Mars Habs and Anthropology

One strand of emergent anthropology that I've been following over the years has been the "anthropology of outer spaces,"  one recently given new life by a few anthropologists, Deborah Battaglia and David Valentine among them, who have begun to theorize space not just as shadow of terrestrial geo-politics, but as "reconstituting humanness and human sociality in the here and now" (Valentine, Olson and Battaglia 2009: 11).

Space is one of the paramount sites for the legitimation of Western configurations of power/knowledge.  The kinds of futures people ascribe to space--e.g., the military-technocratic order of Star Trek: the Next Generation--have a lot to do with the apotheosis of colonialism under the auspices of neo-liberal capitalism (Kilgore 2005).  But there are different possibilities as well--as Vaelntine et al point out.

But some of these possible, alternative futures are happening right here, in the form of Mars simulations placing groups of scientist-volunteers in a "hab" environment for long periods of time (from a few weeks to, in the case of the ongoing Russia/ ESA project, a few months), during which communications with the Earth are severely truncated and people should "suit up" before going outside, etc.  Sure, as Valentine et al point, only 500 people may have inhabited space, but how many thousands more have enacted life in outer spaces?  

The Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) has been around for some time--since 2002, and has been joined by other habs as part of the Mars Analog Research Station (MARS) project.   Over the last 7 seasons, teams have gone to the station, simkulated their Mars colony, and posted lots of repoprts and updates.  Lots of these present and former para-astronauts have left behind their blogs--"Mars, ho!".

OK--some of this looks an awful lot like those dismal Star Trek futures, but there are occasionally intimations of sometghing else.  Together, all of these records, journals and reports suggest other possibilities--challenges to race, gender and class.  Possibilities for a playful and emancipatory outer space. 

References

 Kilgore, De Witt Douglas (2003).  Astrofuturism.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. 

Valentine, David, Valerie Olson and Debbora Battaglia (2009).  "Encountering the Future."  Anthropology News: December, pp. 11+. 

A tale of two futures--North and South Korea at the Shanghai World Expo

I am deeply disappointed that I can't travel to Shanghai to see the national theater that is the World Expo.

With both Koreas plotting futures in which China plays a pivotal role, both expo pavilions express the shape of future, Korean engagements.

South Korea with a nod to its accelerated program of "cultural content" projected into the future as a longing for Korean culture through variously streamed media (image from the official site).   Korean writing (한글) forms the building blocks of a multimedia spectacle--literally, a media ziggurat erected upon Korean culture and language. 

 The North Korean installation (looking a bit like a carpet discount outlet), expresses an affirmation (an also a desire) for a properly "juche" future where China and the world will look to North Korea for its steadfastness.  The juche tower still burns!  I don't know what's up with those umbrellas, though.  

Review: Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks

Over the past couple of years, a rising trend: ethnographic explorations of gaming and RPG's. The anthropological ones have been interesting: Tom Boellstorff's Coming of Age in Second Life: An anthropologist explores the Virtually Human and the forthcoming ethnography, My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An anthropologists account of World of Warcraft, by Bonnie Nardi. But it's the para-anthropologies that concern me here--Mark Barrowcliffe's blistering (and ultimately depressing) The Elfish Gene and, most recently, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: an Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms

All of them (anthropological and para-anthropological) share certain characteristics: they all approach role-playing games from the perspective of the middle-aged outsider, socially distant from the world of the gamer. This is at least methodologically familiar in the academic anthropology. Stereotypically, the anthropologist is always supposed to straddle ironic configurations of engagement and detachment. But for the nonce anthropologists, it is an invitation to indulge in psychologisms about "those" people. What makes those gamers tick? Why are they spending so much time in WoW, anyway?

This is at least partly attributable to the writers themselves. Ethan Gilsdorf begins with the psychodrama of his mother's aneurysm, the trauma of which intensifies his adolescent fascinations with role-playing. In fact, it's Various Issues originating in this that send him into metonymic encounters with other forms role-playing far removed from his childhood D&D campaigns: Live-Action Role--Playing (LARPs), the Society for Creative Anachronism, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings tourism in New Zealand. Amidst interviews with men and women who game, his own adulthood is never far behind: What does he really believe? Can he let the past go? And can he commit to his girlfriend (or, perhaps, find a new one)?

Of course, it's all about him in the end. At the end of his journey, Gilsdorf finds himself clutching some Lord of the Rings action figures in the shadow of Mount Victoria (site of the "Outer Shire" where Frodo and co. first encounter the Nazgul). Here, he finds both deep embarrassment and, of course, self-revelation:

Goofing around with the figurines had been fun, until it began to feel pathetic. What was I doing, a forty-two-year-old, single, and childless man, traveling on his own, sleeping in youth hostels, and playing with toys?
[ . . .]
I gathered my strength. It was time to leave Mount Victoria and Middle-earth behind. I packed up and headed down the path. Then, I heard a voice.

This is what you're going to do, Ethan. You're going to leave them here.

[ . . .]

You are digging a hole in a hillside in New Zealand, the voice continued. It was hard to turn it off. You are doing something symbolic. This is what it feels like to have an epiphany. (266-67)

But do gamers indulge in the same introspection? I suspect that the vast majority are no more troubled than, say, the modal American (and perhaps considerably less so). But this really isn't a critique of Gilsdorf's otherwise engaging essays. Gilsdorf's relentless pop-psychology and narcissistic navel-gazing seems to be an inextricable part of this genre. In fact, I consider this a kind of popular ethnography, full of interesting interviews and observations--all to the good, I think.

But I wonder if Gilsdorf's book, in the final analysis, is constrained by the same assumptions that enable it in the first place. That is, what animates the book project is the sense that gamers have broken with everyday mores, that they, in other words, are different, odd, noteworthy, iconoclastic: that they require investigation and explanation. Once we've understood their gaming lives, of course, they no longer seem quite so strange after all, do they? What Gilsdorf's book does is to fall into the old anthropological gambit: a) describing the strangeness of gamers; and b) rationalizing that strangeness.

But what if gaming isn't a particularly strange activity? What if, in fact, "gaming" describes a very commonplace experience? Gilsdorf begins to develop this idea towards the end of his book (181):

I noticed gamers playing everywhere, even in my corner cafe. Being online with WoW and other MMOs has become an acceptable use of public space. However, penetrating the MMO subculture proved more difficult than showing up for a weekend event in a purple shirt. Online gaming runs silent. Online gaming runs deep. And it takes place both everywhere and nowhere, and the spaces in between. As I learned more about online gaming, and spoke to players and game developers, nothing seemed black and white. I kept reading stories that linked gaming to either escapism or hedonism, antisocial behavior or community. Both warm fuzzies and red flags kept popping up.

But I knew that alternative electronic identities were a part of life. I'd already participated in online dating, MySpace, Facebook, and e-mail: In my profiles and flirtatious texts, I'd put forth my best, most seductive versions of myself. Safe behind the barrier of a computer screen, I was tempted to rewrite my personal history, or claim to be passionate about something--say, ending world hunger--just to snare a date. Wasn't I already role-playing, even if not in a heroic fantasy realm? But at what expense to me, not to mention the millions of MMO players whose interest in gaming seems to fill a psychic hole in our culture?

And:

I didn't find my Lady Geek. My Rings fanboy was only partly sated. To end with the Dark Lord of the Sith felt like poetic justice. But, as Ethnor-An3 might say, observing the scene in a partial state of inebriation, I was as welcome here as anyone. The great bat wings of Dragon*Con embraced all types. This was the lesson of the con. Even if I personally did not end up embracing anyone.

I trudged back to my hotel, passing through the real Planet Earth, that brash zone of Hooters and Hard Rock Cafes and warring football fans who had descended on Atlanta, or Atlantis, or wherever I was. Folks lingered at tailgator parties in parking lots, each side dressed in matching uniforms--one fandom (Clemson) in orange T-shirts, polos, and baseball caps, the other (Alabama fans) in scarlet. They stumbled about, smashing bottles, trying to find their hotels, clinging to their gods and heroes, no more or less freakish than the rest of us. (239)

I think Gilsdorf is right--gamers are similar to people who spend their time posting on Facebook, or sports fans who tail-gate. They're all investing--lavishing--time and money on their hobby/ avocation. They're all working at their play.

It has become commonplace to look at consumption in the age of Web 2.0 as (after the work of Michel de Certeau) a form of "secondary production," where meanings, social relations and affect shift in the act of appropriation by the consumer. But little, here, on the "relations of secondary production".

As Marx wrote in Contributions to the Critique of Political Economy,

In the social production of their life men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure, the real basis on which rises and legal and political superstructure . . .

Couldn't this also be the case with secondary production? Much of the work on consumer studies implies a separation of the work of producers from that of consumers. Somehow, "leisure" and "consumption" haven't implied the level of alienation and reification that we associate with "real" work. In fact, the opposite has generally been true, with critics in cultural studies characterizing work practices utilizing language and theory cribbed from leisure. That is, work practices get coded as social and cultural expression, rather than the opposite.

But if we consider leisure a form of work, or, rather, if the two have become so interpenetrated in an age of networked capitalism that it is no longer particularly helpful to analytically separate them, then we can see games as work.  As Vandenberghe (2008: 884) notes, “With the privitization of the commons, the boundaries between production and communication, production and consumption, labour and leisure, paid and unpaid work disappear. [ . . .] When free time becomes productive, everything becomes work"

This is particularly the case in the more socially networked games that Gilsdorf explores. Without the "free labor" of 11 million WoW adherents, there would be no record-breaking profits for Blizzard Entertainment. Moreover, despite the absence of wages, it seems obvious to me that this is a form of work, similar to other forms of non-remunerated labor.

So what was most interesting to me in Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks were the tales from the trenches, the narratives of labor: how many hours people lavish on costumes, the tales surrounding the acquisition of various artifacts, the hours they drove to LARPing, the time they'd put into DragonCon. A "relations of secondary production" would focus our attention on the conditions of (secondary) work: the relations of (re) production, the alienation of the (re) worker: the proletarianization of the world in the frisson of Deleuzian capitalism.


References

Vandenberghe, Frederic (2008). "Deleuzian Capitalism." Philosophy & Social Criticism 34(8): 877-903.

Notes from the Ethnographic Archive

Web 2.0 has stimulated ethnographic desire--the archiving of vast records of everyday life in the form of videos and podcasts. The Gamer's Haven is one, hours and hours of role-playing game sessions . . .

Images of Futures Past from Dajeon's 1993 World Expo--꿈의 벽--The Wall of Dreams

Robert Fletcher on Cory Doctorow

There's a nice piece on Cory Doctorow by Robert Fletcher in the current issue of Science Fiction Studies (SFS).  It surprised me a little to find it there, since Doctorow is not exactly the sf canon, yet, as I have blogged about here, there is really no better example of the current "structure of feeling" than Doctorow--he's right there, blogging constantly, writing for any magazine that will have him, putting a creative commons license on everything but insisting on the profitability of the whole enterprise.  In short, it would be hard to find a literary figure who does a better job exploring the tensions and contradictions of the neo-liberal, especially when it comes down to the fluidity of information, the role of the state, the constitution of the individual and, in general, the contradictions of a monolithic yet simultaneously superannuated capitalist system.  It's that aspect of his fiction that I find interesting, even when it doesn't quite hold together: the accelerated heteroglossia of a networked era. As Fletcher (81) writes, "Like Dickens's competing roles as artist, advocate, and entrepreneur tell us something about his novels' relations to changing modes of cultural production and to the social organization they entail."  And as Doctorow continues to write past the dot.com crash into the depths of our information-saturated, Orwellian state, we'll see more in his work that chronicles the contradictions of our times.  One of the best parts about what Fletcher identifies as Doctorow's "networked" identity is the perspective it gives us onto the messiness of figuring things out in the global present.  Drawing on the diverse discourses around him to form occasionally refractory assemblages of ideas, and then working those ideas back and forth over the course of several essays, novels and short stories is not only symptom but also synecdoche of the neoliberal present.

Imagining a Unified Korea, Part I--파란 달 아래와 국가의 사생활

A nation like Korea that has been artificially partitioned (분단) necessarily spends considerable resources planning for unification. Indeed, the governments of both north and south Korea have historically drawn legitimation from their promise of eventual unification. But the scholarship here falls mostly along economic, security and administrative policy lines: the logistics of the unified nation. What's missing from much of this is a sense of the everyday life of a unified Korea, i.e., one that, whatever the course of unification (sudden v. gradual) or the ultimate shape its will take (e.g., one nation, two systems), addresses the way people will live and interact with each other. How do people imagine interacting with the Other on a quotidian level? Indeed, the imagination of everyday life may be the most important factor in the successful unification of the two Koreas.

There are some interesting sites from which one might extrapolate. One is the growing population of North Koreans residing in the South (탈북자, or the more official, '새터민'). As they interact with their southern counterparts, seek employment (a big problem for this small group of people) and render their opinions of life in the South (helped by a fairly relentless crowd of network television and Korean social scientists), we can begin to see at least one shape for a unified Korea.

But, science fiction may give another. There have been a handful of sf novels and stories extrapolating on Korean unification through the eyes of the south, although I expect to see more as the imagination of unfification moves from an emphasis on redressing past injustices (i.e., correcting the distortions of Korea's artificial partitioning and restoring the nation/ethnos (민족) to its rightful patrimony) to the plotting the ascendancy of a Korean future (Korean unification merged into the developmental discourse of the neoliberal state).

Probably the best known of unification sf is Bok Geo-il's (복거일) 1992 novel, 파란 달 아래 (Under a Blue Moon). Originally published serially on a discussion board, Bok's novel traces the unficiation of two lunar bases in the year 2039--the north's Kim Il-sung base, and the south's Jang Yeong-sil base. There is considerable resistance from their respective Earth-bound governments, but, in the context of a strong, lunar independence movement (the Selenites, after H.G. Wells), the possibility for a truly unified ethnos (한민족) gradually becomes possible,

Indeed, we can see Bok's vision as an extrapolation of 1980's minjung (민중) discourse that sought to transcend political and social divisions through transcendental evocations of "folk" Korea, i.e., a critical, oppositional discourse on Korean identity arising "from below" and drawing selectively from agrarian tradition (Bok would return to minjung themes in some of his more recent writings). In this novel, the message is simple: without the interference of government (both domestic and international), Korean unification is a natural tendency. Through Bok's North Korean protagonist, we get both a critique of government brinkmanship, but also a circumspect critique of Western imperialism.

Here, as Grinker points out in Korea and Its Futures, Bok anticipates more official sentiments in exonerating the North's people of any wrongdoing: the tragedy of division lies with the government that has prospered on the back on bundan (분단). The lunar bases literally allow the realization of a minjung utopia from the ground up.