This essay is about ice cream, beading, trust, friendship, and finding happiness in unexpected spaces while being an anthropologist. Collaboratively envisioned and written, we offer these reflections on praxis for a screen-bound contemporary moment, as well as an equitable and critical way to conceive of intellectual work in our future that feels like it engenders a space of happiness.

Setting the Stage
When the organizers (Uzma Z. Rizvi and Sarah Jackson) began planning an academic workshop, with funding from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, they envisioned a space of concentrated engagement for a group of anthropologists working on topics related to crafting and worldmaking in ancient contexts. They imagined intense, productive conversations, planned excursions that engaged with local experts and the landscape.

On the first Friday in October 2020, instead of meeting on Tohono O’odham land, the eleven of us found ourselves in a virtual space, located in Zoom boxes from our homes around the globe. The pandemic had changed our world. Instead of canceling, we had decided to imaginatively rethink the possibilities. We built in ways by which the engagement with the workshop was not bound by space or time, but rather through materiality and intentional gestures of community building that we borrowed from participatory and community-based archaeology, and from adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy (2017).

We met on the five Fridays in October, picking times that recognized our span of time zones. While we communicated a tentative plan for the meetings in advance, it evolved with group input over the month. The rhythm of the full-group meetings alternated between ones in which group members, their projects, and academic ideas took precedence, and two meetings in which we welcomed an honored guest, Krista Leddy, an expert Métis beader, who taught us beading techniques and told us stories to contextualize the significance of beading within Métis culture. This approach to crafting, learning, and being, fit beautifully within our concept of Crafting as Worldmaking. Between our weekly meetings, we hosted optional and agenda-less “coffee hours” — one per week — at various times. Alongside these synchronous, live contacts, we had a background infrastructure of multiple connections: group Dropbox folders to facilitate sharing of materials, and a Slack group with channels for both official and social exchanges.

At the end of October, we realized that none of us wanted to stop meeting, that we had made real, new friends, that our scholarly conversations had been some of the most productive and collaborative we had had. In the midst of unabashedly adverse circumstances, we had not only achieved success in carrying out our workshop, we had also found unexpected happiness. The larger context of the world was precarious, which made the connections we found particularly precious.

Our intention in writing this piece is not to share logistical best practices for successful or effective online meetings; rather, we wish to share what happened — how we found happiness and connection in an unlikely space of separate Zoom boxes, physical distance, and considerable disappointment — in order to think about how this experience can impact the ways we come together, to form and sustain communities, not only in pandemic contexts, but also in other moments of literal or metaphorical separation.

Building Trust
To gain trust you have to take a risk and open yourself up to others you do not know. This is not an easy thing to do even when you are meeting people in person. Being online takes it to another level as we cannot see or react to body language or cues of those with whom we are in conversation. It makes us think differently about how we engage and create trust with each other in this new reality. You are putting yourself out there, into a vulnerable place, trusting process. Without taking this risk we will not learn how to trust others in this new world of online convening.

We came together without most of us knowing each other beyond professional ties. We engaged in intentional, meaningful, and community building processes so that we could make our gatherings more than just a meeting. One of the significant ways we did this was through sharing parts of ourselves that we do not usually share in professional settings. A moment we all hold as significant is our first introduction with Krista Leddy; she asked us who we were, what kind of ice cream we liked, and how we came to like this type of ice cream. This simple yet important way to engage with each other created a place where we all have common ground, even sharing that some of us may not like ice cream. This exercise, facilitated by Krista, made her an important part of our group. She not only taught us how to bead together; through her teaching, we learned an archaeology of beads, histories, stories…ways of knowing about Métis life, and each other. Her framing allowed us to be heard as we started our conversations and not feel dismissed as we were talking.

In our meetings with Krista, we were taught a new skill — beading. Our vulnerability was inevitable as we all had the space to make mistakes. Interestingly, Krista made us feel like no mistake was ever irreversible nor was it something that could not be adjusted. That generosity of the craft and of her teaching created an energy of equitable exchange, a feeling that we were all in it together. It was also during this time we all became comfortable with silence on Zoom; when someone was ready, they shared.

Each part of this process allowed us to feel comfortable in taking a risk to engage with each other. As we shared and visited every Friday we started building trust in each other to follow through with what we were engaged with, and we learned how to think together.

Making Space
There is no one way that a virtual space has to be; because our meetings were mediated by Zoom did not mean that our interactions had to follow an established template. As the context for this workshop was during a period when we were all envisioning new ways of working, teaching, and collaborating, meant that we were all more open, willing and thus able to experiment. What we created together was a place for making mistakes; a space of vulnerability.

This space emerged from the framework and tone that the organizers established from the beginning, but it came alive through what we all brought to the space, and subsequently, what the space engendered. It began with the intentionality of the organizers to create a space that encouraged listening and engagement; one that eschewed hierarchy. For example, rather than facilitating discussion by calling on people, as a way to hear all voices and provide each voice with the vested position of directing our collective thoughts, whomever spoke would choose the next person to speak. This dismantled the hierarchy of conducting a conversation in a particular form and fashion.

As participants, we all found ourselves coming into a space that, therefore, was not strident or competitive; what we brought with us, and what was encouraged, was the ability and desire to be collaborative, open, and vulnerable. We found ourselves within our scholarship in new ways because we were in new spaces online, which in turn fostered a different engagement with texts, ideas, and our ways of sharing. We built together, adding bit by bit, and ensuring we did not tear things down. This became a clear ethos in the group – a generative, rather than destructive approach to knowledge sharing.

Moving beyond the visual-centered nature of Zoom created a different kind of space. Communal crafting engaged us tactilely while still allowing for conversation; our vision was engaged elsewhere, at a different focus; unexpectedly, we found that this more closely evoked in-person, comfortable encounters. This multi-sensory experience where the screen was de-privileged allowed for insights that would not have otherwise arisen.

Ultimately, the space was fluid in ways that mimicked in-person engagements but also took advantage of not being in one physical space for a continuous week. The virtual workshop was temporally spread out, allowing time to process ideas in ways that would not have been possible in the more intensive atmosphere of an in-person experience. A part of each participant’s physical space contributed to the collective virtual space of the workshop, and the interplay between the individual and collective spaces added to the productive and generative dynamic of the workshop.

Visiting, Not Meeting
Many of the virtual spaces we enter in our work are formal meetings or structured presentations, where our participation is determined by agendas or schedules. These spaces require us to interact in ways that conform to expectations of our workplaces and to come with our minds rather than our hearts. From the outset, however, it was clear in our crafting workshop that we were doing a lot more than meeting. Instead of the focus being on achieving some particular goal, our focus was on building connection. This shifted us from being in a meeting space to being in a visiting space. Indigenous scholar Cindy Gaudet writes about a visiting methodology as a means of building connection in her work with Métis women in Saskatchewan, where the emphasis is on spending time with one another.

Visiting centers reciprocity, respect, and relationality, rather than emphasizing the accomplishment of a specific outcome or producing a product. The outcome of the visiting space is actually the relationships built between the participants. In our context, we began each gathering in conversation with one another, inviting into the space something we were engaged within our lives. The prompt in our first meeting of what we have each been crafting or making, opened up the space where we entered into the fullness of each other’s lives. Krista’s ice cream inquiry created a visiting space as she led us through the process of learning to bead. Part of the beadwork teachings she shared with us emphasized the visiting nature of doing beadwork. She shared a story with us of when she first was learning to bead with her Métis relatives where they kept asking her to thread their needles as they beaded, drank tea, and visited. This story demonstrated for all of us the importance of visiting during the process of crafting or making.

We were not just visiting with each other, but we were also visiting with ideas. We would start with texts that we’d share with one another, readings that we found inspiring, or concepts that we wanted to discuss. In some of the small groups, we continued with our crafting work as we visited with ideas; in others, we shared our own writing as ‘crafted material.’ Out of these small groups came inspiration for work that we wanted to do, deep conversations about terms and concepts, and the forging of new relations between people as well as ideas.

Materializing Connections
In addition to the intentionality of building trust, creating space, and visiting, there were particular material connections we shared. This engagement came through boxes of materials that were mailed out by the organizers prior to the start of the workshop, which created and continue to create connections. Opening the box was like opening a delightful trove of presents on one’s birthday!

Archaeologically, it was an assembly of materials….but also a first step into the ethos of the meeting. The hosts had thought long and hard how to open the meeting and say, ‘trust us, these are places we are going to go’.

Some of the items were familiar residents of conferences: coffee, tea, a drip-coffee filter and mug, and to everyone’s glee, an assortment of gourmet, free-trade chocolate bars. Anthropologists have long recognized that commensality builds ties and makes communities. For us, the simple addition of a way to share in food and drink was one ingredient of intellectual sharing whereby taste and smell fed discussions, points of articulation between different research domains, and friendships between new colleagues.

The box included a suite of books on craft production, relationality, creativity and worldmaking from BIPOC, subaltern, queer, and feminist perspectives. The intent of the books was not to read each one cover to cover. Rather, participants dipped into different books before the meetings, read elements throughout at their leisure, and afterwards now have those books as points of reference – evoking other participants and recalling conversations.

Some of the other goodies in the box were meant to stimulate ideas through doing – a topic we as archaeologists are committed to in theory, but do not often engage with in practice. These included the bead-making kits, origami paper, watercolor markers and blank postcards. We might have been initially reticent, yet once everyone started, we realized that ‘doing’ opened up a creative outlet that had us ask new questions and allowed us to see craft production from new perspectives. The presence of these tools in our personal spaces throughout the month materialized the ongoing workshop. For some, the doing was therapeutic. For others, it was a way to share something with colleagues.  For all, it was good fun. We snail-mailed the watercolor postcards to each other with little hand-written notes at the end of the conference. These personalized notes and colored works are not just material mementos of the conference but are indeed gifts in the sense of the word by Marcel Mauss. They set up possibilities for reciprocity that so much of our participatory and community based archaeological work depends upon. They are points in a chain of reciprocal engagement that compel us to want to keep that conversation going.

Concluding thoughts

Now
make room in the mouth for
grassesgrassesgrasses

Layli Long Soldier begins Part 1 of her book of poetry, Whereas with these words. As one of the books in our box, we returned to her words in different ways during our sessions as we read her poems out loud to one another in our large group. These were emotional because we were reading out loud the violence of settler colonialism, not just citing it. These were not performative gestures or readings, rather, they became ways by which we were bringing each other closer; gentle and inclusive. We all shared the horror of the mass killing of the Dakota 38.  As we recognized parts of ourselves in each other through these feelings, there was an intimacy to scholarship and a focus on relationality among ourselves.

This relational aspect of togetherness as something we experienced, rather than just studied, shifts the ways by which we incorporate theory into our everyday research: we are not working on something but working with something. As we consider this experience, we feel it has pedagogical implications on how to teach and learn differently. Indeed, it has already shifted the ways by which we all engage in our academic spaces.

Finally, it is important to recognize the rigor and criticality that we imbued in our spaces — that criticality could be generative and not about tearing down arguments was a revelation for some of us, and became part of our ethos. We had come together not only to think about crafting as worldmaking, but in some part, we also redefined our own praxis as anthropologists. And it was there that we found our happiness – the ability to read, think, learn, make mistakes, bead, and visit theory in a just and equitable framework; where we were not asking the past in extractive ways to fuel our own professional goals, but where we brought respect and a different way of knowing to inform our workshop. In some manner of speaking, we enacted crafting as worldmaking as our experience beading made a new and different world for all of us, leading us to unexpected happiness in virtual spaces.

Uzma Z. Rizvi

Uzma Z. Rizvi is an associate professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY, and a Visiting Scholar at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan. Her current work focuses on Ancient Pakistan and UAE, during the third millennium BCE. She utilizes poetics as a mode through which to push the limits of archaeological theory. Additionally, her research focuses on ancient subjectivity, intimate architecture; memory, war, and trauma in relationship to the urban fabric, critical heritage studies at the intersections of contemporary art and history, and finally, epistemological critiques of the discipline in the service of decolonization.
Previous posts can be accessed via https://savageminds.org/author/uzma/

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A College Community of (COVID) Consociated Contemporaries

by Christian Elliott

On Thursday, March 12th, I piled into a rental van with a dozen other student writing tutors from Augustana, a small liberal arts college in western Illinois. We were bound for the Midwest Writing Center Association’s annual conference in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. After a few hours of cornfield-lined interstate, we pulled into the DoubleTree hotel’s parking garage. We crowded into an elevator, joking about the oatmeal cookie smell in the air, courtesy of the Quaker Oats factory next door. COVID-19 had started to make national news, but still felt far away from Iowa’s second-largest city. We knew something was wrong, though, when we entered a deserted hotel lobby devoid of the Midwestern writing nerds we’d been expecting. Our faculty chaperone logged onto a hotel computer to check his email—sure enough, the conference had been cancelled due to concerns about the spread of the novel coronavirus, just an hour before it was scheduled to begin. With time to kill, we wandered around the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art admiring Grant Wood paintings, then all gathered around one table in a local restaurant for dinner. Sharing a restaurant table with others now is a strange and unsettling thought. I haven’t seen those twelve colleagues and friends (except in Zoom calls)—and have rarely left my family’s home—since that night. That weekend, Augustana announced classes would move online for the remainder of the term.

The front of the t-shirt that Augustana College mailed me reads “Class of 2020: We Made History.” I’m not sure how likely graduating via a YouTube video from a small liberal arts college in Illinois during a pandemic is to make the history books, but it’s a nice sentiment. Today, as I sit in my room scanning job boards and LinkedIn pages back at my childhood home in Iowa, I find myself reflecting on how radically my college experience changed in the three short months leading up to graduation. Now, with time to think, I’ve been reading social science research in an attempt to put into words, from the perspective of a recent college graduate, how different “distance learning” felt and why the success of current and future college students depends on a return to in-person learning as soon as is safely possible.

In the early 20th century, Austrian phenomenological sociologist Alfred Schutz coined the terms “consociates” and “contemporaries” to describe the differences between direct face-to-face social interactions (copresence) and indirect, mediated relationships (noncopresence) respectively (1967). Schutz believed face-to-face relationships possessed a directness, a vividness of experience not otherwise possible in indirect interactions. A group of college students sharing a classroom (or a rental van) as consociates grow older together, if just for an hour, and experience each other’s consciousnesses in an intimate continuous way until the moment they go their separate ways. The instant they separate, they exit the world of each other’s direct experiences and become contemporaries. As soon as I stepped out of the crowded van and left college and my friends behind, I was a slightly different person. As the weeks passed, I had new experiences and gained new perspectives—I began to possess a new self, different from the “yesterday self” that lives on in the memory of those I’ve left behind. I certainly possess a different self now than the one left in a Cedar Rapids restaurant with my fellow tutors almost five months ago when we last saw one another in person.

Schutz was inspired to make these distinctions because in his time, indirect and increasingly anonymous social interactions were becoming more and more common—a person could have relationships with people they read about in newspapers, with collective entities’ unknown individual members, or via telephone with people they’d met in person in the past. Contemporaries are people with whom one knows one coexists but does not experience directly anymore. In 2004, sociologist Shanyang Zhao coined the term “consociated contemporaries” to describe a novel emerging “mediated social realm” he observed—“cyberspace” communities in which individuals may share a community of time without sharing a community of physical space. For the first time, space had been torn away from place—instead of being physically present to interact with others, people could communicate “face-to-device” in what he called “telecopresence,” a condition of “electronic proximity” through which they remained within reach of the “mediated senses” of others extended by computers (Zhao 2004). We take these types of interactions for granted now, but to phenomenological sociologists in the early 21st century, they represented a dramatic restructuring of the social conditions of communication.

As an unintentional online college student this past semester, I spent long hours at my desk with a cup of coffee, sending dozens of emails, posting to discussion forums, sharing my essays online, and meeting for Zoom advising sessions. When I replied to fellow students’ forum posts, I interacted with them through telecopresence—our two separate “worlds within mediated reach” coincided briefly, and we spoke to one another, however asynchronously, with written words as consociated contemporaries. Yet, in doing so the flow my consciousness was always split—part of me was synchronized with the other student in telecopresence, while part of me remained in my room, at my desk, synchronized with my family, with whom I share my home and a relationship of corporeal copresence. We experienced, to use a term coined by biolinguist John L. Locke, “being alone together” (Locke 1998). Since Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, artists have used the term to try to capture the isolated experience of being together but alone, especially in cities. Sherry Turkle used the term to explain how technology (social media) replaces actual human connection with an unsatisfying simulacrum—McDonaldizing friendship (Bakardjieva 2014). The same phrase has now become a favorite hashtag of my college’s social media account managers and now carries even more meaning. Being alone together in this new way—communicating only through the internet—is a complicated experience, and one that has destroyed the work/home life binary. We’re all “BBC dad” now, a recent New York Times article claimed, providing some recommendations for how to prevent distractions created by children and pets in video conference calls. As a remote learner, suddenly I could no longer share a classroom with my fellow students—instead, we all lived in our own, distant physical worlds and the online one maintained through electronic mediation at the same time. We were simultaneously “linked to and buffered from” one another in complicated and challenging new ways.

More recent studies of communication, like Zhao’s, which address online interactions, have largely affirmed Alfred Schutz’s “pro-proximity” stance for the superiority of direct face-to-face interaction. Spoken language possesses an “inherent quality of reciprocity” and comes with a “rich array of bodily indices” that make face-to-face interactions uniquely reciprocally synchronous (1967). Nevertheless, the development of online communication technologies represents a fundamental change, a “new normative order” of social interaction (Zhao 2004). Electronic mediation changes both the structure and conditions which lie beneath all symbolic exchange. Through distance learning, students have been forced to navigate these new and complicated realities. For the last three months of spring semester we, along with students in colleges across the country, functioned as a community of consociated contemporaries, creating knowledge together in real time through brief connections facilitated by our laptops and internet connections. We perhaps defied Alfred Schutz’s dated definitions, but we certainly felt the loss of our pure consociate relationships with one another. To grow older with other like-minded individuals, to directly experience the sheer diversity of others—each with their own perspectives and backgrounds—in the same classroom, is a special thing, and a sad one to lose.

Some might argue that our proven capacity to learn at distance means the kind of college experience liberal arts schools like Augustana offers is overpriced and irrelevant. The Harvard Business Review, in a recent article claimed that basic-level college courses (think big lecture halls) already lack a face-to-face “social experience,” and could easily be replaced with videos and forums to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and save students time. Other articles have reconsidered old arguments for McDonaldizing college through “modularized and gamified” online programs and “boot camps”—more fiscally sensible replacements for expensive in-person college. Furthermore, the economic crisis and demand for room and board refunds have jeopardized some schools’ endowments, and others have opted not to admit a freshmen class this fall. Nationwide, colleges are set to lose $23 billion in revenue, and small private institutions are among the hardest it. Is online the inevitable future of higher education?

I’ve heard from some of my Augustana classmates, through video chat and text conversations, that they actually preferred the online class format—it was less of a time commitment they told me, you didn’t have to get dressed to “go” to class, and no one knew if you were scrolling through social media instead of watching a lecture online or responding to a forum quiz. As children of the internet, current college students are, in a way, uniquely prepared to learn online. Research has shown 95% of teenagers own smartphones today, a significant increase from just a decade ago, and 45% are online “almost constantly.” Though social scientists have been slow to take online relationships seriously, they’ve now begun studying how critical the internet is to teenage identity formation. In a 2005 follow-up paper to the “consociated contemporaries” article, Shanyang Zhao develops the concept of the “digital self,” constructed through online interaction. To make his point, Zhao builds on a long tradition of symbolic interactionism traceable to sociologist Charles Cooley. In 1902, Cooley described how our conception of who we are develops through our interactions with other people—we present ourselves to them and “come to know ourselves” by how they react to us. As a teenager, I know my identity was generated partially online. I’ve maintained an online relationship with my best friend, who lives on the other side of the country, for over a decade. I’ve laughed at and shared memes my parents couldn’t begin to understand—they bristle at “okay boomer.” I had my first email address in middle school—online communication is second nature to me and to my peers. I faced few significant issues completing assignments, peer reviewing papers, and watching video lectures online.

Nevertheless, I find my fellow liberal arts school students’ affinity for online learning concerning. I faced questions when I first chose Augustana as a high school senior and soon to be “undecided major”—why spend thousands of dollars to attend a small liberal arts college when I didn’t even know what career I aspired towards? My father went to a trade school and my mother a large state university for a very specific program, and neither exactly saw the appeal (though they were supportive). I didn’t even know what a liberal arts school was until I visited, but once I did, I was sold on the concept and it’s safe to say my college experience would not have had the same trajectory otherwise. Over the past four years I’ve tried new things and experimented widely—taking classes in geography, French, philosophy, and Muslim literature—before finally finding cultural anthropology. Online, I would have missed the irreplaceable chance hallway encounters and drop-in doorway conversations with my professors (during which I made many decisions about my education), the camaraderie of the cafeteria table, the clubs and organizations (like Lives of the Mind), the late nights, the field trips, the annual ritualistic rites of passage. There’s more to a college experience than efficiency, than acquiring credentials and receiving knowledge—young adults like me need four years with one another to grow as people and lifelong learners if we are to succeed in this rapidly changing world. Once the pandemic ends, one way or another, in-person residential college must continue if future students like me are to experience the rich, face-to-face education that I have at Augustana.

The Harvard Business Review authors, later in their article, cite a number of barriers to ending face-to-face learning for good. IT infrastructure does not currently exist at the scale necessary for widespread online learning, and video conference software can’t deliver the same “personalized experience” that face-to-face classes can. Furthermore, they admit, students can’t learn as efficiently online because of multi-tasking/attention span issues. Digital divides remain a problem too—online learning amplifies the gulf between rich and poor students, and faculty often aren’t prepared to teach with new technology online. This fall, as many schools plan to offer hybrid online/in-person programs, low-income students are predicted to fall behind. Despite these challenges online classes are, for now, the only safe option. Professors at my college, despite their passion for in-person teaching, have taken to Twitter recently to share their concerns about being forced by administrators to teach face-to-face in addition to online this fall. Donald Trump’s administration has pressured schools to reopen immediately. I care deeply about in-person education, but now is too soon.

Years ago, experts predicted “massive open online courses” would kill residential universities, yet face-to-face college education has “stood the test of time.” Following this pandemic and corresponding massive uptick in online education adoption (with teachers transforming their curriculums and new infrastructure being constructed), it seems likely that more colleges than ever will continue to offer online alternatives permanently. I agree with those who have argued, convincingly, that small institutions dedicated to deep relationships between faculty and students (think liberal arts schools) must continue post-pandemic, because online education misses “the human touch,” and “…those colleges that survive (with strong and supportive communities) will become more attractive as students will crave their focus on learning and the attention they give to each and every student.” For now, teachers can only do their best cultivate human connection online (even at the expense of course content, some have urged). Doubtless, regardless of how the pandemic plays out, the debate between commoditized online and slower, less “efficient” in-person education will continue. But as I’ve learned, a college community of consociated contemporaries cannot learn together, cannot grow older together, in the rich, deep way that students sharing a campus face-to-face can.

References:

Bakardjieva, Maria. 2014. “Social Media and the McDonaldization of Friendship.” De Gruyter Mouton.

Cooley, Charles H. 1902. Human Nature and the Social Order. NY: Scribner’s.

Locke, John L. 1998. Why We Don’t Talk to Each Other Anymore: The De-Voicing of Society. New York: Touchstone.

Schutz, Alred. 1967. The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. G. Walsh and F. Lehnert. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Turkle, Sherry. 2011. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books.

Zhao, Shanyang. 2004. “Consociated Contemporaries as an Emergent Realm of the Lifeworld: Extending

Shutz’s Phenomenological Analysis to Cyberspace.” Human Studies 27: 91-105.

Zhao, Shanyang. 2005. “The Digital Self: Through the Looking Glass of Telecopresent Others.” Symbolic Interaction 28(3): 387-405.

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