Multimodal Methods in Anthropology

Today (April 26, 2024), our book, "Multimodal Methods in Anthropology" is released into the world. Here's a song I've created for the moment using Udio, a text-to-song Generative AI model: https://www.udio.com/songs/m5HMHSZ2exSgEWE7f8AaAr

And here's a code for a discount on this book from our publisher, Routledge Books:

Tales From the Remix Anthropologist

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 especially surprising that remix hasn't taken off in anthropological circles--it looks too much like what we've been doing since the 18th century.  The "freedom" to take content out of one context and place it into another looks more like oppression when it's practiced on ethnographic data gathered about people who are routinely denied the means for their own self-representation.

When we started our Anthropology By the Wire project--an NSF-funded effort to build a large corpus of collaborative media about neighborhoods in Baltimore--we naturally gravitated to a Creative Commons license--but we couldn't go the final step towards the "gold standard,"  one that "lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work."  Given the power inequalities and rampant racism of contemporary life in the U.S., it seemed too dangerous--and even unethical--to subject our work with communities in Baltimore to this kind of remix.

Needless to say, like us, other anthropologists have not been especially eager to enjoin remix in their own work, although they've certainly had their own work remixed by others, as when footage from Adam Fish got remixed for pro-Palestinian hip-hop.  Sometimes anthropologists have invited  remix, as Chris Kelty did after the open source/ creative commons Two Bits was published.  In good, open-source fashion, the book was "ported" by readers onto different platforms, but that seems to have been the limits to the monograph's "remix"--beyond that of traditional scholarly remix whereby influential texts shape the scholarship that comes after them.

Despite these somewhat tepid engagements with remix, and the ethical responsibilities we owe the communities with whom we work, we believe that remix can offer anthropologists some important possibilities, but not in the ways, perhaps, that Lessig and Jenkins originally envisioned.  Instead, we decided to remix ethnographic data about the community with members of the community.  To create, in other words, derivative works about our work with our community collaborators in order to better disseminate anthropological media to audiences on a different platform.

From 2013 until now, we've been experimenting with different app platforms, including ARIS and MIT App Inventor.   These both support geo-located apps, and we've produced some apps about Baltimore.  But the big impetus for our app remix has come in the form of a structured, plug-and-play platform for tour apps called "izi.travel".  It's readily available on Android or iOS platforms and is free (although not open source).  While it lacks the programmable interface of MIT App Inventor, it makes up for it in the capacity to upload multimedia onto the app, including text, video, photograph and audio, all accessible through a geolocated map.  With izi.travel, we move from a miscellany of media about a South Baltimore neighborhood to a remixed, multimodal experience that engages app users on multiple cognitive and sensorial levels.

There are several things to keep in mind when making your anthropological media into an app: 1) your media is going to be experienced by people walking around with a smartphone, so it needs to be short and simple: brief interviews, short clips, terse historical notes.  2) Smartphones allow you to use audio as well as visual media--take advantage of this by including some interview material with interlocutors and by turning some of your narrative into an audio tour.  3) Include notes on directions!  Even though our app comes with a Google map embedded in the smartphone interface, it's reassuring to have someone tell you to "turn right at the corner"--especially when you're encountering a neighborhood for the first time! 

In addition, there are several things are worth pointing out.  First, our app is free and the content we've loaded up is under a creative commons license.  Second, we produced the app with the same people we've worked with during Anthropology By the Wire--i.e., the derivative remix is also a collaborative work.  Third, we agree, as part of our ethical commitment to our interlocutors, to monitor how this multimedia data is utilized.  As we say in the our letter of consent (vetted by our institution's IRB):

If you do choose to allow us to place text, audio, photographs and/or film online, then we promise to monitor this content using different tools in order to find out how the material is being received, and how it's being used.  Similarly, if you discover that media we've made together is being used in a way you find inappropriate, please contact us immediately.   (from Networked Anthropology, p. 128)

The final product is the "Sharp Leadenhall Walking Tour".  What we hope we've produced is something that is anthropologically dense and critical, but that still gives people an opportunity to discover a beautiful neighborhood!

Latent City

A couple of decades ago, social network analysis was a fairly recondite branch of sociology and anthropology applying mathematical matrices to social relationships.  And then there was Facebook.  With the widespread adoption of social networking sites (SNS), several things happened.  First, these social networks utilized the same graph theory and matrices that social network analysis had applied to social relations.  Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social networking services are analyzing your social network data constantly, mining your information for friend recommendations (and to better sell you to advertisers).  Second, courtesy of the enormous popularity of SNS, we now initiate and maintain social relations based on those same matrices.  In other words, from an abstract representation of social relations, social network theory becomes generative of actual social relations; we relate to each other according to matrix logics of tie strength and degree centrality—a neat inversion of the usual relationship between empirical observation and theoretical interpretation.

And so, social network analysis can be said to have a profound impact on social lives.  But does it end there?  In South Korea (where I do fieldwork), social networking sites are overwhelming utilized through smart phones; people tweet or Facebook from their mobile devices.  As with any SNS platform, this means that people are making (and re-making) social connections with each other, but it also means that people are connecting to place in complex ways.  Even if gelocation is disabled, these social media still have this embodied dimension—they’re not just tweets, but tweets in a particular place at a particular time.

Image courtesy Michael Najjar and wikicommons

But more than this: just as theories and methods for social network analysis can be said to structure our social lives through SNS, so the city itself can be said to be re-forged according to social networking logic.  For example, one of the most useful concepts in social network analysis is tie-strength and particularly the distinction between strong ties and weak ties.  Our daily round builds strong ties with places around us, ties that are reinforced through multiplex relationships to place as the embodiment and practice of social life, memory and bodily hexis.  On the other hand, we also form numerous weak ties with places and neighborhoods that lie on the interstices of our daily round.  Less places we know then places we know of, weak ties to place form the connective tissue between islands of strong ties in the city.

With the advent of gelocational apps, social networking sites have become very good at showing our tie-strength to place.  Foursquare, for example, rewards strong ties (and renders them visible) through granting users “mayorship” over places they frequent.  In addition, it encourages the exploitation of weak ties through the assignation of badges for checking in a new place.

However: social networking sites are also useful in rendering latent ties.  Haythornthwaite (2002) defines a latent tie as one “for which a connection is available technically but that has not yet been activated by social interaction” (289).  Social media generate vast clouds of low-density relationships: thousands of friends with weak or entirely absent connections to us and to each other.  And yet, these ties aren’t entirely useless; they can be activated through circumstance and initiative—e.g., a sudden move to a new city stimulates you to mine your social contacts for advice.  In this, social networking sites like Facebook are latent tie machines, enabling users to construct reservoirs of potential relations that can be maintained nearly indefinitely with little effort.

Could the same be true of our socially networked relationship to urban spaces?  In other words, do social media construct latent ties to geography?  In many ways, we are already tied to place in networked ways.  Network theorists have long looked at structural equivalence of actors in a network: people in similar positions not only have similar roles, but similar relationships to others vis-à-vis that position in a network.  For example, professors may not know each other, but they tend to have the same sorts of connections (in terms of directionality, tie strength, etc.) as other professors.   In a similar ways, our identities involve multiple, structural relationships to space, especially through race, gender and class.  Indeed, these are generally over-determined relationships in U.S. cities, leading to hyper-segregation by race and class.

But social media suggest other latencies.  Let’s say that you’ve become involved with the Baltimore & Maryland Workers Assembly in your support for an increased minimum wage.  You go to their Facebook page to find out information about their May Day rally in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor (Peoples Power Assembly)—and perhaps you post up your own memorable photo or video clip from the event.  Now, you have a latent connection to a few hundred other people who have posted or liked the page—not even a weak tie, but something that could develop into one if you followed up on these latent relationships.  In the same way, the page facilitates spatial latencies—in this case, to other rallies for worker’s rights, both in Baltimore, and beyond (Washington, D.C., Detroit, etc.).  You may never contact the other people affiliated (however tenuously) with the Baltimore & Maryland Workers Assembly.  Similarly, you may never attend future rallies in Baltimore or Washington, D.C.  But those spaces nevertheless carry a certain latency—a networked signification that could become activated when, say, minimum wage legislation again comes up in Maryland’s Assembly.

Multiply these latencies over and over again through diverse social media, and the city looks less like a series of physical spaces than a charged field through which we move, each structure or square a potential connection or action that precedes our conscious decisions to move or act.  And while this offers new possibilities for knowledge and practice, it also seems to confirm Orwellian fears of a surveillance state that is prepared to exploit this data in order to limit our movements: a latent city that connects to us with infinite filaments of power and politics.

Previous published in Anthropology News.  

Anthropology, Fieldwork and the Third Man

I watched Carol Reed’s “The Third Man” (1949) again last week, and I was again reminded what a perfect parable the film is for the ethnographic encounter.  It begins with Holly Martins’ arrival in post-war Vienna.  He’s a dime-store novelist who’s been invited by his school friend, Harry Lime, for a visit—but Harry’s been run over by a car and killed.  And yet, Holly is suspicious, and begins to pursue leads that take him through the fractured landscape of postwar Vienna, through different zones controlled by Allied forces, and ultimately face-to-face with Harry Lime himself, a decidedly not-dead black market trader in doctored penicillin.  And all this to the crazy virtuosity of Anton Karas’s zither score.

View from the first level of the Eiffel Tower. Photo courtesy wikicommons

Where’s the ethnography?  Certainly, there’s a resemblance in Holly’s awkward confusion to that of anthropologist entering the field—he’s perpetually flummoxed and frustrated, always asking  “What did he say?,” and running down shadowed streets shot at discombobulating camera angles.  And post-war Vienna is an eerie harbinger for today’s neoliberal order, a city of glitz and ruins divided into different “zones of exception,” each governed by different powers with their own understandings of law.

But it’s the idea of the third itself that I find most anthropological.  In a literal sense, the eponymous “third man” is Harry Lime—the man who was at the scene of the faked car accident and who holds the key to the mystery.  However, there are lots of “thirds” in this film, each offering a conflicting interpretive frame for Harry Lime’s life and purported death.  Is Harry Lime a ruthless black marketer?  Is he a devoted boyfriend?  A loyal companion?

Here’s where “The Third Man” looks like a noir-thriller version of Plato’s Parmenides, where the “Third Man” (in Aristotle’s interpretation), is the “ideal” form that starts off a chain of infinite regress in an endless search for ideal forms that cannot be subsumed back into the “class” of men.    Like Plato’s ideal form, the truth of Harry Lime seems to continuously recede from Holly, until the only choice (for Graham Greene, anyway) is to end the inquiry with gunshots.

There was a time when anthropology went the way of this philosophical chestnut, deferring the ultimate meaning of the ethnographic encounter and in the process marveling at the hall of mirrors it itself had constructed.   When we follow this logic, the Geertzian anthropologist reading over the shoulder of the native can never be the final interpretation of culture; there’s always someone reading over the anthropologist’s shoulder, and someone visible behind that shoulder (an institution, a theory, a context).

But there’s another “third” here, the third that lies outside of a closed dyad of these ideological constructions of anthropologist and field.  Following Michel Serres’s “Le troisième homme,” this third interrupts the stable and static meanings.  It is the noise that upsets and re-orders the hegemonic, that introduces not only new meanings, but new frames that cascade into new understandings.

Image courtesy Tsutoma Takasu

Here, it’s the moment of interruption itself that is powerful—and generative of powerful truths.  When Holly sees Harry Lime briefly illuminated in the shadows, it completely re-orders his interpretation of events: from a murder mystery to a cover-up, from outrage over his friend’s death, to a confirmation of his friend’s nefarious deeds.   That “third man” jolts Holly Martins to an entirely different interpretative frame: what starts as a murder investigation becomes an indictment of war profiteering.

This is the kind of interruption we look for in anthropology: when first impressions are confounded and complicated.  The moment a “third” enters into a neat correspondence and turns it upside down.   To put it another way, only novice ethnographers believe that the truths they discover in the first phase of fieldwork will survive into their completed ethnography.  At first, we may resist the insistence of that outside noise: it is difficult to jettison assumptions we (or our dissertation committees) may hold dear.  But, eventually, we’re going to listen.

I always think about the strange figure of the taxi driver: a stock figure in contemporary ethnographies.  Fleeting, chance encounters with these oftentimes enigmatic, knowledgeable people signal a turning point in our understandings, a sign-post that guides ethnographers along a different path: anthropologists literally driven down the road not taken.

Another example: last month in Anthropology News, Jennifer Carroll wrote movingly of the “Ethnographic of the Unexpected” in Kyiv.  Walking past political activism in Independence Square every day meant that, after a while, she could not ignore the noise of protest, even if she was in Ukraine for an entirely different reason.  But eventually, she succumbs to that third; political protest ends up being her field site after all.

Of course, this is very different in other disciplines; I can hardy imagine a similar epiphany in the hard sciences.  While letting in what Serres calls the “prosopeia of noise” might be a defining characteristic of ethnography, physicists (for example) may agonize over where exactly to “cut” their data, to separate the disjecta of noise from the “real” data they can publish.  Doing otherwise would mean going back to the drawing board and beginning again.

And here’s where we’re like Holly—looking into the enigmatic shadows of a kaleidoscope modernity for a third that will challenge our understandings of events and re-frame them in ways we’ve not anticipated.  Not, however, in some infinite regress of unstable meaning, but as the moral necessity of engaging complex lives.

First published in Anthropology News.