CaMP Anthropology

Stephen C. Rea’s “Acceleration and Information: Managing South Korean Online Gaming Culture

June 5th, 2017

What first strikes me about page 99 are the “%”s. I am not a quantitative social scientist, yet on this page alone there are twelve % symbols. A Command+F search reveals that there are 113 %s in the entire dissertation, meaning that page 99’s account for just over 10% of the total. In a 275 page-long document, this seems like an outlier.

The first time that I presented a draft of the chapter containing page 99 to a dissertation writing workshop, the overwhelming reaction was, “Why so many numbers?” To my peers it felt discordant not only with the rest of the dissertation, but also with the genre of ethnographic writing writ large. I remember being frustrated by their reaction, as I had spent countless hours arriving at those %s through assiduous coding of fieldnotes and running cross-tabulations. Had all of that work been in vain? Was I failing to perform the subjectivity of a “good anthropologist”?

In the larger context of the dissertation, it makes more sense (at least to me). Page 99 falls within a chapter where I draw upon data from the site(s) where I spent most of my time during fieldwork: PC bang, the South Korean variant of Internet gaming cafés. During the thousand-plus hours that I sat in plush leather chairs while my virtual self battled with digital monsters in online game dungeons, I diligently recorded the comings and goings of the cafés’ customers, noting gender, age, activity, duration, and whether the customer was alone or accompanied by others. On page 99 my analysis focuses on the correlation between age and group size. Demographics are not the meat of my dissertation; my argument concerns how Korean online gamers calibrate themselves and their play with sociotemporal expectations for “ethical” IT practices. Yet buried in all of the %s lies a hint of the dissertation’s connective tissue: “PC bang tempos also correlate with customers’ age grades and the likelihood that they will be in groups.”

For any other reader page 99 might seem as out of place as it did for my peers in the dissertation writing workshop. But for me it demonstrates ethnography-as-craft: the fieldwork that is often mundane in the moment, the scaffolding work involved in post-field data analysis, and the awkwardness of representing sociocultural processes in writing. In this sense, then, perhaps page 99 does reveal “the quality of the whole.”

Rea, Stephen C. “Acceleration and Information: Managing South Korean Online Gaming Culture.” Phd dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 2015.

Dr. Stephen C. Rea is a cultural anthropologist and ethnographer of digital culture. He currently works as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, where he received his Ph.D. in 2015. Stephen has published on a number of different topics, including consumer finance in the United States, mobile money and financial inclusion in the Global South, and South Korean digital gaming culture. You can contact Stephen at stephen.campbell.rea@gmail.com.
The Trouble with Page 99: Michael Scroggins takes the test

May 29th, 2017

As I navigate to page 99, trouble arises. Adobe Acrobat assures me that I am on page 99 out of 329, but the number at the bottom of the page is 85. How many page 99’s can my dissertation contain? Two, it seems: one circumscribed by Acrobat’s digital scheme that assigns equal value to each page, and another circumscribed by Columbia’s traditional scheme that assigns value only to certain pages. Whose numbering scheme counts here?

My dissertation draws on two years of fieldwork in Silicon Valley Do‑It‑Yourself biology (DIYbio) laboratory. The DIYbio movement’s self‑announced goal is replacing the hierarchy of academic science with the egalitarian work of “citizen scientists.” The first page 99 contains a summary of Chapter Two, which discusses safety measures within synthetic biology, starting with the 1976 Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA. The second page 99 is bisected by a section heading titled “What Kind of Scientists?” which describes the sentimental education of DIYbiologists in 2010. In the interval between 1976 and 2010 the table was set for the disruption of traditional laboratory expertise by a new form of expertise emerging from DIYbio laboratories. My dissertation describes the formation of this new expertise.

The new expertise took form materially and symbolically. A new design language regulated interactions between laboratory members and the public. The logic of human resources governed interactions among laboratory members and supplanted the laboratory apprenticeship. New literary and material technologies for witnessing experiments were instituted by a class of entrepreneurial experimenters. Publicity and hype replaced findings. Experimental safety, the concern of the 1976 Asilomar conference, came to be underwritten by the FBI’s WMD directorate and enforced through surveillance. As we navigate the contemporary scientific landscape, the trouble with page 99 reasserts itself in a new key: whose expertise counts, and when?

Michael Scroggins. “‘This is a New Thing in the World”: Design and Discontent in the Making of a “Garage” Lab. ” Ph.d. dissertation, Columbia University, 2016.

Michael Scroggins is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Knowledge Infrastructures at UCLA. He is currently working on labor, repair and maintenance in data-intensive science, a book manuscript about DIYbio in Silicon Valley, and planning a project on the intersection of DIYbio and cellular agriculture. You can reach him at mscroggins@ucla.edu.
El Khachab’s Technology, Labor, and Mediation in the Egyptian Film Industry

May 8th, 2017

My thesis is not about the link between cinema and car mechanics in Egypt, but this is what I discuss on page 99. There is still a sense in which this link touches on a core intellectual contribution that I hoped to make. The thesis examines how workers in the Egyptian film industry cope with the unforeseeable future of film production. I argue that this future is not entirely unforeseeable, as it is made to seem by interlocutors and scholars alike, but that it is managed through a hierarchical division of labor, an attention to the socio-technical process of film production, and a constant use of technological devices. In other words, when filmmakers confront such an unforeseeable problem as imagining “the film” while writing it, their responses never come out of nothing: they rely on existing hierarchies, techniques, and technologies to manage the issue.

This has little to do with car mechanics, or so it seems. Cinema carries strong expectations regarding what there is to study about it, and one imagines a cinema anthropologist to hang out with stars and directors to study their works, worldviews, and creative impulses. What I have done instead is to document the contributions of “unknown soldiers” in the film industry: set builders and production assistants, cameramen and sound engineers, grips and gaffers; workers who have more in common with craftsmen than the creative types we imagine peopling the industry. The vital insight is that each worker has a different stake in the film’s future: what it means to imagine the film is very different to a director as opposed to a gripping technician. By giving equal consideration to the director’s and the technician’s projects, however, I have tried to complicate expectations about what there is to study in “cinema”.

What remains to be studied is the historical link between cinema and other industrial crafts, for example, car repairs. The history of Egyptian cinema – and arguably, the history of cinema tout court – is predominantly written as though cinema was a series of “artworks”, without recognizing how cinema workers exist in a wider socio-technical world. It would be astonishing if the strong similarities between Egyptian craftsmen in the film industry and in the car repairs industry were a mere historical accident. Yet this comparison is seldom raised, because both activities are seldom put in the same sentence together. The comparison matters nevertheless because it breaks the stereotypical bounds between “creative” and “technical” activities, and it lets us think about what Egyptian cinema can say about Egyptian society more broadly.

Chihab El Khachab. “Technology, Labor, and Mediation in the Egyptian Film Industry.” DPhil dissertation, University of Oxford, 2017.

Chihab El Khachab is a Junior Research Fellow in Anthropology at Christ Church, University of Oxford. His doctoral research examined the everyday production practices of Egyptian cinema. He is currently working on a history of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture. He can be reached by email at chihab.elkhachab@chch.ox.ac.uk.
Lynnette Arnold’s Communicative Care Across Borders

May 1st, 2017

My dissertation, “Communicative Care Across Borders: Language, Materiality, and Affect in Transnational Family Life,” explores the role of everyday communication in the lives of multigenerational transnational families living stretched between El Salvador and the United States, revealing how technologically mediated language both produces and contests the political-economic marginalization of geographically mobile populations. These families rely on regular cell-phone calls as a primary form of kin work in the face of long-term physical separation caused by restrictive immigration policies (Di Leonardo 1987), and the dissertation provides a close analysis of these cross-border conversations, informed by insights developed through multi-sited ethnographic engagement.

Page 99 is located in the middle of my methods chapter, and discusses the relationships that made this intimate investigation possible, describing how 15 years of connection had resulted in my adoption into several transnational families, signaling close affective ties despite the insurmountable gulf between our political-economic positions. As such, although page 99 is methodological, it draws attention to the primary theoretical contribution of the dissertation, the concept of communicative care.

Building on feminist approaches to care, I develop this term to highlight how mundane conversations attend to both material and affective concerns, nurturing the relational ties upon which cross-border families depend. The dissertation analyzes long-distance greetings, collaborative reminiscences, and negotiations of economic decisions, elucidating how each practice works to reproduce material connections between migrants and their relatives back home, while also providing forms of affective engagement that maintain kin ties.

In sustaining transnational family life, communicative care practices constitute a creative response to the failures of state care, but one that also reinforces the domestication and privatization of caring responsibilities. Thus, while communicative care is a means of pursuing well-being at the margins of neoliberalism, these strategies simultaneously produce forms of personhood and relationship that conform to neoliberal models. The analysis presented in the dissertation demonstrates the crucial importance of paying close attention to technologically mediated talk for understanding how the tensions of neoliberal mobility are both produced and managed.

Lynnette Arnold, “Communicative Care Across Borders: Language, Materiality, and Affect in Transnational Family Life,” Phd diss, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2016.

Bibliography

Di Leonardo, Micaela. “The Female World of Cards and Holidays: Women, Families, and the Work of Kinship.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12, no. 3 (1987): 440–453.

Lynnette Arnold is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research examines the intersection of communication and care in the context of the exclusions produced by neoliberalism and contemporary regimes of (im)mobility in the Americas. You can reach her at larnold@anthro.umass.edu.
Birgit Meyer on her new book, Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity

April 17th, 2017

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520287686

Interview by Yeon-Ju Bae

Given that Ghanaian video movies provide audiovisual experiences of what the Ghanaian audience might have imagined, for example, occult forces, Satan, God, modern life styles, and so on, I was curious in the first part of the book why the visual modality seems to be more emphasized in terms of “imagination, image, and imagery”, whereas audio is more briefly mentioned. In reading chapter 3, I realized that attention to the aural modality alerts us to backchannel cues that the audience produces in watching and participating in video movies. I think this interactive and co-creative process across video technology and human viewers, and across visual and aural modalities, composes one of the important features in the Ghanaian video experience. In this sense, I wonder how you would situate the audience’s aural participation among the processes of “imagination” and “sensation”.

Thank you. You raise a very interesting point. Some readers of my book have pointed out – rightfully so – that I pay too little attention to the sound dimension of these movies. The issue, of course, is not to just say more about sound, but to reflect on the sound-image relation. In the passage in Chapter 3 to which you refer I argue that the low quality of the sound compels audiences to co-produce their own sound track. This, as you observed very well, is a central dimension of the genesis of the typical video experience. So here poor sound facilitates high level interaction of audiences with the moving images. A technical deficiency allows for higher participation! But certainly more can (and should) be said about the sound-image relation in the video experience. Sound is imperfect, but not absent. In watching movies, people look and listen (and speak, sing, shout) all at the same time. There is no neat separation between visual, aural and other modalities. They intersect in various ways. In writing the book, I used the terms audience and spectators with a critical awareness that the emphasis on the aural in the former and on the visual in the latter ideally should imply each other. The lack of a single term to describe the entanglement of the aural and the visual (let alone other sense perceptions) in film reception testifies to the difficulty of developing a thoroughly multi-sensorial approach to cinema. Maybe the term “spectaudience” might be a solution? I think that in order to critique and transcend the visual bias that is still dominant in the study of cinema and film, it may be worthwhile to think further about the work of Michel Chion, who has proposed a distinction between “visualized sound” (that is, sound the source of which is visible to viewers) and “acousmatic sound” (that is, sound the source of which remains hidden). The latter accounts for the evocation of a sense of suspense. It would be interesting to think through his distinction with regard to Ghanaian movies, where sound tends to be deficient and people make up for this lack. This would require audiovisual recordings of film shows. Alas I do not have such materials, I only have audio recordings.

The same problem of an over-determination of the visual arises with regard to approaches to the imagination, imaginaries and images. In my book, which is about the interface of film and Christianity, I explore the question how movies feed into and are fed by what people imagine, how their imagination is synchronized and how this yields shared sensations and common sense. In the Introduction I wrote: “… the ‘stuff’ to which imaginaries refer is not limited to pictures and other visual items. It is the imagination, as a visualizing faculty that – not unlike a film – represents all this ‘stuff’ as mental images.” I agree with your observation that “the visual modality seems to be more emphasized” than the aural. I do think that film and the imagination are visual by definition. However, the point is that visual does not stand by itself, but is coupled with sound, smell, taste and touch. Exactly for this reason I sought to embed the imagination into a broader frame of sensation. Fleshing out an approach to the imagination, imaginaries and images that is not limited to visual registers but opens up for speaking or singing images, smelling images, sounding images, and so on, is a major conceptual issue that deserves much more attention. I think that Hans Belting’s anthropology of images, which has inspired my sensorial and material stance to the imagination as outlined in the Introduction, may be a useful starting point to conceptualize the imagination from a new thoroughly material and sensorial angle. This is one of the theoretical projects I would like to pursue in the future. Especially for the study of religion this is an important topic. From the ways in which audiences in Southern Ghana responded to the images and often deficient sounds they witnessed on screen I learned that going to the movies was an experience in which imagination and sensation converged. So much so that the films are understood to reveal something real which is normally hidden to ordinary perception.

It was intriguing for me to encounter the folk notion of public that seems to be closely related to their notion of ethics. It seems like Ghanaian people don’t regard rumors and hearsay as “public” even though these discourses are circulating. However, if those rumors and hearsay are framed in terms of the Christian ethics in which retribution adequately takes place, then the stories involving occult, violence, and sex become “publicized” via video movie forms. Within video movies as well, if there is a scene in which actors show their intimate/private body parts, their behavior is often associated with immorality in terms of the plot flow and protagonist characteristics. I’m wondering if the Ghanaian notion of public as morality is drawn from Christianity or is rooted in Ghanaian traditions. Put in other way, how do different religions or different ethnic groups in Ghana exhibit different understandings of the relationship between public and ethics?

What I wanted to make clear is that video movies flourished under conditions of democratization and the deregulation of mass media as radio, television and film that had previously been under full state control. The change occurred around 1994. The point here is that, prior to that change, stories and rumors circulated, but were not allowed a space in the mass media around which the modern public sphere evolved. Scholars studied such narratives and performances as popular culture. After 1994, videos became one of the new outlets through which popular imaginaries that had circulated before under more clandestine conditions would become visible and audible on screen. Hitherto subdued narratives circulating via rumors could go public in the context of a new politics and aesthetic of representation of culture. What I found very interesting – and here we come to the gist of your question – is the strong emphasis on ethics. So, while as far as content and message were concerned, video movies digressed from state-cinema, they were still embedded in a longstanding ethical attitude towards film according to which moral lessons were to be learned. This attitude is certainly not limited to Christianity, but emphasized in indigenous traditions, especially in traditional storytelling, as for example Ananse stories. And even though video movies revel in picturing all sorts of transgressions, the “good” people are morally sound (and hence do not undress, consult a “fetish” priest, and so on). In this book I showed how approaches to video-movies on the part of both the producers and the “spectaudiences” are embedded in everyday or “ordinary ethics” (Michael Lambek). Since I could notice that the movies appealed to people with different ethnic backgrounds, I am sure that the expectation of the morality of entertainment is widely shared. Over the next years I will conduct a collaborative project with colleagues in Ghana in the course of which we will investigate modalities of co-existence across religious and ethnic differences in the suburb of Madina (Accra). The issue of public ethics and the morality of circulating cultural forms will certainly be a major issue.

When I read your interview with a woman who paid attention to video movie scenes in which characters of the upper class are matching the color of curtains and bed sheets depending on situation, I wondered if she were a man, would the interviewee have paid so much attention to such details. This interview excerpt brings up issues of how social differences map onto experiences of watching movies. Are there any patterns in terms of audiences’ reactions or focuses depending on gender, age, class, language, region, religion, ethnicity, and so forth? I think the class (as well as language and age) differences were described in the book. What about region—are the movies circulated in rural villages as well; if so, do the ways of watching videos in villages show any difference from those of urbanites? And are there any reactional patterns in reference to multireligious and multiethnic situations in Ghana?

The movies I studied were consciously tailored to appeal to women first, who would then make the male members of the household watch as well. This is what my filmmaker friends told me over and over again. A film that would fail to do so was doomed to flop, and this would end the business of filmmaking. The women who admired the match between curtains and bed sheets was a seamstress called Floxy who had a big atelier. She unfortunately died in childbirth not long after our interview. As she told me, she got phone-calls from her female customers when a film (often Nigerian) was on in order to copy a particular appealing dress. So she, and her customers had a keen eye and great appreciation for the new styles displayed in movies. By contrast, I myself did initially not look at movies in this manner, but was eager to discern meanings. This is what I realized in the interview with Floxy. She alerted me to a modality of looking which I had so far overlooked. Scouting for styles is one of the ways through which movie watching is embedded in everyday life. It is indeed the case that what people find remarkable in a movie very much depends on their interests and dispositions. My research mainly took place in Ghana’s capital Accra, and to some extent among Ghanaians in the Netherlands. These are multi-ethnic settings which are predominantly Christian. Unfortunately I did not accompany screenings of videos in the rural areas. Nor did I study the Kumasi film industry which uses Twi as main language (rather than English). It would have been interesting to follow the circulation and screening of Accra- and Kumasi made films in villages and across the borders of neighboring countries in detail. Alas I did not do so. And now, with the spread of television and the mobile phone and its increasing use for film viewing the days of screening movies in villages to paying audiences are a matter of the past. All the same, I do not think that the identity markers you mention are reflected in particular watching patterns. The movies are made to travel across Ghana, Africa and among people of African descent in the world. Together with Nigerian movies, they are consumed all over the continent. I would rather say that these movies actively disseminate particular images, styles and attitudes about African tradition and the modern world. They articulate visions, desires, dreams, anxieties, life styles and identities. They make people share imaginaries and sensations. They are part of performing African modernity.

You said that the “sensational forms” of Ghanaian video movies give rise to “religious real”, and I was wondering for whom it is real. It seems like the representation of reality must be considered within the context of authority at various levels. For instance, video movie directors are facing criticism from censorship officers that they are not representing what is reality; traditional chiefs think that the directors cannot accurately visualize the spiritual forces, or juju, because these are not visualizable in the first place; those viewers who know English might find protagonists’ speech artificial; directors are concerned that it might seem unrealistic to the upper class if movies depict hyper-urban lives that aren’t present in Ghana—which the lower class wants to see in the movies; and during filming, actors are acting to visualize what is invisible and inaudible in a way that they themselves don’t believe it to be real. Given that you vividly show how various representations of reality are contested, I’m curious about your thoughts in using the terms “real” and “revelation”.

Yes, this is an important issue. What is taken as real is not given, but subject to authorization processes. Competing politics and aesthetics of world-making co-exist. This is so in all cultures and societies. In Ghana the video-film industry was situated in a context of heavy contestations, as it digressed from established forms of representing culture and tradition under the aegis of state cinema. Video-movies rather surfed along with the popularity of Pentecostalism, which purports a specific take on reality as being enveloped in a spiritual war whose main operators are located in the invisible world of demons. In Southern Ghana, there was and is a broad consensus, running across differentiations in terms of ethnicity, age and education, that the spiritual is real. The video movies that form the major focus of my book echoed and affirmed this consensus. This does not mean that movies were taken to be credible under all conditions and by everyone. Even sympathetic viewers would find certain depictions more convincing than others, and dismissed others as artificial. Still one main attraction point lay in the fact that video movies transfigured stories about occult forces that were circulating in society into movies. They set out to reveal the invisible realm which the naked eye cannot penetrate. In chapter 5 I argue (inspired by the work of Achille Mbembe) that one could see video filmmakers as high priests of the imagination, who create doubles of the “real thing” that is hidden from view but whose features enter into the double. Images are not mere representations, but make what they represent somehow present. At the same time, any attempt to depict the invisible generates contestations, as is the case with the chief who also was a photographer and who insisted that the real thing could not be visualized. So, interestingly, the picturing of the invisible is a paradoxical endeavor, in that the images that reveal the “religious real” (the term was coined by Adrian Hermann) on screen may well conceal it at the same time. At the same time, and you refer to this, actors can only play the role of a witch or the devil, if they do not believe that in so doing they have to become a real witch or devil. And yet, there is a sense of danger of being affected by mimesis, reason why actors recur to prayer so as to protect themselves from being intruded by the role. There were also anxieties that, in filming certain scenes which involve occult forces, these forces could be called upon to inhabit the fake shrines and possess people staging a dance or doing incantations for the sake of shooting a movie. What I wanted to show is that video-movies are embedded in processes of world-making in which what is real is constituted through revelations that rely on authorized Christian visual regimes, but are always haunted by a sense of the ultimate impossibility of revelation. We encounter here a fundamental feature of the image: it acts as a medium of something which is not present as such. The image itself – as a medium – is real, but the question is whether that what it represents is taken as real too, or simply as fake. So I use the term “real” not in an objective or positivistic sense, but as an outcome of politics and aesthetics of figuration that are tied to broader, competing imaginaries. Revelation is a way of vesting the act of representation with a sense of truth, and a confirmation of a “Christian real”. I think that this fact that what is considered real depends on processes of producing something as real and authorizing it is a basic feature of societies, as for instance the current insecurity about the possibility of news being “fake” also shows.

The Ghanaian video movie producers started to emerge thanks to the development of video technology, yet have recently been out of business due to changes in available alternatives for audiences which include films on the internet. In a sense that Ghanaian video movies are deeply concerned not only with religious “sensational forms” and moral lessons, but also with the social life of video technologies, I wonder how the video movie directors have experimented with technological resources and limitations. And I wonder what new experiments the directors are attempting to conduct in order to compete with other alternatives in this current changed situation. Moreover, will these new creative ways of “mediation” bring about any emergent themes or values?

My research ended in 2010 and I circumscribe it as a historical ethnography. Since 2010 I have only followed the industry from some distance. In chapter 1, I trace the implications of the shift from analog to digital video, and show that this technological transition offered new opportunities for newcomers. Most of the filmmakers I followed since the early 1990s are not doing well. In 2010 some sought to remain in the business by opting for another kind of transgressive revelation: mild porn. This generated a moral outcry among the audiences (although these films, just as porn, sold to some extent). It is a difficult situation for them to survive, certainly as there are no film funds and no easily accessible loans. One reason for the problems filmmakers face is that there are non-stop older films shown on various TV channels. Also an Youtube a huge amount of Nigerian and Ghanaian movies is available for free. Nowadays it is difficult to launch a new film and make sufficient money via VCD and DVD sales to earn back the investment. Piracy is lurking. Still new producers are around. My friends in Ghana told me that watching movies on television is still a very much a social affair. People watch together in the family. In long distance busses movies are shown, too. And also in pubs. I also noted that increasingly movies are available digitally and watched on mobile phones. Lindiwe Dovey has documented this shift in African screen media very well. I have not conducted research on this new phase myself. It would be great to take this up. Maybe you want to go into this?
Colin Halverson “Individualized: an ethnography of translation in a genomics clinic”

February 6th, 2017

I spent about twenty months in a genetics clinic in the urban American Midwest. I shadowed genetic counselors, worked in medical ethics, observed in the laboratories, and attended case conferences and board meetings. I also interned in Patient Education, where writers produce pamphlets on healthcare issues for patients from the general public. It is in one of my chapters that focus on this aspect of my fieldwork that page 99 falls. While Patient Education is more peripheral to my actual dissertation, the argument I develop on this page is in fact central to the monograph as a whole. My primary concern in undertaking the project was to examine how experts in a given field communicate complex information to others who lack the background knowledge to understand the information fully. Geneticists face this problem when talking to patients, just as biologists struggle to explain scientific intricacies to clinicians.

Patient Education acts as a group of specialists who ‘simplify’ complex and jargon-riddled propositions into something they consider ‘readable’ for the ‘average’ patient. Such simplification, however, is not itself a simple process. Patient Education serves as a prime site to unravel the rich local theories of language-in-practice that dominate in the hospital. Page 99 of my dissertation lands in the middle of my demonstration of how these employees of the clinic understand specific verbiage’s effects on patients’ emotions and behaviors, and in turn patients’ acquiescence to the demands of prescribed healthcare regimens. Each of my chapters analyzes a mode of translation that occurs in the clinic, examining which (types of) qualities of an object are taken to be essential for the reproduction of ‘identity’ and which (types of) qualities are either unrecognized or considered contingent. Throughout the monograph, I analyze the various gene nomenclatures used by different types of clinicians and scientists, the graphic illustrations of genetic material, and the representations of the individual patient him- or herself, among other things. In the chapter in which page 99 stands, I discuss the debates clinicians and writers have over how successfully to ‘simplify’ expert concepts like cholangiocarcinoma and whole exome sequencing.

Halverson, Colin. 2016. “Individualized: an ethnography of translation in a genomics clinic.” Phd dissertation. University of Chicago.

Colin Halverson is currently an assistant professor of Bioethics at the University of Indiana. His research focuses on communication of complex information (in particular, genetic test results), the semiotics of scientific nomenclatures and systems of classification, and lay patient and clinician imaginations of medical knowledge production. You can reach him by email at chalver@iu.edu.
Erin Debenport on her new book, Fixing the Books: Secrecy, Literacy, and Perfectibilty in Indigenous New Mexico

January 25th, 2017

https://sarweb.org/?sar_press_fixing_the_books

Interview by Shannon Ward

You identified commonalities in the processes of creating the San Ramon dictionary and pedagogical texts, as well as in the speech genres and cultural practices they encode. For example, both texts are continually refined, or “perfected,” through editing meant to closely control the circulation of knowledge about certain linguistic and cultural practices. Also, both texts contain chronotopes that link authoritative knowledge about the past to present community issues and the potential future implications of cultural and linguistic loss or revival. How do these features of the texts intersect with other socialization strategies practiced informally within families or among community members? That is, how does the use of these texts fit into broader language and cultural socialization within San Ramon?

The most visible socialization strategies that connect to ideas about perfectibility at San Ramon were approaches to childrearing and the associated transmission of knowledge. Although outside the focus of the book, I noticed that caregivers—both men and women, parents, non-parents, adults, and teenagers—felt comfortable “correcting” children, telling them to be respectful, to listen, or simply stop what they were doing if they were misbehaving. This connects to the idea that the responsibility for the transmission of knowledge is shared among all community members. Related to this, adults would often correct or comment on behavior even when the child was performing a task correctly or behaving themselves. Once I heard a Head Start teacher say, “That’s the way, Amber. You don’t go messing up the play area when you spend time there,” almost keeping the master/apprentice “channel” open between teacher and child. A new way that texts are figuring into broader patterns of language and cultural socialization at San Ramon and the other Pueblos is through the use of Facebook. When posting about community events or commenting on tribal policies, I have noticed that the past is often invoked in this new context, as in “Make your ancestors proud and help clean up the arroyo this Saturday.” Processes of perfectibility are apparent here, too, as users craft elaborate comments, replies, and visual materials while composing Facebook posts.

The student authors of the Keiwa soap opera, As the Rez Turns, artfully employed characteristically Pueblo speech genres, extracommunity genres, and non-Native images of indigenous people to create subtle social and political critiques. How does this project differ from young people’s everyday interactions that may (or may not) similarly display multiple intertextual links? What does it suggest about changing possibilities for young people’s community-directed action?

I think the soap opera project differed in that the abstract notion of a “language dialogue” provided enough distance for participants to employ such intertextual links while discussing things like tribal politics, “tradition,” and Native identity. Usually the two “realms” are quite separate: the copious use of pop culture references and the production of intertextual links on one side and the serious work that is being an engaged community member on the other. As far as changing political possibilities, I think this is an example of how new spaces for critique are opening up almost within new forms of language circulation. I would not go so far as to say that Facebook and other platforms are singlehandedly enabling youth participation and political action, but I would say that I continue to see social critique within such spaces, spaces that are considered to be frivolous or unconnected to tribal history and values by older community members.

You argue that language revitalization projects perform culturally and linguistically meaningful work beyond preserving grammar and phonology. For example, language revitalization projects serve as metapragmatic resources for reproducing cultural practices and morality, as well as for enacting social critique (pg. 112). Participants in these programs thus tend to view them as beacons of hope for future linguistic and cultural revival, even in the absence of data proving the successful reverse of language shift (pg. 112-117). What possibilities do you envision for expanding recognition of and support for these other facets of language revitalization, in San Ramon and beyond?

I think that one potential influence of the U.S. educational system and dominant approaches to parenting in this county is that increasingly younger tribal members insist on being given credit “for trying” or for attending language classes regardless of their linguistic abilities. In such moments, youth connect attendance and participation with “being Indian” or being a good community member, invested in the future of the Pueblo. I have started to work with an additional Pueblo community, Ysleta del Sur Pueblo (not a pseudonym) in El Paso, Texas, and these kinds of connections are much more overt there than at San Ramon. Due to their distance from the other Pueblos, intense discrimination, state educational policies, and the predominance of Spanish in the region, the Southern Tiwa language was largely lost at the Pueblo. Their language program has been an incredible success, however, with the emergence of several advanced speakers who have learned the language as adults. While meetings with other Pueblos or native speakers of the language can be stressful for these learners, they often say that the fact that they are trying to learn shows that they are true Pueblo people rather than being able to speak Southern Tiwa without making any mistakes.

While Pueblo secrecy radically affected your participation in the community of San Ramon, you also harness secrecy in your ethnographic writing, for example, by focusing on cultural and linguistic knowledge production without revealing the content of this knowledge. What aspects of ethnographic methodology aided you in continually adapting to the changes and complexities of your consultants’ relationships with outsiders? That is, how did your ethnographic training help you reconcile your initial expectations of your anthropological endeavor with the constraints (and associated possibilities) you encountered in your fieldwork, analysis, and writing?Your description—“continually adapting to the changes and complexities”—really captures my experience perfectly! Having to always revise my new and ongoing projects keeps this concern at the forefront of my thinking and research, too. I think that two parts of my ethnographic training continue to inform how I research and write in and about Pueblo communities: being introduced to the ideas of informed consent, harm, and language ideologies; and being introduced to literature on knowledge production and power. I first experienced the former when preparing my IRB, which was a surprisingly nuanced process at my graduate institution (there was a separate IRB for social sciences, so I felt guided by scholars working on comparable projects). My advisor also shared with me instances where he chose not to circulate language examples as part of a language project to which he contributed. Also, critiques of language revitalization discourses by scholars including Jane Hill, Robert Moore, Joseph Errington, and Peter Whiteley alongside work on language ideologies and literacy (especially by Paul Kroskrity and Justin Richland who have worked in Pueblo communities) really paved the way for being able to think about such projects as both objects of analysis and potential sites for conflict or collaboration. However, it was really being in the field and realizing the stakes involved with keeping secrets that led directly to the choices I eventually made in the way I presented data in the book. Lastly, works in anthropology, social theory, and science and technology studies that analyzed the ways that anthropologists produce and circulate knowledge had a tremendous effect; Bourdieu, Foucault, and Fabian were key.
Shane Greene on his new book, Punk and Revolution

December 15th, 2016

https://www.dukeupress.edu/punk-and-revolution https://www.dukeupress.edu/punk-and-revolution

Interview by Orin Starn

Can you tell us about Punk and Revolution: 7 More Interpretations of Peruvian Reality and what you set out to accomplish with the book?

I hope the book goes down as a few things: a novel take not just on Peru’s war with the Shining Path but, somewhat by extrapolation, the narratives that dominate understandings about “Cold War Latin America.” I’m invested in inserting some wacky anarchists into that otherwise standard tale of the “hard left” (that is, Marxist) and “hard right” alternatives that dominated the region from the 60s to the 90. I also want some sort of disruption into punk’s too comfortable location in the Anglo North Atlantic rock nexus, and all the debates about provocation, selling out, and being reborn that that typical story about punk has generated. And I guess it is something like a modest assault on academia to make it slightly less boring. There’s also the distinct possibility I was just trying to live “rock subterráneo” vicariously and reopen old wounds about the politics of feeling out of place, something that started when I was about 13.

Punk is genre-busting music. And this is a genre-busting ethnography. Can you tell us about your ethnographic style here, including all that good nasty language? Do you see your book as having lessons for other anthropologists in thinking about experimenting with our writing?

Not everyone thinks my nasty language is all that good, and some were in a position to question or kill it when they thought it too nasty, or, maybe just too “masculine” (oh, how they have overrated my masculinity). It was never really a project about challenging “political correctness” (a phrase that emerged on the radical left but has long been appropriated by the far right) and more about wondering what we can or can’t say with academic voices or how we are or are not allowed to juxtapose academic voices with other, um, less staid, voices. The criticisms sometimes made me really rethink the nastiness (Interpretation #4) and, other times, I just snuck it back in elsewhere (because I’m sneaky). That said, even my kid knows I have a dirty mouth so probably a certain percentage of it is just how I talk anyway. But, really, the main thing was just that I wanted each of the 7 Interpretations to sound/read/look totally different. Eventually, that meant not even writing essays, which explains the Situationist-style art project (Interpretation #6) and the short story (Interpretation #7). For that matter, there’s technically more than 7 Interpretations given all the supplemental side projects that the book is linked to on the companion website (www.punkandrevolution.com), the zine-stuff, a music video my band did, a tee shirt I made, and so on. The idiosyncratic aspect of “just interpreting shit” (like the punk Geertz or something) makes me not really know if there’s a teachable lesson. But in general I’m all for encouraging people to go beyond or even explicitly against the standard and dry academese we love to subject ourselves to.

Anthropologists have long had Peru as a favorite stomping ground. But much of that scholarship has been about the rural Andes. Your focus is on the megalopolis of Lima. How do you see your contribution to understanding urban experience in Peru and Latin America? And to how we understand Peru and Latin America more broadly?

There’s definitely a thing with Peru and the Andes fetish. It goes deep and straight to the heart of nationalism. It’s hard to even think of a handful of interesting books about Lima – on any topic – much less about other Peruvian cities (Arequipa? Piura? Trujillo?) written by anthropologist (oh, but Daniella Gandolfo’s book about Lima is amaaaaaazing). I think this was honestly more of a side effect than my real intent, that is, I ended up creating a peculiar look into one segment of Lima, basically the middle-class and up (since rock as a genre is mostly middle-class and up). There’s some good work on hip-hop out there in countries like Cuba, Brazil, and so on. And there’s some STS types doing interesting stuff that at least crosses into urban spaces but isn’t necessarily about “the city” or necessarily “anthropology” (thinking of Anita Chan’s book Networking Peripheries). Either way, we are overdue for some anthropologists thinking more about the multiplicity and depth of urban subcultures throughout Latin America, as well as their global inspiration in, and creative divergence from, subcultures that emerged elsewhere. Even when anthropologists finally come out of the countryside and go to the city they seem to end up focusing on the same subaltern populations or themes, like rural-to-urban migration or historically racialized groups, and so on. But welcome to the history of anthropology, I guess.

What do you see as your contribution to understanding the global history of punk? And to how we think about sound and the politics of sound?

The book doesn’t talk about sound per se but I got very interested in the geopolitics of music formats, hence all the stuff about production and circulation (and piracy) of demo cassettes in Interpretation #1. Of course, format studies are now an offshoot of sound studies. There’s something mystically beautiful and marvelously awful about the sound of Peruvian punk from the 80s. The conditions for production (or instruments available for recording for that matter) were so bad, it is just truly wonderful. Some contemporary Peruvian punks and hardcore types wax nostalgic about the cassette format for that reason and so they buck the global digitalization trend by recording new albums on cassette now when it seems utterly anachronistic. The global north has its own history with cassettes but it isn’t quite the same thing. First off, it more often connotes some sort of social intimacy or friend networks (such as: the friend who recorded album X for me; or the girlfriend who gave me the mix tape Y). In Lima, because of the dramatically unstable political context there was a curiously ambiguous dialogue taking place between the “underground rock” economy (cassettes, fliers, art pieces, and so on) and the other “underground political” sector of Shining Path organizers and militants who were also producing art, propaganda, newspapers and other genres for the “revolution.” Both were happening outside, and against, mainstream media circuits (and, for that matter, the state). So, it became really dangerous for Peruvian punks at the time and many of them found that out the hard way (hence Interpretation #6). There was a deep political risk (of death, disappearance, imprisonment, exile) built into being a Peruvian punk and producing things that were punk-like in the Peru of the time. That, as far as I can tell, is quite unique within punk experiences writ large.

What’s your next project?

I’ve been throwing around this term “misanthropology” for the last few years and threatening to write a book about how we, the human species, are all gonna die. And probably should. Given November 2016, seems like maybe it’s a good time to get started on that.
Local Food: What Counts?

December 5th, 2016
by Jennifer Meta Robinson

“Local” has emerged as one of the hottest food and cultural concepts in the United States in the past 25 years. Many people choose to buy local, read books written or published or bound locally, wear clothing made from homespun fiber or fashioned nearby, ride locally made bicycles, recreate locally, and build homes with locally sourced materials. Three-quarters of Americans say that they are highly influenced by labels that indicate food is “locally grown.” Food industry giants that regularly source from around the world, such as members of the National Restaurant Association, the largest food service trade organization, and Walmart, the largest US grocer, identify “locally grown” as a top food trend in recent years. The term’s ubiquity alone begs examination.

In a new book with co-author James R. Farmer, Selling Local: Why Local Food Movements Matter (Indiana University Press 2017),

we report on our research over two decades that includes hundreds of interviews and site visits and thousands of surveys to understand why local matters to the people involved and how they live it. Our focus is on people associated with farmers’ markets and community supported agriculture (CSA) in the Midwest and in the central Appalachian regions, but we also range far beyond. Here is a brief glimpse.

What Counts as Local?

Research and experience point to many appeals to local food—social, economic, and environmental factors. But the definition remains elusive.

On the surface, localism seems to be all about proximity–what is sourced nearby has more appeal than what is transported from far away. But defining local in terms of distance turns out not to be very definitive, even among its advocates: 400 miles, within state lines, within a day’s drive? Proximity, it turns out, is only part of how people define local. A passionate statement by a ten-year local grower, market vendor, and CSA provider we will call Sage Goodell helps open up many of the values that define local.

We call this thing that we are doing farmer. We are working hard to create a new definition for farmer. We are working hard to replace the image of big tractors and acres of corn with an image of farm diversity, creative thinker, healthy people, healthy land, life not death, vibrant nutritious living food, good land steward, responsible caretaker of this earth. Rather than a worn-out, sick “farmer” sitting in an air-conditioned tractor spraying toxic chemicals on a field, you see a robust, energetic, inspired, loving farmer on her hands and knees hand-weeding the carrots. Rather than going to Kroger and buying lifeless, tasteless, chemical-laden produce, you go to the farmers’ market and shake hands with the person who grew your vegetables, harvesting them the day before and sharing with you the latest news on the farm. You develop a relationship with this farmer. She thinks of you as she harvests produce each week. She thinks of you at supper on market day, knowing you have gratitude as you nourish yourself with her produce. You have a relationship with the farmer that grows your food. This is the new definition of farmer.

In the process of defining her profession, Goodell articulates seven notable facets of the ideology of local.
1. Local Is Temporal
Freshness is frequently cited as one of the most desirable qualities of local food, and Goodell references “vibrant, nutritious living food.” Picked so recently, it may still be alive. She mentions “harvesting [produce] the day before and sharing with you the latest news on the farm.” The food she grows, like news, loses an essential quality over time. In addition, she references generational time, agricultural practices dying away with the conventional farmers while the “robust, energetic, inspired loving” next-generation farmers flourish.
1. Local Is Healthful
Goodell describe a generational trajectory of improvement in healthfulness and sets local in opposition to conventional agriculture. She describes a shift away from conventional agricultural methods that involve “spraying toxic chemicals” for “lifeless, tasteless, chemical-laden produce” and toward intensive methods that produce healthful food, “life not death.”
1. Local Implicates Scale
She sets the scale of “big tractors and acres of corn” and rote, straight-line work against “an image of farm diversity, creative thinker . . . on her hands and knees hand-weeding the carrots.” The artisanal, or “small batch,” scale of local conveys desirable qualities beyond proximity or nutritional content. Indeed, food grown nearby but processed at large scale can lose the value it might gain from its proximity to origin, according to the ideology of local.
1. Local Means Accountability
Goodell contrasts the traditional supermarket experience with going “to the farmers’ market to shake hands with the person who grew your vegetables.” That tangibility, an actual touch, enacts a “relationship,” a bond of exchange, a shaking of hands that may perform a greeting, a thank-you, or a contract.
1. Local Implies Environmental Stewardship
Goodell describes her goal of being a “responsible caretaker of this earth,” caring for it “down in the soil on my hands and knees, in the dirt.” Local food offers practical solutions to the environmental impact of agriculture in shorter transport distances, less fuel consumption, and less pollution, and many local food farmers strive to live with a small environmental footprint.
1. Local Fosters Systems Thinking
In another conversation, Goodell described her work as “growing nutritious food the smart way” to benefit all, because “we are all in this thing together.” Her approach to land stewardship constitutes an “intimate relationship,” a “marriage” of sorts. The integrative nature of local informs “the new definition of farmer.”
1. Local Is Oppositional
Goodell defines her work against capitalistic norms, setting corporate agriculture with its productivity ideal to “feed the world” against localism’s values of small-scale accountability and performative competence. The rich farmer with air-conditioned tractors is demoted, and the poor one on her hands and knees is elevated. The flawless and bountiful are toxic while the small and laborious are vibrant.

Local remains rhetorically ambiguous. It’s a fiddly notion that must be puzzled out differently by different people according to the contexts in which they find themselves. Freed from a strict spatial definition that only reductively renders the spirit of the movement, local food in its many dimensions can become an activist tool for change–it’s not just about space but also about time, health, human scale, accountability, stewardship of environmental systems, and progress. It puts people inside a system with many actors who each play an important part. As people and goods become more far-flung from their roots, the longing for connectedness and community become more intense. Local rehumanizes.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Sage for sharing her brilliance. And thanks, too, to the many other farmers and customers of local food who generously shared their worlds with us.

Thanks to Indiana University Press for their faith in the project.

Jennifer Meta Robinson, PhD, is professor of practice in the Indiana University Department of Anthropology where she studies food, communication, and pedagogy. She lives on a 40-year local food farm in scenic Greene County, Indiana.
Falina Enriquez’s Composing Cultura

November 28th, 2016

“ . . . those who align with Pernambucan discourses of cultura [culture] [. . .] are not simply elevating themselves by excluding massively popular, commercial genres like swingueira from the category of cultura, but their ability to evaluate and define cultura is a sign and source of power” (pg. 99).

My dissertation, “Composing Cultura: Musical Democracy and Multiculturalism in Recife, Brazil,” examines how a constellation of musicians, bureaucrats, and audiences objectify and commodify local culture in Pernambuco’s capital city, Recife. The dissertation contributes to anthropological and ethnomusicological studies that analyze how musical practices are interactionally embedded in debates over power and meaning. Specifically, the dissertation argues that while participants in Recife’s state-sponsored music scene were creating new multicultural and democratic understandings of ‘culture,’ they were simultaneously reconfiguring social stratification. Page ninety-nine is part of the second chapter’s introduction. The chapter is organized around the musical rivalry between Pernambuco and the neighboring state of Bahia. It examines how members of a state agency committee and other participants in the state-sponsored music scene invoke pop music from Bahia as the antithesis of Pernambucan “cultural” music. I show how these actors interpret Bahian pop music as kitschy and disposable, but more importantly, how they discursively employ these qualities to depict its performers/consumers as lower-class and (implicitly) racially marked. As the quotation above suggests, these discourses are important because they are themselves a sign of power and a tool for (re)producing it. When I conducted the majority of my fieldwork research from 2009-2011, many of my consultants interpreted these problematic discourses as evidence that new policies and idioms centered on socio-political inclusion were not as effective as they seemed. Yet, while these were significant concerns, they existed within a broader understanding that Brazilian society was progressing. However, now in 2016, such hopes seem even more remote. Brazilian citizens are currently coping with instability caused by corruption scandals, economic decline, the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, and the new federal administration’s elimination of government ministries and programs focused on minimizing poverty, racism, and other forms of inequality. The issues I discuss on page ninety-nine and throughout the dissertation therefore seem more relevant now. Accordingly, as I develop my book project, I will focus on how musicians and other residents of Recife are negotiating the dramatic changes they have experienced during the past five years.

Falina Enriquez. “Composing Cultura: Musical Democracy and Multiculturalism in Recife, Brazil.” Phd diss, University of Chicago, 2014.

As an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Falina Enriquez teaches multiple courses on anthropological theory and is writing a book manuscript comparing how a variety of musicians, bureaucrats, and other residents of Recife, Brazil, construct the social order and situate themselves within it through their musical practices. You can reach her at fenriquez2@wisc.edu.