My next post will be more text-heavy, but until then: my short meditation on comics.

Rine

Rine Vieth is a PhD candidate at McGill University. Their current research explores how the UK asylum system assesses religious belief, they work towards a more curious (and kind) academy, and they live in Tiotiá:ke/Mooniyaang (Montréal) with their partner and cat.

Their website is here: https://rinevieth.carrd.co/

rinevieth.carrd.co/

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Digital Migration

By Patricia G. Lange

Migration patterns have long drawn the attention of anthropologists. Contemporary humans and their ancestors have been running across the globe for millennia. As it happens, humans run all over the internet too. In the context of mediated environments, to migrate away from a site means that participants stop using it and instead move on to explore and interact on new internet vistas. The digital migration story as seen through the lens of socially-motivated YouTubers reveals a dynamic kaleidoscope of patterns that shed light on human mediation. A multi-year ethnography of vloggers revealed nuanced and consistent digital migration tendencies. Key questions of interest include: 1) When do people deploy multiple forms of media and “swap them” in and out for social reasons? 2) Under what circumstances do participants more permanently leave one site and go to another, or several others? and 3) How might anthropologists build a collective conversation about digital migration patterns?

The dazzling array of media that is available to many people around the world produces what Madianou and Miller (2012) refer to as a “polymedia” environment. According to this concept, when people have access to media such that price, availability, and digital skills are not factors in deciding uptake of a technology or influencing consistent usage, people “socialize” media. In other words, aspects of dealing with relationships and sociality more centrally influence how and why a particular medium is selected. People choose from a “plurality of media which supplement each other and can help overcome the shortcomings of a particular medium” (Madianou and Miller 2012: 8). Madianou and Miller studied people who were not economically privileged. Yet, they had access to a “plethora” of media, and their decisions about which medium to use revealed much about their relationships and sociality. For example, people might choose email over a phone call to avoid unpleasant confrontation in a particular relationship. Participants use social and emotional criteria to select particular media from an array of choices that are equally available and plausible for them to use. 

Media choice is at times influenced by personal factors that index issues of control. Research on young people on YouTube suggested that participants tended to display “media dispositions” in that they strongly preferred certain media and avoided others (Lange 2014). For example, in a study of “digital youth,” one study participant said she would never post of a video of herself on YouTube. She said, “I don’t really like the idea of anyone in the world being able to watch me do something.” Despite being able to participate on YouTube infrastructurally and economically, her media disposition clearly showed that recording YouTube videos of herself was not desirable. Her reasoning suggests that what appears to be a personal choice was also influenced by aspects of sociality. She preferred to control her image vis-à-vis larger populations by withholding it. Ultimately, she preferred to engage with YouTuber as a viewer.

Interview narratives from a study of adult users of YouTube who used the site socially in its early years, also reveal instances of how participants took advantage of alternative types of media to “overcome the shortcomings” of YouTube. My ethnographic film, Hey Watch This! Sharing the Self Through Media (2020) was filmed at grass roots meet-ups across the United States (and one in Canada) in which observations of participants’ interactions as well as ethnographic interviews revealed important information about YouTube sociality through video. 

In the film, interviewees describe how they used the live video chat service of Stickam to deepen their social connections and simply have fun with other YouTubers. Stickam (2005 – 2013) was a live video chat service that enabled participants to see and communicate with other people simultaneously through video feeds. It offered a limited number of “boxes” or windows containing the live feed of several participants, as well as an option for text chat. In one meet-up in Toronto depicted in the film, a live Stickam chat session was displayed on a very large screen, thus enabling in-person participants to enjoy interacting with remote YouTubers who could not attend the gathering.

Interviewees in my ethnographic study noted that they enjoyed participating on Stickam because it felt more “live” or present than YouTube’s asynchronous atmosphere. Interviewees also noted that responses times were far more rapid on Stickam than on YouTube, in terms of receiving feedback on videos. Instead of waiting for two or three weeks for feedback on a posted video, YouTubers could get responses immediately and interactively through video chat. Burgess and Green (2018 [2009]: 101) made a similar observation and characterized Stickam as a “supplement” or “plug in” to YouTube, thus illustrating the “polymedia” aspect of YouTube and Stickam.

Unlike other documentaries that are character driven, Hey Watch this! is constructed in a modular way around themes of YouTubers’ experiences when using an array of media. Two themes that clearly emerged from the interview narratives were reflections on where participants saw the “real me” located across different types of media, and their views on the status of their YouTube participation over time. Some YouTubers felt that they could be more their “real selves” on Stickam as opposed to YouTube, which felt less live and was more public. Interviewees expressed concern about having their videos exposed to hostile audiences and “haters,” or people who post mean-spirited or pointless comments or insults. Initially, their use of Stickam represented a pattern more consistent with being in a polymedia environment. Later on, however, their concerns about YouTube and its monetization trajectory prompted them to greatly reduce their participation on the site. They began migrating to other social media such as Twitter.

Hey Watch This! documents the results of a multi-year ethnography. Although it is not always feasible, long-term ethnographic projects offer certain advantages. Sociologist Henri Lefebvre (2004) draws on a rubric he termed “rhythm analysis” to analyze cycles or patterns of behavior, a lens which is productively applied in studying internet migratory patterns. A long-term engagement enables the ethnographer to see large-scale patterns or cycles of interaction that are not necessarily visible when studying a group over a few short months. For example, when I began filming the documentary, YouTubers were very excited about using the site in social ways, to bond with other people in shared “communities of interest” such as those who wished to learn about video, or who shared similar difficult life experiences. By the end of the filming, interviewees expressed dismay over YouTube’s highly commercialized environment and told me they were no longer participating on the site with the same intensity. A long-term engagement helps document the kinds of cycles or patterns that Lefebvre saw as important for understanding the inner workings of society. In this the case the cycle began with initial excitement for the site, proceeded to exhibit a high point of feelings of community with other YouTubers, and then saw a decline a few years later as interest in the site cooled and people moved on to other social media.

A glance at some of their YouTube channels confirmed their self-observations about their dwindling participation on the site. Nuances about digital migration emerged from their narratives. Whereas some participants engaged in “radical migration” in which they made a complete break with YouTube, others engaged in a more “conceptual migration” in which they cooled or stopped using YouTube for the most part, but they brought the “concept” or idea of YouTube sociality to a new site, in this case Twitter (Lange 2019). Mechanisms that support a conceptual migration to Twitter from YouTube included retaining their YouTube channel name on the new site, interacting with other YouTube participants on Twitter, providing links on YouTube to their Twitter channel, and continuing to talk about YouTube and other shared video-related themes of interest on their new social media site.

In a conceptual migration, participation on a particular site such as YouTube may not be completely severed but finds its way onto a new site. One interviewee insisted that his lack of activity on YouTube and his move to Twitter was not a “migration.” He continued to see Twitter as something to use “in addition to” YouTube. Yet, he removed many of his YouTube videos and no longer posts there. Nevertheless, his view clarifies and supports the analysis that YouTube as an idea retains purchase on a new site conceptually. The idea of YouTube never quite goes away even though from a participatory standpoint, a migration has occurred because YouTube is no longer used with consistent intensity.

Characterizing these patterns and discovering additional nuances will be important for future studies in digital ethnography. YouTubers also spoke of what I refer to as “in-migration” in which people do not leave a site, but rather start a new account within the same site that they feel better reflects their current interests and media persona (Lange 2019). On YouTube, this means opening a new channel and posting new types of videos. Another conceptualization is the idea of “virtual diaspora,” in which a site closes and its participants “flee to other virtual worlds” (Boellstorff 2008: 197). Participants may be very upset and long for a new platform in which to interact. Boellstorff (2008: 197-198) refers to this configuration as a “virtual diaspora.” He also notes that “lesser forms” of virtual diaspora appear when a site simply becomes less popular and participants leave for another site, again illustrating the notion of digital migration.

Use of the word “diaspora” in this context may initially be somewhat controversial for some scholars. To anthropologists, diaspora connote groups of people who are violently or at least suddenly separated from their homeland to which they may never return. Notably, it is certainly possible that groups who are suddenly ejected from their online home world might feel a profound sense of loss and confusion. Clearly strong feelings may accompany the loss of online sites, which may represent a very important social life line for dispersed individuals, especially marginalized people who rely on internet sites to find crucial social support. Loss of an online, anchoring site might well prompt people to experience intense social mourning. Whether such patterns constitute “diaspora” in the emotional sense must be studied in each case. An umbrella term such as digital migration is arguably useful for encompassing many different forms of migration and emotional responses that appear. 

Moving forward, it is important that anthropologists continue a collective conversation about online migration patterns and come to terms with nuances that are revealed. A long-term approach is beneficial in this context given that it may take several years for migratory patterns to be fully revealed. In my observation, intensive participation for some of the YouTubers lasted a few years before they migrated away. Saying good-bye to one site may index a permanent break with most social media, or it may mean saying hello to a new site. Studying such patterns is of value to anthropologists who wish to understand the cultural, social, technical, economic, and other factors that influence how people to choose to share the self through media. My anthropological antennae are receiving strong signals that digital migration will be a fascinating terrain of study for years to come.

References

Boellstorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Burgess, Jean, and Joshua Green. 2009. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 

Constine, Josh. 2013. “Scene Kids Cry as Streaming Site Stickam Shuts Down.” TechCrunch. January 31. http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/31/scene-kids-cry-as-streaming-site-stickam -shuts-down/. 

Lange, Patricia G. 2019. Thanks for Watching: An Anthropological Study of Video Sharing on YouTube. Louisville, CO: University Press of Colorado. https://upcolorado.com/university-press-of-colorado/item/3737-thanks-for-watching

Lange, Patricia G. 2020. Hey Watch This! Sharing the Self Through Media. 54 minutes. https://vimeo.com/394007182

Madianou, Mirca, and Daniel Miller. 2012. Migration and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.


Lefebvre, Henri. 2004. Rhythmanalysis. London: Continuum.

“Stickam.” n.d. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stickam.


Guest Contributor

This account is used to upload posts by guest contributors to the blog. For more information about contributing to anthro{dendum} please see our contact page.

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During the past few months colleges and universities all over the world have shifted our teaching online because of the COVID 19 Pandemic. While many in our community have taught extraordinary online courses for decades, both because of the needs of rural and remote communities and because of the increasing global neoliberalization of higher education, many of us have not.

As we scramble to put courses online for the first time ever in extremely short time periods (many of us were asked to have online courses up and running in less than two days once our employers announced the switch to online teaching) and at a time when we are worried for the health of our communities, our families, our friends, our students, our colleagues, and the millions of strangers who are facing this pandemic globally, we may need a little help.

Taking very seriously the clear and compelling calls to resist the fiction that we can become brilliant virtual teachers overnight and the cogently articulated worries that this pandemic and the rapid push for online instruction may have long term consequences for higher education given the many companies, state legislators, and administrators who have been pushing for pedagogy without faculty for decades now, we have created a platform for anthropologists (and those anthropology adjacent) to create and share 10-30 minute videos and accompanying texts and pedagogical resources (slides, film clips, lesson plans/assignments suitable for online submission) as a way to supplement, enliven, and collectivize the work we are all already doing to take our courses online.

we have created a platform for anthropologists (and those anthropology adjacent) to create and share 10-30 minute videos and accompanying texts and pedagogical resources (slides, film clips, lesson plans/assignments suitable for online submission) as a way to supplement, enliven, and collectivize the work we are all already doing to take our courses online.

Our platform is not meant to replace active engagement with students by faculty, nor is it meant to provide the same kind of pedagogical content and experience that out students receive in the classroom, or in online courses that have been developed with due time, resources, and training. We remain concerned that in the neoliberalized university, online teaching is rarely a good way to produce collective knowledge and reciprocal engagement. But for the sake of our students, we are following the dictates of our employers while trying to stay true to the spirit of relationality that many of us find more essential than ever in our work. There are lots of wonderful people creating similar sites of sharing and caring so we’ve kept our ask specific.

What should I do for my mini lecture?

These videos can be based on your research, your synthesis of other people’s research, your reading and analysis of key theoretical texts, your critiques of the discipline of anthropology, and just about anything else that you would use in your own classroom to teach about our field. We welcome any form of creativity that you can come up with and we welcome lectures pitched to different levels. For each video, while we know people will produce their own content, we ask the following:

1. Please keep the videos between 10 and 30 minutes.
2. At the beginning of the video, please say who you are and what you do. (“I’m Paige West and I’m a cultural and environmental anthropologist.”)
3. At the beginning of the video, please tell the students what you are going to tell them about and why. (“This video focuses on the research that resulted in my first book, Conservation Is our Government now. It can help us understand the relationship between European ideas about nature and culture, the ideas about the world that people living in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea have about value, and the power dynamics that exist in international environmental conservation projects.”)
4. At the beginning of the video, please tell the students what kinds of questions you were asking when you did the research or the analysis you are about to present and how you worked to answer those questions or conduct that analysis. This is a kind of ‘methodological’ component for the videos. We include this so that these videos can be used both for topical teaching and for more general introduction to anthropology courses.

For accessibility purposes, we’ll be trying to add transcripts of all videos as quickly as we can. Our plan is to hire work study students (who suddenly have no work) and students participating in the #COLA4all strike at the University of California.

How do I record my mini lecture?

• You can use Zoom (platform of choice for #COVIDcampus) to record your mini lecture, which also allows you to include a slide show on the screen pretty easily. Here are some instructions.
• Most recent model iphones and other smart phones will take good enough video and audio. You can place your phone on a shelf or rig up a make shift tripod, hit record, and you’re off to the races. Here are some tips about filming yourself.
• If you would like to record a conversation with a collaborator, rather than a solo lecture, you can do that in Zoom (see above) or in Skype (instructions here)

Where do I upload my materials?

We have chosen the Open Education Resource Commons (OERCommons.org)as our platform. First, go to OERCommons and create an author account. Then email us at AnthropologyTeaching@gmail.com with your name and the address with which you registered so we can add you as an author to the Anthropology Mini Lectures resource. Once that’s out of the way, here are the steps:

1. Login to https://www.oercommons.org/ and navigate to the “Anthropology Mini Lectures” resource which you’ll find in the “My Items” section of your profile (the profile button is on the top right of the screen)
2. Click the “edit” button.
3. Scroll all the way down to the bottom and click the “Insert new section” button.
4. Give your section the name of your lecture (keep it brief, simple, and informative).
5. In the “Main Content” section, click on the “Insert Video” button and follow the prompts to upload your video (NB: the upload will take a while–please be patient! If the progress bar stalls or the upload really doesn’t work, follow the instructions in #6.)
6. Add any additional files (PDFs, documents describing suggested digital assignments or exercises, slide shows, etc) by clicking on “Attach Additional Resources” and following the prompts. You can attach multiple files but must do so one at a time.
7. Click SAVE (at the top of the screen). We will do our best to update the page with new resources at least once per day.

Finally, thank you. Many of our students are scared and feeling extremely alone. We believe that our classrooms, and the social worlds that they are capable of producing, may be a place of refuge for many of our students in the coming weeks and months. Before they left campus, we saw that a few times a week. We were part of what seemed like, with all the appropriate caveats in place here, a normal, daily, weekly, and monthly routine. We know that all students are different, and that many of them have obligations that take priority over their courses even at the best of times. So we are not assuming that we have any undue power over how okay or safe they feel in the world. However, for many of us, teaching gives us a sense of normalcy and creates both spaces of learning and spaces of collective being and stability. During this next few months, we all may need that.

Paige West is Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Colombia University and Director of the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University. Paige’s broad scholarly interest is the relationship between societies and their environments. Since the mid 1990s she has worked with indigenous people in Papua New Guinea. She is the author of three books and the editor of five more and the founder of the journal Environment and Society. In addition to her academic work, Paige is the co-founder of the PNG Institute of Biological Research, a small NGO dedicated to building academic opportunities for research in Papua New Guinea by Papua New Guineans and the co-founder of the Roviana Solwara Skul, a school in Papua New Guinea dedicated to teaching at the nexus of indigenous knowledge and western scientific knowledge.

zoë

Zoë Wool is assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Rice university. Zoë works at the intersection of (medical) anthropology, critical disability studies, STS, and queer theory. Most of her ethnographic work explores the intimacies, socialities, and materialities of life making among injured US soldiers and veterans. She’s also been thinking about new feminist, queer, and cripistemological histories of neurology…among other things.

anthropology.rice.edu/zoe-wool

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You never know when or how new research will begin. Let alone how you’re going to do it. That’s why it’s always good to take notes…and photographs.

In March 2012, when I was in the middle of my doctoral work in Cabo Pulmo, I just happened to map the coastal profile of a nearby beach (known as “Los Frailes”). It’s a long, sandy stretch of beach that curves around a small bay. I walked along the edge of the waterline with a small hand-held GPS unit and mapped the profile. I’m still not sure why I did it; I just decided to map it. By chance, the very next week, a huge section of that same beach collapsed into the ocean. As it turns out, there’s a deep underwater canyon that runs right up to the shore. That morning I heard several reports about the beach collapse, so I raced over to check it out with a few friends. About 120 meters of the beach–the same place where I’d walked and mapped the week before–had just fallen into the ocean. I re-mapped the coast, took some photographs, and archived it in my memory bank as something to keep in mind.

Later that year, this issue of coastal instability came up yet again. In early September, I stepped outside to watch an approaching storm as it hit Cabo Pulmo. I didn’t even mention this event in my fieldnotes, but I did take photographs (see Image 1 above). At the time, my research was focused primarily on the local politics of conservation and development. I wasn’t looking at anything related to the effects of climate change, coastal erosion, or sea level rise. But there it was. Once again: archived.

I returned to Cabo Pulmo in 2013. This time, I was paying more attention to coastal erosion, but it still wasn’t my primary research focus. I re-photographed the sea wall and beach that I had photographed in 2012 (see Image 2). This second image is shot with a different camera, and from a different position, but the change that took place is pretty clear: a large section of the rounded sea wall in the foreground is gone, along with a big chunk of the soil behind the wall.

During that trip in 2013, I spent more time photographing the effects of coastal change and erosion, including photographs of failing sea walls and repairs. This was when I began paying closer attention to the unstable nature of the coast, and not only how people live with this instability, but also try to control it as much as possible. These sea walls are basically temporary fixes that can withstand coastal erosion for an often unknowable period of time. Some hold up better than others. But these residents persist, battling against the tides and storms.

Around that time I started asking more people about these changes. Some of these conversations had come up during my interviews, and I wanted to know more. One couple who has been traveling to Cabo Pulmo for more than two decades shared a photograph they had taken of the beach in the mid 1990s (Image 3), which is basically a 180 degree view of the same beach shown in images 1 and 2. Like all of the other images (and data), this went to my mental archive as something I wanted to focus on more closely in the future.

Fast forward to the present. I just returned from another follow up trip to Cabo Pulmo this past June. I also went there for some follow up research in 2017. On both of these trips I was paying ever more attention to erosion and what people were saying about it. Image 4 (below), taken on New Year’s day in 2017, shows a similar view of the beach as Image 3. If you look closely at Image 4, you can see the same orange-yellow wall on the left side of the image that is in Image 3. These images were clearly taken from different positions, but they show the dramatic changes that have taken place over the past two decades. The sandy beach that used to buffer these coastal structures has been severely reduced. At high tide, there is no beach. Image 5, from June of this year (2018), shows the same approximate location. This last image was taken at a moderate high tide, and it illustrates the complete loss of beach (and a sea wall that has been severely undermined).

The collapsing beach and the storm photograph that I discussed at the beginning of this post have, in the end, sparked an entirely new line of research for me. I am currently working on new projects that examine coastal erosion and sea level rise from an anthropological perspective. This includes ongoing work in Cabo Pulmo, and an expanded project that examines these issues along the California coast in the US.

Up until this point, I have used photography in a fairly unsystematic way, mostly as a quick note-taking tool. I took photographs to loosely document places and events, and as visual reminders. Now it’s time to get far more systematic. When I shot all of these images, I was not thinking about using photography as a primary method for my research, but I am now.

Repeat photography is a thing, in case you didn’t know. If you haven’t heard about it, I recommend checking into the work of photographers such as Mark Klett (for starters). Here’s a short article from the Christian Science Monitor in 1985 that discusses some of Klett’s work, along with a few others who have undertaken this kind of re-photographic work. In Klett et al.’s 1977 book “Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project” the authors relocated and rephotographed locations that were first documented by 19th century photographers:

Over a period of three years, using the photographs of O’Sullivan, Jackson, Hillers, Russell, and Gardner, along with government maps and notes, the survey found 120 of the orginal sites. They then made photographs that matched the originals in both angle and light.

The work of Klett and others has been very useful and inspirational. But is anybody using this methodology in anthropology? The answer is yes. Trudi Smith, for example, is an anthropologist who has done some excellent work with repeat photography. I first learned about her work back around 2009 and have followed her since. Her work is creative, detailed, and compelling. Smith published a 2007 article in Visual Anthropology titled “Repeat Photography as a Method in Visual Anthropology.” Answering George Marcus’s call for a ‘research imaginary’ that challenges and reorients existing ethnographic practices, Smith writes:

I propose that repeat photography reimagines ethnographic practice and realigns product and process in visual anthropology while it examines the photographic record of a place and subjects it to contemporary analysis. Repeat photography reworks the double meaning of ethnography for visual anthropology. The process, or the fieldwork component of ethnographic practice in repeat photography, is a visual, embodied strategy that emphasizes looking, insight, and reenactment.

Klett et al. and Smith each blend the scientific and the aesthetic in their work. They are concerned with not only finding and rephotographing certain locations, but also thinking through the process that goes into making photographs. Why did the photographer make the image in that particular way, and what does it tell us about culture and aesthetics of that time? And what does this tell us about change, not just in landscapes but also in cultural meanings and memories that people attach to those landscapes?

As I move from the note-taking stage to a more focused research project, these are definitely some of the questions I plan to explore via repeat photography. I am also interested in exploring how this kind of photography can be helpful for opening up dialog and reflection about issues (climate change, sea level rise, and the subsequent social, economic and political problems that come with them) that are often difficult to discuss.

In Cabo Pulmo, this means I will be systematically rephotographing images that I have taken between 2005 and the present. At the same time, the plan is to repeat photographs such as Image 3 (above) and and then interview residents (and hopefully some of the people who took the photographs) to round out the process. Working with the photographic collections of local residents could be a great way to not only document historical change, but also to create venues for talking about both the present and the future.

I’m doing something along the same lines up here in California, although in this case there are often extensive photographic archives (via local Historical Societies and various university collections) that provide a good baseline for repeat photography work. I am starting this work in San Diego and Santa Cruz counties, and building off of the work of Gary Griggs (among others) for the latter. Griggs, who is a coastal geologist and Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Santa Cruz, has done extensive work on issues of coastal change, erosion, and sea level rise (see Griggs 2017 for example). He has not only produced a ton of scholarly articles about these issues, but also written a lot for broader audiences. This includes a popular 2006 publication with Deepika Shrestha Ross that employs repeat photography to examine the Santa Cruz coast in the past and present. Here’s a short online article about some of this Santa Cruz-based work by Griggs and Ross.

In all of the sites where I am working, the primary idea is to use visual methods to compliment and augment more traditional ethnographic methods. I’m looking to find out more about the material effects of coastal erosion and sea level rise (i.e. literally documenting how places have changed), while also exploring the social meanings and implications of these persistent, ongoing processes.

As someone who grew up near the ocean, and in the water all of the time (like 4-6 hours per day), I can’t say that these issues were at the forefront of my mind. Sure, I knew about sea walls and erosion and the effects of big storms (like the 1983 El Niño), but these weren’t issues that were on my mind day in and out. This stuff only became a pressing issue when something big collapsed or when some massive storm overtook a coastal road. Otherwise, for me and many of the people I surfed with, we just sort of lived with the changing coast and took it all day by day. We paid close attention to all of the daily effects (shifting beach sands affect waves daily), but it’s not like we were worried all the time about long-term change or damage.

This is all personal and anecdotal, of course, but based upon some of the preliminary interviews and informal conversations that I have done on these issues so far, many people seem to have a similar attitude. While climate change, sea level rise, and coastal erosion are big, hot-button issues, it’s not necessarily the case that they are such pressing issues that they are a daily concern. It’s hard to see change at this level. Some of this depends quite heavily on the extent to which people feel that they are personally at risk, however. But, as with climate change, trying to assess not only what people think, but also how and why they ultimately decide to take action is tricky. These are just some of the questions that I am in the process of trying to answer now. Photographs, especially when they depict striking differences, may be able to help highlight some of the long-term changes that are difficult to see on a day to day basis, and therefore facilitate the ethnographic process. That’s the idea, anyway.

The next step is to identify some of the images and locations that I plan on rephotographing. That means paying closer attention to dates, time of day, tides, lighting, lens choices, angles and so on. But that’s the fun part. After that I’ll move on to using those images as part of the interview process. Or, perhaps, it could be fun to open up the whole process and have people relocate and photograph these places with me. These are just some ideas. It’s always fun (and challenging) to move from ideas and notes to actual research. And that’s right where I’m at now.

All of this began with a chance event, which I happened to document, and a few photographs of an approaching storm. This is how research and a lot of creative work takes shape, at least for me. Sometimes things lead nowhere, and sometimes small avenues, ideas, or side projects lead to whole new lines of exploration and research. This is yet another reminder for why taking good fieldnotes is so important, because you just never know where some seemingly minor detail will lead you. But in this case, don’t just take notes! As I said in the opening lines of this post: take photographs as well. It doesn’t matter if you’re using an iPhone or an 8×10 film camera. And, if you think you have any interest in using repeat photography as a method: take notes about your photographs as well! Trust me, it will save you an immense amount of time when you try to relocate and rephotograph something you shot 10 years ago. Wish me luck.

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist.

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This series – #ROR2018 – has taken a backseat for several months. I’ve been mostly active on Twitter while I navigate state bureaucracies, assemble a research team, begin the process of data collection, management, and analysis, build a house, do my part to getting Footnotes off the ground, deal with #hautalk, fast for Ramadan, and focus on my visiting partner. Things have been hectic, but I found a fleeting moment to address something. Recently, I received an email from a student. Here is an excerpt:

I would be very curious and interested to read something about how you engage in what you named “visual ethnography” and how photography interacts in your practice in anthropological research: what use do you make of the camera? What place holds photography in your project? How does it change it?

I want to begin by noting that “visual ethnography” is not my term nor is it my invention. I want to first clarify how I think about ethnography. The suffix of ethnography should not denote that it is just about writing, but that it involves description, representation, and record more generally. It can be written and it can be recorded as a photograph and video, but it can even be a soundscape or illustration. The term “visual ethnography” may then seem redundant, but I think it’s necessary in order to distinguish a particular sensory engagement from the accepted standard of reading “written ethnography.” Importantly, I don’t think that any form of ethnography should stand alone: just as visual ethnography should be paired with text (or something else), so too do I believe that text should be paired with non-text. My hope is that we can move toward a significantly more mainstream “multimodal” model of anthropology, to use a hot new word. Multimodality describes just that: anthropology that engages with the world by many different ways. Text and photos and video, but also social media, art, experience, sense, and on and on and on.

Ethnographic photography, in particular, is practically as old as the camera,[1] but some of my favorite work comes out of the early to mid-20th century. While not deliberately ethnographic, you should spend some time perusing the documentary oeuvre of Kiowa photographer Horace Poolaw and portraiture of the Malian photographers, Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibe. Among today’s active photographers, I admire the portraiture of Matika Wilbur and Omar Victor Diop, the street photography of Brent Luvaas, and the work of Jason De Léon. Not all of these photographers were or are “ethnographers,” but to say their work is not ethnographic or documentary[2] would be to undermine the expansive potential of ethnography itself.

To answer the above questions, it is tempting to say that the camera is another tool and photography another kind of data, but that would be a vulgar underestimation of what they actually can do. The camera is a tool, but also method, key, and weapon; photography is data, but also directive, generative, and educational.

The camera both opens doors and closes them. In my experience, people want to be photographed during the events for which they are dressed to the nines, like naming ceremonies and marriages, which I attend frequently, but also religious holidays like Korité (Eid al-Fitr) and Tabaski (Eid al-Adha). Being known as a photographer means being invited to these events which are so important to peoples’ lives and it means sharing in celebration with them. The camera has been at the center of conversations which jumpstart of new friendships.

Most of the people I photograph begin as strangers and become my friends. I help with the farm work, go through all the annoying ethics documents with them, and ask for their input into the creative process. (Kate Schneider, personal communication)

People do not always want to be photographed as they walk through the market, drive to work, or take part in other quotidian tasks – the kinds of things one captures in the genre of “street photography.” As a result, while I’m regularly told to take my camera everywhere, I’ve actually been taking my camera to fewer and fewer places. People treat me differently, sometimes as an interloper (one who invades private and personal spaces), other times as a tourist (one who is not significantly invested in the care and attention to the experiences of the community around me). Common sense is helpful: I would never raise the camera to my eye in the thick of a hospital waiting room, consultation room, or delivery room, even if childbirth lies at the center of my dissertation research. Those are moments best left to the memory of the attendees.

One reason I chose anthropology, as opposed to journalism, was because anthropology allows me to put my camera down. I don’t always need to “get the shot.” (Jeffrey Schonberg, personal communication)

The key, of course, is to be respectful and to ask permission, and to engage in a collaborative project and to pay or barter when appropriate. A collaborator’s time, labor, and voice are important to the development of strong ethnographic photography. When in doubt, one might ask themselves what they might do as not to embody the naked entitlement and privilege from which Diane Arbus and Susan Sontag have drawn.

“Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do,” [Diane] Arbus wrote. The camera is a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed. The whole point of photographing people is that you are not intervening in their lives, only visiting them. The photographer is supertourist, an extension of the anthropologist, visiting natives and bringing back news of their exotic doings and strange gear. The photographer is always trying to colonize new experiences or find new ways to look at familiar subjects—to fight against boredom” (Sontag 1977, 33).

Move slowly and with caution. Compose carefully. If possible, use film. Take the time to listen to those with whom you engage, or at least make yourself conspicuous to them, as well as your audience.

Take your time, shoot film. Publish photos, lest we keep our interlocutors invisible. Be visible in your work. (Jason De Léon, paraphrased from my #displace18 notes)

I like to joke, perhaps to the chagrin of my committee, that if “a picture is worth a thousand words,” then I should be able to submit a portfolio of 100 photographs as my dissertation. What it really means is that photos can be coded (if coding is your thing). Codes are thematic keywords, which are akin to hashtags, that one can assign to words, phrases, paragraphs, but also photos (or parts of photos), video, sound – anything really. The codes I use have been collaboratively developed and defined (in Wolof, French, and English) with the assistance of two Senegalese graduate students. I use these same codes to organize my photography in order to tie visual representations of themes, ideas, or just memories to those that are written (i.e. notes) and spoken (i.e. transcriptions). Like notes, not everything can be coded and photography is therefore also generative; it gives way to new ideas, directions, and questions, particularly when they don’t fit neatly into categories. Photography gives me pause for reflection. It provides visual cues from which I recall details that I might not have put into words at the time, or maybe I can catch things that I had not seen before.

So, then, back to methods: Photographs can also be cues to others. With a method called “photo elicitation,” we may present a photograph to someone and ask, “Can you tell me about this?” With another called “photo voice,” we call on a group of participants to take photographs and then present them to each other in a focus group-style interview session. In both cases, though to varying degrees, what we’re seeking is the perspective of the participant in a different way than we might in informal conversation or formalized interviews.

My journey with photography – like the rest of my work and my approach to it – is still unfolding, but I know that it will occupy a significant portion of my dissertation. (Editor’s Note: Dear Committee, Not 100%. Sincerely, Dick.) There’s only so much of the story that I can tell in writing.

[1] Early examples of photography that told us something about people and their relationships to histories, experiences, and power can be found in the works of Augustus Washington, a Black American portrait photographer and daguerreotypist who worked in Senegal, Gambia, and Sierra Leone and opened a studio in Liberia in 1853; the Lutterodt brothers, Ghanaian portrait photographers of the late 19th century; Alphonso Lisk-Carew, the Sierra Leonean portrait photographer of the early 20th century. Even though they came after some of those listed above, the following three White Dudes tend to be a starting point for the history of ethnographic photography in Visual Anthropology curricula and “household names” (at least in the house of North Atlantic Anthropology): Franz Boas was using photography as early as 1894, the photographer Edward Curtis began his career in “salvage ethnography” in 1895, and Bronislaw Malinowski was photographing during his research between 1915-1918.

[2] In my Visual Anthropology course in college, we were asked, throughout the semester, to ponder the difference between visual ethnography and documentary. The best answer I could come up with was that it depended on whose voice was most apparent – researcher, collaborator, participant. As filmmakers and photographers collaborate with ethnographers, or as students seek dual training in ethnography and film/photo, I’m not so sure it’s a question worth asking any more.

Dick

Dick Powis is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, and is also pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His research interests include men and childbirth, prenatal screening technologies, and reproductive health in urban settings in Senegal. Read more at dickpowis.com.

www.dickpowis.com

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What I find curious is that even though most liberals would scoff at such a neoconservative worldview, Hollywood productions such as the Star Trek: Discovery TV series, and the Black Panther movie, both of which are notable for taking some progressive stances on identity politics in other aspects of their productions, still manage to reproduce this Hobbesian myth. In this post I will argue that some of the enduring power of this myth comes from the fact that Hobbes himself was something of a science fiction writer who carefully crafted the myth as a tool to use for political ends. In a followup post I will then explore exactly how the myth is deployed in the above mentioned Hollywood productions. So unless you consider a discussion of Hobbes to be a “spoiler” this post is spoiler free, with all the spoilers saved for part two…

It is said that Doctor Who, which first ran from 1963 to 1989 and has been on again continuously since its revival in 2005 is the longest running TV series of all time, but perhaps that honor should be given to Thomas Hobbes? The Hobbesian myth of the foundational moment of sovereignty—in which a war of all against all is averted only by their surrender to a sovereign—was deliberately designed to scare his fellow citizens into submission. In doing so he hoped to bring peace to a nation beset by civil war.

Hobbes’s myth has two important elements: On the one hand there is the sovereign,¹ depicted as an artificial man made up of the people who are subsumed in this larger identity like the Borg in Star Trek. On the other is the pre-social human who exists in a state of nature, which (for Hobbes) is a state of war. Only the monstrous artificial man can save us from the threat of a life that is ”solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Above is the original front piece of Hobbes’s book. Hobbes spent a lot of time working on it. He had written his earlier, more academic work, De Cive, in Latin, but with Leviathan he hoped to reach a broader audience. For this reason he supplemented his use of logic and “geometric demonstration,” with “myth, imagery and illusion” in order to make a bigger impact.² At a time that England was ravaged by civil war, he hoped that fear of the sovereign would move them to emotionally accept the “imperative of absolute obedience” that his logic demanded but couldn’t be relied upon to compel in his readers.³

Hobbes considered himself to be a scientist before he was a political philosopher, and longed to get back to his work on optics. As part of his research he had amassed a collection of optical instruments, including the “perspective glass” which he picked up in Paris:

The tube’s multifocal beveled lens was projected from a certain point onto an image of apparently unconnected fragments; the sections then came together to form a new arrangement. Hobbes apparently saw a witty example in which Ottoman sultans merge together and, from their fragments, reassemble themselves in the form of the young king of France, thus becoming visually subordinate to him. By optically sacrificing a part of themselves, they form their sovereign.²

Descartes accused Hobbes of having stolen his ideas on optics from him, but there were important differences between the two.⁴

For Descartes and other dualists, whilst they accepted that sensations are caused by motions in the brain, the seat of consciousness is another substance, mind, which is not material, whose essence is thought, in contrast with matter, whose essence is extension. Hobbes’s readers failed to appreciate the importance for Hobbes’s position of this distinction, which was a cause of considerable frustration for him.

This mechanical view of optics is replicated in the monster that graces the cover of Hobbes’ book. ²

If Descartes, in his Discours de la Méthode, presented a complex panorama of connections between bodily movement, the nervous system and the human structure of the brain, in order to compare the various functions of sensory perception, social control, memory and imagination with machines, he nevertheless maintained that machines do not possess reflexive language capabilities, and therefore could never possess intellect or reason. Yet Hobbes in the opening paragraph of Leviathan, takes up precisely this distinction, likening the body politic as a living machine to humans as the ‘rational and most excellent work of Nature’. And insofar as Leviathan as ‘Commonwealth or State’ has the capacity to protect and defend its citizens, it surpasses even human reason.

But it wasn’t enough to have a monster. Hobbes needed his readers to willingly choose obedience to the monster and for that he needed the alternative to be even more terrifying. The opposite of the artificial man was, for Hobbes, the concept of the pre-social other.

He produces an “outside” that is truly horrific in order to cause those “inside” to recognize themselves, to realize their good fortune, what they owe to the state, what the state enables. Without a common power, men are in conflict…⁵

It is here that the “savages of America” make their appearance in Hobbes writing. Drawing on racist accounts by early colonial settlers, he writes:

For the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small Families, and concord whereof dependeth on natural lust, have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner

Despite his claims to scientific rationality, there are serious problems with the “logic” of Hobbes two myths. On the one hand the idea that a sovereign will bind people together and bring an end to war ignores the fact that sovereigns are almost always at war with other sovereigns. On the other hand, the idea of a pre-social “savage” falls apart once you accept that these pre-social humans are organized into families. Also, where does language come from? Either we have language in the state of nature, in which case we are already social, or we don’t, in which case it is unclear how the conditions essential for language can emerge? But Hobbes’s myth requires both the artificial man and the state of nature, one part of the story cannot work without the other.

In part II, I will consider how closely the appearance of the Hobbesean myth in Star Trek: Discovery and Black Panther actually fits Hobbes’s own version, and explore what the differences might mean for the contemporary legacy of this sixteenth century work of science fiction.

UPDATE: Part II is now online.

Kerim

P. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy. An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, ‘Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!’ about a street theater troupe from one of India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).

kerim.oxus.net/

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Early on in college, I took a lot of inspiration from John Hawks’ article calling for researchers to be transparent and engaging with their research in combination with Tricia Wang’s article outlining “open ethnography.” To me, Wang’s methodology was an answer to Hawks’ call. Somehow, I would have to navigate ethics review boards which weren’t at all familiar with using social media to disseminate information – and I did (which is a blog post for another time). Later, Samuel Collins and Matt Durington’s work helped me to refine my multimodal workflow, and with Harjant Gill’s help I was able to articulate my mission. As I’ve written there, here, and elsewhere, the overarching goal of publishing data in near-real-time across multiple platforms is to engage multiple audiences, i.e. my home public, a social media savvy Senegalese public, and academic scholars worldwide. Each entry written on a particular social network for a particular audience paints a larger picture when taken as a whole. Conversations with Kate Schneider, Matika Wilbur, and Jeffery Schonberg gave spirit to the ethical relationship between my photography and my photographic collaborators, extending as a fine analog to the relationship between the research and the research participants. I’ve played with some of these multimodal methods in the last five years and I’m about to begin the 12 months of my dissertation fieldwork, so I think it’s important for me to outline the vision of my open ethnography.

This is the ecosystem of my live fieldnotes.

• Facebook: Short texts, personal musings, and conversations about life and research, but also things that have nothing at all to do with research or Senegal. (Access to this account is limited.)
• Twitter (@dtpowis): Shortest texts and multilingual musings reaching the widest audience. While my home public looks on, this is the social media where I’m mostly like to engage with Senegalese interlocutors.
• Instagram (@dtpowis3): Snapshots of selfies, food, books, notes, Post-It Notes, mind maps, sketches, and other kinds of ethnographic marginalia.
• Instagram (@dickpowis): Street and portrait photography captured with digital or film cameras. (Yes, I am lugging darkroom equipment and chemistry to Dakar.)
• Anthrodendum: Long texts about my experiences preparing for and engaging in life and dissertation research (if there is a difference). I’ll use this space to fuse together the smaller components from other social media accounts and fieldnotes and talk about emergent themes. The subreddit r/Anthropology can sometimes serve as an extended comments section to discuss the content of my blog posts, because I’m doing that now since that I’ve had a change of heart.

I’m avoiding YouTube because I know too much about video editing and the time and effort required for that kind of project would completely consume the research project that I am there to do. (Data is very expensive, as well.) I won’t employ Snapchat in this ecosystem because I would like my notes to have some permanence. All materials will be united across all platforms with the hashtag #RoR2018 (i.e. Relations of Reproduction 2018). Am I missing anything? Is there anything else I should consider?

Dick

Dick Powis is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, and is also pursuing a Graduate Certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His research interests include men and childbirth, prenatal screening technologies, and reproductive health in urban settings in Senegal. Read more at dickpowis.com.

www.dickpowis.com

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For the first time in the history of Visual Anthropology anthropological film can now be published on par with written articles, assessed by peers, and inscribed in international credential systems of academic publication as the Nordic Anthropological Film Association (NAFA) has launched this first edition of Journal of Anthropological Films (JAF) published by Bergen Open Access Publishing (BOAP).

Amazeballs! The announcement that the Nordic Anthropological Film Association (NAFA) had launched the Journal of Anthropological Films (JAF) really blew me away. When I applied for promotion to associate professor (kinda like tenure here in Taiwan, except that we don’t have tenure) I was made to remove all references to an award winning ethnographic film I had made because only publications subject to blind peer review counted for my promotion application. I have since heard of similar stories from visual anthropologists around the globe. There is a deep irony in the fact that our universities employ us to teach ethnographic filmmaking to the next generation of scholars, perhaps even accepting documentaries as part of an MA thesis (as is allowed at my university) but still won’t accept these works in evaluating our own scholarly output. In addition to providing an important open access platform for publishing ethnographic films, hopefully JAF will also help scholars establish the academic value of their work.

The announcement is also interesting for how it handles both definition of “anthropological film” (something I wrote about recently in a series of three posts on the old site):

JAF publishes films that combine documentation with a narrative and aesthetic convention of cinema to communicate an anthropological understanding of a given cultural and social reality. JAF publishes films that stand alone as a complete scientific publication based on research that explore the relationship between “contemporary anthropological understandings of the world, visual and sensory perception, art and aesthetics, and the ways in which aural and visual media may be used to develop and represent those understandings” to borrow words from Paul Henley…

Because of this definition, with its emphasis on “films that stand alone,” most films are presented without text, except in the case that “it adds productively to the anthropological analysis and in case the peer-reviewers will ask for it.” This is an interesting choice, and probably not one I would have made, but I do think it helps establish the idea that films deserve to be taken seriously as academic texts. After all, if every film was accompanied by a written document it might seem like it was the text that was getting reviewed, not the film itself.

I think this is a really exciting development for the discipline and I’m tempted to submit a film for publication just to see what would happen if I included it in my portfolio when I’m ready to apply for full professorship…

Kerim

P. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy. An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, ‘Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!’ about a street theater troupe from one of India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).

kerim.oxus.net/

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