AAA podcasts

I was delighted to discover today that the American Anthropology Association is broadcasting biweekly podcasts.  The second one reports on a letter that the AAA sent to the Thai government expressing concern about their newly relaunched “war on drugs” and extrajudicial executions during their previous drug war; a response to Stanton’s article entitled “Anthropologists agree on traditional marriage” for Focus on the Family; news on the AAA’s plans to revise the AAA Code of Ethics following the unanimous vote to accept all recommendations in the Ad Hoc Commission’s final report on the engagement of anthropology with US and security intelligence communities; and some stuff on the proposed US fiscal budget that frankly was gobbledygook to me, but anthro policy wonks will probably get it.

In other anthro community news, oh how I laughed at Savage Minds‘ April Fools Day joke.

–L.L. Wynn

Chicago anthropologist weighs in on “pimp-gate”

More on the U.S. presidential race and tenuous links with anthropology: Michael Silverstein, a professor of anthropology, linguistics and psychology at the University of Chicago, was asked to weigh in on “pimp-gate,” the scandal where MSNBC anchor David Shuster was suspended after suggesting on-air that the Hillary Clinton campaign was “pimping out” Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea.

Here’s the quote I loved:  “To say that someone is pimping is really an extraordinarily negative description,” said University of Chicago’s Silverstein. “It takes a lot of work to use it so ironically that it becomes positive.”

Islamic Rage Boy

 A few days ago, the British tabloid, the Daily Mail, brought an interesting story (it came to me via 3 quarks daily) . It contrasted the media and pop culture portrayal of Shakeel Ahmad Bhat known globally as Islamic Rage Boy (featured as a most frightening example of radical Islam in countless newspapers, on Jihad Watch websites, boxer shorts and bumper stickers – look at the picture, you have seen him before, he scores more than a million results on google) with the real man as encountered by an author/journalist in Srinagar, Kashmir. The man - not very surprising to people critical of the current Islamophobia – turns out to be quite different from what he has come to stand for. Yet I found the story powerful, as anthropologists tend to deconstruct clichés with the description of specific social scenes and are not often able to demonstrate the processes of demonisation with regards to a particular individual.

The Second Life of Sacred Sites

Ute Eickelkamp put me onto a really fascinating article that appeared recently about legal and cultural issues arising due to real world locations being recreated in the online world Second Life.  The question of how to apply copyright is raised, but more interesting from my point of view is the controversy surrounding Teltra’s reproduction of a virtual Uluru without the permission of the traditional owners of the original, the Anangu people. The article reports that:

Designers of the BigPond site included a scaled down Uluru, with a barrier to stop people walking or flying over the sacred site. However, representatives of the traditional owners, the Anangu people, warned that even with the restrictions it may be possible to view sacred sites around Uluru, although they were continuing to investigate the issue.

Concerns have also been raised that Uluru and the opera house could be exposed to digital vandalism, following an attack on the ABC’s Second Life island earlier this week.

[...]

A spokesman for Telstra confirmed the company had not sought the permission of Uluru’s landowners.

Legislation has been in place to limit photography, filming and commercial painting at Uluru for 20 years, with tight restrictions on what is and is not allowed.

Capturing images of parts of the northeast face of Uluru is banned and all pictures taken of that part of Uluru must be submitted to the landowners for approval.

While visitors in the game cannot touch Uluru or fly over it, they can virtually fly in the no-fly zone to the northeast and take snapshots.

However, while the rules governing photography, filming and paintings have been in place since 1987, a spokesperson from National Parks said the issue of digital images online had never been raised before.

National Parks, which administers the area on behalf of the traditional landowners, now has lawyers looking at Uluru in Second Life and is considering sending a delegation to meet landowners to discuss the situation.

This article raises a lot of really interesting questions about the relationship between the digital technology, the sacred and cultural rights.  It’s worth noting that the Anangu people’s reaction is not to the unauthorised reproduction of Uluru but also because of unauthorised visiting and viewing of secret/sacred parts virtual rock itself. But given that this is just a digital model, in what sense are these virtual visitors seeing secret/sacred objects or sites? Unlike a photograph, a digital copy has no indexical relationship to the original — no physical connection between sign and referent. But nevertheless the Anangu are expressing a real concern about unauthorised people seeing what they’re not supposed to and going where they’re not supposed to.  The magical umbilicus between the two remains, it seems, and actions in a virtual world appear to be capable of damaging the sacred qualities of the original.

I don’t know a great deal about phenomenology of ritual and production of sacred sites in Aboriginal socieites, but it seems like an interesting case to explore how these are being rearticulated in response to the challenges presented by new technologies.

On Monday Ute will be hosting a round-table discussion about this article in her Art and Culture course here at Macquarie.  I might go along and see if I can learn some more about this.

Jovan Maud

Popular/izing anthropology

Strong over at Savage Minds recently noted that anthropology and anthropologists are appearing quite a bit in popular culture of late. The film rendition of The Nanny Diaries has the main character as a recent graduate of anthropology with an essentially useless degree who regards her experience working for the Upper East Side elite with some of the analytic eye of an anthropologically trained participant-observer. Coincidentally (or not?), another recent release, Fierce People, follows a teenage boy who had planned to go live with his anthropologist dad in the Amazon but who instead gets stuck spending the summer with the ridiculously wealthy in New Jersey. He decides to regard it as fieldwork and carefully takes notes on the manners and customs of this exotic tribe. In an interview, Dirk Wittenborn (who wrote the novel on which the movie was based) elaborates: “I’ve always thought of the very wealthy as a tribe. They have unspoken rules they don’t tell you, so the rest of us have to play by rules we don’t understand. It’s like a Martian bridge game.”

I’ve seen neither film, but it is worth noting that the best-selling book version of the Nanny Diaries did not style the main character as an aspiring anthropologist (whoops, did I just confess to having read it?). So the device of the anthropologist protagonist does seem to be a Hollywood strategy for signaling the cultural distance between “us” (? — I guess the non-wealthy, non-elite movie-going public) and “them” within our own society. Or, as Strong puts it more eloquently, the use of the anthropologist figure “play[s] on the conceit of reflexive defamiliarization or ironic self-otherization.”

In some circuits, though, the popular face of anthropology remains Margaret Mead, nearly 80 years after Coming of Age in Samoa was published, and even though Clifford Geertz was, before his death last year, on many lists of top 100 world intellectuals. In Slate.com, Alan Greenspan was recently described as “Margaret Mead in a pinstripe suit” to make some point about Greenspan acknowledging the human (by which they mean ‘irrational’) side of the economy. Is it just a generational thing that gives us a clue about the journalist’s (or perhaps the headline-writer’s) age? How long will Mead remain the public face of anthropology?

L.L. Wynn

An example of the machine which is us/ing us

Michael Wesch’s great video about the social consequences of so-called Web 2.0 of course provides a lot of food for thought. The argument is that Web 2.0’s increasingly “social” interactive qualities are essentially teaching or training “the machine” using an enormous amount of data uploaded. New technologies of correlation and capture mean that the social qualities of the web don’t merely lie in the types of personal interactions now possible, but in the overall effect of the sum of interactions.

The video below contains a dramatic example of this trend, made possible by two new Microsoft programs called Seadragon and Photosynth. I have to say, I was completely gobsmacked watching it.

I was directed to this video by this post at “this blog sits at the…” The author, Grant McCracken, thoughtfully writes that:

In effect, tags and texts end up giving me perspectival information as, or more, interesting than the photos themselves. They become an opportunity to build collective memories as good or better than the memories we construct for ourselves. And this suggests an internet that contains collective emotional and intellectual resources.

More and more of our internal operations are being off loaded into cyberspace. That memory should be one of them feels wrong, because memory is perhaps the most personal and authenticating of our internal faculties. But it is not difficult to imagine a time when the the “memory of crowds” might be the best memory of all.

These questions about memory, the relationship between public and private, and the sorts of collective consciousness that will be produced by these new developments are important. Whether the possibilities are as positive as Grant suggests, I’m not sure. There would appear to be an even more powerful tendency towards “the hive mind”. And I imagine the points of collective fascination and memory creation, such as Notre Dame, will be matched by dark areas of collective forgetting.

This is obviously something that bears more thinking about.

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?

Contemporary Iraq 101

Khatab Sabir, one of our research students who is working on Kurdish experiences under Saddam Hussein’s regime, just forwarded me a link to this presentation by MSNBC on the political background to the current situation in Iraq. In my view it provides a useful corrective to the prevailing perception that the conflict in Iraq is essentially religious, i.e. ‘cultural’, in nature. Instead, it points more clearly to regional geopolitical tensions and machinations, though limiting its analysis to Iraq’s neighbouring countries. The geopolitical designs of the US and Israel, for example, are tellingly left out of the equation. Still, it’s good to see the mainstream media making an attempt to provide some sort of contextualisation of the situation. Sadly, even this rather basic level of analysis is relatively rare.

Link>>

‘Shift happens’ video on Information Age changes

I just watched a PowerPoint ‘video’ that made me smile. It’s about the growth in information technologies, such as the geometric increase in ‘information’, the changing of technology-based occupations, the eonomic expansion of China, and the spread of MySpace (which would be the ‘11th largest country in the world’, if it were a country … of course, how large would Telephonelandia be?). The video is not great quality, but there’s some interesting facts that slide by accompanied by a sort of bagpipe-drenched New Age soundtrack. For example, 3000 new books a day are published, so why are you reading a blog?

The ones that really strike me as interesting, from the perspective of an anthropologist of the ‘New Economy’, are the suggestions that sheer increase in amount of information, number of Google inquiries, and computing power will fundamentally transform basic social, economic, and psychological human realities. For example, the video editors ask to whom all the questions now posed to Google were addressed ‘B.G.’ (Before Google).

The commedy in this is that, if anyone looks closely at the most common search terms, it’s usually starlets, common news items, or pop culture ephemera (for example, week ending 18 May, top 10 searches on Google: Jerry Falwell, Halo 3 beta, (American Idol contestant) Melinda Doolittle, Kim Kardashian (Paris Hilton friend and amateur sex tape… errr… ‘performer’), Preakness (horse racing), Shrek the Third (in theatres near you), Taylor Swift (teenage country singer & Internet phenom), Phoenix Suns (having a very good year, including on Google), Yolanda King (rest in peace), and Opie and Anthony (vulgar and recently suspended radio hosts).

Although it would be nice if the massive increase in ‘information’ brought about a fundamental change in human nature, until ‘what is the meaning of life?’ or ‘how do I become a decent, conscious human being?’ make it onto the list, I suspect we’re in for more of the same. The steadily growing anxiety in the US about population growth in China and India leading to the end of ‘American Empire’, however, is interesting to watch. The fear of being ‘out-bred’ seems to be a persisting subtext of it all.

New film on young Australian Muslims

I just receive an announcment about a new film called Temple of Dreams, about young Australian Muslims in Sydney’s west. Directed by Tom Zubrycki, it will be premiering in the Sydney Film Festival on Saturday 16 June at the State Theatre. Here is the description of the film from the brochure:

Fadi Rahman is one of a new breed of Australian Muslim leaders. Young, charismatic and politically ambitious, he runs a youth centre/gymnasium in Sydney’s west in what was once a Masonic Temple. The Centre struggles in the face of council planning regulations and funding shortfalls. Fadi sets out to solve all their problems with the help of three determined but often argumentative young women – Alyah, Amna and Zouhour. First up to raise funds he flies out former rap star, turned born-again Muslim, Napoleon. Next, he and his trusty team organise a youth conference to discuss the problems young Muslims face in Australia. This event is much bigger than anything they’ve attempted before, and the stress is taking it’s toll. Meanwhile the Council deadline is looming, with the threat of closure imminent. Will the Conference succeed? Will the Centre survive? This is a story told from the inside revealing Muslim Australians in a way that dispels stereotypes of a vilified and victimised minority.

Click here more info on the film and the Sydney Film Festival.