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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.
Batiste, Dominique Pierre. 2013. “‘0 Feet Away’: The Queer Cartography of French Gay Men’s Geo-Social Media Use.” Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 22 (2): 111–32.Boellstorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.———. 2016. “For Whom the Ontology Turns: Theorizing the Digital Real.” Current Anthropology 57 (4): 387–407.Edelman, Elijah Adiv. 2016. “‘This Is Where You Fall off My Map’: Trans-Spectrum Spatialities in Washington, DC, Safety, and the Refusal to Submit to Somatic Erasure.” Journal of Homosexuality 63 (3): 394–404.Horst, Heather A. 2013. “The Infrastructures of Mobile Media: Towards a Future Reseach Agenda.” Mobile Media and Communication 1 (1): 147–52.Hu, Tung-Hui. 2015. A Prehistory of the Cloud. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.Ito, Mizuko. 2010. “Mobilizing the Imagination in Everyday Play: The Case of Japanese Media Mixes.” In Mashup Cultures, edited by S. Sonvilla-Weiss, 79–97. New York: Springer.McGuire, M. L. 2016. “The Problem of Technological Integration and Geosocial Cruising in Seoul.” New Media & Society, 1–15.Messeri, Lisa. 2021. “Realities of Illusion: Tracing an Anthropology of the Unreal from Torres Strait to Virtual Reality.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27 (2): 340–59.Mittermaier, Amira. 2010. Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press.Nibbs, Faith. 2016. “Hmong Women on the Web: Transforming Power through Social Networking.” In Claiming Place: On the Agency of Hmong Women, edited by Chia Youyee Vang, Faith Nibbs, and Ma Vang, 169–94. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Okabe, Daisuke, and Mizuko Ito. 2006. “Everyday Contexts of Camera Phone Use: Steps toward Techno-Social Ethnographic Frameworks.” In Mobile Communication in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Views, Observations and Reflections, edited by Joachim R. Hoflich and Maren Hartmann, 79–102. Berlin: Frank and Timme.Osburg, John. 2020. “Consuming Belief: Luxury, Authenticity, and Chinese Patronage of Tibetan Buddhism in Contemporary China.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10 (1): 69–84. https://doi.org/10.1086/708547.Pearce, Celia. 2009. Communities of Play Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company.Wallis, Cara. 2011. “Mobile Phones without Guarantees: The Promises of Technology and the Contingencies of Culture.” New Media & Society 13 (3): 471–85.———. 2013. Technomobility in China: Young Migrant Women and Mobile Phones. New York and London: New York University Press.Zigon, Jarrett. 2019. A War on People: Drug Users Politics and A New Ethics of Community. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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.
Here's our antepenultimate episode on the Iliad! In Book 22, Apollo, disguised as Agenor, lures Achilles away from Troy. When he sees through the deception, Achilles goes after Hector, and chases him around the city's walls. This goes on until Athena disguises herself as Deiphobus, and tricks Hector into facing Achilles. Then Achilles kills Hector, and drags his corpse around behind his Continue Reading …
The post Combat & Classics Ep. 80 Homer’s “Iliad” Book 22 first appeared on The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast.I know, I know. There are few things more tedious than taking a popular TV show and applying it to a sector – there have been “Manage the Ted Lasso Way” and “The Ted Lasso method of Leadership” type posts aplenty. But hear me out. The angle here is more about the writing and how it relates to traditional TV than Lasso himself (and no, you don’t have to be a fan of the show).
So Ted Lasso ended last week, amidst a wave of pieces declaring that it was about time and it had in fact, been rubbish all along. I think TV critics sometimes fall in love with a series, and then become embarrassed at a later date at their weakness in showing humanity, so double down on the need for cynicism. You certainly saw that in pieces like this in the Guardian (they also bad mouth The Good Place to demonstrate their anti-nice credentials). I’m not going to defend it as TV, it was a bit corny and sentimental, and I think it had run its course.
But I think the critics miss how unusual it is in its writing. The Guardian piece bemoans that all the drama takes place off screen (eg Nate leaving West Ham), as if this is accidental. I see it as a deliberate and radical attempt to subvert our expectations of conflict and confrontation. Conflict drives so much of TV, and often lazily so. Nearly all of soaps such as Eastenders is driven by people doing nasty things to each other and shouting a lot. It’s stressful to watch. I had a similar reservation when watching the classic of the ‘nice’ genre, Parks and Rec. When the Rob Lowe character was introduced I was gearing myself up for conflict. I knew how this would go – he would be controlling, try to close them down, there’d be tension. But of course, that wasn’t what that show was about, and his character became an integral and likeable part of the show.
This is difficult writing – conflict is easy. The saying that happiness writes in white ink on a white page should be seen as a challenge, not an admission of defeat.
Which brings me to education. When people talk of a ‘pedagogy of care’ I think it can seem a bit woolly, maybe a bit hippy. But it’s actually a radical notion in the same way that producing a drama that centres kindness is radical. Gita Mehrotra talks about care as a pedagogical anchor, and says that “I especially had concerns about students not taking the course seriously, being seen as a push-over, or being perceived as an ineffective instructor.” This was during the pandemic and her focus on “flexibility, humanity, community care, and personal and family health” were reciprocated by students with greater engagement.
Rose and Adams remind us that there are implications for the educators also, with burnout, the tyranny of always on demand and over-demanding students as possible factors. In addressing the question “who cares for the teachers?” Maha Bali emphasises the institutional role in creating environments that facilitate this. Care begets care I guess.
In my last post I was asking the question (which Dave Cormier neatly summarised in the comments) “If AI is good at repetitive things, and we’re not going to do them anymore, how are we going to design things that aren’t repetitive?” The whole education system needs to look quite different. And similarly, using care as a pedagogical anchor raises big questions – what does assessment look like? How does funding work in such a system? What are the external quality assessments for care?
Like Ted Lasso, a pedagogy of care can look vague, even bland on the surface, but if you scratch that surface you find a beating heart of radical reform beneath.
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/)
Carl Sagan describing books.
– Need more bass in your car? These decked out cars made me laugh.
-If you ever find yourself in Fort Greene Brooklyn, make sure to eat at Miss Ada and have the Whipped Ricotta. It’s the most heavenly dish I ever had. And if visiting NYC is not in the cards, you can make it yourself. Here’s the recipe. You’re welcome.
– Crazy Ideas. Love this!
– The next Buddha will be a community, – Thich Nhat Hanh
– The First Safe Chat-GPT for Kids, built by my dear friend Youmna Cham Cham. Try it with your kids.
– Visualization of prepositions
– “Gratitude is not a passive response to something we have been given, gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us.” Full Article
– VW ID Buzz coming in 2024. Wheee! (via)
– Matt Gray runs a ‘personal board meeting‘ every month.
– Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard tells us about how trees communicate underground through a complex web of fungi, and how they coordinate a powerful network that heals and sustains each other and in the end, us. (via)
– It has been my secret dream to be on How I Built This. It happened this week! Still can’t believe it.
– Pride is just around the corner. Get ready.
We're back, with our preantepenultimate episode on the Iliad! In Book 21, we get into the action. Achilles kills so many Trojans that the river Scamander protests the mess he is making. So Achilles fights the river, and nearly dies. Then there is a war between the gods; they lay it on without restraint. Meanwhile, Achilles kills two of Priam's sons, Continue Reading …
The post Combat & Classics Ep. 79 Homer’s “Iliad” Book 21 first appeared on The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast.In Book 20, Achilles gets new armor from his mom, and rejoins the battle. Zeus tells the gods to take sides, and to go nuts. And Achilles faces Aeneas and Hector, and fights them, so that the gods have to save them. Brian, Shilo, and Jeff talk about why Achilles' single combat with Aeneas is the centerpiece of the book, Continue Reading …
The post Combat & Classics Ep. 78 Homer’s “Iliad” Book 20 first appeared on The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast.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.
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.
Boellstorff, Tom. 2016. “For Whom the Ontology Turns: Theorizing the Digital Real.” Current Anthropology 57(4): 387-407.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.
Hogan, Bernie. 2010. “The presentation of self in the age of social media: Distinguishing performances and exhibitions online.” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 30(6): 377-386.
Madianou, Mirca. 2015. “Polymedia and Ethnography: Understanding the Social in Social Media.” Social Media + Society, (April – June): 1-3.
Madianou, Mirca and Daniel Miller. 2013. “Polymedia: Towards a New Theory of Digital Media in Interpersonal Communication.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 16(2): 169-187.
Miller, Daniel, Elisabetta Costa, Nell Haynes, Tom McDonald, Razvan Nicolescu, Jolynna Sinanan, Juliano Spyer, Shriram Venkatraman, and Xinyuan Wang. 2016. How the World Changed Social Media. Vol. 1. London: UCL Press.
Taylor, Nicole and Mimi Nichter. 2022. A Filtered Life: Social Media on a College Campus. New York: Routledge.
Tolentino, Jia. 2019. Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. New York: Random House.
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