Etymologically, the ethnographic comes from ethnography. Following from its Greek origins, ethnography is the writing of people, of society, of culture: ethnos means “folk/the people” and grapho is “to write.” In noun form, ethnography is no longer tethered just to writing. Instead, it is often used to refer to a type of research; it is not only non-anthropologists who use the term this way. We do it too. We talk about “doing ethnography,” using it as a shorthand for fieldwork, saying ethnography when we mean ethnographic research. By ethnographic research we mean the ever-evolving Malinowskian program of (usually) a single ethnographer in the field conducting participant-observation, living within a community, and getting deeply into the rhythms, logics, and complications of life as lived by a people in a place, or perhaps by peoples in places. But, even at its most methodological, ethnography is not only about method. (And it certainly does not mean to watch someone or interview someone or assemble a focus group as it is sometimes understood and practiced.) Ethnography and the ethnographic is a method and a theory and a material object (“the book”) and a position in the world. As Sherry Ortner puts it in her 2006 book Anthropology and Social Theory, ethnography “has always meant the attempt to understand another life world using the self—as much as it of possible—as the instrument of knowing.”

Researching and writing ethnography is an experiential and embodied practice, and in Clifford Geertz’s classic phrasing, we expect it to be composed of “thick description.” What counts as thickness shifts over the decades and across theoretical and methodological approaches, but one thing that remains constant is a commitment to realism. Whether non-fiction or fiction, prose or poetry, ethnography is a realist genre.

In class, we tracked the ethnographic by reading and comparing six different contemporary ethnographies covering different parts of the globe, each written by an American anthropologist. (Again, this was an undergraduate level course; at the graduate level, you could do different things with period and place and national scholarships.) The ethnographies were Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (University of New Mexico Press, 1996), Kristen Ghodsee’s Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life after Communism (Duke University Press, 2011), Donna Goldstein’s Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown (University of California Press, 2003), Danny Hoffman’s The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia (Duke University Press, 2011), Mandana Limbert’s In the Time of Oil: Piety, Memory, and Social Life in an Omani Town (Stanford University Press, 2010), and my book Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War (Duke University Press, 2010).

Prior to reading the ethnographies, we read about and discussed trends and shifts in ethnographic writing in anthropology. Key to the class was George Marcus and Dick Cushman’s piece “Ethnographies as Texts” from the 1982 Annual Review of Anthropology in which they review the state of ethnographic writing at the time of and following Geertz’s discipline-changing The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). They identify nine characteristics of ethnographic realist writing:

1. a narrative structure organized by topic, chronology, or a problem;
2. the unintrusive presence of the ethnographer in the text;
3. common denominator people, not as characters but just “the people;”
4. based on ethnographic data produced through fieldwork;
5. a focus on everyday life situations, what they see as a case study merger of interpretive and realist goals;
6. an emphasis on the native point of view;
7. establishing specificity and sufficient context for any generalizations made;
8. the use of disciplinary jargon to signal anthropological scholarship; and,
9. contextual exegesis of native concepts and discourses.

This list is now thirty years old. Some parts of it have stood the test of time, but what might such a list look like if generated now, in 2012?

As my class read the above ethnographies, we discussed each in relation to Marcus and Cushman’s list, over the semester cumulatively assessing both the ethnographies and the list. At the end of the course, we collectively generated our own list of what makes something ethnographic now. Our list also had nine items:

1. anthropological purpose via research question and argument;
2. yet, in dialogue with issues of local concern;
3. attempt to articulate native point of view;
4. focus on ethnographic realities, on life as lived, on everyday life and ordinary time rather than solely on extra-ordinary time;
5. people appear as named individuals rather than categories;
6. clear marking of the production of ethnographic knowledge, i.e., of how the anthropologist knows what he or she knows;
7. sufficient context and background in terms of the literature, history, theory, etc.;
8. ethnographer’s relationship with the community s/he writes about, how was trust gained, relationships of care forged?; and,
9. clear scholarly credibility of the author, reader’s trust of their credentials.

Three things not on Marcus and Cushman’s list were deemed key by my students, and to them were instrumental in the making of a successful ethnography. These were: (1) a transparency of the ethnographer as researcher; by this they meant not gratuitous reflexivity, but a clear and communicated sense of how knowledge was accumulated, of what the scholar’s relationships with the community were; (2) the presence of people in the text as characters who you get to know, people who appear as themselves, as real people; and (3) clear demonstration that the topic being studied matters; by this they meant mattered not only in an anthropological sense, but mattered and was relevant to the people in the community. To my students, these were the hallmarks of the current ethnographic realism. These were the things needed to make the ethnographic seem thick and thus real and trustworthy.

What would be on your list? What makes something ethnographic now, in this particular disciplinary and world historical-political moment?

Carole McGranahan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado. She is grateful to the students in the Spring 2012 Reading Ethnography for their entirely uncensored views and critiques of all the books they read in class, including her own.

Anthropology is, in many ways, the art of taking implicit, taken-for-granted meanings and making them explicit. This is important because human beings cram a tremendous amount of meaning into everything we do, and yet much of the time we are only vaguely conscious of the meanings we surround ourselves with  – and if you are a cultural outsider, you may miss them entirely. Just as learning the grammar of a language will help you understand it and write clearly in it, learning to make cultural meanings explicit helps us understand and express ourselves to others. Take, for instance, the thinking woman’s crumpet.

The other night I was watching a documentary about Shakespeare written and presented by the historian Michael Wood. As the documentary went on and I spent more and more time watching Michael Wood describe the Tudor police state with great enthusiasm, it occurred to me that he might be physically attractive. So I turned to my wife and asked: “is he attractive?” She thought for a minute and said she didn’t think so. But since she is a professor, just to be sure, she looked him up on wikipedia. “Apparently,” she said, “he’s the thinking woman’s crumpet.”

If you are British, or an anglophile American, it is not too hard to understand what it means to say “Michael Wood is the thinking woman’s crumpet”. Implicitly, you might understand that educated middle-class women find Michael Wood attractive even though he is not conventionally attractive. But as an anthropologist, I want to move beyond this implicit awareness to a richer, more explicit understanding of this phrase, an understanding of it that explains what it means even if you don’t even know what a crumpet is, much less what it symbolizes to the British. I’ll begin by talking about what it means to be a ‘thinking woman’ and then I’ll move on to the ‘crumpet’.

The noun phrase “thinking women” seems at first cut to describe women who think, but this is not exactly right. I’m not British and not an anthropologist of Britain, so I may not have all the details right (anthropologists are, like everyone else, fallible). But the UK is a class-conscious place and I think that the term is meant to invoke a certain socioeconomic position and the entire set of habits and dispositions that come along with it: affluent and educated, refined enough to be attracted to someone’s personality as well as their looks, etc. ‘Thinking woman’ is just two words but for those with the cultural knowledge necessary to decode them it summons up an entire way of classifying people which is more or less systematic. In particular, it implicitly defines large swaths of the population as people who ‘don’t think’. These people are usually less wealthy, less educated, and less powerful than ‘thinking people’. Anthropology as a discipline often finds these kinds of systems of inequality hiding within our implicit meanings, and as a result we’ve grown to be very mindful of the way that power and inequality are omnipresent in human life.

In addition to class, the phrase “thinking woman’s crumpet” has a lot of implicit things about gender relations in the UK within it, things which can be (as we anthropologists like to say) ‘unpacked’ or made explicit. The term is actually a transformation of the pre-existing phrase ‘thinking man’s crumpet’. The phrase was (according to Wikipedia and Google) originally used to describe Joan Bakewell, a TV presenter in the sixties. The comedian who invented it did so as a joke but, like most labels that stick, it made explicit a set of ideas and desires that were at work implicitly. Bakewell was intelligent, articulate, and chic and object of desire for male viewers of a certain social position.

Something happens when you turn the phrase around so that women, rather than men, want ‘crumpet’. The idea that ‘thinking women’ can want ‘crumpet’ has a certain empowering air about it — if thinking men can find articulate and intelligent women attractive, why can’t thinking women find Michael Wood attractive? I would say that the phrase has a whiff of feminism about it (sensing cultural meaning, like smelling a scent, has a certain indomitability that comes from being deeply embodied, and yet is also intangible and ephemeral). But ‘feminism’ is the wrong word to use here, since the term invokes a cultural move that is opposed to the sexual objectification of women and other people. That ‘thinking woman’ can have ‘crumpet’ is an ‘empowering appropriation of the male gaze’. Or, in plainer english, women assert their equality with men by adopting male ways of looking at and finding people attractive, ways which in themselves might seem sexist. Or, as the British say in another culinary metaphor that I don’t have time to unpack here, ‘what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander’.

So that was ‘thinking woman’. Let’s turn now to ‘crumpet’, the second part of the phrase I’ve been examining.  As we’ve seen, there are people like Michael Wood, who is “thinking woman’s crumpet” and Joan Bakewell, who is “thinking man’s crumpet”. But what is plain, unmodified crumpet?

At a certain level, the answer can be easily found on wikipedia: crumpet is a griddle cake, one of the large number of foods Europeans (and the people in their settler colonies) cook by heating flour, water, a fat (typically butter) and a bit of salt and/or sugar on a griddle or pan and leavened with yeast and/or baking powder. If you can read this blog entry in the original English I wrote it in you will already be familiar with pancakes, biscuits, waffles, crepes, and similar foods which are the cousins of crumpets. Americans may even be familiar with “English muffins” which are something like crumpets.

Now we face the very common anthropological problem of people’s use of metaphor. Michael Wood, on the face of it, has almost nothing in common with crumpet. Crumpets are seven centimeters in diameter and Michael Wood is around six feet tall. Crumpets are inanimate, while Michael Wood moves under his own power and enthusiastically describes the Tudor police state. Crumpets are eaten by British people, but British people would consider completely disgusting the idea of killing and eating Michael Wood or Joan Bakewell or any other human.

Or would they? Like many peoples, the British often draw metaphors between people and food, and in the metaphor hunger for the food is equated with sexual desire (an anthropologist would describe both of these as ‘appetitive longing’). Thus, for instance, a pastry shell filled with fruit called a ‘tart’ is often used as a metaphor for a sexually promiscuous woman.

And in fact ‘crumpet’ is a term used to describe a certain kind of sexually attractive woman. My knowledge of this topic is extremely limited, but according to the youtube documentary “Crumpet – A Very British Sex Symbol” the term originated in the 1930s with the rise of mass media such as the television and film. It denoted scantily clad, voluptuous women whose appearance in movies and television was inappropriate but not actually pornographic. The pieces they appeared in were low-brow and down-market — vulgar and working class. Apparently men of the thinking class weren’t supposed to like that sort of crumpet. They preferred Joan Blakewell.  At times there’s a strong feel of class warfare to the youtube documentary — for instance where the narrator accuses Monty Python of objectifying Carol Cleveland while other films (not made by Oxbridge grads) present crumpets as empowered in their sexuality.

It’s hard for me to say as a cultural outsider and non-expert, but I think that calling a woman ‘crumpet’ evokes a wide range of associations: just as a crumpet is not a proper, nutritious meal, crumpets are not properly modest women; watching a crumpet on TV, like eating a crumpet, is a sort of cheap fullfilment — perhaps a guilt pleasure? Do working class people eat crumpet while upper class people eat some other sort of griddle cake? Its hard to say.

All I wanted to establish here is that even simple phrases like “thinking woman’s crumpet” contain within themselves incredible depth. Because they are part of a tightly interwoven and rich cultural system, understanding them requires that they be placed in their cultural context. In this case, this involves everything from British food to the class system to the history of mass media. At the same time, making the meanings of ‘thinking woman’s crumpet’ explicit makes cultural insiders see their own culture in a new way because it forces them to rethink what they used to take for granted — indeed, it may actually prompt some of them to learn about television shows and movies that have shaped their culture in ways they didn’t previously understand. Above all, unpacking the term ‘thinking woman’s crumpet’ allows us to take a look at how anthropologists interpret cultural materials.

black marker, brown cardboard, red flags, blue jeans

sage, cigarettes, sweat mix with city smog and fried food:

in a circle we stand, breaths fogging, arms raised,

lie fragile under layers of tarp, blanket and winter night,

layers of poverty, police, and political scrutiny–

the sun sets fire to polluted streams, raises

factory stacks like charred fingers clutching sky:

powerlessness and power war in the returned Gaze of the cops,

antipathy, anger, appreciation in the honks of passing cars,

(never) doubting a small group of people can change the world.

Occupy is on our minds. With the May issue of American Ethnologist featuring articles on Occupy, and the New York Times noting recent social science interest in the movement, Occupy seems back on the anthropological radar—just as it is dropping off many screens outside academia. While this may just be a symptom of the speed with which our research and publishing tends to move, I’d argue there’s a better reason why anthropologists are researching and writing on Occupy. Early on, we maybe all felt we knew what it was about: economic inequality, the bailout of the rich, the newly-homeless foreclosed-on middle class and a permanent protest of all this, starting with Zucotti Park. As Occupy encampments sprung up nationally, then internationally, then started to get closed down, many of us became less and less certain of what Occupy is really about—homeless issues? Direct democracy? The banking system, or capitalism in general? Reform or revolution? It’s difficult to get a read on Occupy, not only because the interests of ‘the ninety-nine percent’ seem so broad, but also because there are multiple ninety-nine percents, with each Occupy locality made up of local people working autonomously on local issues, as well as translocal ones they might share with the larger Occupy movement. Is it even a movement? Towards what? Even locally, the diversity of concerns, goals and people involved in Occupy make this a hard question to answer.

That’s where anthropology comes in. The articles in this month’s American Ethnologist do a good job of talking about issues in two Occupy localities—Ljubljana, Slovenia (Razsa and Kurnik) and Boston, Massachusetts (Juris)—as well as their implications for Occupy taken more broadly. As part of a seminar on research methods, three colleagues—Dani Merriman, Meryleen Mena and Willi Lempert—and I worked this spring to understand them within Occupy Denver, asking in what ways Occupy Denver could be called “the 99%,” and seeking participants’ visions of success for the movement.

What we found was a divide between participants who defined success in terms of particular social/political goals, and those who saw success as bringing in more people, moving Occupy Denver closer to being the literal 99% they thought was needed for real change. The goals of the first group varied widely, from stopping environmentally-damaging mining corporations to promoting ethnic and gender equality, and tended to have local as well as translocal foci. Both these versions of success reveal an underlying struggle I argue is central to Occupy’s future viability—the struggle to move from what many see as a white, middle-class movement to one of the 99%, including historically marginalized people and their concerns alongside the newly-disenfranchised. In the case of those concerned with particular issues, these were often issues affecting populations other than middle-class white folks; for those wanting to increase the numbers of the movement, there was a sense that Occupy actions wouldn’t really be successful until they included a much broader swath of the Denver population. What is needed is not just class consciousness—it’s ethnicity, race, gender, age, queer, native, historical, pan-class consciousness of the issues that have so far kept the poorer 99% of Denver citizens from working together for a more equitable society.

Is this possible? I would like to say yes, and many Occupiers do, but it hasn’t happened yet. Many of our informants felt marginalized or excluded by others in Occupy Denver, some uncomfortable identifying as part of the movement, others asserting they would leave if things didn’t improve. Because of lingering gendered, hierarchical, etc. thinking in the movement, it’s easy to dismiss the entire project as doomed to failure—but I think this is a mistake. What we saw in Occupy Denver is not a status, but a process, a gradual coming to consciousness of people who originally joined the movement for much different reasons, as they come to understand the positions and problems of their social ‘others,’ and own their part in these. Eloquent witness to this is the older white man who spoke at an Indigenous Activist Teach-In. He said he wasn’t raised aware of or concerned about marginalized groups, but now felt “we need to support the gays, the blacks, and the Indians.” Far from politically correct (and certainly not representative of most Occupiers), he is nevertheless closer than he was pre-Occupy—and his presence at an Occupy teach-in alone speaks volumes. Education towards consciousness of the 99% happens in more informal spaces too—in speeches and people’s mics, discussions during General Assemblies, conversations had before and after events, or sitting around encampments, when they were the norm—Occupy Denver’s is one of the last remaining, scheduled for illegality May 29^th. With or without encampments, Occupy continues, and central to the process in Denver is nurturing consciousness of what it means to chant ‘We are the 99%.’

Is this messy, multi-faceted process, then, a movement? Towards what? From research in Denver, at least, I would argue it is—not yet a movement towards any one or several particular things, but a movement together, towards a political and social body conscious of itself in ways US citizens never have been before. Forget about the encampment—this is Occupy’s real experiment, getting the 99% to agree on more than their disagreement.

It’s not there yet. It may never be. Trying to be a movement of the 99% means nothing less than the collective overcoming of the Differences we anthropologists have fetishized since the discipline’s inception. Yet this may be what really needs to happen—it may be what is happening. So we can’t write off Occupy yet. If anything, as one of the greatest social experiments of our time, anthropologists need to be writing more on it.

Levi Jacobs is a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Colorado. Interested in intersections of spirituality and conflict, he researches Pentecostal Christianity and spiritual rehabilitation practices in northern Uganda. www.levijacobs.com

So which is it?  Both, I think.

Reading books and articles by Keith Hart, David Graeber, and Julia Elyachar, among others, has convinced my both of the fact that value is interesting and somewhat maddening.  It’s incredibly rich, and terribly vague at the same time.  I mean, how do we determine the value of particular things, ideas, and places–and how are different value regimes or systems comparable (e.g. is there a really useful way to compare or juxtapose moral value systems with those based upon money and markets)?

Going into fieldwork I decided to put the whole value question to the side a bit, and let things go where they may for a while.  Sometimes it’s a good idea to let certain pet ideas and theories take a back seat for a while to open up room for a range of possibilities. You know, let the empirical stuff run amok for a bit and keep a notebook on hand just in case.  Besides, I was getting to a point where the whole value thing was starting to seem a bit too abstract.  So I gave it a rest.

Then, when I was attending a community meeting about plans for shaping local development, the value question came crashing back into the forefront. The meeting itself was all about how one of the communities where I am working is looking to create a strategic development plan in contrast to the mega-tourism development proposals that they feel threaten their way of life.  It was hosted by one of the local conservation groups, and led by a marketing and consultation group.  One of the speakers at the meeting started talking about the difference between price and value in the production of tourism sites, and how the actual value or meaning of a particular place or experience is not one and the same as the price that people are willing to pay for these things.  Value, he argued, is something apart, something a little more than a set of numbers associated with a medium of exchange.

This speaker’s argument, in short, was that the community needs to think about producing a certain kind of place, rather than just trying to create a place that just makes money (although it can surely be argued that money has a lot more meaning than many assume–check out Hart’s book on the subject for starters).  Ultimately, he is talking about the production of a certain kind of value, which to me was very interesting.  Especially since he was speaking to the community in a context of producing a particular place with a network of services to attend to the needs of a growing tourism economy.

So his argument about the differences between price and value were meant to get people to see that there is more to tourism than just charging money, and that the local tourism economy needs to take account of other ways in which people value certain experiences, events, and places.  So, in the end, it was all geared toward serving a market, just with different considerations in mind.  It’s not like he was talking about the values of community as well…he was talking about how to appeal to a certain class of tourists.  This is an argument for a particular kind of value production, but one that differs from the sort that Elyachar talks about in her book Markets of Dispossession, where people were producing a kind of value based upon social solidarity.

Regardless, the value question is back on the table…maybe as it should be. It never really left entirely, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it so I kind of let it wander around in my mental pastures for a bit–on a very long leash.  It was there, but kind out there on a distant knoll if you know what I mean (talk about being abstract!).   The funny thing is that it’s always hard to balance these kinds of theoretical obsessions with the tumultuous, unpredictable, you-never-know-what-you’re-going-to-get nature of fieldwork.  But, things come and go, and I guess the main lesson here is to find ways to remain open to taking them in stride when they do show up on your mental doorstep.  Because you just never know when theory is going to come back and smack you in the face.

Let’s say I’m going to give a lecture on the anthropology of money. I do this every year and I think I do a decent job of it, but I’d be a fool not to think that David Graeber, Richard Wilk, or Keith Hart couldn’t do it better. The problem is, even if I could find entire lectures by them online, I probably wouldn’t do so. I’ve never liked using class-length lectures by other scholars in my own classes, even something like Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey which I think is great. Class-length lectures from someone else’s syllabus don’t easily fit into my own syllabus unless I work the whole syllabus around those lectures. Nor do I think any of us are comfortable giving our entire class over to pre-recorded lectures. Not only is it boring for students to watch, it just feels lazy.

But imagine that Graeber recorded a five minute lecture on the economic myth of the origins of money, and Richard Wilk recorded a five minute lecture on Polanyi, and Keith Hart gave a five minute lecture on money in West Africa, etc. Each lecture could be used by teachers as the focus of class discussion, or the basis for a collaborative interrogation of those ideas. They could also be used entirely on their own for self-study by students. In any case, they would be a valuable resource for students and teachers alike.

So here’s my suggestion: someone (OAC?, HAU?, Living Anthropologically?) creates a site which allows people to post topics they’d like to see covered, has a searchable index and perhaps some kind of a rating system as well. The lectures themselves could be hosted on Archive.org under a CC license, so people could edit and remix the lectures as they see fit. All that shouldn’t be too hard – it’s just a database. The biggest problem would be getting anthropologists to actually make and submit content. Still, it might be fun to try if someone has the energy to do so. Maybe someone could even set up a room at the AAA to help record scholars who would like to participate but aren’t comfortable around a video camera… I’m just throwing this out there, I don’t have the time to follow through, but if anyone would like to get the ball rolling, feel free to use the comment thread to discuss how such a plan might actually work.

Take for example this letter from Mohit Chandra, a partner with KPMG, to “India’s Graduating Classes.” Many of his complaints would be just as valid of students I’ve met in Philadelphia as they are of students I’ve met in Ahmedabad or Taipei. It seems to me that there are two possible explanations for this failure. The first is that the institutions of global higher education are particularly unproductive and inefficient at producing the type of students they wish to produce. The second is that they don’t actually wish to produce such students in the first place. I’d like to argue that the latter statement is closer to the truth.

Let us look at the skills that Chandra wishes to find in new employees: “language skills, in thirst for knowledge, in true professionalism and, finally, in thinking creatively and non-hierarchically.” In reading this list I can’t help but think of Bourdieu and Passeron’s argument that education primarily serves to cultivate a

misrecognition of the truth of the legitimate culture as the dominant cultural arbitrary, whose reproduction contributes towards reproducing the power relations.

The skills Chandra lists are elite skills largely cultivated in the home long before arriving at the university. Bourdieu and Passeron argue that schooling exists largely to “inculcate the fait accompli of the legitimacy of the dominant culture” rather than actually training students to cultivate these skills.

I think this tension explains the tremendous popularity of the Bollywood Film 3 Idiots.

Almost every single Taiwanese person I know has seen this film, which was also a huge hit in India. The film is about three engineering students at a highly competitive university who refuse to learn the official curriculum, instead evidencing those skills which Chandra claims KPMG is looking for. My point being that there is a certain recognition in the success of this film that the skills being taught in universities are not the skills people really need to compete in the new economy.

When my wife and I were shooting our last documentary in India we sometimes stayed in a guest house on the campus of an engineering school. Some of the students there knew that there was a visiting anthropologist and they would wait outside our guest house late at night when we got back from shooting, wishing to talk until I could no longer keep my eyes open. Like the “3 idiots” in the film, they were desperate to get the education they feel they needed rather than the official education being provided by the university.

One often reads that high end management companies and the like (places like KPMG) like students with advanced degrees in anthropology. While few people with advanced degrees in anthropology are interested in working in management, I think one could make a good argument that an anthropology degree is much closer to the kind of training Chandra is looking for than that provided by the engineering and management schools which train most of his actual employees.

I think Bourdieu and Passeron do a good job describing the problem, but I don’t think they adequately explain how such institutional failure continues to be reproduced on an ever-expanding global scale. It might be that KPMG is the exception and that there really is a huge need for low level technocrats of the kind actually produced by most schools and that elite skills would actually be a problem for the companies seeking to hire these workers. But I find such a market-driven answer equally unconvincing. I tend to feel that there is a contradiction between the needs of employers qua employers and the needs of employers qua capitalists. As employers they need these skills, but as capitalists too many people with these skills would be a threat. I think that the current state of global higher education is the result of the working out of these contradictions.

As these creased and dog-eared magazines get passed back and forth at our family dinner table I had my brilliant wife (a real scientist) on hand for questioning.

“So is this telomere stuff for real?” I asked her.

“Mmm-hmm,” she said with a shrug. “It looks that way.” So there you have it, from the seat of authority.

Let’s refer to the Science journalist here:

Telomeres are repetitive sequences of DNA that prevent the ends of chromosomes from unraveling, much like the plastic tops on the ends of shoelaces. As cells divide and replicate, telomeres get shorter and eventually can no longer prevent the fraying of DNA and the decay of aging. Recent studies have found a link between living to 100 and having a hyperactive version of telomerase, an enyzme that keeps telomeres long.

If you’ve got long telomeres on your chromosomes then genetically speaking this is beneficial and improves your chances at living a long life. But what factors determines telomere length?

The results of some very interesting new research (cf. Science vol.336, pg.539) suggest that telomeres in sperm cells are proportional in length to the age of the man. Thus the older the father is at conception, the longer the telomeres of his offspring. The researchers found that this effect extended to grandfathers as well, passing on their telomeres to their son’s children but not their daughter’s children.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that older dads have great genetic advantages. In fact as we age our gametes are more likely to contain mutations, so there are definitely some benefits to having younger parents. But I couldn’t help but be prompted to reflect how reproductive advantages of older men might have had an impact on the organization of society.

Certainly when it comes to mothers, experience pays serious dividends in terms of reproductive fitness. As Sarah Blaffer Hrdy writes in Mother Nature, among primates first time mothers are generally less successful but since mothering is learned behavior this can improve with time. Thus:

Given a choice between two sexually swollen females, male chimps invariably choose the older one. It is interesting to speculate why men in some societies differ from other primates in this respect, placing so much emphasis on youth. One reason, I suspect is that these men are in a position to monopolize access to their mate and to literally possess her long-term. (186)

So human sexuality, as we can observe it today, is always already in the context of patriarchal relations. This may even extend to the cultural valuation placed the beauty of youth, which is desirable not because young people make better parents but because young women yield long term benefits for older men.

On the theme of “interesting to speculate” we might question whether older men hold some benefits in terms of the reproductive fitness of younger women. There is after all this ubiquitous pattern, seen around the world, of older men shacking up with younger women. This is readily observed in the age difference between spouses, with the male partner typically older than the female partner. What is the basis for this? How far back in human history does this pattern extend?

One outcome of this pattern is that from the beginning of the affinal relationship the male is in a privileged position as the elder. Of course, there are other factors that may be more relevant than the age difference of the spouses when it comes to understanding household micropolitics. For example, there are social and cultural reasons why a woman might choose an older man to be her mate. An older man might have command of more economic resources, or he might have more clout and authority in the community — things that can make a big difference when it comes to raising offspring to reproductive maturity.

Now perhaps we can count another “pro” in the advantages of older male spouses: longer telomeres. Because men and women have different reproductive strategies, a man who can sire children well into his maturity can have additional opportunities to enhance his fitness unavailable to his shorter lived peers. And this trait of longevity may be passed down to his offspring, and his son’s offspring.

It’s been a great, tumultuous seven years. Although regular readers may not know it, behind the scenes we at Savage Minds have contemplated closing down the blog numerous times, mostly because it is so much trouble to keep posting things to it. But blogging is a habit that’s hard to quit, and so we stumble on.

In this past year the blog has become weirdly hegemonic in anthropology, despite the large number of better things out there being written by other authors. I was talking to someone recently who was afraid they detected a lack of quality in ‘SM’s usual high standards’ and were worried the blog was going down hill. This, to me, indicated that they has not read anything from our first three years! While we soldier on the anthropological noosphere keeps getting bigger and better, filled with more journals, blogs, occasional papers, and social networks. Its gratifying.

Most gratifying for me, however, has been working with the other Minds on this site. I probably lay eyes on Kerim or Celty once every two years, and so I’m always amazed that when we do sit down together we find that we really have become close friends. Even if SM can’t take credit for the development of anthropology’s online community, it definitely has created — no kidding — friendships that are set to last a lifetime. I’m quite happy in our little silo, and I hope regular readers have enjoyed the past year as much as I have.

In principle, our ideas don’t stop being right if they’re spelled wrong. In practice, academics get incredibly freaked out if you don’t adhere to the bizarre and illogical orthographical conventions of English. Copyediting is an indispensable part of creating open access anthropology, and it requires highly skilled people — our usual strategy of creating open source software to replace the Big Content’s technical infrastructure won’t work here.

This is the biggest challenge we face, and there isn’t a good solution: copyediting requires time, concentration, and training in a unique way of looking at texts. Open access works by leveraging the human resources of academy, but academics often lack the unique skill of copyediting. Given the amount of attention the rest of the publication process requires, we lack the time as well. Where are we going to get a cadre of cheap, high quality copy editors?

I see a couple of possible solutions.

The first and perhaps least likely solution would be to expand our existing model of copyediting. All over the country in little nooks and crannies universities, presses and professors have go-to people who they give copyediting work to: graduate students who have dropped out and support themselves on odd jobs, secretaries who have copyediting superpowers, and others who are in the margins of the academic system. With the Internet there might be a way to find these people and hook them up with work. If pooled the needs of several projects, perhaps that would be enough to clothe and feed a pool of copyeditors? If there was such a network it might attract work that we don’t even know is out there yet.

This approach could be combined with other means to encourage copyediting: making it a legitimate destination for subventions, combining it with lectureships or perhaps other quasi-academic positions like lab management or webpage design, and so forth. In addition to making it more explicitly part of the administrative work of the academy, we need to work to change our culture and to legitimate — indeed, to celebrate! — the incredible work that copyeditors do.

The second option is similar to the first: crowdsourcing. Break the job into many small pieces, use some technology to make it easy to collaborate, and then get many volunteers to do it. If the costs were very low — in the DIY range that homebrew open access projects usually run in — we could even pay people. In fact, this might be a way to help people discover their inner copyeditor and thus stimulate interest in solution #1.

Key to the second option would be to partner with groups that are working on existing solutions to this problem. For scanning OA documents and proofreading the OCR Ye olde and noble house of distributed proofreaders comes to mind as an example here of a great success we could latch on to: they want content and volunteers, we want an infrastructure to copyedit our work. I would say it’s a match made in heaven, but the devil is in the details on this one and we’d need a test run to see how it would work in practice. Another possible solution is Soylent, which I know less about but which looks promising and might very well be bent to our evil purposes if we wanted to actually copyedit, say, journal articles.

Going this route could be a way to turn average academics into copyeditors. It would require asking existing copyeditors to get used to a new and potentially less controlled system — something that might not appeal to the unique blend of selflessness and control-obsession that copyediting seems to instill in its adherents. It would be great to find a few, very small projects to get our feet wet in this area.

What is a Silo?

Silophication is most actively theorized by a person who straddles anthropology, global finance, and journalism: Dr. Gillian Tett, a Cambridge trained anthropologist and US managing editor of the Financial Times. Below I build theory through  categorizing Tett’s use of the term silophication in her financial journalism critical of how regulator’s and banker’s silophication led to an absence of information sharing and the presence of a global financial crisis.

Tett sees the “modern age” as epitomized by tensions between integration and fragmentation. “[W]hile technology is integrating the world in some senses, it is simultaneously creating fragmentation too. Moreover, as innovation speeds up, it keeps creating complex new activities that are only understood by technical ‘experts’ in a silo.” (Tett 2009). Tett provides reasons why silos exist (complexity and professional specification) and implores regulators and bankers to silo-bust through hiring holistic thinking anthropology-like personnel to cross silos and share information.

Tett refers to two mutually reinforcing silos, an intellectual silo epitomized by monological and non-holistic thinking supported by the second structural silo of employment departmental balkanization. She admits to this duality of silos describing “structural silos (ie: departments that do not talk)” and “mental silos (financiers with tunnel vision)” (Tett 2009).

Structural Silos

Tett states that financial regulators, the British Financial Services Authority (FSA), has “increasingly succumbed to a ‘silo’ mentality” (Tett 2008a). They “spend their time ticking boxes, within their allotted silos, rather than take a holistic view of risk” (Tett 2008a). Within these homogenized specialist silos, without “common sense and talk” (Tett 2008b) within or across specific fields, the chances of arriving at disasterous “solutions” increase exponentially. These structural silos are workers’ castes reinforced through “career silos” (Tett 2012a). Tett writes about “career silos” referring to how bankers or regulators remain in those castes, resulting in an absence of silo-transcending, information sharing, and empathy across silos (Tett 2012a).

Structural silos are results of the hierarchical organization of the firm, the spatial arrangement of offices within the firm, and the lack of collaboration within the firm. As Thomas Malaby, Andrew Ross, and other corporate ethnographers have recognized, companies can modify their office cultures and use social technologies to transcend structural silos. Business organization have been known to reject hierarchy in exchange for the semi-lateral flow of information across the firm that comes with heterarchy is analyzed by David Stark. This is often the case in new media firms. As Google, Facebook, and other Silicon Valley companies with their California ideologies have shown, it is possible to institutionalize through space, culture, and practice ways of addressing structural silos. This is de rigueur in new media firms but not so in the financial and federal sectors.

Intellectual Silos

In 2010 emails revealed the extent of the deception and greed within the culture of Goldman Sachs investment bankers and Standard and Poor’s credit raters. Tett refers to these leaked emails as primary documents in her analysis of the mental silos behind the global financial crisis of 2008. She writes, “Their world was also in a strange, geeky silo, into which few non-bankers ever peered” (Tett 2010a). By “geeky silo,” Tett refers to the mental or intellectual silophication that defends proprietary knowledge against boundary breakers.

In another example, Tett expanded her notion of the silo to apply outside of finance and its regulation to describe America and American media as polarizing and tribal (Tett 2011). Tett says that the internet is not helping Americans bridge their tribal silos: “social media, far from bridging these silos, is spawning a new form of cyber-tribalism of its own” (Tett 2011). She continues, “Now that Americans feel free to create their own identity online, they increasingly assume that information should be ‘customised’; and as media companies rush to offer these bespoke services, it becomes easier to retreat into an intellectual silo” (Tett 2011).

The phenomenon of the intellectual silo has been identified by a range of scholars, activists, and anthropologists. Going by the name the “filter bubble” which fosters the “myth of digital democracy,” intellectual silos appear to be reinforced by personalization algorithms and by the innate safety of sameness in risk prone fields of cultural production.

Why Silos?

Complexity and specialization, the result of growth in the knowledge management fields augmented by specific technological competencies, is the reason for the proliferation of task, department, intellectual, and field fragmentation today. Tett claims, “If you look around the world today, it is clear that almost every institution, from the army to the banks, is becoming increasingly complex. That, in turn, is creating a plethora of silos, where specialists beaver away, performing an activity that few outsiders understand. Yet the irony is that while these silos are springing up, we also live with systems that are increasingly interconnected; events on a trading desk or isolated battlefield can send ripples across the world” (Tett 2011b). As social complexity scales up, the silos proliferate and grow dangerously less communicative. In core intelligence industries of modernity, from the military to science, energy production, and finance, the silo curse impacts much of the world’s Western elites and by extension the rest of the world.

Tett explains the process: “This problem is not unique to finance. On the contrary, similar patterns can be found in numerous other areas of the modern world, ranging from science to medicine to energy and manufacturing. For as innovation speeds up in the 21st century, specialists are engaged in highly complex activities in numerous silos, that almost nobody outside that particular silo understands, or even knows about – even though the activity in that silos often has the ability to affect society as a whole. There is thus a bizarre paradox in the 21st century world: namely while the global system is becoming more interconnected in some senses, the level of mental and structural fragmentation remains very intense” (Tett 2010b: 129).

Craft specialization has long been our species’ reaction to increasing social complexity. For logical efficiency as well as the domination of worker’s biopower, hierarchically controlled professionalization has been one solution to the problem of knowledge containment. Employment casuality is one result of such efficiency logic on the human scale. But on the present global scale, and with the increasing dissociation of resources and publics through digital abstractions and its derivatives, unchallenged silos and the logics that support them, appear to be able to create global catastrophes.

Solving Silos?

Tett works for the Financial Times so she is a knowledge worker for financial elites willing to pay exorbitantly to access her pithy writing behind an expense paywall. She is also a social actor who doesn’t want to see her clients create another global financial crisis. For Tett this is the “silo curse” she wants to solve for her clients and because her client’s work impacts the wealth of millions of people, poor and rich (Tett 2009).

Tett provides some evidence that by 2009 certain sectors of finance and financial regulation were embarking on efforts to cure the “silo curse” impacting numerous sectors of modernity: “The problem that military and financial systems alike are grappling with, then, is how to combat tunnel vision; or, more accurately, how to persuade players to recognise how tempting – but also dangerous – it is to operate with a one-track mind” (Tett 2011b).

She applauds companies like Goldman Sachs who “try to ensure that different business silos have ways of watching what each other does” (Tell 2008b). Some regulators, for instance, are employing “macro-prudential surveillance (essentially, a posh word for active, holistic regulation). … [This stresses] the importance of joining up the dots” (Tett 2009). Meanwhile, “asset managers are trumpeting the importance of lateral thought and trying to understand what is happening in seemingly disconnected silos” (Tett 2009). To trump the silo curse, improve regulation, and reduce the prevalence of risking investment, Tett argues that bankers and regulators should “be forced to talk about their business with a wide pool of colleagues, including their immediate silo” (Tett 2008b).

Tett claims that “one of the essential investment challenges today [is to] understand the micro-details of modern silos, but [also] see how the macro-pieces interconnect, in a world that is both highly interconnected and tribal.” (Tett 2009). She looks back to her PhD training in anthropology for the penultimate solution. She proposes the development of “cultural translators”, who can explain what is happening in those silos to everyone else (Tett 2009). Tett is suggesting that anthropologist-like employees could help regulators and bankers translate insights from one department to another. For example, she champions “silo-busters” like Dr. Jim Yong Kim, also an anthropologist, as the president of the World Bank for showing the “power of breaking down the intellectual silos that mar much of the modern world” (Tett 2012b).

She concludes: “So, for my money, a better way to frame the debate is not to call for business leaders to be ethical, but to launch a fight against tunnel vision; call it, if you like, a focus on silo busting, both in terms of how companies organise themselves and how business people think” (Tett 2011b).

Conclusion

Tett identifies two iterations of silophication, one structural and another mental. Silos exist because of the complexities of today’s socio-technical world require professionalization and specialization. Silos need to be solved because they result in bad decisions that negatively impact millions of people. One way to solve the “silo curse” is to employ “cultural translators” who can inform specialized knowledge workers about the big picture of their work.

In my work with media reform broadcasters I identified silos: Inter-firm silos that are similar to structural silos in which departments fail to communicate; Inter-audience silos that are similar to intellectual silos in which television viewers balkanize into affinity groups; and intra-field silos, not addressed in Tett’s silo categorization, that refer to institutions within a single field of cultural production, a social movement for instance, who want to but fail to collaborate because of their silophication.

Financial journalists and media reform broadcasters are using the same opaque term, silophication, to describe similar processes. What is the significance of this shared emergent discourse? A methodological question remains. Tett is both a financial journalist and an anthropologist who is using a term used by the subjects of my research. Building theory requires a meta-language developed from records of an indigenous discourse. What to do when the ethnographic subjects and anthropological theorists share the same theoretical discourse?

Tett, Gillian
2008a The danger of letting ‘group think’ spin out of control. Financial Times, March 28. http://www.ft.com/intl/cmts/s/0/1925d542-fc6a-11dc-9229-000077b07658.html#axzz1u23EtNca

Tett, Gillian
2008b How talking can help cut the risk of a lemming fall, Financial Times May 16. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e040ef72-22df-11dd-93a9-000077b07658.html#axzz1u23EtNca

Tett, Gillian
2009 Waking up to the ‘silo curse’ is far from the end of the problem. Financial Time. October 9. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6d1de780-b469-11de-bec8-00144feab49a.html

Tett, Gillian
2010a E-mail howlers bring murky credit business out of shadows, Financial Times. March 25. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CFwQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2Fa9da1aa4-508b-11df-bc86-00144feab49a.html&ei=l7-yT4–FYTRiALn-4ySBA&usg=AFQjCNEWttbIb-CaTyM61YL6Fn9HMKhLEA&sig2=Nh82w8uZk9l8z5-rc8y5WQ

Tett, Gillian
2010b Silos and silences: Why so few people spotted the problems in complex credit and what that implies for the future. Banque de France • Financial Stability Review • No. 14 – Derivatives – Financial innovation and stability • July 2010 121. http://www.banque-france.fr/fileadmin/user_upload/banque_de_france/publications/Revue_de_la_stabilite_financiere/etude14_rsf_1007.pdf

Tett, Gillian
2011 US Tribes and Tribulations, Financial Times, August 5, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/9a0ed5ae-be37-11e0-bee9-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1uyNOEaac

Tett, Gillian
2011b The tunnel-vision thing, Financial Times, January 28. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/32637b44-28eb-11e0-aa18-00144feab49a.html

Tett, Gillian
2011c  ‘Preventing a repeat of the financial crisis isn’t about more business ethics, argues Gillian Tett; it’s about fewer silos’ Financial Management. April 19. http://www.fm-magazine.com/comment/our-guest/preventing-repeat-financial-crisis-isn%E2%80%99t-about-more-business-ethics-argues-gillian

Tett, Gillian
2012a Hildebrand affair a blow for Europe’s public bodies, Financial Times, January 12. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9c389df0-3d3b-11e1-8129-00144feabdc0.html

Tett, Gillian
2012b Right time for a World Bank renaissance man, Financial Times, March 30, 2012. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9eda0f8e-798c-11e1-8fad-00144feab49a.html

[Russell Berman] and five other professors at the university have produced a paper that calls for a major rethinking at Stanford — a reduction in the time taken to graduate by Ph.D. candidates in the humanities, and preparing them for careers within and beyond the academy. The professors at Stanford aren’t just talking about shaving a year or so off doctoral education, but cutting it down to four or five years — roughly half the current time for many humanities students.

This includes getting an MA (they suggest a two year review to decide “which students will advance to candidacy, and which will receive a terminal M.A.”). Now I can’t remember where I read it, but I believe that the average time to Ph.D. in anthropology is roughly what they say it is in the humanities: about nine years. How feasible is it that this time could be cut in half?

Part of their plan involves making better use of the summers: “Unfunded summers impede progress.” I can see how this might have speeded things up for me, maybe shaving off a year or even two, since not only would I not have had to work summers, but funding would have made it possible to start my fieldwork sooner. Lets say students receive full funding and aren’t required to teach (as I was) and I think one could go from an average of 9 years to 7. Of course, the reality is that funding is getting cut these days so I remain skeptical that we’ll see many universities increasing funding even if it means getting students out sooner.

Can we get it below 7? At my four-field program I took three years of courses. The only way I can see that being cut down is if they eliminated the four-field approach. That would be unfortunate. While I resented it at the time, I’ve really come to appreciate my four-field training in subsequent years. Actually five fields because we also had a visual anthropology program with its own requirements. But even if we are talking about a straight cultural anthropology program anthropologists still need pretty broad training. Usually we need additional courses on the language, culture and history of the region we intend to study – often outside of our own department. Language study alone can take at least an extra year (or two). On top of that we might need to brush up on an area of study related to our research topic, such as immunology, second language education, environmental science, etc.

And then there is fieldwork. I’ve seen some recent Ph.D. thesis from universities which have instituted drastically reduced time-to-Ph.D. constraints and you could really see it in the mismatch between the theory and the ethnography. It might be possible to do fieldwork in a few months if you’ve already spent a year or two somewhere during grad school, but I don’t think it works for graduate research. And if you don’t get a chance to really “be there” as a graduate student when will you have that opportunity? As a professor trying to get tenure?

Three years of course work, a year of language study, a year in the field, plus at least a year or two for exam prep, proposal writing, etc. not to mention the dissertation… I just don’t see how anyone could do it in less then seven years unless they were doing the research in their own backyard, already spoke the language, and had already gotten more than enough specialized training in the culture and topics they are studying before starting an Anthropology degree. And remember, seven years is predicated upon 12 months of full funding for each of those seven years. Have to work summers and part-time to make ends meet and we get back up to the current average…

I want to talk about the role of ethnic difference in narrative, but since Rex brought up the issue of bodies, let me first note that one of the interesting things about The Culture is that unlike the many other “highly advanced alien species” discussed by Rex in his post, bodies are very important to The Culture. In this post-singularity world people can back themselves up or choose to live entirely virtual lives, but most choose to have bodies anyway. These bodies are enhanced, to be sure: they have neural laces to tie them to the co-evolved artificial Minds which run their space ships, and they have extra glands which give them whatever drugs they might like at a mere thought, but they are still bodies. Over their long lifespans they can choose to be male or female at will, and many go through several changes over a lifetime. The Minds too can take on human avatars, and the nature of these avatars is an important reflection of their personalities, although we are frequently reminded that they are not human. For instance, they can eat and defecate, but they don’t have to and the food which is passed through their bodies is still edible since it hasn’t really been digested. We are even told that some humans like to eat avatar-digested food. But then who understands humans?

Getting back to ethnicity and narrative… let me start with Special Circumstances, an organization which figures prominently in The Culture novels. Here’s an explanation from Wikipedia:

Special Circumstances is part of a larger fictional Culture organization called Contact, which coordinates Culture interactions with (and in) other civilizations. SC exists to fulfill this role when circumstances exceed the moral capacity of Contact, or where the situation is highly complex and requires highly specialized skills… Special Circumstances also does the ‘dirty work’ of the Culture, a function made especially complicated by the normally very high ethical standards the Culture sets itself. SC acts in a way that has been compared with the democratizing intentions of real-world liberal intent on overcoming the world’s (and especially other nation’s) evils by benign interference.

One of the things that makes The Culture books so interesting is the deep ambivalence Banks has for his Special Circumstances heroes. While they have no material interest in delving into the affairs of other societies, it is clear that their motivations are not entirely selfless. They are driven in equal parts by a desire to “improve” these other cultures as well as their own boredom. Yes, they usually win in the end, for the betterment of all concerned. One could thus argue that SC is an argument for liberal interventionism. But I think it is much more about the need for good stories.

SC is important to The Culture novels because the world of The Culture is a rather boring utopia. There is no money, no discrimination, no real politics, etc. For this reason, for anything interesting to happen it must happen at the fringes of Culture, at the point of contact with other (usually less developed) civilizations. This interests me because it makes clear how important contact (or Contact) is for narrative. I also think it explains why people get so defensive when anthropologists point out the underlying racism implicit in various fictional worlds.

Take, for example, the Dothraki of Game of Thrones:

The Dothraki are dark, with long hair they wear in dreadlocks or in matted braids. They sport very little clothing, bedeck themselves in blue paint, and, as depicted in the premiere episode, their weddings are riotous affairs full of thumping drums, ululations, orgiastic public sex, passionate throat-slitting, and fly-ridden baskets full of delicious, bloody animal hearts. A man in a turban presents the new khaleesi with an inlaid box full of hissing snakes. After their nuptials, the immense Khal Drogo takes Daenerys to a seaside cliff at twilight and then, against her muted pleas, takes her doggie-style.

Now, I think a lot of the problem is that the Dorthraki are intentionally a “hodgepodge creation”:

George R.R. Martin has written , “I have tried to mix and match ethnic and cultural traits in creating my imaginary fantasy peoples, so there are no direct one-for-one correspodences [sic]. The Dothraki, for example, are based in part on the Mongols, the Alans, and the Huns, but their skin coloring is Amerindian.”

I think a lot of the problem is Martin’s reliance on the worst stereotypes about nomadic peoples rather than more historically accurate accounts. For instance, one popular history of Genghis Khan emphasizes the importance of the Mongols in the creation of the “modern world.”

But I don’t want to talk about what is wrong with Martin’s Dorthraki so much as why so many people get upset when scholars point out these problems. I think it is because of a feeling that good stories need good “others” and that without difference, including different levels of civilization, one can’t have a good narrative. The anthropologist in me wants to reply that recreating Tylor and Morgan’s stages of civilization in narrative form serves to reproduce the ideological foundations of racism is even if it isn’t directed at any particular ethnic group, but the fan of science fiction and fantasy novels in me understands that such is the stuff that (most) fantasy worlds are made of. Fictional others allow us to explore the limits of our own humanity. Still, I think The Culture novels show that we can do better, that we can ask more of our imagined worlds. But even Banks’ novels still rely upon a social darwinian view of galactic development, with each civilization necessarily going through the various stages of development, with only minimal interference by the more developed societies. I say this not so much to criticize Banks but to point out how hard it is to escape from such narrative frameworks, even in (or especially in?) stories that otherwise push the boundaries of what it means to be human.

Addendum: I posted it to Twitter, but I wanted to link again to a recent interview in Wired with anthropologist Kathryn Denning who “studies the very human way that scientists, engineers and members of the public think about space exploration and the search for alien life.” I think she has some really interesting things to say about our discourses about contact with alien life.

Take a second to think about it: why do we assume that the more advanced you get, the less body you will have?

Star Trek is a product of its time featuring all the teleological unilinear evolution you could shake a stick at — more Leslie White and Herbert Spencer than Julian Steward and Charles Darwin. I understand that it views all life-forms as being located on a Victorian continuum with Papua New Guinea on one end and NASA on the other. But even in a world obsessed with technological improvement, since when did the body become something that, technically, it would be better for us to get rid of? I really want to hammer home the incredibly non-obvious nature of this question in: what is technologically backwards about having a body?

The answer, of course, is that contemporary Eurochristian cultures have a long history of viewing the body as the dirty, uncontrolled, appetitive fleshvelope that our pure, divine souls have been crammed into. All of the Star Trek tropes of floating pools of light entering our bodies to possess our engineers and lieutenant commanders; their need to lower themselves by using physical speech to communicate; the promise that someday we might be able to comprehend the infinite majesty of the universe once we’ve joined them…. totally different from angels, amirite?

One of the oddities of anthropology is that once you’ve tuned into a cultural pattern, you see it everywhere — that’s how you know you’ve gotten your analysis right. But for most Americans, say, it takes quite a lot of exposure to American and British culture to see the big picture. Not just because you are too close (although that is a problem) but because you spend most of your life going to work, cooking dinner, etc. and not reading Sacvan Berkovitch and Perry Miller. Or for that matter Madame Blavatsky.

And yet it is a strange, very culturally specific idea that we are more truly ourselves when we are out of our bodies rather then when we are in them. Many people in other cultures think that they are their bodies — a very sensible proposition indeed given the available evidence. It takes analysis and comparison to understand this, even though the examples of the pattern occur regularly on Netflix. 

To salvage the discipline Graeber encourages you to abandon building theory from Western philosophy. He provokes you to draw theory from your ethnographic experience. He writes:

Where once we drew our theoretical terms – “totem,” “taboo,” “mana,” “potlatch” – from ethnography, causing Continental thinkers from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Sigmund Freud and Jean-Paul Sartre to feel the need to weigh in on the resulting debates, we have now reduced ourselves to the scholastic dissection of terms drawn from Continental philosophy (deterritorialization, governmentality, bare life…) – and nobody else cares what we have to say about them. And honestly, why should they – if they can just as easily read Deleuze, Agamben, or Foucault in the original? (Graeber n.d.)

I respect Graeber’s invective and take the challenge to make theory from ethnographic experience and not the Continental library. But his understanding that there are anthropologists from the West here and indigenous carriers of semiotically rich terms there is odd. The divide of emic discourse and etic analysis is increasingly implausible. His segmenting of the studied indigenous from the Continental scholar is rarely as well defined in 2012 as it was in the days of Boas and Levi-Strauss. For those of us who work with communities globally and reflexively networked into the socio-technical contemporary world, such differences are increasingly slight.

For example, in my work with mediamaking knowledge workers I encounter novel terms and phrases that emerge at the same time from other knowledge workers attempting to understand the same predicament, such as journalists and anthropologists. We are both struggling with the same problems.

The shared present predicament invites reflexive awareness from both anthropological and indigenous as well as etic and emic contexts. Increasingly these two populations draw from the same sources, cross fertilize and crowdsource their preliminary findings, and co-develop novel terminology. A hallowed “taboo”-like term from an ethnography of a Western subject is likely to be similar to the term used by the similarly positioned ethnographer grappling to define the same knowledge problems. For instance, ethnographic reports from work with media makers, bankers, programmers, journalists, bureaucrats, etc. show these communities developing terms, partially based on their own graduate school eductions, that are as theoretically dense as terms anthropologists use to meta-reflect on those very terms.

Considering this, how should we address the complex and loaded discourse that is used by both subjects of ethnography and those whose job it is to interpret those subjects?

We spend some time doing kinship diagrams. I show them my family and lead them through exercises where they chart their own families. Such diagrams are passe I guess, but for me they hold quirky charm not unlike the lost art of diagramming sentences. I can throw them up pretty quickly on a white board and we use them in class to help visualize social relationships.

Students find patrilineal descent, which flows from fathers to offspring, to be somewhat intuitive. After all they behave in a similar way to our tradition of passing down surnames and students can anticipate how patrilineality might coincide with a a socio-economic system that favors powerful fathers and husbands. But matilineal descent which flows from mothers to offspring are strange to them, its illogic manifest most clearly in the responsibilities for discipline granted to resource providers such as uncles and brothers, with weaker bonds ascribed to biological fathers.

Matrilineality seems exotic to students, but in fact some examples of it can easily be found in one of the most ancient charter documents of “Western Civilization.” Bereishit (Genesis), the first book of the Torah (Old Testament).

I don’t know if you’ve ever just sat down and read a whole lot of the Bible. My knowledge of it is fairly limited. I am familiar with Genesis which is distinguished by its engaging mythic narratives that rewards rereading. These incredibly evocative and powerful stories caught the imagination of underground cartoonist R.Crumb and inspired him to complete a fully illustrated Book of Genesis. The Crumb illustrations, thick and fleshy, help out to humanize the characters especially for people who aren’t already familiar with the stories.

Now granted, what I’m about to do is not the usual way one reads Genesis. I’m only doing this in order to make some points about matrilineality, not to claim some sort of religious insight.

 
Overview

Some scholars estimate that the Old Testament was first written down in 1000 BCE. Prior to that the stories almost certainly existed as oral traditions, so their true age is unknown. According to some they may have roots in ancient Summerian myths. Genesis covers a lot of ground that is outside our scope. What we’re focusing on here is the middle portions of the Book which follows the lives of one family all descended from a man named Abraham.

As you might guess the stories mostly focus on the men of the family: Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Joseph. Simply put there are not very many female characters. But if you read Genesis from the point of view of the few females that are there some remarkable similarities to matrilineal kinship patterns arise.

I already told you I’m not a Biblical scholar, okay?

 
The original love triangle: Sarah gives Hager to Abraham

Abraham’s wife, Sarah, cannot have children and so she gives her slave girl, Hager, to her husband. Predictably this ends in tragedy as Sarah grows jealous of Hager for giving birth. She chases Hager off, but she promptly returns after an angel of the Lord directs her to do so.

Later there is a miracle and Sarah does conceive despite her old age. This son is to be Isaac. Ultimately Sarah instructs Abraham to banish Hager and his first born son Ishmael. This is the mythic fission of the Abrahamic religions as Ishmael becomes the ancestor of many Islamic prophets, including Mohammed. The line that issues from Sarah through Isaac becomes the Hebrews. So the Muslims and the Jews have the same father but different mothers!

In fact Abraham outlives Sarah and after her death he has many other wives. And although children by these women are descended from Abraham, Abraham’s wealth and God’s blessing go to Isaac. Thus the chosen people, the Jews, are – following a matrilineal pattern – the descendents of Sarah. Others who are the descendants of Abraham by other women are excluded.

 
Rebekah’s Bride Price

In the next story Abraham wants to find a suitable wife for his son Isaac. He doesn’t want Isaac messing around with any of the local girls, so he sends one of his servants back to his homeland to the family of his brother, Nahor. The servant returns with Rebekah, technically Isaac’s first cousin once removed. What’s interesting to us in this context is how he acquires her.

So Abraham’s man makes this long journey until he finally arrives at Nahor’s compound. There’s this pretty young woman at the well and she shows her hospitality by drawing water for him and his camels. Abraham’s servant is impressed with her kindness and gives her gifts which she immediately takes back to show to her mother and brother.

Laban, Rebekah’s brother, is intrigued that there’s some rich stranger on the outskirts of town giving gifts to his sister so he goes to check it out. It’s the brother that negotiates the terms of marriage for his sister, the father is nowhere mentioned. Abraham’s servant pays Laban and Rebekah’s mother with more gifts and they reciprocate with a feast in celebration of the arrangement.

This is very much in keeping with matrilineal kinship patterns because the brother is in a position of authority relative to the sister and the bride’s mother is the recipients of the bride price. For those familiar with the patrilineal tradition of the father giving away the bride this is an interesting reversal.

 
Shit gets too heavy for Jacob

In the next story Rebekah gives birth to twins Esau and Jacob.

Twin brothers Esau and Jacob are like perfect opposites. Esau is big and burly, he’s covered in manly body hair and is a successful hunter. Jacob is a mild mannered kind of guy, he spends a lot of time indoors working with his mom. The parents play favorites too. Isaac has a taste for game so he loves the first born Esau best, but Rebekah loves Jacob and together they hatch this elaborate plan to divest Esau of his father’s inheritance and God’s blessing.

Once Esau discovers what Jacob is up to, that he has successfully stolen his father’s blessing, he is pissed. He threatens to kill Jacob, which we have to suspect would be no match – this big strapping hunter against mama’s boy. What do you do when things get too hot around the patrilineage? Go take refuge with your mother’s brother!

As members of the same matrilineage Laban graciously receives Jacob as if he were his own son. Laban also appears to be the primary property owner in this land and is probably overjoyed to have gained a new employee for his ranching operation.

 
Jacob scores a threesome
So Jacob goes to work for his mother’s brother while things cool off back at his dad’s place. Laban asks him “What should your wages be?” when Jacob really has his eyes on Laban’s daughters (his first cousins). There’s Leah who has pretty eyes and then there’s Rachael, who has everything else.

I really like how Crumb draws her with some va-va-voom!

Jacob strikes a deal with Laban. He will work for seven years to pay Rachael’s bride price.

Seven years pass, the wedding is held and Lo! That’s not the woman I thought I married! Are we to take it that the bride’s face was veiled? At any rate it seems Laban has pulled a fast one on his nephew.

Laban feeds Jacob a line about how it is their tradition that the younger daughter should not be married before the elder and he swallows it. Still his love for Rachael is so great that he’s willing to work another seven years to marry the other sister! This double cross comes back to haunt Laban in the next story.

Now Jacob is nestled in real tight with this matrilineage. Having married sisters this insures that all of his children from either wife will be on the same team.

 
The sisters side against the father

It seems like things are going pretty well for Jacob now. After overcoming some trickeration from his uncle/ father in-law, Jacob’s wives are blessed with many children. He even seems to benefit from a little sibling rivalry between the sisters as they give to him their handmaiden’s much as Sarah gave Hager to Abraham.

By this point in the story Jacob has been in Laban’s house for many years and the fact is not lost on him that his labor is making his uncle wealthier at his own expense. Not unlike the plot to defraud Esau of his inheritance Jacob conceives of an elaborate conspiracy to fleece Laban of his flock and then flee back to the land of his father, Isaac. And just as he needed his mother Rebekah to execute the last heist, he needs the assistance of Leah and Rachael. When he shares his plans with them Jacob finds he has no trouble at all turning the sisters against their father.

So the plan is put into action and Jacob looks to make off with most of Laban’s herd. When Laban discovers the deal is going down he runs out into the field to try to put a stop to it. With Laban out of the house Rachael sneaks back in and steals some of his household idols. This only infuriates Laban more and Jacob gives him permission to search their tents to recover his idols unaware that his own wife has taken them.

Then there’s this fascinating scene where Laban storms into Rachael’s tent. Taking the idols and hiding them under some blankets Rachael sits down on top of them and pretends to be on her period. Laban retreats. The matrilineage has succeeded in appropriating the domestic gods.

 
Dinah is raped and the matrilineage sides against the father (again)

Like I said there’s not a whole of stories in Genesis with prominent female characters, but there is one more that will serve our purposes here. After Jacob deserts Laban and reconciles with Esau he becomes a successful patriarch and keeper of flocks.

Being that he’s married to sisters all of his offspring would belong to the same matrilineage. Here we are interested in how Dinah’s brothers react to her assault by Shechem Prince of the Hivites

Not cool Shechem. You’re supposed to marry the girl and then take her virginity. Not the other way around!

Hamor, his father, knows he son has screwed up and so the two of them head out to Jacob’s camp to tray and make amends. But in the story Jacob the father of Dinah “keeps his peace” and instead her brothers take charge.

I love this scene because its like something right out of Levi-Strauss. Here are two groups of men engaged in politics using women as a tokens of exchanges.

Dinah’s brothers have other ideas, however. Remember, these guys are Hebrews. Its unacceptable to them that Shechem would be uncircumcised. Eew, gross! There is no way you are touching our sister. Unless… snip snip.

Have you guessed that this is leading up to an elaborate conspiracy whereby one group exacts revenge on another? Good for you! The brothers convince Hamor and Shechem that they will exchange women and build up their alliances if they have all the men of their village circumcised simultaneously. Then while the Hivites are convalescing from their wounds Dinah’s brothers come in and KILL THEM ALL!!

When Jacob hears about this he is pissed.

Guys, he seems to be saying, you’re making me look really bad here. But its too late. The matrilineage has sided against the patrilineage yet again.

I hope you enjoyed this. My plane is boarding so I’ll have to leave it here. Happy Mother’s Day! I love you mom!