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The video below this text is interactive.[1] To view, click play and follow the instructions you see on the screen. As you watch, look for areas that you can click with a mouse (or tap with your finger, if on a mobile device)[2] or see what appears when you mouse over different areas of the image at different times. What do you see?[3]
[1] This multimodal content, due to technological limitations, may not be accessible to all. If the multimodal experience is not accessible to you, please visit the text based version for visual and audio descriptions and full-text transcription or listen to the audio narration:
Audio Narration by Kara White
[2] On mobile devices, we suggest viewing the page in landscape mode and selecting “Distraction Free Reading” in the top-right corner.
[3] This is an interactive video. This video is designed to get the viewer or reader to “search” the image for interactive buttons. To navigate by keyboard, you can use the tab key to switch between objects. Press enter to click on each object. The text is revealed by interacting with objects that appear at various times during the video. As each object appears, the video will pause, and you will be instructed to click or press enter for the text to appear. When you’re ready to continue, click the play button object or press enter.
Ballestero, Andrea, and Brit Ross Winthereik, eds. 2021. Experimenting with Ethnography: A Companion to Analysis. Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ingold, Tim. 2018. Anthropology: Why It Matters. Medford: Polity Press.
Law, John. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. International Library of Sociology. London ; New York: Routledge.
This is a work of hypertext-ethnography.
It is based on my research of a small genetics laboratory in Tokyo, Japan where I am studying the impact of the transnational circulation of scientific materials and practices (including programming) on the production of knowledge. In this piece, I draw primarily from my participant observation field notes along with interviews. I also incorporate other, maybe more atypical, materials such as research papers (mine and others), websites and email.
The timeframe for this work is primarily the spring of 2020 and the setting is largely Zoom. Although I began my research in 2019 physically visiting the lab every week, in April 2020, it—and most of the institute where the lab is located—sent researchers home for seven weeks. That included me. Luckily, the lab quickly resumed its regular weekly meetings online (between the Principal Investigator (PI) and individual post-docs for example, as well as other group planning and educational meetings), and I was invited to join. I continued my ethnography for an additional year in this style.
Working in Zoom, my field notes narrowed to transcript recording, and I eventually grew frustrated with the loss of texture and diversity of information, even hands-on, that I had encountered being in-person, in the lab. However, a good deal of my original field notes from the lab describe scientists working silently and independently at their laptops, and on what kinds of materials or with what tools I could hardly, at the time, fathom. Online meetings allowed me to join scientists, inside their computers in a way, where I had a more intimate access to their experimental work.
At the same time, the lab was undergoing a transition. Scientists who practiced “wet” experiments (involving human/animal materials in chemical reactions), like many others, were mostly at home and shifting to planning or learning new skills. But even before the pandemic, this laboratory was gradually incorporating more and more “dry” techniques—using computational methods as part of their genetic research. This includes programming languages like Python and R (note that R appears in this work as a literary device more than accurate depiction), and more accessible entry points such as “no-code” and other web-based tools for analysis that require less time-consuming training. More of the researchers began to learn and play with these methods while at home in that time of “slow down,” and with more or less success. While coding scripts are not so completely different from the experimental protocols that scientists use in the lab (each takes time, patience and a kind of careful attention to perfect), they presented a general challenge that was compounded by being separated at home. In my case, just as I felt I was getting a grasp of the technical terms and biological concepts harnessed in the lab’s research projects, I was exposed to, and lost in, a layer of coding practices with which I had no background knowledge. This time of transition, and of destabilization, is ultimately the location of this work. It weaves two threads: a closing down into relative isolation while at home (and a limiting to the kind of surface data I could collect), and a shared opening up to new practices and forms of lab “work,” including computational research (and for me, remote participant observation). This is the experience that I work to recreate here in interactive form.
As a kind of ethnographic accounting, hypertext-ethnography remains uncommon. Despite the promise of early works such as Jay Ruby’s Oak Park Stories (2005) and Rodrick Coover’s Cultures in Webs (2003), hypertextual forms have been mostly left for other disciplines like documentary filmmaking (some examples are described by Favero, 2014). For most, its bare textual form—as in this piece—might even be considered horribly outdated. For me, hypertext is a method to tell a different kind of story. I use this as a form of ethnographic representation along a relatively rhizomatic path to convey the feeling of being “always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1993, 25). Here, interpretation emerges as part of the direction the reader intentionally, or accidentally, takes through the material; it is therefore open in ways different from traditional academic texts. Any “narrative” emerges primarily in juxtaposition of moments, comments, records and links that also refuses complete(d) analysis. At the same time, hypertext highlights the multivocal and always emergent nature of ethnographic data, destabilizing authorship, if even in small ways. It helps me to raise familiar questions which don’t have (any) easy answers: how do we ever know what we know, and how much do we really need to know and understand to faithfully represent others?
For me, this “story” is only one story among many others which I have yet to fully see.
Coover, R. (2003). Cultures in webs: Working in hypermedia with the documentary image. CITY: Eastgate Systems.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1993) A thousand plateaus. Minnesota: The University of Minnesota Press.
Droney, D. (2014) “Ironies of laboratory work during Ghana’s second age of optimism.” Cultural Anthropology 29:2, 363-384, https://doi.org/10.14506/ca29.2.10
DeSilvey, C. (2006) “Observed decay: Telling stories with mutable things.” Journal of Material Culture 11:3, 318–338, https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183506068808
Favero, P. (2014) “Learning to look beyond the frame: reflections on the changing meaning of images in the age of digital media practices.” Visual Studies 29:2, 166-179, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2014.887269
Larkin, B. (2008) Signal and noise: Media, infrastructure, and urban culture in Nigeria. Durham: Duke University Press.
Li N., Jin K., Bai Y., Fu H., Liu L. and B. Liu (2020) “Tn5 transposase applied in genomics research.” Int J Mol Sci. Nov 6;21(21):8329. doi: 10.3390/ijms21218329.
Krasmann, S. (2020) “The logic of the surface: on the epistemology of algorithms in times of big data.” Information, Communication & Society, 23:14, 2096-2109, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1726986
McClintock, B. (1973) Letter from Barbara McClintock to maize geneticist Oliver Nelson.
Pink S., Ruckenstein M., Willim R., and M. Duque (2018) “Broken data: Conceptualising data in an emerging world.” Big Data & Society January–June: 1–13.
Ravindran, S. (2012) “Barbara McClintock and the discovery of jumping genes.” PNAS 109 (50) 20198-20199, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1219372109
Ruby, J. (2005) Oak Park stories. Watertown: Documentary Educational Resource.
Venables, W. N., Smith D. M. and the R Core Team (2022) An introduction to R. Notes on R: A programming environment for data analysis and graphics, version 4.2.2 (2022-10-31).
Virilio, P. (1997) Open sky. Translated by J. Rose. London: Verso.
Virilio, P. (1999) Politics of the very worst: An interview by Philippe Petit. Edited by S. Lotringer and translated by M. Cavaliere. New York: Semiotext(e).
Virilio, P. (2000) Polar inertia. Translated by P. Camiller. London: Sage
During my first semester of undergrad, I began my truly independent cooking journey—a path many have taken before me, but few survive. After weeks of failing to replicate one of my mother’s simplest dishes, scrambled eggs with jasmine rice, I was devastated. Arriving home for winter break, I told her about my struggles—how I looked up many recipes online and tried making them all, adding milk, sprinkling in cheese, whisking the eggs with a particular technique. Nothing seemed to replicate the correct taste or texture. The familiar experience of the eggs was absent. She laughed at me and explained she made them “Khmer style,” to which I promptly replied, “What’s ‘Khmer Style?'” Half smirking and rolling her eyes, Ma explained that the scrambled eggs have fish sauce, green onions, and black pepper in them. “Make sure you use the good fish sauce okay? Either Three Crabs Brand or the Squid Brand. How did you not know this?”
A common Khmer breakfast of grilled pork, eggs, and pickled vegetables. (Photo by the author)
Reflecting on the scrambled eggs incident across the years, I felt a bit estranged from and confused about my identity. As both Khmer[1] and Vietnamese, and having grown up the United States, I had a lot of questions about who I was and what I was eating. What was “Khmer” and “Cambodian” food anyways? Why were there so many crossovers with things I ate with my Vietnamese family? Is that just geographical proximity or something else? How do people “just know” something is Khmer? Inevitably, these thoughts trickled into conversations with my family, as well as into my online searches.
What people are eating, how they are eating it, and why they are eating it have been debated throughout time and space. With increased engagements with food with different types and layers of technologies, online food discourse has expanded rapidly (Ilde 1990, Lewis 2018). Yet people have been forming and joining online communities to share their ideas, experiences, and perspectives around food in multi-modal ways for decades (Rhiengold 1993). I refer to these communities as digital food spaces (DFS), defining them as online communities and platforms dedicated to the sharing of food-centered ideas and media. I prefer DFS over other commonly used terms like “digital food platforms” because of its broader framing. Many of these online communities have entire infrastructures, which imbue particular authorities and responsibilities to users, including founders, moderators, and anonymous members. I have had my fair share of anonymous lurking and inactivity within DFS I am a part of, and as a result I prefer the flexibility. After all, being present in a digital community differs from being present in a non-digital one.
DFS are spaces of culture exchange and learning. It seems like for every niche food interest, there is a DFS looming somewhere on the internet. Scholars of digital food have examined these digitally captured “worlds of food,” noting their capacity to facilitate communities of users with shared interests into collective action (Schneider et al.2018). DFS allow for the demonstration of shared values among members which can take many forms: for example, digital food activism, where users engage with and critique different parts of the food system online (Schneider et al. 2018), or digital gastrodiplomacy, where ideas of food and nationalism perpetually collide.
Throughout history, food and cuisine has been crucial within diplomatic relations. Unlike “culinary diplomacy,” which involves the “expansion of relations through cuisine and the eating habits of visiting ambassadors or public figures” (White et al. 2019, 129), gastrodiplomacy is centered on generated ideas around the foods of a country. Gastrodiplomacy is often paired with nation-branding, where governments allow themselves to build distinguishable personas to bring awareness and express their democratic ideals in the global arena (Zhang 2015, White et al. 2019). As one scholar kindly explained to me, “Culinary diplomacy is governments towards other governments, gastrodiplomacy is governments towards their people.”[2]
Gastrodiplomacy is important because “national foods” expand a country’s opportunities for increased cultural acceptance with other nations and its own citizens (Nahar et al. 2018, Ichijo, Johannes, and Ranta eds. 2019, White et al. 2019.) Although it can be difficult and reductionist to decide which foods can be considered “national” across populations, the benefits of sharing how many people of a country experience and relate to food are manifold. Breaking bread, sharing tea, and exchanging fruits and other sweets are just some of the ways that people have historically bonded with one another, even in the absence of nation-states.
But how does one translate this into the digital? How can governments, or other culinary authorities, communicate to their people what kinds of foods are recognized as significant within a shared national identity? This is where the DFS come into play. As relatively accessible arenas of discussion and learning, they are integral points of intervention for gastrodiplomatic initiatives. Therefore, we can understand digital gastrodiplomacy to be the collective tinkering of perceptions relating to unified ideas around a country’s “national foods” within DFS.
Unlike in its non-digital form, in digital gastrodiplomacy, flows of power tend to shift and deviate. Authority on what foods are authentic or what dishes make up a part of a country’s “national foods” expands to include more kinds of people. However, this does not dissolve the issues of over-emphasising the significance of certain foods over others within collective, nationalist food narratives, and visions.
Through digital gastrodiplomacy, citizens and members of a diaspora are able to explore, share, and negotiate ideas about food from anywhere. As informal, yet impactful shapers, DFS members have the potential to shift narratives and perspectives about different national cuisines one social media post at a time. They have become very important non-governmental actors within food discourse. Subsequently, concentrations of knowledge and authority around “national foods” become dispersed, pixelated, and multidirectional. In comparison to non-digital gastrodiplomacy, digital gastrodiplomacy can be considered a grassroots approach. DFS members have a relatively equal say and role in contributing to what makes up “national foods” because of the fluidity of DFS in both structure and governance. From Boston-based aunties on Facebook with pictures of their pets as their avatar, to hyper-stylized Instagram foodie influencers from Long Beach, the profile for gastronomic critics and commentators continues to grow.
In my explorations to connect with my Khmerness and its foods, I took to the Internet. I joined several Facebook groups, perused Reddit, and lurked on relevant hashtags on Instagram, TikTok, Tumblr, and Twitter. I began by scanning “Subtle Asian Traits” (SAT), a Facebook group started in 2018 that calls itself “one of the largest Asian communities with members from all around the world.” Within SAT, I found many other subgroups I would classify as DFS, including “Subtle Asian Cooking.” However, after a few scrolls, I noticed that the posts were dominated by certain ethnicities and nationalities. At times, it felt as if “Asianness” exclusively centered East Asian culture. This did not help me in my search for either Khmer or Cambodian food and cuisine, but it stirred up some negative feelings about gatekeeping authorities of Asianness. Eventually I stumbled upon Subtle Cambodian Traits (SCT), an off-shoot group of SAT, which claims to “connect the greater Khmer community from all walks of life.” Observing that posts in this group were exclusively in English or Khmer, I sensed a decolonial edge permeating the space. No French posts… how interesting. Herein, I found a wide range of people from across the globe who self-identified as Cambodian and/or Khmer. They posted on a myriad of topics, interlinking these topics to both Cambodianness and Khmerness within their realms of understanding and experience—food was just one component. Through groups like SCT, there are ample opportunities to gain unfiltered insights on Cambodian and Khmer food between nationals and members of the diaspora.
Curious about what constitutes Khmer and Cambodian cuisine among the diaspora, I asked members of SCT for recommendations for Cambodian/Khmer restaurants within the United States and analysed the recommended places’ menus. After posting my question, I received 31 recommendations from 25 SCT members. Twenty-seven recommendations were for restaurants in the United States, three of them for pop-ups/mail order food businesses, and one for a restaurant in Cambodia. Two out of 31 recommendations were recommended more than once by SCT members. Eight out of ten cities on the Pew Research Center’s list of cities heavily populated by the Cambodian diaspora were represented (Pew Research Center 2019).
After collecting and analysing the menus of each recommendation, I noted the overlaps in how each understood and marketed their cuisine. To these restaurants, “real” Khmer and Cambodian cuisine could be defined by:
Restaurants interlinked ideas of “traditional,” “authentic,” and “special” Khmer/Cambodian dishes with the use of expensive/rare ingredients, high preparational labour demands, or both. Restaurants also used Khmer (script or romanisation) to label and re-orient commonly found pan-Asian dishes, like fried rice, as specifically Khmer and Cambodian on their menus. Comparatively, for highlighted “traditional,” “authentic,” and or “special” dishes, culinary points of reference were used: descriptions would relate them to other nations’ popular dishes. This practice allows for restaurant patrons who are not familiar with Khmer or Cambodian cuisines to easily explore, within their own comfort levels, the unique features of these cuisines. Through this, Khmericans are constantly forming points for culinary knowledge-sharing among informal gastrodiplomats, who may be community members or curious others. Such activities are further facilitated on DFS and other online communities, thus expanding knowledge, interest, and engagement with Khmer and Cambodian cuisines through digital gastrodiplomacy.
Such efforts directly support the Cambodian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and the National Institute of Diplomacy and International Relations’ 2020 initiative to incorporate food into their cultural diplomacy strategies through specifically gastrodiplomacy. They reflected that presently, “Cambodia has yet to fully exploit this extraordinary opportunity for nation branding.” Given that Cambodia’s rates of general tourism are considerably lower than other (southeast) Asian countries, it is crucial for both cultural and economic reasons to garner interest among travelers. Governments such as Cambodia’s have much to gain from the development of gastodiplomatic initiatives; also, they should consult DFS throughout each step. Doing so would increase the success of such endeavours by forming dynamic nation branding which is representative and considerate for as many people as possible.
[1] Khmer is the predominant ethnic group of Cambodia. I differentiate because you can be a Cambodian national and not Khmer. However, these two are often used interchangeably despite their differences.
[2] If you are the scholar who said this to me at the SOAS Food Forum seminar talk I gave in January 2023, please reach out!
Pew Research Center. (2019). “Top 10 U.S. metropolitan areas by Cambodian population, 2019”. Pew Research Center analysis of 2017-2019 American Community Survey (IPUMS). https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/chart/top-10-u-s-metropolitan-areas-by-cambodian-population-2019/
Rheingold, H. (1993). The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier. Reading, MA: MIT Press.
Schneider, T., Eli, K., Dolan, C., & Ulijaszek, S. (Eds.). (2018). Digital Food Activism (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315109930
Suntikul, W. (2019). “Gastrodiplomacy in tourism.” Current Issues in Tourism 22(9), 1076–1094.
White, Wajeana, Albert A. Barreda, and Stephanie Hein. (2019) “Gastrodiplomacy: Captivating a Global Audience Through Cultural Cuisine-A Systematic Review of the Literature.” Journal of Tourismology 5(2), 127-144.
Zhang, J. (2015). “The foods of the worlds: Mapping and comparing contemporary gastrodiplomacy campaigns.” International Journal of Communication 9, 568–591.
This article received an honourable mention in the graduate category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics
Written by University of Manchester student Thomas Long
Abstract
This essay presents, first and foremost, the recollections of a doctoral anthropologist as they attempt to make sense of a moment of embodied, ethical dissonance: a moment where the “familiar” of their own ethical positionality was suddenly and violently made very “strange” to them through participation in applause. Applause is one of the most practical ways we can perform our support for a cause, idea or individual within corporeal social space. Through a vignette, I examine the ethical challenge presented by my own, unexpected applause – applause for the Pro-Life movement – that occurred during fieldwork with Evangelical Christians in the U.S.A. I use this vignette to question the impact of the field on an anthropologist’s capacity to practice what they see as good ethics, and in doing so, consider the practical ethical limits of conducting ethnographic research with so called “repugnant cultural others” (Harding 1991). I argue that moments of uncomfortable alienation from one’s own perceived ethical positionality present not a moral, but a conceptual challenge, in that through this alienation the elasticity of our ethical selves is laid bare. I conclude by suggesting that the challenge presented by doing ethnography with ethically divergent interlocutors constitutes an “object dissolving critique” (Robbins, 2003, p.193) of our implicit conception of what it means to be a coherent ethical subject at all.
About a month before the Supreme Court went public with its decision to overturn Roe VS Wade, the legislature protecting the right to an abortion in the U.S.A, the Southern Baptist Convention was holding its annual meeting in California. As the largest and arguably most politically conservative denomination of Evangelical Christians in the U.S, the SBC boasts a spanning network of cultural and institutional infrastructure, extending deep roots that perforate the fabric of society in the North-American South. At this year’s annual meeting – along with a scandalous report exposing an endemic sexual abuse problem within the denomination – Roe vs Wade and the burgeoning gains of a galvanised Pro-Life movement dominated centre stage.
Some weeks prior, a draft opinion document detailing the Supreme Court’s plans to overturn the historic constitutional amendment had been leaked to news outlet Politico, re-energising evangelical anti-abortion crusaders for whom an, albeit troubled, political intimacy with the Trump administration was continuing to bear fruit. For Southern Baptists, who – quite literally – consider abortion to be murder, this signified a great “victory for life” in what for over half a century had been widely considered a losing battle with death. There was talk of widespread elation and even parties being held amongst the Baptist community in celebration of the leaked opinion draft, and the excitement in the air at the annual meeting was palpable.
“Just imagine”, expressed an impassioned speaker presenting a panel discussion on the future of the Pro-Life movement in “a post Roe-V-Wade world”, “how many babies this will save if Roe is in fact overturned. How many of Gods children will be allowed a chance at life”. Discussing potential legislative options, another speaker described plans to lobby government “to treat the abortion pill like illegal contraband”, reminding the audience that half of all abortions are chemical abortions and likening the import of the morning-after pill to drug trafficking. A third gave a run-down of the Psalm 139 (V13-14: For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb) project, an initiative with the goal of placing ultrasound machines in abortion clinics, in order to encourage potential mothers to “see their babies” before making the decision to terminate them. A smartly dressed attorney fiercely stated her pride at the readiness of Southern Baptists to “stand shoulder to shoulder in this fight for the dignity of women, the dignity of their children and the dignity of human life – God bless us all!”.
Having grown up in London and then moved to Manchester, bustling and politically liberal urban hubs where abortion remains a right and available for free on the NHS, this was the first time in my life that I had rubbed elbows with anti-abortionists, let alone hard-right “Christian nationalists”. Sitting there, engrossed and definitely a little shocked, I had my first encounter with the infamous political fervour that I had seen plastered all over newspapers and news stations since Trump’s election in 2016; The figure of the incandescent evangelical, inflamed by a fury and a fire conferred by God himself, draped, obtuse and unapologetic in red white and blue, and alive with a divine moral purpose that burned through the eyes and lashed off the tongue. Theirs was after all, a “moral majority”, an ideology powerfully infused and inseparable from an urgent ethical mission, to swim up the stream of a polluted and poisonous cultural swell, and save one nation-under-God from its own misguided modern circumstance.
It was, at once, everything that interested me about right wing Christian politics in the U.S, and everything that worried me about performing ethnographic research on it. With every new speaker, with every damning speech, and with every bout of growing applause for each, a paranoia was beginning to set in. I had begun to feel my presence as an ‘ideological outsider’ increasingly as the event went on, my sense of its perceived obviousness swelling like a balloon in the back of my head, giving me away to the rest of the room and to the big Other of the convention at large. I could say with some certainty that I disagreed quite strongly with almost everything the Baptists had to say, and the radical unfamiliarity of the lens through which they spoke about abortion had disturbed me in a visceral, discordant kind of way. This was that radical unfamiliarity distinctive of the ethnographic experience, in that it was as intrusive as it was intellectually invigorating. I could feel eyes upon me: lasers pointed at the back of my head that heated up my neck, to the point where I dared not turn lest the slightest movement somehow splinter and destroy whatever fragile façade of support I was still upholding, exposing me as an interloper to the entire room.
This was all, of course, completely in my mind. The Southern Baptists had been nothing but accommodating and friendly towards me the entire time I had been there, giving me a press pass, access to a break room and an unlimited supply of tea and coffee. They had welcomed me in as a university-based researcher knowing full well that I probably didn’t agree with their politics, and what’s more, I remember thinking that the idea someone was monitoring how I, a random observer in a sea of maybe four-hundred, was actively reacting to what was being said on stage, verged, quite frankly, on the schizophrenic. For whatever reason, this knowledge was powerless to relax me. I had expected when preparing for this project that my positionality would be challenged, that I would feel uncomfortable in the presence of “the repugnant cultural other” (Harding, 1991). I had not however, considered exactly what this would feel like in an embodied, practical sense. I had, in my naïve haste to intellectualise the field and my fieldwork, overlooked “the ethical as a modality of social action or of being in the world [more so] than as a modular component of society or mind” (Lambek, 2010, p.9); I had seen my own ethical positionality as something to be intellectualised also.
As the event came to a close, a final speaker expressed his gratitude for the other panellists, the audience, and for the work of the Pro-Life movement in general. “I just want to say that I am so, so proud to be a part of a community doing so much for life and for the unborn everywhere. We’ve had some great speakers tonight. Let’s now show our support for them, and their tireless work to make abortion not just illegal, but unnecessary and unthinkable! Amen people!”. The room erupted into thunderous applause, and it was only as the applause began to die down, that I realised that a pair of disembodied hands beneath my eyeline were applauding as well. The burning I had felt in the back of my neck remained but adopted new significance, as I realised that those hands – applauding a punitive ban on abortion – belonged to me. I felt guilt, shame, and inflaming both of these to the point where I broke out into a light sweat, a panicked sense of what I can best describe as alienation.
I had been in the field not three days, and felt as though I had already betrayed my own moral beliefs. I was, and remained, firmly pro-choice, not least because I felt my own gender disregarded me somewhat from any other kind of imposition. How on earth had I found myself in this situation, actively performing my support for a movement seeking to strip this choice from women? Applauding a ban on abortion? Really? When I had read in the past about “going native” – the moment in which “the anthropologist loses his supposed detachment, and throws over the world he was born into for the world he has found” (Wickham-Crowley, 2000, p.11) – I had never imagined this to be an exercise that would compromise my morality. I was not Pro-Life and was quite sure of this fact, so why did I feel so alienated from my own sense of morality?
The applause itself could be explained in a number of different ways. In an article about social production and shared ritual worship in Pentecostalism, for example, Joel Robbins (2009) uses Collins’ (2004) notion of “Interaction Ritual Chains” to explain the “emotional energy” (p.44) produced when acting as part of a group in a ritualised setting: a setting where a particular form of participation such as prayer – or indeed, applause (Remisiewicz & Rancew-Sikora, 2022, p.309) – is elicited as an aspect of an event’s sequence. Beginning from Durkheim’s (1995) argument “that major collective rituals produce a kind of effervescence that energizes people and leads them to feel empowered” (Robbins, 2009, p.60), Robbins suggests that the draw of shared participation in Pentecostal spaces lies less in their theology and more in their praxis: in their capacity for “emotional entrainment through bodily synchronization” (Ibid, p.61) that is difficult to resist and adept at interpolating the hesitant. It certainly seems a reasonable explanation to suggest that, given the affective power of the ritualised (and religious) emotional energy in the room – a powerful, politicised energy engendered by the Pro-Life movement’s envisioning of itself as a divinely commissioned “social crusade” to enhance women’s position (Ginsburg, 1998, p.218) – I had merely been swept up in an “Interaction Ritual Chain” of applause as it moved through the crowd. My participation was an arbitrary, physical response to stimuli rather than a practical ethical act in itself.
Also worth considering was the paranoid sense of otherness that I had felt so intensely preceding the moment of applause itself. Understanding the experience through a Foucauldian lens for example, renders the act less as an exposition of ethical subjectivity and more as the response to power of a disciplined body: “The body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they… force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs” (1977, p.25). It could therefore be argued that applause here represented one such sign, its enactment engendered by my perceived “state of conscious and permanent visibility” (Ibid, p.201) located in the panoptic (Ibid) ideological gaze of some four-hundred Pro-Life advocates.
Both are sufficient explanations, and go some way as to explicating some of the practical ethical pressures that may be placed on an anthropologist during the ethnographic encounter. They do not, however, address the contradiction at the centre of my recollection: namely my guilt, panic and sense of moral alienation in light of the fact that I knew I was not Pro-Life. If I wasn’t feeling a sense of alienation from my own moral compass, then what exactly was I feeling? Perhaps the answer lies in the most basic and obviously disturbing element of the experience: that my surroundings had made my body act in a way my mind – and “heart” – did not condone. Perhaps what had disturbed me was the abrupt, practical demonstration of our environment’s power to alter our behaviour in immediate and unexpected ways, regardless of the moral ambiguity of that behaviour. And perhaps worse of all was the sense that I had been, in that moment, completely powerless to stop it.
As Lambek tells us, ethics often exists “in the movement or tension between the ostensible (manifest, explicit, conspicuous, declared, avowed, certain, normative, necessary) and the tacit (latent, implicit, ambiguous, subjunctive, aporetic, paradoxical, uncertain, transgressive, possible)” (Lambek, 2010, p.28). Bearing this in mind, the analytic potential of the ethnographic encounter for practical ethics thus becomes its ability to make poignantly visible the elasticity that this perpetual in-betweenness demands of the ethical subject. Being ostensibly pro-choice in an environment that demands (through interaction ritual chains or panoptic disciplinary power) a performance that is tacitly Pro-Life (namely, applause for the movement) indicates unequivocally a contradictory and elastic ethical self: an ethical self that is disembodied and impalpable enough to do both of these things simultaneously. It is here we find the locus of the alienation we have been seeking to root out.
In the sudden, dizzying realisation that the hands applauding one cause and the heart bound to another originate from the same subject, the formless contingency of the ethical subject is laid bare. At the absurd moment of this recognition, the illusion of our consistent ethical self is, for a brief moment, lost to us, and a sense of groundless, alienated dissonance creeps into our core. Not only does the field challenge our conceptual registers with radical forms of epistemological otherness and difference, it also pulls at the very substance of our ethical selves by situating them within an environment incongruent to their normative animation. Captured in my applause for the Pro-Life movement was thus not only a moment of moral slippage, nor a mere instance of participation in synchronised social activity. Neither can it be reduced to a simple concave to the (inferred) social pressure of my interlocutors. Instead, the event and its unsettling, introspective, alienating effect, represented a practical crystallisation of ethnography’s uncomfortable challenge to the ethical subject. The “object dissolving critique” (Robbins, 2003, p.193) of its own incoherence.
Reference List
Collins, R. 2004. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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Enlarge / This artist's conception shows how Neanderthals might have faced down the mammoth task of butchering a freshly-killed elephant. (credit: Benoit Clarys, courtesy of Schoeningen Project)
Two recent studies of Neanderthal archaeological sites (one on the coast of Portugal and one in central Germany) demonstrate yet again that our extinct cousins were smarter and more adaptable than we’ve often given them credit for. One study found that Neanderthals living on the coast of Portugal 90,000 years ago roasted brown crabs—a meal that’s still a delicacy on the Iberian coast today. The other showed that 125,000 years ago, large groups of Neanderthals came together to take down enormous Ice Age elephants in what’s now central Germany.
Individually, both discoveries are fascinating glimpses into the lives of a species that's hauntingly similar to our own. But to really understand the most important thing these Neanderthal diet discoveries tell us, we have to look at them together. Together, they show that Neanderthals in different parts of Europe had distinct cultures and ways of life—at least as diverse as the cultures that now occupy the same lands.
On the Iberian coast 90,000 years ago, groups of Neanderthals living in the Gruta de Figueira Brava cave spent their summers catching brown crabs in tide pools along the nearby shore, then feasting on crab roasted over hot coals back in the cave.
My brother Nicholas David, who has died aged 85, was a leading figure in the field of ethnoarchaeology who undertook important research in west Africa and became professor of anthropology and archaeology at the University of Calgary.
Long after he retired in 2002 Nic continued to receive funding to carry out his research. He developed and maintained a website about the people of the Sukur in the Mandara mountains of Cameroon, and he contributed to adding the Sukur cultural landscape to the Unesco World Heritage list. In 2014, when Sukur was attacked by Boko Haram, Nic set up the Boko Haram Victims fund and website.
Continue reading...In the film Doctor Dolittle (1967), the title character yearns to “Talk to the Animals,” as the song goes, to understand their mysterious and often vexing ways. It is interesting to observe a similar impulse to understand and communicate with algorithms, given their current forms of implementation. Recent research shows that intense frustration often emerges from algorithmically driven processes that create hurtful identity characterizations. Our current technological landscape is thus frequently embroiled in “algorithmic dramas” (Zietz 2016), in which algorithms are seen and felt as powerful and influential, but inscrutable. Algorithms, or rather the complex processes that deploy them, are entities that we surely cannot “talk to,” although we might wish to admonish those who create or implement them in everyday life. A key dynamic of the “algorithmic drama” involves yearning to understand just how algorithms work given their impact on people. Yet, accessing the inner workings of algorithms is difficult for numerous reasons (Dourish 2016), including how to talk to, or even about, them.
Common shorthand terms such as “the algorithm” or even “algorithms” are problematic considering that commercial algorithms are usually complex entities. Dourish (2016) notes that algorithms are distinct from software programs that may make use of algorithms to accomplish tasks. The term “algorithm” may also refer to very different types of processes, such as those that incorporate machine learning, and they may be constantly changing. For the purposes of this discussion, the term “algorithm” will be used while keeping these caveats in mind. In this post, I relate the findings of ethnographic research projects incorporated into the new volume, The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology (Costa et al. 2022), in which interviewees use the term to narrativize troubled interactions they experienced with devices and systems that incorporate algorithmic processes.
Simply pinpointing how algorithms work is a limited approach; it may not yield what we hope to find (Seaver 2022). In studying technologists who develop music recommendation algorithms, Nick Seaver (2022) reminds us that algorithms are certainly not the first domain that ethnographers have studied under conditions of “partial knowledge and pervasive semisecrecy” (16). He lists past examples such as magicians, Freemasons, and nuclear scientists. Seaver argues that researching algorithmic development is not really about exposing company secrets but rather more productively aims to reveal “a more generalizable appraisal of cultural understandings that obtain across multiple sites within an industry” (17). A different approach involves exploring algorithms’ entanglements in an “ongoing navigation of relationships” (15). The idea is to reveal the algorithmic “stories that help people deal with contradictions in social life that can never be fully resolved” (Mosco 2005; see also Zietz 2016).
In order for data to “speak” about a domain vis-à-vis a group of users, data must be narrativized (Dourish and Goméz Cruz 2018). In the domain of machine learning, large-scale data sets accumulated from the experiences of many users are subsequently used to train a system to accomplish certain tasks. The system then must translate the processed information back so that the information is applicable to the individual experiences of a single user. Algorithmic data must ultimately be “narrated,” especially for devices that have the potential to “re-narrate users’ identities in ways that they strongly [reject] but [cannot] ignore” (Dourish and Goméz Cruz 2018, 3). Dourish and Goméz Cruz argue that it is only through narrative that data sets can “speak,” thus extending their impact, albeit in ways that may differ significantly from designers’ initial conceptions.
In light of this context, responding to algorithms through ethnographic narrative emerged as an important theme in a volume that I had the pleasure of co-editing with Elisabetta Costa, Nell Haynes, and Jolynna Sinanan. We recently saw the publication of our ambitious collection, The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology (Costa et al. 2022), which contains forty-one chapters covering ethnographic research in twenty-six countries. The volume contains numerous chapters and themes pertaining to science and technology studies, including a section specifically devoted to “Emerging Technologies.” Additional themes include older populations’ struggles with technology, Black media in gaming ecosystems, transgender experiences on social media, and many other relevant themes. The volume also collectively tackles numerous media types including digital spaces, virtual reality, augmented reality, and historical media forms.
One science and technology-related theme that emerged across different sections of the volume involved perceptions of algorithmic usage and impacts on individuals. Several chapters explored identity characterizations that users of technologized devices, such as the Amazon Echo and the Amazon Echo Look, as well as spaces such as the video-sharing platform of YouTube, found violative of their sense of self and well being. In her chapter, “Algorithmic Violence in Everyday Life and the Role of Media Anthropology,” Veronica Barassi (2022) explored the impacts of algorithmic profiling on parents through an analysis of Alexa, the voice-activated virtual assistant in the home hub Amazon Echo. The chapter examines the experiences of families using Alexa in the United Kingdom and the United States during her study from 2016-2019.
Talking back to the algorithm. Image from Pixabay.
Participants in Barassi’s study often felt that the product engaged in demeaning algorithmic profiling of them. For example, a woman named Cara whom Barassi met in West Los Angeles related how angry and irritated she felt because she was automatically targeted and profiled with weight loss ads simply because she was a woman over 50 years old. Feeling belittled by such profiling, she told Barassi, that “there is so much more to me as a person.” Amy, another participant in her study who was actively trying to lose weight, felt that algorithmic profiling concentrated on a person’s vulnerabilities, such that every time she went on Facebook she was bombarded with ads for new diets and plus-size clothing. She too used exactly the same phrase, that there was “so much more to her as a person,” than the algorithmically-generated profiles constructed.
The commentary that Barassi collected from participants represents an attempt to “talk back” to the “algorithm” or perhaps more accurately the developers, companies, and societal perspectives that have collectively implemented violative profiling. By relating their experiences, these narratives work to counteract the feelings of powerlessness that many interviewees felt in the technologized construction and representation of their perceived identity.
Another important aspect of Barassi’s contribution is to broaden analysis of algorithmic creation and impact beyond a particular piece of technology, and understand how algorithmic profiling and predictive systems are deeply intertwined with forms of bureaucracy. She observes that algorithmic profiling engages in symbolic violence because it “pigeon-holes, stereotypes, and detaches people from their sense of humanity” (Barassi 2022, 489). Barassi argues that we must attend far more closely to the relationship between bureaucracy and structural violence as instantiated in algorithmic profiling.
Similar interviewees’ experiences of feeling belittled by algorithms emerged in the chapter by Heather Horst and Sheba Mohammid, entitled “The Algorithmic Silhouette: New Technologies and the Fashionable Body” (2022). Horst and Mohammid studied the Amazon Echo Look, an app that compares outfits and provides fashion recommendations based on expert and algorithmic information. Priced at $199 and released widely in the US market in 2018, it was ostensibly perceived as a democratizing fashion tool, given that the average user would not ordinarily have daily customized access to fashion expertise.
Horst and Mohammid examined use of the device among women in Trinidad in 2019-2020. One of its features was called Style Check, in which the user selected and tried on two different outfits and submitted images of themselves wearing the outfits for the device to compare. It provided a percentage preference ranking, along with a narrative about the recommendation. Women in the study noted that the system could be very useful for providing recommendations and affirming their choices, particularly for meeting their criteria to appear professional in their wardrobe.
Yet some women felt that the device misrecognized them or their goals in oppressively normative ways. In one instance, a woman was threatened to be banned from adding images due to violating “community guidelines” because she was trying to compare herself wearing two bikinis. Another woman complained that the device’s recommendations seemed to be geared to select garments that made her appear slimmer. In an interview she noted:
It’s assuming that you want a slimmer silhouette, less curves, less flare…it doesn’t take into consideration me, like my personal preferences. It’s comparing me basically using its algorithm and how do I know that your algorithm is as inclusive as it should be, you know?
They conclude that these tensions reveal complexities that emerge when devices do not translate across cultural contexts. Their research demonstrates how inherent biases as instantiated in devices and systems reproduce structural inequality. Horst and Mohammid (2022) recommend analyses that can “give feedback to designers and others at particular points in the life of algorithms and automation processes” (527). They recommend taking a “social life of algorithms” approach that considers how algorithmic processes are embedded in cultural and social relations, and how particular values become normative. Feedback from people interacting with algorithmic products needs to be collected and circulated, particularly to challenge the “inevitability” narrative of technical impact that often accompanies the emergence of new technologies.
Zoë Glatt (2022) writes about perceptions of algorithms among YouTube influencers in London and Los Angeles between 2017 and 2021 in her chapter, “Precarity, Discrimination and (In)Visibility: An Ethnography of ‘The Algorithm’ in the YouTuber Influencer Industry.” Drawing on fieldwork among hard-working videographers, video editors, performers, and marketers, Glatt’s chapter traces how people respond to algorithmic recommendations on the YouTube platform, which directly impact influencers’ livelihoods. She found that “algorithmic invisibility,” or having work deprioritized or omitted on recommendation lists based on algorithmic rankings, is a common fear even among successful content creators with sizable followings. One vlogger expressed her deep concerns about platform invisibility:
Over the past year it has all gone to hell. There’s just no pattern to what is happening in essentially my business, and it is scary and it’s frustrating. I don’t know if people see my videos, I don’t know how people see my videos, I don’t know what channels are being promoted, I don’t know why some channels are being promoted more than others. There’s just no answers, and that’s scary to me. (Excerpted from a vlog by Lilly Singh 2017)
Glatt makes the important contribution of analyzing the cultural and economic meanings that creators attach to assumptions about algorithms. In triangulating what creators say about algorithms with how they feel about them, and the actions that influencers take in response, Glatt provides an important framework for parsing algorithmic interactions in culture. Glatt’s findings that influencers found the algorithm to be unpredictable and stressful underscore the importance of researchers to help hold developers and implementers accountable for algorithmic processes, particularly with regard to addressing the algorithmic discrimination that participants reported.
Collectively, these chapters in the Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology include crucial analysis about ethnographic interviewees’ perceptions of algorithms while also providing a mechanism for participants to “talk back” to “algorithms” about how they as individuals are represented in everyday life through technology. Indeed, the stories presented serve as a reminder that it is important to think of algorithms relationally and to provide consistent mechanisms for feedback and implementation strategies to reduce harm. It is indeed time to “talk to the algorithms” by engaging users as well as the designers, processes, and societal organizations that implement them in daily life. We can move on from pinpointing exactly how algorithms work, to shifting attention to establishing ways to meaningfully incorporate feedback to change their impact on human beings around the world.
Barassi, Veronica. 2022. “Algorithmic Violence in Everyday Life and the Role of Media Anthropology.” In The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology. Edited by Elisabetta Costa, Patricia G. Lange, Nell Haynes, and Jolynna Sinanan, 481-491. London: Routledge.
Costa, Elisabetta, Patricia G. Lange, Nell Haynes, and Jolynna Sinanan. 2022. The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology. London: Routledge.
Dourish, Paul. 2016. “Algorithms and their Others: Algorithmic Culture in Context.” Big Data & Society (July – December): 1-11.
Glatt, Zoe. 2022. “Precarity, Discrimination and (In)Visibility: An Ethnography of ‘The Algorithm’ in the YouTube Influencer Industry.” In The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology. Edited by Elisabetta Costa, Patricia G. Lange, Nell Haynes, and Jolynna Sinanan, 544-556. London: Routledge.
Horst, Heather A. and Sheba Mohammid. 2022. “The Algorithmic Silhouette: New Technologies and the Fashionable Body.” In The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology. Edited by Elisabetta Costa, Patricia G. Lange, Nell Haynes, and Jolynna Sinanan, 519-531. London: Routledge.
Mosco, Vincent. 2005. The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Seaver, Nick. 2022. Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Ziewitz, Malte. 2016. “Governing Algorithms: Myths, Mess, and Methods.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 41(1): 3-16.
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