational possibilities. There are international associations (The International Board Game Studies Association), journals (Board Games Studies Journal), meetings, colloquia, and college classes. Yet much of this scholarly attention has focused on new games. But what about the previous games that are points of departure – or outright rejection – for many of the indie games today? If many indie titles are critiques of the heteronormativity, capitalism and colonialism at the heart of older board games, then what about those earlier games themselves? Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5366844521314988314.post-44453281924880639142022-06-06T06:28:00.014-07:002022-06-06T07:48:18.268-07:0020th Anniversary of HBO's "The Wire"<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOgK092WAZjqRt51I8LeCqQxkMHuFwjeKONXiNjqY_xb6IV82cQGF7HSRG0aW0UqohVNTwTk7Pg5YuXd3Utx8XJDht4WknkSDxDdLl15bU3_V8gwHGkp9NEDLDoVHNONiIuUA6StRGQRUx39tM6OlHCzkES382qxxNTWbprdAYjtuhnE74i2isOXBM/s1400/poster-the-wire-tv-series-s4-dvdbash-wordpress.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" data-original-height="1400" data-original-width="945" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOgK092WAZjqRt51I8LeCqQxkMHuFwjeKONXiNjqY_xb6IV82cQGF7HSRG0aW0UqohVNTwTk7Pg5YuXd3Utx8XJDht4WknkSDxDdLl15bU3_V8gwHGkp9NEDLDoVHNONiIuUA6StRGQRUx39tM6OlHCzkES382qxxNTWbprdAYjtuhnE74i2isOXBM/s320/poster-the-wire-tv-series-s4-dvdbash-wordpress.jpg"/></a></div>
In 2011, we started a project entitled "Anthropology By the Wire" with participants drawn mainly from community colleges in the Baltimore area. Our goal was to collaborate with neighborhood-based groups in Baltimore to make anthropologically informed representations of their communities that they could utilize for their own purposes. My co-PI for the project, and my co-author, Matt Durington, explains the whole process in this 2011 video on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P13CeEzm-QY&t=143s">the YouTube channel for the project</a>. We meant it as a critique of "The Wire"--or, at least, the way "the Wire" had come to stand in for documentary truths about the city. Circling back to the series 20 years, and our project 10 years later, I find that not much has changed. The series continues to have this representational hegemony and, in many ways, still pushes to the sides other representations of Baltimore not grounded in policing and heavily demonized images of drugs and crime.
"The Wire" presented audiences with a superbly acted, nuanced portrait of Baltimore - certainly the most complex mass media representation to date. But it was, in the end, mass media grounded in a white perspective that wants to see Baltimore as a spectacle of abandonment and violence. Yet there were moments when the city seemed to exceed that perspective - when neighborhoods themselves took the stage. Those were our favorite scenes. I know that the camera "wanted" us to see the boarded up houses, weeds and trash - but there are times when we saw the small-scale intimacy of neighborhoods and the interpenetrations of lives in "Smalltimore." As anthropologists, what "The Wire" made us realize is that communities could represent themselves. Also, as time went on, technologies (smart phones, social media) that would help people do that became more and more available. "Anthropology By the Wire" was about building collaborative media with people in neighborhoods to tell stories they wanted to tell in ways that made sense to them. It was piecemeal, production values varied, and, of course, there was no script. In that sense, it was the opposite of "The Wire." But it was still generated in the space opened up by "The Wire."Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5366844521314988314.post-51076864318802023662022-04-03T14:04:00.007-07:002022-04-03T14:11:43.058-07:00Ghostly Encounters on Google: Spirit Photography, Reverse Image Search and Urban Critique in Baltimore<div class="separator" style="clear: both;">
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In 1866, Alfred Russell Wallace proclaimed a “new branch of anthropology”
premised on the Spiritualist movement that was then exploding in popularity in
England. For Wallace, that anthropology would revolve around a growing body of
highly disputed evidence of life after death. While séances were one major site
for the evidence of spirits, other technologies were also important to the new
religion, including spirit photography, where ghostly figures or more amorphous,
ectoplasmic emanations would appear in photographs next to (living) humans
sitting for their portraits. Although these photographs brought solace to those
missing their loved ones, they were also windows onto a future utopia; after
all, the afterlife was a place where humans would continue to grow and develop
into more perfect beings, beings who had come back to help guide their still
living compatriots. While these photos appear to us today to be clumsy double
exposures, they suggest—along with their twentieth-century counterparts in
Dadaist montage—a source of social critique. And, indeed, Spiritualism was
readily embraced by social progressives of the day for just these reasons.
Interpellating other images onto a photograph both breaks the illusion of
objectivity in realist photography which is grounded in the indexicality of the
photograph (first discussed by Charles Saunders Peirce) (Peirce 1894: 4). In so
doing, spirit photography anticipates the challenges digitization, manipulation
and algorithmically generated images raise to the indexical truth-value of the
image.1 In this essay, I extend Wallace’s “new anthropology” to urban
applications of reverse image search, where search engines apply a combination
of indexed images, neural networks and machine learning in order to identify the
same or similar images across huge databases. Although mostly utilized for
locating copyright infringement, uncovering catfishing or identifying locations,
reverse image search also suggests a series of alternative “spirits” to photos
of urban spaces. In Baltimore, where my research has concentrated on issues of
urban gentrification and abandonment, reverse image searches of Baltimore’s
spaces reveal other possibilities—alternatives to urban divestment. For example,
a search based on a photo of a boarded-up block of stores in West Baltimore
generates images of bustling mercantile districts in cities all over the world.
Each of these images, in turn, is an argument against the neoliberal algebra
that has laid waste to cities and compounded poverty and segregation. By
overlaying images of Baltimore streets and facades with these ghosts of other
urban possibilities, I attempt to summon an anthropology of critical future
possibilities. In so doing, I identify another role for digital technologies:
one that conjures absent possibilities into urban presents through regimes of
Big Data that would otherwise be used for surveillance. The end of the essay
finds me revisiting Wallace’s “new branch of anthropology,” not to revive his
call for the study of ghosts, but for our work to include spirits of the future
in our critiques of present inequality.
<br>
Just published in
<a href="https://www.semioticreview.com/ojs/index.php/sr/article/view/74/132"
>Semiotic Review</a
>
Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5366844521314988314.post-75958302861336742562022-02-17T05:43:00.004-08:002022-02-17T05:43:33.281-08:00A piece for Anthropology Day<h1>Margaret Mead Imagined Different Futures</h1>
<p>By Samuel Gerald Collins</p>
<p>In the face of climate disaster, a continuing pandemic, and endless global conflict, it’s difficult to be optimistic about the future. Researchers in psychology <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02582-8">have marked</a> a sharp upswing in “eco-anxiety” among young people. <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/03/21/public-sees-an-america-in-decline-on-many-fronts/">Surveys show</a> that most people in the U.S. believe life will get worse over the next 30 years. None of this is surprising. The future isn’t shaping up to be something many people look forward to.</p>
<p>When the status quo seems threatened—for example, by climate disaster—some turn to “technological salvation” in the form of new consumer products and engineering innovations to solve the problems. Technological fixes seem to offer comfort through the promise that life can continue as it does today. Yet when these solutions don’t work, people are left in the grips of anxiety over <a href="https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/">an oncoming apocalypse</a>.</p>
<p>While conditions are undoubtedly dire, some of the anxiety-induced panic many of us feel may be due to the difficulty we have imagining alternatives. From its advent in <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2149">Enlightenment thought in the 18th century</a>, “progress” has come to mean increase: faster, bigger, richer. If the future doesn’t deliver “more and more”—or if this idea of progress leads ineluctably to ruin—then it doesn’t seem like much of a future at all.</p>
<p>However: There can be alternative futures. And anthropology—unlikely as it may seem at first glance—can help take us there. Anthropologists are deeply invested in making other worlds possible, as I know from 20 years of researching and writing about anthropology’s future orientations.</p>
<p>At its core, anthropology is the study of the past and present for the future, and its methods can help us imagine different futures than the ones that haunt us now.</p>
<p >The future-orientation of the field was evident from the very beginnings of contemporary cultural anthropology in the U.S. That became clear to me when I started learning about Margaret Mead’s long and legendary career, starting with her doctoral studies in anthropology at Columbia University under Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict in the 1920s, through decades of her work as a public intellectual until her death in 1978.</p>
<p>In 1928, Mead’s <a href="https://archive.org/details/comingofageinsam00mead">Coming of Age in Samoa</a> captivated general readers with descriptions of Samoan adolescence and sexuality. After its release, some reviewers <a href="https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9780824863777-004/html">were scandalized</a> by the frank discussion of promiscuity, especially among young girls. Decades later, <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Margaret_Mead_and_Samoa.html?id=qaqBAAAAMAAJ">critics attacked</a> the accuracy of Mead’s ethnographic data. As an anthropologist, <a href="https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/4614.htm">these controversies</a> surrounding Mead’s work were familiar ground. But what intrigued me most upon closer inspection was Mead’s future-facing cultural critique.</p>
<blockquote><p>Read on, from the archives: “<a href="https://www.sapiens.org/culture/mead-freeman/">The Life and Meaning of Margaret Mead</a>”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Coming of Age in Samoa ends in a curious way. While most of the ethnography is devoted to portrayals of Samoan life, the final sections take on an entirely different subject: the problems faced by young women in the United States. If Samoan adolescents had a (comparatively) easier time adjusting to their maturing sexuality, as Mead claimed, couldn’t people in the U.S. raise their children in a similar way? Mead quickly dismissed that idea, but then offered up another possibility: Familiar U.S. ideals of freedom and liberal tolerance needed to be extended to adolescent women as they explored their own sexuality.</p>
<p>“They must be taught,” Mead concluded, “that many ways are open to them, no one sanctioned above its alternative, and that upon them and upon them alone lies the burden of choice.” In other words, alternative ideals of sexual freedom were already present within pluralistic U.S. society—just withheld from most of the middle-class women Mead addressed through her work.</p>
<figure class="wp-caption has-iframe" itemscope="" itemstype="http://schema.org/VideoObject" style="width: 855px;"><iframe loading="lazy" width="855" height="481" title="Margaret Mead - The Family Lifestyles of the Future (1971)" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cXGZxMhFaOk?wmode=transparent&rel=0&feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe><figcaption>Mead’s critical commentary on nuclear family structures features heavily in the short documentary “The Family Lifestyles of the Future,” which aired in 1971 as an episode of the Canadian television series Here Come the Seventies. Biophily2/YouTube</figcaption></figure><p>This is an early version of Mead’s futurology—her exploration of anthropology as a resource for <a href="https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/MeadWorld">the study and planning of the future</a>. Coming of Age in Samoa serves as a textbook guide for how to approach cultural critique anthropologically: Start with an insistence on cultural relativism, the general idea that cultural practices need to be understood within their cultural contexts. Then move from that to a recognition of what I would call “relativism within”: the search for alternative value systems and ways of life already present in our own societies. The trick is turning the anthropological gaze inward to question the ways the status quo obscures alternative possibilities, as Mead did when she pointed U.S. women to the choices they had regarding sexual freedom.</p>
<p>In many ways, Mead’s life was a touchstone for the struggle for a different, more open future. On one hand, she capitalized on privileges accorded elite, White women at the time, siding many times with the status quo on a number of <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo3618685.html">social and political issues</a>.</p>
<p>On the other hand, her romantic and sexual relationships with both women and men, and her critical analysis of 20th-century ideologies of family, suggested alternatives to the present. In her own way, she created room for a different future through the relationships she forged with the people around her.</p>
<p >By the 1960s, Mead was writing about the future <a href="https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/oneworld-comment.html">across multiple institutions</a>: the future of family and sexuality, certainly, but also the future of science, of space travel, of the environment, and of global peace. As Mead broadened the scope of her anthropology to speak out on public issues of the day, her thinking shifted more and more toward evoking these alternative futures. In fact, she was present at one of the pivotal events that forged the future horizons we see before us today.</p>
<p>Mead and her then husband, anthropologist Gregory Bateson, were unlikely additions to a series of landmark meetings on cybernetics sponsored by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation between 1946 and 1953. The <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/C/bo23348570.html">Macy conferences</a> brought together an interdisciplinary group of scientists to consider an emerging language of information, feedback, and neural networks, with the underlying goal of reunifying the sciences.</p>
<p>Insights from those conferences would, in many ways, pave the way for the world we’re experiencing: the manipulation of information, the interest in “controlling” the environment, the development of smart cities. Mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener, often credited as the <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/cybernetics-or-control-and-communication-animal-and-machine-reissue-1961-second-edition">founder of cybernetics</a>, defined the field in 1948 as “the science of control and communications in the animal and machine.” Cybernetics, according to Wiener, was the discovery of a language that could control the world.</p>
<blockquote>Anthropologists are deeply invested in making other worlds possible.</blockquote>
<p>Yet Mead and Bateson (to Wiener’s chagrin) were less interested in the “control” dimension of cybernetics than the “communication” aspect. For the anthropologists, the Macy conferences were an opportunity to not only understand how people interact with the world around them, but also to think about new worlds that might emerge from these relationships. Bateson, for his part, expanded cybernetics into the study of human consciousness. He <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo3620295.html">famously explained</a> that the “mind” extends beyond the human brain to the body, to the body’s tools, and to the natural world with which the brain, body, and tools interact.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Mead was compelled to speak out further on pressing issues of the day. In the context of environmental crises and the nuclear arms race, she articulated to scientific societies and to civic groups around the world her hope that people would choose a different direction for the future. She called for a “human-oriented society” where people were “willing to recognize our basic nature as one which shares the fundamental properties of life with all other living things.”</p>
<p>For Mead, the first step toward a more harmonious future was recognizing that the seeds for a genuinely different way of living with nature existed in the present moment.</p>
<p >As I think back on Mead’s legacy, I wonder what world we’d be living in if this version of cybernetics had come to pass.</p>
<p>Mead’s version suggests a very different future from the one many find themselves imprisoned in today. In this alternative scenario, humans recognize our common lot with life around us and then communicate and listen within these shared systems—all through the same mechanisms of feedback and information sharing that cyberneticists hoped would allow them to dominate and control the world by regulating how those systems act.</p>
<p>It’s worth noting that neither Mead nor Bateson wanted to spell out exactly what such a future of communicating and listening might look like; they just knew it would mean a different world.</p>
<p>And this, ambiguity and all, is the anthropological contribution. Mead and her generation of anthropologists knew that when we study other peoples and their worlds, whether those are geographically close or far from our homes, anthropologists can uncover alternative futures in the making.</p>
<p>We may be 100 years out from Coming of Age in Samoa, but this is the approach to the future that we still need now. We need to be reminded that we can be different in the future because we are already different—if we only open our eyes to the possibilities.</p>
<p>This work first appeared on <a href="https://www.sapiens.org">SAPIENS</a> under a <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND 4.0 license</a>. Read the <a href="https://www.sapiens.org/culture/margaret-mead-different-futures/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">original here</a>.<img src="https://www.sapiens.org/track/21682-1645105313473/?dt=Margaret+Mead+Imagined+Different+Futures&dl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sapiens.org%2Fculture%2Fmargaret-mead-different-futures%2F" alt="" width="1" height="1" /></p>
Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5366844521314988314.post-60817892515982847462021-11-24T08:56:00.000-08:002021-11-24T08:56:04.256-08:00Where's #Anthropology? Hashtag mayhem at #AAA2021Baltimore<p>The American Anthropological Annual Meeting has come and gone after a year
hiatus. But, courtesy of the continued pandemic, it was not business as usual,
and a combination of uneven face-to-face/online hybridity and a buggy app meant
continued confusion throughout the conference. Adding to that confusion was the
multiplication of conference hashtags, a continuing source of ambiguity that I
have chronicled on this blog over the years. This year, #AAA2021Baltimore was
joined by numerous, other hashtags: #AAA2021, #AAABaltimore, #AmAnth2021. Here’s
a sociograph of different hashtags:</p>
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<p>In the lower left of the graph, you can see #AAA2021Baltimore, the “official”
hashtag, mostly deployed by @AmericanAnththro--accounting for the “hub and
spoke” pattern of that cluster.. The largest clusters, though, belong to the
AAA--that is, the Asian Artist Awards--and, in particular, the popular vote
category, which generated at least 80 percent of Twitter traffic around AAA2021
(congratulations Kim Seon Ho!) in Korean, Japanese and Thai. Other hashtags
referring to the Awards likewise commanded large numbers of likes and retweets,
and anthropology was fairly occluded under the white-hot glare of K-Pop fans.</p>
<p>
Here are the top Twitter accounts by “betweenness centrality”: top
betweenness: starnewskorea jonah_writer unitedmongjis_ anneekarika yoonbwii
gummy88888 tsukicooky fkfkfk_kfkfkf korb_blog weareoneexo yukaseon18 nuestnews
jseolhee 1exoklwkn americananthro kimsoen08051986 biancaphd Wickedwitcheso1 </p>
<p> Note that @americananthro was the only anthropology account in the top counts. </p>
<p>
Here’s the top anthropology tweet by re-tweet counts: “Interested in reaching
a wider public with your research? Join us and @SAPIENS_org on Friday in
Baltimore at the @AmericanAnthro annual meeting for our public scholarship
event! Looking forward to learning and sharing ideas with you! @NapaAnthro
@WennerGrenOrg #aaa2021 https://t.co/b4k210aCYs” While here’s the top tweet by
“likes”: “Speaking of sanctuary spaces she has found/created within anthro,
Dr. Harrison says (and I paraphrase) "If I had to depend on a department of
anthropology for my sense of self, I wouldn't be an anthropologist today!"
SAY. THAT. AGAIN. #AAA2021Baltimore”
</p>
In terms of the resulting network of meaning, this resulted in a AAA with a
distinctly KPOP feel to it. Here’s a semantic network that classifies tweets
according to otheir overall theme:
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;">
<a
href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ0yy_qVBDBKgvqOGqVt5PDcRZNw0udDrkBmVqiP6DxJeswW4nt5nqQPvOddNM45dIltCP3gdbufFCALlvr5pt84yBe84n01zbn-SdKxget6PF39-sLEqtaRWei9hDAw_GbLvGgxOMw_8/s1600/AAA2021SemanticNetwork.png"
style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "
><img
alt=""
border="0"
width="400"
data-original-height="1175"
data-original-width="1600"
src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZ0yy_qVBDBKgvqOGqVt5PDcRZNw0udDrkBmVqiP6DxJeswW4nt5nqQPvOddNM45dIltCP3gdbufFCALlvr5pt84yBe84n01zbn-SdKxget6PF39-sLEqtaRWei9hDAw_GbLvGgxOMw_8/s400/AAA2021SemanticNetwork.png"
/></a>
</div>
<p>“Obfuscation” is a term that Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum have used to
describe the political mobilization of hashtags and other techniques to dilute
messages, hide data or otherwise re-direct people for political ends.
“Obfuscation is the deliberate addition of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading
information to interfere with surveillance and data collection” (2015: 1).
Brunton and Nissenbaum document the first instance of obfuscation in Russian
attempts to quell protests over the 2011 parliamentary elections. By flooding
the hashtag “#Triumfalnaya” (a Moscow public square where protests took place)
with messages extolling Russian nationalism or just nonsense words, the Russian
government rendered the hashtag useless as a rallying point and reference to
protests resisting the Putin/Medvedev government. More recently, KPOP fans
around the world have used to same technique to flood white supremacist hashtags
with concert clips and KPOP news. But, here, we have the American
Anthropological Association in essence obscuring itself through its dogged
insistence on the “#AAA” hashtag, with AAA already a casualty of twentieth
century efforts to select names that would appear first in the alphabetical
yellow pages listings (AAA Bailbonds, anyone?). </p>
<p>Why does the AAA continue with
this hashtag? I think it ultimately comes down to brand identity--in other
words, placing the organization over the imperatives of its members who might
use hashtags to build solidarity among anthropologists. And it also has to do
with a firm misunderstanding of the way Twitter works. Events are temporal. Even
though Twitter breaks the strict chronology of its feed with older tweets (“In
case you missed it”), conference tweets are not going to persist more than a few
days. And what is the goal? To communicate with anthropologists, or to increase
the visibility of the American Anthropological Association? If it’s about
anthropologists, then what about hashtags like “#Anthropology2021”? There’s no
reference here to AAA at all, and the hashtag could be used by any anthropology
conference. Why not? Are we afraid that this will compete with other
anthropology conferences in late November? At a time when hybrid formats seem
likely to persist, why not use hashtags to build links around the world to other
anthropologies?</p>
<p>References</p>
<p>Bunton, Finn and Helen Nissenbaum (2015).
Obfuscation: A User’s Guide. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.</p>
Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5366844521314988314.post-71675374287563182021-05-26T13:26:00.006-07:002021-05-26T13:26:41.514-07:00Anthropology and the Twitter Challenge<p>For many of us in anthropology, the advent of “big data'' represents a threat. Why, after all, spend months developing rapport and interviewing 100 people when you can run sentiment analyses on 40 million tweets in a matter of hours? Still, I agree with <a href="https://medium.com/ethnography-matters/why-big-data-needs-thick-data-b4b3e75e3d7" target="_blank">Tricia Wang</a>, who urges us to engage big data and complement that work with our own “thick data.” In “thick data,” the depths of our insights into meaning and interpretation, “the native’s point of view,” could act as a corrective to billions of data points that may “speak for themselves,” as Chris Anderson claimed, but not, perhaps, for people. Ironically, this move to “thick data'' was enabled by the gradual choking off of data access to social media APIs. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter - one by one social media platforms began limiting third-party access to their data, under the cover of protecting users from infringements on their privacy. Well, not all third-party access. Corporations and select researchers still manage to maintain access to the “firehose” of user data in social media, while the rest of us have to make do with whatever limited sets of data we can access. For some platforms, (e.g., Facebook), access has ceased altogether. You can still gain access to much of this proprietary data through scraping, but that’s not an ethical research practice for anthropology. So, I’ve worked towards my “thick data,” using the limited data I can download from platforms like Twitter to broaden the “deep” data I’ve been getting from more traditional, ethnographic methods. </p><p>This has proven useful for community-based ethnographic work, and I've applied it to studies of neighborhoods in Baltimore, in Seoul, and elsewhere, resulting in articles and a co-authored monograph (“<a href="https://www.routledge.com/Networked-Anthropology-A-Primer-for-Ethnographers/Collins-Durington/p/book/9780415821759">Networked Anthropology</a>”) explaining the advantages of this mixed-methods approach to community-based, participatory research strategies. I’ve also worked on multiple grants with the National Park Service using the same approach. There, the park itself is the focus of social media investigation, with the ultimate goal being the identification of community stakeholders and their connections to the park. </p><p>However: in early 2021, after the introduction of a <a href="https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/tools/2020/introducing_new_twitter_api.html">new API interface</a>, Twitter allowed academics to apply for an academic track with access to 10 million tweets per month. While this is not full access, it certainly moves my possibilities more into the realm of big data. And this raises all sorts of new problems and possibilities. While my work has utilized some basic metrics (centrality measures, word frequencies, descriptive statistics), the scale of data I now have access to requires a different set of empirical tests and, perhaps, a different class of questions. Ultimately, I wonder if it is possible to even ask similar kinds of questions of these data. Can they tell me, for example, about the meaning of place? About the ways people interpret their worlds? The challenge for me is to bridge “thick” and “big” data.</p><p>But the big challenge (and opportunity) here is to anthropology. While no stranger to quantitative methods, we still generally do not work with larger data sets. These have been inimical to the “small societies” approach that characterized anthropology in the early twentieth century. So what will anthropology become in this environment? </p>Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5366844521314988314.post-65098351144736237472020-09-29T09:42:00.003-07:002020-09-29T09:42:33.229-07:00Abstract for a paper-in-progress: quarantine and sentiment analysis. <p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: sentiment analyses of
new connections and communities in a COVID world. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Quarantine re-makes the city around us, re-defining “inside”
and “outside,” “home” and “neighborhood.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“Staying home” means complying with a socially and politically
constructed bubble that delimits not only who or what can move from one side or
another, but the protocols to be followed when that barrier is breached.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Moreover, transitioning from one to another
is not just a matter of spatial movement, it also involves a shift in identity,
from the one quarantined to the one not quarantined.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Finally, quarantine is a temporal state: fourteen
days, or until the city lifts the quarantine measures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Under these conditions, what does “home”
mean?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What does “inside” mean?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And when one is quarantined, what do more
collective identities like “community” and “neighborhood” mean?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Under these circumstances, “home” can have a
negative valence—it can be isolating and alienating from the people around
you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the other hand, “home” can be a
source of new realizations of self, and new formed of connectedness and solidarity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this project, I utilize a large set of Twitter
data gathering thoughts on quarantine from different countries at different
times, from March to September.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mostly
urban, the tweets originate in cities undergoing quarantine from around the
world: Seoul, Paris, New York, each instituting different quarantine protocols
at different times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Using sentiment
analysis and textual analysis, I examine Twitter as 1) a source of positive and
negative valuations of quarantine; and 2) as a record of activities and
relationships forged under quarantine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On
the one hand, preliminary results would seem to validate dire predictions from
Durkheim, Simmel and others with regards to alienation in the city.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And, indeed, many people use Twitter to
bemoan their isolation and their truncated lives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the other, many Twitter users explore the
possibility of new connections with self and with community amidst physical
separation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this, quarantine’s
temporality plays an importance role by allowing people to construct visions of
community and togetherness as a future temporality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This paper explores the possibilities for
building urban community in a pandemic world through an exploration of the way
“home” and “neighborhood” have been re-conceptualized.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ultimately, what comes from this research are
insights into being together while being apart, and “home” as a staging area
for the construction of community. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
essay ends with hopeful speculations on a post-pandemic city that retains communal
solidarity while maintaining distancing.</p>
<p><style>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5366844521314988314.post-1945115785511909182020-09-13T18:54:00.004-07:002020-09-27T08:57:20.934-07:00Review of The Anthropology of the Future, by Rebecca Bryant and Daniel M. Knight<p> Just published, and not behind a paywall. You can find it <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/764098/pdf?casa_token=lapKpM7p7IUAAAAA:PWBjgdMiGX5Iea0KlxNAOxxnc3uaLy5tdeM6BnqSSruw6aJcNGgMvV1w8NdDv24h8bAVr5DbMD0" target="_blank">here</a>, in the Spring 2020 issue of Anthropological Quarterly. Update - now it is! Uggh - what the hell did I expect. <br /></p>Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5366844521314988314.post-66026913909105549272020-05-04T13:36:00.000-07:002020-05-04T14:57:56.318-07:00The Impoverishment of the COVID Future<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-3d3b12d9-7fff-0e5e-4c37-fd6fd6027ab2" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><br /></span></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilf-IkbdiuUhpna2-rp56GXciPDA93xsOvyN-kapEHWyjO-4Yb_ZVEcUxytNUIsu_5Il546J7-7GLmzUFR6H6W5KXZeWNuen66tpwo8SFnPrH9vD6uTH2cVr3uTLGYRRnjVPNuupCLXd4/s1600/512px-Dystopian_set_up._%25284874449072%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="384" data-original-width="512" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilf-IkbdiuUhpna2-rp56GXciPDA93xsOvyN-kapEHWyjO-4Yb_ZVEcUxytNUIsu_5Il546J7-7GLmzUFR6H6W5KXZeWNuen66tpwo8SFnPrH9vD6uTH2cVr3uTLGYRRnjVPNuupCLXd4/s320/512px-Dystopian_set_up._%25284874449072%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dystopian_set_up._(4874449072).jpg" target="_blank">Wikimedia Commons</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"> </span>
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As I complete this essay, the quarantine imposed on
Baltimore stretches into its second month, and I continue teaching online amid
terror and despair.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Blog posts and
newspaper articles forecast a new era of education in the age of social
distancing, a new kind of virtual conference in the absence of travel, and new
research without the face-to-face interactions that have heretofore been the
bread-and-butter of ethnographic fieldwork. All of these may be
prognostications, but they are not, I would submit, really about the
future. Instead, each “future” describes a present--online education,
virtual meetings, digital anthropology. None of them are really “new” at
all. Just the opposite, they are part of a process of what Escobar
(echoing Tony Fry) describes as “the systematic destruction of possible futures
by the structured unsustainability of modernity” (Escobar 2018: 117).
Here, the COVID pandemic ushers in a future, but it is not a real future. Instead, a “de-future,” a truncated present where face-to-face relationships
disappear and only online connections remain. As Deleuze wrote in his essay on Bergson's duration, “The possible passes into the real through limitation,
the culling of other possibilities” (Deleuze 1991: 187). Shorn of alternatives,
the COVID future ushers forth an impoverished dystopia of distant relations,
multiplied inequalities, Mad-Max guerilla capitalism. Prognostication in
the age of the pandemic has been about the way our future will be an attenuated
present: less social interaction, less economic well-being, less life. It
it was a tv miniseries, I don’t think I would want to see this
future. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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Of course, it’s worth asking why it would matter if I would
watch such a dystopia. Isn’t this the way it is? Yes, and no.
Yes-the disruption and loss of life have an undeniable, terrifying
reality. But at the same time, no: we can look to alternatives that
acknowledge pandemic realities but also sketch alternatives to capitalism, to
the bourgeois rentier class, to precarious employment (<a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/04/06/covid-19-and-the-failures-of-capitalism/">Wolff
2020</a>). We can sketch alternatives to a digital divide education where
people with a fast broadband and the latest laptop get access, and everyone
else survives on asynchronous, canned powerpoints (<a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/03/coronavirus-digital-classrooms-cambridge-schools-internet-broadband-access">Aschoff
2020</a>). Finally, COVID underlines the failures of neoliberalism at
almost every level. And, in that failure, raises alternatives that are
already implicit in the practices and institutions of people in many of the
places where anthropologists have worked: all kinds of cooperatives, land
trusts, community health centers. As anthropologists, we need to
elaborate those alternative futures, to engage in a “futuring” that will spell
the end of a fait accompli modernity. </div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">References</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Deleuze, Gilles (1991). Bergsonism. NY: Zone Books.</span></div>
<br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">Escobar, Arturo (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. </span></div>
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Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5366844521314988314.post-88208086244910742522020-04-11T11:59:00.001-07:002020-04-12T13:01:51.443-07:00Networked, Not Virtual: ethnography when you can't go there<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMg2ZWHSl_FBTeWdkhpe7qNRc7O54NP19TAcXt4o7u9dO4rvTvRSE4Oup3uqShW1mpyp8e7eCCFELFxzqBq12-cEcqr79ovpmBSGHnSFrXGjDt8bYWwhuU0lJ9uE9cYGMaTqfcgm2Q5Bs/s1600/Screen+Shot+2020-04-11+at+2.49.34+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1366" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMg2ZWHSl_FBTeWdkhpe7qNRc7O54NP19TAcXt4o7u9dO4rvTvRSE4Oup3uqShW1mpyp8e7eCCFELFxzqBq12-cEcqr79ovpmBSGHnSFrXGjDt8bYWwhuU0lJ9uE9cYGMaTqfcgm2Q5Bs/s400/Screen+Shot+2020-04-11+at+2.49.34+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
(from our <a href="https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/c28f0b6fab85650562ac54dd5cfa403e/greenmount-west-3/index.html" target="_blank">storymap</a>)</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<br />
In my capacity as a fellow in our faculty research center, I've been doing a
lot of support work for the unexpected shift to learning-at-a-distance.
At my uni, very few of us have experience teaching online. The faculty
(generally) aren't especially enthusiastic, and there hasn't really been a lot
of institutional support. So, I wasn't surprised when most of the
questions I was fielding took the form of: "I do X in my class. How
can I do X online?" Not surprised because that's the ideological
frame distance education has relied upon: an exact homology between offline-
and online teaching, with the physical classroom replaced by the discussion
board, the lectures by videos. But actual online courses (not our band
aid efforts to stitch together something in a few days) are structured very
differently than their physical counterparts. The best classes maximize
their digital affordances and don’t try to simply "reproduce"
face-to-face education.<br />
<br />
Something similar has happened with ethnography. I have read dozens of
semi-panicked posts: if I can't go into the field, perhaps I can go into the
digital field? Well - there have been several, thoughtful posts from
digital anthropologists on this sentiment, including a recent one in <a href="https://thegeekanthropologist.com/2020/03/25/so-you-want-to-do-digital-ethnography/" target="_blank">GeekAnthropologist.</a> Reading these, though, I can't help but notice that these
would-be digital anthropologists don't really want to be digital at all.
And they're not really proposing digital anthropology. If you're studying
the lives of people in their (physical) communities, can you really do digital
anthropology? In other words, if people are undertaking online/offline
lives (whether under quarantine or not), are those lives best understood
through digital anthropology? Or are you talking about what my colleague,
Matthew Durington, and I have called "<a href="http://tomorrowculture.blogspot.com/2012/05/coming-to-terms-with-networked.html" target="_blank">networkedanthropology</a>"?<br />
<br />
In networked anthropology, we acknowledge the skein of digital and physical
connections in people's lives, and we try to recognize and enable the
capacities of people to represent those lives through networked,
media platforms that make sense to them.<br />
<br />
In a quarantined world, what's
missing from the social scene? With regards to the production of
ethnography, at least one element is missing: the anthropologist. But
only that. Even without the anthropologist, social and cultural life
continue. And more than that--the documentation and theorization of
social and cultural life continues as people record and comment on the things
that happen in their lives and in their communities. In this sense,
networked anthropology is about capitulation--perhaps we really weren't that
important anyway? But we can certainly help people in their own efforts
to represent and communicate their identities and communities, and this is, I
think, what (at least some) of our colleagues should be doing.<br />
<br />
Last summer, we worked on a project in a small neighborhood in Baltimore
undergoing rapid gentrification that was leading to the displacement of a
long-standing community of African American residents. Collaborating with
children at a community center, we helped them (co)produce maps, photographs,
video and audio interviews that we put together for an app tour, an exhibit and
a performance. It was a great project to work on, and the article that we
are submitting on this includes all of them as co-authors. In light of
our present pandemic, and in the interest of protecting communities from us, it occurs to me that we (me and Matt Durington) didn't really
need to be there at all. Sure - we needed to talk to people and see what
they were up to. In the end, though, the images and interviews are
produced by people in the community. My point: if we never actually
stepped foot in that neighborhood, that would not make it digital
anthropology. We would just be doing networked anthropology -
anthropology with people who were physically (not virtually) in their
communities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
I don't know when the infection rates and death toll of the pandemic will
subside. But it seems likely that we will not be able to undertake our in
situ research for some time. Even if we can go into the field, it may be
in fits and starts, with pandemic flare-ups mandating our social distancing
once again. But just because we are not in situ doesn't mean that people
in the communities where we work aren’t in situ! By now, we are all used
to that peculiar hypocrisy in anthropology that decries colonization and its authorizing
gaze, but that still seems to insist on presence in order to undertake
anthropology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps enough of
that?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
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Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5366844521314988314.post-43154803423114864082020-01-07T11:01:00.000-08:002020-01-07T11:01:00.379-08:00The Future of Social Media in Anthropology<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
From the conclusion to my contribution on "<a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2439" target="_blank">Social Media</a>" in Wiley's "The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology:"<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Anthropologists are still coming to terms with social media and its impact on every<br />level of our lives. No matter what new SNS platforms develop, though, it is certain that<br />social media will continue to be a source of controversy in the field. The reasons for<br />controversy may vary, but they will all pivot on the essential liminality of social media.<br />By definition, it occupies spaces between worlds: between people, between online and<br />offline, between official and unofficial, between private and public, between resistance<br />and accommodation, between horizontality and verticality. For all of these reasons,<br />anthropologists are unlikely to be entirely comfortable with the social media they and<br />their interlocutors utilize, whatever new platforms may develop in the future. But that<br />discomfort can also be a source of strength, one that can help to highlight and perhaps<br />help to overturn persistent inequalities in the field, all the while revealing dimensions<br />of our work that may have been suppressed or sublimated in the past. </blockquote>
And I think I still agree with that-- social media continue to be leaky and messy: the dishes you haven't yet washed in your intellectual sink. </div>
Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5366844521314988314.post-85435068538237262182019-10-03T16:28:00.000-07:002019-10-03T16:28:24.262-07:00Review of Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction,<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
My review of the tremendously exciting collection of translated South Korean science fiction: <a href="http://sfra.org/resources/Documents/SFRA%20Review%20329.pdf" target="_blank">Readymade Bodhisattva</a>. It's the first of its kind in English, and serves as a tremendous introduction to SF that is really quite different than that of neighboring China or Japan. </div>
Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5366844521314988314.post-40733990092140516532019-10-03T04:30:00.002-07:002019-10-03T04:32:19.663-07:00Futures at AAACASCA 2019<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The American Anthropological Association/ Canadian Anthropological Society meeting in Vancouver is in November, but the browsable schedule is already out. As in <a href="http://tomorrowculture.blogspot.com/2018/10/mapping-future-at-american.html" target="_blank">previous years,</a> I have identified future-oriented or science fiction-oriented panels that I would love to attend (including two I'm on). This may not be a complete list, and I apologize for panels I've missed. But even this, incomplete as it might be, is an impressive collection of a robust future-orientation in the work of anthropologists. <br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Thursday,
November 21</span></h3>
<span class="prestime"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">8:00
AM – 9:45 AM</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> – <span class="presname"><span style="color: #0088bb;">Decolonial Belongings and Futures:
Creating Spaces of Belonging thru Epistemic Disobedience</span></span> - Vancouver
CC EAST, Room 7</span><br />
<span class="prestime"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">2:00
PM – 3:45 PM</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> – <span class="presname"><span style="color: #0088bb;">Biofutures</span></span> - Vancouver
CC WEST, Room 122</span><br />
<span class="prestime"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">2:00
PM – 3:45 PM</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> – <span class="presname"><span style="color: #0088bb;">Haunting Toward the Future: Colonial
Durabilities and Temporalities</span></span> - Vancouver CC EAST, Room 13</span><br />
<span class="prestime"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">2:00
PM – 3:45 PM</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> – <span class="presname"><span style="color: #0088bb;">Untaming futures? Plural knowledges,
unknown environments and technologies of anticipation (Part 1)</span></span> -
Vancouver CC WEST, Room 202</span><br />
<span class="prestime"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">4:15
PM – 6:00 PM</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> – <span class="presname"><span style="color: #0088bb;">In an Atmosphere of Change:
Speculative Futures in Anthropological Perspective</span></span> - Vancouver CC
WEST, Room 118</span><br />
<span class="prestime"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">4:15
PM – 6:00 PM</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> – <span class="presname"><span style="color: #0088bb;">NARRATING THE FUTURE FOR A WARMING
WORLD</span></span> - Vancouver CC WEST, Room 205</span><br />
<span class="prestime"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">4:15
PM – 6:00 PM</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> – <span class="presname"><span style="color: #0088bb;">Untaming futures? Plural knowledges,
unknown environments and technologies of anticipation (Part 2)</span></span> -
Vancouver CC WEST, Room 202</span><br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Friday,
November 22</span></h3>
<span class="prestime"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">10:15
AM – 12:00 PM</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> – <span class="presname"><span style="color: #0088bb;">Utopia and Changing the Future:
Anthropology’s Role in Imagining Alternatives (Part 1)</span></span> -
Vancouver CC EAST, Room 11</span><br />
<span class="prestime"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"></span>
<span class="prestime"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">2:00
PM – 3:45 PM</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> – <span class="presname"><span style="color: #0088bb;">The Climate of Governance and the
Governance of Climate: Negotiating the Futures of Natures & Cultures</span></span>
- Vancouver CC EAST, Room 15</span><br />
<span class="prestime"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">2:00
PM – 3:45 PM</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> – <span class="presname"><span style="color: #0088bb;">Utopia and Changing the Future:
Anthropology’s Role in Imagining Alternatives (Part 2)</span></span> -
Vancouver CC EAST, Room 11</span><br />
<span class="prestime"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">4:15
PM – 6:00 PM</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> – <span class="presname"><span style="color: #0088bb;">Horizons of Possibility: Dynamic
Future Selves in a Changing and Contested World</span></span> - Vancouver CC
WEST, Room 115</span><br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Saturday,
November 23</span></h3>
<span class="prestime"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">8:00
AM – 9:45 AM</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> – <span class="presname"><span style="color: #0088bb;">Algorithmic Futures: Computing as a
Site and Object of Technopolitical Interventions</span></span> - Vancouver CC
WEST, Room 301</span><br />
<span class="prestime"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">8:00
AM – 9:45 AM</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> – <span class="presname"><span style="color: #0088bb;">Forging Futures in Contested
Landscapes</span></span> - Vancouver CC WEST, Room 215</span><br />
<span class="prestime"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">10:15
AM – 12:00 PM</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> – <span class="presname"><span style="color: #0088bb;">Forecasting Futures: Education as
Speculative Practice</span></span> - Vancouver CC WEST, Room 119</span><br />
<span class="prestime"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">10:15
AM – 12:00 PM</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> – <span class="presname"><span style="color: #0088bb;">So many futures, so little time:
Anthropological approaches to catastrophe and the future</span></span> -
Vancouver CC EAST, Ballroom C</span><br />
<span class="prestime"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">4:15
PM – 6:00 PM</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> – <span class="presname"><span style="color: #0088bb;">Ethnographies of Palestinian Futures</span></span>
- Vancouver CC WEST, Room 204</span><br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Sunday,
November 24</span></h3>
<span class="prestime"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">10:15
AM – 12:00 PM</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> – <span class="presname"><span style="color: #0088bb;">Geological Anthropology: Waters,
Ruins, Futures (Part 2)</span></span> - Vancouver CC WEST, Room 101 & 102</span><br />
<br />
<b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The Meaning of the Future</span></b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Yet there is a great deal of polysemy implied in "the future," and our orientation to future temporalities likewise varies (Bryant and Knight 2019). I did some text analysis of the abstracts for these panels in order to look at the evolving terrain of future work [click on the graph for the full size]:</span><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdZIv38V6LDuJv6u3Bbkhj0Fut_c47fjlGaOGB_3MfsSoV-gilNRc8gRrWmQ3zZSYB4jP6ThtSLFS-P_6BuoVjqVaLEkJg5R0dc8N0Laeytlu_uLG7Fn60lnApdHa8hwoxOuBCuRo_gE4/s1600/scollins_imported%25281%2529.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="762" data-original-width="1600" height="304" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdZIv38V6LDuJv6u3Bbkhj0Fut_c47fjlGaOGB_3MfsSoV-gilNRc8gRrWmQ3zZSYB4jP6ThtSLFS-P_6BuoVjqVaLEkJg5R0dc8N0Laeytlu_uLG7Fn60lnApdHa8hwoxOuBCuRo_gE4/s640/scollins_imported%25281%2529.png" width="640" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The graph uses "<a href="https://infranodus.com/" target="_blank">Infranodus</a>,"a web-based, text analysis application that uses word co-occurence to construct a network. Nodes are key terms, and the edges (or lines) between them show words (actually lemmas) separated by 1 word or words separated by two words (Paranyushkin 2019).<br />
<br />
Additionally, the algorithm tries to identify "clusters" of terms--represented by different colored nodes and edges here. But this seems of limited efficacy here, where there is considerable overlap in the nomenclature of the future. Better, perhaps, is to focus on a few key terms, and the terms to which they're linked.<br />
<br />
<b>"Environmental" [click on the map for a full image of the network]</b><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcVXfuT14tAqOfJBqwWb3JN4Og19Rt8G37Ecw7EN2xpXYnqrhOgkqKpNxxKdRFNml5ap1UJRLve5FPzrIVwRzsXVypMehLVmm4_k47aQMXIH-3oOx-pbu4DnmST58yzii1m5r7P9UQP3Y/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-10-01+at+10.47.16+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1366" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcVXfuT14tAqOfJBqwWb3JN4Og19Rt8G37Ecw7EN2xpXYnqrhOgkqKpNxxKdRFNml5ap1UJRLve5FPzrIVwRzsXVypMehLVmm4_k47aQMXIH-3oOx-pbu4DnmST58yzii1m5r7P9UQP3Y/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-10-01+at+10.47.16+AM.png" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<b>"World"</b><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh24n3t0beFSjHeg1vE8w0EImG9EM2at3JeFgtBDhcAUHlfhNpH7geQu2u_EkzoxxrRWBHpGMi3XAJiWnpVtw3_NhYNFDaxRngOrs73RSrffFB8bzxfzftpT-OWayWsidRV7YBtK4KsINw/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-10-01+at+10.50.23+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1366" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh24n3t0beFSjHeg1vE8w0EImG9EM2at3JeFgtBDhcAUHlfhNpH7geQu2u_EkzoxxrRWBHpGMi3XAJiWnpVtw3_NhYNFDaxRngOrs73RSrffFB8bzxfzftpT-OWayWsidRV7YBtK4KsINw/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-10-01+at+10.50.23+AM.png" /></a></div>
<br />
<b>"Climate"</b><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-YspJGeJDLD_RQXotSRsjjc_NXzvBpZzLYTezgBQFKi14dvJFm4cSP4LeSsk_N1PeZMfe9YRr4RO2eHN6LBMj3CL_Lp_amTqvdHTbrz7RUqshsx7BWqbmWwbh-WZMrF7NhQVV0lIXQU0/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-10-01+at+10.53.01+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1366" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-YspJGeJDLD_RQXotSRsjjc_NXzvBpZzLYTezgBQFKi14dvJFm4cSP4LeSsk_N1PeZMfe9YRr4RO2eHN6LBMj3CL_Lp_amTqvdHTbrz7RUqshsx7BWqbmWwbh-WZMrF7NhQVV0lIXQU0/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-10-01+at+10.53.01+AM.png" /></a></div>
<br />
<b>"Alternative"</b><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgx-4ihu3dJEdcdCJyUU_wt9mguYBhV-tCAajaYdv15JGHRH0beXw8x_NV-eMV7AWViLQxq7hurrNvOUpvABjj55CLG5hd0tpkKb8lrWyx0E00if1SJ2G0fpIIgs70dfJFDggU84J4ste8/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-10-01+at+10.54.15+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1366" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgx-4ihu3dJEdcdCJyUU_wt9mguYBhV-tCAajaYdv15JGHRH0beXw8x_NV-eMV7AWViLQxq7hurrNvOUpvABjj55CLG5hd0tpkKb8lrWyx0E00if1SJ2G0fpIIgs70dfJFDggU84J4ste8/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-10-01+at+10.54.15+AM.png" /></a></div>
<br />
These keywords, together with the connections they forge, ultimately tell a more nuanced story about anthropology's emerging futures. The lemma "world" might appear in texts as "worlding," "world-building" etc., and might point, on the one hand, to the changes inextricably impacting our world today. On the other hand, "world" also includes links to the prospect of different worlds, however defined, whether in "space" or "imagined." "Alternative" opens on to the imaginative element of anthropological futuring, and the ways this might gesture towards other possibilities less premised on capitalist exploitation. This includes indigenous futures, and alternative narratives on the future from oppressed peoples. On the other hand, "climate" brings us into the decidedly more pessimistic futures of the anthropocene, where "change," "health" and "environment" make up the dreadful calculus of environmental catastrophe.<br />
<br />
All together, the pessimism and the optimism of the present moment, one where we teeter on the brink of future disaster, while alternatives appear to us (as anthropologists) in multiple forms, from policy changes, to space travel, to worlds re-shaped by alternatives to Eurocentric capitalist exploitation. The future work evolving in anthropology engages all of these levels simultaneously: 1) the future as a significant horizon in the lives of our interlocutors; 2) the future as an ethnographic object in its own right; 3) the future as a site for anthropological interventions.<br />
<br />
References<br />
<br />
Bryant, Rebecca and Daniel Knight (2019). The Anthropology of the Future. NY: Cambridge University Press. <br />
<br />
Paranyushkin, Dmitry (2019). "Infranodus." In Proceedings of WWW '19: The Web Conference (WWW '19), May 23, 2019, San Francissco, CA. <br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5366844521314988314.post-19573759825049778612019-03-24T17:50:00.000-07:002019-03-24T17:50:26.495-07:00AAA Paper Abstract: The Weight of Absence: Anthropologies of Non-Connection<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjym3ALTXR4JavSzB9Z7vI_HORy3TTfljTP7OGz9oabzS-rWAaff4lGGyPIREo-TC3CgSEPDCwiDQliAivjeNnthRmOUeHAXkeyLpgL0QorUVj7iJ3nvedWDaSW0DEoB6xIuHYpBCfLVXg/s1600/baltimoreinstagram.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1366" height="358" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjym3ALTXR4JavSzB9Z7vI_HORy3TTfljTP7OGz9oabzS-rWAaff4lGGyPIREo-TC3CgSEPDCwiDQliAivjeNnthRmOUeHAXkeyLpgL0QorUVj7iJ3nvedWDaSW0DEoB6xIuHYpBCfLVXg/s640/baltimoreinstagram.png" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
(A day's worth of geolocated instagram posts in Baltimore: August 24, 2018)<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The digital world presupposes a binary logic of connection
and disconnection, one that decomposes into haves and have-nots. Moreover, this
binary logic follows on burgeoning urban inequalities in a neo-liberal age, and
growing chasms in wealth and opportunity only seem to confirm the either/or
logic of digital capitalism. In cities,
it echoes in the dreadful calculus of gentrification and abandonment, capital
investment and disinvestment, inclusion and exclusion. But is dis-connection
only an absence? In this paper, I
explore absences and disconnections in social media and in urban networks as latencies
visible through an application of structural holes, triadic closure, structural
equivalence and other social network tools to digital media in cities. This work is inspired both by Ernst Bloch’s “Not-Yet”
and his insights that even forms of social life thoroughly imbricated in
capitalism nevertheless contain a “surplus” of potentiality that gestures
towards critical, emancipatory futures. In
addition, the work is inspired by anthropological methods from Alfred Russel Wallace
and others that take absence as data points in the empirical proof of
presence. I argue that even absence itself
is imbricated by a “horror vacui” that sets up presence as a moral dialectic. In this paper, these take the form of alternatives
that connect equity, justice and utopian alternatives to disinvestment and
abandonment visible through analyses of diverse digital platforms, including
social media, app platforms and website connectivity. Ultimately, this research builds on
anthropologies that move beyond the narration of what is to the speculative
design of what should be.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5366844521314988314.post-57567759781618058472019-01-29T14:26:00.001-08:002019-01-31T06:55:03.900-08:00Work Out of Joint: Our Future Lives With Robots and Intelligent Agents<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6IZnMEpUBHkIGR5q-QLMyGnTY4TqZWXZjca6bRTu-sD4VXdcEOW3l8i7KQ9Ai5Dcy230QbBbiaPJzOP_aFS0j0quoBZd9FR8HXRdD26GUNu-LB4QXFFKhkigdKXZK5bT-evicR4s2tZ4/s1600/Pulmonary_embolism_algorithm.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="254" data-original-width="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6IZnMEpUBHkIGR5q-QLMyGnTY4TqZWXZjca6bRTu-sD4VXdcEOW3l8i7KQ9Ai5Dcy230QbBbiaPJzOP_aFS0j0quoBZd9FR8HXRdD26GUNu-LB4QXFFKhkigdKXZK5bT-evicR4s2tZ4/s1600/Pulmonary_embolism_algorithm.svg.png" /></a></div>
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</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Wired magazine - mostly hagiographies of silicon valley entrepreneurs
- capitalist porn - vague reassurances for the future from the uber-wealthy.
500 dollar headphones.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Senior Associate
Editor Jason Kehe was "weary with dystopian prediction of nefarious robots
taking jobs from humans," so he challenged seven sf writers to
"imagine a world in which the gig economy and automation have redefined
the daily grind" (7). </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The results? A collection of stories--"T<a href="https://www.wired.com/story/future-of-work-farm-charlie-jane-anders/" target="_blank">he Next25 Years: What'll We Do?</a>"--from a stellar group of writers: Laurie Penny,
Ken Liu, Charles Yu, Charlie Janes Anders, Nisi Shawl, Adam Rogers and Martha
Wells. And only one killer robot (from Martha Wells) which, to be fair,
isn’t killing anyone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But there's still
much here that is dystopian. But from the next 25 years?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course, these aren't futurist prognostications;
like any good sf, they’re descriptions of our present--dystopian enough.
Or, as China Mieville has written, <span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">“We <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">live</i> in utopia, it just isn’t
ours” (Mieville 2015). </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">What I found
fascinating about this collection was the ways the writers highlight our service
to robot- and digital agents; the way, in other words, that we supplement their
agency by discounting our own. In Laurie Penny's "Real Girls,"
an unemployed writer becomes a simulation of an AI girlfriend: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">"Niall
explained that a lot of lonely people liked the idea of having a robot
girlfriend who was always on call and had no feelings of her own, a remote
algorithm that could shape itself to your particular needs--they'd seen it on
TV. But the technology wasn't there yet.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">
Hence the front company. All over the world, Niall said, broke millennials
who needed cash fast were signing NDAs and signing on to pretend to be
robots" (Penny 2019: 62).</span></div>
</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Similarly, Charles Yu's "Placebo" has an actor
playing a doctor in order to give a human face to end-of-life decisions being
made by a software agent:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"The human in the room is not in charge. The
thing is. As it should be. Brad barely made it through a year of junior
college. The black cube in the corner, on the other hand, is a $10
million doctor in a box, running trillions of calculations per second, simulations
within simulations within whatever" (Yu 2019: 67). </div>
</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And a journalist in Charlie Jane Anders's "The
Farm" re-edits his story until it can satisfy a convocation of
super-charged, robotic trolls: "a virtual machine populated with copies of
a few trillion different bots, scraped from the internet, living inside a fake
social network" (Anders 2019: 70). Anything remotely
objectionable--anything that might pierce the veil of the phantasmagoria of media
news--is summarily rejected. Yet they still need the human writer, at
least for the moment.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I agree with Jason Kehe: we’re missing something in
concentrating on the ways robots could be taking (or are taking) jobs away from
people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all—that cat’s already out
of the bag: automation has long been a management tool for the subjugation of
labor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But robots (and intelligent
agents) are much more than smarter, more autonomous versions of automated
systems from the 1950s and 1960s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our
interactions with robots are all about shifting agency back and forth from the
human to the non-human.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As I described in my (paywalled) essay, "<a href="https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/awr.12131" target="_blank">Working for the Robocracy</a>":</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
“But while the Mechanical Turk certainly exploits the
reserve army in its apportionment of low-paid, menial tasks, I would argue that
it creates an additional reserve army—this one a robot army that exists at some
point in the future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is, workers on
MTurk (Amazon’s platform) are essentially placeholders for tasks that robots
will do later when they’ve acquired the skills in pattern recognition, natural
language processing and translation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This is, in other words, the repetition of a process that began with
industrialization: first, reduce the worker to repetitive, machine-like tasks,
and then replace them with a machine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Automated phone calls have a similar quality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While few consumers prefer automated service
calls to person-to-person, the intelligent agent processing the phone call is
based on the real (but robotic) work of decades of human workers who have been
reduced to an algorithm of scripts in order to sell more product.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is, the work presupposes the robot, and
the robot is therefore able to replace the worker because the worker has
already been replaced: forced to become a reified simulacrum of themselves in
order to maintain employment, not only in terms of technical operation, but
also in intellect and affect.”</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The moments when we grant robots agency, or when robots “give”
us robotic agency: these are diluvial events happening right now that may tell
us a lot about our human-robot futures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
people in these stories aren't being precisely <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">replaced</i> by machines: they’re being reduced to algorithmic shadows
of themselves in order to serve non-human agencies that are supposed to replace
them altogether at some middle-point when humans become more robot-like and robots
become more human -like. After all, another way to pass the Turing Test
is to lower the bar by making us less human than we are now. When we are
forced to simulate non-human agency in our lives--when we interact with phone
trees, utilize ATMs, security systems. When we learn to interact with the
non-human agents in our lives, the first things to go are the skein of affect
and discourse that characterize even rudimentary social interactions. To
talk to the machine, we will have to become the machine. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There's one more story that could fit into this fascinating
collection: Phillip K. Dick's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Time Out of
Joint</i> (1959).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Following the Dick-ian
oeuvre, Time Out of Joint is a novel of paranoia, of madness and, ultimately,
one that interrogates reality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dick’s
protagonist, Ragle Gumm, spends his time winning newspaper contests and drinking
beer, but that reality gradually unravels to reveal another, where the
newspaper contests are a psychological cover for the mathematics of predicting nuclear
strikes in a war against lunar colonists battling for independence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There’s a lot in <i>Time Out of Joint</i> (and in many other
Dick novels) about the ultimate reality of our lives, but the relevance of the
novel to the future of work lies in the triviality of Gumm’s labor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His job – as the sole person capable of predicting
nuclear strikes – is suppressed under the triviality of the newspaper contest, “Where
Will the Little Green Man Be Next.” He spends all day following pleasure that
looks suspiciously like work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Indeed: through the magic of neoliberalism, much of our labor
goes under the guise of pleasure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Social
media mine our quotidian lives in order to connect us to products, and
services, and to mine our connections with others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like Dick’s Ragle Gumm, we spend hours each
day laboring for a cause we know little about, nor one that we would necessarily
agree with were we cognizant of the fate of our data.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This doubling has become axiomatic in late
capitalism: our pleasure is simultaneously a labor, while efforts to coat labor
in a veneer of pleasure fail to ameliorate its exploitative dimensions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On some level, then, it’s work all the way down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If the Wired stories dwell on the service to the algorithm,
and to the reduction of the human to the capacity to simulate robotic agents,
then our contemporary “work out of joint” harnesses our pleasure in the service
of capitalist algorithms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our suspicions—our
paranoia—of this subtended labor do little to ameliorate the distinction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One phantasmagoria erodes to reveal
another.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Facebook’s recent “10 year challenge”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Was it, people wondered, innocent pleasure or
an experiment to tool Facebook’s facial recognition algorithms (<a href="https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-10-year-meme-challenge/" target="_blank">O’Neill 2019</a>)?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Facebook dismissed these as paranoid fantasies,
but, of course, Facebook runs on the subterfuge of pleasure-as-work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If this is our present, what future, phantasmagoric
palaces will be built in order to conceal our complicity in the exploitation of
ourselves and others in the name of corporate profits that we will never
share?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">References</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">Anders, Charlie
Jane (2019).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“The Farm.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wired (January): 68-71.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">Collins, Samuel
Gerald (2018).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Working for the
Robocracy.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Anthropology of Work Review
39(1).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">Dick, Philip K (1984
[1959]).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Time Out of Joint.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>NY: Bluejay.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">Mieville, China
(2015).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“The Limits of Utopia.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Salvage Zone 1.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Retrieved from <a href="http://salvage.zone/">http://salvage.zone</a>,
November 4, 2017.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">O’Neill, Kate
(2019).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Facebook’s ’10 Year Challenge’
Is Just a Harmless Meme—Right?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Wired.com, retrieved 1/17/2019.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">Penny, Laurie
(2019).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Real Girls.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wired (January): 60-63.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">Yu, Charles
(2019).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Placebo.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wired (January): 66-67.</span></div>
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-->Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5366844521314988314.post-44802913791914039662018-12-18T06:02:00.001-08:002018-12-18T06:02:48.789-08:00Speculative Anthropology Series in Cultural Anthropology<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Please check out this <a href="https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1627-speculative-anthropologies" target="_blank">provocative collection of papers</a> at cultural anthropology. Edited by Ryan Anderson, Emma Louise Backe, Taylor Nelms, Elizabeth Reddy and Jeremy Trombley (and including my own short commentary), the essays speak to the importance of SF to our imagining of alternatives. </div>
Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5366844521314988314.post-10460631853028595252018-11-20T15:17:00.000-08:002018-11-22T11:43:31.417-08:00Twitter Wrap-up for AmAnth2018: Hashtags and Hautalk<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
As I have done over the past few years (<a href="http://tomorrowculture.blogspot.com/2017/12/amanth17-wrap-up-anthropology-matters.html" target="_blank">2017</a>, <a href="http://tomorrowculture.blogspot.com/2016/11/amanth2016-wrap-up.html" target="_blank">2016</a>), I returned from AAA2018 and ran some Twitter analytics. Here's the sociograph I came up with (click on the image to see it in its entirety):<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh33X0WB0qpt2dx9mt6PGj1jwTHYKaCPG4KTSwdSTMDjN7rI3K8sXuumOByO4dZbD43idRFvj_ZGLT7WdekbeoT2xUBqe-wBD2AwEBG746i8Zly4oK40PDMwnR19HkIdDVhTMAMkpMHB_8/s1600/amanth2018hautalk.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="380" data-original-width="665" height="364" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh33X0WB0qpt2dx9mt6PGj1jwTHYKaCPG4KTSwdSTMDjN7rI3K8sXuumOByO4dZbD43idRFvj_ZGLT7WdekbeoT2xUBqe-wBD2AwEBG746i8Zly4oK40PDMwnR19HkIdDVhTMAMkpMHB_8/s640/amanth2018hautalk.png" width="640" /></a></div>
The chart represents over 2300 users and over 6400 "edges," which include both mentions and re-tweets. I've arranged them in groups by their hashtags. Not surprisingly, "AmAnth2018" is the largest group. But if you look to the upper right of the graph, you can see other, prominent hashtags, among them "#hautalk" and "#lgbt." <br />
<br />
If we rank the top Twitter users by "betweeness centrality" (a measure of the importance of a user in terms of their capacity to bridge parts of the graph), we can see many of the same usual suspects, but also some accounts that have become prominent over the last few weeks:<br />
<br />
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<td align="left" class="xl74" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt; width: 48pt;" width="64">americananthro</td>
</tr>
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<td align="left" class="xl74" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">culanth</td>
</tr>
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<td align="left" class="xl74" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">news4anthros</td>
</tr>
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<td align="left" class="xl74" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">eliseakramer</td>
</tr>
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<td align="left" class="xl74" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">allegra_lab</td>
</tr>
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<td align="left" class="xl74" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">tfstweets</td>
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<tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">
<td align="left" class="xl74" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">omanreagan</td>
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<tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">
<td align="left" class="xl74" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">thevelvetdays</td>
</tr>
<tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">
<td align="left" class="xl74" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">jasonhickel</td>
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<td align="left" class="xl74" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">risako_sakai</td>
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<td align="left" class="xl74" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">anandspandian</td>
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<td align="left" class="xl74" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">pubanth</td>
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<td align="left" class="xl74" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">sarahshulist</td>
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<td align="left" class="xl74" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">zoestodd</td>
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<td align="left" class="xl74" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">lorenagibson</td>
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<td align="left" class="xl74" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">anthro_sarah</td>
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<td align="left" class="xl74" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">savvyology</td>
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<td align="left" class="xl74" height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">citeblackwomen</td>
</tr>
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In particular, I want to highlight users like @thevelvetdays, @zoestodd, @lorenagibson, @anthro_sarah, @citeblackwomen, @savvyology, etc. Why? These are anthropologists who have been engaged in the debate over Hau (Journal of Ethnographic Theory) and the issues that the debate raised: racial inequality and gender inequality in the academy, institutional elitism, the appropriation of indigeneity, precarity and graduate students, sexual harassment, #metoo and gaslighting.<br />
<br />
In actuality, this was a conference dominated by #hautalk and #refusehau. For example, if we remove AmAnth2018, then a "<a href="https://worditout.com/word-cloud/3481988" target="_blank">worditout</a>" wordcloud of the top 300 words in the hashtags looks like this:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKK_tZ1uUXebmHjbcYxc_ESwVOz98TsuuVhmPcXKSZYA4pdgoOPfTqxQFMgnNQKnSyu9_bCD1eGQ-p5d2nzzvMtNmFz8CCQ-MsnEwjapWOkLRSnHefqBEjiroori12Vngj-NdZzz-BFRk/s1600/WordItOut-word-cloud-3481988.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="634" data-original-width="1024" height="396" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKK_tZ1uUXebmHjbcYxc_ESwVOz98TsuuVhmPcXKSZYA4pdgoOPfTqxQFMgnNQKnSyu9_bCD1eGQ-p5d2nzzvMtNmFz8CCQ-MsnEwjapWOkLRSnHefqBEjiroori12Vngj-NdZzz-BFRk/s640/WordItOut-word-cloud-3481988.png" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
Since many people included two or more hashtags in their tweet (#AmAnth2018 and something else), the prominence of #hautalk to this conference is obscured until you remove the AmAnth2018--a nice metaphor for what indeed happened.<br />
<br />
The AAA wrongly assumed that the Hau controversy was somehow ancillary to its own practice--a scandal in a non-AAA journal with a European editor. But the issues there cast a very deep shadow on practices within the AAA, including all of those US scholars imbricated in Hau who are, after all, institutionally supported by universities considered (by some) to lie at the core of anthropology in the United States.<br />
<br />
If I take the original sociograph and filter the tweets for "hautalk," a different picture emerges:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzwsh9M8Dmh2TGBpNTz3elEBkvN6ySXAr5_jBmZQwXz7PI_xqR7T8msBbA4-zVCMQIeVJqElfCMub4whXT2cZpzYHGLSpoN__ZwuSeAUsKyWJEqGWDMHRfmYtDziJZZWgvlpaJs2KWHrA/s1600/hautalk.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="380" data-original-width="665" height="364" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzwsh9M8Dmh2TGBpNTz3elEBkvN6ySXAr5_jBmZQwXz7PI_xqR7T8msBbA4-zVCMQIeVJqElfCMub4whXT2cZpzYHGLSpoN__ZwuSeAUsKyWJEqGWDMHRfmYtDziJZZWgvlpaJs2KWHrA/s640/hautalk.png" width="640" /></a></div>
Here, "hautalk" is combined with all of the critical hashtags in this conference: #refusehau, #citeblackwomen, "anthrosowhite, "destabilizingefforts, #decolonizeyourconference, #wakandau2018 and many others.<br />
<br />
In other words, hautalk succeeded in overturning dominant meanings in a conference designed in many ways to marginalize those voices. But will the AAA acknowledge that U.S. anthropology's "regular program" has been preempted? <br />
<br />
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Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5366844521314988314.post-25929735949525723242018-10-22T06:02:00.002-07:002018-10-22T06:02:19.846-07:00One more VOSviewer visualization of the Future at AAA 2018<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXv7ue83dU9hVi6CDX-60BXAr7BI9mTbcgJKggi2Iq_S0q3nMzMxdGDASYFuSjoIG4hNZvh2jCa3Xub0mTT3UrZt-ztvlU0UlOGqMv3JPDITbxV0o20ZrU548LeEimFSeG3TuXk9bUxis/s1600/VOSviewer.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="974" data-original-width="1600" height="388" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXv7ue83dU9hVi6CDX-60BXAr7BI9mTbcgJKggi2Iq_S0q3nMzMxdGDASYFuSjoIG4hNZvh2jCa3Xub0mTT3UrZt-ztvlU0UlOGqMv3JPDITbxV0o20ZrU548LeEimFSeG3TuXk9bUxis/s640/VOSviewer.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5366844521314988314.post-71599543280741423772018-10-20T06:50:00.000-07:002018-10-20T06:50:26.789-07:00Mapping the Future at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
"The future" (however imagined) continues to be a concern for anthropologists, and this year is no different than <a href="http://tomorrowculture.blogspot.com/2017/11/tracking-future-at-american.html" target="_blank">2017</a>. But while I was content to just list the different panels in 2017, this year I decided to construct a semantic map of the session abstracts. First, I created a text document with each of the 28 session abstracts that explicitly concerned the future as an object of research (rather than something like "the future of graduate education"). Then, I loaded up the file into <a href="http://www.clementlevallois.net/portfolio.html" target="_blank">Cowo</a>, which spit out 55 words by frequency of occurrence (minus all of the stop words like "the"). Then I loaded the file onto VOSviewer, and created a semantic map of co-occurrences between terms (nodes) in the same sentences.<br />
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Here's the visualization from VOSviewer:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqAXm_zSCxPSdPrupK1DFndzZLUQJgRUKMiTdE-Pm7flRGsAPlyb19hn52l4AGYb_zhjGK1cqdovD4t4b0PxQBH98H_1zQGtaLznkATpnbCzdFbsjYS7oqo6kBlmEVzGulee0vifyVPqQ/s1600/futuremap.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="974" data-original-width="1600" height="387" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqAXm_zSCxPSdPrupK1DFndzZLUQJgRUKMiTdE-Pm7flRGsAPlyb19hn52l4AGYb_zhjGK1cqdovD4t4b0PxQBH98H_1zQGtaLznkATpnbCzdFbsjYS7oqo6kBlmEVzGulee0vifyVPqQ/s640/futuremap.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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And here it is again in Gephi:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgybOlgma8HfG-MhvW2vWTtKJpbF2o5g51Owou3CGl27At-QORdYb_EJq5EMIqVHGiByvILPUw098Xn1QgcWpsu7MFYDc5cf3yv2VxJecyKv7C98aRQiyloqazHscUfZSbNengRFPNCeQQ/s1600/futuremap2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1024" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgybOlgma8HfG-MhvW2vWTtKJpbF2o5g51Owou3CGl27At-QORdYb_EJq5EMIqVHGiByvILPUw098Xn1QgcWpsu7MFYDc5cf3yv2VxJecyKv7C98aRQiyloqazHscUfZSbNengRFPNCeQQ/s640/futuremap2.png" width="640" /></a></div>
We can identify several semantic clusters here, but I want to highlight a few: 1). urban resistance to the neoliberal (right); 2) environmental disaster and the future of the anthropocene (bottom); 3). the utopian imagination for critical alternatives (left); and 4). human migration and human futures in an age of increasing precarity (top). <br />
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This semantic map is a a helpful shorthand for taking the pulse of the future in anthropology right now. Hurtling toward disaster along multiple axes simultaneously (environmental, political, demographic), anthropologists (and their interlocutors) occupy multiples sites of emergence across precarious futures. <br />
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Are there themes that bring together these different future orientations? Here are the top terms as defined by betweenness centrality:<br />
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<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="width: 64px;"><colgroup><col style="width: 48pt;" width="64"></col>
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<td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">era</td>
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<td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">ecological</td>
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<td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">anthropologist</td>
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<td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">city</td>
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<td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">infrastructural</td>
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<td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">mobility</td>
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<td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">migrant</td>
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<td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">precarious</td>
</tr>
<tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">
<td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">urbanization</td>
</tr>
<tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">
<td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">ethnographic</td>
</tr>
<tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">
<td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">anthropology</td>
</tr>
<tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">
<td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">emergent</td>
</tr>
<tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">
<td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">institutional</td>
</tr>
<tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">
<td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">cultural</td>
</tr>
<tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">
<td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">modernity</td>
</tr>
<tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">
<td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">politically</td>
</tr>
<tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">
<td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">anthropological</td>
</tr>
<tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">
<td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">power</td>
</tr>
<tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">
<td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">roundtable</td>
</tr>
<tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">
<td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">utopian</td>
</tr>
<tr height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">
<td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;">film</td><td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> </td><td height="20" style="height: 15.0pt;"> </td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
This AAA promises to consider futures that impinge onto anthropological presents--that is, ecological and urban catastrophe that emerges into coeval fieldsites. Yes - there's still a concern here for utopian promise (there's a panel on Ursula K. Le Guin!), but much of the panels in this map consider the disastrous coincidence of precarious futures with precarious presents. </div>
Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5366844521314988314.post-17841420953010948572018-10-14T06:14:00.001-07:002018-10-14T06:15:13.761-07:00Storymapping Your Research<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "open sans" , "tahoma" , "geneva" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/c28f0b6fab85650562ac54dd5cfa403e/my-seoul-fieldwork/index.html">https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/c28f0b6fab85650562ac54dd5cfa403e/my-seoul-fieldwork/index.html</a></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "open sans" , "tahoma" , "geneva" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "open sans" , "tahoma" , "geneva" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;">Over the course of a year of fieldwork in Seoul (2014-2015), I accumulated tons of photographs (and some short films) that I made all over the city: a corpus of material that, for the moment, just resides on a couple of computers and cloud drives, waiting to be deployed into publications and presentations. With storymap, I could use these materials to trace the arc of my research through the city. Ultimately, I tried to take what oftentimes felt like random discovery and imposed a linearity to my thinking. Or, perhaps, the exercise helped me to connect the projects into some semblance of order. Telling a story, after all, involves the imposition of a frame, and the one I've sketched here is about a particular strand of urban anthropology in a complex city. </span><br />
<div id="yui_3_17_2_1_1539522636117_100" style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; background-color: #eeeeee; margin-bottom: 1em;">
<br /></div>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "open sans" , "tahoma" , "geneva" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif;">In the end, this looks to me like an interesting way to do a research prospectus for a job application or a tenure and promotion file. It allows you to locate your research in space and narrate connections between otherwise disparate projects. I could extend this to my research in Baltimore as well and create a storymap that could introduce work I've done over the last 20 years. </span></div>
Samuel Gerald Collinshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08370068678814736140noreply@blogger.com0