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It is currently held, not without certain uneasiness, that 90% of human DNA is ‘junk.’ The renowned Cambridge molecular biologist, Sydney Brenner, makes a helpful distinction between ‘junk’ and ‘garbage.’ Garbage is something used up and worthless which you throw away; junk is something you store for some unspecified future use. (Rabinow, 1992, 7-8)
In the bioscience lab near Tokyo where I did my ethnographic study, the researchers taught me how to do PCR experiments. This was before Covid when almost everyone came to know what PCR was, or at least, what kind of instrumental information it could be good for.[1] The lab was working with mouse models, although I never got to see them in their cages. But the researcher I was shadowing showed me how to put the mouse tail clippings she collected into small tubes. She hated cutting tails, by the way, and preferred to take ear punches when she could. She told me that she didn’t like the way the mice wiggled under her hand, as if they just knew. But at this point anyway, the mice are alive in the animal room and she is only putting small, but vital, pieces of them into a tube to dissolve them down (mice becoming means), to get to the foundation of what she really wants.
I’ve still got the protocol that I typed up from the notes I made with her in the lab. Step 1 was: “Add 75 ul of NaOH to each ear punch tube (changing tips as I go).” The changing pipette tips part was really important to avoid haphazardly spreading around DNA, I learned. I also had to make sure the clippings were at the bottom of the tube and submerged. She said I could flick the tubes with my finger to get the “material” to fall down to the bottom and she showed me how to do it. I also, she cautioned, always had to be very careful of bubbles, but more flicking could help there and by making sure I didn’t put the pipette too far down into the solution. Then we would spin the tubes in the vortex (which I always typed as VORTEX for some reason), add some other reagents, and put it all in the “PCR machine,” but that is not at all its technical name.[2] Then we would usually go with all the others to the cafeteria for lunch.
In writing this now, I couldn’t remember what “NaOH” stood for so I had to ask the internet. And as I looked back over this protocol, and these practices I was just barely learning to embody before the pandemic sent us all home, I realize that they must have settled back in my mind somewhere, just as the material-ness of the lab which anchored them for me has receded like a shrinking lake in a drought summer. But what I do hold on to is what the researcher taught me about the importance of repetition and focus, for a kind of purity of practice, and the diligence to make materials—whether of mice or of sodium hydroxide—do what they ought to do.
Because what captivated me about these initial PCR steps was what appeared to me to be the profound transformation they wrought (of course, I am not the first person to say so)—from fleshy ear punch to silt DNA multiplied in a clear plastic tube, with just a little bit of chemicals and some repetitive cycles of heat—but even more, how this transmutation had the potential to fail in one way, or for one reason, or another. How difficult it could actually be to get the materials, and even the researchers themselves, to do what they ought. Once, I used some unknown solution instead of water because it was on a shelf in an unmarked bottle close to where the water, which I later supposed had gone missing, was usually kept. Once, I didn’t remember to change pipette tips. Or the sense in my hands of precisely what to do next and properly would simply begin to unravel. When we had to throw the tubes in the trash, the researcher comforted me by telling me about a time when her mind wandered for just an instant while pipetting and she lost track of which tube she had last filled with reagent. A minor momentary mistake that grows, and can even burst, into a huge error in the downstream. She taught me that sometimes, if I lifted the tubes to the light to examine their volume of liquid, I might be able to get back on track.[3] Other times the PCR machine might not cycle its heat properly. One machine was already considered to be of questionable working order but the lab didn’t have the funding to replace it. We didn’t know about its full potential for failure until we got all the way through to the very last stage of the process and discovered we had to go back to the beginning with new clippings.
The researcher and I classified these particular (wait, was that water?) experiments-in-the-making as failures because they missed the mark of their intentions. Their purposefulness, decided in advance by the goal of genotyping these mice, was also appended to other purposes, specifically to cultivate a living gene population that the researchers needed for other more central concerns. Trashing the experiments that deviated from this intentionality, although it could be costly, was a seemingly simple decision. After the PCR melt and the second half of the experiment, the electrophoresis machine either “read” back the base pair numbers we were looking for, or those numbers were just wrong and we’d made an obvious mistake. Or worse, everything collapsed into inconclusiveness and we needed to repeat the experiment anyway.[4] In this case, deviation from expectation, and therefore from usefulness, was what pushed experiments to a kind of failure, beyond which point they could not, in this context at least, be so easily reclaimed.
But what does something like “junk” have to do with mice ear punches, chemical transmutation, and mundane laboratory failures? Garbage experiments are routine in scientific practice after all. But as any scientist might tell you, failure can be its own kind of productive; in the least, as a way to learn the value of steady hands, and how to recognize water by smell, or its necessity as a control in genotyping—to become a “capable doer,” as one scientist told me. But beyond these mundane errors, some scientists argue that failures of a particular kind can break open old ways of thinking and doing, although what that failure is, and can be, is variously classified:
Science fails. This is especially true when tackling new problems. Science is not infallible. Research activity is a desire to go outside of existing worldviews, to destroy known concepts, and to create new concepts in uncharted territories. (Iwata, 2020)
I wish “failure” were the trick to seeing and moving beyond the limits of current knowledge. Is that what Kuhn said? I think that paradigm change requires making a reproducible observation that does not fit within the existing model, then going back to the whiteboard. But I don’t think these observations are very well classified as a failure. If failure = unexpected result of a successful experiment/measurement, then I can agree. (Personal communication with laboratory supervisor, 2020)
Failure has more potential than we might often recognize, where an instinct to trash can instead push to new beginnings. Just as Rabinow described Brenner’s description (1992), failure is like junk, those materials or states that are in-the-waiting—waiting to be actualized, reordered, and reclaimed as meaningful, valid and valuable, even if we don’t yet know how or why. Junk is, in this way, more than matter “out of place,” although it may land there interstitially. If “[d]irt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements” (Mary Douglas, 1966, 36), then junk is garbage and failure and decay, and even breakdown, on the precipice of being made anew. After all, without intentionality or purposefulness and other values, there can be no garbage, or failed and failing experiments and paradigms, in the first place.
Consider an example that seems categorically different from scientific experiments: inventory management in role-playing videogames. In Diablo 4 (2023), any item picked up from downed enemies or collected in the environment can be marked as “junk” and then salvaged by visiting an in-game merchant. These bits of amour and other gear reappear in your inventory afterwards as junk’s constitute materials, useful again for crafting and building up new things—strips of leather and other scraps as well as blueprints for better stuff. In Fallout 4 (2015), the “Junk Jet” gun lets you repurpose your inventory instead as ammo, anything from wrenches to teddy bears, which can be shot back out into the world and at random adversaries, where you might later be able to pick them up again, if you want. Managing encumbrance in Skyrim (2011), on the other hand, is a task of drudgery and tedium. Almost every item in the game world is moveable, each with its own weight calculation, and can be picked up and stored even accidentally, until your character is weighed down to the point of being unmovable. But the game is designed to make you feel that there is always the possibility that some magical potion, random apple, or 12 candlesticks, might just come in handy for a future encounter, a book that you might really read later, leading to a hesitancy to trash anything. In turn, every item brims with, as yet undiscovered, use-value. As Caitlin DeSlivey argues: “Objects generate social effects not just in their preservation and persistence, but in their destruction and disposal” (2006, 324). And certainly this is true when, over-encumbered deep inside a dungeon, I agonize over which items to drop, in order to move again, in order to continue to collect more—or laugh as I spray the world with cigarettes and telephones.
A decaying dog, reanimated by something that is not supposed to be there. (Image by Sarah Thanner, used with permission)
For me then, junk is a way to look for when and where particular boundaries of the useful or valuable—and even the clean and functioning—are “breached” (Helmreich 2015, 187), and then reordered. Although Helmreich is speaking to scientific experimental practices and their organizing ideologies, his insight is useful for junk’s attention to those very breaches: “moments when abstractions and formalisms break, forcing reimaginations of the phenomena they would apprehend” (185). Of course, junk DNA itself has experienced this very kind of breaching—more recent scientific research demonstrating its non-coding role is actually not without usefulness (c.f. Goodier 2016)—(re)animating it for future use. And although DeSilvey is describing vibrant multispecies-animated decay within abandoned homesteads, like Helmreich, she points to junk’s transformative potential. We just have to dig through rotted wood and insect-eaten paper, or virtual backpacks and books, to find it.
Junk merges failure, trash, and decay with the processual and everyday negotiation of culturally meaningful and policed categories: garbage, scraps and waste, but also “breakdown, dissolution, and change” (Jackson 2014, 225). Although Steven J. Jackson describes the ways these last three are fundamental features of modern media and technology, an anthropology of junk collects and extends these processes into broader techniques and social practices. Junk can help us see connections criss-crossing symbolic and material breakage and disintegration. It helps us see in/visibility of the dirty and diseased, not as a property of any material or technological object alone, but as also always in coordination and collaboration with the ways they are imagined and invested—and more, always enmeshed in variously articulated forms of power.
If infrastructures like computer networks, for example, become (more) visible when broken (Star 1999), it is not their brokenness or decay in an absolute sense that reveals them, but the way their state change defies our everyday and embodied expectations—the way they push against normativity. We may be just as surprised to find things in good working order.
Metal becoming wood in “animation of other processes” (DeSilvey 2006, 324). (Image by Sarah Thanner, used with permission)
Bit rot after all, has just as much to do with the made-intentionally-inoperable systems that force the decay, or really uselessness, of data (Hayes 1998), as it does with any actual mold on CD-ROMS and other corruptions of age and wear. In fact, digital information or technological and material infrastructures don’t become broken, just as they don’t become fully ever fixed either. Breaks and breaches are hardly so linear. Instead, these are “relative, continually shifting states” (Larkin 2008: 236). This view may be in contrast to Pink et al.’s suggestion to attend “to the mundane work that precedes data breakages or follows them” (2018, 3), but not to their entreaty to follow those everyday practices of maintenance and repair, and even intentional failure and forced rot. This is not simply because data and other material practices like PCR experiments may fail under given conditions or focused intentions, perhaps as a result of a momentary distraction or a faulty machine—or in the case of programming, because debugging is actually 90% of the work, as one bioinformatician told me. Indeed, software testing in practice goes beyond merely verifying functionality or fixing bugs and broken bits of code, but helps to define and make “lively” (Lupton 2016) what that software is, and can do, and can be made to do in the first place (Carlson et al. 2023). Along the way, as a generative process, testing, tinkering, and fixing have social effects (DeSilvey 2006) which are external to, but always in extension of, broken/working materials themselves (Marres and Stark 2020).
More importantly, perhaps, broken things can be used, as Brian Larkin argued in relation to Nigerian media and infrastructures, as a “conduit” to mount critiques of the social order (2008, 239)—to call attention to inconsistency and inequality, and to demand or remodulate for change. To see this resistance at work demands a collating of junk practices. As Juris Milestone wrote in his description of a 2014 American Anthropology Association panel, “What will an anthropology of maintenance and repair look like?”:
Fixing things can be both innovation and a response to the ravages of globalization—either through reuse as a counter-narrative to disposability, or resistance to the fetish of the new, or as a search for connection to a material mechanical world that is increasingly automated and remote.
Junk’s transformative potential asks us to see removal and erasure, or in Douglas’ terms “rejection,” as always coupled to these reciprocal practices: rebirth, repair, repurpose, renewal. In this way, junk shows us the way decay, even technological corruption, is less a “death” than a “continued animation of other processes” (2006, 324).
But if junk describes a socio-cultural ordering system concerned with practices of moving materials—even ideas and people—into and out of categories of value and purposefulness, it must also contend with the vital agency of other material and microscopic worlds, which just as easily unravel out or spool up regardless of human presence, intention, and desire. Laboratory mice in fact are particularly disobedient, they hardly ever behave as they are supposed to—just as cell cultures in a lab are finicky and fail to grow to expectations, and junk ammo from the Junk Jet has a 10% chance of becoming suspended in mid-air, becoming irretrievable.[6] If we repurpose sites or moments of breakdown to resist configurations of power, then materials themselves are also always resisting what they ought to do or become.[7] This is the draw of the things in which we are enmeshed, where we are always extending, observing, destroying and deleting. If junk is the possibility, under particular cultural expectations and desires, for things to be pushed or cycled across such thresholds, and also, of making and unmaking these, it also must contend with the things themselves—with what we see in a corroded mirror, looking, or not, back at us.
A woman in a corroded mirror, disappearing and extending. (Image by Sarah Thanner, used with permission)
Although junk may be over-bursting in its use here as a metaphor, I argue it can still usefully be used to stitch growing anthropological attention to material decay, breakage, and deviation together with tinkering, maintenance, and repair—across locations, states, practices and materialities. Granted, “manifesto” is also a too decisive word to attach to this short piece. Too sure of itself. But this post is also an attempt to challenge the understanding of what it means to be (academically) polished and complete. I use manifesto here mostly tongue-in-cheek, while still holding to the idea that any argument has to begin in small seeds, and start growing from somewhere.
My thinking about junk began years ago with Brian Larkin’s attention to breakdown (2008). More recently, I found DeSilvey (2006) by way of Pink et al. (2018); and Jackson (2014) from Sachs (2020); and Hayes (1998) from Seaver (2023). This lineage is important because I am not inventing, but building. These ideas are also bits and tears of conversations with Libuše Hannah Vepřek, Sarah Thanner and Emil Rieger, and very long ago, Juris Milestone. But everything gets filtered first through Jonathan Corliss.
This research has been supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science’s Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) 20K01188.
[1] PCR stands for polymerase chain reaction. It is an experimental method for duplicating selected genetic material in order to make it easier to detect in secondary experiments.
[2] Thermal cycler, for anyone interested. Also, just to note, but for the purposes of this retelling, I gloss over the most detailed part in writing so simply: “add some other reagents” and later, “after the PCR ‘melt’ and the second half of the experiment.”
[3] I wrote in my protocol notes, as an (anthropological) aside to myself: “K. stressed that the amount of liquid in this case doesn’t have to be super accurate, but that this is rare in science experiments. When I tried it for the first time, I almost knocked over all the new tips and also the NaOH solution which can cause burns! Yikes~)”
[4] Inconclusiveness includes an unclear or unaccounted for band in the electrophoresis gel, which is seen in the machine’s output as an image file.
[5] The images in this post are part of the artistic work of Sarah Thanner, a multimedia artist and anthropologist who playfully and experimentally engages with trashing and untrashing in her work.
[6] Fallout Wiki, Junk Jet (Fallout 4), https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Junk_Jet_(Fallout_4)
[7] Here, I also gloss over (new) materiality studies, Actor Network Theory, etc. which have linages too long to get to properly in this small piece.
Carlson, Rebecca, Gupper, Tamara, Klein, Anja, Ojala, Mace, Thanner, Sarah and Libuše Hannah Vepřek. 2023. “Testing to Circulate: Addressing the Epistemic Gaps of Software Testing.” STS-hub.de 2023: Circulations, Aachen Germany, March 2023.
DeSilvey, Caitlin. 2006. “Observed Decay: Telling Stories with Mutable Things.” Journal of Material Culture 11: 318-338.
Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge.
Goodier, John L. “Restricting Retrotransposons: A Review.” Mobile DNA 7, 16. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13100-016-0070-z
Hayes, Brain. 1998. “Bit Rot.” American Scientist 86(5): 410–415. http://dx.doi.org/10.1511/1998.5.410.
Helmreich, Stefan. 2015. Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Iwata, Kentaro. 2020. “Infectious Diseases Do Not Exist.”「感染症は実在しない」あとがき. Retrived May 9, 2020, https://georgebest1969.typepad.jp/blog/2020/03/感染症は実在しないあとがき.html.
Jackson, Steven. J. 2014. “Rethinking Repair.” In T. Gillespie, P. J. Boczkowski, & K. A. Foot (Eds.), Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Cambridge: MIT Press. Pp. 221-239.
Lupton, D. 2016. The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self Tracking. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Marres, N, Stark, D. 2020 “Put to the Test: For a New Sociology of Testing.” British Journal of Sociology 71: 423–443. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12746.
Milestone, Juris. 2014. “What Will an Anthropology of Maintenance and Repair Look Like?” American Anthropological Association Meeting.
Pink, Sarah, Ruckenstein, Minna, Willim, Robert and Melisa Duque. 2018. “Broken Data: Conceptualising Data in an Emerging World.” Big Data & Society January–June: 1–13. https:// doi:10.1177/2053951717753228.
Rabinow, Paul. 1992. “Studies in the Anthropology of Reason.” Anthropology Today 8(5): 7-8.
Sachs, S. E. 2020. “The Algorithm at Work? Explanation and Repair in the Enactment of Similarity in Art Data.” Information, Communication & Society 23(11): 1689-1705. https://doi:10.1080/1369118X.2019.1612933.
Seaver, Nick. 2022. Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43(3): 377–391. https://doi:10.1177/ 00027649921955326.
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.
Our first encounter with Randy Rettberg was somewhat surreal. Not that the others weren’t—the sui generis atmosphere is always present—but that first meeting was set in a scenario so far from our everyday reality that it felt like we’d been thrown into a science fiction novel. It happened in 2022 and we were a bit disoriented after ten hours of transatlantic travel and two hours riding Bentleys to the British countryside. It was July, and we had left the cold and dry wind of our almost never rigorous Brazilian winter to find a pleasant summer sun that gently bathed the English lands. The people there were in a good mood and smiling. Someone told us that it was an atypical moment, that life was not so bright most of the time. We got lucky. At least the weather made us feel a little bit at home, but only that.
We were invited to participate in a workshop named “Safe, Secure, & Responsible Synthetic Biology Beyond Containment,” being part of a group of around 30 people, including biotechnology students, government regulators from around the world, union people, and scholars. We stayed in a 2400-hectares property called Wilton Park, in a building that reminded us of a castle—of course, in reality a Victorian mansion, named Wiston House. This event was jointly organized by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Foundation, the independent, non-profit organization of which Randy—who was also attending the workshop—is president and founder. We got to know iGEM while we were studying for graduation at the University of São Paulo and participated in the student-organized Synthetic Biology Club. Clarissa was carrying out field work as an anthropologist with the club’s participants, and Érico was one of them. Participation in international competitions was one of the club’s main activities, and iGEM was one of those competitions. Created in 2003 as a spin-off of the MIT department Registry of Standard Biological Parts, the international competition iGEM aims to promote the international development of synthetic biology, engaging students, young scientists, and established scientists around the world.
At that first meeting, in the impressive Victorian mansion full of old paintings of men dressed in strange clothes and with menacing looks, we had the opportunity to talk with Randy about his participation in the development of the internet and about the connections of this previous experience with his interest in synthetic biology. A few months later, on an October afternoon, we had the opportunity to record a conversation lasting more than two hours in Randy’s office at iGEM’s Paris office. Both meetings were made possible because Clarissa was hired as a Human Practices Summer Fellow at the iGEM Foundation, working with a team assigned to develop projects and research on responsible practices and synthetic biology, while Erico actively participates as a volunteer in iGEM activities involving biosafety and biosecurity.
Randy is an enigmatic and extraordinary figure. He worked on a range of exciting and society-changing projects, including an important participation in the ARPANET[1] project while working at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN). There he worked on the first internet routers and packet switching protocols, as well as in parallel and distributed computing. Machines he helped create would be used to coordinate US military satellites and address what would become internet routing. He would then move to Apple Computer and to Sun Microsystems—two other leading companies in the personal computer and internet revolution—before joining MIT. Falling in love with synthetic biology through his long-time friend Tom Knight, now owner of NASDAQ-listed synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks, Randy was invited to direct the MIT Registry of Standard Parts, a department that would spin off to create the iGEM Foundation.
Randy’s transition from the development of the internet to becoming a prominent figure in synthetic biology is something that has always caught our attention, as the internet carries with it important constituent elements of synthetic biology itself. We grew up along with the development of the internet. We lived our childhood in a world that no longer exists, nor will it ever exist again. We were formed in a cyberpunk broth, and perhaps due to the savagery of our condition as inhabitants of a forest city,[2] we were never able to ignore the intrusion of nature. Our curiosity to understand more about the roots of our roots—cybernetic and biological—led us to dig into the history of the internet with countercultural tools. We read books like “Neuromancer” and watched movies like “The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet” and “Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees.” It was from this cyber-bio-punk reference that we approached Randy and formulated our questions for him.
The exercise of listening to the trajectory of scientists is very interesting for an anthropology of science and technology based on a notion of localized knowledge, as proposed by Donna Haraway. By turning to the memories of scientists from an anthropological perspective, we are able to situate techno-scientific work in a given space and time and in relation to broader historical and social processes. At the same time, working with biographies and memories of scientists also makes us capable of bringing to the surface dimensions that account for the specificities of each trajectory. When questioned by us about the origins of the concept of information, Randy alternates between great historical facts, such as the second world war, memories of his work in laboratories, and intimate family memories. This complexity of the web of scientists’ memories is very interesting as raw material. For us, peripheral researchers from the global south who practice science and technology studies as a way of imagining different possible worlds, opening listening spaces in hegemonic places of knowledge production—especially linked to what is understood as the “frontier” of science such as synthetic biology—allows us a certain smuggling between different realities, a true exercise of anthropological alterity.
“Randomness must be in there, right? And you kind of think this is like earth, air, fire, and water. Those are the elements for a long time. Those were the elements.”
Randy Rettberg was born in 1948. He began the interview telling us that while he was growing up in rural Illinois in the 50s, several things drew his attention towards science and technology. His father, who was very religious (Randy’s grandfather was a lutheran minister) and had been a prisoner of war in Japan during World War II, came back to the US and, thanks to the GI Bill,[3] obtained a degree in Architecture, working in many urban buildings—schools, hospitals, prisons—after graduation. He says that his childhood and teenage years were lived in a “small world” where complicated machines would be farm machines, though his world kept expanding in several directions while he came in contact with several initiatives fostering curiosity and engagement in science and technology—from Bell Labs[4] films and pictures promoting their own technologies and marvelous inventions, to do-it-yourself science kits that you could buy from magazines. Randy remembers several scientific-fueled teenage adventures like building a radio from one of these kits, playing with chemical reagents with a friend whose father had a pharmacy, building a tin-can telephone network in the backyard, and playing with a huge recorder that came encased in a suitcase and that he bought selling newspapers door-to-door in the 7th grade. The television, a very “fancy” machine at the time, would bring technologic tales as well. A friend’s father was a professor of Physics at the University of Illinois, so Randy together with his friend would spend a huge amount of time playing in an electronic prototype board with switches and lights that could be reassembled to create different combinations of button and light activations. Two other important childhood memories were how computers were beginning to feature in public imagination at the time—as huge and expensive machines with buttons and flashlights—and the launch of the soviet satellite Sputnik[5] in 1957.
In Rettberg’s account, his world definitely expanded widely when he joined MIT in 1965. While during his basic education the teachers would often repress his curiosity, at MIT it was the opposite. Curiosity was rewarded and it would be the norm. Suddenly teachers would consider “taking things a level down” while searching for answers in a specific topic. Another thing that Randy remembers from this time was his first intense contact with a real computer. This computer was the size of a room and could be used by the university staff with individual accounts who could reserve computing time slots. He describes the operating interface as “a big big tube and a light pen.”
When Randy graduated, the Vietnam War was raging on and he didn’t want to fight in it, so he went back to Illinois to get a Master’s degree in Physics, describing it as a “really really hard” experience because of the complexity of the math involved. After obtaining his MSc, he contacted Nicholas Negroponte[6] from MIT’s Architecture Machine Group[7] and was hired as a “computer guy.” He operated an Interdata Model 3, a business computer already “small,” the size of a desk table. Randy remembers how “slow” it was: only 30 thousand instructions a second.[8] From Negroponte he heard of Bolt, Beranek and Neuman (BBN), a government contractor[9] that managed at the time several groups of highly motivated scientists and engineers working at very exciting projects at the edge of science and technology. Randy says BBN was created by three MIT professors who were renowned specialists in acoustics and began working for the Department of Defense in this field, but soon started providing services related to other fields of science and technology, receiving several government contracts including from the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).[10] In 1972, Rettberg managed to get interviews in different teams within BBN and was invited to join one of the teams that was building the ARPANET project together with people from MIT Lincoln Labs.[11]
ARPANET was an ARPA project aimed at creating a network that would interconnect all US military bases and Department of Defense facilities in a way that information could be securely and effectively shared between them. The ARPANET project created most of the currently used internet protocols, for example, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP). ARPANET was the prototype of what would become the internet. In Randy’s words, ARPANET at the time was “a four node network. It was the first packet switching network[12] and it was four different nodes connected together by 50 KB links. So we started very slow, with teletypes[13] terminals, 10 characters per second.” Randy recalls that the group had very interesting ideas about transforming and transporting information reliably. For example, there was the idea that systems fail often, so there must be ways for interconnected information processing systems to check the integrity of sent and received information. From this idea the Transport Control Protocol, one of the backbones of modern internet, would be born. This needed in turn to be coupled to a decentralized network—so it could withstand and route around problems in individual nodes of the network such as a power outage or a military attack—and this decentralized network should be able to be composed of machines of different manufacturers that would follow in hardware and in software certain common procedures and standards that would ensure compatibility and communicability between any type of device able to follow these procedures.
According to Randy—building from the idea of bit encoding from Shannon and early information pioneers[14]—some of the really innovative ideas regarding information transfer were related to packet switching. The use of a network of interconnected nodes (composed of digital computers for a collaborative and decentralized discovery of possible routes for the information to travel on) and the establishment of protocols designed for the computers to speak on a common language (which could be understood by computers of different manufacturers) was how the ARPANET team chose to solve the problem of the ability of information to travel from one place to another. Prior to travel however, the information needed to be encoded and packaged in what would become the “network packet.” The network packet would contain the proper information users wanted to transfer and an additional “header” of information, a complementary message that contained “control information”—needed for the nodes of the network to find the best routes for the information and for the effective forwarding of the messages from one node to another after the best possible way was found. The combination of all protocols and ideas above would form a “packet-switching network.”
Rettberg emphasizes that prior to ARPANET, data could be sent from one place to another, but this task would require specific and expensive equipment. At his account, even in the academy and in the telecom industry most people believed that things had their own essences and while transferring information, these “essences” should be transmitted. For example, music was composed of sound waves, so then the only way to transfer music was to physically reproduce the sound waves from the transmitter to the receiver—and that would require special equipment for each type of “essential” information. From the ARPANET on, everyone with a digital computer, peripheral equipment, and a common phone line could be connected to every other person with a similar setup and transfer any type of information such as audio, video or text in digital format—a format that would subsume the idea of the specific “essences” of each type of information, replacing it with the concept of “digital encoded” information where everything that can be represented can also be digitally represented.
Randy told us two or three times that he and most of his colleagues at the project were against the war in Vietnam and were heavily influenced by the rock and roll movement, so this forms a contradictory background against which these ideas were designed. In ARPANET the engineers embedded a diffuse but real feeling against central control and authority funded by the military itself. With this new technology, the United States military sector would transform itself towards a decentralized informational entity capable of operating anywhere on earth. In a prior conversation, Randy told us that at times the technoscientific problem presented for the team to solve was straightforward military, such as the coordination of military satellites and the livestream of video and audio between them. In fact, the network transfer of audio and video for the military was one the first purposes of the computer Rettberg helped create in the ARPANET project, the Butterfly BBN. BBN itself was brought to the ARPANET project because of the renown associated with the acoustical know-how of the company.
The Butterfly BBN is considered a wonder of the early digital computers. It was one of the first of the modern “supercomputers.” It used commercially available digital processors from Motorola and each machine had up to 512 of these 12-33MHz processing units. It was first programmed to act as a “router” machine in the late 70’s DARPA’s Wideband Packet Satellite Network, making possible a continuous 3 Mbits/s broadcast of digital data— mainly audio and video—around multiple US military bases. The machine would then be used both in the Terrestrial Wide Band Network, a network that physically connected several Department of Defense facilities through high speed capable data cables from the late 1980’s to 1991. From 1991 forward Butterfly BBN was the computer used as the first internet routers, implementing in hardware and in software the first version of the Internet Protocol (IP).
A “die image” (a photograph of the internal parts of an electronic chip) of the Motorola 6800, the processor used by the first ARPANET routers, including the Butterfly BBN mentioned by Randy. (Photo by Birdman86 at commons.wikimedia.org)
It is funny to note that while telling us everything above, Randy—who had a lutheran minister grandfather and a “very religious” father—refers multiple times to religion as a way of explaining how prior to everything above, ideas about information were kind of mystical and quintessential. We had the impression that, for Randy, the cybernetic revolution which he took part in was almost like a new step in the human relationship with the universe. He, for example, compares cybernetics to the role of religion in English literature, saying that the former formed the backbone to the latter. For Randy, cybernetics is the backbone of our current mode of existence and of understanding the world we live in: in his distinctive atheist mystical language, he likens the development of cybernetics to the addition of entropy[15] to the four “original” elements, earth, fire, air, and water.
In a future blog post, we will describe the second half of the interview on Randy Rettberg’s transition from early internet pioneer to early synthetic biology pioneer. The next blog post also takes a deeper look on Randy’s view of how cybernetics is connected to synthetic biology and to science and technology in general. Until next time!
[1] ARPANET was an Advanced Projects Research Agency (ARPA) project aimed at creating a network that would interconnect all US military bases and Department of Defense facilities in a way that information could be securely and effectively shared between them. The ARPANET project created most of the currently used internet protocols, for example, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP). ARPANET was the prototype of what would become the internet.
[2] São Paulo is the financial capital of Brazil, a city surrounded and restrained by both the Atlantic Forest and the booming agribusiness.
[3] The GI Bill, formally Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, was a US law aimed at rewarding war veterans for their participation in World War II. Through this law, war veterans would have a facilitated process for getting superior and technical education.
[4] Bell Labs was founded by Alexander Graham Bell and was one of the first R&D intensive companies in the world. It became a large and important government contractor, conducting research and development for the US government, especially the US military. Researchers from Bell Labs were responsible for the invention of several technologies that form the backbone of contemporary industrial mode of living. Some of these inventions were the transistor, laser technology, the UNIX operating system, photovoltaic cells, and several others.
[5] Sputnik was the first man-made satellite to be launched and successfully orbit the earth. It was launched by the Soviets on the 4th of October in 1957. It was one of the events that started the space race.
[6] Nicholas Negroponte is known to be the founder of the MIT Media Lab (and prior to that, the MIT’s Architecture Machine Group) and to be an early internet evangelizer, being one of the founders of the WIRED magazine.
[7] In 1985, the lab would be reassembled into the now famous MIT Media Lab.
[8] Today a personal computer can run at 1-10 trillion operations per second. A Geforce GTX 1080 graphic card used in gaming today runs at 8.9 trillion floating point operations per second (unit used to measure computing speed).
[9] A government contractor is a private company that works under contracts to governments.
[10] Advanced Research Projects Agency, now Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is one of the most important US government institutions dedicated to the creation of new technologies that could be used in defense purposes. DARPA funded projects include the modern jet engine, as well as the technologies behind the integrated circuits, super computers and the internet.
[11] Lincoln Labs is another R&D laboratory that works under government contracts. Founded in 1950 as the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, recently it spun-off from MIT, becoming a private laboratory. Lincoln Labs is historically tied to the US Department of Defense, having developed the computer network called SAGE in the 50s (the first military computers to be connected to others and to have graphical user interfaces, used to coordinate radar sites around the US). Most of what Lincoln Labs does is classified, but we know they are also interested in synthetic biology because their staff participates in iGEM’s events.
[12] Packet switching is one of the theoretical basis of the current internet and of modern telecommunications. The idea behind it is to create a procedure that two or more computers must follow to securely and reliably exchange information. It involves a series of steps that the machines will have to know and follow in order to ensure that the information has really been transmitted between them, even if problems arise due to inconsistent connection.
[13] A teletype is an electromechanical device that could be used to send and receive messages from other teletypes and later, to and from computers. Teletypes would then be used as computer interfaces as Randy mentions here.
[14] Shannon – whose research was also funded by the US military – proposes the idea of encoding information as sequences of zeros and ones, what he calls “binary digits” or bits in his paper “A mathematical theory of communication” from 1948.
[15] In information theory, entropy measures the amount of information that a certain event contains.
Increasingly, scholars across the life and social sciences recognize the necessity of multi-method, interdisciplinary research for its ability to adequately understand the world’s complex problems.[1] However, the process of designing and executing these projects can be challenging. Interdisciplinary endeavors often risk privileging one discipline/methodological paradigm with others incorporated in a more consultative manner (i.e. quantitative versus qualitative), or, they run in-parallel without integrating epistemologies and methodologies (Lewis 2021). Examples of symmetric and integrative projects which unsettle disciplinary boundaries to afford new kinds of knowledge remain few and far between.
In the following piece, we (ZB and CB), as members and ethnographers of interdisciplinary teams, reflect on several “Mexican Exposures” (MEXPOS) projects which bring together researchers in anthropology, epidemiology, biostatistics, engineering, and health economics to make better knowledge and “better numbers” about health and inequality in Mexico (Roberts 2021). MEXPOS projects collaborate with long-standing epidemiological birth-cohort studies (ELEMENT and PROGRESS) which are based within Mexico’s National Institute of Public Health (INSP). Through performing and observing the laborious process of integrating the often-disparate methodologies, epistemologies, and analytical aims that each expert brings to the team, we have identified that some team members act as mediators, performing a critical role in making these interdisciplinary collaborations work. Our contribution to understanding how interdisciplinary knowledge is made (Lin et al. 2007) is a focus on the interpersonal aspects of knowledge production through exploring how these teams make better data by destabilizing disciplinary boundaries. By doing so, we hope to elucidate the challenges and opportunities of this kind of collaboration by exploring what is made possible when doing this work together.
ZB has a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and has spent a year managing MEXPOS projects as she prepares to begin a joint MD-PhD Anthropology training program; as an undergraduate, she also spent three semesters working in the MEXPOS ethnographic coding lab. CB has a background in physiotherapy and medical anthropology, and works with MEXPOS as part of her doctoral research and the Biosocial Birth Cohort Network, which included shadowing the MEXPOS team for ten days in April 2023 and meeting field workers in Mexico City. We developed this essay from our shared experience and observations of interdisciplinary knowledge practices within MEXPOS team meetings.
MEXPOS projects perform bioethnographic work. Bioethnography is a research method which combines methodologies from the social and biological sciences to understand environment-body interactions as relational and situated processes (Roberts and Sanz 2018). The premise of bioethnographic teams is to generate new knowledge by transcending disciplinary boundaries to tackle the complexity of the topics of study. Bioethnographic methods differ from other examples of collaboration between the life and social sciences that break down because of the lack of a shared intent or question (Lewis 2021) and encourages critical implosions between “nature/culture” (Roberts 2021). This methodology calls for the unsettling of traditional epistemological boundaries between the disciplines involved to critically engage with the questions and objects of research at hand in new and innovative ways.
This interdisciplinary research model hopes to create knowledge that truly apprehends pressing problems and questions. In practice, however, we have found that this process can feel awkward, clunky, and falter as members navigate the integration and destabilization it requires, working through the tensions of epistemic purity and interdisciplinary compromise while creating new modes and subject positions towards these blended methods. In our experience, the element which often relieves these tensions and moves teams toward achieving their collaborative aims has been the presence of mediators and the labor they perform.
Mediators are key for facilitating conversations between disciplines that bring underlying “taken-for-granted” assumptions to the surface, enabling these teams to progress past disciplinary limits. Most MEXPOS teams consist of a core of senior academics that are anchored within respective disciplines and act as knowledge-keepers alongside a variety of research assistants and management staff. Within MEXPOS, we have found that mediation is typically performed by the project manager and several graduate research assistants, including ZB. These are junior scholars with varying degrees of training in ethnographic methods as well as survey methodology, epidemiology, biology/life sciences, statistics, and other quantitative analyses. Through their training and background, mediators are well positioned to steer, generate, and develop bioethnographic questions while fostering a group dynamic that advances the team’s goals. The two examples we present here demonstrate mediation-in-action which allowed these teams to move forward amid, and possibly because of, disciplinary friction (Tsing 2011), which was harnessed by the mediators and transformed into something generative.
In the Spring of 2023, a team within MEXPOS worked on a collaborative paper based on the insights of the Household Chemical Assessment Project, a pilot study of two working-class households in Mexico City. This project, involving anthropologists, epidemiologists, exposure scientists, and metabolomics researchers, documented household and personal care products along with their use/meaning and generated a master list of chemical ingredients and insights about household exposure. During these meetings, the team debated how to situate this project and its outputs within an existing paradigm of exposure research, “the exposome” (Wild 2005). The team was stuck; the epidemiologists were aiming for epistemological clarity and a fixed structure to proceed, while the anthropologists were looping back and questioning the paradigm itself by posing alternative questions. The mediator registered that the two camps were talking past one another due to differences in their underlying notions of what “exposure” entailed on an ontological level, and pulled together readings that spanned both sets of disciplines to be discussed as a group at the next meeting. This effectively moved the team forward by 1) developing a new starting point with a shared knowledge base and vocabulary, and 2) opening a window into each discipline’s mode of inquiry in a way which allowed for more nuanced discussion about their respective stakes and assumptions. In this way, mediators can act as disciplinary polyglots thanks to their ability to understand the languages of the different disciplines, recognize and iron out misunderstandings, and summarize the conversations held by senior academics from different camps. This practice of mediation enabled the team to theorize beyond disciplinary limits and pioneer a new orientation towards exposure inquiry and intervention that enmeshes social and life scientists within a framework of shared understanding.
The second example involves another MEXPOS team, comprised of anthropologists, health economists, biostatisticians, and epidemiologists, that leveraged insights from a previous project (NESTSMX) about household water infrastructure. The team created a module of survey questions for the Mexican National Health and Nutrition Survey (ENSANUT) in order to investigate the impact of an intermittent water supply on health, gender, and household finances. One meeting about question revisions for the following year’s survey got stalled when differences in disciplinary aims and timelines surfaced. The anthropologists, who predominated, wanted to ameliorate their own apprehensions around survey methodology by tinkering with existing questions and discussing potential new ones to keep fidelity to the complex ethnographic insights. The biostaticians seemed frustrated by this, as they pointed out the looming due date and advocated for straightforward and generalizable questions to produce data that could be meaningfully compared to the previous year. The mediators suggested narrowing the discussion only to the ethnographic data that could be directly operationalized into the specific module questions that the biostaticians agreed would be worth modifying because they describe experience instead of measuring prevalence. As such, the mediators helped to reconcile qualitative richness and quantitative concreteness in translating ethnographic insights into questions that produce 0s and 1s, modulating between the sometimes-disparate aims and scales of ethnographic and statistical research processes that make integrating them so difficult.
Sketches from CB’s notebook while observing interdisciplinary knowledge practice, integrated and expanded by ZB.
Contemporary academic training calls for more interdisciplinary models, which could produce more mediators for multidisciplinary teams. These mediators do not always squash or quell conflict, but rather harness the productive role of the disciplinary unsettling that bioethnography facilitates among established academics, including the resulting misunderstandings and moments of uncertainty. These moments of generative friction offer critical points of reflection and surprise, and can reveal disciplinary assumptions and blind spots – which might be what is most valuable in bioethnography. This generative friction is a function of the unexpected: to borrow from studies of cognition, it is when a habit, in this case a disciplinary way of thinking, is contradicted and calls for a new way of understanding (Clark 2018), as well as epistemic humility. Here, these new ways of understanding are the interdisciplinary insights that are made possible through practices of bioethnographic integration. The mediators make friction productive by “paying attention to the diverse concerns of different disciplines and incorporating responsive negotiation of their collaborative possibilities and the tensions between them” (Mol and Hardon 2020). Here, mediators provide the crucial vector required to propel the group forward.
The making of truly interdisciplinary knowledge often requires overcoming epistemological paradigms through disciplinary destabilization. Mediators both manage interdisciplinary tensions and foster the generative friction that emerges, allowing for new kinds of knowledge to be produced together. Mediators can recognize, hold, and harness the discomfort of competing objectives and respond accordingly with the symmetry of the meta research process continually in mind. While disciplines will transform as opportunities for interdisciplinary training continue to increase, our experience with these bioethnographic collaborations underscores the importance of maintaining spaces for generative frictions that mediators can render into positive momentum.
[1] See https://www.ucl.ac.uk/soc-b-biosocial-doctoral-training/soc-b-centre-doctoral-training-biosocial-research; https://new.nsf.gov/funding/learn/research-types/learn-about-interdisciplinary-research
Clark, Andy. 2018. “A Nice Surprise? Predictive Processing and the Active Pursuit of Novelty.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17 (3): 521–34. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9525-z.
Lewis, Ashley. 2021. “Questioning the Promise of Interdisciplinarity: An Ethnography of an Interdisciplinary Research Project.” University of Nottingham.
Lin, Wei, Rob Procter, Peter Halfpenny, Alex Voss, and Kenny Baird. 2007. “An Action-Oriented Ethnography of Interdisciplinary Social Scientific Work.”
Mol, Annemarie, and Anita Hardon. 2020. “What COVID-19 May Teach Us about Interdisciplinarity.” BMJ Global Health 5 (12): e004375. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2020-004375.
Roberts, Elizabeth F. S., and Camilo Sanz. 2018. “Bioethnography: A How-To Guide for the Twenty-First Century.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Biology and Society, edited by Maurizio Meloni, John Cromby, Des Fitzgerald, and Stephanie Lloyd, 749–75. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52879-7_32.
Roberts, Elizabeth F.S. 2021. “Making Better Numbers through Bioethnographic Collaboration.” American Anthropologist 123 (2): 355–69. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13560.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2011. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt7s1xk.
Wild, Christopher Paul. 2005. “Complementing the Genome with an ‘Exposome’: The Outstanding Challenge of Environmental Exposure Measurement in Molecular Epidemiology.” Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention 14 (8): 1847–50. https://doi.org/10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-05-0456.
On Chinese gay dating apps, “fake profiles” are a constant concern: photos might have been altered or biometrics might have been fabricated. Offline, the person might barely resemble their profile. The lived experiences of Chinese gay men, however, show us that the fake is not always antithetical to the real. The fake, under certain circumstances, could enact material realities of its own. Gay socialites (同志名媛, tongzhi mingyuan) in urban China’s gay community are cases in point.
One aspect of my research among gay socialites focuses on the in-between zone of “real” and “unreal,” and how exactly the transformation from unreal to real can be achieved in a specific socio-technological context—contemporary urban China—in the digital age. I argue that we need to go beyond a binary of “real” and “unreal” to understand a social world where human actors are using digital technologies to create intermediate zones that are neither squarely real nor completely unreal, with the purpose of fulfilling their desires. These blurry, intermediate zones are liminal (Turner 1969), existing in the form of fantasies, constructed personas and lifestyles, and intoxicated states. It is through concrete human actions, and sometimes their unintended consequences, that liminal realities become full realities.
Fourteen years ago, in Coming of Age in Second Life, Tom Boellstorff (2008) argued that virtual worlds are in and of themselves cultural worlds distinct from the physical world, and that it is not only possible but suitable to study the culture of a virtual world with ethnography. Contesting the “false opposition” that fails to recognize that “the myriad ways that the online is real” and mistakenly assumes that “everything physical is real” (Boellstorff 2016, 387), Boellstorff states that “[c]hallenging the derealization of the digital is of pressing importance” (2016, 397). There have been consistent efforts in anthropology and related social sciences that echo or take up Boellstorff’s intervention. Anthropologists caution that design features and affordances of apps are deeply shaped by socio-cultural contexts, and that these new technologies bring about not only new possibilities, but also new risks and hierarchies in users’ lived realities (Batiste 2013; McGuire 2016; Edelman 2016). They pose a collective challenge to the misconception that the virtual and the actual are separated (McGuire 2016; Hu 2015). These pioneer studies have, from various perspectives and with meticulously constructed ethnographic details, highlighted the fact that the virtual and the actual are not only increasingly integrated, but on many occasions the virtual is real in every sense of the word.
Speaking more broadly, Lisa Messeri (2021) cogently points out that what she calls the “anthropologies of the unreal” have continuously expanded what counts as real in anthropological worldview by demonstrating how the seemingly “unreal,” such as illusions, dreams, digital technologies, intoxicated states of mind, and so on, are real or made real in specific socio-technological contexts (Boellstorff 2008; Mittermaier 2010; Messeri 2021; Zigon 2019; Pearce 2009).
In this case study, I use the term “liminal realities” to better conceptualize these in-between realities that were neither absolutely real nor undeniably fake. I draw on Victor Turner’s concept of liminality (1969) to highlight not only the transitional nature of these realities but also their uncertainty, malleability, and fluidity. Indeed, a gay socialite in China is not born; he is made.
The lives of the Chinese gay men I met during fieldwork provide a fruitful lens to understand the in-betweenness of life as a liminality between “real” and “unreal,” when boundaries, or thresholds, are not always clear or absolute. In this blog post, I will show how my interlocutors—mostly rural-to-urban migrant gay men—use digital technologies to create “fake” personas; that is, personas whose lifestyle, socio-economic status, and overall social status were different from their offline ones. In these urban Chinese men’s cases, however, “fake” is not the opposite of “real.” It was precisely through meticulously constructed “fakeness” that these men accumulate attention from China’s gay community, build a large fan base, and increase their social status. Eventually, this “fakeness” materialized and turned into tangible economic gains and social recognition. In other words, the fake became something undeniably real.
A “gay socialite” was one of the multiple identity categories created by urban Chinese gay men that placed gay men into an always changing hierarchical system according to their upbringing, education, class status, sexual practices, and more. My interlocutors described a gay socialite as someone who was young, good-looking, muscular, financially well-off, and fashionable. Most importantly, however, being a gay socialite was about enacting a particular lifestyle. Indeed, without a Louis Vuitton bag, or comparable luxury brand-name products, a good-looking, muscular, young gay man was considered a “wild chick” (乡下野鸡, xiang xia ye ji) ridiculed for their assumed rural, financially tight, and unsophisticated “nature” (本性, ben xing) despite their good looks. In contrast, hard labor was considered a foreign concept to gay socialites. A socialite must not work yet still have the financial means to travel around the world, stay in luxury hotels, and post their experiences on social media for fans to admire and/or evaluate.
Image 1: A well-known gay socialite posting on social media an image from a luxurious high-rise hotel room. The caption reads: “This is what a vacation is supposed to look like.” (Image screenshot by the author)
Image 2: On a different day, the same socialite posted a picture of a fancy breakfast at a luxurious hotel in Hangzhou, China. The caption reads: “A beautiful day begins with two Americanos.” (Image screenshot by the author)
During my fieldwork, however, I found out that most gay socialites actually came from humble backgrounds and that their financial position was not exactly as their social media posts suggested. Their luxurious lifestyle was, in fact, performed. It was common for gay socialites to rent a hotel room together. They took turns taking individual photos in each corner of the room and planned to post their pictures on social media at different times. During my fieldwork, I also learned that these gay men often borrowed brand-name products from others—from either individual people or companies specializing in brand-name rentals—to enhance their upscale persona on social media.
What’s the point, one might ask? Many socialites are looking for “gold masters” to look after them. In the gay lexicon, a “gold master” (金主, jin zhu) referred to a wealthy and usually older gay man who took care of younger and less monied gay men. However, in this gay social hierarchy, gold masters were not just looking to take care of any physically appealing gay men. Due to the equally intense hierarchical thinking among gold masters, and a social environment that measured a person’s social worth partly through the identity of their intimate partners, gold masters were looking for “worthy” (配得上，pei de shang) gay men—a position well fit by gay socialites. If a gold master ended up with a “nobody” (谁也不是, shei ye bu shi, translated literally as “who is nobody”) the reputation or social worth of the gold master would deteriorate as well. After all, the number of wealthy people in China grew to such an extent that some felt the pressure to differentiate themselves even further, pursuing a form of distinction from the so-called “vulgar new rich” (暴发户, bao fa hu, translated literally as “people who got rich as quickly as an explosion”) (Osburg 2020). During my fieldwork, gold masters and gay socialites were common couples. While the former gained face by having an attractive intimate partner, the latter eventually lived a material life that used to exist only in the virtual sphere.
There was more than one way the “fakeness” on social media could turn into material and financial realities. Not every gay socialite could find a gold master. Some took advantage of China’s vast “sunken market,” referring to the vast number of consumers who purchased cheaper products with their more meager incomes. Numbering in the billions, these individuals form the biggest market with the strongest potential one could hope for. By creating a fake persona, gay socialites accumulated a large number of followers from this market, many of whom could never keep a socialite like a gold master could or afford the socialite’s lifestyle for themselves. This is beside the point, however: most fans knew that the social media gay socialite life was often staged. Rather, these virtually mediated personas and lifestyles served not as truthful representation of another person’s reality, but snapshots of the fantasy of a good life, of an otherwise, of an alternative of a life (hopefully) yet to come. The power of fantasy was strong, leading to loyal fanfare, who would click the link and purchase whatever their idols recommend to them.
Brian, for example, was one of the most well-known gay socialites in China. Brian started his entrepreneurship and accumulated his fortune by selling affordable protein power on his social media accounts back in 2010s. When I returned to China for my dissertation fieldwork in 2019, Brian already owned a couple companies, multiple properties in China and Thailand, and was a major sponsor for one of Asia’s biggest dance parties in Bangkok. Even though Brian is still ridiculed by other gays for his highly photoshopped, “fake” pictures on social media, it would be hard to deny that the real and tangible changes in his life originated from purposefully constructed fakeness.
Indeed, the persona and lifestyle put on social media by these socialites might be “fake.” But “fakeness” is not always the opposite of realness. Mediated by virtuality, fakeness—understood in this context as a form of purposefully constructed liminal reality with the intention to craft a better life—is generative, productive, and performative; it brings new realities into existence. For Chinese gay socialites, many of whom migrated from rural China or lower-tier cities to the metropolis such as Shanghai, virtually mediated fakeness was their attempt—sometimes a very convenient and efficient one—to “make it” in China’s urban centers. In their cases, the fake, instead of standing in sharp opposition to the real, stood right beside the real. Here, the differences between the fake and the real were not quite ontological but temporal and conditional. The fake, in this sense, bears the potential to transition and transform into tangible and material realities that are no longer constrained in the virtual world. The fake, then, can be seen as a specific kind of real—the liminal real.
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The biology, as astonishing as it is, does not tell us what it will mean. -Stephan Helmreich, “Homo Microbis” (2014, 4)
Within microbiome research, the human body can be recast as a host of microbial ecologies, a “supraorganism” or “holobiont.” From this comes new ways of understanding and treating digestive diseases as well as illnesses associated with brain functioning, like depression and Alzheimer’s. This research reflects the increasing emphasis in the life sciences on “life as process” (Dupre and O’Malley 2007, Dupre 2020), and in the social sciences on the body as “biosocial” (Niehwöhner and Lock 2018). We take up these insights and examine one way that these ontologies of body and environment circulate in public ways by analyzing how the human body is depicted in relation to microbes and environments through public visualizations of the human microbiome.
Despite the fact that the human microbiome is made of up non-humans and should raise questions about human exceptionality, the human microbiome circulates in the media primarily in relation to human health. How to care for health through attending to the human microbiome has become a wellness topic circulating in popular news media, from science journalism to lifestyle and wellness magazines and websites. There are soaps, foods, and food preparation methods that are microbiome-friendly. There are direct-to-consumer tests that will offer personalized, if not precise, nutrition recommendations. There are magazine articles advising readers on how to care and optimize their various microbiomes, from stomach to skin to vagina. How are bodies, microbes, and environments portrayed as the relational entities that they are for public audiences?
We explore two prominent visual themes in the public visualizations of the microbiome. First, the representations of boundaries of the human body in relation to microbial bodies. This means paying attention to how the microbial worlds within, and the environment outside, the body are visually constituted. This is to visually contextualize the ubiquitous headline or textual hook about the human microbiome: that within the human body, microbial cells outnumber human cells. The scale of difference has oscillated as research accumulates and has ranged from estimates of a ratio of 100 microbial cells to 1 human cell, to 10:1 to 3:1, and most recently resting closer to a ratio of 1.3:1 (Saey 2016). Second, we consider how differences (racial, gendered, in physical ability/fitness) were represented. Our focus on public media follows Adele Clarke’s analysis of the role of the media in the assemblages of “healthscapes” (2010, 105-06) and shows how the microbiome becomes part of expansive processes of biomedicalization (Clarke et al 2010) that normalize directions of health care and individual responsibility. The media is not only central to the proliferation of concepts of health, but also generates and reproduces expectations of how the world should work in regard to health (Briggs and Hallin 2016).
We argue that the visualizations of the microbiome in the popular media depict it as a friendly frontier within the bounded human body. Through pictures and the news article headlines that accompany them, the human microbiome is presented as having silently cared for the body until its potential was recently discovered by scientists. This depiction suggests that the human body’s health is the purpose of the microbiome itself and of scientific research into its mechanisms. The human body, with the guidance of experts, becomes a site in which one can attune themselves to their microbiome’s unique composition through experiments in diet, skin care, nutritional supplements, and nutraceuticals. Ultimately, the microbiome becomes another part of the human body that can be known through biomedicine with the ends of optimizing human health. As such, we are critical of the science communication but also see it as embedded in social and political processes that exceed it, meaning that the future for more-than-human flourishing that some narratives of microbiome science hope for will take a great deal of work to realize in a world of the financialization of microbial life.
Our visual discourse analysis is based on publicly circulating images we compiled from online news articles about the human microbiome. In so doing, we aimed to capture a part of the microbiome’s place in the contemporary healthscape. Our database spans across all forms of online news, from traditional to specialist, reflecting the accessibility of media in the current age. We collected these articles by following Google Alerts set up to catch the keywords “microbiome” and “direct-to-consumer microbiome test.” We have focused our visual analysis on images featured in articles for a generalized audience—like a health news site detailing steps readers can take in their daily lives to improve their health—rather than those speaking to experts—like a health news site informing practitioners about new treatments and developments in the field. We compiled this data in the fall of 2019, from September 7th, 2019 to January 20th, 2020, unknowingly doing so just before the COVID-19 pandemic began and people the world over were compelled to be aware of a new microbe harmful to human health. Throughout this article, we focus in-depth on several images which reflect or contest the makeup of our larger collection of 152 images.
With few exceptions, the human bodies portrayed in these articles are all white, able-bodied, and fit (Figure 1). The link between fitness and the human microbiome is strongly emphasized in the media, visually and textually, echoing the portrayal of able-bodiedness and weight loss as ideals by direct-to-consumer microbiome tests, as Dryden has also found in gut microbiome therapies (2023). The majority of the photos featuring people show them alone. If not alone, then the images depict humans in a clinical setting of medical professionals or scientists alongside a patient. Very few images feature people together in non-medical settings.
Figure 1: A close up on a white person’s bare torso with hands cradling a slim stomach (Image taken from iStock, Peopleimages)
Figure 2: Illustration of microbes in the shape of two human bodies coded as female and male (Shuttershock, lanatoma)
There are important translations occurring in these images, notably that of scale, a particular challenge for visualizing the connection between humans and their microbiomes as the average human is well over a million times greater in size than a single microbe. Even the width of a single human hair is seventy-five times greater than an average microbe. The relationship between the two across this vast space is visually affirmed by truncating the human body and enlarging the microbes, portraying them as closer in scale. Related images show enlarged microbes that render the silhouette of a human body (Figure 2). Notably, even in this abstracted state, the microbes privilege sexual dimorphism and gender stereotypes: the microbes representing a woman are identifiable as such because they are positioned to imply the wearing of a skirt, much like the dualistic symbols used to denote gender on public washrooms stalls. In contrast to the solitude of the human body among microbes, microbes are always represented in plenty; there is no solitary microbe, only solitary humans.
Of all the images we analyzed, only two showed microbes engaged in activity, and they offer a striking contradiction. One image features two microbes fighting each other, equipped with anachronistic armour and weapons[1]; the other image features three microbes with stick arms and legs meditating harmoniously in a stomach.[2] These images represent differing public metaphors for understanding the microbiome. One is antagonistic, portraying the supposed need to attack and destroy to survive, while the other shows harmony as the desired state and solution. The microbiome is a potential site for human intervention and control in service to one’s health, but it is also a slippery research subject that requires large data sets and whose implications are emergent and nascent, despite what the landscape of wellness products would have consumers believe. The microbiome challenges contemporary health management practices but is still trying to be understood through these practices (Wolf-Meyer 2017).
The microbes in our database images are made friendly by their bright colouring. This makes them approachable, perhaps to counteract their daunting plenitude, association with germs that impede health, and integrality to scatological functions. Only one image of a microbe from our data set was not digitally rendered and colourized; all the others were turned into bright colours. Images of diverse microbiomes used an array of aesthetically pleasing colours to differentiate between the different microbes. This colourizing continues outside of our dataset. For instance, on the front page of APC Microbiome Ireland’s (a research centre at University College Cork) website for World Microbiome Day, microbes are caricatured into bright, grotesquely smiling little monsters reminiscent of the characters from Monsters Inc. or the pill-shaped yellow Minions (similar to Figure 3). This representation maintains the otherness of the microbe to the human—some have only one eye, others have horns, all are oddly shaped—while also bringing the microbe closer to the human—the mere fact that they have eyes, smiling mouths, waving arms, and bipedal legs. The translation between human and microbe is emphasizing commonality and aestheticizing difference in a familiar and palatable way. The microbes are not quite anthropomorphized, but recognized as distinct yet potentially friendly. Microbes—these infinitesimal organisms that have only the most basic similarities to humans—are being translated into human conceptions of what life looks like and how the human can optimize it through proper management and care regimes.
Figure 5: Banner from APC Irelands’ World Microbiome Day (Image taken from Shuttershock, curiosity)
These visual representations of microbes contribute to narratives that strongly associate the microbiome with actively managing human health. Microbiome science also challenges narratives of dangerous microbes as disease causing pathogens to be systematically eradicated. Because the microbe of the microbiome’s ecology challenges such narratives, it is rendered visually relatable and appealing through the methods of representation detailed above. While people are mostly pictured alone in these representations, they are also frequently pictured in clinical settings. The individualism of healthy practices is thus bridged through the figure of the expert, the scientist or doctor.
Penny Ironstone (2019) writes that the human microbiome is associated with a liberatory micropolitics because it potentially challenges biomedical models of health, providing “post-Pasteurian models” (Paxson 2008) or “post-antibiotic futures” (Sariola 2021). But while certain people, such as fermentation specialists (e.g. Hey in press; Widmer 2021), draw on human-microbial relations to critique biomedicine, even capitalism, in favor of new futures, the optimism of new relations between humans and microbes is conveyed slightly differently in biomedical and wellness narratives.
There is an almost unimaginably large amount of microbial life that humans move through in their daily lives, and that moves through humans. Although the microbiome’s promise in the health sciences, and to a lesser extent in the social sciences, circulates with much hope for new experiences of the body and new kinds of politics, the visual depictions to date rather replicate other aspects of biomedicalization: the microbiome is visualized as a scientized entity to be harnessed by the human host to optimize wellness. This is in the scaling translations of microbes to seem closer to human, as well as in the way that microbes are depicted in relation to the boundaries of the human body and not to microbes in surrounding environments, such as soils. This is also in the depiction of friendly microbes that resemble children’s cartoons. The visualizations of the microbes in the service of the human host render the “human microbiome” as something that can become “my microbiome.” This rendering lends itself well to precision wellness possibilities. The visualizations do not disrupt other common naturalizing categories associated with the body: the bodies in the healthscape of the microbiome centre whiteness, able bodies, and heteronormative gender binaries.
The microbiome sciences and the social scientists who engage with them (e.g. Benezra 2020, 2023) hold promise for reimagining the body and illness in ways that might decentre the human. While this work is crucially necessary for grappling with health and social issues of the broader late or post-industrial context, the images of the microbiome in the current biomedicalized healthscape only take us a short way there.
[1] https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/569226
[2] https://thevarsity.ca/2019/09/30/the-promise-of-the-human-microbiome-in-cancer-research/
Benezra, Amber. 2020. “Race in the Microbiome.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 45(5): 877–902. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243920911998.
Benezra, Amber, 2023. Gut Anthro: An Experiment in Thinking with Microbes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Briggs, Charles L., and Daniel C. Hallin. 2016. Making Health Public: How News Coverage Is Remaking Media, Medicine, and Contemporary Life. London: Routledge.
Clarke, Adele. E. 2010. “From the Rise of Medicine to Biomedicalization: U.S. Healthscapes and Iconography, circa 1890–Present.” In Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S., edited by Adele E. Clarke, Laura Mamo, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, Jennifer R. Fishman, and Janet K. Shim, 104–146. Durham: Duke University Press.
Clarke, Adele E., Laura Mamo, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, Jennifer R. Fishman, and Janet K. Shim, eds. 2010. Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the U.S. Durham: Duke University Press.
Dryden, Jane. 2023. “The Gut Microbiome and the Imperative of Normalcy.” International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 16:1, 131-162
Dupré, John, and Maureen A. O’Malley. 2007. “Metagenomics and biological ontology.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Science 38 (4):834–846.
Dupré, John. 2020. “Life as Process.” Epistemology and Philosophy of Science 57 (2):96–113. https://doi.org/10.5840/eps202057224.
Hey, Maya. (in press). “Communicating with the Microbial Other: How the Material Practices of Fermentation Connect Humans and Microbes in Polylogue.” Global Media Journal: Canada Edition.
Ironstone, Penny. 2019. “Me, my self, and the multitude: Microbiopolitics of the human microbiome.” European Journal of Social Theory 22 (3):325–341.
Niehwöhner, Jörg, and Margaret Lock. 2018. “Situating local biologies: Anthropological perspectives on environment/human entanglements.” BioSocieties 13:681–697. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-017-0089-5.
Paxson, Heather. 2008. “Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese in the United States.” Cultural Anthropology 23 (1):15–47.
Saey, Tina. 2016. “Body’s bacteria don’t outnumber human cells so much after all.” Science News. January 8, 2016. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/bodys-bacteria-dont-outnumber-human-cells-so-much-after-all.
Sariola, Salla. 2021. “Fermentation in Post-antibiotic Words: Tuning in to Sourdough Workshops in Finland.” Current Anthropology 62 (S24):S388–398.
Widmer, Alexandra. 2021. “Positioning Human Microbiome DTC Tests: On the Search for Health, Data and Alternatives Amid the Financialisation of Life.” Medicine, Anthropology, Theory 8(2): online. https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.8.2.5127.
Wolf-Meyer, Matthew J. 2017. “Normal, Regular, and Standard: Scaling the Body through Fecal Microbial Transplants: Normal, Regular, and Standard.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 31 (3): 297–314. https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12328.
Download the transcript of this interview.
For this episode of Platypod, I talked to Dr. Tanja Ahlin about her research, work, and academic trajectory. She’s currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and her work focuses on intersections of medical anthropology, social robots, and artificial intelligence. I told her of my perspective as a grad student, making plans and deciding what routes to take to be successful in my field. Dr. Ahlin was very generous in sharing her stories and experiences, which I’m sure are helpful to other grad students as well. Enjoy this episode, and contact us if you have questions, thoughts, or suggestions for other episodes.
Dr. Tanja Ahlin, image from her personal website.
Dr. Tanja Ahlin is a medical anthropologist and STS scholar with a background in translation. She has translated books about technology and more. She has a master’s degree in medical anthropology, focusing on the topic of health and society in South Asia. Dr. Ahlin has been interested in e-health/telehealth for a long time, before the recent COVID-19 pandemic years, in which those words became part of our daily vocabulary. Her Ph.D., which she concluded at the University of Amsterdam, has focused on everyday digital technologies in elder care at a distance. Her Ph.D. research is being published as a book at Rutgers University Press. The book will be available for purchase starting on August 11, 2023.
Calling Family – Digital Technologies and the Making of Transnational Care Collectives | Rutgers University Press
In our conversation, we talked about Dr. Ahlin’s blog focusing on the Anthropology of Data and AI. This project—in which Dr. Ahlin writes about the intersection of tech and different fields such as robotics, policy, ethics, health, and ethnography—is a kind of translation work, since Dr. Ahlin is writing about complex topics to a broader audience who are not familiar with some STS and anthropological concepts and discussions. “The blog posts are not supposed to be very long. I aim for two to four minutes of reading … I realized that people often don’t have time to read more than that, right?” says Dr. Tanja Ahlin.
Dr. Ahlin’s book is based on ten years of ethnographic research with Indian transnational families. These are families where family members live all around the world. The reason for migration is mostly due to work opportunities abroad. In her research, Dr. Ahlin looked at how these families used all kinds of technologies like mobile phones and webcams, the Internet, and Whatsapp, not only to keep in touch with each other but also to provide care at a distance. Dr. Ahlin conducted interviews with nurses living all around the world, from the US to Canada to the UK, the Maldives, and Australia. This varied and diverse field gave origin to the concept of field events that Dr. Ahlin develops in her work. In her work, Dr. Ahlin also developed the notion of transnational care collective to show how care is reconceptualized when it has to be done at a distance.
In sum, this episode of Platypod highlights how anthropologists come from different backgrounds and gives an honest overview of how we get to research our topics and occupy the spaces we do. We do not have linear stories, and that does not determine our potential. We at Platypod are very thankful for Dr. Ahlin’s time and generosity.
Perched on a makeshift stage, a trio dressed in wool ponchos sings pirekuas, the region’s most acclaimed and loved musical genre in a mix of Purépecha and Spanish. Despite their upbeat and soft-sounding melodies, the lyrics of the songs describe a time of fear and destruction when, eighty years ago, the Paricutin, the world’s youngest volcano, emerged from a cornfield and devastated the region. Stallkeepers are busy selling quesadillas, chips, sodas, and beers to the expectant crowd, gathering around a bonfire installed inside a miniature volcano. This contrast between apparently joyful festivities and solemn commemoration marks the evening’s atmosphere in Angahuan, Caltzontzin and San Juan Nuevo in Michoacan, Mexico. Several uniformed and heavily-armed municipality police stand nervously watching the horizon. These days, this is fraught territory, as organized crime groups dispute control over the area. This is also the first time that an event like this is staged on-site at the place known locally as las ruinas [the ruins], a shorthand for the remains of the old San Juan Parangaricutiro church, the only surviving structure of an entire town buried under the thick and rugged lava.
Image 1. Bonfire inside the miniature volcano in Las Ruinas. Photo: Sandra Rozental.
Although this uncanny landscape, a combination of human and non-human architecture, has been an iconic tourist attraction for decades, tonight it shines under the lights of commemoration. Authorities from San Juan Nuevo, the locality where the residents of the devastated town were relocated, installed strings of blue strobing LED lights to illuminate the ruins. Their blinding glare made the silhouette of the volcanic cone barely visible in the distance. At 9 pm, the mountain began emitting incandescent explosions. These were not the product of molten magma emerging powerfully from the earth’s core, as had been the case decades ago, but purpose-made fireworks, spinning loudly, spitting orange and red heart-shaped sparks into the sky. National tourists and local visitors silently admired the spectacle sitting uncomfortably on the sharp rocky surfaces by the ruins; others chose panoramic vistas of this volcanic surrogate from the terrace restaurant and tourist center in the nearby town of Angahuan.
In Mexico, we are fond of anniversaries. Our political culture relies heavily on commemoration, centennials, and bicentennials. The volcano is no exception. Every decade that passes, around the volcano’s birth on February 20th, its anniversary is marked both by locals, who commemorate its eruption and its destructive effects, and by academic institutions and government bodies celebrating its emergence as a milestone for the earth sciences and for Mexican national and regional history.
Image 2. Program flyers for community and state government’s events commemorating the Paricutin’s 80th anniversary posted on the wall of the municipal office in Angahuan. Photo: Sandra Rozental.
But a volcano is not a military victory, nor a conquest, nor a war with friends and foes to be honored or shunned. It is an eruption, a geological emergence, a sudden and unexpected event that physically opens and breaks the earth’s surface, reminding us that we travel on an unwieldy, unknown, and capricious fireball. A volcano might then be imagined as an interstice, a liminal space that for a brief moment in earthly temporalities, brings together history and deep time. It’s an event, but it is also a place where the forces of what we call “nature” and of human historicity and territoriality collide. How, then, do humans memorialize the kinds of disruptions and transformations, even violence, caused by such phenomena? How might those who endure its effects up close mark a volcano’s birth and subsequent destruction of their territory and livelihoods?
Image 3. Fireworks from the crater, February 2023. Photo: Lorena Casillas
One of the stall owners, at Las Ruinas known as “Cachuy,” is the event’s main organizer. Nervously feeding the miniature volcano with gasoline and firewood, he is charismatic and clearly enjoys his role as MC. Just before the fireworks, he gathers a group of children and curious visitors (ourselves included) and leads us down a barely visible pathway in the otherwise ash-covered landscape. Our feet sink into the thick powdery surface. Cachuy stops abruptly and asks for silence. In a solemn voice, he explains that we are standing on what is left of the old town’s main street. As he guides us in the dark, he tells a story: “The night that the town was finally evacuated, in May of 1944, elders say the whole street lit up with a long line of flickering lights. They headed down the street from the cemetery like a row of candles. It was the souls of the dead following the living. Even the dead left this place to join their families before the lava covered it.” Cachuy pulls back the branches of a tree, drawing our attention to a pile of crumbling stone masonry. “This is what is left of the walls of a house,” he tells us. A young man walks cautiously amongst the rubble for a few minutes. Almost in a whisper, he murmurs: “I think this was my family’s home.”
Eighty years ago, in February 1943, the Paricutin famously emerged in these lands in Michoacan, becoming the first volcano to be registered during its entire lifespan. The eruptions lasted for almost a decade, completely transforming the region where entire villages were destroyed by lava or devastated by the immense amounts of ash and toxic gasses that the volcano spewed into the air. During this time of hunger, destruction, and forced migration for local residents, scientists, photographers, filmmakers, and artists flocked to the area to witness, as well as to capture, the spectacular displays of incandescent wonder. The Paricutin became an international sensation. Its images went around the globe, featured in artworks by Mexico’s most renowned artists and portrayed in different views, up close and from afar, in thousands of glass plate negatives, black and white and color photographs, and even 35 mm film.
In February of this year, we set out to find out. Although we had attended previous anniversaries, we were especially interested in how the volcano’s 80th anniversary was commemorated. This time period–80 years–was the equivalent of a human lifespan, and therefore, marked the fading possibility of eyewitness accounts, setting the stage for strategies of commemoration that went beyond human memory.
We attended the commemorations organized by three of the Purépecha communities most affected by the Paricutin’s eruption: Caltzontzin and San Juan Nuevo, the resettlements of the disappeared Combutzio and San Juan Parangaricutiro, relocated to lands on the outskirts of Uruapan, Michoacan; and the neighboring Angahuan, a town that survived the lava flows, becoming the point of access to the extinguished cone and the ruins, elsewhere surrounded by the inhospitable terrain known in Spanish as “malpais,” or badland.
Thinking of commemoration as a reiterating strategy for making memory palpable, during these events, we found constant tensions between an impulse to reenact the spectacularity of the geological event–which is also a way to sustain tourism and its subsequent consumption economy; a collective need to compile and display information and images showing the volcano’s past and its effects in the communities’ present; and a wary discomfort, even reprimand, from some elders angered by the celebratory tones that concealed the painful aftermaths of the Paricutin’s emergence in the histories and lives of current inhabitants.
A recurrent theme in local inhabitants’ efforts to commemorate, often in collaboration with researchers like ourselves and with cultural institutions, has been to repeat the eruption in image form, with film screenings and photographic exhibitions on the volcano, particularly on its destructive effects on local towns. Through these activities, commemoration is also a space to affirm senses of ethnic, linguistic, and territorial belonging in a complex and historically rooted context of land disputes, organized crime, and cultural and economic dispossession. The images we share here, which are part of a work in progress, open a visual dialogue on the tensions, possibilities, and also failings of the eruption’s commemoration.
Image 4. A girl watches an itinerant photo exhibit, co-organized by geologist Pedro Corona and historian Juana Martínez with the authorities of San Juan Nuevo, Caltzontzin and Angahuan. The exhibit was part of the anniversary commemoration activities. Photographs were selected from different scientific archives that Corona and Martínez’ team compiled into an “object-box” as a strategy to return physical archival images and documents to communities affected by the eruption. Photo: Sandra Rozental.
Image 5. Photographic exhibit “Surviving a Volcano”, co-organized by Gabriela Zamorano, Sandra Rozental, Manuel Sosa Lázaro, Lorena Casillas and the community museum Kutsikua Arhakucha. Photo: Lorena Casillas.
Image 6. Stage prepared for the Paricutín Anniversary in Caltzontzin featuring regional dance and music. Photo: Gabriela Zamorano.
Image 7. Kurhaticha dance, presented by youth from Arantepacuain the Central Plaza of Angahuan as part of the commemorative program of the Paricutin Anniversary. (Photo: Lorena Casillas).
Image 8. Purépecha researcher Manuel Sosa interviews María Guadalupe Anguiano Aguilar, a resident of Angahuan, about her childhood memories of the eruption in San Juan Parangaricutiro where she was born and lived until 1944. Photo: Sandra Rozental.
Although commemoration is highlighted in anniversary events, it is also present in everyday forms of interacting with remains, images, and replicas that refer to the eruption and its aftermaths. Catzontzin’s residents, for example, commemorate the volcano every day, as the Saint images rescued from Combutzio and the old bronze bell from the disappeared church were reinstalled in the town’s new church and are now worshiped there.
Image 9. The highly venerated figure of Divino Santiago and the together with a dozen Saint images, were rescued from Combutzio and transported to Caltzonzin where they are venerated in the contemporary town church. Photos: Gabriela Zamorano and Sandra Rozental.
Image 10. Bronze bell rescued from Combutzio and transported to Caltzonzin’s town church. Photos: Gabriela Zamorano and Sandra Rozental.
In San Juan Nuevo, where the residents of San Juan Paranguricutiro were resettled, a small museum next to the rebuilt church houses a collection of ex-votos. In these images, another kind of commemoration and record, the volcano is shown as the cause of great suffering, a source of desperation that people prayed and went on pilgrimages to escape.
Image 11. An ex-voto of a woman thanking the Señor de los Milagros for having found a water well in San Juan Nuevo, the community where people from San Juan Parangaricutiro were resettled. Photo: Sandra Rozental
One of the first attempts at commemoration once the village of Combutzio was resettled in the outskirts of the city of Uruapan was the mural Exodo de la población de la región del Paricutin, painted in 1950 by two of the country’s important muralists, Alfredo Zalce and Pablo O Higgins in the corridor of the newly built school, a building associated with the Mexican welfare state that had organized the town’s relocation. Now in a rather poor condition and walled in when this part of the school was transformed into the headmistress’ office, the mural continues to be a testament to how the volcano and its aftermath endure in the daily lives of the residents of Calzontzin forced to flee from its afflictions.
Image 12. Mural Éxodo de la población de la región del Paricutin by Alfredo Zalce and Pablo O Higgins, now the backdrop of the headmistress’ office. Photo: Sandra Rozental.
Another set of murals was commissioned by town authorities to José Luis Soto, an artist from Morelia, to mark the volcano’s 50th anniversary. The artist used glass shards and pieces of volcanic rock to make a multicolored mosaic showing a battle between good and evil incarnated in the local Saint, el Señor de los Milagros, and the devil. The mural commemorates the eruption as well as local religion and beliefs regarding divine punishment for earthly sins.
Image 13. Mural by José Luis Soto in Angahuan showing the volcano as the result of the battle between good and evil. Photo: Sandra Rozental.
While these murals constitute enduring interpretations of the volcano’s emergence, annual commemorations also reinforce strategies to interpret, remember, and reenact this history, particularly with youth and children. In all the places we visited, community representatives organized a competition where schoolteachers and their pupils were invited to represent the volcano and its effects in drawings and clay models. Hundreds of color drawings lined the buildings that make up the towns’ main squares, featuring human figures and tiny cattle running away from red rivers of lava.
Image 14. Women look at the exhibition of children’s drawings in the Central Plaza of Angahuan. Photo: Sandra Rozental.
Photo 15. Detail of a drawing about the Paricutin eruption in the Central Plaza of Angahuan. Photo: Sandra Rozental.
In Caltzontzin, the award was unanimously given to a model by a 12-year-old that, like the mural made thirty years ago, featured the volcano as well as the Catholic Saint images in the local church protecting town residents from the dangers of geology. Despite the fact that this child’s life is now temporally and geographically distant from the Paricutin, her present, like that of all the children involved in the commemoration activities, is defined by the intersection of geological and human time. This generation’s awareness and intimacy with the Paricutin is reenacted and kept alive through practices that constantly recreate the volcano and recall its aftermaths.
Photo 16. Liczi Gabriela Diaz Trejo from Caltzontzin showing her clay model. Photo: Gabriela Zamorano
*** The authors would like to thank Manuel Sosa, Simón Lázaro, Esperanza Azucena Padilla Anguiano, Jesus Velázquez Gutiérrez (Cachuy), as well as Pedro Corona and Juana Martínez for their welcoming support and guidance during the 80th Paricutin Volcano Anniversary in Angahuan, Caltzontzin, and San Juan Nuevo. We also thank Lorena Casillas and Paula Arroio for their assistance during this visit. Funds for this research were provided by the Imagining Futures project (https://imaginingfutures.world/)
While visiting the exhibition by the artist Xadalu Tupã Jekupé at the Museum of Indigenous Cultures in São Paulo, one of the works caught my attention. It was a monitor on the floor. On the screen was a modification of the game Free Fire, where it was possible to follow a virtual killing taking place from the point of view of an indigenous character wearing a headdress. For a while I couldn’t look away. I remembered a conversation I had with Anthony, a Guaraní-Mbyá professor that works with the youth of his territory. At the time I was also a teacher, working with marginalized youth. I remember Anthony’s distressed words—he was concerned about the time and attention young people were putting into games like Free Fire, creating a situation very similar to the one I lived when I worked with teenagers in the outskirts of São Paulo.
It took a while for me to get rid of the profusion of shots, bodies, and feathers that were frantically intertwining in front of the monitor. I took a few steps away from the work when my partner, who was with me at the exhibition, called my name. “Did you see it?” he asked me, pointing at the monitor. “I saw the Free Fire….” Smiling from the corner of his mouth, he said, “No, you didn’t see it… it’s a trap!” I thought to myself, yes, I know, it’s a trap. It took me a few seconds to realize that the monitor was positioned inside a beautiful bamboo structure, a kind of hollow basket in the shape of a pyramid, resting on one of the edges on the floor, with the opposite edge suspended by an ingenious system of capture made of joined pieces of bamboo. It was an arapuca, a traditional trap set to capture those who let themselves be seduced by the offer placed inside. A trap that captured me without even having the opportunity to resist.
This text is an outline of a proposal for a feminist and decolonial strategy to be and remain working and producing techno-scientific knowledge within academic institutions. I present the trap as such a strategy, a kind of low-intensity guerrilla technique so that we, marked bodies, can establish alliances and move within structures that are essentially bourgeois, masculine, and Western. This strategy is especially important for those of us who research with other scientists, or who have science and technology as the main focus of our concerns. It allows us to experiment with ways of researching that are simultaneously capable of carrying out the necessary denouncements while also experimenting with possible ways of production of techno-scientific knowledge that interests us.
In The Science Question in Feminism, Sandra Harding asks: “Is it possible to use for emancipatory ends sciences that are apparently so intimately involved in Western, bourgeois, and masculine projects?” (p. 9, 1986). In this way, Harding displaces the question of women in science from a concern with proportionality and representativeness and moves instead toward questioning the very structures of the production of techno-scientific knowledge. As a result of Harding’s provocations, Donna Haraway writes the article “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” (1988), a classic of feminist studies of science and technology. Even today, a few decades after the article was first written, the questions raised serve as support for us to elaborate our thoughts in a scenario that is still structurally very similar to the one Harding described—bourgeois, masculine, western.
In the last two decades, the composition of the higher education body in Brazil has been changing through struggles that resulted in affirmative public policies, implemented by leftist governments from 2003 onwards. Some of these actions were: the construction of universities in peripheral regions of the country; the establishment of quotas in public university entrance exams for people coming from the public education system, black people, and indigenous people; and the funding of programs for people from the working classes to access private higher education. I myself am the result of this process, a worker daughter of workers. With this never-experienced-before entry into higher education by a greater diversity of people than ever before, the resumption and transmutation of the issues raised by Harding and Haraway is a necessary and effervescent movement, so that our occupation of these spaces does not end up swallowing ourselves in our differences. The institution is a machine for shaping bodies and homogenizing possibilities of futures.
Something we inevitably end up asking ourselves as marginalized people is whether we should occupy these spaces. Stengers (2015) addresses this issue, defending our permanence in spaces of contradiction, including the academy, as a way not to resolve this contradiction once and for all, but to at least get to know the terrain through which we are forced to walk—and, who knows, build new alliances capable of establishing other trails. If we want to remain researchers, teaching and working within universities, we need strategies to make our permanence viable. This obviously includes a constant struggle for better material conditions, but that goes hand-in-hand with the need to remain honest with our differences—which is only possible with a radical change in the way science is produced. It is necessary to cultivate techniques of insistence that, on the one hand, protect us and, on the other hand, allow us to continue walking and facing the overwhelming monster we are facing. Knowing how to produce traps can be one of these techniques.
An arapuca, a traditional trap (image made by Clarissa Reche)
“The nature of the trap is a function of the nature of the trapped.” It is in this way that Stafford Beer (1974) summarizes one of the most interesting attributes of the trap: the cybernetic character between the object, who designed it, and what it is intended to capture. These three nodes are entangled in a feedback system that works like a game of mirrors where, when we look at any of the nodes (capture-trap-captive), we will inevitably find the other nodes. In this game of mirrors, we can see not only the relationship of nodes with each other, but also with the environments they compose. The trap therefore participates in complex fields of interactions.
Anthropologist Alfred Gell (1996) sought in African traps a tool to think about the tension between the piece of art, specifically Western, and the artifact, arising from the so-called “exotic” cultures. Gell argues that the possible conciliation between these poles lies precisely in thinking of both as traps, in an exercise of horizontality that, in a single movement, empties Western arts of their specificity, filling them with ethnicity. The anthropologist makes an exquisite description of the conceptual modes of operation of a trap.
For Gell, the trap is the knowledge of oneself and the other turned into an object. The trap is a functional model of the one who created it, replacing the presence of the one through a “sensory transduction” (p. 27, 1996). The capturer’s senses are replaced by a set of “sensors” attached to the trap, such as a rope or a stick that can simultaneously sense and act as triggers. In this sense, the trap is an automaton. But, at the same time, it is a model of what one wants to capture, since in order to function it needs to emulate and incorporate behaviors, desires, tendencies, functioning as “lethal parodies of the umwelt” (own world) of the captive.
In addition to this spatial dimension, the trap also has a temporal dimension whose structure is based on waiting. In this way, the trap incorporates a scenario of a dramatic nexus between the capturer-captive poles. Gell describes this waiting as a tragic theater, where the trap places the captor and the captive in a hierarchy. The metaphor would be that who sets the trap is God, or fate, and who falls into the trap is the human being in his tragedy. The task of creating traps would therefore be to experiment with controlling fate. However, if we take into account Amerindian conceptions of the trap, such as the Guarani-Mbya practice/thought, this relationship becomes more complex, since a prey is only captured in the trap if there is consent from its owners, who are non-human entities responsible for the animals. Here, the attempt to control fate slips through the bamboo stakes—the tragedy is shared between captor and captive.
From an Amerindian perspective, in particular Guaraní, the trap can be understood as a “memory card” (Caceres and Sales, 2019) capable of storing information that accounts for a profusion of knowledge such as: the behavior of the prey in its environment, modes of production of traps, cosmopolitical relationships involved in hunting, etc. But this potential for keeping memory has been gaining other contours with the increasing destruction of nature and traditional ways of life. With indigenous peoples without possession of their territories and abandonment in the face of deforestation and land grabbing that agribusiness and mining advance, hunting is no longer a possible reality. The maintenance of traps in this scenario becomes a form of resistance, a way of safeguarding what is possible and transmitting that memory to those who are growing up and will soon be responsible for the struggle.
Returning to the idea of thinking about the trap as a strategy to be and remain producing techno-scientific knowledge within an academic context, I would like to list the following characteristics that may be useful to us:
Acquiring the necessary knowledge to build a trap also helps us to know how to identify one when we come across it on our walk. Stengers points out how a moment of relative success, when you move from a position of contestation to a position of an interested party, is also a dangerous moment. For many of us who insist on working at the university, coming from classes historically far from that space, life becomes restricted, in an eternal non-belonging. On the one hand, it shows the impossibility of “integration” into the ideal body of those who produce technoscience—we have no way of doing that. On the other hand, we are haunted by a constant (self-)accusation of betrayal, and in fact something is lost from our previous relationship with “our own.” Faced with this impasse, Stengers proposes that we be able to “foresee that there will be tension” (p. 89, 2015), that is, share common knowledge and experiences that help identify and avoid predictable traps.
Image of an arapuca, a traditional trap (image by Clarissa Reche)
Some traps of the scientific knowledge production system are quite obvious. We come across well-set traps that straddle the path as we advance along our academic careers. We see the trap and look around. The alternatives are to abandon the trail or to stay in the same place. Since the food is just inside the trap, standing still means starving, or at best surviving in starvation. If we want to insist on the journey, we must voluntarily surrender ourselves to the cruel trap placed in our path, in the hope that even captive, though well fed, we may be able to retort before being devoured.
The list of traps is long, but I want to describe a specific type that is prostrating itself in front of me at this point in my journey: the trap of publishing in international academic journals. In Brazil, a researcher and/or scientist who wants to pursue a career within universities will necessarily find a scoring logic that allows, or not, their permanence and advancement to more prominent and better paid positions. As in other national systems of science and technology, research funding is linked to a good score, mainly arising from productivity and measured through, for example, number of publications and citations. An important characteristic in the case of Brazil, which differs from countries like the USA, is that funding for scientific research is mostly public, organized through state funding agencies. For this reason, most Brazilian academic journals are free, both for publication and for circulation.
In recent times, the internationalization of research has been a requirement of Brazilian funding agencies. In this scenario, publication in high-impact international journals has become a necessity. In some science and technology systems in other Latin American countries, this requirement is even tougher, with the acceptance of only articles published in journals indexed in repositories such as Web of Science and Scopus, both maintained by private entities seeking profits. The overwhelming majority of journals indexed in such repositories charge a lot of money for publication and access to the article. The amounts that researchers must pay to have their articles published can reach around R$ 20,000. For comparison purposes, the value of the minimum wage in Brazil is R$ 1,320 (about 15x less than the publication cost of the article).
Although most of the time the money to pay for such publications comes from the institutions, not being paid directly by the researchers, the effects produced by this logic of professional permanence are cruel. At the national level, it intensifies competition between researchers and research centers, who need to outperform each other in order to obtain funding. Internationally, such logic keeps the knowledge produced by the poorest countries in the corner, unable to circulate in large centers. This trap works like colonial shackles to which we often have to submit.
But the traps that we will find in our paths are not always so brazen and so painful. In fact, the most dangerous traps are precisely those that we don’t immediately notice and that offer us pleasure. When we are finally able to recognize our status as prey, we are so committed that we try at all costs to convince ourselves that it is better to become captive than to give up the delicious offer they make us. What we are offered is a biochemical comfort well adjusted to the “pharmacopornographic era” of Preciado (2008), which for many of us means a substantial distance from situations of physical suffering and the most varied humiliations, especially intellectual humiliations. In a scenario of growing public attention regarding the degradation of working conditions that researchers are facing, made explicit for example in a vertiginous decline in the mental health of workers who occupy laboratories around the world, this “pleasant” counterpart of working producing technoscientific knowledge that I mention in the last paragraph can only be understood from a class point of view—academic/intellectual work is essentially different from the overwhelming majority of jobs available to workers.
Money, prizes, publications, and recognition are some of the achievements that academic work brings and that activate these biochemical pleasures. Academic work offers comforts that many of us would not have if we had chosen other paths. An example is the possibility of traveling internationally. All the international trips I took were for my academic work. On these trips, we have the possibility of getting in touch with a dimension of cultural capital that was previously inaccessible. When we make our way back to our homeland, we are already transformed. In this movement, it is important to always plant your foot on the ground, exercise your memory, recognize the terrain to know where you are stepping, and always take very small steps. After all, many of the traps are hidden in the ground.
Image of an arapuca, a traditional trap (image by Clarissa Reche)
It took me a long time to understand why Isabelle Stenger’s proposal (2000) of “not hurting established feelings” resonated so much with my colleagues as a strategy to create alliances with scientists and engineers. In my naive rebelliousness, that phrase sounded like a conformist attitude. I wondered if, in exchange for maintaining a “good” relationship, we wouldn’t be giving up the best of what we have as social scientists—our critical capacity. In my master’s degree fieldwork with biohacker scientists, I was surrounded by people who, from within their disciplines, sought to produce science in more open and democratic ways. Maybe that’s why it took me a while to realize that a posture based only on confronting and denouncing the ills of technoscience is fruitless, as it produces an alienating and perverse result: it hides from us, people who research from the human sciences, our responsibility as co-inhabitants of this same space where the scientists we are denouncing.
Complaints are important, yes, and we have lists of them on the tip of our tongues. But Stengers, Haraway, and so many other feminists concerned with technoscience point to the importance of not stopping there. Recognizing our responsibility as co-inhabitants of the scientific knowledge production system is also learning to establish and maintain dialogues, however difficult they may be. And they are. Difficult, tiring, and frustrating. However, the possibility of establishing alliances around common knowledge is also a strategy to keep producing science from joy, as proposed by Stengers (2015) when claiming that the taste for thinking is only possible through encounters capable of increasing our power of understanding, action, and thinking. The trap can also be a bridge to establish such alliances without, at first, hurting established feelings.
The first time that the trap was presented to me as a possible tool for thought-action was when I participated with a group of friends in the speculative anthropology project called FICT, at the University of Osaka. In the group were artists and people from letters, history, and anthropology. The objective was to produce “artifacts” from different timelines, different possibilities created from a fictitious past event: the Black Death had killed many more people, and the European colonial enterprise of the 16th century had failed. Thinking about it was not only challenging, but also quite painful. We were living a pandemic ourselves, with a denialist government, and many people close to us were suffering. But beyond that, the starting point of the project struck us as somewhat violent. By proposing a non-colonial reality, we were forced to think of a world without us, people whose full-life identity comes precisely from the fact that we are daughters and sons of colonial violence.
We refuse to think of a world where we do not exist. The story of how science was established in Brazil is precisely the story of how the dominant classes—politically, economically and culturally—tried to deal with the “problem” of miscegenation. Our first scientists were renowned eugenicists. Their busts still rest in white peace on university campuses, and their names baptize streets and buildings throughout Brazil. Our starting point in the project was a rebellion against the suggested starting point, in an affirmation of our uncomfortable existence. We are the incarnate memory of the violence against the land, against the original peoples of our lands and those who were uprooted from the continent of Africa. We are the incarnate memory of (scientific) racism. But how to exist within a project that predicts our non-existence? How to be there, keep occupying space and communicate to those who hope that we don’t exist that yes, despite everything we are here?
It was Joana Cabral, an anthropologist who works with the Amazonian Wajãpi people, who proposed the trap as a way of occupying the crossroads we were at. Our issue was a communication issue. We needed to communicate the existence of something that shouldn’t exist in the cosmopolitics we were in, but that did exist. Something present but invisible. I believe that this thought was the trigger for Joana to remember the Amerindian traps, especially the trap to “catch” the caipora, an entity from Tupi-Guarani mythology, inhabitant of the forest and owner of all hunt, with whom hunters must negotiate to catch their prey. Such traps were described by Joana as beautiful pieces braided in straw, positioned along the dense forest in the places where caipora usually frequent. The capture system is quite simple: enchanted by the beauty of the piece, the caipora’s attention turns completely to the moths, and their curiosity to learn more about the braid makes them stay there, undoing the braids. Thus, caipora “waste time” in the trap, while people gain time to move through the forest more safely.
At the same time that it holds the caipora’s attention, the trap also communicates its existence to those who walk unaware. We finally managed to make our artifact, a kind of dream diary where we report receiving dream knowledge about how to manage having a party where the most different people can be at. Thus, we seek to face colonialism not as a historical period, but as an entity, a drive from which we will not be able to get rid of—just as we exist, the colonial impetus also exists, persists, and is alive among us. The making of the trap revealed to us that in order to be able to capture, we ourselves need to become aware of our diverse prey conditions.
But the perception of our prey condition cannot be paralyzing. Our malice can certainly enable us to escape from some traps set for us—but not all, never. My proposal is that we cultivate the necessary calm and attention to walk in more or less safe territory, but, at the same time that we perceive ourselves captured and entangled, we are also capable of designing and setting our own traps to make the issues that we formulate capable of going through the academic toughness. Traps capable of opening and sustaining impossible dialogues. What I propose is an insurgent counterattack, or counterspell, to stay with Stengers. It’s a kind of low-intensity direct action, a guerrilla strategy to keep producing scientific knowledge. And so that we can protect our vulnerabilities, remain with joy in the process. It is important to repeat: the trap is not only something to be avoided, but also to be produced. We need to take ownership of capture technologies, collectivize them, and scale them up.
Caceres, Rafael Rodrigues; Sales, Adriana Oliveira de. Memória e feitura de armadilhas Guaraní Ñandeva. II Seminário Internacional Etnologia Guarani: redes de conhecimento e colaborações, 2019.
Beer, Stafford. Designing freedom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1974.
Gell, Alfred. “Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps.” Journal of Material Culture, v. 1, p. 15-38, 1996.
Haraway, D. “Localized Knowledge: The Question of Science for Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14.3 (Autumn 1988): 575-599.
Harding, Sandra. The Science Question in Feminism. New York: Cornell University, 1986.
Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. New York: The Feminist Press, 2008..
Stengers, I. In Catastrophic Times Resisting the Coming Barbarism. London: Open Humanities Press, 2015.
___________. The Invention of Modern Sciences. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
“Are you seriously telling me that this hot mash of mushrooms and fruit is going to completely heal his wounds?” (Gilbert 2019)
It is summer 2020 and I, like many others, am sequestered indoors clutching my recently acquired Nintendo Switch playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH). In wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, people around the world seemed to swarm either to their handy technological devices or towards the soothing arms of nature. Luckily for me, my technological device included encounters with some virtual greenery—the trees and flowers of my beloved tropical Animal Crossing island.
Thao and Zucker having a nighttime picnic in Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Screen shot by Author)
As I planted my strategically planned flower beds and traveled from mystery island to island collecting fruits which I didn’t have, I also consulted many online forums for guidance. To my surprise, I stumbled upon PETA’s Vegan Guide to Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Within, I found several suggestions on how to play the game while supporting vegan ethics. My favourite part? The commentary on what foods within the game are vegan friendly. While nowadays it’s possible to cook a variety of dishes in ACNH (even seasonal varieties!) much of the early discourse on food in ACNH was about how powerful vegan diets are. In the game, you can literally dig up entire trees with the nourishment provided after eating a singular luscious virtual fruit. Sadly, this spurred some backlash from players arguing about: (1) the boundaries of our onlife and offline selves, (2) the potential of video games as pedagogy, and (3) the politics of digital and virtual foods. But how is it possible to extract all of these insights, politics, ethics, and social tensions from a game mimicking an agricultural life on a tropical waterfront property we all secretly desire during daydreams?
In this piece I apply my concept of Digital Food Spaces (DFS) or “online communities and platforms dedicated to the sharing of food-centered ideas and media” (Dam 2023) to the realm of video-gaming. I draw from both personal experiences and the insights of fellow gamers who I recruited via Twitter. Through our conversations I apply my theory into practice by analyzing the DFS of ACNH to examine how users conceptualize and interact with food in video games. Twitter (at its peak) had the capability to house and foster dialogues of every topic without reserve—food was just one of many, and as Schneider et al. (2018) has demonstrated, contentious discussion draws activist responses in the form of digital food activism by users.
From these conversations and interdisciplinary literature review I present three arguments:
Matt’s Animal Crossing: New Horizon character chats with Franklin, the Turkey Day chef. (Screen shot by Matt Fifield)
While there are video games whose sole focus is to highlight food and related processes like cooking and eating (e.g. Overcooked and Cooking Mama), I include all games which feature some aspect of food within its play and/or landscapes. I should clarify that even though something in a game is edible by characters, I try to focus on what we can colloquially code as “food” through its relatability to offline counterparts. Basically, a food is a food within a video game if its origins can be traced back to a particular food or food idea which exists offline to some degree.[1] This tracing is rather open, considering video games also feature mockeries of offline eats for several reasons. As a result, the boundaries of onlife (Van Est et al. 2014, Floridi et al. 2015) and offline in this piece are flexibly framed because they easily flow into one another and inevitably shape each other. As Floridi et al. (2015) emphasise, because ICTS[2] shape our (1) self conceptions, (2) mutual interactions, (3) realities, and (4) our interactions with reality, there are ongoing instances of boundary blurring between reality and virtuality as well as between humans, machines, and nature. Therefore, we can easily translate insights between the different realms and apply interventions and solutions accordingly—furthering the range of intimacy that technologies have with us presently and in the future (Van Est et al. 2014).
Digital Food Spaces (DFS) are not limited to social media sites and platforms, considering discussions about food take place almost everywhere online. Given that gaming (in practice and interest) continues to grow in popularity across age groups, it is essential that we include video games in our examinations of onlives and their capabilities of shaping the offline. Such insights are crucial for identifying and charting the transformations of how people are perceiving, understanding, and engaging with different foods—most especially when they allude to offline counterparts and processes.
A common feature which links many games together is the association of life/health points being replenished by consumable items in-game, much of which are stylized as food items. Gone are the days of only red health-boosting and blue mana-boosting potions—we’ve got entire menus of gourmet foods to fill player stats and inventories now.
This has led to much reactionary discussions and creations both online and offline. Entire online communities dedicate themselves to the recreation of these edibles in their own kitchens. Whether it’s a Reddit thread, a Facebook post, or a multi-video series on YouTube, gamers are experimenting with ways to bring the fantastical foods they encounter in their favorite games into their offline lives. Several dining establishments have also launched with these sentiments, but take a more reflexive approach through creating dishes inspired by in-game characters, locations, and items—for example the (unofficial) League of Legends restaurant “Challenger” based in China. However, for those of us who wish to capture the magic at home, there is also a growing video game cookbook collection which can teach you how to make foods from games like Destiny, The Elder Scrolls, World of Warcraft, the Fallout franchise, Sims, Minecraft, Street Fighter, and more.
Some games simulate the food production and preparation processes. In the Harvest Moon series, you’re a farmer with both crops and animals which grow and transform across the seasons. In several games it is possible to hunt creatures and cook them.[3] The Cooking Mama series allows us to pick recipes, prepare them step-by-step, and receive reviews on the final dishes. Overall, video games allow players several opportunities to critically consider and connect with foods and associated activities. This inevitably spurs discussion and prompts the formation and articulation of food-related opinions and perspectives among players. Within the DFS paradigm, video games are like entrées—catalysts of inspiration to explore and engage with foods in ways that go beyond the virtual.
Video-gaming universes are seemingly infinite, in both creativity and vastness. Within, there are places for every wacky interaction and dream in between. We create our avatars from an assortment of options, and we attempt to explore the crevices of how we see (or would like to see) ourselves and the world through these choices. When given the tools (ICTs) in video games, we test the limits of what’s possible and appropriate. This logic extends to food in games as well. Think about so-called “dubious food” in the Legend of Zelda series:
“Dubious Food” from Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Screen shot by Author)
“It’s too gross to even look at. A bizarre smell issues forth from this heap. Eating it won’t hurt you, though…probably” (In-game description, Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild 2017)
This food experimentation through hunting, gathering, and preparing foods often occurs in many explorational “open world” games, like The Elder Scrolls franchise and newer Pokémon games. For players, it provides a wider range of engagement and creativity with virtual foods while also providing insights into how cooking and mealtimes transform relationships between the player’s virtual body, their surroundings, and their in-game companions. VR games take this to the extreme by directly translating players’ physical movements into virtual simulations for added experiential depth. Hilariously, it is important to note that not all video game foods are helpful. Some creations also actively harm in-game health status and abilities, mirroring food poisoning experiences to some degree.
Video games easily initiate learning through vicarious consumption (Veblen 2007). As players encounter, prepare, and consume virtual foods, they increase their familiarity and knowledge around them (Staiano 2014). In turn, it sparks further curiosity and thinking around the foods and their offline cultural and historical inspirations. Often, players find this learned food-related information applicable in offline scenarios and conversations even in the cases where the foods are entirely fictional.
“Cooking foods in virtual reality has transferred over to what I apply in the kitchen. I used to bake bread but I got to know a number of pastries and deserts like tiramisu.” (personal communication, @Zay_ZYXWV)
“The Fallout games have all the disgusting foods. But also a lot of parodies of actual American snacks I guess. I don’t get all of them because I am from Germany, but I have a sense that they are versions of actual foods.” (personal communication, @PrimoRCavallo)
“I recently played the controversial Russian game Atomic Heart. One of the primary themes is the Soviet Union, and one of the main food factors which is a completely mandatory item for traversing the game is condensed milk, alongside bottles of vodka. I thought it was an odd choice for a power up item in a game, but after spending some time looking into it it seems like those two items had some high degree of value to the survival of those geographical people due to their long shelf life and stability in indeterminate situations.” (personal communication, @TheAbeg)
Considering many games have foods which are modeled after offline ones, they are useful for learning about foods outside of one’s experiential range. In the MMORPG MapleStory, many places which pay homage to real offline locations have their own special consumables that allude to local dishes, for example: satay, ramen, chili crab, unagi, bento boxes, steamed buns, dumplings, laksa, chicken rice, tacos, and curries. Several tropical fruits and snacks like durian, dragon fruit, dried squid, and dango are also available in-game.
Various food items found in MapleStory SEA. (Screen shot by Author)
Scholars across disciplines have stressed the importance of considering interlinking implications and applications of happenings online with those offline (Boellstorff 2016, Taylor and Nichter 2022). Analysing the interactions and engagements of our onlives within the DFS of gaming universes can provide information about points of interventions (e.g. cases of digital obesogenic environments) or the range of shared interests of certain groups as they pertain to food. While video-gaming only simulates life or death, the impacts of digital obesogenic environments has yet to be thoroughly explored. Video-gaming allows for people to embrace (if not overexaggerate) and explore aspects of their individual values and varied performances of self (Goffman 1959). It is of interest to those working in diplomacy, marketing, and the food industry to pay attention to the reception of foods in video game universes and players’ concerns as starting points for improvements in initiatives of gastrodiplomacy, product design, food communication, and more. Doing so would help generate more interactive and reflective national foods branding given the diversity of gaming communities (Ichijo et al. 2019, White et al. 2019, Dam 2023). Furthermore, there is immense potential to expand digital food studies’ research theories and methodologies in video games while also continuously challenging the boundaries of online and offline. If art does imitate life, how are we to ignore or deny the salience of how people play with and reimagine foods and foodscapes?
[1] An honorable mention for the “dubious food” available in Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
[2] Information and communication technologies
[3] There is an exhaustive amount of games where you can hunt creatures and eat them, so to list them all would be…well, exhaustive.
Atsuko Ichijo, Venetia Johannes, and Ronald Ranta. 2019. The Emergence of National Food: The Dynamics of Food and Nationalism. Bloomsbury.
Boellstorff, Tom. 2016. “For Whom the Ontology Turns: Theorizing the Digital Real.” Current Anthropology 57(4): 387-407.
Dam, Ashley T.K., 2023. “Dining with the Diaspora: Khmerican Digital Gastrodiplomacy”. Platypus Blog. https://blog.castac.org/2023/03/dining-with-the-diaspora-khmerican-digital-gastrodiplomacy/
Gayle, Latoya. 2020. “Nintendo fans mercilessly mock PETA for claiming vegans shouldn’t play Animal Crossing because it features virtual fishing and bug catching”. Daily Mail. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-8155471/Video-game-players-mercilessly-mock-PETA-vegan-guide-Nintendos-Animal-Crossing.html
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Lynn, Lottie. 2021. “Animal Crossing Cooking: Ingredients and how to unlock cooking in New Horizons explained”. Eurogamer. https://www.eurogamer.net/animal-crossing-cooking-ingredients-how-unlock-new-horizons-8007
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals [PETA]. 2020. “PETA’s Vegan Guide to ‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons”. https://www.peta.org/features/animal-crossing-new-horizons-vegan/
Schneider, T., Eli, K., Dolan, C., & Ulijaszek, S. (Eds.). (2018). Digital Food Activism (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315109930
Staiano A. E. 2014. Learning by Playing: Video Gaming in Education-A Cheat Sheet for Games for Health Designers. Games for health journal, 3(5), 319–321. https://doi.org/10.1089/g4h.2014.0069
Taylor, Nicole and Mimi Nichter. 2022. A Filtered Life: Social Media on a College Campus. New York: Routledge.
Van Est, R., Rerimassie, V., van Keulen, I. & Dorren, G. 2014. Intimate technology: The battle for Our Body and Behaviour. Rathenau Instituut.
Veblen, Thorstein. 2007. The Theory of the Leisure Class. Oxford: Oxford UP.
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.
Download the transcript of this interview.
On the morning of Friday, March 10, 2023 Nick Seaver and I met over Zoom to talk about his new book Computing Taste: Algorithms and Makers of Music Recommendation, which was published in 2022 by the University of Chicago Press. In that meeting, we recorded an episode for the Playpod podcast, which is available at the link above.
Image by Christina Agapakis.
Nick Seaver is an anthropologist who, as he puts it, studies how people use technology to make sense of cultural things. He teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Tufts University, where he also directs the program of Science, Technology, and Society. His first book is Computing Taste: Algorithms and Makers of Music Recommendation. Nick has published several articles in academic journals on topics related to critical algorithm studies, as well as ethnographic stories and anthropological research methods. A more comprehensive list of his academic work can be found on this link.
Computing Taste is about the people who make music recommender systems and how they think about their work. The book is 216 pages long, divided into six chapters, plus a prologue, introduction, and epilogue. The book stems from Nick’s Ph.D. dissertation at the University of California Irvine. Each chapter of Computing Taste offers a dense, well-researched, and well-told story of how socio-technical arrangements giving life to music recommender systems come together in practice. Each chapter of the book also challenges conventional narratives about algorithmic systems and their “evil” impacts on society. In a way, Nick’s book surprises the reader by telling stories that we’re not expecting to hear.
Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Maker of Music Recommendation Systems
In our interview we covered several topics, including how Nick’s work has been received by the anthropological community and some major themes from the book. As a graduate student, I was especially interested in questions of how to conduct research. I encourage the reader to read the entire book and engage with the richness of information and anthropological analysis brilliantly conducted by Nick.
Nick has a sophisticated way of critiquing data metaphors. He is cautious and does not jump into precipitated conclusions and judgments that classify algorithms as good or evil, which ultimately excludes the socio from these technical systems. Nick reminds the reader that black boxes are constituted by legal regimes, a perspective that he builds on from Frank Pasquale’s book, The Black Box Society. According to Nick, these secret boxes are the story of legal intellectual property related to company secrets. The black box, as a metaphor, becomes a problem because it makes us want to know what’s in it. Nick thinks the black box figure is damaging to how we think about these systems as it encourages us to think about them as discrete or as individual entities that exist by themselves in the world. This metaphor can lead us to think that black boxes are openable, which they are not, since they’re being constantly changed, updated, trained with new datasets, and adapted to users’ behaviors. This makes Nick’s book even more fascinating, as the people behind algorithms for music recommendation are trying to capture, measure, retain, and work with these systems, which are always in flux.
As a reader, I noticed how the conventional idea of access used in much anthropological research does not translate well to the studies of objects bound by “legal regimes.” Nick mentions in the book that “access is not an event.” In discussing more access-related questions (access to information, people, and resources during the fieldwork), Nick explained he has a complicated relationship with this idea. There’s no way to show up at Facebook or other tech companies and just do “fieldwork inside the company.” Not all anthropologists can get to every place, Nick said, and what can we do in this case? Nick hinted in his response that we might need to change our questions and methods and, more importantly, what access even means. As anthropologists of tech, and more specifically in Nick’s case, as an anthropologist of tech and startups, we’re doing something more than just going to the field, finding something that everybody knows, and telling other people about it. “My job is not to go into a company, figure out how the algorithm works, write it down, and then sort of be a corporate espionage actor and bring it out,” he said. This disrupts, perhaps, what we conceive of as the point of anthropology. Is the point of anthropology just to share secrets? Nick does not think so, especially as these sociotechnical systems are protected by legal regimes and also because they simply don’t exist out there in the world as discrete things to unearth. As he says,
If you’re studying algorithms, there’s no algorithm. They [the company] don’t have that, like sitting out on the table somewhere, right? It’s not anything that you can see. And so, really, it’s this ongoing process as you access this kind of thing. It’s a relationship. It’s a negotiation. It’s an ongoing effort.
Nick described that an ethnography is also history, and in this light, an ethnography would rather narrate this ongoing effort of gaining access to fieldwork and also of telling stories that people might not be expecting to hear. In all, he moves away from an essentialized view of fieldwork, and talks about how parts of his fieldwork involved meeting people at rock climbing gyms, waiting rooms, conferences, and offices, as well as watching Youtube videos. He is also aware of his positionality and notes that he shares some identity markers with the developers of music recommender systems—predominantly white males, American, and in their thirties—and how that impacted his entrance into this fieldwork.
Nick thinks there is much work to do about the anthropology of “these systems”—algorithmic systems and their designers who try to capture, measure, retain users’ attention, etc. He highlights how his book is not explicitly critical enough about the systems he writes about in the way people might expect, and how he worries about the book “coming across as being very nice.” This is within the context of a public discourse around recommender systems right now that tend to portray them as either good or evil.
Rather, since Nick’s book stems from a moment in his career when he was an anthropologist in training, he ended up realizing that his goal as an anthropologist was to try to give an adequate representation of what was going on in these sociotechnical systems behind music recommender systems. He blended this idea with “a little bit of our sort of classic anthropological virtues of interpretive charity.” In this light, his book is rich not only in ethnographic descriptions and vivid stories from the field, but also in anthropological interpretation, and the reader can expect to encounter Bourdieu, Lévi-Strauss, Alberto Cosín Jiménez, and many other theorists in the book. During our interview, Nick noted that his book is about “music recommender system developers primarily based in the United States,” and the findings can’t be universalized. Still, he’s looking forward to new ethnographic works on streaming services focusing on non-hegemonic systems like the US, adding layers of technical and cultural specificity.
As we wrapped up the interview, Nick noted how being part of the broader CASTAC community means being in contact with brilliant researchers and their research.
During our interview, I told Nick about the impressions his book left on me as a reader. But it wasn’t just the book that left a positive impression on me. It was my first time recording an interview for a podcast. My anxiety and insecurity are noticeable in the recording, as well as my accent since English is not my first language. But Nick was extremely patient and kind. I thank him for the insightful and warm conversation, and my colleagues at Platypus for the opportunity to produce this episode of Platypod. I encourage you to listen to the entire episode and let us know if you have any authors or books you’d like us to record an episode about.
Every January, government officials, urban dwellers, and rural families across the state of Ceará, Northeast Brazil anxiously await the rainy season forecasts from Funceme, the Research Institute for Meteorology and Water Resources of Ceará. Yet throughout the state, many also proclaim that Funceme’s forecasts are “wrong,” that the forecasts do not work.
Dona Maria, who lives in a rural community in the municipality of Piquet Carneiro, explained it this way: “The problem with Funceme is this: sometimes it doesn’t work. Here, if I have a… how do you say… a forecast from Funceme, it can work in another municipality. Here it doesn’t work. Funceme predicts rain, for example. But then it rains there. In Juazeiro do Norte, it rains. It doesn’t rain here in Piquet Carneiro. It rains there in Barbalha and Várzea Alegre. And here it doesn’t even drizzle, you know? And that’s why I don’t give it a lot of importance. Do you understand?” (Dona Maria, personal communication, March 7, 2022).[1]
But what does it mean that a forecast is wrong?
Indicating more general rainfall patterns, Funceme’s seasonal forecasts consist of a distribution of probabilities of rainfall below, at, or above the mean for a large geographic region. Because a forecast is a distribution of probabilities, technically, a forecast cannot be “wrong,” though its performance may be evaluated over a period of years. Models may indicate that there is a greater chance of rainfall above average, but lower rainfall levels are still possible. At the same time, forecasts are not made at the household or community-level but rather at the regional level, where a region may be a state or larger geographic area. However, for agricultural families in the sertão, or hinterlands, of Ceará, a forecast is wrong when it rains less (or more) in their community or municipality than what was “promised” by the forecast, and the highest probability becomes deterministic at a very fine scale. That is why for Dona Maria, Funceme’s forecasts work in some areas but not in others.
In this post, I explore the evolution of Funceme and its seasonal forecasting in Ceará, where drought is integral to the collective socioecological memory (Alburque Jr. 1994, 2004; Seigerman et al. 2021). The majority of Ceará forms part of the Brazilian semi-arid region, characterized by distinct rainy and dry seasons, low rainfall levels, and high evaporation rates (de Souza Filho 2018). The droughts of 1877–1879, 1915, 1931, 1973, 1983, 1993, and 1998 evoke memories of unequal suffering in the Cearense sertão, as well as the implementation of large-scale infrastructure solutions in response to drought. The most recent drought (2012 to 2018) is considered the worst drought in Ceará’s history (Marengo, Torres, and Alves 2017).[2] While mortality and migration due to drought have declined dramatically in recent decades, in part due to government conditional cash transfer programs (Nelson and Finan 2009), “crises of collective anxiety about the rainy season” occur frequently and are often provoked by the communication of climatic information (Taddei 2008, 79).[3]
In 1987, Ceará restructured the Secretariat of Water Resources (SRH), and Funceme went from the Foundation of Meteorology and Artificial Rain of Ceará to the Research Institute for Meteorology and Water Resources of Ceará.[4] This name change, fifteen years after Funceme was founded, signified a transition from Funceme as an institution focused on experimental artificial rain production to one whose focus was “water in a general sense” (F. L. Viana, personal communication, August 19, 2022).[5] It has evolved as an innovative institution that advances forecasting modeling, basic environmental studies, and research on sociohydrologic dynamics. These advancements are not linear but rather have been achieved through efforts of Funceme’s most recent presidents, who were tasked to justify Funceme’s role as a research institute after the president from 1995 to 2001 almost dissolved Funceme with his business-like model for the research institute (E. S. P. R. Martins, personal communication, October 25, 2022). Today, government and non-government institutions, from regional to international levels, applaud Funceme. However, Funceme’s innovative character is often overshadowed in rural Ceará by the worry surrounding rainy season predictions.[6]
Since the 1970s, hydrologists have made significant progress in understanding the systems that shape the rainy season in Northeast Brazil, including the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), a coupled atmosphere-hydrosphere system in the Atlantic (Hastenrath and Heller 1977, Hastenrath and Greischar 1993).[7] Yet, only in the past couple of decades have researchers at Funceme and around the world developed models to make quantitative forecasts. In its early forecasting years, Funceme employed a climate monitor that used qualitative indicators, including Atlantic and Pacific Ocean conditions, global circulation patterns, and regional studies, to visualize three scenarios without indicating probabilities: rainfall below, at, and above the historic mean (personal communication, F. L. Viana, August 19, 2022). Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, forecasting methods advanced globally, with consensus forecasting as the norm.[8] Funceme has actively contributed to advancements, including the development of seasonal climate forecasts using dynamical downscaling in 1998-1999, the first operational forecast being launched in 2001 (personal communication. E. S. P. R. Martins, October 25, 2022). Dynamic downscaling, also called regionalization, resolves global-scale weather conditions at a finer scale to create more spatially detailed climate information.
Funceme broke conventions by adopting an objective forecast system in 2012 (personal communication. E. S. P. R. Martins, October 25, 2022). It gained independence in forecast production, running the ECHAM4.6 model (an atmospheric general circulation model) and adopting a thirty-year hindcast (1981 to 2010) for its ECHAM4.6 and RSM97 models. Sea surface temperatures were incorporated into the ECHAM4.6, and scenarios were run to better communicate forecast uncertainties. Concurrently, Funceme contributed to a national climate model superset, which helped Funceme establish itself as a national forecasting leader.[9] Today, Funceme uses probabilistic forecasting, which provides the probability that an event (rainfall) of a specific or range of magnitudes may occur in a specific region (the state of Ceará) in a particular time period (a trimester). However, despite forecast improvements, whether these innovations lead to better informed decisions is not clear. Decisions may depend not only on the forecast’s objectivity but also factors including users’ understanding of uncertainty in forecasts, personal or professional interests, and how available information is applied (Morss et al. 2008).
Salience, relevance, authority, and legitimacy are key to the uptake of forecast information by different actors (Taddei 2008). In part, Funceme establishes authority and legitimacy during forecast meetings using graphs that depict forecast model results. Data visualization is a discursive tool for social semiotics (Aiello 2020), as seemingly simple charts substantiate the presented rainfall probabilities. Model complexity, the immense quantity of atmospheric and other environmental data, and fluxes of ambient conditions are flattened into digestible nuggets for non-experts.
At this year’s forecast announcement, Funceme’s president, Dr. Eduardo Sávio P. R. Martins, used a pizza analogy to explain the anxiously awaited rainfall probabilities. As of January 20, the climate forecast indicated probabilities of 10:40:50 (10 percent below average, 40 percent around average, and 50 percent above average). Martins had the audience imagine these probabilities as portions of a pizza: cutting the pizza in half gives 50 percent of the pizza as above-average rainfall. The other half, divided into parts proportional to 40 and 10 percent, represents the other probabilities. Rotating the pizza, you can pick a slice from any of the three options. Rotating it again, you may get a slice from a different part of the pizza, that is, a different rainy season outcome. Martins also emphasized that the models suggested high spatial and temporal variability, addressing common misconceptions held by Dona Maria and others. Rainfall will probably not fall uniformly across Ceará or during the trimester.
Dr. Eduardo Sávio P. R. Martins, the president of Funceme, presents the seasonal forecast for Ceará for the months of February, March, and April on January 20, 2023. The presentation took place at the Governor’s Palace in Fortaleza, Ceará and was live-streamed by Funceme via Instagram.
Directing perceptions about probabilities during public presentations is one strategy Funceme uses to educate its interlocutors, especially the press. To that effect, Martins beseeched those who were to communicate the forecast to ensure they had these concepts correctly explained before publishing, “So that we [Funceme] don’t have a lot of work later on to, let’s say, redo presentations for other groups to clarify communication problems.”[10] While Funceme’s forecasts are shared via social media, including Instagram and WhatsApp, in addition to newspapers and the radio, there is no guarantee that their complete message reaches or changes perceptions of those living in the sertão.
As a publicly facing research institution, Funceme confronts compound challenges of innovating and communicating those innovations in understandable, useful, and usable ways. Throughout the year, Martins discusses the implications of forecasts and climate trends with different government actors. In mid-March, for example, Martins met with the governor of Ceará and the leaders of various government organs to determine flood-risk areas due to strong rains. Funceme’s forecasts also provide technical experts at the state water management company, Cogerh, a baseline to model water availability in the state’s reservoirs to support bulk-water allocation decision-making by river-basin committees, composed of representatives from civil society, industry, and the government (Lemos et al. 2020).
Funceme, a state institution, also faces the challenge of precarity every four years during the gubernatorial elections. Each election poses the possibility of the reconfiguration of the SRH and Funceme. For two decades, Funceme has experienced relative stability, in part a reflection of the technical competence by Martins, now in his seventeenth year as president. The future of Funceme will depend on its ability to adapt to new leadership, potential political influence, and new environment scenarios in the face of rapidly changing climates.
Thank you to Dr. Eduardo Sávio P. R. Martins for his insights, feedback, and collaboration in the development of this research. Also, thank you to Dr. Francisco Vasconcelos Junior and Kim Fernandes for their useful comments on drafts of this post.
[1] Original: “O problema da Funceme é o seguinte às vezes ele não funciona. Aqui, se eu tenho uma, como é que diz uma previsão da Funceme? Ela pode funcionar lá em outro outro município. Aqui não funciona. Ele prevê uma chuva, por exemplo. Mas aí chove. Lá em Juazeiro do Norte não chove aqui em Piquet Carneiro, chove lá em Barbalha e Várzea Alegre. E aqui nem pinga, né? Então é por isso que eu não dou muita importância, entendeu?”
[2] Individually, the rainy seasons of 2012 to 2018 are ranked better than the tenth most critical year in the history of systematic records, but the persistence of drought reveals a very different drought footprint. See for example:
Martins, Eduardo Sávio P. R., Magalhães, Antônio. R., and Diógenes Fontenele. 2017. “A seca plurianual de 2010-2017 no Nordeste e seus impactos.” Parcerias Estratégicas 22: 17-40.
Martins, Eduardo Sávio P. R. and Francisco de Chagas Vasconcelos Júnior. “O clima da Região Nordeste entre 2009 e 2017: Monitoramento e Previsão.” 2017. Parcerias Estratégicas 22: 63-80.
Escada, Paulo, Caio A. S. Coelho, Renzo Taddei, Suraje Dessai, Iracema F. A. Cavalcanti, Roberto Donato, Mary T. Kayano, et al. 2021. “Climate services in Brazil: Past, present, and future perspectives.” Climate Services 24: 100276.
[3] Original: “crises de ansiedade coletiva em relação à estação de chuvas”; See also: Taddei, Renzo. 2005. Of clouds and streams, prophets and profits: The political semiotics of climate and water in the Brazilian Northeast. Doctoral thesis. Columbia University.
[4] Fundação Cearense de Meteorologia e Chuvas Artificiais and the Fundação Cearense de Meteorologia e Recursos Hídricos, respectively.
[5] Original: “água no sentido geral”
[6] People in the sertão are also inundated with sometimes conflicting rainfall information from a variety of sources—from national agencies to private institutions. This poses a challenge for Funceme to maintain its legitimacy among rural community members, who link conflicting rainfall information from various sources with Funceme because the information is all about rain.
[7] Meteorological drought has been related to anomalies in the Atlantic system, which result in the ITCZ remaining anomalously far north (Hastenrath and Greischar 1993). Meteorological drought is defined as rainfall in the category below the mean. We can imagine having thirty years for which we put rainfall in order from lowest to highest and divide then in the ten years into three categories: The first ten years (below average), the last ten years (above average), and the ten years between these two category, which represent rainfall around the average. The El Niño-South Oscillation (ENSO) and the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) also influence climate patterns at varying temporal scales. See for example:
Kayano, Mary Toshie, and Vinicius Buscioli Capistrano. “How the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (Amo) Modifies the Enso Influence on the South American Rainfall.” International Journal of Climatology 34(1): 162-78.
Vasconcelos Junior, Francisco das Chagas, Charles Jones, and Adilson Wagner Gandu. 2018. “Interannual and Intraseasonal Variations of the Onset and Demise of the Pre-Wet Season and the Wet Season in the Northern Northeast Brazil.” Revista Brasileira de Meteorologia 33: 472-484.
[8] A significant level of subjectivity is added when a group of forecasters determine a single forecast through consensus. In this negotiation process, social and political pressures (e.g., the need to establish a forecast that appeases farmers or state agencies) may drive outcomes. Conversely, objective forecasts are produced directly from the selected models, without a negotiation process.
[9] The superset included a statistical model for Brazil (INMET) and four global atmospheric models (one from Funceme and three from the National Center for Weather Forecasting and Climate Studies). Other projects with sociotechnological significance, including the development of a national drought monitor, attest to the innovative and socially driven character of Funceme.
[10] Original: “[P]ara a gente depois não ter um trabalho muito grande de, digamos assim, de refazer apresentações em outros grupos para esclarecer problemas de comunicação.”
Aiello, Giorgia. 2020. “Inventorizing, situating, transforming: Social semiotics and data visualization.” In Data Visualization in Society, edited by Martin Engebretsen and Helen Kennedy, 49-62. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Albuquerque Jr, Durval Muniz de. 1994. “Palavras que calcinam, palavras que dominam: a invenção da seca do Nordeste.” Revista Brasileira de História 14 (28): 111-120. [pdf]
—. 2004. The invention of the Brazilian Northeast. Durham: Duke University Press.
de Souza Filho, Francisco. 2018. Projecto Ceará 2050. Fortaleza (Brazil).
Hastenrath, Stefan, and Leon Heller. 1977. “Dynamics of climatic hazards in northeast Brazil.” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 103 (435): 77-92.
Hastenrath, Stefan, and Lawrence Greischar. 1993. “Further Work on the Prediction of Northeast Brazil Rainfall Anomalies.” Journal of Climate 6 (4): 743-758.
Lemos, Maria Carmen, Bruno Peregrina Puga, Rosa Maria Formiga-Johnsson, and Cydney Kate Seigerman. 2020. “Building on adaptive capacity to extreme events in Brazil: water reform, participation, and climate information across four river basins.” Regional Environmental Change 20 (2): 53.
Marengo, Jose A., Roger Rodrigues Torres, and Lincoln Muniz Alves. 2017. “Drought in Northeast Brazil—past, present, and future.” Theoretical and Applied Climatology 129 (3): 1189-1200.
Morss, Rebecca E., Julie L. Demuth, and Jeffrey K. Lazo. 2008. “Communicating Uncertainty in Weather Forecasts: A Survey of the U.S. Public.” Weather and Forecasting 23 (5): 974-991
Nelson Donald, R., and J. Finan Timothy. 2009. “Praying for Drought: Persistent Vulnerability and the Politics of Patronage in Ceará, Northeast Brazil.” American Anthropologist 111 (3): 302-316.
Seigerman, Cydney K., Raul. L. P. Basílio, and Donald R. Nelson. 2021. “Secas entrelaçadas: uma abordagem integrativa para explorar a sobreposição parcial e as divisões volúveis entre definições, experiências e memórias da seca no Ceará, Brasil.” In Tempo e memória ambiental : etnografia da duração das paisagens citadinas, edited by Ana Luiza Carvalho da Rocha and Cornelia Eckert, 25-54. Brasília: ABA Publicações.
Taddei, Renzo. 2008. “A comunicação social de informações sobre tempo e clima: o ponto de vista do usuário.” Boletim SBMET: 76-86. [pdf]
In this post, we unpack the meaning and many works of creating and maintaining digital multiples, a term we coined in our recent ethnography, A Filtered Life, to explore the multiple, dynamic expressions of self across online contexts (Nichter and Taylor 2022). This concept emerged from our ethnographic research with more than 100 college students exploring sociality, emotional expression, and online identity work. Our methods for this study included in-depth interviews, focus groups, writing prompts, and long-term participant observation in students’ social media sites.
Colette, a college junior studying marketing at a large public university, prides herself in curating clever posts across her social media. After a difficult day, her Instagram post would feature an artsy photo of a glass of wine, using her signature colors as background. On Twitter, she would post a funny meme about getting drunk. Snapchat would show a video of her drinking the wine (since the post would disappear quickly). Colette’s Facebook post would include a short narrative about why her day was hard without any mention of wine (since her parents might see it).
Posts from one weekend include a filtered close up photo on Instagram of Colette dressed in fitted jeans and a tank top taken from a flattering birds-eye angle with the caption, “Getting ready for fun with my girls (heart emoji).” On Snapchat, her photo was a blurry image of a half-empty pizza box and several crumpled tissues on her cluttered bedside table with the caption, “Had better days.” Facebook featured a candid selfie of Colette snuggling with her golden lab on the couch with the caption, “Just a quiet night at home.”
One Thursday night, Colette posted a curated photo of herself laughing with friends in front of an iconic graffiti wall in Austin that reads, “I love you so much.” Snapchat featured her bare legs in bed with a bandage and scratch marks along with the caption, “I’m a fucking mess.” On Twitter, she retweeted a popular cartoon meme of a woman falling down stairs.
These examples from Collette’s social media illustrate the strategic presentation of self across social media contexts, a process guided by site-specific affordances, social norms, and perceived audience expectations. The term “polymedia” refers to a dynamic model which incorporates the proliferation of new social media that “each acquires its own niche in people’s communicative repertoires” (Madianou 2015, 1; see also Madianou and Miller 2013). The concept of polymedia underscores that today’s users rely on an assemblage of media to accomplish their online goals.
If we consider the multiple contexts that college students traverse without factoring in social media, impression management is complicated enough. We can imagine that a typical day for college students might include interacting with peers, co-workers and supervisors, and professors in a variety of contexts such as home, campus, parties and bars, and workplaces. Once we layer in social media contexts that overlap and integrate with those offline realms, the idea of managing one’s impression, performing appropriately for the particular platform, and segregating audiences becomes infinitely more complex. Additionally, the digital multiples that one presents on various online platforms reach diverse audiences, a factor requiring consideration in the creation of a post.
Cover of A Filtered Life, by Nicole Taylor and Mimi Nichter
Engagement with multiple online contexts is not a new area of study. Tom Boellstorff has highlighted the interconnected nature of interactional contexts, arguing that digital worlds are as real as offline worlds (Boellstorff 2016). He illustrates that what we do online affects life offline, challenging a pervasive assumption in research on technology and sociality that understands “digital” and “real” as binary opposites. We found that digital multiples necessitated fluid identities—that is, being flexible in one’s presentation of self in relation to specific contexts and social spaces. Yet, the mandate to remain consistent with online and offline presentations of self further complicated the creation of digital multiples.
Here we explore the many works involved in creating and maintaining digital multiples alongside the impossible imperative of authenticity. Maintaining digital multiples required intensive labor as college students competed for likes amidst an attention economy where the half-life of a single post was short. On the one hand, site affordances, social norms, and perceived audience expectations constrained self-presentation; on the other hand, engaging across multiple sites, each with its own unique set of cultural mandates, provided an opportunity to cultivate digital multiples.
Daniel Miller and colleagues point out that since most people now engage across multiple sites, social media has become an ecology that offers many choices for sociality, ranging from small, private exchanges to public broadcasts (Miller et al. 2016). Miller and his colleagues refer to this as scalable sociality, a term they coin to describe the interconnected nature of social media, where individuals have a range of platform choices, degrees of privacy and size of audience that they want to reach. Interactive dynamics between social media users and their audience are key for understanding digital multiples.
Sociologist Erving Goffman described social life as a theater with interactions representing the interplay between actors and their audience (Goffman 1959). Goffman contends that we are always performing to create an impression for an audience. We need an audience to see our performance and a backstage area where we can both relax and do much of the work necessary to keep up appearances (Hogan 2010). Importantly, the self is not “a fixed, organic thing but a dramatic effect that emerges from a performance” (Tolentino 2019, 14). In our study, we observed that students portrayed themselves differently across social media platforms, depending on site affordances, audience expectations, and aspects of their identity they wanted to highlight.
We found that the process of constructing and maintaining digital multiples not only requires strategic tailoring by site, but also needs to be sufficiently aligned with one’s offline self and appearance to maintain an “authentic” identity. The concept of “authenticity”—revealing one’s true self—emerged as an important theme in our study. Students emphasized the importance of “being real” online as a marker of honesty, trustworthiness, and integrity. They scrutinized social media posts for signs of over-editing, a faux pau that signaled inauthenticity and elicited derision.
Among young women, authentic expression online translated into beauty practices that highlight physical appearance. The name of the game was to present both an authentic and an edited self that appeared effortlessly attractive. Successfully navigating this contradictory imperative required great skill, attention to detail, and vigilant monitoring of editing norms and feedback on posts. Men felt less pressure to post a flawlessly edited image, making it easier to achieve an appearance of authenticity. However, some still struggled with their online image and sense of self.
Both women and men were cognizant of the superficial nature of their editing practices. Students who did not edit risked critique for visible flaws and imperfections; those who did edit risked critique for being inauthentic. Successfully striking a balance between real and fake in social media was a highly valued skill and getting it right was important. This pressure underscores the importance of impressing an imagined audience, one that appears to value both perfection and authenticity, an impossible contradictory imperative.
Using social media. Image via Pexels.
Throughout A Filtered Life, we highlight the many works involved in creating and maintaining digital multiples, which include the following: editing work, the work of identity and gender performance, beauty work, emotional work, the work of remaining visible, and the work of managing social relationships. This is mostly invisible labor. Editing work, for example, is an intricate process for perfecting social media content, involving taking multiple photos, attending to angles, lighting, posture, spacing, and background, as well as editing out perceived flaws and strategically posting during peak times to attract maximum attention.
Another important work is that of identity and gender performance, shedding light on cultural prescriptions for self-presentation, which remain equally robust online as they do offline. Physical appearance, emotional expression, and lifestyle must be carefully surveilled and curated differently across contexts, yet it is important for a unifying thread of authenticity to remain intact. Under the constant surveillance of multiple imagined audiences, some were able to maintain the appearance of a seemingly “natural” aesthetic despite the tremendous effort required to produce content so that the “look” of their posts was eye-catching.
Beauty work describes the imperative to post your most attractive self and the production process required to achieve such perfection, including the work of micro-targeting each body part to discover and then conceal one’s flaws. In this process, social media practices are shaped by viewer expectations and site-specific conventions, as they converge with an online social milieu that values maximum visibility, adherence to cultural and gendered beauty norms, and promotion of the self as a recognizable brand image.
Students engaged in the emotional work of anticipating audience desires and developing tailored content across sites designed to get as many likes and positive comments as possible, vigilantly monitoring feedback on posts, and the emotional vicissitudes of counting likes and reading comments. Emotional work also included the imperative to always portray a happy, upbeat self and package one’s sad or angry emotions in socially acceptable ways, which differed by site. In this way, students needed to carefully produce and manage their emotional state.
The work of remaining visible by posting regularly was also important. Posting infrequently suggested a lack of social life. Students worried that if they did not post frequently friends would forget them. Being online constantly and seeing other people’s posts of how they were living their best life often resulted in frustration and jealousy, especially when comparing your own life to that of people in your friend network who seemed to “have it all.”
Finally, the work of managing social relationships involved scrolling through sites and liking others’ posts. Students said it was especially important to like the posts of friends who regularly liked their posts. It was common for a student to call out their closest friends for failing to reciprocate in this way. The timing of a like was important as well. Being the first to like a post signaled a sense of desperation; conversely, students said it was strange to get a like on an old post, explaining that it could signal a sudden and intense focus on them. Through the lens of these various works, we can see how the creation and maintenance of digital multiples becomes infinitely more complex and labor intensive.
The title of our ethnography, A Filtered Life, is multi-layered in meaning. On the most obvious level, it refers to the use of filters available on many platforms to alter and enhance one’s physical appearance and the background of an image. Beyond this interpretation, filters are a metaphor for strategically repackaging the self on different sites. Filtering the self is about every aspect of self-presentation, from the aesthetic of a person’s feed and their physical appearance to the personality characteristics and lifestyle they want to convey. Yet, all of this is bounded by a generational desire to remain authentic, meaning that there are limits to strategic self-expression online. Collette, like others in our study, carefully walked the fine line of achieving the impossible imperative of maintaining both filtered and authentic digital multiples.
The maintenance of digital multiples across online spaces—each with their own set of rules, editorial mandates, and audience expectations—intensified identity work. Everyone knew images they saw online were heavily cultivated, yet many students worked hard to perfect the ability to mask their editorial efforts in an image that appeared natural and effortless. While this editorial tight rope was stressful to navigate, students took pride in cultivating their skills and enjoyed the positive feedback from others when they got it right.
On the one hand, students expressed cynicism and frustration with social media—they struggled with the seeming inauthenticity of editing and self-presentation imperatives. On the other hand, students enjoyed the creative freedom to play with their identities, from the more superficial elements of fashion and physical appearance to deeper aspects of emotional expression and authentic self-presentation. As we look toward the future, it will be important for research to explore how the production of digital multiples shifts after college as young adults take on different roles and responsibilities.
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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.
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When I asked my aunt back in 2014 if my old Game Boy Color was still around, she handed it to me, but confirmed that the A and B buttons no longer worked properly. The Game Boy Color is a handheld game console that was released in 1998 as a successor to the black-and-white Game Boy (1989), though both consoles were discontinued in 2003. My grandmother had died recently, and we were clearing out my and my brother’s belongings from her newly empty house. Truthfully, I hadn’t touched this handheld console since the mid-2000s, around the time I upgraded from the family desktop computer to my own personal laptop. The title stickers on some of the cartridges had begun to wear out, but I held hope that this wasn’t an indicator of what their inside was like, or whether they had reached the end of their lives. I told my aunt I’d find a way to fix the buttons, to which she answered, “Why would you want to repair something from the past when the quality of what’s now in the present, on the market, is infinitely better?” In the mind of many people, it is indeed better to wait for a newer, more technologically advanced model to come out, a manifestation of planned obsolescence which we have learned to live with.
Photo by the author of a purple Game Boy Color with Pokémon Gold and Pokémon Blue cartridges.
Flash forward to 2022, and I had still not managed to fix the buttons on my deep-purple handheld but I attended a Game Boy Hardware Hacking workshop hosted by Lee Wilkins, with the support of Alex Custodio and Michael Iantorno as part of a series of events leading up to a Solar Game (Boy) Jam. The purpose of this workshop was to hack into the console to alter the way it functions, involving changing the buttons. After a quick presentation, we started by removing the external screws from the Game Boy Color console using an “iFixit” toolkit. We had to use a tri-wing screwdriver because the screws Nintendo uses aren’t the typical Phillips; picture a peace sign Y, instead of a plus sign +. The internal screws were a plus sign (Phillips), however. The point of the screws requiring a different screwdriver is to stop you from getting in, but once you’re in, you’re in. We then took both sides of the case apart slowly, careful not to damage the screen or circuit board.
Photo by Yiou Wang of the author holding the Game Boy they had taken apart.
While concerned with sustainability throughout my whole life, ever since we had a tree-planting day at school when I was eight years old, my main takeaway from the workshop was not sustainability, but that I had been implicated in the process of making. I was made into an actor: not in the theatrical sense, but I had been given a role in making the game instead of just playing it. In other words, I became a “prosumer,” a mix between producer and consumer (Berg, Narayan, Rajala, 2021). I, and the workshop attendees, gained a form of agency that day through hardware hacking.
Taking the console apart felt cool, but we still had more to do. We wanted to hack into it and alter some of its functions, particularly the buttons, so the next step involved soldering. I had done some soldering before, with Alex and Michael as well, in May. We had replaced the volatile memory batteries on some Game Boy cartridges, which had to be soldered on the motherboard to stay in place. In the more recent workshop’s case, we soldered the exposed part of the wires onto the buttons and the wires served as extensions of the buttons which we could attach to conducting elements using alligator clips.
After everything was in place, we had to think about movements that would close the circuit on each button. We glued aluminium paper on cardboard to make bracelets, rings, headbands, and other accessories to connect to the alligator clips. Yiou, a visiting scholar, sketched out the positions we would be standing in. We stood in a circle to symbolise a circuit, with Alex holding the console in the middle of the circle. We each wore one or two of the accessories we had prepared earlier. The workshop attendees worked together: in order to move downwards, I would high-five Justin, Justin would (gently) smack Owen’s head to go left, and Richy and Yiou would elbow-bump to go right. Unfortunately, Tetris doesn’t have an upwards function so we couldn’t test Owen and Richy fist-bumping to go up. We modded a Game Boy console to become THE Game Boy console and played the coolest game of communal Tetris ever!
As I’m writing this, people are preparing for the eShop closure (the electronic Nintendo store through which people can purchase digital copies of games and other programs) on Nintendo 3DS and Wii U consoles by downloading everything they’d purchased before they no longer can, as per Nintendo’s official announcement. The 3Ds, successor of the DS (2004), was released in 2011 while the Wii U, successor of the Wii (2006), was released in 2012. People can still buy second-hand games for both platforms, in the form of physical cartridges, but as of this month (March 2023), they can no longer buy them digitally from Nintendo. This news came around the same time it was announced in Nintendo Direct that classic Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games will now be included in the Nintendo Switch Online membership, in digital form. Fans suspect DS and 3DS games will be next.
As defined by industrial designer Brooks Stevens in 1954, planned obsolescence is a marketing strategy that presumes that electronics are made with the intent that the consumer will want to discard them by the time their successor comes out on the market through “instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary” (Adamson and Gordon, 2003). Many people assume that with planned obsolescence, their electronics will break down immediately, or that their electronics will stop functioning. However, scholars suggest that consumers will be under the impression that their belongings stopped functioning because they don’t function the same way the latest model does (Miao, 2011; Kuppelwieser and Klaus and Mathiou and Boujena, 2019). In other words, it’s not really becoming out of use as much as it would become inconvenient to use them in conjunction with other existing, newer models on the market.
In a sense, getting into the console to fix a button or switch out the screen are sustainable efforts to combat planned obsolescence, all while giving consumers more agency over what they consume.
In Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020), the game doesn’t end once the players reach the end credits. After the credits roll, one of the game’s NPCs, or non-player characters, tells the player that they’ve unlocked terraforming, making them an official “Island Designer” who can reshape hills, cliffs, create ponds, move bridges, to personalise their islands a step further than redecorating by putting down items from their pockets. Terraforming even comes with a white hard hat the player must wear every time they’re changing the architecture. This new feature that wasn’t included in previous iterations of the game before 2020 gives the player some form of agency, in my opinion, over what the game they’re playing looks like. In this case, agency was given, thus making it voluntary on the behalf of the development team and different from the agency consumers achieve through hacking and modding.
A form of agency I am more concerned with is people taking the reins of technology for themselves out of a want or a need. When I couldn’t get my Game Boy Color buttons to work in 2014—desperate to play Pokémon Crystal again—my first thought was to give up and purchase a 3DS, which would have newer editions of the game, though not the exact game I wanted to play. But I found a solution: Twitter friends opened my eyes to the world of emulators. To explain it simply, emulators tell a computing platform to operate a certain way that mimics another computing platform in order to run software that only works on a certain platform. Emulators exist for almost any platform and can even be encased in a shell that looks like one of the retro handheld consoles, another form of agency the players themselves have taken. I downloaded a Game Boy emulator onto my laptop and then downloaded a ROM file[1] of Pokémon Crystal that someone had modded to work on an emulator. I had so much fun playing it and reliving my memories, I ended up locking myself in my room for hours and hours every day that summer.
Photo by the author of the author’s Raspberry Pi computer encased in a shell made to look like a classic Game Boy.
As the technology advances, there will be more to consider in the process to stop defunct consoles from ending up in landfills. When it comes to software, emulators have proven to be the way to go to preserve the games. In the case of Nintendo closing down eShops for decade-old handheld consoles, it could be justified as the company choosing to focus their efforts on their current consoles over continuing to invest in supporting older platforms, which requires human labour and financial cost.
It can be quite scary to not know where to begin or which tools you need to repair or alter electronics, but all you need to do is to start tinkering. I will leave you with my now-functioning Game Boy Color buttons, taken apart, then replaced by my brother—who, just like me, has no background in any of this, but also has a lot of curiosity and doesn’t want to give up on our childhood memories.
Photo by the author’s brother of a workshop area with tweezers, screwdrivers, rubbing alcohol.
[1]Read-Only Memory, the software data present on the game cartridges.
Adamson, G., Gordon, D. (2003) Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World. MIT Press, Cambridge.
Berg, P., Narayan, R., Rajala, A. (2021) “Ideologies in Energy Transition: Community Discourses on Renewables.” Technology Innovation Management Review 11(7/8): 79-91.
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Miao, C. H. (2011) “Planned Obsolescence and Monopoly Undersupply.” Journal of Information Economics and Policy 23(1):51-58.
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/
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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.
When I talked with Jia, who works for an e-commerce company in Shanghai, China, she was trying to finish a “Perfect Month Challenge” on her Apple Watch. That meant closing the rings on her watch every day for a month—achieving goals for standing up once an hour across all 12 hours, burning over 400kcal calories, and exercising 20 minutes. She was fully invested in this project, until Shanghai hit a lockdown due to the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2022, and she suddenly lost the streak. “The ‘firework’ after closing the rings is so nice, and the ‘Perfect Month’ sounds attractive to me,” she said, “I was drawn into exercising, and made a lot of progress, and setting myself a new goal every now and then. But this is also a source of anxiety and stress, and once I couldn’t keep up, I would just let go.”
This experience, from obsession to disappointment, might resonate with a lot of people who have made goals to track themselves, especially after Apple Watch and other trendy wearables took over the consumer’s market. Every time I introduce myself to a crowd and say what my research is about, I always ask “How many of y’all wear Apple Watch, Fitbit, or anything like that?” A few would raise their hands with some shiny gadgets around their wrists. I then ask “Do you love them? Hate them? Or—love and hate at the same time?” They will politely laugh, or nod, admitting that although “I like how it tracks everything,” but “it’s annoying sometimes,” or “I can’t really meet my 8,000 steps goal every day.”
It is a love and hate relationship, as we gain knowledge of ourselves by numbers, getting excited about the fun parts of self-tracking, while getting disheartened at the never-achieving goal of self-improvement. Described as the “bitter-sweet ambivalence,”[1] this technological intervention is not all smooth and positive but always carries the “not working out” part that delivers negative affective elements. In addition, the technological practices indicate another layer of bitterness—hidden labor. By quantifying our health, self-tracking makes explicit the points of actions for improvements. It blurs the boundaries of health and illness. We all have something to learn, to correct, to improve in order to reach a healthier status but never perfect. In a sense, self-tracking makes managing health harder, not easier.
We are asked by society to take the harder route. This implies deep attachment to the commercial interests and modern health ethics. The living experiences from the ethnography, the feelings, emotions, and interpretations from the users reveal how users situate themselves with numbers, and give us clues about the evolving relationship between humans and technologies of personal data collection.
A user checks their rings on their Apple Watch. Image by Anna Shvets, via Pexel.
As Jia’s experience indicates, rather than making progress and reaching goals as a linear, smooth process, which many of the self-tracking apps propose and promises to us, users’ patterns of use across time often look like this—a ‘fun’ period, a resolution filled with enthusiasm, followed by disruptions and bounce-backs, and the worst case, a total give-up. Health-related tracking apps have long struggled with the “adherence” or “compliance” of users’ continuous use.[2] Then, users often blame themselves for not being self-disciplined or determined enough to make change happen.
Of course, we love the idea of making progress, being self-realized, and productive. This love is shaped partly by how technology imagines each of us as a high-achieving consumer of health in a marketized world. We fail to do it, not because of us being lazy or lack of self-discipline; rather, it is the making of a datafied life,[3] “outsourcing” out experiences and perceptions to objectified numbers.[4] The sensors, apps, and health promotions produce the numbers, which encapsulate and glorify the idea of personal productivity while ignoring who we are and what we do.
Sometimes, the biggest promise of self-tracking apps is that they make exercising simple and smooth. Everything is recorded via wearable sensors, and all the interactive features will guide the users through various stages of their fitness journey. There are countless design tricks that give users a “nudge,”[5] a psychological term to describe that through certain mechanisms, people can be attracted, lured, or hooked to do something subconsciously. Things like a hot red button will make users eager to click. Designers believe that such mechanisms can also be put into good use, and make users easily “addicted” to what are considered optimally healthy behaviors. A nice sound effect after every exercise? Check. A friendly notification to push users to finish their daily walk? Check. A ‘level-up’ after every consecutive 10-day tracking? Check.
However, lived experiences often differ from the imaginaries of technologies. My research focuses on self-tracking and wearables in China, especially among the overworked—those who work in the notorious “996” schemes (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days a week). Health management is seen as necessary as many of my research participants suffer from work-related stress and sedentary lifestyles, but there is a bigger challenge when it comes to self-tracking. People with a busy schedule want something that’s simple and straightforward, but have mixed emotions towards all these “make things easy and attractive” designs to boost healthy behaviors. Many of my research participants love a sense of achievement and the joy that a game-like experience could bring. However, their experience with self-tracking is far from easy. All the interactions—recording, tracking, celebrating, and summarizing—demands extra work. The interpretations of numbers are detached from their daily routine, and engaging with the tracking device calls for extra attention. The plans that self-tracking apps provide ask for a lot of information and require users to meticulously manage their change of weight, calculate the intake and consumption of calories, and take times in between shifts to finish daily exercise quota. Many of the apps break down goals to daily actions and encourage continuous record-taking. Phone notifications will ring every day at a certain time, whether or not you are eating, chilling, or in a meeting.
More than half of my interviewees work overtime, and most of them are faced with various health concerns. They recognize that fitness and health are important, and some think that they need to be making lifestyle changes. However, the conflict associated with self-tracking is not only as it relates to a lack of time—since self-tracking apps break down your daily goal into 15-min ‘easy’ tasks—but also to the amount of mental resources that the whole idea of self-management takes. The quantification of goals, tasks, and rewards resembles work and are doubtless a form of hidden labor. Contrary to the image of these tasks being of the ‘easy,’ they are mentally and physically challenging. Relentless progress, non-stop monitoring and self-monitoring, and the interruptions protruding from daily routines all make self-tracking with an app ‘hard’ work. The stress from work, from the fitness tasks, and ultimately, from the demand of self-management and self-improvement, accumulates and reinforces the sense of burnout. One interviewee, in his 40s, described his cycle of stress, mentioning that the tiredness from work was the biggest obstacle. However, the fact that he couldn’t finish the simple daily task of exercise and “lost track” added a sense of self-blame and failure, which pushed him into deeper distress. Everything added up eventually to a point that he gave up on his exercise goals.
The idea of endless self-improvement is not alien to us as self-help books and “how-to” videos everywhere claim to help us make resolutions and make us hold the belief on making change for a ‘better self.’ As a society, we are also not unfamiliar with the self-blame after the resolutions fall apart and we fail to realize our promises to change. The origin of such beliefs is the individualization of society, which seeps through every aspect of our life: work, education, health, well-being, and selfhood, where we are made to believe that we are on our own. Without adequate community support and a robust social safety net, our health is also individualized, and health has become an individual choice. Self-tracking and wearable technologies epitomize such a belief. As we (seem to) gain control and knowledge of every bit of what is happening in our bodies, the responsibilities of making changes are shouldered upon us. The social norms—being fit, being efficient, and being responsible—are built into the design and internalized through our actions with self-tracking apps and wearables.
One outstanding aspect of such self-improvement is to equal productivity with responsibilities and self-care. The cult of productivity prevails as we are surrounded by such languages and discourse of producing and measuring values. Making a change is to log and register it with quantified numbers, i.e., to translate daily routines into challenges and achievements. Research has revealed that quantifying fitness and health will undermine a person’s intrinsic motivation by acting upon extrinsic numbers.[6] But in today’s culture of productivity, the line between intrinsic and extrinsic value blurs, and so as work and life, fitness and health, social and personal. The growth and improvement in numbers becomes a part of our selfhood as we detach ourselves from the environmental and social aspects of health and treat the body as a workable project.
This culture of productivity aligns with the commercial interests of health tech and with a hunger for data. For the users, their daily numbers are achievements and badges of honor for being a better self. For the Venture Capital supported businesses, the numbers are a gauge of a user’s ‘value’ of how much data can be harvested, and how many services, subscriptions and products can be sold. The hidden design language behind the frenetic narrative of improvement and progress is that the more engagement users make, the more they are valued as a savvy customer in the “ecosystem” of data. The scenario is promising, yet not enough to deliver a stable profit yet, as some of the most promising health tech start-ups, such as Peloton, are not faring well. This in turn leads us to question the long-held belief of health tech: is it actually productive to wrap fitness and health in the model of productivity? What might it mean to flatten every lifestyle change into taking courses, tailoring plans, and making achievements?
An interviewee joked about the wristband being a “digital handcuff.” “It does work sometimes,” she laughed. Scholars might agree with the Foucauldian metaphor that self-tracking is also self-surveillance. It’s about how power gets embedded in the technology and renders our bodies legible and manageable to politics.[7] But situated in living experiences, numbers acquire more meaning toward the practice of self-care. What do people talk about when they talk about their numbers? Beyond the sense of achievement, the urge for a change, and the cycle of self-blame, self-tracking has, however, given them a way to comprehend their health in a bigger picture. The human-tech relationship is a two-way bridge, that human livings are co-shaping the meanings of technology, linking to the historical, social, material and mundane context of “everyday life.”[8]
I asked my interviewees to send me screenshots and charts of their self-tracking records, and talked through the colored charts with some self-reflection questions, such as: How did you feel? What happened in your life when you achieved that number? What else did you notice throughout the tracking of your daily routine? It is a process of re-contextualizing each of their numbers, and it shows how varied and unpredictable our lives can be, versus the monotonous patterns and plans that self-tracking apps lay to them. For example, one interviewee recalled that after a stressful day and conflicts with her boss at work, she pushed herself further on the treadmill. “Look at my heart rate. It went up steadily, and I was getting into a flow where I felt in control and cleared up my mind.”
People re-associate their experiences, positive or negative, with their life events and changes, and what they value about their bodies. One important thing that many of them mentioned is the association between their workload and the fluctuation of the way their bodies perform. Self-tracking makes them more sensitive to their bodily changes, or how their bodies respond to stress, lack of physical activity, and an unhealthy diet. Some of them will choose a certain set of numbers to follow and try to maintain them at an acceptable level. For that, they tend to do less, thinning on daily tracking and recording rather than making more comprehensive plans or commitments. As one interviewee recalled, “It is enough to know roughly where I am at, and precise numbers don’t make too much sense.” The data from self-tracking are re-contextualized as life narratives, which help them maintain a balance of work and life, and negotiate a “self” that they can have control over, such as “keeping an eye on my resting heart rate.” In this way, self-tracking is seen as an interface to construct and understand their selfhood. It is a mixture of society’s expectations of self-management of health, and the social and personal restraints one must navigate.
Most of the self-tracking devices right now are commercial products, which are driven by data centric profit gains, and shape the image of a productive and responsible individual (as a consumer of health). But what we should learn about self-tracking is to look beyond the models of measuring productive behaviors towards lifestyle changes and situate them into living experiences, where data is given multiple meanings and interpretations. It can help people frame their health or illness narratives and reveal the social and structural predicaments that people struggle with.[9] There is a lot of potential for us to make the numbers our own.
[1] Diefenbach, Sarah. “The Potential and Challenges of Digital Well-being Interventions: Positive Technology Research and Design in Light of the Bitter-sweet Ambivalence of Change.” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (2018): 331.
[2] Kelders, Saskia M., Robin N. Kok, Hans C. Ossebaard, and Julia EWC Van Gemert-Pijnen. “Persuasive System Design Does Matter: A Systematic Review of Adherence to Web-Based Interventions.” Journal of Medical Internet Research 14, no. 6 (2012): e152.
[3] Ruckenstein, Minna, and Natasha Dow Schüll. “The Datafication of Health.” Annual Review of Anthropology 46 (2017): 261-278.
[4] Smith, Gavin JD, and Ben Vonthethoff. “Health By Numbers? Exploring the Practice and Experience of Datafied Health.” Health Sociology Review 26, no. 1 (2017): 6-21.
[5] Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Penguin, 2009.
[6] Lister, Cameron, Joshua H. West, Ben Cannon, Tyler Sax, and David Brodegard. “Just a Fad? Gamification in Health and Fitness Apps.” JMIR Serious Games 2, no. 2 (2014): e3413.
[7] Ajana, Btihaj. “Digital Health and the Biopolitics of the Quantified Self.” Digital Health 3 (2017): 2055207616689509.
[8] Fors, Vaike, Sarah Pink, Martin Berg, and Tom O’Dell. Imagining Personal Data: Experiences of Self-Tracking. Routledge, 2020.
[9] Ruckenstein, Minna. “Charting the Unknown: Tracking the Self, Experimenting with the Digital: Reflection.” In The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology, pp. 253-271. Singapore: Springer Singapore, 2022.
Ajana, Btihaj. “Digital Health and the Biopolitics of the Quantified Self.” Digital Health 3 (2017): 2055207616689509.
Diefenbach, Sarah. “The Potential and Challenges of Digital Well-being Interventions: Positive Technology Research and Design in Light of the Bitter-sweet Ambivalence of Change.” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (2018): 331.
Fors, Vaike, Sarah Pink, Martin Berg, and Tom O’Dell. Imagining Personal Data: Experiences of Self-Tracking. Routledge, 2020.
Kelders, Saskia M., Robin N. Kok, Hans C. Ossebaard, and Julia EWC Van Gemert-Pijnen. “Persuasive System Design Does Matter: A Systematic Review of Adherence to Web-Based Interventions.” Journal of Medical Internet Research 14, no. 6 (2012): e152.
Lister, Cameron, Joshua H. West, Ben Cannon, Tyler Sax, and David Brodegard. “Just a Fad? Gamification in Health and Fitness Apps.” JMIR Serious Games 2, no. 2 (2014): e3413.
Ruckenstein, Minna. “Charting the Unknown: Tracking the Self, Experimenting with the Digital: Reflection.” In The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology, pp. 253-271. Singapore: Springer Singapore, 2022.
Ruckenstein, Minna, and Natasha Dow Schüll. “The Datafication of Health.” Annual Review of Anthropology 46 (2017): 261-278.
Smith, Gavin JD, and Ben Vonthethoff. “Health By Numbers? Exploring the Practice and Experience of Datafied Health.” Health Sociology Review 26, no. 1 (2017): 6-21.
Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Penguin, 2009.
Space exploration in northern Sweden often gains meaning in relation to mining. In this blog post, I ask: how does mining serve as a “speculative device” (McCormack 2018) for envisaging a future beyond Earth? I was drawn to the topic of outer space infrastructures by the Swedish Space Corporation’s ongoing expansion of its rocket launch site, located outside the subarctic city of Kiruna. This expansion aims to turn what has thus far been a sounding rocket range into a full-fledged launch site for small satellites, undertaken in anticipation of a dramatic increase in the demand for launch services over the forthcoming decades. The land occupied by the spaceport and its impact area, twice the size of Luxembourg, interferes with the reindeer herding lands of four Sámi villages. In early 2022, I traveled to Kiruna to begin inquiring into the politics of space exploration in Sweden, focusing in part on the relation between the launch site and the reindeer herders. Yet, eluding my questions about space and instead shifting the conversation to mining, several of the herders I spoke with urged me to consider how outer space was often shot through the region’s long-running history of underground resource extraction.
In his book Space in the Tropics, Peter Redfield (2000) investigates the relation between two seemingly separate phenomena in French Guiana: an old penal colony that operated between 1852 and 1943, on the one hand, and the contemporary spaceport from where the European consortium rocket Ariane is launched, on the other hand. Redfield (2000: xiv) asks, “what might it reveal that [these] different things happen in the same place?” The same question can be posed about mining and space in Kiruna, where the city’s surrounding landscapes have long been presented by the Swedish state as resourceful and available for exploitation. Inspired by Redfield’s question, here I attend to a series of negative, positive, historical, and “speculative relations” (Ojani 2022) between mining and space as invoked by reindeer pastoralists, local residents, politicians, and space actors in subarctic Sweden.
For reindeer herders working within the launch site’s impact area, space sometimes held a oppositional relation to mining in that the spaceport helped keep new mining initiatives at bay. In a context long characterized by resource extraction, discrimination, and marginalization, one exploiter prevents herders’ ever-shrinking grazing areas from further destruction by other exploiters. While often critical of its placement on their lands and the various forms of disturbance created by its surrounding infrastructure, the herders occasionally emphasized the launch site’s utility. For example, only a few years ago, it became the reason for halting mineral prospecting in the area. Hence, while some of the herders expressed deep anxiety about falling rockets near their animals, others were quick to point out that they were in fact fortunate to have a relatively good collaboration with the Swedish Space Corporation. In response to my queries about space, the herders switched to other, more pressing concerns: mining initiatives located outside the spaceport’s impact area, tourism and the increasing use of snowmobiles on their herding lands, and hunters who were lobbying against a state initiative to increase herders’ influence over hunting licenses, among several other issues.
In contrast, local space actors and politicians saw a potentially allied relation between mining and the space industry, calling for stronger synergies between the two. These actors frequently underscored that both industries are not only “hi-tech” but also operate in “extreme environments,” above the atmosphere and below the ground. For them, the connection between mining and space seemed almost self-evident, and there had already been several collaborations between the two industries. For instance, local scientists conducted an experiment using a sealed-off mining area for the detonation of dynamite, the vibrations of which were then measured with infrasound microphones attached onto stratospheric balloons. And as it turns out, the analogy often drawn by my interlocutors between space and the underground is not in any way unique to this particular setting. It also predicates space analogues undertaken in cave-environments elsewhere in the world (see Park 2016).
A MAXUS rocket with the iron ore mine visible in the background. Photo by the author.
But the relation between space exploration and mining in this region is also historical. The establishment of the Swedish launch site in the 1960s drew on an already-existing scientific infrastructure whose purpose was atmospheric research and space physics. The development of this scientific infrastructure, in turn, was enabled by an earlier infrastructure that was built for underground resource extraction. This mining infrastructure has a history that stretches back to 17th-century copper and silver mines but most significantly to the late-19th-century establishment of the Kiruna mine, one of the world’s largest underground iron ore mines. It was to a great extent that the existence of what is essentially the mine’s surrounding infrastructure motivated the placement of the rocket base in this particular region.
While local politicians and space actors have long attempted to brand Kiruna as a “space town” (Backman 2015), this history reveals the processes that have made such branding and associated space activities possible to begin with.
By the same token, the vertical territorial understanding (Braun 2000) reflected by ongoing developments around space exploration relies on assumptions about “emptiness” conjured up by the mining industry. Today, such understandings are invoked to render resourceful not only horizontal space and the underground, but likewise vertical space as it extends upwards. Alongside tropes about empty landscapes, the branding of Kiruna as a globally attractive space hub is frequently made with reference to its vast and supposedly unpopulated surroundings as well as its relatively unoccupied airspace.
In the 1959 Swedish-American science fiction film Space Invasion of Lapland (Rymdinvasion i Lappland), two scientists travel to northern Sweden upon hearing about the landing of a mysterious extraterrestrial object.[1] As viewers, we have already had a glimpse of the latter: the film opens with Sámi reindeer herders awing at the glowing round object as it glides over the subarctic landscape, before finally crashing into a snow-covered mountain. The movement of the presumed meteorite strikes us as eerie and not at all in accordance with the way an actual space rock would behave upon entering into the atmosphere. As the story continues, we gradually come to learn that the puzzle that the travelers have been called upon to unravel ultimately exceeds the grasp of modern science, as the object turns out to be an alien spaceship.
A conversation unfolds between the two scientists onboard a plane bound for Kiruna. Nodding at a boat visible from the plane’s window, the famous geologist, Dr. Wilson, asks his fellow traveler, Dr. Engström, whether he knows what it is. “Ore boats from the Kiruna ore mines, the richest iron deposit in the world,” Dr. Engström replies, upon which Dr. Wilson speculates: “[D]o you think that the magnetic attraction of the mines could have any bearing on the meteor falling there?” His colleague is skeptical, replying, “Come on doctor, like making the meteor skid across the snow for miles?” A brief moment of deliberation follows, before Dr. Wilson finally asks: “Who said it had to be a meteor?”
The speculative relation drawn by Dr. Wilson between the extraterrestrial and the Kiruna mine compels me to also attend to another set of connections drawn by some of my interlocutors. While Redfield’s question about the coincidence of seemingly unrelated phenomena in French Guiana has oriented my attention to infrastructural history, here I would like to return to the relations that my interlocutors themselves drew between things.
A PhD student at the local space campus offered a captivating analogy. Sitting in his office, we were chatting away about everything from aurora borealis and housing in Kiruna to the navigation and control of small satellites for deep space exploration, which was the subject of his doctoral studies. As the conversation went on, he told me that he did not really believe in space colonization in the way this is usually imagined. He did not think that space settlements would emerge as ends in themselves but rather as consequences of off-Earth mining. He brought home this point by way of comparison, suggesting that this is not very different from the way Kiruna did not exist prior to the establishment of the local mine. According to him, there could be no significant reason to settle down in the region prior to the emergence of a mining infrastructure.
Akin to Dr. Wilson’s speculation about the connection between the extraplanetary and the local iron ore mine, my interlocutors, too, made connections, contrasts, and analogies between mining and outer space. At times, the Kiruna mine served as a “technology of the imagination” (Sneath, Holbraad, and Pedersen 2009) or speculative device for envisaging the specific unfoldings of a future beyond Earth.
The city and the mine. Photo by the author.
Scholars have argued that remote sensing technology has served to create and reconfigure environments on Earth, often unintentionally (Sörlin and Wormbs 2018). By affording a view from above and without, satellites have participated in the modification of our ways of conceptualizing and relating to our earthly and atmospheric surrounds. In this blog post, I have tried to highlight a somewhat different matter – namely, how grounded, planetary milieus become infrastructures for envisioning space. These are “the terrestrial localit[ies] of outer space” (Messeri 2016: 163); places and relations – in this case the infrastructural history of a mining town – that reshape landscapes in an immediately material way and occasionally come to inform situated, extraplanetary imaginaries.
[1] The regional designation in the title of this film draws on the discriminatory expression “lapp,” a Swedish term that has been used historically to label the Sámi. This term does not exist in the Sámi languages. In Northern Sámi, this region is known as Sápmi.
I would like to thank Platypus’s contributing editors Kim Fernandes and Yakup Deniz Kahraman for their thoughtful suggestions and comments. This research received funding from the National Science Center, Poland, project number 2020/38/E/HS3/00241.
Backman, Fredrick. 2015. Making place for space: A history of “space town” Kiruna 1943-2000. Umeå: Umeå University.
Braun, Bruce. 2000. “Producing vertical territory: Geology and governmentality in late Victorian Canada.” Cultural Geographies 7 (1): 7-46.
McCormack, Derek P. 2018. Atmospheric things: On the allure of elemental envelopment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Messeri, Lisa. 2016. Placing outer space: An earthly ethnography of other worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ojani, Chakad. 2022. “Speculative relations in Lima: Encounters with the limits of fog capture and ethnography.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 12 (2): 468-481.
Park, William. 2016. “Why caves are the best place to train astronauts”. BBC, November 30. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20161130-why-caves-are-the-best-place-to-train-astronauts (accessed 5/11/2022).
Redfield, Peter. 2000. Space in the tropics: From convicts to rockets in French Guiana. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sneath, David, Martin Holbraad, and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2009. “Technologies of the imagination: An introduction.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 74 (1): 5-30.
Sörlin, Sverker, and Nina Wormbs. 2018. “Environing technologies: A theory of making environment.” History and Technology 34 (2): 101-125.
This is is a multilingual comic that serves as a meditation on the infrastructures of COVID-19, care, and time. In the spirit of the multilingual spaces I inhabit in Tio’tia:ke/Mooninyaang/Montréal, I have chosen to write bilingually—a process that can be messy, but that speaks to my experiences of COVID-19 locally as I am thinking of COVID-19 globally.
This refusal to separate my experiences into two linguistic boxes is an experiment in thinking about both the process and products of creation through the form of comics, an art form popular in Québec, where I lived during the start of the pandemic (and still live, at the time of this writing).
A note on translation: In panel 6, I have used “vie valide” (FR) as “abled life” (EN). This is meant to emphasize the language in the source material, which emphasizes both hypocrisy and violence of ableist and eugenicist approaches to a pandemic, and also serves as a power of refusal. As someone who is disabled but who is not francophone, I welcome conversations about this language over Twitter or over email (see profile).
Il s’agit d’une bande dessinée multilingue qui sert de méditation sur les infrastructures de COVID-19, les soins et le temps. Dans l’esprit des espaces multilingues que j’habite à Tio’tia:ke/Mooninyaang/Montréal, j’ai choisi d’écrire de manière bilingue – un processus qui peut être quelque peu compliqué, mais qui parle de mes expériences de COVID-19 au niveau local tout en pensant à COVID-19 au niveau mondial.
Ce refus de séparer mes expériences en deux boîtes linguistiques est une expérience de réflexion sur le processus et les produits de la création, en utilisant la forme de la bande dessinée, une forme d’art populaire au Québec, où je vivais au début de la pandémie (et où je vis toujours, au moment d’écrire ces lignes).
Une note sur la traduction : Dans le panneau 6, j’ai utilisé “vie valide” (FR) comme “abled life” (EN). Ceci a pour but de mettre l’accent sur le langage du matériel source, qui souligne à la fois l’hypocrisie et la violence des approches “ableistes” et eugénistes d’une pandémie, et sert également de pouvoir de refus. En tant que personne handicapée mais non francophone, je suis heureux de discuter de ce langage sur Twitter ou par e-mail (voir profil).
(note: the comic uses a dark brown, light brown, and blue color palette and appears to be drawn on a textured background)
(note : la bande dessinée utilise une palette de couleurs marron foncé, marron clair et bleu et semble être dessinée sur un arrière-plan texturé)
Panel 1: A comic spread with text that reads/Une bande dessinée avec un texte qui dit: “I don’t remember the first day I noticed COVID-19 infrastructure in Québec .” “Je ne me souviens pas du premier jour où j’ai remarqué l’infrastructure COVID-19 au Québec.”
“Stickers on the floor to tell us where to stand, lines on the floor to tell us how to queue.” “Des autocollants au sol pour nous dire où nous tenir, des lignes au sol pour nous dire comment faire la queue.”
In the background, there is a light and dark brown illustration of two stickers with footprints and “2m” written on them. / En arrière-plan, il y a une illustration marron clair et marron foncé de deux autocollants avec des empreintes de pieds et “2m” écrit dessus.
Panel 2: The text reads/Un texte qui dit: “There is a phrase, translated from Italian*, that describes hope in a post-COVID-19 future:” “Il y a une phrase qui a été traduite de l’italien* et qui décrit l’espoir dans un futur post-COVID-19 :”
Below, there are signs that read / En dessous, il y a des panneaux qui disent: “Tout ira mieux” (Belgium/Belgique), “tout ira bien” (France/France), “Everything will be OK!” (US, New Zealand, États-Unis, Nouvelle Zélande)
“*« andrà tutto bene »”
Panel 3: The text reads / Un texte qui dit: “In Montréal, the phrase written by children and taped to windows, printed on stickers and put on shop doors, and placed beneath a rainbow was « ça va bien aller »”
“À Montréal, la phrase écrite par les enfants et collée aux fenêtres, imprimée sur des autocollants et collée sur les portes des magasins, et placée sous un arc-en-ciel était « ça va bien aller »”
In the frame next to it is a drawing of a rainbow in brown, white, and blue, taped to something. It reads ça va bien aller. / Dans le cadre à côté, il y a un dessin d’un arc-en-ciel en marron, blanc et bleu, collé à quelque chose. On peut lire “ça va bien aller”.
Panel 4: The text reads / Un texte qui dit: “People with different kinds of relationships to labour, different identities, and different incomes have had different experiences under COVID-19 (and capitalism). Race, immigration status, class, and more shape how COVID-19 has been felt by people around the world.”
“Des personnes ayant des relations différentes avec le travail, des identités differentes et des revenus différents ont vecu des expériences différentes dans le cadre de COVID-19 (et du capitalisme).”
“La race, le statut au regard de la législation sur l’immigration, la classe sociale et d’autres factures façonnent la manière dont le COVID-19 a étè ressenti par les gens du monde entier.”
Next to the text is an image of a healthcare worker (who appears to be not white) in blue, wearing gloves, wearing a mask, and with hair tied up. À côté du texte se trouve l’image d’un.e travailleur.se de la santé (qui semble ne pas être blanc.he) en bleu, portant des gants, un masque et les cheveux attachés.
Panel 5: There are two panels, with text around them and images inside. Il y a deux panneaux, avec du texte autour et des images à l’intérieur.
On the left, the text around the panel reads / À gauche, le texte autour du panneau dit: “Capital shapes not only our relationship to labour, but also our relationship to health (and who gets heathcare).”
On the right, the text around the panel reads / À droit, le texte autour du panneau dit: “Le capital façonne non seulement notre rélatuion au travail, mais également notre relation à la santé (et qui reçoit des soins de santé)” Under, it reads: (Adler-Bolton and Vierkant 2022)
On the left, there is a drawing of a white deliveryperson who is pushing a trolley with a number of packages on it, including / À gauche, le dessin d’un livreur blanc qui pousse un chariot sur lequel se trouvent plusieurs colis, dont “HIGH RISK LOW PAY,” “MASKS,” “N95,” “FREE? TESTS.” Below, it reads / En dessous, on peut lire: “The surplus, or surplus populations, can therefore be defined as a collective of those who fall outside of the normative principles for which state policies are designed, as well as those who are excluded from the attendant entitlements of capital.”
On the right, there is a drawing of two white people. The person on the left is white, has shoulder-length hair, is wearing glasses, and is named as “Beatrice Adler-Bolton.” The person on the right is white, is wearing less tinted glasses, has a beard, and short hair, and is named as “Artie Vierkant.” / À droite, il y a le dessin de deux personnes blanches. La personne de gauche est blanche, a les cheveux longs, porte des lunettes et s’appelle “Beatrice Adler-Bolton”. La personne à droite est blanche, porte des lunettes moins teintées, a une barbe et des cheveux courts, et s’appelle “Artie Vierkant”.
Below, it reads / En dessous, on peut lire: “Le surplus, ou les populations excédentaires, peuvent donc être définis comme un collectif de ceux ne relèvent pas des principes normatifs pour lesquels les politiques de l’État sont conçues, ainsi que de ceux qui sont exclus des droits afférents au capital.”
Panel 6: There are two panels, with text around both. On the left, it reads / Il y a deux panneaux, avec du texte autour des deux. À gauche, on peut lire: “Disability justice organizer Mia Mingus reminds us that political refusals cost disabled lives.” Inside the square is a skeleton in brown ground, with some grass. A l’intérieur du panneau se trouve un squelette dans un sol brun, avec un peu d’herbe.
Inside the right panel, the text reads / À l’intérieur du panneau droit, le texte dit: “We will not trade disabled deaths for abled life. We will not allow disabled people to be disposable or the necessary collateral damage for the status quo.” “Nous n’échangerons pas les décès d’handicapés contre une vie valide.” The right panel has a drawing of an IV hanger. Le panneau de droite présente le dessin d’un support de perfusion.
Panel 7: A spread with three panels. Two on either side have drawings of masks on the ground, with leaves and dirt. Below the left, it reads, “Que se passe-t-il lorsque les infrastructures de soins collectifs son mises au rebut, jetées au nom du “choix” individuel ?” / Une page avec trois panneaux. Deux de chaque côté ont des dessins de masques sur le sol, avec des feuilles et de la terre. En bas à gauche, on peut lire, “Que se passe-t-il lorsque les infrastructures de soins collectifs son mises au rebut, jetées au nom du “choix” individuel ?”
In the middle panel, the text reads / Dans le panneau du milieu, le texte se lit comme suit: “We will not look away from the mass illness and death that surrounds us or from a state machine that is more committed to churning out profit and privileged comfort with eugenic abandonment.” “Nous ne détournerons pas les yeux de la maladie et de la morte de masse qui nous entournent ou d’une machine d’État qui east plus déterminée à générer des profits et un confort privilégié avec un abandon eugénique.”
On the right, it reads / À droit, le texte dit: “What happens when collective care infrastructures are discarded, thrown away in the name of individual “choice”?”
Panel 8: A spread of two panels. On the left, around the panel, the text reads, “What happens when COVID-19 is still here, but the infrastructure is being torn down?” Inside, is a drawing of a sign that reads “Couvre visage obligatoire / Masks required” taped to a door. / Deux panneaux. À gauche, autour du panneau, le texte a dit : “What happens when COVID-19 is still here, but the infrastructure is being torn down?” À l’intérieur, le dessin d’un panneau indiquant “Couvre visage obligatoire / Masks required” collé sur une porte.
On the right, around the panel, it reads / A droite, autour du panneau, le texte a dit: “Que se passe-t-il lorsque le COVID1-9 est toujours là, mais que l’infrastructure est en train d’être démolie ?” Inside the panel is a drawing of the tape on the door with part of the sign still remaining, but most is missing. / À l’intérieur du panneau se trouve un dessin du ruban adhésif sur la porte. Il reste une partie du panneau, mais la majeure partie est manquante.
Panel 9: Two panels. On the left, it reads (Silverstein and Lincoln 2022). / Deux panneaux. À gauche, on peut lire (Silverstein et Lincoln 2022).
On the left around the panel, it reads / À gauche, autour du panneau, on peut lire: “Broken pandemic infrastructures were not the “ça va” many of us hoped for.” Inside the panel, it reads / À l’intérieur du panneau, le texte dit : “How did the united States end up desensitized to mass death and disability, angrily opposed to almost all means of mitigating an occasionally fatal airborne virus, and willing to accept so little from the powerful?” “Comment les États-Unis ont-ils fini par êtr désensibilisés à la mort et à l’incapacité de masse, opposés avec colère à presque tous les moyens d’atténuer un virus aérien parfois mortel, et prêts à accepter si peu des puissants?”
Around the right panel, it says / Autour du panneau de droite, le texte a dit: “Infrastructures pandémiques brisées n’ont pas été les “ça va” que beaucoup d’entre nous avaient éspérées.” Inside the panel is a drawing of two people. On the left, is a drawing of a white person with glasses and brown hair, who is named Martha Lincoln. Below, is a drawing of a white person with brown hair and a beard named Jason Silverstein. / À l’intérieur du panneau se trouve le dessin de deux personnes. À gauche, le dessin d’une personne blanche avec des lunettes et des cheveux bruns, qui s’appelle Martha Lincoln. En dessous, se trouve le dessin d’une personne blanche aux cheveux bruns et à la barbe, nommée Jason Silverstein.
Panel 10: A panel spread that has a drawing of COVID-19 case estimates in brown (data via INSPQ), and a drawing of a lung with a brown trachea with blue lungs. Un panneau avec un dessin des estimations de cas COVID-19 en brun (données via INSPQ), et un dessin d’un poumon avec une trachée brune avec des poumons bleus.
The text reads / Le texte dit: “While state infrastructure remains broken, we still take care of each other…” “Alors que l’infrastructure de l’État reste brisée, nous prenons toujours soin les un.e.s des autres…”
Below, it reads / En dessous, le texte dit: “…through wave peaks and troughs.” “…à travers les pointes et creux des vagues.”
Panel 11: Two panels. / Deux panneaux.
On the left, around the box, it reads / À gauche, autour de la boîte, le texte dit: “We are not singular beings: we are social animals, and we depend on each other.” Inside (in light brown text on dark brown), it reads / À l’intérieur (en texte brun clair sur brun foncé), le texte a dit: “Interdependence acknowledges that our survival is bound up together, that we are interconnected and what you do impacts others. If this pandemic has done nothing else, it has illuminated how horrible our society is at valuing and practicing interdependence. Interdependence is the only way out of most of the most pressing issues we face today.” (Mingus 2022) is on the left / est à gauche.
Around the right panel it reads / Autour du panneau de droite, le texte a dit: “Nous ne sommes pas des êtres singuliers: nous sommes des animaux sociaux, et nous dépendons les un.e.s des autres.” Inside, it reads (in dark brown text on light brown) “L’interdépendance reconnaît que notre survie est liée, que nous sommes interconnectés et que ce que vous faites a un impact sur les autres. Si cette pandémie n’a rien fait d’autre, elle a mis en lumière à quel point notre société est horrible à valoriser et à pratiquer l’interdépendance. L’interdépendance est le seul moyen de sortir de la plupart des problèmes les plus urgents auxquels nous sommes confrontés aujourd’hui.”
Panel 12: A spread with text and images of the first panel’s stickers of feet and “2m,” but it is largely missing. Un panneau avec le texte et les images des autocollants de pieds et de “2m” du premier panneau, mais il est en grande partie absent.
The text reads / Le texte a dit: “COVID-19 infrastructure has begun to scuff, peel, and fade away. After a few years of pandemic life, I now realize: ” “L’infrastructure COVID-19 a commencé à s’érafler, às se décoller et à disparaître. Après quelques années de vie pandémique, je réalise maintenant :” “« ça va bien aller » is not a guarantee but a hope, only possible through interconnectedness.” “« ça va bien aller », ce n’est pas une garantie mais un espoir, uniquement possible grâce à l’interdépendance.”
Adler-Bolton, Beatrice, and Artie Vierkant. 2022. Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto. Verso Books.
Institute national de santé publique du Québec (INSPQ). n.d. “Données COVID-19 au Québec.” INSPQ: Centre d’expertise et de référence en santé publique. Accessed February 05, 2023. https://www.inspq.qc.ca/covid-19/donnees.
Mingus, Mia. 2022. “You Are Not Entitled To Our Deaths: COVID, Abled Supremacy & Interdependence.” Blog. Leaving Evidence (blog). January 16, 2022. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2022/01/16/you-are-not-entitled-to-our-deaths-covid-abled-supremacy-interdependence/.
Silverstein, Jason, and Martha Lincoln. 2022. “Why We Fight.” Blog. Peste (blog). December 13, 2022. https://www.pestemag.com/first-row/why-we-fight-w55lm.
When seen through the experiences and histories of experimentation and care, plants such as roses can bring new insights into the affective and material entanglements of more-than-human relations. My ethnographic encounter with Mr. Changa, a prominent figure in the world of horticulture and plant nurseries in Pakistan, gives us a glimpse on “seeing and being-with” (Haraway 1998) non-human others, such as roses, to foreground the making of social worlds through affect. These encounters show that even though colonial inscriptions on social understandings of nature were marked in influences over tastes and attitudes (Mintz 1985), an attention to nuanced affects, articulations, and values can disrupt the process of creating “authentic” relations with plants and singular legacies of expertise. Writing against the dominance of an object-oriented ontology in mainstream science and technology narratives, this post follows scholarship that emphasizes an “anthropology beyond the human” (Kohn 2013) to center the connections between plants and humans as not only metaphorical but literal (De La Cadena 2010).
One of the varieties Mr. Changa cultivates is the Moonberry Rose that has a distinctive pink shade. While color, scent, texture, petal shapes, and stem features are some of the ways to distinguish the flowers, rose growers will also identify soil conditions, water quality, and climatic conditions as forms of care. Photo by Author.
When I entered the plant nursery, I saw an elderly man fervently engaged in talking to customers and meting out instructions to other assistants. Rows of ornamental trees, house plants, and various seasonal flowers were arranged in an eye-catching manner. The nursery was buzzing with activity. I was surprised to learn that some of the customers had traveled from as far as Karachi, more than seven hundred miles away, to Pattoki. The city is the hub of wholesale trading for plants in Pakistan, as well as home to more than a hundred private nurseries. While Pattoki is known as the “City of Flowers,” the Changa Nursery is famous for the most coveted flower, the rose. As Mr. Changa declared enthusiastically, “Yahan aam, shatoot ki nurseries tau baht thee’ magar mein pehlay din se gulab pe latoo tha (There were plenty of nurseries selling mango trees and Mulberry, but I was enamored by the rose from day one).”
As we sat down next to his personal rose garden to talk about the history of Pattoki and his work with roses, Mr. Changa was no longer holding a pen and sales slips. Instead, he had brought out some of his favorite books to show us the techniques and climatic zones for cultivating different varieties of roses. The first edition of David Austin’s English Rose, a sacred text for any serious rose grower according to Mr. Changa, was a cherished companion among his extensive collection of books. This book documented the journey of British horticulturalist David Austin who set a world standard for rose cultivation when he successfully created the English rose in 1969.[1] Mr. Changa’s admiration for David Austin’s devotion to the craft and care of roses was not a complacency with colonial systems of knowledge but rather the wonder of experimentation joined with care for the roses he was growing. As Archambault (2016) has proposed, affective encounters occur when “a meeting with someone or with something” can produce “some sort of effect; when it inspires, unsettles, troubles, moves, arouses, motivates, and/or impresses” (249). It was in the same state that Mr. Changa went over descriptions in the book. He took me through marked pages in his collection to show the process and types of pavandkari (grafting) and the potential results on the color, texture, and form of the rose plants.
Without any formal education in horticulture or botany, Mr. Changa’s journey on experiencing plants came from his schooling in the village. It was there that he learned of different planting practices and different types of soil such as the bhal mitti (clay soil), halki mitti (light soil), raet mitti (loamy soil), and khaalis raet (pure sand). He grew up as a farmer’s son in the fertile Indus plains and even as he marked a different path as a nursery business owner, he found that his roots in Pattoki could not be disengaged from his passion for roses.
Grafting is a botanical technique to cross-fertilize different varieties of plants. This allows for plants to evolve their apparent physical qualities as well as non-visible characteristics, such as resistance to disease. Grafting experiments have brought about new varieties of plants and extended plant networks all over the world. Photo by Author.
At the same time, Pattoki’s development as the hub of nurseries is entwined with a historical, political, and capitalist construction on the place of nature. The city is situated next to colonial-era railway tracks and postcolonial road infrastructure that expanded the possibilities of intra-country trade and promotion of Mr. Changa’s roses. Pattoki’s ability to physically sustain such a large number of nurseries and plant farms also comes from its proximity to Punjab’s rivers and the fertile Indus plain. Furthermore, the soil that nourished the roses came from riverbeds, mixed with ganay ki mael (sugarcane leftovers) and rice ash, from the adjoining agricultural fields. However, while the urban sprawl raises concerns on the availability of these agricultural residues and soil health, it has spurred the demand and circulation of nursery-grown plants and flowers. The Changa Nursery Farms “Rose Specialist” is one example of businesses that have taken to social media platforms to expand the potential and circulation of their roses and plants. In these transformative mediations, the roses’ beauty comes to be prized through its grower’s reputation and fame.
Of the over two hundred hybrid varieties produced under his care and supervision, Mr. Changa had named several of them after prominent national figures or events. At the rose farm, he took us through several different ones. “This one is ‘Our Allama Iqbal’… this one is August 14… this one is Dr. Iqbal,” Mr Changa explained as he gently cupped the roses by holding them from the bottom center.
The image from Mr. Changa’s nursery shows a news paper article highlighting the work of Changa Nursery Farms juxtaposed to a newspaper page illustrated with the photos of Pakistan’s national icons, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founding father, and Allama Iqbal, the national poet. Photo by Author
Roses are widely acclaimed for their aesthetic appeal as well as their symbolic attribution with joy and love. The desi gulaab, a shocking pink wild rose, is a ubiquitous sight at Pakistani weddings as well as newly covered graves of cherished relatives and friends. Roses are not just visually attractive but an olfactory and gustatory delight for many. In fact, for cosmetic and beauty products, as well as beverage companies, these qualities of scent and taste alone can become the raison d’être for roses in their supply chains. Rose extracts can be sold for a couple thousand to several tens of thousands of Rupees, whereas rose oils are three times more expensive. “Soap companies will count each and every drop that goes into the mixture because the extracts can be more expensive than gold,” Mr. Changa explained. On the other hand, the state’s lack of interest and financial capacity on resourcing and encouraging local expertise has prompted a constant struggle to be seen. Without a patent, his roses and ideas will not travel the world with the same prestige and recognition that accompanied David Austin’s flowers to Pakistan.
Yet, somewhere between/beyond colonial inheritance of commoditizing relations with nonhuman others and neoliberal governance of globalization, Mr. Changa’s and the roses’ affective and material entanglements unsettle singular readings of human-plant relations. Analyzing his multi-decade association with caring for, experimenting with, promoting, and cultivating roses, along with the ecological history and constitution of Pattoki, shows that it is imperative to locate human and more-than-human social worlds through their “collaborative” (Smith 2016) making of the other.
The author would like to thank Mr. Changa and Mr. Najeeb for their assistance with this project.
[1] The English Rose, a hybrid variety of roses, are famous for their fragrance, form, and resistance to diseases.
Archambault, Julie Soleil. 2016. “Taking Love Seriously in Human-plant Relations in Mozambique: Toward an Anthropology of Affective Encounters.” Cultural Anthropology 31, no. 2: 244-271.
De la Cadena, Marisol. 2010. “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections Beyond ‘Politics.’” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2: 334–70.
Haraway, Donna J. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. University of California Press.
Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York, NY: Viking, 1985.
Smith, Mick. 2016. “On ‘Being’ Moved by Nature: Geography, Emotion and Environmental Ethics.” In Emotional Geographies, pp. 233-244. Routledge.
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