Justice drones bear witness in this manner, not only to earthly destruction and inequities, but through their practice to the future of resistance. This is drone disruptive justice, an action which rejects oppression while bearing witness to the rich complex forces of oppression. From above, drones put destruction into perspective, inclusive of oppositional humans, extractive as well as liberatory technologies, and monocultures as well as species within biodiversity. Drones for justice bear witness to the sociotechnical life and multispecies dead, dying, living, and being born in the Anthropocene.

According to Stengers, the Anthropocene is an era of ‘multiple entanglements’, between natural or ‘non-human’ forces and human (in)action, or, as Connolly describes this, of ‘entangled humanism’. I prefer a counter or anti-humanism, the non-human witnessing of death, destruction, and crisis of entangled people, networked systems, and non-human species. What does entangled anti-humanistic, biological witnessing mean in the anthropocene? Withering coral, farmed palms, biologists, activists, carbon dioxide belching volcanoes, and trash eating elephants as seen through automated and roaming drones—and carbonised air, hot and acidified oceans, and poor humans seeking environmental justice with drones—this is the multi-species entanglement of post-human drone justice and its becoming. Here a drone is both an agent within this compromised atmosphere, an optic on to terrestrial colonisation and oceanic biodiversity deletion— as well as a tool for witnessing, mapping, sensing, and hacking Anthropocentric transformations of the global biome. 

Anthropological twitter exploded today after David Graeber issued an apology for his endorsement of HAU journal in its conception. There are some hard accusations that you can follow here, here and here, but the main thing is that HAU was a horrid work environment. I was involved with the project as a volunteer of the social media team, and even though I never saw the worst part of these accusations taking place (I live and work in Brazil, so I’m always far removed geographically), I can testify to micromanagement, power centrism and some sort of bullying with staff. I don’t doubt that I only saw the light stuff and that the thing was much worse than appeared in the surface.

But, beyond these accusations (and I believe there are people who can talk about this more clearly), the other thing that surfaced today was the predicaments on knowing what-paid-whom. Graeber stated that there never was a disclosure of the bookkeeping for the “investors”. And that this was attempted without success by Graeber, Sahlins, Strathern and Chris Gregory.

When I discovered last year that HAU was going to be integrated by UChicago Press and there was going to be restrictions in accessibility to the journal’s articles, I remember telling myself “oh well, no more free work from this idiot here”. And I quit. What drew me to this project and what made me volunteer for more than three years was the idea of open access as a virtue (so well articulated by the own idea of the maori concept hau) and the all-present thingy Brazilians have in over-appreciating anglo-french academia over our own.

In this regard, I still think Open Access is the only way forward. Knowledge should not be something to only be accessible to a few who can pay. Another thing I remember thinking when I heard this move to UChicago Press and the paywalling of the articles after the first month was “Thank Bog SciHub still exists.”

I’m not an expert in Open Access, actually I know too little, and I want to improve in this area. But from what I am seeing, the problem OA initiatives in the Global North struggle with is the existence of a huge market of academic/scientific publishing and its monopoly that exploits everyone and gives profit to a few. The other thing that I see is the difficulty to operate a gift economy in a structure whose foundation is based in “Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism” (Therefore the Global North, generally speaking).

Should we go forward? That will only be possible in a way that no one makes money with publishing academic texts. Maybe that’s too radical, but we have multiple examples of this in South America. Just to name a few well-evaluated journals: Mana, ViBrAnt, Boletim de Ciências Humanas do Museu Goeldi (published since 1892), Horizontes Antropológicos. Maybe not making money with academic publishing can be considered a radical idea in some parts of the globe, but not here. Of course, we still have this epistemic death of “publish or perish” and I think that it is awful, but at least we take money out of the equation.

These journals are hosted by universities and museums, are peer-reviewed for no fee and are accessible to everyone. That is true OA for me. The editors work voluntarily or have a few professor hours allocated to do editor tasks when the publication is hosted by a graduate program, the peer reviewers are usually from other institutions and don’t charge for their work and no one charges any fees from the authors. More than this, the authors still hold copyrights to their articles and there’s a policy of original work only. Another thing for me that is quite important is the multilingual nature of these publications. They usually accept submissions in Portuguese, Spanish, English, and French. Depending on the nature/scope of the journal it can also accept works in German and Italian, the only thing that’s paramount is an Abstract in English to facilitate research.

So, about all this harassment problems and misconducts we hear from HAU, I think it only is the final nail in the coffin. The journal’s real death was when it stopped being OA (as I said, I’m not an expert, but nominations of “gold OA” as I heard sounds like crap). Of course, there still is the issue of all the harm that has been done. I cannot offer much relief about this. I can only say that we should take a stand and pressure senior colleagues to do the same. It’s not enough to repair all the hurt, but HAU is dead. What we need to try to find is new possibilities to move forward, more shared ideas, more cooperative initiatives, more diverse and democratic publishing machines. And stop over-appreciating negative initiatives because they offer “excellence”.

HAU’s death doesn’t hurt OA initiatives, it was its continuation that would keep hurting the future of Open Access publishing.

PS: I apologise for possible grammar problems on the post, I will happily take critiques on this since I’m not a native speaker.

I recently spent two weeks in Lisbon, Portugal. It was the end of an incredibly busy semester, and I had recently finished reading Bianca Williams’ breathtaking ethnography, The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism. I was reminded of how international travel offers an opportunity to fully immerse oneself in another environment. Despite being in Lisbon for work, I felt free and unencumbered. I was able to enjoy a temporary respite from the headlines of school shootings and police violence against unarmed black people that seem to occur every other day in the U.S. In this way, I was not unlike the self-proclaimed “Jamaicaholics” of Girlfriend Tours (GFT) Williams describes who travel to Jamaica to escape from the racism and sexism that they experience in the U.S.

This fascinating ethnography brings together studies of race and affect with literature on transnationalism, black feminism, and diaspora to explore the affective dimensions of African American women’s transnational pursuits of happiness. With engaging ethnographic storytelling, Williams illustrates how Girlfriends’ dreams of diasporic kinship and imagined communities are disrupted by cross-class tensions, respectability politics, and American privilege. This book makes an important and timely intervention by centering the often-overlooked experiences of happiness, pleasure, and leisure in the lives of middle-aged African American women.

The chapters in the book are interspersed with captivating interludes that provide personal insights about her interactions in Jamaica, and teachable moments about the nature of ethnographic research.

Written in an accessible and engaging way, this book can appeal to a broad and general audience of tourists, travelers, and globe-trotters, but particularly for black women and women of color from all walk of life who have particular racialized and gendered experiences while traveling. Moreover, this book is also well-suited for students and scholars of anthropology, African Diaspora Studies, and Women and Gender Studies.  There is a great deal that we can learn from this book about the practices and politics of ethnographic research. For 22 months between 2003 and 2007, she used methods of participant observation in group activities and interviews in Jamaica and the U.S. Rather than embed herself in one location, Williams embarked on a multi-sited project in which she immersed herself in the Girlfriend Tours community, following its members on their vacations in Negril and Ocho Rios to their hometowns in Atlanta, Washington, DC, Memphis, Ft. Lauderdale. She combined this with four years of virtual fieldwork on the www.Jamaicans.com site, paying close attention to the trip reports section of the tourist and travel discussion forums.

In the first two chapters, Williams makes two significant theoretical interventions in her discussion of “emotional transnationalism” and traveling with “diasporic heart.” Chapter 1 frames Girlfriends’ pursuits of happiness as acts of resistance and theorizes “emotional transnationalism” (Wolf 1997) as that which connects girlfriends’ emotional lives with their transnational mobility. Notably, in true #citeblackwomen fashion, Williams gives credit to Audre Lorde for her groundbreaking theorizations of shame and anger that predated the “affective turn” in scholarly literature. Chapter 2 describes how African American women tourists to Jamaica traveled with “diasporic heart” by engaging in strategic forms of “tourist consumption and spending practices” to maximize the impact their US dollars would have on Jamaican lives (69). Some of these strategies included opting to stay in locally owned hotels and patronizing locally-owned businesses. While Jamaicans often assumed they were wealthy, Girlfriends were actually lower middle-class women who made great sacrifices to be able to afford their trips.

In Chapter 2 Williams also builds upon Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of “contact zones” to describe “diasporic contact zones,” places like airports, hotels, restaurants, and the beach that “test the elasticity of shared notions of blackness” and interrogate “power differentials within African diasporic relationships” (65). There were lots of crossed signals between Jamaicans and African American women. While African American women traveled in search of diasporic kinship and belonging, they lamented their inability to connect with Jamaican women. They did not realize that Jamaican women of a similar age and class status rarely entered tourist sectors. Thus, Williams concludes that “sisterhood in tourist spaces and service relationships complicated diasporic belonging and the Girlfriends’ pursuit of happiness” (151).

Chapter 3 describes how African American women saw Jamaica as a black paradise that was close to the United States – familiar yet foreign. This chapter encourages scholars to apply theories of transnationalism to tourism, which is an under-studied subject in anthropology. Williams understands tourism as a “rich site for understanding how consumption practices and processes of identity formation (such as racialization) are being reshaped” (105).

Questions of sexual agency and autonomy are also central to this project, and they come to the fore in Chapter 4, which explores the emotional entanglements of romance tourism. Reflecting on the impact of the film, How Stella got her Groove Back, Williams describes how the “specter of sex and romance tourism haunts this text and their happiness pursuits” (16). While some GFT members had established long term, long-distance partnerships with Jamaican men, others went to Jamaica with the intention of having short-term liaisons. Interestingly, Williams notes that regardless of their intentions, almost all of the Girlfriends “hoped and desired to be the subject of a Jamaican man’s appreciative gaze and seductive lyrics, even if they did not take them up on the proposition” (129). Williams is to be commended for the nuanced way that she treats this topic – one that is often dealt with in a sensationalistic way. The Pursuit of Happiness makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the sexual and intimate economies of tourism.

Chapter 5 focuses on the “online diasporic contact zones” of the www.Jamaicans.com website, revealing how media allows people to create and maintain emotional connections that give them a sense of diasporic belonging and emotional satisfaction. Williams makes a significant contribution to the study of race and the Internet, as well as to theorizing virtual media and its role in the construction of racialized subjectivities.  She discusses how “boardites” constructed virtual selves through their engagement with the website, and often used the Internet to facilitate face to face connections in meetings IRL (“in real life”). Ultimately, Williams concluded that African American women experienced “a new sense of themselves during these virtual and travel interactions” (23).

In the Epilogue, Williams reflects on the lessons of fieldwork, which included the challenges of being seen as an insider-outsider, the importance of relationship-building, the emotional labor of ethnography, the complicated nature of extricating oneself from the field, particularly when it involves digital technologies, and what happens when participants return the ethnographic gaze. Interestingly, some Girlfriends were uncomfortable discussing their relationships with Williams because they saw her as a “daughter-figure” or “play niece” who was too young and innocent to be privy to this information.  Williams learned valuable lessons from the Girlfriends about black women’s agency and the importance of creating space for intergenerational conversations among black women. Ultimately, Williams’ finds that relationships are the key to black women’s collective survival (190), and that pursuing happiness is a political project for Black women –a way to privilege self-care and wellness in a country that “consistently fights to misrecognize or deny the fullness of their humanity” (32). Simply reading this book felt like an act of self-care for me – a breath of fresh air. I look forward to teaching it to Spelman College students in my first-year colloquium course, Going Global: From Travelogues to Black Travel Blogs.

Erica Lorraine Williams is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. She earned her Ph.D and M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University, and her B.A. in Anthropology and Africana Studies from New York University. Her research has focused on the cultural and sexual politics of the transnational tourism industry, and Afro-Brazilian feminist activism in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Her first book, Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements (2013), won the National Women’s Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize. She is also the co-editor of African American Pioneers in Anthropology: The Next Generation, 1950-1970, which will be published by the University of Illinois Press in November 2018.

In a textured ethnography in guise as an ESPN feature by Sam Borden, The New Hooligans of Russia, one of the men interviewed, “believes fighting is a necessary part of dealing with the anger that grows out of life’s inevitable frustrations and disappointments.” The authorities in Russia are cracking down on these individuals, with some arrests and a general state of alertness. Borden’s article makes space for such fights to sound like a resurgence of an older tradition, a cultural artifact linked to heritage, not a practice that has emerged recently due to an erosion of civil society, class struggles, or some anarchic impulse, which many of the other reports suggest.

Within Anthropology, of course, we can look back to the literature related to war, aggression, and sports. As I have been reading the various reports on the Russian Hooligans, much of the analysis continues to feel settled (perhaps stuck) in early popular ideas related to combative sports. Even though as early as 1973 anthropologists like Richard Sipes argued that aggression is a learned cultural behavior pattern, we continue to see popular ideas of war, aggression and masculinity being linked, particularly in relation to sports.  We also know that the ways in which sports have been studied has changed and become more nuanced, but it continues to be talked about in public discourse in a way to suggest that it has not really moved beyond those early frameworks of aggression. In contrast, Sports (as an enterprise) is and has been trying to change the view that it is linked to masculinity and aggression. Just recently, FIFA Secretary General Fatma Samba Diouf Samoura claimed at the 2018 FIFA conference on Equality and Inclusion, that football can change the world; that it can be used as a tool for social change.

Utilizing her own appointment as the first female Secretary General at FIFA as an indicator, she seems to be leading change within the sport, increasing numbers of women administrators in FIFA from 32% in 2016 to its current 48%. But her claim is not just about hiring more women – it is about inclusion, it is about understanding and underscoring that football has the ability to transcend religion, race, and gender (for some critical reading on issues of race/gender, see The Place of Afro-Brazilian Women in the World Cup, by Melissa Creary and Erica L. Williams).

The Secretary General brings with her the postwar optimism that surrounded the UN – not surprisingly so, given that is her experience prior to FIFA. And in some measure, she is not wrong; there is certainly something about football that brings much of the world together, for example I’m thinking of all the neighborhoods, particularly in the postcolonies, that go all out and decorate their neighborhoods in team colors, like at Siddiq Goth in Malir, Karachi. In these neighborhoods, however, violence and aggression do not break out during the World Cup – at least they have not been reported as resulting from sporting aggression. Being a Baloch neighborhood, there are other issues of violence that continue to plague many of the residents, and it seems as if football provides some respite.

There is something familiar that Secretary General Samoura is trying to do that, at least from the outside, looks somewhat impossible, and yet necessary. She is attempting to un-do a system that was created to reflect (and maintain) a certain world order, a particular power structure that we all love and loathe simultaneously.

FIFA was founded in Paris in 1904, conceived of as an umbrella sports organization within Europe. With France leading the meeting, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland in attendance, and a remarkably absent Great Britain, FIFA was created. As FIFA’s history web-page (very pointedly) relates, “When the idea of founding an international football federation began taking shape in Europe, the intention of those involved was to recognise the role of the English who had founded their Football Association back in 1863.” Apparently the Football Association had been contacted, but there were delays in getting feedback from everyone involved to move it forward. But really, how could they have moved it forward? Great Britain and France were not really on good terms. In fact, the founding of FIFA happened a little over a month after the Entente Cordiale (April 8, 1904) — an Anglo-French agreement that ended (or started the end of) the antagonism between both powers primarily to grant freedom of action to Great Britain in Egypt and to France in Morocco. This agreement did not create an alliance, but it did set the stage for diplomatic cooperation that would help in their stance against the German’s leading up to WWI. Also part of this agreement, and arguably more significant, was France renouncing its exclusive right to certain fisheries off Newfoundland, and Great Britain ceding the Los Islands (off of French Guinea) to France. Moreover, Great Britain agreed to French control of the upper Gambia valley, defined the frontier of Nigeria in France’s favor, and zones of influence for the French and British in Thailand were outlined. Indeed, as Matisse was imagining how to represent a world in a particular manner and form in Paris, in just as vivid and non natural strokes, the colonial powers were distributing the world and its resources, and conjuring up new worlds within which football would bring people on the European landmass together.

I do applaud FIFA Secretary General Samoura’s efforts to transform a remarkably colonial, racist and misogynist organization, but I also want to draw attention to what happens when there are aggressive transgressions that contest the histories of power, its abuse, and how the bodies that perform them on the field are held to different standards. In this case, it is about the history of wars, aggression and sports that continues to play itself out on the field and in the stands. There are particular ways in which we see brown bodies claim their space on the field — where it becomes less about the patriotic jerseys and claims to nationhood that football teams obviously represent – and it becomes something slightly more nuanced, an historic global resistance that pulls people together because the tension of being pulled apart becomes obvious through some action done to that body as a power play. This can be done through the media and narratives spun around the players, or can be done by the powerful sports institutions themselves. It is the responses that those athletes have to such explicit racism that I am always watching for because it, in that moment, becomes emblematic of all of our struggles.

Gearing up for the World Cup, there is always a lot of activity in the football world. In particular, last week I read a headline about how Zinedine Zidane resigned as Real Madrid’s Head Coach. As ESPN’s Dermot Corrigan reported: “Zidane shocked the football world with Thursday’s snap decision to resign just days after securing a third Champions League trophy in just two and a half years as Madrid coach.” The mode by which many sports reporters articulate this decision is telling: they focus on the quickness of it, the knowing that he might be getting fired anyway, and the overall snappiness of it is reminiscent of the tone used after the 2006 FIFA World Cup Final. It was in that World Cup Final that Zidane, famously, ended his last game as Captain of the French Team by getting a red card in overtime after headbutting Marco Materazzi. At the time, his actions were called into question as unsportsmanlike and acts of a hooligan. What else could one expect, they asked us from their news rooms, from an Algerian Kabyle descent child who grew up in poverty in northern Marseille? Reporters continued to bring up Zidane’s childhood in order to explain his actions. He was cast as violent, unpredictable, and uncivilized.

Halfway around the world, however, in Brooklyn NY, the entire crew of football enthusiasts cheered for him. Caught off guard, we knew the headbutt was not just for whatever verbal altercation that had ensued. We raised our fists and yelled at the projection in the side room of a dingy restaurant in Williamsburg.

I cannot help but think of the many ways by which we love and loathe colonial structures (cough archaeology cough) and how these choices to decolonize or address issues of equity and inclusion are not limited to academic discourses but are emerging in multiple disciplines, and practices. Right now, because of how toxic the world has become, the academy is starting to feel like bare-knuckle fighting among ourselves – allies, accomplices, friends, and others. I wonder if our disciplines are ready for that change or if we will have to continue to slowly headbutt our way through, red card after red card.

I have been empirically testing the disruptive potentials of drone practices through many diverse contexts throughout the world. Between 2015 to just a few days ago I’ve been conducting participatory and ethnographic fieldwork with drone operators, inventors, entrepreneurs, fanatics, artists, and activists in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Australia, the US—including Los Angeles and Native America—and the North Atlantic—Iceland, Scotland, Denmark, and the UK trying to see how this flying Turing machine is used in acts of political and economic discovery. I’ve documented 10 potential candidates for drone justice. They cover the issues of surveillance, privacy, information, humanitarianism, ecological, scientific, mammalian, economic, national, and aesthetic. Here is a quick introduction followed by one key question before a brief conclusion.

Beyond the hype, my question is this: Is the drone practice involved in disruptive justice—actual challenges to capitalist incumbencies, extractive hegemonies, and exploitative inequalities—or is it a discursive and ideological “disruption”—effective but first for capital creation.

The answers to this question provide evidence for or against the legitimacy of drone justice.

10 Types of Drone Justice

Surveillance Justice:

The Dakota Access Pipeline bringing oil from Canada through the United States including several Native American reservations and sensitive environments, including under the Missouri River, and contributing to climate change. In response emerged an alliance of activists, environmentalists, and Native Americans in the making of the effective up to the point of Trump of stopping this pipeline.

In what ways does the drone used by research participant Myron Dewey at the Dakota Access Pipeline protest at Standing Rock constitute a more than discursive use of drones and a form of counter-surveillance? Will the rights of journalists and activists to use drones to counter-surveil continue or will laws be modified to make illegal such counter-surveillance practices?

Privacy Justice:

Stop LAPD Spying Coalition has a No Drones! Project to stop the violent Los Angeles Police Department from acquiring tax-paid drones for activist and ethnic surveillance.

The question here is can continually racially profiled communities reject surveillance and find drone justice through counter-surveillance and non-discursive understandings of drones’ potentials?

Humanitarian Justice:

Indonesian company Aeroterrscan volunteered its time and technology to monitor the Agung volcano and measure volcanic CO2 emissions.

Does this kind of experiment featuring a collaboration between the USGS, a private drone company in Indonesia, and the Indonesian government represent more than an opportunity to test prototypes for later commercialisation? How would this volcanic CO2 data be used in climate change denialism?

Informational Justice:

Facebook Aquila, and Google Loon, are flying internet delivery platforms for internet delivery around the world.

Does Google Loon, Facebook Aquila represent an imperial colonization of national airspace and of electromagnetic spectrum? Does a domestic alternative such as Helion, in Indonesia represent a nationalistic and viable alternative?

Scientific Justice:

Using historical satellite and drone images we have mapped coral bleaching in north Sulawasi, Indonesia.

How does higher resolution images, corroborated with longitudinal satellite imagery and other data signals of coral bleaching, corroborate in public sphere climate change debate and/or denialism?

Aesthetic Justice:

With my friend Sydney Research Fellow Bradley Garrett we tracked with drones the four undersea internet cables connecting Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Shetland Islands, Orkney Islands, Scotland, and into the City of London.

Should the ability to artistically interpret from above be equally distributed? Should counter-surveillance of information infrastructure be democratized? Does seeing equate to affect and result in activism?

Economic Justice:

Former Boeing, Xerox, and Silicon Valley engineer has developed a multi-billion dollar project which he calls the Robotic Air Cargo Network to transform Sri Lanka’s airspace into a series of corridors for drone deliver.

Does this project for high-speed, high-quantity, high-cost good delivery (jewels, luxury goods) in Sri Lanka constitute economic justice or reinforce economic inequalities and extractive industries?

Mammalian Mashup Justice:

The Sri Lanka Wildlife Society is using drones and other air-based platforms—bees, tree houses, airborne citrus scents—to scare away and mitigate the negative consequences of wild elephant and human conflict.

Can there be any other intended result than mere mitigation of collective harm in the ancient entanglement of hydrological infrastructure, elephants, and humans in the Sri Lankan highlands?

National Justice:

Engineers at the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka have developed the nations’ first working drone. However, it remains under-appreciated despite being as effective as competitors.

Does the importation of French drones by the Sri Lankan Survey department instead of buying these domestically invented drones constitute economic justice? How will such importation ultimately influence data and air and space sovereignty?

Ecological Justice:

Illegal Palm oil plantation expansions and erosion in West Papua has been mapped by activist friends with their drones.

Do counter-maps, informed by indigenous senses of space and designed through drone deployment, have a legal standing? As most of these drones are gifts from large US NGOs are drones a form of technoliberal developmentalism—which applies feel-good technologies to solve social problems?

Anthropology is flourishing outside universities. More anthropologists than ever before work in the commercial sector- as researchers, consultants, user experience and design specialists.  Techniques informed by anthropological practice  comprise an expanding  portfolio of  approaches widely used in commercial qualitative research.  The practice of anthropology within commercial contexts has implications for the ways that research is conducted and fosters new professional identities. Many anthropologists at home in the commercial world are actively engaged in EPIC whose successful annual conferences  attract  a growing number of  researchers,  as well as design, tech and industry insiders.

The activities of EPIC members may be largely under the radar of  anthropologists  situated  in academically oriented university departments  who don’t see themselves as working  with,  or for,  businesses (universities as businesses not withstanding).  Another  reason why  developments in the world of business anthropology may escape the attention of  those of us outside it is that much of their knowledge production to date has been directed towards commercial clients  and to developing the knowledge base for practitioners.  A number of  excellent introductory texts  provide accessible overviews for researchers  interested in entering this field.  Although business anthropology has yet to integrate itself within the mainstream anthropology journals,  the practice of  anthropology within businesses is  beginning to attract  scholarly attention.  Recent academic work  is starting to examine how ethnography is used by corporations  and how the business of ethnography is marketed, organized and delivered.  A longer established body of work, including the path breaking contributions of Marietta Baba, investigates businesses  as social organizations, ethnographically.

A newer practitioner literature  aims to move beyond  ethnography handbooks and ethnographic descriptions to demonstrate  the potential of ethnography as an organizational practice.  Jay Hasbrouck  is an anthropologist  based in the United States. His MA in Visual Anthropology focused on  the Radical Faeries, a community of gay activists exploring spirituality and ecological concerns.  His PhD in Social Anthropology examined the role of anthropology in shaping the ideology and actions of radical environmentalists operating as the Earth Liberation Front. For the past fifteen years he has  used ethnographic research to address challenging problems  for corporate clients internationally.  Hasbrouck’s book  Ethnographic Thinking: From Method to Mindset (Routledge, New York 2018)  is a manifesto for  using ethnography as a tool for strategic thinking which has value for businesses  and other kinds of organizations. Hasbrouck  uses examples based on his experience to demonstrate the  distinctive value of  the open ended iterative  approach  to understanding  derived from the  immersive engagement which characterizes anthropological research.

Ethnography for Hasbrouck is  not merely a method  to be selected from a set of research tools.  It is a situated practice which  fosters  the curiosity, analytical capabilities and adaptability of the researcher.  Using ethnography only to investigate  research questions misses its transformative potential.  Adopting ethnographic thinking within organizations, Hasbrouck suggests, can  be productive in generating strategically  useful insights and making organizations more adaptable. Ethnographic Thinking uses experience from commissioned research ranging from an investigation into the global fish supply chain to how  nurses carry medicines between patients  in a  busy hospital  to  show how  ethnographic approaches can  be used to identify and address real world problems.  The book  conveys a vivid sense of  what is satisfying and exciting about this kind of work and how ethnographic practice can reveal what hides in plain sight because `it goes without saying’.

The description of a research team working with nursing staff  to resolve the misallocation of  patient medication on a busy ward provides an excellent example of problem focused team work using ethnography.  Confusion over medication didn’t indicate a problem with  nurse training or knowledge,  or with the ways in which medicines were stored. It arose from  the ways in which pressured staff  managed their professional interactions  as they moved quickly  between other staff and patients.  Constant interruptions from staff needing to communicate with each other about patient care  meant  it was easy to lose track of  the medicines they were carrying. Part of the team’s role is to facilitate a solution. A carrying device  for sorted medicines is introduced, along with efforts to  increase awareness among staff about the risks of interrupting each other. Tales like these  are intended to convey the productivity of  ethnographic practice for business insiders.

The book has much to offer business outsiders also.  Hasbrouck is a skilled ethnographer whose  field experience  encompasses  rural Mexican communities  at risk of displacement from  eco tourism, apartment dwellers in an Egyptian city and Radical Faeries in North America.  Diverse experience of doing ethnography in different settings gives  applied ethnographers a unique perspective on  what helps such approaches travel.  Good ethnographic practice  which prioritizes a  relational understanding of  social processes  depends on the  skills and sensitivities of the ethnographer.  This book is packed with strategies for doing better ethnography through adopting  the attitudes and behaviors which cultivate curiosity, openness and the capacity for holistic analysis. Active listening and emotional intelligence enable the  quality of interactions that are the foundation of good ethnography.   What Hasbrouck  terms `ethnographic thinking’ is  a  kind of grounded,  problem focused curiosity  which facilitates the  quality of  dialogical interaction between ethnographer and participant that can move a question forward .

This book is  a committed argument for the holism  and embodied nature of ethnographic practice which  perhaps speaks more to  practicing anthropologists than to its intended audience of  executives and business strategists.  The ethnographic offer is clearly set out. What is less clear is the  means through which it could be taken up by those not already practicing it.  Businesses can obviously hire anthropologists and  commission ethnography. How people in business could incorporate ethnographic thinking into their professional practice  would benefit from more detailed explaining.   Ethnographic Thinking  presents a  convincing argument for  the  place of anthropology in organizations.

Note: This post was amended by Maia on June 6th 2018 to clarify details of Jay Hasbrouck’s postgraduate research.

The first rule of Bite Club is that we’re going to talk about cookbooks.

The second rule of Bite Club is I need some of ya’ll to help me out talking about cookbooks.

…

Do you read cookbooks and think they are, in fact, practical ethnography??

When you look at a recipe do see history and memory? Evolution and ecology? Technology? Gift exchange? Social roles? Current events? Is there a favorite cookbook that would be of interest to your fellow anthropologists?

Do you have enough time this summer to try some of the recipes and tell us about them??

Let’s do this together, it’ll be fun. No pressure! Also, there’ll be food. You decide whether there’ll be guests.

To join:

1. leave a comment below or find me on Twitter @MattThompsonSPL, I will reply to you
2. chose a cookbook that invites you to read it as a cultural document or object of folklore
3. try to complete at least two recipes from the cookbook
4. write a short and light-hearted piece for me to post on Anthrodendum that tells other anthros why the cookbook is culturally interesting, and what happened when you followed the recipes

This’ll be fun!

…

When I began my career as a professional anthropologist, teaching undergrad courses on an adjunct basis, one of the first jobs handed to me was Food and Culture. To be frank, I had to hide my disappointment. I had high hopes about all the brilliant courses I could teach and, to my mind, food didn’t fit into any of that.

Over the course of several semesters I discovered that, actually, food touches on every aspect of anthropology. Perhaps moreso than any other topic.

Besides being my baptism into professional teaching, that Food and Culture class was also my introduction to reading cookbooks as cultural documents. This is when I discovered a genre of cookbooks that, unlike the tried and true Joy of Cooking (great wedding gift for a young couple, btw), presented themselves as a kind of folkloric object.

That first eye-opening experience came courtesy of Sweets: Soul Food Desserts and Memories by Patty Pinner. Here I found not just recipes for cookies and cakes, but stories about the women associated with each dessert, the relationships among those women, the histories of those family as they moved from Mississippi to Michigan, and the larger economic forces at work in the Great Migration.

My students, relatively privileged and white, were a little skeptical. A cookbook in place of a textbook? At least the price tag was cheaper!

But look, I pointed out to them, whose knowledge gets to count as authoritative? Who writes cookbooks and who are their audiences? What is the epistemological difference between the practical and contextualized knowledge embodied in a cookbook and the disembodied knowledge of a textbook? And do these differences explain why we afford less status to certain knowledges over others?

Then I baked them a cantaloupe pie.

This summer I am diving into Vivian Howard’s Deep Run Roots and thought there might be some like minded anthros out there who also want to cook and tell stories. If so, hit me up!

Taylor R. Genovese is a PhD student in the Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology program at Arizona State University. He has a BA and an MA in Anthropology and is interested in radical (techno)politics, the anthropology of outer space, utopian futures, and multimodal ethnography. He is also a blogger at Footnotes (http://footnotesblog.com ), a new anthropology group blog dedicated to the practice of being multimodal, anticolonial, and iconoclastic. More at: http://taylorgenovese.com  and on Twitter @trgenovese –RA

***

Ryan A: Hey, remember that time when you posted on twitter about the AAA takedown notice? What did you think about that notice?

Taylor G: [laughs] You know, that tweet is a good lesson for academics to never underestimate what kinds of social media content will go viral. When I reached 150 retweets, I was pretty shocked. When I reached 750, I was just laughing to myself at the never-ending notifications. When it reached 1,700 retweets and 4,100 likes, I was fairly certain the AAA was going to order its hit squad after me at the annual meeting.

But I think there is a valid reason why my rather unnuanced, iconoclastic snark ended up striking such a nerve in this era of academic precarity: people are feeling the corporate noose tighten ever quicker around the neck of our universities. The wealth disparity between administrators and, not only professors, but the bulk of academia—untenured, precarious lecturers and graduate students—mirror the enormous disparity between large academic publishers and the scholars that provide them unpaid labor in the form of writing manuscripts, reviewing them, and serving on editorial and advisory boards.

To me, the AAA notice unfortunately signaled to the member base that the organization was going to be siding with the large, exploitative journal corporations rather than its membership. One sentence in particular irked me: “AAA has put the author agreement in place to protect authors, and to prevent unauthorized or inappropriate usage.” Exactly from whom is the author being protected? Those pesky hustlers on the street peddling academic articles? (“No thanks, Bob, I’ve read enough bootlegged anthropology articles about Papua New Guinea; let me know when you get something multispecies in!”) I actually think most of us would be thrilled to find that our articles were being printed out and hungrily consumed by a general audience! After all, we’re not being paid by the publishers to write them.

Instead, the second part of the statement shows what’s really going on. The “unauthorized or inappropriate usage” of our writing ends up undermining the incredibly high institutional access fees that the journal publishers charge; including the $20-40 single-use charges it imposes on independent scholars. As the author, we never see any of that money. Does the AAA see any of that money? At least a large portion of it goes directly to the large journal publishers themselves.

As I said in my original tweet, the CEO of Wiley makes over $4 million year. Erik Engstom, the CEO of the Relx Group, which used to be Elsevier, makes £10.5 million a year. That’s $14 million. Insanity!

Even if you aren’t the type to hum The Internationale in your sleep before throwing Molotovs in the street, I think you can appreciate the incredibly unjust theft that is happening in academic publishing.

RA: So I hear you have a new article you’re working on that’s about neoliberalism, publishing, and open access. Are you telling me that open access isn’t going to save us from the perils of corporate publishing models?

TG: Right, so, actually that tweet brought a colleague of mine, A.M. Stapp at Pierce College, as well as Joseph M. Gabriel at Florida State University, together to begin to collaborate on this paper in which we’re nearly finished.

Essentially, what we are arguing is that the platform of open-access publishing is actually more of a landscape in which both neoliberal and radical actors are able to interact. We discuss this through the tragic story of hacktivist Aaron Swartz, who was charged in 2011 with 11 violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and 2 counts of wire fraud for downloading millions of documents from JSTOR on his authorized MIT account. Swartz hung himself at the age of 26 rather than face the $1 million in fines and 50 years of imprisonment that the federal government was expected to sentence him with.

In our paper, we ask: why was the U.S. so eager to punish Aaron with such brutality? Aaron’s own justification for downloading those articles was the freedom of information and the open spread of knowledge. We argue that today, there seems to be a dialectic between openness and monopolization emerging within neoliberal discourse—where on one side stands the Old Guard of gatekeepers and on the other side stands Aaron, hacktivism, and open-access culture more broadly. I don’t want to give too much of the paper away yet—since it is a transforming, collaborative project—but what we argue is that the types of forces that Aaron dedicated his life to fighting are now some of the strongest proponents of an open-access model—this is what Nick Srnicek has called “platform capitalism.”

The best examples of this, especially in reference to your question, are academic social networks like Academia.edu and ResearchGate. Both of these corporations present themselves as champions of open-access and the sharing of knowledge, but are actually rather nefarious in the ways in which they monetize the work of scholars for capital gains. In the case of Academia.edu, they even attempt to add legitimacy by using the .edu domain name, when in actuality the company is run by venture capitalists, not by an academic institution. And now, they are offering “premium memberships” in an attempt to further profit off our data and writing.

So this is the complex landscape of open-access. We need to be critical of all these projects rather than expect them to be egalitarian by default just because they endorse an open-access approach—some of those that were eager to see Aaron Swartz imprisoned are now promulgating, and hoping to twist and profit off of, his ideals.

RA: What about viable alternatives? Not just new ideas that sound a little better, but projects that can actually open up new ways of doing this publishing thing. Do you think something like SocArXiv, for example, has the potential to be transformative here?

TG: I think projects like SocArXiv, run by the Open Science Framework—which, I might add, was set up by academic institutions and research librarians, not venture capitalists—is a step in the right direction. The so-called “hard sciences” have been utilizing arXiv to share their research for a long time; and, actually, the scientists that I have spoken to have said that they use arXiv almost exclusively to keep up with research and collaborate with each other—the actual journal articles, which come out months later, are merely used for CV purposes.

In my view, the only way forward with academic publishing is open-access, but it must be an open-access that is controlled democratically. SocArXiv is beginning to do that; their steering committee consists of all academics, although I think they should include adjuncts and graduate students on their committee as well. The next step, I think, is to leverage large academic journals to tear down their paywalls. This task, of course, is enormous and complex. In the meantime, we need to think of ways to collectively use our academic freedom to resist the corporate hold on academic journals and our organizations. We should continue publishing our pre-prints on non-corporate, open-access sites and promote only those preprints which are publically accessible. When possible, we should try to submit more of our research to open-access journals. We should organize and lobby our academic organizations, which are supposed to advocate for us, to battle against the corporatization of publishing.

And on a more important micro scale, we, as anthropologists, should collaborate on projects more. Perhaps this is changing, but anthropologists have tended to approach publishing as a solitary process and single-authored papers/books are the norm. To change the publishing model to something more collaborative and democratic requires a change in the mode in which we approach research itself. We must all become multimodal. We need to legitimize—in the eyes of admission and tenure committees—blogs, social media, drawing, photography, soundscapes, filmmaking. We need to write, to make, to create, to play collaboratively. We also need to become accessible to the public and our participants.

RA: All of this sounds good to me! Including the push for more collaborative writing and publishing. But we’re slow to change. The single-authored book or article reigns. The mathematicians (and other hard scientists) are way ahead of us on this, including how they use platforms like ArXiv. It seems we have call after call of people saying we need to rethink all of this, engage with broader publics, and open up how we publish. But not much happens. One of the biggest challenges, I think, is getting people interested. Is it just apathy? Is publishing a boring issue? Are people just too busy?

TG: Apathy might be part of it, but if I can get a little indignant and provocative, I think a majority of it is connected with cowardice, especially from senior, tenured faculty; and this includes some faculty that claim to be on the side of those disadvantaged by the publishing status quo. I have experienced this first hand in the publishing realm from academics I truly respected and thought were allies who ended up completely turning their backs on junior faculty and/or graduate students in order to side with dominant, abusive power structures and the cronies that latch on to them. I’m sure many have experienced this kind of betrayal and lack of reflexivity throughout the academy. I think David Graeber said it best in his tweet: “Academia is full of people who confuse cowardice and maturity.”

Furthermore, the widespread cowardice in academia must also be viewed in an intersectional manner. These issues are tendril-like—creeping into and intertwining with issues like publishing, working conditions, racism, sexism, continued colonialism, bullying, etc. It’s a problem that requires an engagement with a broader politics, as you say. However, in order to do this, we need to disrupt the system of hierarchy that enables bullies and abusers to rise to positions of power, thereby enabling cowardice to become the status-quo. In general, as the precariat, we need to collectively organize against academia’s corruption and our mistreatment within that system. This call is far from novel: PrecAnthro is doing good transnationalist work, Eli Thorkelson has called for a Union for Job Seekers, secondary education teachers are engaging in wildcat strikes throughout multiple states, and graduate student unions are collectively bargaining and striking against this robust neoliberal cowardice. I believe a uniquely 21st century syndicalism may be forming, thanks in part to social media and virtual solidarity, but only time will tell.

RA: Only time will tell indeed. So what’s your guess? When it comes to all these questions of publishing and precarity, what do you think will happen? Will the status quo just…persist? Or is there actually space for “publishing otherwise,” as Marcel Laflamme once put it?

TG: The status quo will persist, of course…until it doesn’t. What I mean is that we need to hit that critical mass of resistance before change can happen. Publishing otherwise has the potential to create some change, especially if it is articulated as an “exilic space,” but it also possesses the potential to just reinforce the status quo the same way that most reformist rhetoric and action tends to plaster over structural inequalities—the allegorical band-aid over the dismembered limb.

That said, I don’t really believe in forecasting these types of things. I don’t know what will happen. But I do believe we are living in a moment of revolutionary momentum with an unbelievable potential for change. Hunter S. Thompson has a famous quote from Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas where he is lamenting over the perceived failure of social movements in the 1960s. He says: “There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . . And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil […] We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

I think that wave did roll back throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Hunter was right. We experienced neoliberal intensification as “reformers” attempted to stave off capitalism’s impending death by making it not only an economic system, but also a political and social one. Now, I believe, a new wave is beginning to crest and it’s an enormous groundswell of revolutionary potential. All that’s left is for us to collectively catch that wave and shred!

RA: I see what you did there with that optimistic surfing metaphor. Something new may be building; I hope so. Thanks so much for taking the time for this interview, Taylor.

TG: That metaphor was just for you! Thanks, Ryan.

In the fall 2017 quarter I kicked off my intro to cultural anthropology course with one of those Ancestry dot com videos. These are all over the place, and many of them carry the same basic theme. They all purport to tell people about their ‘family’ or ‘roots’ or ‘heritage.’ That’s fine, except for some of the troubling, misguided messages they send to the public.

The video I showed in class is really short (see above). It’s about a guy named Kyle, who starts off the video saying, “Growing up we were German.” He danced in a German dance group, wore lederhosen, and so on. Culturally, his family was ‘German.’

Here’s where the plot thickens. Kyle then started doing some family research on Ancestry dot com, and wasn’t finding any ‘Germans’ in his family trees. In the background of the video, a graphic displays a family tree with names like Flemming, Ross, and Stewart. Apparently he was looking for German sounding names, didn’t see them, and got to thinking. So he went and got his DNA tested (also via Ancestry dot com). Then the results came back. This is the big moment.

The verdict? Kyle has been living a lie! He found out that he wasn’t German at all! Instead, Ancestry dot com tells him that 52% of his DNA comes from “Scotland and Ireland.” In addition to that, 28% comes from Scandinavia, 10% from Greece and Italy, and another 10% is unknown. This is a game changer for Kyle, and one of the big lines of the video is when Kyle says he decided to “trade in his lederhosen for a kilt.” That’s where the commercial ends. The take home message is basically that these DNA tests tell you who you really are, despite your actual upbringing, cultural practices, family histories, and memories.

This is just wrong.

I understand the fact that people want to research their family histories and find out more about their heritage. Tracing your family genealogy can be fascinating. That’s not the problem here. Kyle’s case is a perfect example of how misguided these tests can be. From an anthropological perspective, one of the primary issues is that these tests seriously conflate culture and biology. The second issue is that these tests paint an oversimplified, if not outright false picture of culture, history, genetics, and genealogy.

To start with the first issue: culture is not genetic. This is a basic, fundamental starting point of cultural anthropology. There is no “Irish” or “German” gene or combination of genes. That’s just not how it works. Culture is shared, patterned, learned behavior. Humans may have the biological capacity for culture, but the specific expression of that capacity is a matter of social relationships and history. This is an old lesson in cultural anthropology, a point that Ruth Benedict drove home in her classic 1934 book Patterns of Culture. “All over the world, since the beginning of human history,” Benedict wrote, “it can be shown that peoples have been able to adopt the cultures of peoples of another blood” (2005:13).  What does this mean? It means that any given cultural behavior is not intrinsic or inherent. As Benedict put it, “Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex” (2005:14). Nobody is born with a certain culture or set of cultural behaviors–people learn it over time (even though, as Bourdieu might say, we tend to ‘forget’ that this has happened). We anthropologists know this. It’s Anthropology 101. Isn’t this old news?

Unfortunately…it’s not. It’s 2018 and this issue is front and center. Our friend Kyle is sort of an entry-level example of a much deeper, more egregious problem. Take, for example, the whole debacle with Kaya Jones (aka #IronEyesKaya), who claimed to be Native American–and therefore qualified to be a “Native American Ambassador” for the Trump administration–because of her genetic ancestry. Jones received a pretty thorough dragging by #NativeTwitter at the end of last year for her attempts to claim Native affiliation. Biological anthropologist Savannah Martin, who was among those to push back against Jones, highlighted the serious problems of what she called the “quantification of Indigeneity.” Martin clearly delineated the core problems with Jones’ claims:

Lastly, as evidenced by #KayaJones / #IronEyesKaya, the perpetuation of the belief that “blood/stereotypes = identity” permits non-Natives to claim Indigeneity at the drop of a tweet, the purchase of a DNA test, without engaging in the NATIVE aspects of Native identity. (7/n)

— Savannah Martin (@SavvyOlogy) December 27, 2017

In the aptly titled article “Sorry, that DNA test doesn’t make you indigenous” posted on CBC radio, Kim Tallbear explains that Kaya Jones’ attempts to appropriate Native identity are part of a broader pattern:

There is this national sort of story, and this I do see becoming more prominent in certain parts of Canada too, that you have people with no lived experience in indigenous community, they can’t even name any indigenous family or ancestors, but they have a family myth about a Cherokee great-grandmother, or they’re descended from Pocahontas, you get that a lot on Virginia. So I think it’s another kind of claim to own indigeneity, to try to have a moral claim or sense of belonging on the North American continent and so that’s the context in which these tests are so popular.

Tallbear also explains that cultural affiliation extends far beyond the merely genetic or biological: “We construct belonging and citizenship in ways that do not consider these genetic ancestry tests. So it’s not just a matter of what you claim, but it’s a matter of who claims you.” What Tallbear is pointing out is that cultural identity and affiliation are matters of social relationships, not simply biology (let alone some results you get from a main-in DNA test). They are about mutual relationships and histories, not just some fly-by-night Twitter assertions. This is precisely why Kaya Jones’ claims were so strongly rejected, and also why our friend Kyle’s Ancestry dot com results don’t make him Scottish or Irish. Sorry Kyle.

This brings us to the second issue, which is that Kyle’s Ancestry dot com commercial wreaks tremendous havoc on understandings of the relationships between culture, genetics, genealogy, and history. What a disaster. We already have Kyle’s account that he grew up culturally German. If this is true—and not just some embellishment for the sake of the commercial—then it raises a lot of questions. When Kyle got his Ancestry dot com results back, they said that 52% of his DNA comes from Scotland and Ireland, 28% is from Scandinavia, 10% is from Greece and Italy, and another 10% (not a small percentage) was “unknown.” Ok, one thing to realize here is that these tests are based upon a population database. How does this work? Well, as Jon Marks explained in an article written by Barbara King:

They take DNA from people from disparate regions and compare yours to theirs. The numbers reflect a measure of your DNA similarity to those of the divergent gene pools. How do they calculate it? Don’t know; the algorithms are protected intellectual property. Are they accurate? About as accurate as looking in the mirror.

In the same article, King highlights one of Marks’ fundamental points (he explains this more in his book Is Science Racist), which is that these corporations are producing a kind of “fabricated meaning” that is “superimposed” over seemingly objective, raw data. What does this mean? Well, let’s go back to Kyle’s case. When he got his DNA results, he apparently assumed that they meant his family practices were wrong, disproven by science. Kyle read his results to mean that he was mostly from Scotland or Ireland, and therefore culturally Scottish or Irish. This is where Marks’ “fabricated meaning” comes into play. The primary problem here, as genealogist Roberta Estes explains in a very, very detailed article, is that “This technology is not really ripe yet for that level of confidence except perhaps at the continent level and for people with Jewish heritage.” This isn’t the story that Ancestry dot com and others are promoting, of course. What Estes means is that these kinds of DNA tests are only roughly accurate at the continent level, and even then require careful interpretation. Estes explains:

When dealing with intra-continent ethnicity—meaning Europe in particular, comparing one country or region to another—these tests are not reliable and in some cases, appear to be outright wrong.

Kyle’s results, which appear to give him a more detailed understanding of his genetic back, simply cannot be read at that level of confidence. This is due to the limits of technology, but also the realities of human populations. Why? Because humans move, intermix, and generally make the quest to pinpoint any specific ethnic identity on a given geographic population really, really difficult. Kyle was searching for “German” ancestry, but what does this mean? Who were the Germans? Estes asks a great question in her article: “Who or where is the reference population that you would use to represent Germans?” Are we aiming for 2000 years ago? Maybe 1000 years ago? Or 500 years ago? And how does this connect to the reference samples that these companies have today? There are so many variables here, and these mail-in DNA testing companies don’t even come close to addressing them. Again, it’s important to think about migration, war, population mixing and all the fluidities of the human story. It’s all very slippery, complex territory. But again, that’s not the story (or product) that Ancestry dot com is selling.

In Kyle’s case, his results told him that his DNA was mostly Scottish/Irish (aka in the British Isles) and Scandinavian. But who settled the British Isles? A couple of “Germanic” populations come to mind: they’re often lumped together as the “Anglo-Saxons.” Of course this makes any reading of his DNA results much more complicated than his commercial suggests. Not to mention the fact that the “Scandinavian” reference sample—depending on which populations have been used—may be largely indistinguishable from any surrounding “Germanic” population. Remember, these tests are only roughly accurate at the continent level. As Marks puts it, they’re about as accurate as looking in the mirror. So there’s quite a bit of storytelling going on here, a lot of filling in the blanks for the sake of selling DNA tests to eager consumers who want to know “who they are.”

“Heredity,” Ruth Benedict once wrote, “is an affair of family lines.” Beyond that, she argued, “it is mythology” (2005:15). I think she’s right, and it helps to think about how and why we construct these mythologies, and what they mean. I totally understand the reason why people like Kyle would want to learn more about their family histories and discover more about themselves. Who doesn’t want to know more about where they came from? I love learning about this stuff. But there’s a problem when we have companies creating and selling false narratives that claim to clarify these questions, when in fact what they’re doing—at best—is muddying the waters. At worst they’re promoting highly deceptive answers about the past, especially with commercials like the one Kyle appears in.

In the end, if Kyle grew up with all of those culturally German practices, there’s probably a reason for it. I don’t know the story, but something tells me that he didn’t come from Scottish ancestors who arrived in the Americas and suddenly traded in their kilts for lederhosen. I suppose it’s possible, but I doubt it. It’s more likely that Kyle’s family histories and practices were grounded in shared, patterned, learned behaviors that were passed down from one generation to the next. In anthropology, we call this culture. It’s not a biological or genetic thing, and if you’re trying to find out more about it, depending on companies like Ancestry dot com to give you all the answers is not the best plan.

Ok, so you want to learn more about where you came from and who you are. You want to learn about culture. Where to begin? Well, you can always take a cue from anthropologists: A good place to start is taking the time to ask and, more importantly, listen. Yes, I’m talking about asking and listening to people (not machines, or apps, or websites). I realize I’m channeling my inner Luddite here, but sometimes it amazes me just how much we trust technology to tell us everything we want to know about ourselves. Or, even worse, to tell us some truth we want to believe or claim as our own (here’s looking at you Kaya Jones). It’s important to think about why we search for these answers, and what we’re hoping to find. Are we looking for simple, quick, easy truths? Or are we willing to take the time to delve into it all? Are we open to finding out who we can claim, but also who claims us, as Tallbear put it? In Kyle’s case, he may have gotten a lot further by simply grabbing a notebook and sitting down with a close family member and asking, “Who are we?” That’s just the beginning, of course, but again, it’s a good place to start. Sometimes better answers require more than pushing buttons and swiping credit cards. But they’re worth it. Now get out there. Talk. Take notes. Listen.

References

Benedict, Ruth. 2005[1934]. Patterns of Culture. New York: Mariner Books.

*Updated to correct for typos on 5/28/18.

Reflecting back on that and what it might mean for Anthropologists to find themselves on television, I thought of the many ways by which our work, our ideas, and even our presentation is often mediated and fit into what the public wants to see or expects to see. There are some moments when things shift and change, but even as those happen, they are often directed by, edited, and then re-presented to the world – and not by us. As an anthropologist who works with and within many distinct and overlapping publics, I thought I might try this venue out when the opportunity presented itself. What would it mean for me to be on TV and how might I react to this negotiation? Was my public anthropology public enough for television media consumption?

I was contacted in early 2017 by Wall-to-Wall, a production company that was interested in filming at the World Heritage site of MohenjoDaro (Pakistan) and they wanted me to work with them on a project for a series entitled, First Civilizations. After a series of long, thoughtful, and hesitant (on my part) discussions, I was won over by the public-ness of this project: this documentary was for PBS (the Public Broadcasting Service). PBS is our public outlet for TV in the United States. It is the only channel that continues to thank “Viewers Like You,” because it depends on all of us to continue to support it alongside the many grants and funding that they receive. I had grown up watching PBS, and was keen on it’s children’s programming for my own child, and so I felt generally good about the whole discussion, except for the explicit lack of control we would have over editing and content.

This lack of control is made explicit so that there is built in protection for the director and editors of the series and their creative and research rigor. We are then, as academics on the “show,” just one part of a larger story they want to tell. In some manner of speaking, it is as if they cite us in person, on film; and so the same way we have no control in the ways that the many worlds may cite us in text, we have little control over what they (directors/editors/etc) may chose to do with our sound and image.

This is simultaneously somewhat liberating, but mostly anxiety producing. There is something unsettling about having ones image and sound captured by another, particularly knowing you have no control over how it might be used. The irony of that statement is not lost on me when I think about the history of Anthropology and what our discipline has done to many around the world in an effort to learn about humanity.

To be honest, public presentations always have a bit of the adrenaline and exhilaration of things being out of ones’ control. My experience with this team was not unlike many of the other public lectures I’ve done in many different locations around the world. I may want to tell them about something specific, but the interest that is shown is in something completely different. And I have had to cater many a talk, and in particular, public/community workshops, to what was being asked of me. When I first started doing such work, the advice I had been given by senior researchers was, “make sure you get what you want out of it.” My experience however, has always proven the opposite. Public lectures, workshops, and meetings, have nothing to do with “what I want” in a research sense. But in terms of my ethics around public research, it is exactly what I want. What I want is to make my discipline, my work, my research more accessible – and what that means is making sure it finds its way into public discourse in responsible forms. It means conducting workshops that address different community’s curiosities around the ancient world and contemporary issues around heritage. Sometimes it might also mean how to teach people how to do research on different topics, how to write policy papers, how to revamp a syllabus, and now apparently it also means being filmed for TV — whatever form it takes, as long as it is informed by my work in Anthropology, I consider it to be part of my larger project as an anthropologist.

Beyond that ongoing ‘project’, what I did get out of it was another visit to one of my favorite ancient cities, another chance to get to know the men who work and live close to the site (see images below), and another chance to demonstrate to the American public (at least those who watch PBS) that there might be a different voice and vision of who does the knowledge sharing on TV.

The episode on Trade, as a part of the First Civilizations series aired May 15th, 2018. It was predictably awkward to see myself on TV, but my students (past and present) loved it. They felt like they were back in my classroom – many of them sent me emails after saying it reminded them of how important learning about anthropology was in their own practice and lives.

I may not agree with all of the ways in which the argument and premise of the show unfolded; I may not agree with all of their editing decisions; but I am glad I did it anyway. If nothing else, the negotiations we have to do with those creating, directing, editing and presenting the many publics we encounter and engage with, has become more clear.

Top image: Author being filmed at MohenjoDaro (image courtesy of Ibad Rahman). Bottom two images: Hanging out in DK-G Area, MohenjoDaro (images taken by author, with permission to publish by all present in image).