All Tomorrow's Cultures

  ( The Somerset onion , from the Pitt Rivers Museum) In his lyrical essay, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (1982), Marshall Berman defines modernism broadly, as “a struggle to make ourselves at home in a constantly changing world” (6).   By that he includes art, poetry, but also political economy and philosophy; as an urban people, we are a moderns engaged in this daily struggle of sense-making and homeliness.   How we live in the world is a question that exercises artists, revolutionaries, cosplayers: in short, all of us suspended in a world not of our own choosing.   But that modernist impulse is not without its push-back.   “Making ourselves at home” means finding the reality distinctly “un-homely,” or, as Freud defined it in his 1919 essay, as “uncanny” (unheimlich): that is, the hidden, mysterious and unexplained that invades the feeling of familiar, expected comfort.   The two ideas, as Freud explained, are related: “homeliness”...

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...

There are many interesting formations that might be called networked phenomena.  Homophily and the tendency towards triad closure.  Scott Feld's Rule (I'm more likely to make friends with someone who has more friends than me).   Cascading behaviors (i.e., virality).  Small world phenomena (those 6 degrees of separation).  In all, a series of social forms that complicate typical binarisms like individual v. group. Instead, these behaviors are simply networked--explicable through linked nodes.  In other words, not an 'individual'; but not an amorphous, superstructural group.  These have all kinds of implications for social action, cognition, identity and feeling.  As Sampson (2012) writes, Decision are not, as such, embedded in people, or in the voluntary exchanges with others, but in the very networks to which they connect.  It is, like this, the network relation that leads the way. (168) But what happens when more and more of our p...

I've been following Kim's work for some time now, and, at some point, will post up my impressions of his novel, "Neighborhood War" (동네 전쟁).  But, until then, some short notes on his short story, "Superman Now" (초인은 지금) in the collection "The Superhero Next Door" (2015).  What draws me to Kim's work is his use of Seoul as the staging for his stories, and it is not difficult to see why.  Besides being a huge, Dickensian metropolis full of dramatic encounters and chance meetings, it is city of sometimes profoundly alienating spaces: row upon row of apartments, faceless office buildings.  Accordingly, Kim's Seoul is a place for disturbingly non-human encounters.  Seoul citizens are harried by a black-hole like sphere in 절망의 구 (2009), and by monstrous, multi-species aliens in 동네전쟁 (2011).  Confronted with the completely enigmatic, Kim's characters circulate rumors and wild theories, but their attempts to understand the city always fall sh...

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...

An essay I wrote a few years ago that has emerged from behind its paywall . . .Let's hear it for Science Fiction Studies ! http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/review_essays/collins109.htm

Twitter's new, non-chronological timeline ranks tweets by their (algorithmically) perceived importance to your network.  As they say in their documentation, "Tweets you are likely to care about most will show up first in your timeline. We choose them based on accounts you interact with most, Tweets you engage with, and much more." There's a lot not to like with these changes, and, of course, the whole thing has more than just a whiff of desperation about it.  But my unease is more than just with the Facebook-ization of Twitter.  In subordinating chronology to 'importance' (however defined), Twitter undermines its temporality--and in doing so inhibits the ways we might manipulate that temporality as part of our practice of Twitter. That is to say, if time is replaced by a proprietary algorithm, than chronology is no longer a significant dimension in our understanding of Twitter events, and the interesting (and rather quantum) perambulations of Twitter-tim...