#AmAnth17 Wrap-Up: Anthropology Matters?

On Monday, I downloaded #AmAnth17 tweets.  This proved in many ways elusive and piecemeal.  First, the conference hashtags continue to shift.  Last year, the AAA finally discovered that the #AAA hashtag had other meanings and other audiences, among them AIDS activism in Japan and a pop music awards program in Korea (both of which prompted lively Twitter conversations this year).  Their efforts to promote alternative hashtags resulted in confusion, with people tweeting at #AmAnth17 (the ‘official’ hashtag), along with #AmAnth2017 (which would have been logically consistent with previous years) and, for the hell of it, #AAA2017. So the graph below includes tweets with any one of the three, with the top 50 Twitter users (by in-degree centrality) labeled. 

Here are the general metrics on this network.  

Graph Metric	Value
Graph Type	Directed
Vertices	426
Unique Edges	649
Edges With Duplicates	0
Total Edges	649
Self-Loops	145
Reciprocated Vertex Pair Ratio	0.047817048
Reciprocated Edge Ratio	0.091269841
Connected Components	100
Single-Vertex Connected Components	63
Maximum Vertices in a Connected Component	245
Maximum Edges in a Connected Component	445
Maximum Geodesic Distance (Diameter)	12
Average Geodesic Distance	4.810299
Graph Density	0.002783761

It’s not an enormous graph, nor particular connected.  In many ways, it's similar to other graphs I’ve run in 2015 and 2016 (see.  For example, we see the same, prominent Twitter users.  Here are the top 50 accounts by in-degree centrality:

americananthro

profsassy

womenarchys

anthrofuentes

aprilmbeisaw

culanth

julielesnik

aba_aaa

sonyaatalay

hilaryagro

valorieaquino

altmetric

protest_matters

drtomori

jennyshaw011

lesleybartlett_

aunpalmquist

archyfantasies

twitatreyee

dukepress

stemethnographr

lauraellenheath

aaas_doser

pottershousedc

diane_tober

susangsheridan

blackfeminisms

afburialgrndnps

geekanthro

anthrosciences

stelynews

dcanthro

archpodnet

yarimarbonilla

oceaniajournal

beccapeixotto

mcclaurintweets

cvans

soclinganth

police_worlds

illinoispress

machristofides

anthroboycott

hildallorens

ratnagiri77

anthromuxer

tikabakic

camee_maddox

This is a great bunch of anthropologists and institutions, but, compared to previous years, Twitter traffic has diminished and, with it, topics have proliferated along lines of subdiscipline and sub-specialty.  That is, anthropologists (at least in their Twitter traffic) have retreated to the specifics of their panels and papers.  Here’s a word-cloud of the most frequently occurring 500 words from the 2017 AAA:

Now here’s another wordcloud from the 2015 meeting.  

The prominence of activist causes in 2015 (#BlackLivesMatter, BDS) stimulated tweets across subdisciplines in a way that is conspicuously absent from this year’s conference with some notable (and welcome) exceptions (thanks, @yarimarbonilla, @aba_aaa and others!).

Of course, these causes are still with us, along with a dumpster fire of authoritarian politics, fascism, rampant misogyny, ascendant white supremacy and environmental apocalypse.  But, in all of this, where does anthropology matter?  And if we can’t represent our united opposition to, say, fascist policies in the U.S., then what hope do we have of demonstrating the relevance of anthropology to anyone outside of this conference? 


In her critical summary of this year's meeting, Emma Louise Backe notes in Geek Anthropologist:  

the exclamatory nature of Anthropology Matters feels ineffectual. Are we trying to signal to the broader intellectual community and American public that anthropology does indeed matter? Or are we instead convincing ourselves that our choice of discipline was legitimate, necessary?

Well--those are the questions.  What will we--as anthropologists--do in the face of the palpable evil around us?