AAA annual meeting online submissions (and where are those blogs?)

The American Anthropological Association just sent me an e-mail announcing that online submissions and registration for the 2008 annual meeting is now available on their website. It also says:

Notice something new? The AAA has recently launched a redesigned website. The website links to three new blogs: Anthropology News, AAA Public Affairs and AAA Human Rights. Let us know what you think about the site by completing our three-minute web survey.

I like to think of myself as not completely Internet illiterate, since I’ve put up a few websites in my day*, but I swear it took me about 20 minutes to find the blogs by navigating through their website. How do they expect anyone to find the blogs when the only links to them are embedded several layers deep within the website? Aside from that clue, I won’t tell you how to find it — any sleuths amongst you who can go searching and report back here on how long it took you to find the blogs?

corporate anthropology = anthropologists working for the military?

Over at Savage Minds there is a small but fierce exchange of comments about the merits of corporate anthropology (two commentators divide over whether the appropriate analogy is corporate=military or corporate=academia).  Since we here at Macquarie like to think about applied anthropology, maybe some of our students and readers of Culture Matters would like to go over there and weigh in.  Preferably with something a little more thoughtful than name-calling (e.g. “reductive dumbass”).

Open access tools

Over at Savage Minds, Rex has just posted an incredibly useful piece on the process he went through to negotiate open access rights to an article that he published with the journal Games and Culture. He describes all of the tools that are available for finding out the policy of each journal regarding open access and links to sites that provide tools for authors to write addenda to the copyright contracts they sign with journals. He also reminds us all to get off our butts and send our pre-print publications, theses, dissertations, etc. to the Mana’o open access repository.
L.L. Wynn

American Anthropology Association issues Human Terrain System resolution

The American Anthropology Association has released a statement of resolution by the Executive Board on the Human Terrain System (HTS) Project. The statement, posted online, is dated October 31, 2007 (though I just received the e-mail from the AAA announcing the resolution today, and as as far as I can tell from the metadata on the website, it was only posted online November 7, 2007).

The resolution is brief and it concerns itself almost exclusively with ethics, not with the methodological trouble of working for the military in a war zone (which Greg has discussed here on Culture Matters). The resolution identifies three key areas of ethical trouble that potentially puts anthropologists involved with the HTS at odds with the AAA code of ethics:

(1) the difficulty of distinguishing between anthropologists and the military “places a significant constraint on [anthropologists'] ability to fulfill their ethical responsibility…to disclose who they are and what they are doing”;

(2) the imperative of doing no harm to the people being studied cannot be assured when anthropologists are reporting on these people to the dominant military power; and

(3) the ethical imperative of voluntary informed consent is compromised when anthropologists are working for the military in a war zone.

It also notes that (4) involvement of anthropologists with the HTS project puts at risk other non-HTS anthropologists — and the people they study — all over the world.

It concludes,

“Thus the Executive Board expresses its disapproval of the HTS program.

“In the context of a war that is widely recognized as a denial of human rights and based on faulty intelligence and undemocratic principles, the Executive Board sees the HTS project as a problematic application of anthropological expertise, most specifically on ethical grounds.”

The full text of the resolution can be read here.

The AAA has also created a blog where members can comment on the Executive Board Statement and related issues at http://aaanewsinfo.blogspot.com/. However, as far as I can tell, one need not identify as a dues-paid member of the AAA to comment.

While the AAA statement is primarily about ethics, many of the comments posted on the blog grapple with the complicated entanglement of ethics and methodology. Some, for example, doubt whether an ‘applied anthropology’ can call itself anthropology when it is in the employ of an interested institution. For example, Hugh Jarvis from the University at Buffalo argues that, “Surely to achieve any credibility or scientific objectivity, anthropologists need to be independent observers.” Others profess deep disappointment with the resolution’s seeming rejection of any anthropological cooperation with imperial power on the grounds that, as long as harm is being done somewhere, anthropologists have a duty to try to minimize that harm, if necessary by working for the powers that be. Some criticize the AAA for not going far enough in expressing only “disapproval” and not “condemnation”; others criticize the AAA for taking a position on the war itself.

As of this writing, there are only 14 comments, but I expect we’ll see that explode in the coming weeks, and the matter of anthropology at war is bound to dominate the annual meeting of the AAA later this month. I’ll be attending and I’ll write about it on this blog, so stay tuned.

L.L. Wynn

MANA’O - New Open Access Repository for Anthropology

The Department of Anthropology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa is launching a new Open Access repository for anthropology. This is an exciting step towards increasing access to anthropological writing. Here’s the announcement from Alex Golub over at Savage Minds (and the University of Hawai’i at Manoa):

It is with great pleasure that I request submissions for MANAO—an Open Access repository for anthropology sponsored by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. In Hawai’ian “mana’o” means thoughts, ideas, knowledge, or opinions—when making decisions together people in Hawai’i often ask for each other’s mana’o. The Mana’o project combines anthropology’s commitment with the ideal of ‘open access’ with open source software’s focus on free technology. The goal is to provide tools that allow scholars to better communicate with each other and with the world.

Mana’o will ‘soft-launch’ in late-November 2007 during the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington D.C. We are currently inviting early adopters to submit work that will be featured in this launch. At the moment we are specifically interested in:

BA Theses
MA Theses
Ph.D. Theses
Articles in peer-reviewed journals
Papers given at academic conferences
Digitized books

If you would like to deposit your work with us, simply email it to submissions@manaoproject.org and our staff will process it and deposit it in Mana’o. If you already have your publications online, simply send us the URL and we will process the material ourselves.

Please note that we can only deposit documents that are in the public domain, documents for which you clearly hold the copyright, or documents for which the copyright owner (typically, the publisher) permits authors to deposit their work in a repository such as this. Unfortunately, this does not include PDFs of your dissertation created by UMI (unless you have used the UMI Open Access publishing option). We can, however, accept the electronic documents that you submitted to UMI when you deposited your dissertation with your university library. If you are unsure who owns the copyright to the work you wish to submit, we can work with you to determine your rights.

Anthropologists have long been concerned with making their world available to the public, including the communities with whom they have lived and conducted fieldwork. Mana’o represents an important step forward in creating concrete open access solutions for anthropology. I hope that you will be part of our initial program, and I look forward
to receiving your submission!

Please circulate this call for submissions as widely as possible. If you are interested in volunteering for the project, please do not hesitate to contact me at golub@hawaii.edu.

Thank you,
Alex Golub, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
University of Hawai’i at Manoa

I hope that Culture Matters readers/writers will join in submitting and making their own writing more widely accessible (and hopefully more widely read)!

L.L. Wynn

Web 2.0 - Marx v. Socrates (what would Sapir say?)

In early 2006, Andrew Keen published a polemic in the Weekly Standard in which he argued that Web 2.0 was taking us down a dangerous cultural path. He was troubled about the development of new Internet-based technologies that allowed just about anyone with a computer to be able to “to publish weblogs, digital movies, and music….to become an author, a film director, or a musician.” He warned of the dire consequences in which a world of millions of blogs would crowd out the informed expertise of the “elite mainstream media.”

According to Keen, the new opportunities for writing and creating that the Internet opens up eerily recall “Marx’s seductive promise about individual self-realization in his German Ideology” [sic]:*

“Whereas in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” †

This — the cultural division of labor in capitalist society — is a matter that has long been of interest to anthropologists, at least since Edward Sapir published his riff on Marx and Engels in “Culture, Genuine and Spurious” in 1924 with a comparison of the empty existence of the “telephone girl” versus the more fulfilling life of the salmon-fishing “American Indian.”

First: what is Web 2.0? According to Wikipedia the term was coined by the O’Reilly Media Group in 2003 (and for a hearty guffaw of irony, read this post and the first comment about O’Reilly’s proprietary claim to the term for a technology that is meant to embody open access and an era of new intellectual property law). The NY Times defines Web 2.0 as an era of Internet technology “distinguished by a new generation of participatory sites like MySpace.com and YouTube.com, which emphasize user-generated content, social networking and interactive sharing” and which its proponents argue “ushers in the democratization of the world: more information, more perspectives, more opinions, more everything, and most of it without filters or fees.” (Check out anthropologist Michael Wesch’s brilliant anthropology-inflected explanation of Web 2.0 on YouTube.)

But, according to Keen, this “fantasy” is really leading to narcissism and is “inherently dangerous for the vitality of culture and the arts.” Rather than a utopia of democracy and self-expression, Web 2.0 is leading to nothing but “the flat noise of opinion–Socrates’s nightmare.”

This past week the New York Times reviewed Keen’s new book, The Cult of the Amateur, which extends the argument of his original essay, with reviewer Michiko Kakutani seeming to side with Keen on the problems with “a world in which the lines between fact and opinion, informed expertise and amateurish speculation are willfully blurred.” It’s hard to not feel a little cynical about somber nodding over the threat posed to “informed expertise” when this is coming from that most elite of journalistic institutions, and hard not to laugh when you’re an anthropologist who during fieldwork in Cairo met plenty of wire agency journalists who didn’t speak Arabic. Informed expertise? It seems at least as likely to thrive on the free-for-all web as in the elite print media.

For example, Kakutani decries the possibilites of “postings that are inaccurate, unverified, even downright fraudulent” on Wikipedia, which gets “way more traffic than the Web site run by Encyclopedia Britannica” [sic]. But it’s a glaring omission when any journalist compares Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica without mentioning the Nature research project that famously compared the accuracy of entries in both encyclopedias. Was the finding of the Nature investigation an excess of “inaccurate, unverified, even downright fraudulent” entries on Wikipedia? No. As Jim Giles summarized it, “The exercise revealed numerous errors in both encyclopaedias, but among 42 entries tested, the difference in accuracy was not particularly great: the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; Britannica, about three.” (And Nature, by the way, knows how to spell Encyclopaedia Britannica.)‡

Then there’s the fact that bloggers have been responsible for bringing news to the attention of the world that might otherwise have been ignored or supressed by the traditional media. Let’s take, for example, the case of the Egyptian blogosphere. In October 2006, bloggers were the first to report a mass assault on women in the streets of Cairo during the post-Ramadan feast holiday that Egypt’s state-run media failed to report. As Rania Al Malky reports at length in Arab Media and Society,

“The incidents were initially met with zero coverage in the press and on satellite channels. Some bloggers alleged that Al Jazeera had footage of the episode but was given strict orders by the authorities not to air it. And so it remained for three days until Nawara Negm, daughter of leftist poet Ahmed Fouad Negm and outspoken Islamist thinker and journalist Safinaz Kazem, appeared on Dream TV’s magazine show Al Aashera Masa’an (The 10 O’clock Show) hosted by Mona El Shazly. Nawara was originally invited to critique Ramadan TV shows, but suddenly diverted the issue to talk about the Downtown assaults that were being discussed all over the Internet.”

(See also Sharon Otterman for an extensive discussion of Egyptian female bloggers.) So without the bloggers, the event might never have made it into the mainstream media. The Egyptian blogosphere has also consistently been an early source of eyewitness accounts, in both Arabic and English, of government supression of the democracy protest movement Kefaya, not to mention the means by which the movement propagates itself.

With Web 2.0 (and eBay and Amazon.com§) we may be seeing a new era of the ‘Long Tail‘ (or, as Keen pessimistically puts it, “everyone is an author, while there is no longer any audience”), but that doesn’t mean that we don’t still see talent rising to the top with new media technologies. It’s not only the traditional media and culture industry that are able to “discover, nurture, and reward elite talent,” as Keen puts it. While everyone may be able to create music and dance and post these online for an intimate audience (see, for example, my 3-year old niece perform the hula), not everyone will author an Aunt Jackie and get signed by producer Jermaine Dupri.

OK, so what happens when we try to apply Keen’s argument¤ to Anthropology 2.0?

The Forgotten Farmworkers of Apopka: an applied anthro blog from Florida

Here’s a new blog to keep an eye on: http://apopkafarmworkers.blogspot.com/. It tracks a collaborative applied anthropology project between a student, Nolan Kline, and an anthropology professor, Rachel Newcomb, both at Rollins College in Florida (in the very southeastern U.S.), who are working with a local nonprofit to, as they describe it, “find solutions to the problem of healthcare for former migrant farmworkers, many of whom are living in poverty and still experiencing the effects of exposure to pesticides and other work-related hazards.”

The mostly African-American farmworkers used to work on farms in the Lake Apopka area in Florida. The lake was partly drained in the 1940s for farmland and then, in 1998, the government bought up 14,000 acres of the farmland to restore to the lake. When the water started to fill the lake, it attracted birds, some 1,000 of which promptly died from the great quantities of pesticides and phosphates in the water. The former farmworkers suffer from a host of health problems as the result of long exposure to the pesticides. The project aims to create some sort of healthcare solution for the workers among other possible interventions.

The project is notable both for its activist angle and for its model of student-professor collaboration. I think, also, that we’ll see more anthropologists using blogs to post fieldnotes (of a sort) in a public forum, both to get ongoing feedback and an audience for their research.

L.L. Wynn

the lolruscape

A couple of weeks ago, I laughed my way through a slate.com slide show on the Internet phenomenon of the lolcats (“I can has cheezburger?”). My favorite variation is the lolrus and his search for his bucket. (ROTFL, in my opinion, but I showed it to an engineer who just stared blankly and couldn’t fathom what I found funny about it.)

Meanwhile, over on SavageMinds, another choice anthro blog, Strong posted the image from Arjun Appadurai’s website with the comment, “The brand evolves.” That got Rex thinking about what he calls “the importance of handwaviness” (mark my words, Rex has coined a neologism that will stick.) Let me quote from Rex’s definition of “handwaviness”:

a certain breathless quality of argumentation which relies on enthusiasm—rather than, say, evidence—to convince. I seem to remember this to be particularly the case for Appadurai, bits of whose essay might be paraphrased as saying: “gay filipinos are doing karaoke… to Elvis songs… ZOMG EVERYTHING IS FLOWING EVERYWHERE!” or “hey you know that fractal thing on NPR yesterday about how a butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo and there’s a storm in Paris? GLOBALIZATION IS JUST LIKE THAT D00D!!”

Spurred on by his commentators, Rex followed up with his own theory macro:

And so I cannot resist. Lo, the Appadurolrus:

L.L. Wynn

Kentucky’s new Creation Museum (Adam and Eve were really hot!)

Hallelujah! The Creation Museum has just opened its doors this week in Kentucky, U.S.A, with 4,000 visitors the first day. Armed guards dressed in black with attack dogs patrolled the grounds, presumably to deter the handful of atheist protestors who showed up from thinking they could get away with sabotage. Inside, animatronic, vegetarian T. rexes graze in the same fields where children play. In the picture published on salon.com, a very tanned and sexy Adam and Eve look at each other longingly, and I’m not sure because they’re mostly covered up with her hair, but it looks like Eve may have had breast implants (thanks, God!). No, wait: maybe that’s just her breasts before the fall.

The new museum puts me in mind of some of the anthropology publications that I subscribe to which have recently been serving up homilies about how anthropologists should rally round to oppose the teaching of creationism and intelligent design (ID) in American schools. As Chris Toumey puts it,

“Our discipline of anthropology ought to take the intelligent design agenda seriously, and should actively oppose it, for two reasons: First, it is wrong for our public schools to mislead students. Secondly, intelligent design is a prominent feature of the so-called culture wars. Each victory for intelligent design in the classroom or the courtroom makes it easier to discredit the accounts of human origins that we generate in anthropology, along with the methods and concepts that guide our work.”

Edwin Segal, meanwhile, complains that ID “shows no understanding of science, scientific thought, or scientific progress.”

I’d like to see Anthropology News and its ilk publish careful ethnographic analysis of the debates over intelligent design and the teaching of evolution in the United States. For example, in the set-up of Us vs. Them, with Them attempting to overthrow logic, science, and “progress,” we might see the glimmerings of an intellectual line of descent between contemporary anthro attacks on ID and the notion of “progress” that characterized early anthropology’s attempts to give an evolutionary framework to culture. And I for one would love to know more about what broad visions of time and human history are imagined by proponents of ID. Is it still fundamentally a story of progress? Is it eschatological? Is it a cyclical process of cultural decay and divine renewal (as the Mormon account of ancient American history is)? In the Creation Museum, for example, visitors are taught about the “‘Six C’s of History’: creation, corruption, catastrophe, confusion, Christ, and consummation.” Some of the interesting things that could be revealed about one nation’s multiple visions of human history get trampled down by the “down with ID!” line of attack.

For choir members who have heard enough serious talk about how Bad creationism and ID are, Colin Purrington has attempted to lighten things up a bit by proposing a hilarious set of science textbook stickers on evolution and intelligent design. The background: a school district in Georgia (southern U.S., not the former Soviet Union) mandated that the science textbooks that were being taught in the schools have a sticker attached to the outside of the books reading,

“This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.”

Purrington proposes that opponents print up competing stickers, to be affixed over the school board’s stickers. A sampling:

“This book discusses evolution. President George W. Bush said, ‘On the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the Earth.’ Therefore, until 2009 this material shood be aproched with an open mind, studeed carefuly, and critcly consid’rd.”

He also has a set of stickers that can be stuck to other texts that promote ID. A sampling:

“This book was anonymously donated to your school library to discreetly promote religious alternatives to the theory of evolution. When you are finished with it, please refile the book in the fiction section.”

There are more on Purrington’s Flickr website.

Back to the Creation Museum: how could anyone possibly poke more fun at it? This unbeliever is hard pressed to imagine anything that could be funnier than the museum itself, with its depictions of humans and dinosaurs peaceably living together and a Grand Canyon carved out instantaneously (geologically speaking) in the wake of Noah’s Flood. If Baudrillard could coin the term simulacra to describe a copy that has no original, what term might we coin to describe an object that is its own parody? I’m not an etymologist, so someone who knows Greek, please help me out here.

L.L. Wynn

“Theme Park” Architecture in China

One of my favourite blogs is BoingBoing, not the least because a lot of the posts tickle my anthropological funnybone. A good example is a recent post on new architectural trends in China, where the emergent middle-class is being tempted to live in simulacra of historical Western cityscapes.

In Nanjing, there are Balinese retreats and Italian villas. In the southeastern city of Hangzhou, there are Venice and Zurich. In downtown Beijing, everything is about Manhattan, with Soho, Central Park and Park Avenue.

Seems that there is quite a bit of interest in producing replica of iconic structures from a usually Western “elsewhere”. Another BoingBoing article reports about the Shijingshan Amusement Park in Beijing, described as “basically a weird, Chinese clone of Disneyland”.

Perhaps more interesting than the phenomenon itself is why stories like this are so ticklish for people like me. What should “we Westerners” have a monopoly on consuming the exotic other? Various kinds of exotica have long been decorating Western homes, both inside and out, for a long time now. An example that springs to mind is the not uncommon practice of a few decades hence of placing concrete Aborigines, like indigenous garden gnomes, in front gardens. Can’t do that anymore though; the consumption of exotica these days must be done with requisite postmodern irony. And maybe that’s what’s so strange about these Chinese consumption patterns: they’re just dripping with pomo simulation, but without the ironic self-parodic attitude you’d expect in the West. Or maybe it’s the strange thrill of seeing changing power relations at work. Maybe it’s not so much the weirdness of the copying, but the fact that it’s being done to “us”. “We Westerners”, not the least anthropologists, have been accustomed to representing the other. So its strange to find “our” forms as exotic consumer items.

I’m just guessing here, of course. Good ethnographic work would provide some sense of why the Chinese middle class seem to be enjoying these kinds of consumption. Perhaps our resident China expert, Third Tone Devil, has something to say about this?