Ellis Island and Liberty Island Projects

 

 

The Statue of Liberty National Monument consists of two islands: Liberty Island (which hosts the State of Liberty) and Ellis Island, the site of the Ellis Island immigration station and an associated hospital complex. Liberty Island became a national monument under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Ellis Island was included in the site in the 1960s. During its heyday from the late 19th century until its closure in the 1950s, 12 million people were processed on Ellis island, and it is for many the symbol of immigration in the United States. The Statue of Liberty plays a similar role. As Emma Lazarus’s 1883 poem, “The New Colossus," proclaims: Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,/I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Indeed, the State of Liberty seems to beckon across the ocean to oppressed people everywhere, and, for many the Statue is a symbol of the hope for a new life in the United States.

Yet both islands have quite separate histories and roles. Ellis Island was an actual port of entry for millions, while the Statue of Liberty initially had nothing to do with immigration.  In addition, both have at times symbolized the opposite of immigration and hope–exlcusion, racism, xenophobia and incarceration. In 2021, we received a grant from the National Park Service to work with interpretive materials on Ellis Island, and another grant from NPS through ASALH (the Association for the Study of African American Life and History) to explore the meanings of the Statue of Liberty for African Americans. Both of these gave us the opportunity to examine alternative stories and experiences of both Ellis Island and Liberty Island, and both have resulted in two different–but equally complex–projects. In the case of national monuments, the goal has often been to restrict them to a single set of meanings and significations, but Ellis Island and Liberty are much more than any single narrative. 

What brings these two projects together is an emphasis on community collaboration and multimodal anthropology. Both were made through our work a team of scholars (including Samuel Collins, Matthew Durington, Monica Pelayo and Chayanne Marcano), and with Wide Angle Youth Media, a non-profit in Baltimore that instructs youth in multimedia production and seeks to address the many digital divides that persist in U.S. cities today. 

Our goal for both was to open up that discourse to incorporate forgotten, suppressed and alternative meanings. It’s worth pointing out that both of these function as a commentary on other interpretive materials on the Monument, and our hope is that both open up other possibilities at a particularly fraught moment in U.S. history. 

Ellis Island Encounters:  ( https://www.ellisislandencounters.org/)

The Ellis Island Encounters website is designed to be read in different ways. First, it presents Ellis Island according to a well-established chronology from pre-colonization to the present (“Historic Periods”). These include Ellis Island in its heyday as a port of entry (1892-1924), its transformation into a port of deportation and a prison (1924-1954), and its afterlife in the U.S. imagination (1954-present). Second, the website presents “Stories of Ellis Island.” Taking our cues from the ways the site is interpreted, and the autobiographical narratives people have shared, the “Stories” portion presents a variety of thematic narratives that include personal experiences, incidents, and general themes. 

Statue of Liberty: An American Icon in Black Culture and Beyond  ( https://www.statueoflibertyicon.org/)

The Statue of Liberty site is a collection of short articles, archival materials and popular images, arranged into overlapping thematic clusters. The scope of the project was to elicit the meanings of the State of Liberty for Black people, and we have endeavored to do that through the historical record and the popular imagination. The site invites visitors to jump around through image and cluster, rather than explore in any linear way. 

 

 

 

Turing Tests and ChatGPT’s Sleight of Hand

 

One of the many benchmarks for AI is the “Turing test,” Alan Turing’s adaptation of the “imitation game” where an interrogator must decide which of two respondents is a computer. It is, as many have pointed out, a strangely indirect test, one that depends on the credulity of the human interrogator and the capacity of the machine to deceive (Wooldridge 2020). Will they believe the computer? And will the computer be a good enough liar? As Pantsar (2025) comments, “For the machine to pass the test, it needs to impersonate a human successfully enough to fool the interrogator. But this is puzzling in the wide context of intelligence ascriptions. Why would intelligence be connected to a form of deception?”

 

On the one hand, measuring AI through its deceptive power has the benefit of avoiding the idiocy of attempting to establish a measure of intelligence, a task deeply imbricated in racial eugenics (Bender and Hanna 2025; Wooldridge 2020). On the other, generative AI applications seem to have been developed with deception in mind–deception from all parties. The application designers want to present outputs as just as good (if not better) than the products of human work. And the humans that utilize generative AI often seek to present these outputs as their own work. And even though ethical practice demands that we acknowledge the utilization of AI, the goal is that people consuming AI material will be unable to tell the difference or to mark where the machine ends and the human begins. So even though Turing tests may be a poor measure of machine “intelligence,” they seem to fit the moment.

 

But there’s another part of the Turing Test that is especially relevant: the organization of the “imitation game” itself. Let’s go back to Turing’s 1950 article. As Sterrett points out in a series of articles, there are two games described in Turing’s landmark essay, an "Original Imitation Game” and a “Standard Turing Test” (the terms are Sterrett’s) (Sterrett 2020: 469). The first one describes two rooms, one for the interrogator, and the other for a man and woman, who communicate with the interrogator via a teletype.

In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. Alternatively the question and answers can be repeated by an intermediary. The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as '' I am the woman, don't listen to him! ' to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make similar remarks. We now ask the question, ' What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game? ' Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, ' Can machines think? (Turing 1950: 434)

While people have certainly looked at the gender component here, most of the attention has been on the game itself and its overall intention: deception (Patterson et al 2018). I want to focus on the whole arrangement itself.

 

The game “works” through series of limitations. The interrogator can’t go into the other room, nor can the human burst into the interrogator’s room. The interrogator is also prevented from hearing them. Communication, Turing tells us, is best accomplished through teletype. Of course, one would need such an arrangement with a computer. Yet, game rules aren’t just arbitrary, and Turing’s test tells us much about social hierarchies and workplace organization. By the time Turing wrote his test, the office had taken its contemporary form–a spatialized organizational chart made up of offices communicating with each other through a variety of technologies: mail, telephone, teletype, pneumatic tube. Inter-office communication is also rendered through a variety of intermediaries and, as “organization man” develops, cybernetic systems of communication and decision-making come to dominate managerial processes (Whyte 1956).

 

In other words, Turing’s “imitation game” rules are a description of contemporary work. Turing’s readers would have easily conjured up an image of an organization where people don’t communicate face-to-face  with each other. This has only become more marked in the intervening decades, where people are duped into long-term relationships without ever meeting their con-artist. More to the point, we are more and more called upon to judge between human- and computer outputs, a task in which humans have proven occasionally successful. But perhaps only under special conditions. 

 

One of the theses that I have suggested (both on this blog and in published work) is that the triumph of automation, algorithm and AI are initially built not upon technological change, but upon behavioral and cognitive change. Before business owners can begin to replace workers with algorithmic process and generative AI, before, in other words, those outputs can be accepted as “just as good” or “better” than human work, humans and their labor must be constrained, delimited and “de-skilled.” And more than this - everyone has to be convinced that these narrowly defined outputs are as good as we humans get. With the Turing test, human communication is reduced to lines on a teletype. With algorithmic analysis, applying to a job, getting an apartment or reading a mammogram are reduced to scores that can be ranked, patterns that can be assigned probability, etc.

 

As I explained in an earlier essay, this process of labor alienation unfolds across several steps. First, human labor is parsed out into a series of constituent functions, consistent with the Taylorization that transformed factory labor. Second, those functions are reconceptualized as algorithms: steps in a chain of operations that proceed from inputs to outputs. These might be scripts for telemarketing, decision trees for insurance claims, procedures for reporting inventory loss, etc. Next, workers are confined to those algorithmic choices, and part of the de-skilling process means penalizing workers for deviating from the script. Finally, automation (AI applications and AI-infused platforms) replaces workers. 

 

 

 

[Produced through ChatGPT]

 

The important part here is the human side of the transformation. Humanity must be reduced, and people must be convinced that algorithmic processes are interchangeable with the etiolated human. In other words, the Turing test only works if we stay in our room, if we don’t shout, if we don’t bang on the walls with our fists. And there are 2 levels of deception - one in convincing (or forcing) people to reduce themselves to narrowly defined outputs, the other in misrecognizing those algorithmic products as the total of human possibility.

 

Does generative AI involve a similar series of reductions? Of course it does. In all kinds of professions, our labor has been reduced to the production of “content”: bland and repetitive text, stereotypical images, boilerplate scripts. People produce like this in accordance with late capitalism. The only way, after all, to monetize that YouTube channel is to constantly update with new material. And that new material must fit the algorithmic desires embedded in the platform. So: you start making a lot of content, and you align it with the algorithm. The next step is, of course, to replace you with generative content. ChatGPT may have come as somewhat of a shock to us educators in 2022, but it must have come to no surprise for platform laborers, who have been human generative AI for several years now.

 

References

 

Bender, Emily and Alex Hanna (2025). The AI Con. NY: Harper.

 

Collins, Samuel Gerald (2018). Welcome to Robocracy. Anthropology of Work Review.

 

Pantsar, Markus (2024). “Intelligence is not deception.” AI & Society.

 

Patterson, W., Boboye, J., Hall, S., Hornbuckle, M. (2018). The Gender Turing Test. In: Nicholson, D. (eds) Advances in Human Factors in Cybersecurity. AHFE 2017. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 593. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60585-2_26

Sterrett SG (2020) The Genius of the “Original imitation Game” test. Mind Mach 30(4):469–486. https:// doi. org/ 10. 1007/S11023-020-09543-6

Turing, Alan M.(1950). “Computing machinery and intelligence”. Mind Q. Rev. Psychol. Philos. LIX(236), 433–460.

 

Whyte, William H. (1956). The Organization Man. NY: Simon and Schuster.

 

Wooldridge, Michael (2020). A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence. NY: Flatiron Books.

 

 

AAA Abstract Proposal: Summerland, Otherwise and and the Ghosts of Alternative Futures: the Limits of Multimodality in Anthropology and Spiritualism

 

As anthropologists work with collaborators in evoking alternatives to capitalist fascisms, they increasingly engage multimodal registers; games, design, graphic novels and soundscapes join film and text in innovative work that seeks to ground worlding in sensorial engagement and haptic experience. Here, the multimodal can support the emancipatory politics of communities where anthropologists work. But what of the politics of multimodal? Is there anything inherently emancipatory in the engagement with diverse platforms? In order to problematize the multimodal, this paper explores another moment in multimodal evocations of alternative futures–Spiritualism in the late 19th century. While “spirit rapping” may have been the first volley in the explosion of Spiritualist practice, the movement soon incorporated writing, drawing, sounds, photographs and multiple objects into its evocations of a “Beautiful Beyond” that represented not only the afterlife, but the utopian promise for humanity itself. For Alfred Russel Wallace, this was the “new bench of anthropology” that would engage him for the rest of his career–much to the chagrin of his skeptical contemporaries. In many ways, though, the multimodal proved inadequate to the task of evoking the hereafter, with these diverse media platforms dragged down by their obstinate corporeality and their quotidian fabrication. While our concerns are different today, comparing the fate of spirit photography, object levitation and apporting to the multimodal anthropologies of today can nevertheless help us explore the limits of multimodality in our similarly anxious age. Can the spirits we evoke be more effective than those nineteenth century ghosts? 

Multimodal Interrogations of Anthropologically Unintended Media - Video link

Matt Durington and I had a wonderful time giving a talk at UBC Okanagan. Thanks to Dr. Fiona McDonald and the Collaborative and Experimental Ethnography Lab. 

 

Multimodal interrogations video link 

Multimodal Anthropology Talk - Tuesday, March 25 @ 3 pm EST

 

NPS Ethnographic Report on Hampton Mansion National Historic Site

An article in the Baltimore Banner by Rona Kobell (https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/local-news/hampton-national-historic-site-east-towson-URF5WGM5TZCAZMJAZBGRU7JYMY/) reminded me about the precarious state of knowledge under an authoritarian regime. Will our report on Hampton National Historic Site disappear from the National Park Service site? In all probability, yes - we are, after all, calling out the enslavement and racism that built the United States. I contributed a chapter on the echoes of that enslavement in the formation of contemporary Baltimore County. So, for now, here's the report: https://drive.google.com/file/d/17RT9t1iewAvNxYgjaWV2tStaoNLgcxgT/view?usp=sharing

 

 

CFP: 13 Ghosts of Multimodality

 

 

 

CFP: AAA 2025

 

13 Ghosts of Multimodality: Critiquing, Rejecting and Learning to Live with Multimodality’s Problems

Panel Organizer: Samuel Collins (scollins@towson.edu)

 

(Still from "The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo" (1985))

William Castle was the director and producer of countless horror movies, many of which utilized various “gimmicks”--seats wired to deliver electrical shocks, puppets that appeared from behind the movie screen, props of all kinds. His film “13 Ghosts” (1960) was no exception: the movie recounts the efforts of a family to spend the night in a haunted house and the audience was given special glasses to see the ghosts or make them disappear, an effect (“Illiusion-O”) that critics found a distraction and that did not last into the re-making of the film in 2001. Indeed, many of Castle’s tricks didn’t work as intended: too much voltage to the seats, puppets that people would throw their popcorn at, props that ran far afield of the films they were supposed to support. These were the “ghosts” that bedeviled Castle films. Whatever their success or failure, however, Castle could be considered a multimodal pioneer–constantly trying to reach beyond film to engage other senses. And like Castle, we are also faced with our multimodal “ghosts”--the media that distract, that open alternative narratives, that escape us to create their own, refractory meanings or that produce their own attendant inequalities. Finally, we face some of the same charges of glib insouciance in adopting media that are often seen as outside of anthropology’s usual purview. Here, the gravity of anthropology itself haunts the work.

This panel considers all of these ghosts, and not necessarily to vanquish them. In the spirit of Avery Gordon, ghosts emerge from the past to demand that we act in the future to address an injustice. These multimodal ghosts challenge us to confront digital divides, interrogate what we mean by “collaboration,” and, ultimately, address ethnographic revanchism at the edges of an aesthetic multimodality. Alternately, as Alfred Russel Wallace believed, ghosts are messengers from a utopian future that might stimulate us to lean into the multimodal in order to “burn down” the colonialism of anthropology. Finally, like the hapless Zorba family in “13 Ghosts” who try to last the night the night in the haunted mansion, we might choose to leave–to reject the multimodal–or stay on, learning to live with meanings, platforms and narratives that do not always go as planned. Accordingly, this panel seeks to include papers in a variety of registers: theoretical, confessional, accusatory, communicating through text or through diverse media. Like Castle’s “Illusion-O” glasses, we shift perspectives to see the ghosts or render them invisible; this is both the promise of the multimodal and its inherent weakness. From one perspective, the multimodal helps us to understand and intervene in an increasingly unequal world; from another, power retreats behind a re-deployment of the auteur for a digital age.

Please submit abstracts (250 words) and title by March 14, 2025 to Samuel Collins

(scollins@towson.edu). Decisions will be made by March 21.

 

Cybernetics and Anthropology - Past and Present

 I continue to wrestle with the legacy of cybernetics in anthropology - and a future premised on an anthropological bases for the digital. 

https://histanthro.org/notes/communication-without-control-macy-conferences/

Network Ghosts in the Age of Generative AI

 

What are faculty thinking about generative AI? In my role at our faculty center, I speak to faculty often on the problems they face teaching in the era of AI, and the workarounds they've come up with. The advent of publicly available generative AI platforms was not something people in my field (anthropology) or other faculty in the social sciences and humanities were clamoring for. And yet here we are. This has led to many responses: anguish, certainly, but also ways of incorporating--or at east channeling--the usage of generative AI in the classroom.

But what about faculty outside of my university? I used NodeXL to download Reddit data from the "/Professors" subreddit using the keyword "AI." This generated records of about 2500 users posting, commenting or replying for a total of 7000 contributions to the debate. I then grouped the data in clusters of similar postings, and abstracted the top words from each group as indicated by "up-vote" (which functions as more of a "like" in Reddit). As you can see, faculty were not particularly optimistic about AI in 2024. Yes, there were a couple of more computopian posters (and at least one computer scientist) who chided the community for rejecting what they saw as inevitable. But most worried that their efforts to teach writing, critical thinking, methodology and analysis were thwarted by student reliance on generative AI. Cynically, they predicted their university's tolerance for AI cheating, and speculated over their ability to continue as faculty under these conditions.

In 2024, Reddit sold their content to Google to train their large language models. This would have been been more objectionable, perhaps, if it wasn't already abundantly clear that generative AI have already been trained on Reddit, which maintains a relatively open API at a time when most social media have monetized their social network data. But what happens to that Reddit data when its re-constituted by generative AI? I decided to prompt Microsoft's Co-Pilot (to which I have enterprise-level access) to generate a spreadsheet of a Reddit conversation on AI between professors. Here's the prompt: "I would like you to generate an excel file similar to a Reddit conversation on a subreddit called "professors." The posts should discuss ChatGPT and student work from the perspective of the professor, and should include comments and replies to those comments. There should be 4 columns in the spreadsheet: A (person commenting or replying); B (person whom A is replying to); C (the text of the comment or reply); and D (the date of the reply or comment). Please populate the spreadsheet with at least 20 comments and 350 replies to those comments."

Co-pilot returned a network with with just 10 users, with 350 edges representing multiple re-postings(?) of user posts. Re-posting really isn't a thing with Reddit, so perhaps there's some confusion here with XTwitter. Since this is a much smaller network, I just labeled the 10 nodes with key words from their posts. The comments are a near "upside down" to the actual Reddit discourse over 2024, generally praising the efficiencies of generative AI and, when critical, speculating over the need for faculty at all (hence the precarity). Of course, there's a snarky comment on "Clippy," the irritating Microsoft assistant. The network itself, while smaller, is also structurally different. The actual Reddit network has a density of .001158737. In network measures of density, "1" would represent 100% connection--everyone connected to everyone else. So .0012 may not seem like much, but it's typical of social media networks where, after all, most of us don't feed the trolls and we save our replies for issues (and users) that we really care about. On the other hand, my AI-generated network has one of 0.966666667--an almost perfectly connected network where everyone has replied to everyone in a style of a polite and ploddingly inclusive panel discussion.

So, I guess that Co-Pilot does a lousy job simulating a subreddit? Yes, but, I think, more than that. It wasn't that long ago (2023) when XTwitter adopted a fee-based model for API access. That decision placed Twitter data beyond the reach of most of us. When social media data disappears behind paywalls, we (ordinary researchers) no longer really have access to the "connected action" of social media. While we can certainly look at social media, this only exposes us to our respective corners of the media platforms we inhabit and the structural components of social media are lost. But what happens when social media content is sold to OpenAI or Google Gemini? When social media disappears into a large language model, both the content and the connections are lost, and the simulated networks produced through generative AI manage to misrepresent social media on both fronts. Since Co-Pilot's inner workings are opaque to us, it is unclear if these results are the result of deliberate choice, unintended bias or something else.

Gap Capitalism: Commodifying Zeno's Paradox

By Own screenshot, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26632754

I watch people on the Seoul subway playing 쿠키런 (Cookie Run) while we barrel towards Chongno. It's the successful colonization of the two minutes between stations--just one among many in regimented lives that have become moments to produce and consume.  Will capitalism ever run out of space to subsume into its extractivist logic?

Zeno's paradox of motion describes the impossibility of ever arriving; there is always infinitely divisible space remaining: first 1/2, then 1/4, then 1/8. Mathematically, this isn't a paradox at all, but, really, capitalism depends on Zeno's chicanery. There's always a fraction left to exploit. And this goes in both directions. We're used to thinking about capitalism as an expansive system, constantly locating new sources of profit, but it also goes down, to the molecular level and beyond. Finally, capitalism turns to the between.

 

For Bandak and Janeja (2020: 2), this "gap" is fundamental to the social and cultural processes of waiting they document in their edited collection, "Ethnographies of Waiting": "In a modern conception of time, human beings are situated in a gap, in an interval where there is an engagement with different forces." While undoubtedly universal, and taking its place among other temporalities (anticipation, duration, etc.), this "gap" becomes politicized under modernity, where people and ideas are oftentimes forcibly rendered between. But modern tragedy is a also a source of profit.

Driven by imperialism and colonialism, capitalism is constantly looking for new markets, new resources, new possibilities for profit. In the process transforming all that it touches in the style of Marx, "all that is solid melts into air." But it is also true that capitalism is an uneven process, one that develops, but also under-develops, that produces workers, but also impoverishes populations.

If capitalism is predicated on spatio-temporal changes, then those shifts are hardly uniform. The distance between the the periphery and the metropole describes one, but time and space are produced irregularly throughout human lives, like a stamping die that cuts sheet metal into parts and patterns, but that always produces leftover scrap. You can re-use some of that scrap, certainly, but there will always be scrap in the end. This is what I'm calling the ideology of "gap" capitalism. Pace Zeno, there will never be complete exploitation - there's always something left over.

Many of these "gaps" are already familiar. Think arbitrage as the exploitation of a momentary pricing difference. Or interstitial spaces where brownlands or other in-between zones await urban re-development. The exploitation of leftover space and time (Phelps and Silva 2018). 

The popularity of mobile games is an example of the proliferation of technologies of waiting. We can pick them up for moment or a minute, play in a line, in a doctor's office, on a subway platform. They are designed for the emptiness created by a regimented, spatio-temporal system that simultaneously generates action and inaction, vitality and passivity, attention and inattention.

Digital music is another triumph of gap capitalism, with half of people in the US wearing headphones/ earbuds for their entire day, streaming music that vacillates across layers of consciousness, filling moments between events and social encounters. Not the soundtrack of your life (i.e., music keyed to pivotal memories of events), but what exists in-between: semi-conscious musicality in the intervals.

Social media exploit the gap between stranger and acquaintance, acquaintance and friendship. That gap is simultaneously temporal. If we think of something like triadic closure, the tendency over time is for relationships to close gaps within clusters, social media are anticipatory across a relationship gap (Huang 2015). The genius of social media is in the commodification of these in-between relationships and statuses--both as something to be pursued as pleasurable by users and as a source of fungible value in their own right.

This is a brief sketch of a larger study, certainly. And one that has engaged a number of critics. Ultimately, it begs the question of limits. Where can the exploitation of the gap take us? What can be commodified? And where does commodification cease? Gaps between perception and cognition? Synaptic gaps? The space between cardiac arrest and brain death? 

Outside of undergraduates in introductory logic courses, it would be hard to find someone flummoxed by Zeno's paradoxes. That sleight-of-hand reasoning no longer works; it only does if there's an interlocutor that accepts the (false) correspondences between dissimilar units. This is the same with capitalism: only if we accept time or space in this way - as an infinitely divisible unit to be be developed - spent - then it becomes fuel for capitalist exploitation. If the factory's clock-time is revealed as a capitalist ideology, if people no longer accept land as a source of exchange value, then the artifice of "gaps" must also disappear.

References

Castree, Noel (2009). The Spatio-temporality of Capitalism. Time & Society, 18(1), 26-61.

Huang, H., J. Tang, L. Liu, J. Luo and X. Fu (2015). "Triadic Closure Pattern Analysis and Prediction in Social Networks," IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 27(12): 3374-3389. 

Janeja, Margaret and Andreas Bandak (2020). "Introduction." In Ethnographies of Waiting, ed. by Janeja and Bandak, pp. 1- 40. NY: Taylor and Francis. 

Keogh, B., & Richardson, I. (2018). Waiting to play: The labour of background games. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 21(1), 13-25.

Phelps, N. A., & Silva, C. (2018). Mind the gaps! A research agenda for urban interstices. Urban Studies, 55(6), 1203-1222.

Qiao, Mina (2019). "Consumption on the Orient Express." Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 6(1): 79-94. 

The Last Moon Village: A Proposal for a Multimodal Anthropology

 

 

 

You’ll see them in film, k-dramas, music videos, webtoons and video games: narrow Seoul alleys (골목길), old restaurants with peeling wallpaper, protagonists drowning their sorrows in tent bars (포장마차). Sometimes these images are deployed for critical purpose: e.g., the 반지하 (semi-basement) that the Kim family lives in the 2019 film “Parasite.” And sometimes for nostalgia–with multiple documentaries and websites on the “last urban moon village” (마지막 달동네) of a Korean city. But this is not the Seoul–nor the Republic of Korea (hereafter Korea)--that most people inhabit. Over the last 50 years, urban life in South Korea has been transformed in many ways, with successive waves of state-sponsored gentrification that has culminated with “New Town” developments of block upon block of orderly apartment complexes with mall-like commercial strips between them (Chen et al 2019; Song et al 2019). Here, Korea parallels (and anticipates) urban development elsewhere.

However, this proposed project is not a critique of urban (re)development (재개발), but an inquiry about what remains. Here and there, amidst the gleaming office towers and high-rise apartments of Seoul and other Korean cities, there are older neighborhoods with housing stock from previous decades–small islands of the past. On the one hand, these represent surplus neighborhoods for later redevelopment schemes. On the other, older neighborhoods evoke nostalgia for the past and for what people frequently characterize as a less alienated time. “Moon neighborhoods,” so-called because many were constructed on squats in hills and mountains that were not thought suitable for apartment development, remind people of the struggle and determination of past generations. What happens to these places in the interstices of ubiquitous housing blocks?

If we were doing this research in the United States, the answer would be clear enough: gentrification, abandonment and displacement, the legacy of post-War urban development that may have moved into more hybrid strategies in a neoliberal age, but that still remains devastating to people in working-class communities (Logan and Molotch 1987; Durington and Collins 2019). In South Korean cities, however, “touristifcation” may instead be the result. Rather than move into neighborhoods of older homes without access to infrastructure and amenities, tourists visit instead to snap photos for Instagram posts and to explore (Kim and Holifield 2022). In some cases, the state has facilitated this process by painting colorful murals on neighborhood walls–literally enabling Instagram-able moments. The result is a digital gentrification without the physical displacement of people (Hartmann and Jansson 2024).

My proposed research project is on the way community identity is physically and digitally negotiated in older neighborhoods that have become sites of state intervention, touristifcation and nostalgia.  My earlier work in Seoul included places like Ihwa-dong and different neighborhoods along the old city walls (e.g., Bukjeong Maul). These have been the targets of urban regeneration, media representation and tourist development (Nam and Lee 2023; Yun and Kwon 2023). Older housing stock, narrow alleys and colorful murals attract location scouts for k-dramas and film, as well as busloads of domestic and international tourists. But people live in these places as well, people who have little to show for the mediatization and fetishization of their communities. Yet it would not be accurate to conclude that they are powerless against the onslaught of touristification and hallyu media. For one, residents have occasionally risen up against the commodification of their communities, as in the vandalism of artistic murals in Ihwadong in 2016 (Oh 2020). In addition, as one of the most wired nations on Earth, Koreans engage in social media productions across multiple platforms, and document their neighborhoods and their lives in ways that diverge significantly from the Instagram posts and hallyu tours. Finally, communities host events, gallery shows, media broadcasts and other projects that constitute genuine place-making, and stake a claim not only to their homes, but additionally establish what their communities mean (Kim and Son 2017; Kang 2023).

My perspective on these negotiations is one of multimodality, a recent, anthropological turn I have explored through numerous articles and a recent, co-authored book (Collins and Durington 2024). In anthropology, multimodality recognizes the anthropological practice in non-anthropologists as they seek to document, represent their communities, and intervene in the futures of those places. People are ultimately anthropologists of their own lives, and I have helped to develop a methodology that integrates this insight into a more collaborative, and more de-centered work that considers multiple, community-produced media alongside more “official” anthropological analysis (Collins and Durington 2015; Collins and Durington 2024). Here, I propose looking to neighborhood identity as a collaborative, negotiated and occasionally fraught negotiation of meaning, place and identity. My insights have been very much informed by fieldwork - in South Korea and in Baltimore. And it’s these same insights that I propose to bring into the classroom in a series of methodologically focused, participatory courses that task students with documenting the anthropologies of their own communities. What I hope to accomplish through this research and teaching will ultimately work towards an understanding of global processes in an age where the physical and the digital occupy overlapping spheres in the lives of people and in the futures of communities.

 

Precursors

Years ago, I became interested in a general nostalgia for the narrow streets and claustrophobic spaces of older neighborhoods, including “taldongne” (달동네)—clusters of homes that originated as unofficial housing in the heavy urban migrations after the Korean War, and that are characterized by a lack of planning and infrastructure. Perhaps the most iconic moment for me was the huge popularity of the “Reply 1988” (응답하라 1988), a nostalgic, family drama/comedy that unfolds against the backdrop of the Seoul 1988 Olympics and takes place in a modest neighborhood of 1970s-era homes and narrow streets. The end of the series finds the old neighborhood abandoned and slated for re-development–and end to a more simple time. Indeed, by the 1970s, many of the residents of older neighborhoods were being forcibly (and even violently) evicted, and large-scale apartment developments put up in their place. This trend accelerated through the early 21^st century with the establishment of “new town” developments radically transforming the urban fabric of multiple South Korean cities. Predictably, perhaps, the disappearance of these older, largely working-class neighborhoods was accompanied by a longing for community and an appreciation for these organic, eclectic spaces, in dramatic contrast to the huge developments that now house the majority of people in Korea.          

That nostalgia extends across multiple media, from television and film to webtoons, games and apps—and, of course, social media, where the search for selfies and more aesthetic photography sends millions of domestic and international tourists to the few, extant working-class neighborhoods in search of the perfect pictures for their Instagram accounts. In my 2014-2015 fieldwork, I analyzed numerous “alleyway” social media accounts, and set off with local photography clubs (1 Korean, 1 Korean and non-Korean), taking pictures of narrow streets, rusted grates and broken latticework. Globally, the neighborhoods are iconic, connoting “Korea” even as their existence fades from Korea’s urban fabric; it would be difficult to find a k-drama that didn’t have some romantic moment set in one of these places. Yet the vast majority of Koreans have never lived in them.

Nevertheless some neighborhoods still remain. My previous work in Seoul coincided with a period of relative openness in the form of urban regeneration policies that were just beginning under the leadership of then-Mayor Park Won Soon (Nam and Lee 2023). Through government programs, non-profits and museum exhibitions, people in Seoul looked to these communities as something that deserved, at least, some measure of preservation–in sharp distinction to the policies of Park’s predecessors that had accelerated the frenetic pace of urban redevelopment. Along with this came calls for a more textured and genuine urban life where people might develop attachments to each other and to their neighborhoods (Lee 2011). Along the way, new public spaces, sidewalks, and parks were all constructed to make Seoul a more livable city.

Yet, people in older neighborhoods must still negotiate with the combination of touristification and gentrification that have encroached upon their lives. Touristification in the form of busloads of people coming to neighborhoods that were once avoided by non-residents, and gentrification in the form of up-scale teashops and bars that have grown up in “edgy” and “artistic” areas. There are a variety of means to resist these forces, but I became interested in the ways that residents have utilized diverse media in order to form counter-representations of life that contest the romantic commodification from tourism and, to some extent, from the state. YouTube, film and podcasts are generated alongside print magazines, gallery shows and other events in order to give voice to residents and to underline their placemaking. The irony here—and there are many ironies—is that, in their resistance, residents are instantiating the very community ethos over which people and media have waxed nostalgic.

 

Anthropology's Sad AI Archive

 

There are 3 approaches to generative AI in the classroom: 1) an outright ban on it; 2) a limited use policy that covers certain assignments or parts of assignments, and 3) an open approach that allows students to do what they would. None of these are fool-proof, whatever the intentions of the professor. Ultimately, generative AI are third-party, black-boxed products–more tempting to students, perhaps, than Wikipedia, but also more treacherous. I feel for my colleagues in the humanities attempting to wrest essays from students on Shakespeare or Aristotle: generative AI is all too good at producing a mediocre essay on these subjects. I also understand my colleagues in the computer and information sciences, who utilize these chatbots to help with their instruction.

 

But with anthropology, there are several caveats. 99.99% of writings on other peoples of the world are drenched in ethnocentrism, colonialism and racism. The internet is awash in complete nonsense about “tribes'' and their “traditional culture,” and, in generative AI, all of this is ground up and, like sausage, pumped into prompt-driven content. Yet typically, students don’t know enough to be able to distinguish a “good” and “bad” response from ChatGPT or Gemini. 

 

This is a somewhat longer way of saying that students often tried to utilize generative AI in my introductory assignments and take-home exams, and their grades suffered for it. Not because I was penalizing them for cheating; proving that they’ve used AI is almost impossible, and generative AI detectors are unreliable at best. Instead, the questions that I asked were all about the anthropology I’ve taught in classes, and generative AI is, unfortunately, only too willing to spit out all manner of palaver. Only someone who knows what to ask can minimize the racism and colonialism inherent in generative AI engines. The default is ideology. And hallucinations. 

 

One thing I want to include next year is some process of education. I really think that students don’t really know any better. The least I can do is show them that it’s not so easy and explain why that is–that generative AI is not giving them the “truth.” Or, rather, it is: the truth of colonialism and racism that underlies Western thinking about non-Western peoples. Anthropology’s sad archive. But to someone who’s never taken anthropology before, this stuff looks correct to them, and the temptation is too strong, especially in the panicked moments before a deadline.