(anthrop|techn)ology

In my quest for additional optimization I recently downloaded and tried the mac app Launchbar. In general I do not believe in loading down your computer with tons of software in an attempt to convince yourself that you are a ‘power user’ but I am going to make an exception for Launchbar. This thing rocks as a research tool. Let me tell you why.

For years I have been trying various work-arounds, add-ons, macros, and scripts to make it eaiser to get information about books and journal articles. For books I find myself constantly switching between my library’s catalog, Amazon, Google Books. For journals I am constantly moving between Google Scholar, various Big Content sites (JSTOR etc.), and my university’s clunky interface for getting me past content firewalls. Nothing has worked really well and I’ve resigned myself flipping through multiple tabs in a browser and — horror of horrors — taking my hand off the keyboard and on the mouse, sapping precious milliseconds from my research routine.

Launchbar as a ’search template’ function that makes it incredibly easy to to create custom searches of websites: you basically just copy the URL of a successful search, look around for the string you originally searched for in there, and replace it with an asterisk. To invoke the search you just do command-space bar (what used to be the Spotlight shortcut) and type the name of the search template you want to use and hit return. Then you type your search string, hit return again, and a new browser tab is open with the result.

The genius of launchbar is that it trains itself to guess what search template you are going to use. It only takes a search or two for it to learn that ‘g’ means ‘google’, ‘gb’ means ‘google books’, and so forth. This means that with just a few keystrokes, in any application, you can check out a book, the author’s departmental homepage, or pretty much anything else. No more tabbing between windows or clicking on search windows to get the cursor in a place where you can type your query in.

It speeds up searches by, like, orders of magnitude. For anything.

Apparently it can do lots of other things — like the coveted ‘send as an attachment to an email the PDF file I’m looking at now to someone in my addressbook’. If you are really into controlling your entire computer through a single command line then this is the app for you. But if you are just a normal person who wants to do normal things like locate and save Anna Tsing’s entire scholarly output — fliers for guest lectures on her campus and all — in under ten minutes then you will quickly find that this application is like crack and you will turn into one of the junkie guys in The Wire.

Serious.

I think the the thing that we’ve all figured out by now is that in virtual worlds people who do not share the same physical space get to interact with one another synchronously. This is true of phones as well. And videoconferencing. They are, in Schutz’s terminology, contemporaries but not consociates — they share the same time, but not the same space. This is in contrast to different generations of people who, for instance, view monumental architecture or spend time in the same coffee house (“Oscar Wilde sat here”). These people share the same space, but not the same time.

I think someone needs to write a science fiction novel about a virtual world or online game which suddenly and mysteriously becomes inhabited not by non-consociates, but by non-contemporaries: suddenly people from Elizabethan England and paleolithic Java are logging on to the game. Historians and anthropologists scramble to conduct interviews in chat rooms. And then… ok I don’t have a plot, just an idea. But it would be an interesting permutation on the whole space/time thing. So get on that, ok?

“Digg is restructuring”:http://www.dmwmedia.com/news/2008/01/24/digg-demonstrates-failure-open-collaborative-networks — part of the general Web 3.0 trend to create not just collaborative networks, but collaborative networks that help us flourish, which, it turns out, means structures that are regulated rather than ruthlessly games. I see this as similar somehow to the difference between early MMOGs, where inflation and gaming the system were seen as inevitable, to things like WoW, where ruthless policing has led to a more-or-less working system.

Damn, any feminization of the new mac laptop in “this review”:http://gizmodo.com/348361/our-macbook-air-review-matrix? Must write longer blog entry comparing this to seminal article “When computers were women”.

By Internet standards I have been around for quite a while, and while not a dinosaur on the scale of, you know, _David Weinberger_ or something ( :) )I’ve witnessed the rise and fall of a good many trends in the blogosphere and elsewhere. So while I don’t have a second brain located in my spike-studded tail, I do have a scar or two from being scraped by Internet faddism as its brushed past me and dug into my arm. I’m also in many ways a very traditional scholar who has a passion for paper. So while I am interested in the possibilities of cutting-edge technology I am not a bleeding-edge person or an unreserved enthusiast for change. So I think “Scott Palmer”:http://insidehighered.com/views/2006/08/15/palmer has more or less Got It when he writes:

Similarly, the emphasis that contributors to if:book seem to place on the “transparency” of scholarship and “immediacy” of publication made possible by digital delivery misses a very important point. There is much value to be found in not releasing one’s ideas to peers and public while those ideas are still half-baked. In many respects, the instantaneous delivery of “new media” writing is at odds with the solitude, meditation, and patience that are the hallmarks of traditional scholarship. Perhaps this is less true in if:book’s favored field (media studies), but it is manifestly not so for such disciplines as history, philosophy, and the like. Nor should it be. One can build a convincing case that, in the current age of instant analysis, self-absorbed “experts,” and ubiquitous 24/7 live blog feeds, the last thing that the academy needs is to embrace transparency and immediacy.

It reminds me of something Don Knuth once “said about email”:http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html:

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.

Roberto Rodriguez advocates the way that digital technology allows us to “create at the speed of thought”:http://agile2006.stikipad.com/public/show/MakingMoviesAndSoftwareAtTheSpeedOfThought but of course the question someone with a background in theater rather than movies asks is: what’s wrong with rehearsal again?

All of which to say: digital genres provide increased velocity of information. This creates a continuum of speeds from top to bottom to work from. Since we’ve never had the ability to manipulate information at speed before we find it productive to do so and find lots of ways of doing so that are productive. But that doesn’t mean faster or more networked is automatically better. What is valuable is having the continuum to cherry-pluck from. I love to blog, but there is also work that I keep very close to my chest until it is done. The irony of a universally-readable ‘world of first drafts’ (as David calls the blogosphere) existing side by side with a smaller much higher quality and much more inaccessible world of revised material that, like Debian, is released ‘when its ready’ is hard to miss. But hey that’s life.

My point is just that there is a middle ground between enthusiasts of ‘networked books’ and people who find them anethma. Some of us occupy that middle ground, and we are fairly confident everyone will end up there as well — or at least find the configuration of speeds and modes they find most sympatico. But please recognize that not everyone who is into creative commons licenses also wants to eliminate the bottom of things and force everyone to live at the top.

I’m just at the very edge of the F/OSS world, and so I’ve always enjoyed the uber-idea aggregators at O’Reilly. Tim’s stuff in particular has always been super resonant and mind-expanding for me. Their ability to intuit and articulate future trends is useful, at least to someone like me. Now there’s the “O’Reilly Radar Blog”:http://radar.oreilly.com/. I’m excited and hope it will live up to its potential.

Second, this brief post at Zengestrom.com on “object-centered social networking services”:http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2005/04/why_some_social.html puts its finger on something very important that I was hoping no one would articulate until I had time to write about it. Let me just say in a compressed, occulted form the idea that is driving my research on virtual worlds: Social networks are not so much object-centered as _project-centered_. The ability to provide a project to hang a society on is what makes game type virutal worlds more interesting than Second Life. But more on that later.

Since “Kerim’s touched on the subject”:http://keywords.oxus.net/archives/2005/03/16/race/ I’ll mention a few more things. First, “Troy Duster”:http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/people/duster (“CV”:http://sociology.fas.nyu.edu/attach/938) has a “nice, brief piece”:http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/03/17/ED263680.DTL on pharmacogenetics that is worth checking out. Of course, those of you who are more old-school may prefer “Buffon’s Of the varieties of the human species“:http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Chateau/6110/buffon/1varieties.htm. Of course there is indeed such a thing as the liberal knee-jerk reaction against _any_ account of the genetics of human difference. A more troubling issue is not anthropologists who are ignorant of genetics, but geneticists who apparently weren’t made to read any social science as undergraduates. Our tools for understanding biology are becoming more and more sophisticated, but the sophistication of the concepts some people use to analyze this data appears to be staying more or less the same. In the past — particularly during the AAA meeting fiascos — I felt that anthropology’s four field approach was growing more and more obsolete. Aracheologists were talking with GIS and imaging people, socio-culturals were interested in cultural studies, physical anthros were doing more and more bioinformatics and population genetics, and the linguists had always been sort of attached to philology. I thought: “that’s cool with me.” More and more, however, the archaeology I read seems to benefit from a deep engagement with the anthropological literature (_including_ the literature on ethnicity, thank you very much) and discussions like this make it clear that physical/biological and sociocultural types need to stick together if our ability to make good sense of biological data is going to keep up with out ability to collect it.

Ok I am done with race now. My obsession will now shift to the topic of strong societies and weak states and New Institutional Economics.

My class just finished our section on _What Does It Mean to be 98% Chimpanzee_ today. I admit there are some reasons not to like this book, but overall I find it timely (rather than cobbled together out of a bunch of articles), wide-ranging (rather than unfocused), trenchant (rather than ‘trollish’) and ‘important’ (i.e. I agree with Marks and hence he is preaching to the converted as far as I am concerned). I particularly enjoy when he completely looses it and starts totally flaming his opponent’s position:

To say that statement was “wrong” would imply that we really know the proportion [of Asian and African genes in Europeans] to be, say, 80:20, rather than 65:35. To call it wrong would be a massive understatement. It is _less_ than wrong; it is not _even_ wrong. (italics in original)

This week my intro anthro class is studying race. Explaining why ‘race’ and folk heredity are bad science but omnipresent cultural constructs is something that every anthropology professor has to do over and over and over again. I sometimes find the anthropological knee-jerk against race unsatisfying because it often takes the form of a a sort of blind prejudice “culture determines everything and biology determines nothing and if you don’t agree with me you’re racist” sort of deal. Also, a lot of the time anthropological critiques of race show how race is a cultural construct and differs from place to place. While this is true, it doesn’t answer most students’ question — are human beings naturally divisible into a small number of discrete groups with differing natural characteristics and abilities? I mean, _all_ beliefs are cultural constructs, but whether they are _accurate_ or not is another question. Contemporary natural science is a cultural construct with a complex historical genealogy — but that by itself doesn’t mean I should fear driving over bridges because the engineers ‘just had culture’. Even more thoughtful critiques of authority of bench science like those found in science studies tend to make students eyes glaze over — you need to spend a _lot_ of time in graduate school before you’d trust Latour over Mayr. So I like to teach Jonathan Marks’s “What Does It Mean to be 98% Chimpanzee”:http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9172.html, since Marks (who, god bless him, has “PDFs of all his articles free online”:http://personal.uncc.edu/jmarks/pubs/main.html) deals with issues of genetics straight on and attempts to distinguish genetic science from folk heredity. It’s a snarky, pugnacious book that is highly readable and manages to squeeze in interesting little bits on the history of physical anthropology as well. I’d highly reccomend it.

At any rate, I spend a lot of the class slowly unprying my student’s idea of race. “Why are so many african americans professional athletes?” becomes “Why are so many professional athletes african american?” (because there are millions of african americans and very very few professional athletes). Then I try a thought experiment: if excellence in athletics is explained by genetic endowment, perhaps Australia’s dominance in Rugby League is due to the Australian Rugby gene? Obviously not, say my students, since Australians are white, and our weirdo American intuitions only like genetic explanations for non-white people.

Then I point to “Amartya Sen’s”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen work in “Development as Freedom”:http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-829758-0 which demonstrates that African Americans are less likely to live to 45 (if they reach the age of fifteen, i.e. with adjustments made for infant mortality) than people in rural India and China. Also I believe — although this is off the top of my head with NO evidence to back it up — based on current projections any african american born today has a 30% chance of being incarcerated. Perhaps african americans have the ‘third world conditions in first world countries gene’? (By the way, the reference to Sen’s article “The Economics of Life and Death” is incorrect in at least my version of Development as Freedom — his argument on mortality rates is actually located “here”:http://www.citeulike.org/user/rex/article/116927) None of this is an _argument_ about race, of course — it’s just some thought experiments to limber up people’s heads. Marks does most of the genetics arguments.

One of my students, however, asked me for more information about the prison and mortality figures. Now, due to my sense of professionalism, I can’t go around inflicting my lefty personal leanings on my students, and so in class I try to be very balanced. However, I am now BLOGGING so to everyone who is reading this I reccomend “Angela Davis’s”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Davis latest book “Are Prisons Obsolete?”:http://www.sevenstories.com/Book/index.cfm?GCOI=58322100778090. It’s _only seven dollars_ if you order it from Seven Stories Press, who put it out. Come on, aren’t your NPR reflexes just aching to buy this _progressive political book_ by a _strong, independent woman of color_ from a _small, independent publisher_? You know you want to.

The other option, of course, is to read “Angela Davis’s 1992 interview with Ice Cube”:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0041-1191%281992%290%3A58%3C174%3ANH%3E2.0.CO%3B2-7 (JSTOR enabled only :( ). Word up.

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. -Walter Benjamin

Ka wa mamua and ka wa mahope are the Hawaiian terms for the past and future, respectively. But note that ka wa mamua (past) means the time before, in front, or forward. Ka wa mahope (future) means the time after or behind. These terms do not merely describe time, but the Hawaiians’ orientation to it. We face the past, confidently interpreting the present, cautiously backing into the future, guided by what our ancestors knew and did. -John Osorio

Can the subaltern google? A wikified reflection on the connection between open source publishing and making our research available to our research subjects by Kerim. Via the very good anthropologi.info. We’re building the anthropology blogosphere one entry at a time folks — keep at it!

Two revs ago, on an early form of this blog I remarked on the Kantian nature of the datasphere — making your words world-readable enforces a weirdly universal morality. A few quick dictums:

A lot of stuff we right is not intelligible to nonspecialists because it is technical. This is OK — the world needs technical works.

A well-roundeed scholar should be able to write more than technical works. So I think there is an important role that anthropologists play as ‘public intellectuals’ to make their work available to non-specialists.

We must always proceed as if our research informants were also our audience — increasingly, they are! We must always be thinking: what would one of my research subjects say about this? In the case of technical work, we must always say: what would an anthropologist from my (tribe | ethnic group | field site ) say about this?

We must do our best to make our work available to our research informants without sacrificing the needs of our discipline.

Academics have the best incentive structure in the world to publish free (as in speech) texts: we are paid teaching, not by royalties (modulo a few outliers). But one’s desirability as a professor (and hence earning potential) is proportional to one’s fame, which is furthered by being read. Ditto for your sense of achievement, popularity, and a bintillion other factors. Everything about academics points towards making our texts free.

Acid-free, bound copies of our work need to be stored in cool, dry places — treeware really is still the best way to ensure knowledge sticks around. We still need paper, and we need it distributed widely enough that a few catastrophic disasters don’t decapitate our cultural patromony. This is one need of our discipline.

There is more out there than anyone can possibly read. Certain anthropological brands have whuffie. We use this setup at a filter — we choose what we read based on where it was published, and the institutional affiliation and personal ties of the person who published it. Students of famous professors, articles in flagship journals, monographs published by prestiguous presses — these are the things we read.

With all due respect — and I honestly mean this — University Presses are unique beasties with some very strange characteristics. I say this based on my experience (which is limited, but has centered around a pretty well-known press). Let’s face it: I don’t really know anything about the publishing business. But I thought I’d at least give it a shot:

The staff is sometimes choosen based on their personal connections rather than their ability. People are rarely fired for poor performance. Office politics are even more personal and intransigent than in other sorts of offices. Strong resistance to innovation.

Production is inefficient. Basic editorial functions such as catching typos or poor grammar are increasingly ignored. Quality control is often an issue.

Presses respond to increased competition and increased cost by raising prices or taking further shelter in the protection of the subsidies afforded them by their parent universities. They do not respond by increasing efficiency.

Attempts to reform presses to be ‘more businesslike’ go afoul in two ways: first, a backlash against the idea that business is a good model for presses devoted to The Life of the Mind (a good objection in theory, but perhaps not appropriate given the state of academic publishing) second, poorly-implemented attempts at reform that misunderstand how businesses work. Demanding that a press ‘turn a profit’ is really not the lesson to learn from commercial publishing.

So with all due respect I have to wonder whether resistance to innovation by presses is sometimes misrecognized as an objective fact that ‘academic publishing is just a fundamentally impossible thing’.

Let’s rethink what we want from presses:

1) a small amount of high-quality treeware for archival purposes.

4) Distribution that is quick, cheap, and easy for less privileged people: cheap and ubiquitous delivery of treeware through the well-established subscription channels that 3rd world libraries have been using for some time now.

How do we do this? My argument — which is certainly not original — is to make the electronic text cannonical. Rather than produce the book first and then worry about getting it online, make the online article the definitive version of the text and then publish the book form wherever needed.

How do we do it?

Make presses imprints. Make them smaller, leaner and meaner — since they are essentially brands which provide high-quality texts, hire editors and (for lack of a better term) A&R people to sniff out the best new talent (there are issues here I’ll skip about whether they ought be academics or not). Then hire good designers and pay them what they’re worth to make sure they don’t quit. Focus on producing documents in standards-compliant formats (*ahem* xml) that can be transformed into PDF, HTML, RTF, SXW, and paper formats without too much difficulty.

Shift to print on demand. Consortiums of presses pool their resources to create a cafe-press type setup that can produce cheapo one-off treeware as well as more expensive high-quality archival stuff. Economies of scale will drive down the price of the books. Having a single point of publication means more volume, which means cheaper costs. It also means simpler distribution mechanisms. I know this is wishful thinking, and there are obstacles to overcome, but perhaps we could try thinking in these terms.

I think we might be suprised at what happens to the economics of distributing journals if we were to do this.

Distribute electronically. Distribute electornically. Distribute electronically. Charge if you need to offset hosting costs — that’s cool. Create new lines of ‘occaisional papers’ and charge by the paper. Innovative and forward looking services such as Australia National University’s ePrints service have heaps of great stuff on line even as we speak.

Buy stock in companies that make printers and toner, sell stock in companies that do photocopying. People are going to be printing out a buttload of stuff.

It could even be the case: if anyone could publish anything anywhere they wanted, perhaps quantity of publications would not matter as much. Perhaps quality would become a more important metric of someone’s publication record? Perhaps people would be driven to high-whuffie publications?

Perhaps we’d find monographs are not the best way to publish anymore? I have trouble going there, but is it truly unthinkable?

Perhaps people might start judging the quality of an imprint for “what its done for them lately” in addition to traditional (and potentially ossified) notions of prestige.

Perhaps we’de have 500 small presses instead of 50 big ones.

As I said, there are problems with this model, and it would change how publishing happens. But as those of you who follow the industry know, academic publishing is in a pretty sad state. The future would look different. Very different. But:

How much do we have to loose, and how much do we have to gain?

Jacques Derrida is dead.

Those of you with subscriptions to Project Muse can download and read my latest article, Copyright and Taboo in both HTML and PDF. The person who indexed it decided that the subjects of the paper were “Copyright — Philosophy,” “Taboo,” and “Melanesians — Social Life and Customs.” If you don’t have a subscription, the Creative Commons Licensed versions will be around “in a week” — although I’m always skeptical when academics claim that they’re going to get something done quickly. Anyhoo, let he who has ear hear.

Levi-Strauss and Joss Whedon have a fundamental disagreement. Levi-Strauss believes that myths are machines for stopping time. Joss insists that myths are time in motion. From this we can easily deduce that bad comic books are bad because they are dead.

During his travels in Amazonia Levi-Strauss was impressed by the way that the indigenous people he met modeled their life on their mythic ancestors. One narrowly escaped death thanks to the help of a parrot, and vowed henceforth not to eat parents. Neither did they. In the past they harvested food thus and so. So did their descendants. In the mythic past people married in such and such a way. So do they. Do this extent some might want to call their mode of life picaresque. Levi-Strauss’s vision of the new world was that of an enormous crystalline structure stretching from Patagonia to Alaska, in intricately detailed, organically grown set of stories which dictated life for the people who lived beneath them. He loved to collect ‘primitive’ art.

The structure was brittle however – it resisted novelty, and refused to incorporate history into its mastering narratives. For this reason Levi-Strauss called it ‘cold’. But things had changed since the original peopling of the Americas. The age of discovery led to a second migration from Old World to the New. Amazonians may have lived lives guided by myths, by their colonizers were ‘hot’ – discarding old beliefs for new ones, they learned and innovated. This was the sadness of the tropics as Levi-Strauss saw them: the irrevocable destruction of unique cultures at the hands of a homogenizing Western juggernaut that was as unpalatable as it was unremitting. History and myth did battle, and myth seemed destined to loose.

* * *

Metaphors are figures of speech in which two things are compared. The juxtaposition allows us to see what connects them. When they are good they delight us with their unexpected correspondences. Metaphors such as ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer is like an omelets: they both delight us because they are folded over’ enrich our language an imagination. This is why Ricoeur called them ‘living’ metaphors and made them central to his account of how language innovates and changes. It’s also why he called commonplace metaphors ‘dead’ – they had nothing to teach us.

Joss Whedon has always claimed that Buffy The Vampire Slayer is metaphorical and he is right, but in reverse. Tales of monsters have always been effective metaphors that help us understand ourselves better, whether it be the controlling sexuality of vampires or the rapacious, uncontrollable appetites of werewolves. But what Joss doesn’t seem to get is that Buffy’s monsters are not metaphorical, they are real. Joss’s metaphors live because they fold back on themselves. In Dracula the symmetrical transfer of blood becomes a metaphor for emotional intimacy: Dracula acquired his three wives by sucking them dry, while Lucy’s three suitors demonstrate their loyalty by transferring their blood to her. Mina’s position in the novel because it crystallizes in metaphorical form the battle of desire (vampiric power) and duty (marital love). But Buffy is not a monster movie which functions as an allegory of adolescence. High school is not like a monster movie – it literally is a monster movie. The humanity in Angel and Spike that Buffy lays bare is a literal one. Like an omelet, Buffy delights us because it is folded over. Like a good metaphor, it is vibrantly alive.

In Buffy Joss harnesses myth to time. Would anyone argue that the rich inventory of stories and situations that Joss draws on are not mythic? The epic battles, romantic entanglements, and menagerie of bad guys are drawn from our collective imagination. But unlike Levi-Strauss’s Amazonians, Joss’s characters are not destined to replay myth after myth in a never-ending repetition. Buffy is not a sit com because its situation changes. People learn from their past mistakes, they regain their soul, they decide they like girls. In a word, they grow up. By realizing an inventory of mythic images in the context of a narrative arc, Joss uses them propel and motivate the change in his characters. In doing so, he implicitly disagrees with Levi-Strauss. In Levi-Strauss, cold myth is cold and history is hot. In Buffy, myth is the tools employed to drive time, not to stop it.

* * *

It’s for this reason that Joss might agree with the argument made in the title of Marshal Sahlins’s Historical Metaphor and Mythical Realities. Sahlins’s point is that it is the myths – meaning here the general cultural templates that we employ in our lives – that are enduring and real and our lives are instantiations or metaphors of them. Thus life is a series of metaphors of the mythic ensemble we employ to construct our worlds and make sense of our world. But Sahlins is not one of these cold-theorists. He argues for a feedback loop between history and myth. Universal myths realize themselves in circumstances so laden with particularity that their their manifestation gets tweaked, and the resulting instantiation of the myth then gets fed back into the mythic structure, altering it. Thus myths and history are not opposed, but in a dialectical relationship, feeding off of each other and their mutual morphings.

From this we can see two facts. First, Buffy Season Finale Five really really rawked not just because of how creepy Joel Grey was, but because of its literal instantiation of mythic themes. Second, Buffy has worked its way into our collective imagination that no story of vampires, much less female adolescence, would ever be the same. Although a historically existent television show, Buffy is now one of our mythical realities.

* * *

All of which is to say that we are all bricoleurs, and that bricolage – the creative rearrangement of a given set of elements to deal with this or that problem – is how all human beings operate. And no where is this more clear than in the case of oral performance. Contra generations of British classicists who insisted that the Iliad was Art while all that colonial chanting was so much hogwash. But as Albert Lord has pointed out, the Iliad is essentially a transcription of the epic oral poetry which people in the Balkans still practice. And, bricoleur like, its performers were almost certainly expected to make make every particular performance of its myths slightly different. Today philanthropists get their names on buildings, but back then their relatives just got spliced into the catalog of ships. A fully customizable custom, the Iliad is much a piece of bricolage as (and this is the point) everything else is.

Of course, there are bards and there are bards. I’m sure that Homer, Eminem like, would crush most comers in an archaic Greek rap battle while oxen-eyed Brittany Murphy eagerly waits in the wings. He won because he was good at freestyle, and it’s all freestyle. Art, like life, is all about the artfulness with which we apply general mythic, metric, and meaningful categories to our own life.

I feel sorry for the other guys – the guys who can’t pull off the caesura and can’t remember what’s to the left of the CourtTV scene on Achilles’s shield. But there’s nothing cosmically different from them and Homer. They don’t wallow in the aporias of the bricolesque. They’re just bad story tellers. Like uninformative metaphors, their stories are simply dead.

It’s true that there are interesting tensions between the unchanging situations of situation comedies and the urge to create a story arc that inevitable begins to manifest itself once the characters get really interesting. This is, after all, what explains the unraveling of Moonlighting. But this is a tension of myth and history is endemic to humanity and can be resolved in any number of ways. Excellent artists like Joss Whedon, Alan Moore, and Homer make this tension fruitful. Their realization of our myths is, like a good metaphor, startling and delightful. Their juxtaposition of elements kicks ass. Bad comics are bad because they fail to do something new and interesting with the mythical elements which are their patrimony. They seem superficial not because of the limitations of their genre, but because of the limitations of their artists. And this is something we’ve known intuitively for a very long time indeed.

In honor of Bastille Day I’d like a take a moment to rant and rave about how lousy translations of French are. It used to be that French was considered a model of elegant, artful prose. Somehow these days people have come to associate French and French theory jargony, impassable prose. And, to be fair, sometimes this is because the French philosophers that Americans like to read these days write jargony, impassale prose. But I think its also worth pointing out how many of these wounds are self-inflicted – a lot of times we fail to do justice to the prose that our Francophone colleagues hand us. Consider, for instance, the violence done to the following titles:

1. Six leçons sur le son le sens: This is one MSLV loves to rant about. Jakobson’s wonderfully mellifluous title should obviously have been translated as Six Sessions on Sounds and Sense. But no. We get Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning. Blech.

2. Ce que parler veut dire: Bourdieu’s collected essays on the intricate ways that language and power are intertwined, and the way that how and what we speak embeds us in structures of social inequality. A simple and literal gloss of the French would have caputed the ambiguity of the French title: What Speaking Means. But what do we get instead? Language and Symbolic Power. And we wonder why people consider Academics to be jargonheads?

3. La métaphor vive: Paul Ricoeur’s masterful volume focuses on ‘the fundamental metaphoricity of language’. While ‘dead’ metaphors become cliched, new and unexpected metaphors (‘living’ ones) let us see the connections between things we thought previously unrelated. In doing so metaphors push the envelope of language, keeping it new and fresh. Ricoeur’s book is meant to remind us that speaking is fundamentally a poetic, artistic activity and not simply an engineering feat of accurately denoting things in the world. It’s not suprising then, that the title of Ricoeur’s book is Living Metaphors. Except, of course, it’s not. It’s The Rule of Metaphor. Why? How? Hello? The book is about the way language innovates by violating rules and expectations. Sigh.

4. Le sens pratique: I find this one particularly infuriating. This book by Bourdieu attempts to reconcile a Levi-Straussian structuralism with Sartre’s insistence on the existential agency of actors (I mean, who wasn’t trying to do this post-68?). He gets there by applying Heidegger’s account of human being-in-the-world. His book – entitled “Practical Sense” (which harks back to classical takes on prudence and phronesis, by the way) is about how a certain kind of embodied, non-cognitive disposition can produce logically consistent and observable results. But the book’s title in English is ‘the Logic of Practice’. When the whole point is that practice isn’t logical. It’s practical. It may not seem like a big deal, but if you’ve read a lot of Bourdieu in English you may think my description of le sense pratique is completely screwy. One reason is that I could be wrong (though I don’t think I am) but partially its because the weirdo reception of Bourdieu due to things like these bizarre title translations. [Pause]. Ok I think I’m better now. Thanks for listening.

5. Pensee Sauvage: This is one I’ve already mentioned in several location. The title is an untranslateable pun which means simultaneously “savage thought” and “wild pansies” and, just to mess with you, the French edition has a huge picture of a pansy on the cover. So admittedly the English language translation as The Savage Mind was never going to capture the original French title. Still, Levi-Strauss’s own suggestion – riffing off of Ophelia – of Pansies for Thought would have been more rocking.

Happy Bastille Day everyone!

It’s become clear to me that the ‘cultural difference’ section of first chapter is going to have to be expanded and that its focus will be the critique of Latour’s ’symmetric anthropology’ that has been boiling in my head for sometime. In fact, if properly played out, I see this as being the logical underpinning of the dissertation. Although difficult to write, it connects much more closely with the various issues that I deal with in different chapters. The basic idea of the critique – which I won’t go into here now because I’m not exactly sure how the details work out – is that it operates in bad faith and misrecognizes what happens when we do fieldwork and right ethnography. There are not “different beliefs” between anthropologists and their research subjects (since shared understanding is a condition of possibility for ethnographic research). There are only “different stakes” – different problems. Approaching it this way moves us back to questions not of ontological difference, but of differing motives for entextualization (and hence Weber’s problematic of value-relevance and his ‘even a Chinese’ assertion). When in doubt: Weber.

The idea is to get the political mileage of Latour’s current recasting of cultural relativism that people find so comforting in a more coherently theorized way, and in doing so to relate Latour’s work to the now-extinct (though relevant and unsolved) issues in kinship theory. Linking, in other words, The Pasteurization of France with Smith’s classic article On Segmentary Lineage Systems. In doing so I hope to re-link with Carsten in a pincer maneuver which pays homage to, while simultaneously taking the wind out of the sails of, David Schneider.

Got that?

Ok ok neither do I, exactly. But it’ll get clearer in the next couple of days. At least – it better get clearer. T Minus 22 and counting.

Fellow UofC anthro Yari now has a blog. Except unlike me, she is blogging from the field. I’ve never heard of anyone doing this before. I barely know her – I think we met at a party and I answered a question she had about Human Relations protocols at the UofC – but wish her luck in her twin roles as blogger and fieldworker. Go Yari!

A few years ago I was visiting some friends in Portland, Oregon on the 4th of July. I’ve never been a big fireworks person – they’re loud and so I tried to focus on the barbecue. But my friends of course went nuts. So shortly after sundown I walked out with them to a local park with a public tennis court and we proceeded to light off large amounts of incredibly illegal and unbelievable explosives.

Shortly thereafter some cops on the other side of the park pulled up in their big cop car and brought it to a slow idle. The message seemed to be pretty clear: “come on guys, we’ve got a really busy night. Take it somewhere else where it’s not so obvious, or else we’ll have to get out of the car and hassle you and nobody wants to go through the trouble of doing that.” It didn’t take long for us to get the message. We dropped what we were doing and made our way unceremoniously towards the bushes. Everyone else but Jim, who stood there, staring contemplatively at the massive, artillery like firework that lay at his feet. “Jim? Jim! Come on! What are you doing?!” we asked urgently.

“I’m trying to decide whether I want to possess,” he said.

My brain exploded.

Why?

Jim was a Federal DA, which meant that he spent most of his time defending bank robbers and marijuana growers. He was trying to decide whether to take the fireworks with him or not, but was keenly aware of the difference between being found in the possession of illegal fireworks as opposed to just being caught by the cops running away. What is the difference, legally? I have no idea. Perhaps their different infringements under the law? Maybe they’re violations of the same law, but you have a stronger case in the judge’s eyes if you didn’t actually have them on you when you were caught. The only person who really knew was Jim because – and this is the point – he was imagining ‘what is happening on the tennis court’ from the point of view of a future series of events in which people reflected on ‘what happened on the tennis court’.

I’m calling this ‘prolepsis’.

Understanding how people understand the present from the point of view of what we’ll say about it in the future is something that we do all the time. Lawyers, as I’ve indicated, do this professionally. Sometimes – when you’re negotiating with them, for example – you get the feeling that what they’re really doing is toeing the line that an imaginary future judge would want them to. Presidents brood on their legacy and how they’ll be viewed in ‘history’. And at some level, we all go about our daily lives with some sense of the forward leaning slope of our biography – we don’t just enroll in College to get a good job someday, we unscrew the top of the mayonnaise jar because we anticipate putting the knife into the mayonnaise as part of a proleptic, forward-looking sandwich-making project. But the particular linguistic and interactional way in which people interact with each other in the present with an eye to future descriptions of the event is something that is stirring in the air here in my department. I’m not sure exactly how it’ll shape up – right now we’ve just got one professor and a couple of the more, shall we say, indoctrinated students. It’s something I’m interested in, since I study lawyers and negotiations, where this sort of stuff happens all the time.

It’s an interesting problem because in the last thirty years anthropologists and linguists have gotten very very good at understanding how people work together in conversation to create a coherent sense of ‘what happened’ in interaction that can be described and redescribed and narrated and renarrated. So we know about how to imagine and reimagine our present from the point of view of what has come before, and the uses to which we put the past in the present. There’s been a ton of stuff written about that.

Now at some level these two things – the imagination of how we’ll view the present in the future and how in the present we imagine and deploy the past – are just two sides of the same coin. And its most general, human life is all about the creative deployment of our past lives in our attempts to shape our future together. But still, I admit: prolepsis.

Anyway, that’s why my head exploded.

Here’s a paper I presented at the AAAs this year. I retain copyright for two reasons: first, I’m not that partible and second, I’m too lazy to whip up a Creative Commons license at the moment. Don’t worry – I won’t get after you if you send it around. Don’t dare plagariaze it or fail to attribute my authorship. Google will find you out and strike you down.

The proper citation for this paper is:

Alex Golub. Copyright and Taboo. Unpublished paper presented at “Culture’s Open Sources” panel of the 2003 American Anthropological Association annual meetings, 22 November 2003.

One hundred and fifty years ago, the going theory was that non-Europeans were confused. They had a ‘primitive mentality’ which could not clearly distinguish between things which were in fact distinct. Authors like Frazer and Levy-Bruhl argued that ‘natives’ confused nature and culture, humans and inanimate objects, and cause and effect. Beliefs about the efficacy of blood, fingernails, and hair in ensorcelling the people they were once physically part of were based on erroneously simplistic principles of ‘contiguity’ and ‘association’ which science had, luckily, worked its way past. One of the most common and enduring of these sorts of tropes revolves around cameras. ‘The natives’ would not allow whites to take their picture because cameras could ’steal their souls’. The imperial explanation was simple: these people had a ‘primitive mentality’ and confused their soul with their image A subject of the British Empire or a self-sufficient American pioneer, on the other hand, came from a highly evolved, scientific society. They could tell the difference between a picture and the thing it depicted. Their thoughts were clear and distinct, freed from the miasma of an earlier, less discerning age.

It may come as a bit of a surprise, then, to consider the events of 8 April 2002 when Tipper Gore gave a speech at American University in Washington DC. During the course of the speech, a student protestor began video taping Mrs. Gore and was asked to stop. When he refused a scuffle ensued in which he was handcuffed, led away, and the tape confiscated. Amongst the charges laid against him by the disciplinary committee at AU was possession of stolen property – by which was meant the image and likeness of Tipper Gore.

It is ironic to note that now, a century and a half after Frazer, American proponents of strict intellectual property and copyright laws appear to operate on principles that are almost eerily similar to those described in the Golden Bough. Now don’t get me wrong – I would never tarnish the reputation of the world’s indigenous people by ascribing to them the same level of civilizational development as Tipper Gore. But I would like to use this incident as a way to begin bridging two topics of interest to me: topics that I’ll gloss under the headings of ‘copyright’ and ‘taboo’. How can we deepen our understanding of the American cultural underpinnings of copyright through an engagement with the more traditionally anthropological literatures such as that of taboo and Melanesian personhood? In this paper I’ll argue that copyright and taboo are alike because they are both responses to the same existential predicament: the fact that we are always individuals separate from others, and yet our lives are always caught up with those of other people. In realm of taboo, this troubling confusion is figured in terms of the body. Copyright figures this dilemma in terms of an individual’s creative output.

Let me start to make sense of that last assertion. The subject of taboo, course, is one of anthropology’s classic tropes. In this paper, I will limit myself to Valerio Valeri’s account of taboo presented in his magisterial The Forest of Taboos. Valeri grounds taboo in the embodied nature of human subjectivity. Human subjects are “symbolically constituted, but necessarily located in the body” and, of course, “the body is not only a substance to be… turned into grist for the symbolic mill, but also a constant source of nonsense undermining the affirmation of sense”. This ‘nonsense’ – the resisting, inarticulate physical nature of biology – haunts the subject. Thus, Valeri writes, “the body, particularly the constantly moving and transforming body which we experience in its processes of ingestion, excretion, reproduction, transformation, and decay” is the strongest expression of this fact. As a result, “the phenomenon of taboo and the various dangers that motive it must be apprehended at the points of articulation and confrontation of the subject and the conditions – symbolic and presymbolic – of its existence.”

Thus, on the one hand, we recognize the immutable rootedness of our selves in our body while on the other we are keenly aware that our bodies are what lawyers refer to as ‘prior art’: amalgamations of other people’s substances – our father’s semen, our mother’s milk, the meat of the animals we have killed and eaten. You are, after all, ‘what you eat’. And just as our bodies of others have become separated from them so as to become part of ours, bits of our bodies such fingernails, hair, feces, urine, blood can be separated from us and come into the possession of other people. We have issues about all of this – and it is these issues which Valeri takes as central to notions of taboo.
The troubling non-congruence between our physical bodies and our selves that Valeri takes to be the origin of taboo has long been a topic for Melanesians and Melanesianists. Marilyn Strathern in particular has famously argued that where ‘the west’ sees individuals whose interaction creates social relationships, ‘Melanesians’ see social relationships who interactions create individuals. To Melanesians, individuals are merely the physical nexus through which relations of consanguinity and affinity run, and people are ‘partible’ in so far as their labor and self – the food they’ve grown, the fluid of their bodies, the shell valuables of their clan – can leave their body to create new relationships.

You need not endorse Strathern’s formulations (or her prose style, for that matter) to buy into this – you only have to live in Papua New Guinea. In the Porgera valley, where I did my fieldwork, people were all about pigs. In Porgera, a young man pays brideprice in pigs (among other things) to his future in-laws so that he can marry their daughter. He gets the pigs from his parent’s siblings (who, cringing, I’ll refer to as ‘aunts’ and uncles’) – pigs that they painstakingly raised and fed with food they grew. The boy gives the pigs to his inlaws to detach their daughter from their household – he is depriving them of her own future work by making her a part of his household. At the same time this union creates a connection between groups (Ipili say women are ‘a bridge which men go across’). The aunts and uncle’s subjectivities thus have a certain porcine fungibility which they use to create a relationship – a new marriage – with the other group. The physical excresence of this marriage is, of course, the newlywed’s child. If the two groups ever fight, this is the child who will mediate between them. An in fact the bridewealth the couple will receive for the marriage of their first female child is traditionally divided up amongst the people who provided their original bridewealth.

I don’t want to go into this too much, or needlessly exoticize Papua New Guineans. In fact, my goal is just the opposite. In anthropology, we have a tendency to draw a division between ‘the west’ and ‘Melanesia’ – ‘they’ have partible personhood and ‘we’ imagine ourselves as ‘possesive individuals’. In fact, anthropological critiques of what Marshall Sahlins calls ‘native anthropology of western cosmology’ seek to undermine our assumptions by showing how culturally specific they are – we’re prudish, but they (over in Samoa) are much more open about sex, and so forth. On this account, it’s their difference from us that makes the critique powerful. And this is how it goes in critiques of copyright law, which typically demonstrate that the cultural underpinnings of copyright law involve notions of possessive individualism and the romantic creative genius which are historically and culturally specific. I’d like to propose an opposite strategy – rather than set Melanesian notions of personhood in opposition to ‘our’ individualism, we would do better to find the similarities between Melanesians and contemporary Americans. As the example of Tipper Gore has shown, you don’t have to look very far a field before in order to see lawyers behaving in ways that we associate with ‘the natives’.

I would argue that Americans are keenly aware of the way that their selfhood is anchored in their body but can circulate out of their control. Think again of the Romantic genius whose artistic work is so uniquely an expression of their subjectivity that the music and poetry they produce is quite literally a part of them – this looks very much like partible personhood to me. Seen from the point of view of taboo, then, copyright derives its cultural legitimacy from the strange contradiction that creative output, like hair or fingernails, is at once deeply a part of one’s own integral subjectivity, and yet can circulate out of one’s own control. The same relations of contiguity and association that leads people to collect the hair of the person they seek to ensorcel underwrites the cultural logic that legitimates the Recording Industry Association of America’s attempts to bust down Kazaa.

If our physical integrity relies on forces that lie outside out body, the same thing could be said about our textual coherence. Even if liberal political philosophy and law paints us as group of freely associated individuals, the literature on taboo and the practice of bloggers suggests a more embracing view. Everyone who has spent time on the internet knows numerous stories which make plain how traumatic it can be to live in a world where one’s biography is world readable and our textual selves start circulating out of their control. Indeed, if there’s one thing we’ve learned from blogs, it’s how keenly people dislike it when other people take narrative control of their lives. As in physical taboo, the big bugbear is sex. A college student reads in horror as the man she has dated dreams in his blog of having tantric sex with her in the library stacks and measures the success of his dates with her based on how close he comes to receiving a hand job. A young man blogs his one night stand only to find the guy he hooked up with has left a rather unflattering remark in the comments. A young woman tentatively exploring her own bisexuality finds that her girlfriend has posted graphic descriptions of their erotic encounters on her website. Are you squirming yet? That’s my point.

And finally there is open source software. You don’t have to be a genius to realize that Sourceforge is at some level an enormous gift economy with prestations flying in and out of CVS repositories quicker than you can say ‘Taonga’. But it’s also clear that a cross-cultural focus on selfhood will reveal a partibility of personhood in people’s use, appreciation of, and contribution to code that demonstrates a lived experience of life with others and the nature of their mutual entanglements. And what else are the licenses and standards of the open source movement than codes of conducts – taboos – that govern how the partible bits of ourselves called ‘code’ circulate between and are internalized by others?

And this brings me back to Tipper Gore. Gore’s inability to distinguish between herself and her representation is not surprising, given that our legal regime’s understanding of what it means to have a textual existence that exceeds one’s corporeality is not much more nuanced than simply ’stealing souls’. But people who are living with and through technology – like people who live with and through the animals they hunt, and the food they grow – fashion their own taboos and their own sense of limits. We may always have issues at the places where we stop and the world begins, but how we deal with this lack of limit varies. Although hedged about with taboo and slightly swine-centric, Porgerans have created a lifeway that makes eminent sense of their intimate articulations. Can we say the same about copyright in our country today? And in closing, I’d like to ask: who is the true savage?

I’m excitedly working on a paper that I’ll be giving at the AAAs that will serve as the hinge between my interests in Melanesia and technology. It’s going very well. Since most people present will be technicists, I feel like I’m a little defensive about invoking concepts such as ‘taboo’ and am trying to write in such a way as to convince people of its relevance. Still, I have to know where to stop. Consider, for instance:

“Taboo, of course, is a subject of constant interest to anthropologists because it is a continual concern to the vast majority of humans on the planet – those of you present who do not consider yourself so concerned can prove me wrong by, for instance, waiting for your mother to menstruate, having sex with her, and then killing and eating her.”

This sentence, for instance, is too outrageously over-the-top to let disappear entirely but too wierdo to include in a formal paper. I guess that’s why god made blogs ;!)