All Tomorrow's Cultures

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 the YouTube channel for the project . 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" pre...

For anthropology, remix always sounded better than it looked in practice.  After all, even though it is hard to argue with Jenkins's writings on "Remix culture," it always seemed to mean more for music, art, literature and--primarily--for popular culture.  In anthropology, what does "remix" mean?  Does it mean self-plagiarism?  Does it mean taking images or media and re-using them in other contexts? Colonialism and cultural appropriation under another name?  As my colleague Matthew Durington and I write in our book, Networked Anthropology (70): For anthropology, the problem of remix isn't that it's so new, but that it's so old.  What seems progressive and egalitarian when it comes to creating parodies of repressive legislation or "culture jamming" corporate hegemony looks decidedly less so when we apply the ethic to what gets defined as culturally or socially "other."   Given the past of Western anthropology, it is not especi...

One of the community groups we work with has a book out.  Another has just won a major victory for environmental justice.  A third is looking for new staff.  Another has posted an incredible collection of photos from the Baltimore Uprising.  My responses?  Depending on the social media platform, “Like”; “Retweet”; “Share”; “Follow”.  Perhaps those aren’t even “responses”.  I haven’t done anything—I haven’t even moved from my chair!  Even J.G Frazer had to get up to pick up another tome of hermetic folklore.  But I would be remiss not to engage in this slacktivism .  Not only remiss, I would be endangering our relationship to our Baltimore interlocutors.  Public anthropology takes many forms—including advocate, gadfly and cultural critic.  What about zombie? The digital, networked world in which we live has enabled unparalleled access to the tools of content creation.  All of us can make a movie, write a novel, publ...

Note: the narrative for my Design Anthropology class for Spring 2016. People in Baltimore demand a “right to the city,” i.e., to live in a city that allows them to develop human and community potentials without pernicious race- and class-based inequalities.  But, a year after the Baltimore Uprising, we are still confronting the city’s systematic, structural inequalities. And while there are numerous (pressing) injustices to be addressed, one of the most challenging questions we could ask people in power is simply that: where is the “right to the city” for the majority of Baltimore’s residents? This doesn’t mean the right to buy and consume in Baltimore’s tourism spaces.  Instead, it’s about heretofore marginalized peoples “fighting for the kind of development that meets their needs and desires” (Harvey 2013: xvi).  And not just in the short term.  As Henri Lefebvre wrote in the shadow of the Paris Commune, “To the extent that the contours of the future city can ...

Illustration for Edgar Allan Poe's story " The Man of the Crowd " by Harry Clarke (1889-1931), first printed in 1923 (from Wikimedia Commons) Edgar Allan Poe’s story fragment, “The Man of the Crowd” (published in 1840 when Poe was living between Baltimore, Richmond and Philadelphia), begins with the narrator peering out onto a London street from a café, making observations about passersby: typologies of urban dwellers (“the tribe of clerks,” the “race of swell pick-pockets”), divisions of the population into age, gender, race and ethnicity.   Finally, though, his gaze alights on an enigmatic character that eludes easy classification: “decrepit” and “feeble,” yet “he rushed with an activity I could not have dreamed of seeing in one so aged”; “without apparent aim,” yet characterized by “blood thirstiness” and armed with a “dagger”.   Seduced by these paradoxical attributes, Poe’s narrator follows the man until sunrise, without, though, gaining any insight into t...

 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 ...

It's pretty hard to imagine a more Gothic city than Baltimore (in the literary sense). You've got the Faulkner-esque kind of gothic with over-grown gardens, crumbling shacks, shambling, sclerotic citizens. And also the northern gothic--shuttered factories, menacing turrets on decrepit mansions, etc. It is no particular wonder why Baltimore is often the preferred mise-en-scene for mystery novels. But it's harder to envision a futuristic Baltimore. The usual urban boosters (e.g., Live Baltimore , The Urbanite ) do their best, but I don't know of any sf novel set in the city--even cyberpunk dystopias of the near future seem to have passed us by. Still, I would like to try to evoke stochastic, interesting futures for my city. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Margaret Mead often theorized about the ingredients of the creative city—the institutions that she thought might stimulate what she called “emergent clusters”. But the point to her analysis—and to what I think today—...