All Tomorrow's Cultures

Despite our proclivities for emergence, assemblage, and all manner of objects and behaviors in the process of becoming, the institutions of anthropology appear downright procrustean: the lengthy apprenticeship of graduate school, the sycophantic ranking of programs . . .and the fetish for paywalled, proprietary publications. There are several anthropologists who have worked to challenge these staid formations, and they were active at the 2012 American Anthropological Association in San Francisco in a series of powerful panels on publishing, social media and digital anthropology.  Now that we're all back at our desks, they've had time to reflect, and posts are popping up all over the place. There's Jason Antrosio in Living Anthropologically , who took his paper from our panel ("Sharing Anthropology") and infused it with insightful reflections on the entirety of the conference.  And Matt Thompson and others at the Digital Anthropology Group ( DANG ) have conti...

It's not exactly a huge data set, but the relatively small number of tweets makes twitter traffic easy to track at the year's AAA in San Francisco.  The following graphs were produced with Twitter data using the #AAA2012 hashtag.  Utilizing NodeXL,  I downloaded data, and constructed a graph using a Fruchterman-Reingold algorithm.  I filtered the data by day; the tweets were generated during a 24-hours period ending at the specified time. In the following, I reproduce the full text of the top five tweets (determined by in-degree) after each visualization.. November 15, 2012: 12:43 pm 1). americananthro Obama's english and the racial politics of American English #aaa2012 Still plenty of room at the plenary - come listen 2). savageminds let's do #tweetup for #aaa2012 Thursday 5-7 at Johnny Foley's. Leave the Hilton, turn right, cross the street and you're there. 3). aaa2012 @Melzter777 - not sure what the rules are but I'm gonna try! *...

 It has been 10 years since David Simon's "The Wire" premiered on HBO.  A product of Simon's long-time partnership with Ed Burns, a retired Baltimore City homicide detective, "The Wire" presented Baltimore through the lens of police officers, drug dealers, troubled children, educators.  A Dickensian drama-from-below, Simon's series grew more and more complex through its five seasons.  Actively working to challenge easy interpretations of Baltimore's problems, Simon refused to indulge in the usual media reduction of urban life to pathologized caricatures. Over those 10 years, some anthropologists began to include "The Wire" in their courses , presumably because they found it ethnographically interesting .  And it is, but not because it offers an empirical "window" onto the lives of Baltimore's urban poor.  Instead, "The Wire" is interesting because it presents the complexities of white, middle-class perspectives ...

In a 2010 article entitled “Academic Search Engine Optimization (ASEO),” Joeran Beel et al sparked controversy in some circles by suggesting that scientists tailor their writing in research articles to search engines in order to maximize web visibility.  Once the keywords are chosen, they need to be mentioned in the right places: in the title, and as often as possible in the abstract and the body of the text (but, of course, not so often as to annoy readers).  Although in general titles should be fairly short, we suggest choosing a longer title if there are many relevant keywords. (179) Building on almost 15 years of literature and scholarship in web marketing and e-commerce, Beel et al extended the model to academic work, arguing that the goal in writing for academic journals is little different than writing copy for web advertising: “to make this content more widely and easily available” (190).  That could mean including keywords in significant fields (like t...

There's an interesting piece in this year's Nebula Awards Showcase, a lively short story about an alternative future premised on Aztec culture, "The Jaguar House, in Shadow," by Aliette de Bodard.  One of the biggest challenges to those of us trying to imagine and evoke alternative futures is precisely what animates de Bodard's story: can we come up with futures that aren't already colonized by Western modernity?  As she writes (185): Part of the challenge (and what had frustrated me with the earlier attempt) is making sure that "modern" doesn't end up equating "twentieth-century Western culture"; and equally making sure that the Aztec culture doesn't turn out to be an ossified version of what the conquistadors saw. De Bodard struggles with this premise, ultimately sketching a future Tenochtitlan that is at turns archaeological speculation and Aztec steampunk.  Maglev stations, nanotechnology, religion, traditional d...

Samuel Gerald Collins Matthew Slover Durington It’s happening on your campus now—students in your classes are uploading media about their varied ethnographic projects. Sometimes these photos, films, audio and text end up on blogs, YouTube and Flickr accounts. Some of it ends up on Facebook. Search YouTube for “ethnographic interview,” and marvel (and shudder) at the vast array of student interviews that have been uploaded. But why take student projects seriously? Because it’s not just our students who tweet and update their Facebook pages; the communities with whom we work are networked as never before. Like so many, numerous student goals for the future are tied to their investment in social media. To us, this looks more and more like the emergence of a different kind of anthropology. It’s where the academy meets the community, not in the style of the well-choreographed, collaborative anthropology that is one of the triumphs of applied anthropology...

A fascinating post by Jo Watson about why David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years is popular among sf readers on the Tor.com wesbite. 

From Wikimedia Commons, courtesy Michiel1972 In a sociological tradition stretching back to Durkheim, the city represents the apogee of alienated life, with residents adopting a variety of strategies to cope with their anonymity and to preserve their privacy amidst multitudes of other residents. Especially important are techniques for managing contact in public transportation—trains, buses and subways—where interactions are simultaneously intimate and anonymous. Those strategies include ways of looking, but also a variety of technologies that urban-dwellers adopt to avoid contact with others: newspapers, books, and, in more recent decades, a variety of technological devices, including MP3 players and smartphones. But while analysis of these techniques and technologies has revolved around avoiding contact, it may be more useful to think of them as techniques for relating to the anonymous city—for initiating contact through differentiated interact...

wikimedia commons: Iracaz ( talk ). Original uploader was Iracaz at en.wikipedia In the March 2012 Wired, an article on the Jerusalem syndrome, the religion-related psychosis associated with visits to Jerusalem ( "The God Complex" ).  The article doesn't really develop any new angles on this culture-bound syndrome, but its appearance in Wired is important.  My thought: while we may never travel to Jerusalem, our future will be the Jerusalem Syndrome.  Now that we have crossed the tipping point of urbanization (over 50% of the world's population as of 2007), all of us have an opportunity to be overwhelmed and enraptured by our urban lives: the Baltimore syndrome. Generally speaking, discussions of the Jerusalem syndrome devolve into a discussion of religion, psychology and (more recently) neuroscience.  That's certainly the case with the Wired essay (it's the limbic system!), but there are several interesting asides here, especially those moments tha...

Songdo Under Construction, Courtesy Wikipedia Commons. March 1 is the inaugural celebration of Future Day , and it's got me thinking about urban futures again.  On my futurist bookshself at the moment: Aerotropolis , by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay.  It's a business book, really: breathless descriptions of fabulous capitalists and the globetrotting edge cities they build.  I'm reading it because South Korea's Songdo is a poster child for this vision of the future.  At 7 miles from Incheon International Airport, this massive development on land reclaimed from tidal flats is supposed to represent the city of the future--a networked hub with near-immediate access to most of Asia, hard-wired for ubiquitous computing, and constructed for minimal levels of car pollution (although building a new city from scratch surely caused some pollution!).  Songdo will join other poster-cities for globalization, including Dubai and Shanghai. As Kasarda and Lindsay poin...

 Maureen McHugh's 2011 collection of short stories, After the Apocalypse , is a devastating window onto the conditions of bare life--the reduction of self to homo sacer, humans evacuated of any rights until only their bare corporeality remains to be regulated by the State (Agamben 1998).   Each of the stories takes up the question of the apocalyptic, but not from the Hollywood perspective--there are no bombs, tsunami, alien invasions.  Instead, McHugh explores everyday life in the wake of disaster.  And, little by little, we're led from this novum to the realization that we are, in fact, living after the apocalypse: in the wake of successive catastrophes of capitalism, greed and environmental degradation. This is certainly the case with the second story in the collection, "Special Economics".  In a post-bird flu pandemic China, workers are in short supply, and Jieling makes her way from the provinces to Shenzhen to find her fortune in a factory. ...