Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural
Economy.” Public Culture 2 (1990): 1–23.
Arjun Appadurai is a socio-cultural anthropologist that is currently a Professor in
the Media, Culture, and Communication department at New York University. He
previously served as the Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at
The New School. His main research interests involve modernity and globalization,
and he has written several scholarly papers and books, including Modernity at
Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization and The Social Life of Things.
This article very generally covers the topic of globalization and how research
scholars should approach it. It offers a nuanced way of thinking about fluid cultural
flows by breaking cultural exchange into five dimensions – the ethnoscape, the
technoscape, the finanscape, the mediascape, and the ideoscape.
Appadurai attempts to debunk the idea of cultural imperialism by suggesting that
globalization is not based on a dominant society forcing its culture on a
disempowered society, but instead that there is a global cultural economy, where
the fluid and shifting exchanges of ideas across borders manipulate the balances of
culture throughout the globe. In this way, globalization is not producing
homogenization, or the creation of a single world culture – it is producing
heterogenization with constantly shifting balances of culture. This in turn leads to
the development of “imagined worlds,” where individuals in different parts of the
world have varying understanding of the realties of other parts of the world.
Appadurai suggests that these flows of culture can be delineated into five “-scapes”
that depict dimensions of shifting and adapting cultural exchange.
The ethnoscape represents the shifting landscape of people. – As immigrants and
refugees migrate to new locales and tourists gain exposure to other parts of the
globe, culture is exchanged by shifting the cultural make-up of communities.
The technoscape represents the shifting landscape of technology. – All forms of
technology – from mechanical to informational – are penetrating borders across the
globe at extremely high speeds.
The finanscape represents the shifting landscape of capital. – Stocks, capital, and
currencies are constantly flowing between nations.
These first three –scapes are disconnected, each having their own constraints and
incentives. However, they are also related, acting as constraints and incentives for
each other.
The mediascape represents the shifting landscape of media, images, and narratives. –
Both tools for disseminating media (newspapers, televisions shows) and the
associated images and narratives create “imagined worlds,” where individuals
formulate perceptions of life elsewhere.
The ideoscape represents the shifting landscape of ideologies. – Political imagery and
ideals are spread and exchanged across borders.
Global flows occur in and through the increasingly disjunctive five –scapes. The first
three –scapes (ethno, techno, and finan) are supported by deterritorialization with
“money, commodities, and persons...ceaselessly chasing each other around the
world,” making it possible for mediascapes and ideoscapes to also flow between
cultures.
Nations (people sharing ideas about nationhood) are constantly seeking to gain
state power, while states are constantly try to spread ideas about nationhood.
Disjunctive dimensions of cultural flows (disconnections between labor, technology,
and finance) exacerbate this dilemma by making the movements for nationhood
unstable and the relationships between states vulnerable, which in turn creates
“disorganized capital.”
“Most often, the homogenization argument subspeciates into either an argument
about Americanization, or an argument about ‘commoditization,’ and very often the
two arguments are closely linked. What these arguments fail to consider is that at
least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies
they tend to become indigenized in one or other way: this is true of music and
housing styles as much as it is true of science and terrorism, spectacles and
constitutions” (295).
“This extended terminological discussion of the five terms I have coined sets the
basis for a tentative formulation about the conditions under which current global
flows occur: they occur in and through the growing disjunctures between
ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes. This
fomulation, the core of my model of global cultural flow, needs some explanation.
First, people, machinery, money, images, and ideas now follow increasingly nonisomorphic paths: of course, at all periods in human history, there have been some
disjunctures between the flows of these things, but the sheer speed, scale and
volume of each of these flows is now so great that the disjunctures have become
central to the politics of global culture” (301).
“It is because labor, finance and technology are now so widely separated that the
volatilities that underlie movements for nationhood (as large as transnational Islam
on the one hand, or as small as the movement of the Gurkhas for a separate state in
the North-East of India) grind against the vulnerabilities which characterize the
relations between states. States find themselves pressed to stay ‘open’ by the forces
of media, technology, and travel which had fueled consumerism throughout the
world and have increased the craving, even in the non-Western world, for new
commodities and spectacles. On the other hand, these very cravings can become
caught up in new ethnoscapes, mediascapes, and eventually, ideoscapes, such as
‘democracy’ in China, that the state cannot tolerate as threats to its own control over
ideas of nationhood and ‘people-hood’” (305).
What is the best method for a researcher to study flows of culture? Is it best done
from within a society, observing the incoming flows in order to understand how
they have been manipulated or indigenized? Or should a researcher step outside of
locality and observe how a single cultural aspect weaves its way through several
societies and how it is manipulated along the way?
The belief that the world is becoming homogenized is hegemonic. How can
globalization be taught in a way that people come to understand the uneven,
constantly shifting flows, and how this creates localities? What sort of metaphors,
images, or knowledge maps would be useful to depict the flow of culture throughout
the world?
How does an anthropologist study an “imagined world?” What methods are most
appropriate for understanding the way that individuals understand other realities?
Furthermore, do these “imagined worlds” shift simultaneous to cultural exchanges,
or are they resistant to change once they are formulated?
Follow-ups:
The concept “imagined worlds” refers to the concept of “imagined communities”
coined by Benedict Anderson. Anderson claimed that the idea of nation and
community is socially constructed and built by the imaginations of those who
consider themselves a part of the group.
The concept “deterritorialization” was coined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in
1972. It originally meant “to take control or order away from a land or place that is
already established.” Its meaning has since been abstracted for anthropology to
show the weakening of ties between culture and place.
Fetishism was originally defined as a man-made item with supernatural powers.
Karl Marx manipulated this definition, defining commodity fetishism as a situation
in which objects or commodities are given intrinsic value, disregarding the human
labor that created them. In this way, things take over the position of social relations
as the most vital aspect of capitalist society.
Appadurai, Arjun. “Putting Hierarchy in Its Place.” Cultural Anthropology 3, no.
1 (1988): 36–49.
This article depicts how anthropologists have developed certain discourses for
certain localities. It first describes how the concept of “native” has remained a
dominant identifier for the groups that an anthropologist studies and how these
groups have typically been regarded as confined to a particular place. It then
outlines the genealogy of hierarchy in India, representing it as a discourse that
anthropologists use to make sense of the region. Finally, Appadurai discusses how
certain ideas – such as hierarchy – become confined to and hegemonic in certain
localities.
Appadurai’s main argument is that certain anthropological images become the
dominant means of describing certain places, confining the “natives” that live within
these spaces to the image. This can be seen in the idea of hierarchy that is attached
to India, ancestor worship in China, and honor-and-shame in the circumMediterranean. While anthropological ideas and images about certain places are
constantly flowing from various cultures and places, they occasionally formulate to
develop a “compelling configuration” that is resistant to modification or critique.
This configuration becomes the hegemonic means of depicting a place.
The term “native” has been used to describe individuals that are from a certain
place. However, those in Western contexts (including anthropologists) do not use
the term “native” to describe themselves, suggesting that the term has further
meaning. Appardurai suggests that the term “native” has been defined as people
that are not only from certain places, but also incarcerated within those places. The
Western world constructs this idea of confinement based on how “native ways of
thinking” attach these groups to a certain locality. Accordingly, as studies on how
the flows of ideas and practices through an interconnected globe become
increasingly prevalent, anthropologists believe the “native” (defined to be confined
to a certain location by “modes of thought”) to be disappearing. Appardurai asserts
that “natives” have never actually existed and that they have only been depicted as
such due to the anthropological images that have characterized their “modes of
thought” and depicted them as different from other groups.
The concept of hierarchy that has been attached to India has developed based on a
genealogy of ideas that have come together to form a hegemonic idea. This
developed based on the “convergence of three distinct trajectories in Western
thought.” The first trajectory prompted essentializing practice in order to highlight
a certain aspect of culture as the essence of that culture. Second, anthropologists
tended towards exoticism – making the differences between themselves and those
that they were studying the sole mode of comparison. Finally, certain features or
practices were totalized, meaning that the features identified as an essence of the
culture became known to depict the totality of that culture.
Ideas that become hegemonic in describing a place provide a mechanism for non-
specialists to summarize that place without having to sift through fine ethnographic
details to understand it. Furthermore, specialists adhere to these hegemonic ideas
because it allows for organizing debate around anthropological methods and
assumptions. Ultimately, however, an idea becomes hegemonic when the internal
realities (collected through ethnographic study) of a place are linked to the larger
discourses (through conceptual analysis). Appadurai suggests that in order to
contest these hegemonic ideas, anthropologists must understand that the “essences”
of certain places are actually a culmination of “essences” of many places tied to a
certain locality. Furthermore, ethnographers should pursue studies that “emphasize
the diversity of themes that can fruitfully be pursued in any place” (46). Finally,
Appadurai call for an approach that “polythetically” studies places by seeking the
overlaps between cultural “essences.”
“The link between the confinement of ideology and the idea of place is that the way
of thought that confines natives is itself somehow bounded, somehow tied to the
circumstantiality of place. The links between intellectual and spatial confinement, as
assumptions that underpin the idea of the native, are two. The first is the notion that
cultures are "wholes": this issue is taken up in the section of this essay on Dumont.
The second is the notion, embedded in studies of ecology, technology, and material
culture over a century, that the intellectual operations of natives are somehow tied
to their niches, to their situations. They are seen, in Levi-Strauss's evocative terms,
as scientists of the concrete. When we ask where this concreteness typically inheres,
it is to be found in specifics of flora, fauna, topology, settlement patterns, and the
like; in a word, it is the concreteness of place” (38).
“Anthropology has, more than many disciplinary discourses, operated through an
album or anthology of images (changing over time, to be sure) whereby some
feature of a group is seen as quintessential to the group and as especially true of that
group in contrast with other groups. Hierarchy in India has this quality. In the
discourse of anthropology, hierarchy is what is most true of India and it is truer of
India than of any other place” (40).
“Hierarchy, in Dumont's argument, becomes the essence of caste, the key to its
exoticism, and the form of its totality. There have been many criticisms of Dumont's
ideas about hierarchy. I shall be concerned here to deconstruct hierarchy by
unpacking its constituents in Dumont's scheme and by tracing that aspect of the
genealogy of these constituents that moves us out of India and to other places in the
ongoing journey of anthropological theory. As we shall see, this genealogy is in part
a topographic history of certain episodes and certain links in the history of
anthropological thought in the last century” (41).
To what extent do the ideas and images that become the essence of a particular
culture due to anthropological study affect the individuals being studied? Do the
“natives” adhere to these hegemonic ideas and believe them to be the essence or
totality of their culture? How has scholarly literature on ideas like hierarchy in
India (as well as ethnographies that highlight hierarchy as the foundation of a
certain phenomena) affected actual hierarchy in India?
Appadurai offers several suggestions for contesting hegemonic ideas in
ethnographic research, helping researchers conduct more encompassing studies.
However, his suggestions do not suggest how this will contest the views of nonspecialists who use such ideas to avoid having to sift through extensive
ethnographic research. What can be done to contest hegemonic ideas on certain
places amongst non-specialists, and what type of education is needed to support
this?
While hierarchy may not represent the totality of Indian culture, the caste system
undoubtedly plays a dominant role in Indian society. Where should a researcher
position these ideas in order to understand how they affect society without
determining them to be the sole affecter? In other words, what is the most effective
and appropriate way to use these theories when performing an analysis?
Follow-ups:
Marcel Mauss, nephew of Emile Durkheim, coined the term ‘total social fact.’ This
was an offshoot of Durkheim’s term ‘social facts,’ which described values, norms,
and structures that were not produced by an individual but instead by the
socialization process within a society. ‘Total social facts’ have influence throughout
the entirety of a society, weaving into political, economic, legal, and religious
spheres.
Polythetic classification refers to classifying things by a broad set of criteria that are
neither necessary nor sufficient. This compares to monothetic classification where
things are classified by characteristics that are both necessary and sufficient in
order to identify their belonging to the class. While Appadurai applies this to places,
the term is often applied to families, where monothetic classification would identify
identical members, and polythetic classification would identify resemblances.
Diffusionism is an anthropological term used to describe the nature of culture that
results from the spread of a cultural value from an origin to a new society. There
have been beliefs that all diffused values emanated from one culture, which is
referred to as heliocentric diffusionism, but the more widely spread belief is that
cultural values emanate from a limited number of cultures, known as cultural
circles.
Apter, Andrew. “Africa, Empire, and Anthropology: A Philological Exploration
of Anthropology’s Heart of Darkness.” Annual Review of Anthropology 28
(January 1, 1999): 577–598.
Andrew Apter is a Professor of History at the University of California Los Angeles.
He received his Ph.D in Anthropology from Yale University in 1987. His research
interests include ritual, memory, and indigenous knowledge in West Afica, and how
colonial culture, commodity fetishism, and state spectacle affect these themes. He
has composed several publications and books, including Black Critics and Kings: The
Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society and The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the
Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria.
This review mainly draws on the colonial culture and how it has been embedded
within ethnographic approaches to anthropology in Africa over the past century.
Further, he goes on to describe the recent literature that has been able to
circumvent this issue by approaching African colonialism in a different way. He
goes not to suggest how this literature would look when studying African
postcolonial society.
The main argument of this text was that a colonial legacy exists within the history of
anthropological ethnographies on Africa and should be considered a part of this
history. Although this literature has waned out as researchers have come to
understand it as problematic, its existence as a historical literary period should not
be negated. He in fact claims that it would be dangerous to ignore this period – a
point that he makes clear when he describes how Wilhelm Junker, who had
documented African pygmies as gruesome and savage brought several human heads
that were prepared for him home to Europe, highlighting the savagery of the
imperial anthropologist.
In the first section of his article, Apter traces the history of Africanist ethnographies
as representative of colonial culture. He points to the work of Mudimbe, who
described how the models used by researchers to represent Africans did not
provide “windows into another world” but were in fact “signs of imperial
domination.” The methods employed by anthropologists were riddled with
“imperial ethnocentrism.” The epistemologies, languages, and models used to
depict those that were being studied distorted and modified their actual social
practices and cultures. This was further hardened by the tendency to form a
foundation of assumption around the boundaries of race, kinship, and hierarchal
structures. In this way, colonial codifications were used to produce what we know
about pre-colonial or “traditional Africa.”
Apter goes on to critique the idea that African ethnographies have purely
represented colonialism, providing counter-points to the arguments made by
Mudimbe. More recent articles have shifted away from a fascination with structured
models of societies in pre-colonial Africa. These studies have focused more on the
various approaches that can be taken to garner an understanding for colonial
discourse. In appropriately recognizing and including colonial discourse within
anthropological research and texts, the researcher is able to skirt around
imperialistic tendencies.
In considering the way that anthropological practices have, in the past, incorporated
elements of colonialism, researchers have an opportunity to exercise reflexivity –
recognizing the faults of the knowledge produced by their field and using it as a
point of analysis. From this, the anthropology of colonialism has emerged, offering
insight into the historical and theoretical underpinnings that describe the power
relations and cultural shaping that formed the way we have come to understand
African society. Apter points to ‘imperial spectacle’ as a product of colonial
anthropology and specifically depicts how anthropologists were consulted for
scientific knowledge when European nations were producing museum displays on
native cultures. In this way, the knowledge that Europeans were gaining on African
culture were based on imperialistic ethnographies that racialized groups and
depicted them as a definitive ‘other.’ Additionally, colonial conversions can be seen
in the way that anthropologists mapped European class relations, differences in
gender and religion, and concepts that molded a society onto African societies, who
almost certainly did not fit into the same mold.
Postcolonial African anthropologists get caught in a bind of either reifying colonial
anthropological tendencies or losing their ethnographic subject. Apter points to
how Mafeje approaches this conundrum by removing the concepts of “society” and
“culture” from “social formation” and “ethnography.” In doing so, the producer of
information shifts from the researcher to the subject. Apter questions whether
doing so entirely removes the colonial culture from the study.
“Without denying the existence and local authority of actual African gnostic systems,
Mudimbe (1988:186) locates them within ‘a Western epistemological territory’
where they remain colonized and thus beyond adequate representation and
understanding. Of the African worlds portrayed by such scholarship, Mudimbe
(1988:186) asks: ‘Is not this reality distorted in the expression of African modalities
in non-African languages? Is it not inverted, modified by anthropological and
philosophical categories used by specialists in dominant discourses?’ (580)”
“The colonial library acquires a new significance within such a philological turn,
introducing a more socially grounded appreciation of how colonial inventions of
Africa have been coproduced to become sociocultural realities. At issue is not
whether the colonial figures and categories of Africanist discourse should be (or
ever could be) abandoned, but how they have been indigenized, Africanized, and in
some cases even nationalized through processes of ethnographic writing and
representation. Whatever weight we may attribute to the role of anthropology as
such in colonizing Africa, ranging from considerable (Kuklick 1991; cf Goody
1995:191–208) to trivial (Asad 1991:315), its location within the larger contexts of
imperial politics, science, and culture can be seen as an advantage rather than a
liability. Turning anthropology on its own imperial culture introduces a measure of
reflexivity that, far from undermining the discipline’s knowledge claims,
underscores them with self-conscious recognition (585).
“Understood as a mode of objectification and even fetishism grounded in colonial
relations of production (McClintock 1995), imperial discourses and spectacles of
Africa defined centers and peripheries, citizens and subjects (Mandami 1996),
through the camera obscura of class. If European class relations were mapped onto
race relations abroad, projecting the dislocations of the industrial revolution onto
the savagery and heathenism of the dark continent, class differences at home were
increasingly cast in racial terms as well. Moreover, the class-race axis was further
transposed into gender, religious, and national differences—and discriminations of
‘sexuality and sentiment’ (Cooper & Stoler 1997:26)—forming an emergent imperial
culture at large (588)”.
Where does this view leave African anthropologists? Will they constantly be in a
battle against becoming a colonial entity?
What sorts of models of research, information, or knowledge are needed to avoid
colonialist tendencies? How are the skills needed for producing these models taught
to and cultivated within an African researcher? Further, how can an African
researcher shape the knowledge that they produce in a way that is consumable to
cultures elsewhere but still accurate – how do they make differing knowledge
models understood by the general public?
Should the anthropology of colonialism be segmented out as its own study, or
should its considerations be integrated within existing ethnographic research
projects? How do researchers and educators of researchers ensure that the
anthropologists and ethnographers produced from graduate school programs are
well-versed in the anthropology of colonialism to avoid falling into the same trap as
predecessors? What sort of methods training is needed for this?
Follow-ups:
While both refer to argumentation through dialogue, dialectics refers to a goal of
synthesizing arguments through reason, whereas dialogics refers to a goal of
coexisting with previous and future work and acting as a guide of information for
those works.
Charles Gabriel Seligman was a British ethnographer working in the earlier decades
of the twentieth century. As a professor at the London School of Economics, he
trained prominent anthropologists including Bronislaw Malinowski. In 1930, he
published Races of Africa, which is considered to be one of the first accurate and
extensive ethnographies of Africa published in Europe. It has since been
republished with up to date ethnography four times.
In 2007, the United States Pentagon began placing anthropologists in Army combat
brigades in order to collect information on local populations, identifying community
needs and reducing the need for violent force (a program called Human Terrain
System). While many government officials praised the project, the American
Anthropological Association deemed it a violation to their code of ethics, describing
how it could be misused by the military to better target enemies and resultantly
harm local citizens. Parallels have thus been drawn between some modern
anthropological practices and those that supported the colonial era.
British Broadcasting Corporation. Tales From The Jungle: Malinowski, 2007.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f22VsAlOwbc&feature=youtube_gdata_pla
yer.
The British Broadcasting Corporation is the largest public service broadcasting
provider in the United Kingdom. It released documentary series called BBC Four in
the Autumn of 2006 that focused on depicting the work for four major
anthropologists in order to describe stories of anthropological history and raise
questions for the future of the field. Within this series, documentaries on Tom
Harrison, Margaret Mead, and Carlos Castaneda were also included.
This video outlined the life and work of Bronisław Malinowski, a researcher often
labeled as the “Father of Modern Social Anthropology.” In doing so, it depicted a
major turning point for anthropological research methods and outlined the ethical
issues that surfaced as a result.
Bronisław Maliowski was the first anthropologist to base research on immersive
interaction within another culture. He pioneered participant observation by living
with an aboriginal tribe in Australia for four years, paying close attention to their
practices and interactions, and recording all of his findings in a lengthy set of field
notes. In doing so, he pushed against the traditional Victorian views that aboriginals
were “savages,” showcasing instead how their culture and values were very similar
to those of the “civilized” Europeans.
Victorian era anthropology is often referred to as “arm-chair” anthropology. At this
time, anthropologists did not travel to the locales of the individuals they were
studying. Instead, they collected their research by garnering observations from
tourists and missionaries to formulate theories about the lives of those living in
other parts of the world. Often these theories depicted peoples in foreign cultures
as ‘savages,’ drawing a stark contrast between European culture and foreign tribes
due to their tendency towards violence and promiscuous sex. Australian aboriginals
were often labeled as the most ‘savage’ due to their apparent lack of family
structure.
Malinowski was a perfectionist, obsessed with his health and constantly seeking
notoriety. He entered the Anthropology program at the London School of
Economics at a time when Victorian anthropology was widely accepted as a way of
studying man. Combining his pursuit for perfection with a scientific background, he
determined that there could be more methodological and systematic approaches to
studying cultures.
Malinowski first became acquainted with aboriginal cultures when he voyaged to
Papua New Guinea as part of an academic program. After witnessing an instance
where local descriptions of a cultural event contradicted with the actual turnout of
the event, he concluded that anthropologists couldn’t rely on what people say to
distinguish the characteristics of a culture – anthropologists must get closer to the
actual people. He decided to live within the confines of an aboriginal tribe for a
lengthy period of time in order to observe their actions and interactions and
formulate theories based on this scientific approach (now referred to as participant
observation). World War I delayed his return to Europe, giving him time to observe
and report on a cultural practice of exchange that showcased how the tribe formed
relations with neighboring tribes. When published, this research revolutionized the
way that Europeans looked at aboriginal culture by allowing Victorians to see how
other cultures were complex and forcing them to question their own civility. He
drew out the qualities that drive all human cultures – passions such as hunger, sex,
and vanity that are pursued by all societies to meet individual needs. Doing so, he
killed Victorian “arm-chair” anthropology, proposing a new scientific method for
anthropology that is still deemed applicable today.
After Malinowski died and his journals were published, many came to question
whether his work had been prejudice. His writing was full of fervor, often insulting
the native tribes that he studied. Some believed that these reactions may have
tarnished his work. However, others argued that his journals did not only insult
natives – they also insulted colleagues, Australian administrators, and most often
himself. In any case, Malinowski’s work marked a turning point for anthropology,
justifying his title as the “Father of Modern Social Anthropology.”
“’The work of scientifically trained observers, like myself, once seriously applied to
anthropology will yield results of surpassing value. So far it has been done solely by
amateurs, and therefore done, on the whole, indifferently.’ Not only was Malinowski
a scientist, but his peculiarly obsessive personality was ideally suited to the task
ahead.”
Professor Jeremy MacClancy, Oxford Brookes University: “Malinowski was very
clever because what he did in a way was he civilized the savaged and savaged the
civilized. He showed that they weren’t irrational – that they just had different
cultural rules to us.”
Kate Fox, Anthropologist: “I mean this is I think essentially why Malinowski is right.
You do have to spend a lot of time because it’s not until you’ve kind of hung out and
wandered around, you know, for quite a lot of time before you realize – you start to
see the patterns in what’s happening in a behavior. And there isn’t a particularly
technique for doing that – it’s just hanging out. I think someone’s called it
anthropology or participant observation deep hanging out.”
Malinowski was cited to have a very difficult time living Papua New Guinea for four
years. How does an anthropologist doing fieldwork in a foreign country and culture
contend with personal issues such as feelings of isolation and personal health
concerns? Are there strategies to coping while living in a different culture?
Malinowski was cited to have an attraction to many of the woman that he was
studying. What are the ethical and logistical consequences of an anthropologist
becoming romantically involved with an individual that (s)he studies?
What effect did Malinowski’s findings on cultures that were previously believed to
be ‘savage’ have on colonialism in the early twentieth century? At the time, was
anthropology taken seriously as a science? Did it have the clout to affect policy
change?
Follow-ups:
Malinowski was one of the first individuals to offer a scientific approach to
anthropology and studying cultures. While this reshaped the way that anthropology
was carried out, the scientific approach is now again coming under scrutiny. Most
significantly, the American Anthropological Association has recently taken steps to
remove the word “science” from its statements of plan. These decisions have
highlighted the segmentation between science-based anthropologists
(archaeologists and cultural anthropologists) and those researching cultural
concepts such as race and gender in order to advocate for human rights. The shift
has been attributed to viewpoints of critical anthropologists who view scientific
study as a form of colonialism and postmodernists, who believe that science
assumes universal phenomena. It has created a great deal of debate amongst
researchers in the field.
In anthropology, reciprocity is an informal exchange of goods or labor, marking an
informal economic system. It is believed to be common to every culture.
Malinowski’s study of the exchange of Kula served to develop this theory, and it
later became a central concept in Marcel Mauss’s The Gift.
Malinowski contributed a theory of functionalism that differed from RadcliffeBrown’s theory of structural functionalism. In his view, culture was formulated on
individual needs rather than societal needs, and when individual needs were met,
societal needs were also met. In this way, an understanding of individual needs and
motives were essential to understanding the structure and function of culture
within a society.
Ferguson, James G. “Of Mimicry and Membership: Africans and the ‘New World
Society’.” Cultural Anthropology 17, no. 4 (2002): 551–569.
James Ferguson is a Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford
University and a leading African field scientist. In addition to the book that this
annotation was drawn from, he has written about modernity in Zambia and
development, politics, and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. He also co-authored two
anthropological methods books with Akhil Gupta, an Anthropology professor at the
University of California Los Angeles.
Broadly, this text discusses mimicry and how anthropologists have approached the
concept of African societies seeking to copy Western societies in the past. It also
discusses the desire for membership in the global world order and explores how
these individuals constitute spatiality – how they define the space of which they are
a member – and where they are positioned within this space. It seeks to understand
this from a postcolonial perspective, considering historical context to refine the
main argument. Ferguson attempts to clarify how an anthropologists approaches a
subject who “deliberately aims to spoil his or her own ‘authenticity’” and wants “’to
become like you.’” (553).
Many postcolonial African scholars have cited mimicry to be a form of colonial
cultural disillusionment or defiance against colonizers. However, Ferguson argues
that mimicry in fact points to their desire for membership in a global world order.
He attempts to show how African individuals consider themselves excluded from the
rest of the world. While this claim is based on grounded, empirical evidence,
Ferguson found that the subjects from whom he drew this conclusion did not
consider themselves to be part of a specific locality, but a member of Africa as a
whole. Those African individuals seeking membership thus seek it for the entire
continent – for all of the “people of Africa.”
Ferguson begins by outlining the anthropology of imitation. He describes how
anthropologists steered away from “civilizing” Africa, believing that supporting such
practices would defy their professional mission of respecting a culture. However,
many Africans described “wanting to become like the whites” out of their own
accord, which problematically substantiated European culture as superior to African
culture. As a result to this conflict, many anthropologists asserted that African
mimicry must a form of parody, seeking to debunk the power of colonizers, and thus
represents a form of resistance against them.
As the world becomes more globalized and maintained through transnational
governments, cultural images representative of the North and the South are
transcending borders, exposing them to the images that define the other. At the
same time, the binary relationships that defined colonialism (the colonizer exerting
power over the colonized) are no longer in existence, which should create an even
playing field. The fact that the South is always copying the images from the North
(and never the other way around), points to a break in the social order – the
creation of an uneven playing field. Furthermore, extreme
economic/political/health inequalities still exist along this division. Ferguson uses
the term abjection to describe Africans’ knowledge of the existence of this first class
world through images flowing across borders, combined with their
acknowledgement of exclusion from it. This speaks to their desire for membership
within global modernity.
Many anthropologists have turned to describing “alternative modernities,” where a
culture becomes modern in its own sense rather than in the Eurocentric sense.
However, this turn still leaves Africans excluded from the modernities that define
the world order. Ferguson points out how African urbanites are likely to feel
slighted being referred to as modern when they do not have access to “running
water and a good hospital” (560). African urbanites mimicking Western culture are
seeking solidarity – fair representation through membership in the global world
order, and this solidarity is dependent on their ability to access these modernities.
“The scandal of Africans who ‘want to be like the whites’-first for African cultural
nationalists and later for anti-imperialist anthropologists was not that they blurred
or destabilized colonial race categories but that they threatened, by their very
conduct, to confirm the claim of the racist colonizer: that ‘African’ ways were
inferior to ‘European’ ones. For the late-20th-century anthropologist, the native who
wanted ‘to become like you’ had become not menacing, but embarrassing. The
dominant anthropological solution to the embarrassment of African mimicry, I
suggest, has been to interpret colonial- and postcolonial-era imitations of Europeans
as some combination of parody and appropriation and to insist that such ‘mimesis’
is therefore in fact a gesture of resistance to colonialism” (553-554).
“But the determination of some anthropologists to find cultural difference lurking
even under what most appears to be ‘the same’ has led them to force practices of
apparent imitation or assimilation into a Hauka-like scheme of cultural difference
and appropriation. The danger is precisely the one the African students so swiftly
identified: by taking the extraordinary figure of the Hauka as a paradigm for
understanding African gestures of similitude with ‘Europeans,’ we risk misreading
(as magical appropriations and resistances by a localized ‘African' cultural system)
practices that are better understood in the context of the politics of membership in
the ‘world society’ of which Wilson spoke.” (557-558).
“With respect to the question of membership, then, the two letters are not so
different. Both make implicit claims to the rights of a common membership in a
global society (a society in which Zambia and Rwanda should enjoy no lesser rights
than Bosnia or Kosovo). And both refuse the idea of a separate Africa with its own
separate problems. In their different ways, both make the same paired claim to
global status and recognition that Koita and Tounkara's expatriate countryman,
cultural critic Manthia Diawara, recently voiced in explaining "our [Africans] desire
to be moderinized: ‘We ... want access to education and material wealth: and we are
tired of being ignored by the world’ (Diawara 1998:58)” (564).
How can media studies and the way that individuals interact with communication
technologies that transcend cultural borders be integrated within this research?
How could it be used to further carve out and define Africa’s position and desire for
membership in the global world order?
Looking back to Brad Weiss’s piece Thug Realism: Inhabiting Fantasy in Urban
Tanzania, I question where the line is drawn between mimicry and imagination.
Weiss described how imagination and fantasy were in fact social practices that
involved engaging with the images from another world. Is this a form of mimicry?
Or is mimicry a form of imagination? At what point does mimicry and imagination
shift from being constitutive of an external society into being constitutive of African
society?
How could this research benefit from a grounded, ethnographic approach, where
the mimicry represented in one urban area was thoroughly analyzed to determine
how it represented a desire for inclusion in the global world order? What would
Ferguson cite as the drawbacks to this approach?
Follow-ups:
Abjection is a term used to describe a state where an individual is “cast off,”
depicting baseness and meanness of spirit. However, in an anthropological poststructuralist sense, abjection means a disruption to conventional identity and
culture.
The term post-structuralism marks a method for studying the production of
knowledge in a way that critiques traditional logical and scientific approaches to
studying the structures of cultural products. It argues that a better approach is to
not only study the underlying structure of a cultural product, but to also study the
systems of knowledge that produced it.
The anthropology of imitation has produced ideas about how cultures imitate ideas
of other cultures. Some anthropologists claim that widespread ideas are imitated
based on one or a few cultures, while others argue that several cultures imitate each
other as influences flow and overlap. The anthropology of imitation is often linked
with evolutionary diffusion, which shows that cultures influence one another, but
similar ideas can also be developed without such influence.
Marcus, George E. “Ethnography In/of the World System: The Emergence of
Multi-Sited Ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (January 1,
1995): 95–117.
George Marcus is a Professor of Anthropology at University of California Irvine and
the founder of the Anthropological journal, Cultural Anthropology. He is interested
in reinventing ethnography by incorporating more collaboration and multi-sited
research. Three major book publications include Writing Culture: The Poetics and
Politics of Ethnography, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment
in the Human Sciences, and Ethnography Through Thick and Thin.
This review article seeks to address methodological concerns of multi-sited
ethnography, describe the arenas where it has been prevalent, and depict how such
ethnography can be constructed. In doing so, it highlights how multi-sited
ethnography offers a more encompassing understanding of world systems and
resolves several ethical issues surrounding the position of the ethnographer in
anthropological study.
In order to embed single-sited ethnography into an analysis of world systems,
ethnographers have had to connect and contextualize their own research with
previous scholarly work on globalization, which is often not in ethnographic form.
Such a shift jeopardizes the integrity of ethnographic method. Multi-sited
ethnography offers a methodological approach to studying systems and connections
between dispersed cultures.
Multi-sited research does not attempt to construct a holistic portrayal of a world
system. Instead, such studies produce the content necessary for interpreting a
world system by studying cultural formations and connecting sites. Understanding
the connection factor and being able to translate study from one culture to another
is essential to multi-sited research, and this requires a great deal of shading as the
connections are drawn along unexpected lines. In enlisting multiple sites into
ethnographic study, the traditional focus on subaltern groups is expanded into other
areas of cultural production, offering new ways of interpreting narratives in a way
that depicts a group’s positioning within global systems. Multi-sited ethnography
distinguishes itself from comparative ethnography in that it does not attempt to
depict a linear and bounded comparison between multiple sites. Rather,
comparison develops as a product of multi-sited fieldwork, emerging as
relationships and translations are drawn between differing locales.
Multi-sited ethnography has emerged from the “constructions and discourses” of
interdisciplinary arenas that use postmodern theory to reconfigure cultural studies.
In particular, media studies, science and technology studies, and development
studies have pioneered multi-sited ethnography as they attempt to connect the
landscapes of migration, technology transfer, capital flows, and media.
Multi-sited ethnography marks a revival of constructivism as ethnographers select
locations and design their work around the connections and comparisons between
them. In doing so, there are several options for how an ethnographer can construct
a multi-sited ethnographic study. For instance, they can select locations by
following people as they migrate to new areas or by following material objects as
they are transferred amongst cultures. Additionally, they can follow methaphors or
modes of thought as they are transferred through language or visual media.
Ethnographers can follow stories or biographies to trace out connections that can
shape multi-sited research, or they can follow parties in conflict with a social issue
to formulate a multi-sited study. Finally, ethnographers can employ strategically
situated singe-site ethnography to position a local study into a broader world
system context, developing an understanding of the way that local individuals
perceive their position in the world system and their awareness and perception of
other sites.
‘This mobile ethnography takes unexpected trajectories in tracing a cultural
formation across and within multiple sites of activity that destabilize the distinction,
for example, between lifeworld and system (49), by which much ethnography has
been conceived. Just as this mode investigates and ethnographically constructs the
lifeworlds of variously situated subjects, it also ethnographically constructs aspect
of the system itself through the associations and connections it suggests among
sites” (96).
“Still, what is not lost but remains essential to multi-sited research is the function of
translation from one cultural idiom or language to another. This function is
enhanced since it is no longer practiced in the primary, dualistic ‘them-us’ frame of
conventional ethnography but requires considerably more nuancing and shading as
the practice of translation connects the several sites that the research explores
along unexpected and even dissonant fractures of social location” (100).
“Multi-sited research is designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or
juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of
literal, physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection
among sites that in fact defines the argument of ethnography. Indeed, such multisited ethnography is a revival of a sophisticated practice of constructivism, one of
the most interesting and fertile practices of representation and investigation by the
Russian avant-garde of momentous social change just before and after their
revolution” (105).
Marcus describes how multi-sited research does not attempt to portray a world
system in its totality but instead produces the content for constructing notions on a
world system. In literature and in practice, how have various multi-sited studies
been connected to develop a broader understanding of global connections and
world systems?
How does an ethnographer distribute time amongst various sites? Will some sites
be given more attention than others? How does the ethnographer choose the order
that sites will be studied?
What is the best way to organize field notes when conducting multi-sited
ethnography? What strategies should an ethnographer employ to facilitate an
ability to draw connections and seamlessly translate between differing locales?
Follow-ups:
Postmodernism is a doctrine that claims that reality is constructed as the human
mind attempts to make sense of reality. As such, it takes a critical stance against
explanations that are supposedly valid for all groups or cultures, supporting
relativistic approaches to cultural understanding. It argues that reality is
constructed through interpretation and that specific experiences are more
emblematic of reality than abstract principles.
Public Culture is an interdisciplinary journal producing articles on transnational
cultural studies. It has been in existence for over twenty years and is now published
three times a year for the Institute for Public Knowledge by Duke University Press.
Public Culture seeks to inform on topics related to transnationalism and
globalization by publishing articles that describe global cultural flows and their
adaptation to public settings in the twenty-first century.
Considered the “Father of Modern Anthropology,” Claude Levi-Strauss took a
structural approach to describing mythology. He noted how, while myths were
often seen as irrational, fantastic, and unpredictable, they were also surprisingly
similar across different cultures. With similarities appearing amongst such
outlandish accounts, he suggested that universal laws governed human thought.
Orlove, Ben, and Steven C. Caton. “Water Sustainability: Anthropological
Approaches and Prospects.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39, no. 1 (October
21, 2010): 401–415.
Ben Orlove is one of four co-directors of the Center for Research on Environmental
Decisions a Columbia University and an Associate Director of the Master’s Program
in Climate and Sociology. As an anthropologist, his research has focused on
agriculture, fisheries, rangelands, glacier retreat, and water distribution in Peru,
East Africa, Italy, and Australia. His most notorious publications include the books,
Weather, Climate, and Culture and Darkening Peaks: Glacier Retreat, Science, and
Society.
Steven C. Caton is a Professor of Contemporary Arab Studies at Harvard University.
His research has focused on both poetry as a form of political rhetoric in Yemen and
the politics of water scarcity on the Arab peninsula. His major publications include
Peaks of Yemen I Summon: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a Northern Yemeni Tribe,
Lawrence of Arabia: a Film's Anthology, and Yemen Chronicle: the Anthropology of
War and Mediation.
In a broad sense, this article discusses water sustainability from the perspective of
an anthropologist, drawing in themes such as value, equity, governance, politics, and
knowledge. It offers depictions of social ethnographic studies of water management
and describes the global discourse surrounding the term, Integrated Water
Resource Management.
This review mainly seeks to draw out the importance of studying the
interconnections between the social constructions of water quality and quantity and
its materiality. It claims that anthropologists should focus on a “waterworld,”
drawing out how the boundaries of groups and communities are negotiated by
water availability and distribution. It suggests including, along with ethnographic
studies of water consumers and their governments, studies of transnational water
experts, suggesting a linkage between the anthropology of water, STS, political
ecology, and material culture studies.
Water has value as a resource for well-being and productivity as well as its
association with social beings that connect it with “survival, sanitation, production,
pleasure, and other aspect of social life” (404). Water is also related to issues of
equity and social justice, which implicates a need for governance. As a shared
resource with questionable boundaries, water also is embedded within political
issues. Finally, while a great deal of work has been carried out on indigenous water
knowledge, fewer studies incorporate the viewpoints of water experts.
By diversifying the ethnographic studies of watersheds, water regimes, and
waterscapes, it would be possible for anthropologists to uncover a broader
understanding of “waterworlds” and the social impacts and interconnections
involved.
The term Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) has become a discourse
in the scientific community involved with water management. While there is no
universally accepted definition of what IWRM is, it has become a “hegemonic
paradigm for discussing, legitimizing, and implementing policies” (408). It does not
however describe how the underlying principles of IWRM will be fought over in
actual settings.
“The debates and conflicts over these goals and values lead us to the sphere of
politics. With its propensity to flow, and with its ready partibility, water is almost
without exception shared among people and among localities and is therefore linked
to collectivities. The organizations that manage water operate within a broader
political and regulatory context. These public contexts draw on a variety of forms of
discourse, including property laws and human rights (Boelens & Doornbos 2001,
Derman & Ferguson 2003)” (405).
“These and other studies show that water is not merely an economically valuable
resource that flows through spaces, but is also a culturally and experientially
meaningful substance present in places. Although humans are never fully aquatic,
they are often, perhaps always, hydrophilic, and the human sense of place often
engages with water as well as with land” (408).
“As for the valuation of water, what is meant by a basic right or a commodity is
hardly questioned, as if these matters were settled long ago in philosophical and
scientific discourses and need not be revisited in settings where these concepts are
highly contested or do not hold sway. Anthropology has an important role to play in
keeping these questions open rather than to consign the discipline to the study of
how the ‘natives’ value and use water locally” (410).
Questions (in relation to my current research):
How does Water for People characterize the value of water? Does it purely have
economic or survival value? How about political value? Does Water for People cite
any of the social products or practices involved with water as an aspect of its value?
How are their approaches to delivering water consistent with the view of its value?
How has IWRM been used by Water for People? Do they have a strong definition of
the term? How would they define it? Do they believe that it is necessary for the
successful completion of their water projects?
This “waterworld,” incorporating themes and varying landscapes and discourses,
creates a muddled space for water NGOs to work within. How do water NGOs
negotiate their practices to deal with value, equity, governance, politics, and
knowledge in varying realms - watersheds, water regimes, and waterscapes? How
do these negotiations affect the way that water is distributed in the developing
world?
Follow-ups:
Landscape ecology is a science that studies and attempts to improve relationships
between ecological processes and certain ecosystems. It is an interdisciplinary field,
drawing from biology and social science to analyze how landscapes (areas of
uniform land use) serve as a functional utility for human societies.
The World Water Vision is a vision statement produced by the World Water Council
that calls for integrated water management in order to grapple with sustainable
water practices for the future. It claims that local water scarcity will soon expand to
regional or global issues, and collaborative management that incorporates several
stakeholders is necessary to ensure equitable access.
Hydrology is the study of water movement, distribution, and quality on Earth. It
combines fields of environmental science, geography, geology, and environmental
engineering in order to gain insight on how the hydrologic cycle and resulting
resources affect watershed sustainability. The study is often employed to support
environmental engineering and policy planning.
Sahlins, Marshall. “What Is Anthropological Enlightenment? Some Lessons of
the Twentieth Century.” Annual Review of Anthropology 28, no. 1 (1999): i–
xxiii.
Marshall Sahlins is the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of
Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is also the executive publisher of a
press called the Prickly Paradigm. Decades of anthropological work have focused on
cultural evolution – exposure and adaptation to foreign culture – and his work has
primarily focused in the Pacific. Sahlins most notable publications are his books
Evolution and Culture, Stone Age Economics, and Culture and Practical Reason.
This text discusses the viewpoints on modernity, indigenization, and development
held by both anthropologists and the general public, highlighting how they have
changed due to an anthropological enlightenment. Sahlins draws on the history of
development anthropology to showcase how the ideas of cultural adaptation and
dependency have historically been exaggerated. He then contrasts these histories
with “enlightened” anthropological findings to conclude that culture is not
diminishing due to development and modernity – it is simply shifting.
Sahlins argues that, contrary to historical anthropological studies, culture is not
disappearing. Furthermore, globalization and translocation of culture is not
producing a single, Western-dominated world culture but is instead producing a
“Culture of cultures,” where the global world culture confronts localities, and
localities mold it to fit their needs. Anthropology as a practice is thus more
important than ever, as older versions of culture disappear, being replaced with
newer versions of culture.
In the past, many anthropologists believed that, prior to the entrance of Europe,
cultures were pristine and unaffected by dependence or change – they had no
history. When Europeans arrived, however, there was an epiphany, and all at once
culture was in jeopardy as those less powerful became despondent and eventually
dependent on Western lifestyles and civilizers. Other theories about this time
insisted that reason and progress were universal, and if cultures all followed the
same sequence of development, they would eventually all end up on an even playing
field. ‘Other’ cultures simply needed European influence to “shock them out of
backwardness.” Arguments were often adapted to become morally persuasive in
order to contend with any of the contradictions that these views posed.
Enlightenment has shown that, despite these views, culture has not diminished.
Encounters with modernization, development, and global culture have only offered
new tools for carrying out traditional cultural practices. Many indigenous societies
believe that exposure to Western culture will allow them to harness and adapt tools
for promoting their own development, producing native cultural autonomy and
formulating a “culture of cultures.” In this way, societies are not held hostage to
their history – they are given the space to progress and take a position within the
modern world order.
Culture is constantly reconstituted due to externalities. Foreign technologies are
adapted for local suitability. As people migrate, their cultures travel with them, and
individuals maintain strong ties with their homeland, while making use of urban
offerings to reproduce traditional culture. Even market integration has not had the
anticipated damaging effects on culture. In this way, cultures are not resisting
influence – they are resisting assimilation into a single culture. This shows how
culture is not disappearing, it is simply reforming as an effect of external influence.
“Hence, the history of these societies only began when Europeans showed up: an
epiphanal moment, qualitatively different from anything that had gone before and
culturally devastating. Supposedly the historical difference with everything precolonial was power. Exposed and subjected to Western domination, the less
powerful peoples were destined to lose their cultural coherence—as well as the
pristine innocence for which Europeans, incomplete and sinful progeny of Adam, so
desired them” (iii).
“Unified by the expansion of Western capitalism over recent centuries, the world is
also being re-diversified by indigenous adaptations to the global juggernaut. In some
measure, global homogeneity and local differentiation have developed together, the
latter as a response to the former in the name of native cultural autonomy. The new
planetary organization has been described as ‘a Culture of cultures,’ a world cultural
system made up of diverse forms of life. As Ulf Hannerz put it: ‘There is now a world
culture, but we had better make sure we understand what this means. It is marked
by an organization of diversity rather than a replication of uniformity’ (1990:237).
Thus, one complement of the new global ecumene is the so-called culturalism of
very recent decades: the self-consciousness of their ‘culture,’ as a value to be lived
and defended, that has broken out all around the Third and Fourth Worlds” (ix – x).
“What any and all of these descriptions express is the structural complementarity of
the indigenous homeland and the metropolitan ‘homes abroad,’ their interdependence as sources of cultural value and means of social reproduction.
Symbolically focused on the homeland, whence its members derive their identity
and their destiny, the translocal community is strategically dependent on its urban
outliers for material wherewithal. The rural order itself extends into the city,
inasmuch as the migrant folk are transitively associated with each other on the
bases of their relationships at home. Kinship, community, and tribal affiliations
acquire new functions, and perhaps new forms, as relations of migration: They
organize the movements of people and resources, the care of homeland dependents,
the provision of urban housing and employment. Since people conceive their social
being as well as their future in their native place, the material flows generally favor
the homeland people” (xix).
If older cultures are dissolving as new cultures emerge, to what extent should
anthropologists seek to study and record older cultures or cultural history? Is such
a study valuable as a point of comparison? How does an anthropologist record
history prior to his/her arrival?
Which anthropological methods should be employed to characterize the adaptation
of tools to a given culture? Should studies be multi-sited, following the technology
as it moves from place to place? How can a researcher depict how its use is
provincial and changes from its initial intended use in another location?
I had to really work through Sahlins point on the double-binds of moral arguments
in anthropological research (domination vs. resistance). In history, how did
anthropological arguments become morally based? What are the underlying
motives and drivers inherent in anthropologists that pushed arguments to be
contorted into moral arguments?
Follow-ups:
Despondency theory holds that external development initiatives and exposure to
Western cultures would disintegrate indigenous cultures and leave them
despondent, “demoralized and paralyzed,” and “historically motionless.” Due to the
effects of global capitalism, culture would shift into a void, which would eventually
cause the cultures to become dependent on Western influence.
Dependency theory holds that resources flow from the poorer nations to richer
nations, causing the wealthier regions to become even wealthier at the expense of
the poor. Thus, as Third World states are integrated into the world system, they are
inevitably placed in a position where they are unable to gain social equality. The
theory is a response to modernization and development theory that typically
described development as a rational and universal phenomenon, ensuring that,
upon following the right trajectory, all countries would have an opportunity to reach
the same pinnacle.
The Fourth World refers to populations that are excluded from global society. This
includes hunters and gatherers, nomadic individuals, and pastoral individuals. It
has also been used to describe individuals that are technologically disconnected and
considered structurally unimportant since they do not contribute to production or
consumption.
Segall, Avner. “Critical Ethnography and the Invocation of Voice: From the
Field/in the Field - Single Exposure, Double Standard?” International Journal
of Qualitative Studies in Education 14, no. 4 (2001): 579–592.
Avner Segall is an Associate Professor of Teacher Education at Michigan State
University. His research interests include secondary social studies education,
critical theory and pedagogy, cultural studies, media education, and qualitative
research methods.
In a broad sense, this text focuses on ethnography and how academic writing
inherently creates an “other.” It points out how qualitative research cannot be
“objective” or “value-free” and is instead “interpretative” and “reflexive,” “depicting
a double crisis of representation and legitimization” (579).
The main argument of this text is that writing, as an ethnographic method,
inherently creates segmentation between “self” and “other” and “here” and “there.”
Despite progressive movements to prevent “othering,” the textual representation of
“here” or those “in the field” is often treated differently than the representation of
“there” or those “from the field.” There are different rules applied to the text,
different considerations made for selecting information, and ultimately different
ways of recording experiences, which all lead to different forms of representation.
While Segall recognizes that there is no way to represent any form of voice without
doing some “violence” to that voice, he suggests that, when writing, ethnographers
make effort to recognize whose voice is being violated and how that voice is being
violated – not simply to problematize textualization, but to begin a conversation
about how to represent all voices in an equitable, unproblematic way.
Doing ethnography is not a unidirectional process, where the ethnographer begins
by collecting information in the field and then ends by incorporating ideas from the
academy in order to write on findings. It is a multidirectional process in that
research conducted in the field is structured by and informed by what is drawn from
the academy. However, the conceptual spaces of “here” and “there” are necessarily
created through practice in that researchers must make claim to ‘being there’ and
penetrating a culture in order to appear legitimate and ‘being here’ (as part of an
academic community) in order to have the appropriate credentials for writing. Thus
the special separation of “here” and “there” is created based on the fact that
academia (“here”) reports on fieldwork (“there”), and there is a lack of description
of how the two inform each other in ethnographic writing.
There is a great deal of thought put into how ethnographers textualize voices “from
the field” but not nearly as much thought put into textualizing voices “in the field.”
By incorporating voice from either context into writing, the ethnographer attempts
to accurately depict that voice, but in fact re-inscribes it in a way that it can never
gain back its full initial meaning. In this way, the ethnographer realizes that
“borrowing words from others is always problematic” and that “what [they]
appropriate from others as well as how and where [they] choose to use it will alter
its meaning” (585). Ethnographers thus take great care to appropriately depict
voices “from the field” in a way most accurately depicts true meaning. However,
ethnographers take much less care in selecting voice or text from those “in the field,”
often strategically selecting any text that can support (or negate) the argument in
order to construct a piece of writing. This becomes problematic in that the
ethnographer is not treating all voices equally even though all voices have equal
weight.
“Othering” also occurs due to the way that voice is arranged within a text. Voices
“from the field” tend to be “messy.” The ethnographer does not edit words from
participants and adds in hesitations, pauses, or repetitions in order to maintain a
level of authenticity. However, the same considerations are not made from the texts
derived from those “in the field.” Through orderly referencing formats, thoughtful
and eloquent organization of thoughts by the original scholar and the ethnographer,
and careful editing, voices from “in the field appear disembodied, decontextualized
in the text, simply alphabetized in our reference lists” (587). Furthermore, voices
from “in the field” are chosen based on “knowledge and authority,” whereas voices
“from the field” are chosen in order to best represent the field.
“As researchers, we are inherently embedded in the texts we read before,
throughout, and after our field-research has ended. Indeed, we read and write our
ethnographic world (There) with them, against them, and through them. The Here
and There are never, were never, and can never be untangled regardless of spatial
correspondence. Instead, they are constantly and simultaneously implicated
with/by one another” (583).
“In a sense, member of the two communities – the Here and There – serve as our
participants in the ethnographic endeavor. Both enable us to tell of a specific
ethnographic world in particular ways. Each of their voices contributes equally –
albeit different and for different purposes – to our claims to knowledge.
Nevertheless, ethnographers seem to treat – both textually and epistemologically –
voices ‘from the field’ (There) very differently than they do those ‘in the field’
(Here)” (584).
“As a conscious ethnographer, I will got lengths to think about and explain the
problematics involved in voicing Other, and continuously ask myself as I write: ‘did I
get it ‘right’?’ ‘Do I have the ability to understand her words and actions as she
does?’ ‘How does my own positionality affect how I understand her understandings
of the (my) word and world?’ Yet, as a researcher, I have few similar hesitations as I
re-inscribe – cut-and-paste, put between quotation marks – words I borrow from
bell hoods or any other African-American scholar to support or subvert a claim,
illustrate a point, or even contextualize the words of the above mentioned AfricanAmerican woman participant” (586).
What measures should be taken to ensure that text collected from “in the field” –
from scholarly articles or books – is represented in an unproblematic way? How
should a researcher represent scholarly texts in order to prevent decontextualizing
its original argument so that the text from those “in the field” is exposed to the same
considerations as the text from those “from the field?”
Why do ethnographers treat those “from the field” differently than those in
academia? We know that shifts in practice resulting from postcolonial, poststructural, and feminist theory have played a role in transforming how we relate
with and represent those “from the field,” but why haven’t the same considerations
been put in place from relating with and representing those “within the field?”
Segall cites that his own paper was guilty of treating those “in the field” (Geertz,
Clifford, Atkinson, Denzin, Said) differently than those “from the field” (the
ethnographers he makes reference to), drawing out-of-context quotes from methods
papers on the referenced scholarly authors in order to make his point clear and
sound legitimate. In this way, he is “othering” himself and these scholarly authors
and creating a conceptual space of “here” and “there.” Segall also cites that he has
not work-around for this. Is there a work-around? Is there actually a way to write
ethnography without creating these conceptual spaces – without “othering” a group
of individuals? If so, what is it? If not, what measures should be taken to reduce the
damage caused to those in the “other” category?
Follow-ups:
Paul Atkinson describes how an ethnographic field is constructed in three ways.
First an ethnographer uses personal gaze to construct the field. Then the
ethnographer employs the practice of “writing down,” taking notes or formulating
text describing the field. Finally, while “writing up” this text is reconstituted in a
way that makes it applicable to the academic field and research goals.
Norman Denzin calls for new methods for ethnographic writing in his book
Interpretative Ethnography. He suggests that postmodern ethnography has been
employed based on adherence to a moral discourse and that other forms text can
open new possibilities for ethical inquiry. Some of his suggestions include
performance-based text, literary journalism, and narratives of the self.
Clifford Geertz used the term “thick description” in his book Interpretation of
Cultures in order to describe a type of ethnographic writing that depicts human
behavior in a way that focuses not only on the behavior, but also on its context. In
contextualizing the writing, the researcher hopes to make the behavior meaningful
to onlookers.
Wilson, Samuel M., and Leighton C. Peterson. “The Anthropology of Online
Communities.” Annual Review of Anthropology 31, no. 1 (October 2002): 449–
467.
Samuel Wilson is a historical anthropologist and archaeologist that studies the
relationships between information and communication technologies, flows of
information, and social and political structures. He is a former Director of the
University of Texas’s Technology, Literacy, and Culture program and has written
extensively on the origins of social and governing institutions.
Leighton C. Peterson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at
Miami University. Her research interests include linguistic anthropology, media
studies, visual anthropology, ethnography, and Native American studies.
Broadly, this review of the anthropology of online communities analyzes the current
research on the Internet and new forms of media and their role in creating
communities, identities, political hierarchies, and new forms of communicative
practice. It also suggests how future research could be directed to focus on the
overlap between offline and online communities in order to examine their role as
cultural products that implicate issues of power and access.
The main argument of this article is that anthropology should focus on analyzing
online communities as a product of culture. A majority of the focus of
anthropological research has solely been on computer-mediated interactions, which
fails to consider how offline worlds shape and are affected by online interactions. In
analyzing online communities as a product of culture rather than simply internetworked computers, it becomes possible to draw out how communication and
practices that occur within non-virtual worlds affect those that occur in virtual
worlds and vice versa. Refocusing research in this way would help anthropologists
understand, not only how communication technologies have been a product of
culture, but also how they come to reproduce certain aspects of culture, such as
language and social practices.
Negotiating spatial relations that arise within the study of communication
technologies has been a challenge for anthropologists. Specifically, there have been
debates over the concepts of offline vs. online and real vs. virtual, and where the
emphasis of research should lie within these spaces. Wilson and Peterson argue
that distinguishing these spaces is not useful because it bounds or isolates a
community into a heterogeneous space, when there is in fact a great deal of flow
between online, offline, real, and virtual worlds. Anthropologists should thus seek
to investigate the “continuum of communities, identities, and networks” (456).
Identities are molded through online interaction as individuals are given the
opportunity to experiment with multiple identities and challenge conventional
identity formation. However, the role of identity formation should not be studied
solely through the lens of computer-mediated interaction because this fails to depict
how online identities shape real-world identities and vice versa.
Research on the power relations formed based on access to communication
technologies (in terms of infrastructure and knowledge) has spanned interactions
between both offline and online communities and has pointed to technology as a
producer and a product of culture. However, further anthropological research of
power relations and access to communication technologies should also include an
analysis of the ideologies of technology – the language surrounding its use, how its
perceived use relates to the use inscribed in technological ideologies, and how that
understanding creates avenues for viewing and describing the world. In particular,
anthropology can show the extent to which “discourses of technological
empowerment” in marginalized communities shape its perceived and actual use
(460).
“What is missing from new media literature is the link between historically
constituted sociocultural practices within and outside of mediated communication
and the language practices, social interactions, and ideologies of technology that
emerge from new information and communication technologies. In order to address
this issue, we should heed those who view Internet spaces and technologies as
‘continuous with and embedded in other social spaces’ that ‘happen within
mundane social structures and relations that they may transform but that they
cannot escape’ (Miller & Slater 2000, p. 5)” (453).
“Like much of the early Internet research, this early work reflects the popular
rhetoric of the new medium’s virtual potentials and tends to position online
communication away from other social interactions. More recent investigations of
computer-mediated communication explore how online communication can change
interactions and how interactions are shaped by local contexts (Cherny 1999). Such
studies, however, remain situated in online communication, analyzed through texts
generated in chatrooms, news groups, MOOs, and other multi-user domains (MUDs).
These interfaces represent but one of many available mediated communication
technologies on the Internet, which include pictures and graphics, online verbal
communication, and traditional media like television and radio” (454).
“Understanding local discourse and ideologies of media technology is crucial since
speakers incorporate new technologies of communication from existing
communicative repertoires, which influence new and emerging cul-tural practices
(Hutchins 1995, Keating 2000). These metadiscursive practices have broader
implications for participation in new public spheres (Briggs Bauman 1999, Spitulnik
2001), the ‘social organization of technology’ (Keating 2000), and the consequences
of shifting spaces for language use and language contact (Crystal 2001). The
relationship of ideology to social and linguistic practice is an increasingly important
avenue for future research” (461).
The article describes ethical considerations that need to be made when conducting
research online. I would like to know – how does a researcher obtain informed
consent when analyzing the interactions within online communities? Is informed
consent necessary when information is displayed on a public site? How does a
researcher determine when s/he is violating an individual’s right to privacy when
analyzing the way they interact online?
This review was written prior to the explosion of Facebook and other social
networking mediums, and the social interactions on these sites are clearly produced
by and reproduce aspects of culture. Has this rise of online communities affected
how anthropologists distinguish community spaces – offline and online / virtual and
real? Has it affected how they approach identity formation through computermediated interactions? More broadly, how has the increasing prevalence of Web 2.0
technologies shaped the view of online communities as a product and producer of
culture? Has it served to shift research emphasis to the flows between online and
offline communication?
How does a researcher come to define individual, community, and global ideologies
surrounding technology use? What methods are used to pinpoint how people
perceive the use of technology, and how does that get transitioned into a broader
technology ideologies?
Follow-ups:
A cyborg is a being with both natural and artificial parts. Donna Haraway created
Cyborg Theory to contest traditional feminism, where identity is emphasized. She
claims that life flows from individuals and into the objects that they produce,
diminishing the distinction between natural and man-made characteristics. All
individuals are thus cyborgs.
Focusing research on Aboriginal Australians, Faye Ginsburg expanded on Arjun
Appardurai’s mediascape, not only recognizing the uneven exchanges of media
across boundaries, but also accounting for the interdependence of media practices
within local, national, and transnational contexts.
The Zapatistas of the Chiapa region in Mexico used online activism to fight for work,
land, power, education, and respect. It is a particularly poignant case of online
activism because a small group of poor, marginalized individuals were able to stand
up and be heard amongst major political powers though non-violent means. This
showcased an entrance into post-modern warfare.