Speculative Anthropology Series in Cultural Anthropology

Please check out this provocative collection of papers at cultural anthropology.  Edited by Ryan Anderson, Emma Louise Backe, Taylor Nelms, Elizabeth Reddy and Jeremy Trombley (and including my own short commentary), the essays speak to the importance of SF to our imagining of alternatives.   

Twitter Wrap-up for AmAnth2018: Hashtags and Hautalk

As I have done over the past few years (2017, 2016), I returned from AAA2018 and ran some Twitter analytics.  Here's the sociograph I came up with (click on the image to see it in its entirety):

The chart represents over 2300 users and over 6400 "edges," which include both mentions and re-tweets.  I've arranged them in groups by their hashtags.  Not surprisingly, "AmAnth2018" is the largest group.  But if you look to the upper right of the graph, you can see other, prominent hashtags, among them "#hautalk" and "#lgbt." 

If we rank the top Twitter users by "betweeness centrality" (a measure of the importance of a user in terms of their capacity to bridge parts of the graph), we can see many of the same usual suspects, but also some accounts that have become prominent over the last few weeks:

americananthro

culanth

news4anthros

eliseakramer

allegra_lab

tfstweets

omanreagan

thevelvetdays

jasonhickel

risako_sakai

anandspandian

pubanth

sarahshulist

zoestodd

lorenagibson

anthro_sarah

savvyology

citeblackwomen

In particular, I want to highlight users like @thevelvetdays, @zoestodd, @lorenagibson, @anthro_sarah, @citeblackwomen, @savvyology, etc.  Why?  These are anthropologists who have been engaged in the debate over Hau (Journal of Ethnographic Theory) and the issues that the debate raised: racial inequality and gender inequality in the academy, institutional elitism, the appropriation of indigeneity, precarity and graduate students, sexual harassment, #metoo and gaslighting.

In actuality, this was a conference dominated by #hautalk and #refusehau.  For example, if we remove AmAnth2018, then a "worditout" wordcloud of the top 300 words in the hashtags looks like this:

Since many people included two or more hashtags in their tweet (#AmAnth2018 and something else), the prominence of #hautalk to this conference is obscured until you remove the AmAnth2018--a nice metaphor for what indeed happened.

The AAA wrongly assumed that the Hau controversy was somehow ancillary to its own practice--a scandal in a non-AAA journal with a European editor.  But the issues there cast a very deep shadow on practices within the AAA, including all of those US scholars imbricated in Hau who are, after all, institutionally supported by universities considered (by some) to lie at the core of anthropology in the United States.

If I take the original sociograph and filter the tweets for "hautalk," a different picture emerges:

Here, "hautalk" is combined with all of the critical hashtags in this conference: #refusehau, #citeblackwomen, "anthrosowhite, "destabilizingefforts, #decolonizeyourconference, #wakandau2018 and many others.

In other words, hautalk succeeded in overturning dominant meanings in a conference designed in many ways to marginalize those voices.  But will the AAA acknowledge that U.S. anthropology's "regular program" has been preempted? 

One more VOSviewer visualization of the Future at AAA 2018

Mapping the Future at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting

"The future" (however imagined) continues to be a concern for anthropologists, and this year is no different than 2017.  But while I was content to just list the different panels in 2017, this year I decided to construct a semantic map of the session abstracts.  First, I created a text document with each of the 28 session abstracts that explicitly concerned the future as an object of research (rather than something like "the future of graduate education").  Then, I loaded up the file into Cowo, which spit out 55 words by frequency of occurrence (minus all of the stop words like "the").  Then I loaded the file onto VOSviewer, and created a semantic map of co-occurrences between terms (nodes) in the same sentences.

Here's the visualization from VOSviewer:

  
And here it is again in Gephi:

We can identify several semantic clusters here, but I want to highlight a few: 1). urban resistance to the neoliberal (right); 2) environmental disaster and the future of the anthropocene (bottom); 3). the utopian imagination for critical alternatives (left); and 4). human migration and human futures in an age of increasing precarity (top). 

This semantic map is a a helpful shorthand for taking the pulse of the future in anthropology right now.  Hurtling toward disaster along multiple axes simultaneously (environmental, political, demographic), anthropologists (and their interlocutors) occupy multiples sites of emergence across precarious futures. 

Are there themes that bring together these different future orientations?  Here are the top terms as defined by betweenness centrality:

era
ecological
anthropologist
city
infrastructural
mobility
migrant
precarious
urbanization
ethnographic
anthropology
emergent
institutional
cultural
modernity
politically
anthropological
power
roundtable
utopian
film

This AAA promises to consider futures that impinge onto anthropological presents--that is, ecological and urban catastrophe that emerges into coeval fieldsites.  Yes - there's still a concern here for utopian promise (there's a panel on Ursula K. Le Guin!), but much of the panels in this map consider the disastrous coincidence of precarious futures with precarious presents. 

Storymapping Your Research

https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/c28f0b6fab85650562ac54dd5cfa403e/my-seoul-fieldwork/index.html

Over the course of a year of fieldwork in Seoul (2014-2015), I accumulated tons of photographs (and some short films) that I made all over the city: a corpus of material that, for the moment, just resides on a couple of computers and cloud drives, waiting to be deployed into publications and presentations.  With storymap, I could use these materials to trace the arc of my research through the city.  Ultimately, I tried to take what oftentimes felt like random discovery and imposed a linearity to my thinking.  Or, perhaps, the exercise helped me to connect the projects into some semblance of order.  Telling a story, after all, involves the imposition of a frame, and the one I've sketched here is about a particular strand of urban anthropology in a complex city.  

In the end, this looks to me like an interesting way to do a research prospectus for a job application or a tenure and promotion file.  It allows you to locate your research in space and narrate connections between otherwise disparate projects.  I could extend this to my research in Baltimore as well and create a storymap that could introduce work I've done over the last 20 years.  

Remembrance of SETI’s Past

(I participated in a workshop organized by two anthropologists studying SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence): Claire Webb and Michael Oman-Reagan.  The topic called for us to think broadly about the future in relation to SETI.  My own contribution revolves around the SETI/METI divide and the question of time.)

As Pioneer crafts hurtle off into interstellar space with their plaques celebrating Eurocentric, heteronormative humanity atop a school-child’s depiction of the solar system, people have inevitably thought of better things they could have sent to the stars.  These have been the subject of numerous discussions and Kickstarter campaigns.  But all of these concerns and alternative plans reflect on one of the chief obstacles to communication with ETI—coevalness.  SETI doesn’t take place in coeval timespace; even signals to (or from) nearby systems (e.g., Proxima Centauri) take a few light years to reach there.  Their past is our present; our past is their present.  Whether we are listening for “their” signal, communicating “ours” or some combination, we do so through a time machine that denies the coevalness of the encounter.  SF writers have utilized a variety of devices to surmount these temporal obstacles, e.g., Le Guin’s ansible (first appearing in her 1966 Rocannon’s World), but the problem of communication (rather than just signal detection) remains.  More recently, SF fiction and film have gravitated back to the question of coevalness, notably in the 2016 film Arrival (based on Ted Chiang’s 1998 “Story of Your Life”) and the 2014 film Interstellar.  And even though these mark a departure from the ansible-like plot devices, they ultimately revolve around questions of coevalness. In Arrival, Louise Banks learns an alien language that is premised on strikingly different temporalities—past, present and future circle back on one another in a non-linear way.  And with her language acquisition, Banks becomes aware of the future (remembered as her past), in such a way that allows her to intervene in the present.  With Interstellar, it’s the protagonist, Cooper, who falls into a tesseract which allows him to manipulate the past in order to allow his daughter to develop the technologies that will liberate humanity from a dying Earth.  Strictly speaking, the alien is ancillary to both of these films.  In Arrival, we see aliens through a translucent screen and, in Interstellar, Cooper’s daughter misrecognizes the dust patterns as a ghostly, alien-like communication.  Really, it’s the humans that matter.  In Arrival, the plot hinges on very human problems of war, aggression and cooperation—with the aliens remaining enigmatic and part of the film’s mise en scène rather than active agents.  In Interstellar, of course, the dust patterns and the watch-face manipulations come from Cooper himself.  However: the importance of these films is not their novel approach to communication with ETI; it is, simply, the importance of communicating with ourselves across temporalities.  In other words, finding a coeval timespace to communicate with the alien is a symptom of our own problems communicating between human futures and human pasts and, in the process, coming to terms with a present in which both the past is interpolated into the future, and the future in the past. 

With Pioneer and Voyager, our future contact is premised on our past assumptions about science, philosophy, aesthetics and political economy.  They are—strictly speaking—communications with our past that lie in our future, with an “us” that is already alien(ated) to us.  Is this inevitable?  Or is it (pace Arrival) an artifact of Western temporalities that position past, present and future along a line like the solar system in the Pioneer plaques?  How can we think about that in a way that doesn’t reproduce “the future” as superannuated past?

Why would this matter?  Here, the Other we encounter is our past--the assumptions we make about ourselves and the assumptions we make about extraterrestrial intelligence.  Even if we concede that others whose signals we might detect labor under the same time machine conditions that we do, there is no certainty that the face the same problem of coevalness.  Ours is a product of Western ethnocentrism, modernity and, perhaps, the duration of the human.  But even Earthly species experience markedly different temporalities than the scientists who search signals from other places and other times.  It seems likely that the problem of coeval timescapes doesn’t look the same elsewhere.  

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Tracking the conversation from Displacements

The joint SCA/SVA "Displacements" conference has come to an end (although the archived presentations will remain up until the end of the month).  By all accounts, this virtual conference has been a success, but I wanted to probe the extent to which the conference brought together people across diverse locations.  Although we have some sense of this from the "Nodes" (local groups of face-to-face meetings and events surrounding the conference), Twitter may be a more important index, since that social media emerged as the most generative form of communication over the past few days.

Using NodeXL, I downloaded tweets with the #displace18 hashtag, and grouped them by timezone.  Here is the sociograph I generated:

And here's a key to the groups (which may help with some of the smaller ones in the lower, right-hand corner). 

Pacific Time (US & Canada)	0, 12, 96	Disk			Pacific Time (US & Canada)
Eastern Time (US & Canada)	0, 136, 227	Disk			Eastern Time (US & Canada)
London	0, 100, 50	Disk			London
Central Time (US & Canada)	0, 176, 22	Disk			Central Time (US & Canada)
Atlantic Time (Canada)	191, 0, 0	Disk			Atlantic Time (Canada)
Quito	230, 120, 0	Disk			Quito
Arizona	255, 191, 0	Disk			Arizona
Amsterdam	150, 200, 0	Disk			Amsterdam
Sydney	200, 0, 120	Disk			Sydney
New Delhi	77, 0, 96	Disk			New Delhi
Hawaii	91, 0, 191	Disk			Hawaii
Greenland	0, 98, 130	Disk			Greenland
Paris	0, 12, 96	Solid Square			Paris
Istanbul	0, 136, 227	Solid Square			Istanbul
Jakarta	0, 100, 50	Solid Square			Jakarta
Wellington	0, 176, 22	Solid Square			Wellington
Edinburgh	191, 0, 0	Solid Square			Edinburgh
Chennai	230, 120, 0	Solid Square			Chennai
Mexico City	255, 191, 0	Solid Square			Mexico City
Berlin	150, 200, 0	Solid Square			Berlin
Seoul	200, 0, 120	Solid Square			Seoul
Tokyo	77, 0, 96	Solid Square			Tokyo
Bogota	91, 0, 191	Solid Square			Bogota
Casablanca	0, 98, 130	Solid Square			Casablanca
Mountain Time (US & Canada)	0, 12, 96	Solid Diamond			Mountain Time (US & Canada)
Alaska	0, 136, 227	Solid Diamond			Alaska
Helsinki	0, 100, 50	Solid Diamond			Helsinki
Brisbane	0, 176, 22	Solid Diamond			Brisbane
Melbourne	191, 0, 0	Solid Diamond			Melbourne
Ljubljana	230, 120, 0	Solid Diamond			Ljubljana
Vienna	255, 191, 0	Solid Diamond			Vienna
Athens	150, 200, 0	Solid Diamond			Athens
Lima	200, 0, 120	Solid Diamond			Lima
Taipei	77, 0, 96	Solid Diamond			Taipei
Dublin	91, 0, 191	Solid Diamond			Dublin
Singapore	0, 98, 130	Solid Diamond			Singapore
Beijing	0, 12, 96	Solid Triangle			Beijing
Stockholm	0, 136, 227	Solid Triangle			Stockholm
Tijuana	0, 100, 50	Solid Triangle			Tijuana
International Date Line West	0, 176, 22	Solid Triangle			International Date Line West
Brussels	191, 0, 0	Solid Triangle			Brussels
Muscat	230, 120, 0	Solid Triangle			Muscat
Tehran	255, 191, 0	Solid Triangle			Tehran
America/Los_Angeles	150, 200, 0	Solid Triangle			America/Los_Angeles
Europe/Brussels	200, 0, 120	Solid Triangle			Europe/Brussels
America/Montreal	77, 0, 96	Solid Triangle			America/Montreal
Nairobi	91, 0, 191	Solid Triangle			Nairobi
Buenos Aires	0, 98, 130	Solid Triangle			Buenos Aires
Santiago	0, 12, 96	Sphere			Santiago
Perth	0, 136, 227	Sphere			Perth
Hong Kong	0, 100, 50	Sphere			Hong Kong
Brasilia	0, 176, 22	Sphere			Brasilia
Mumbai	191, 0, 0	Sphere			Mumbai
Pretoria	230, 120, 0	Sphere			Pretoria
Bangkok	255, 191, 0	Sphere			Bangkok
Midway Island	150, 200, 0	Sphere			Midway Island
America/Belem	200, 0, 120	Sphere			America/Belem
Bern	77, 0, 96	Sphere			Bern
UTC	91, 0, 191	Sphere			UTC
America/New_York	0, 98, 130	Sphere			America/New_York
Abu Dhabi	0, 12, 96	Circle			Abu Dhabi
Europe/Amsterdam	0, 136, 227	Circle			Europe/Amsterdam
Irkutsk	0, 100, 50	Circle			Irkutsk
Asia/Singapore	0, 176, 22	Circle			Asia/Singapore
La Paz	191, 0, 0	Circle			La Paz
Madrid	230, 120, 0	Circle			Madrid
Prague	255, 191, 0	Circle			Prague
Europe/Rome	150, 200, 0	Circle			Europe/Rome

What we can see here is some significant traffic between different zones, particularly (but not exclusively) between North America and Europe.  Traffic is generally in the form of re-tweets. I was pleased to see the lively Quito node!

I'm still processing my thoughts about the conference, but I am steadfast in my belief that this represents a real alternative to the disciplinary mega-conference.