American Anthropologist Volume 112 Issue 1 2010 [Doi 10.1111%2Fj.1548-1433.2009.01204.x] Alaka Wali -- Ethnography for the Digital Age- Http- Digital Ethnography (Michael Wesch)

PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY

Review Essay

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 112, Issue 1, pp. 140148, ISSN 0002-7294 online ISSN 1548-1433. c2010 by the American AnthropologicalAssociation. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01203.x

Blogging Anthropology: Savage Minds, Zero Anthropology,and AAA Blogs

ABSTRACT In this review essay, the academic merits of three

anthropological blogs (Savage Minds, Zero Anthropology [for-

merly Open Anthropology], and the official blog of the Amer-

ican Anthropological Association) are considered. The review

examines differences between group-blog projects (such Sav-

age Minds), single-voiced blogs (such as Zero Anthropology),

and official blogs representing central anthropological institu-

tions (the AAAs blog) and identifies roles and strengths of each

of these blog forms.

Keywords: anthropological blogs, public anthropology, academic

blogs

The ease of use and rapid spread of Internet-based blogsmakes them an important venue for academic discourse inall disciplines, and anthropological blogs occupy an increas-ingly important space for fostering cutting-edge anthropo-logical debates. In an hour or two, an average computeruser can use free hosting sites and simple software to setup ones own weblog (blog for short), allowing near in-stantaneous web publishing of ones writing, the writing ofothers, and comments received from any other web-linkedcomputer user on earth. Hundreds of blogs now host anthro-pological conversations on a near endless variety of topicsthat engage anthropologists and nonanthropologists alike.Some blogs, like Savage Minds (http://savageminds.org/),are jointly produced by collectives of anthropologists;others are hosted by long-established organizationslike the American Anthropological Association (AAA;http://blog.aaanet.org/); while still others, like Zero An-thropology (http://zeroanthropology.net), are largely theefforts of a single anthropologist engaging with readers.

Academic blogs inhabit intellectual spaces somewherebetween unpunctuated-verb-absent-run-on-paragraphs andfootnoted meticulous final drafts of thoughtful, publishablepapers. Although the medium of blogs often evokes writingvoices that list toward the Burrowsesque, and the anonymityof responses is a sort of attractive nuisance that seems to invite

graffiti responses, anthropological blogging has the provenpotential to host high-quality anthropological discourse andto expand the reach of the discipline.

Although blogging does not compete with peer-reviewed scholarship, it is becoming anthropologists newelectronic polis. The fundamental value of seminars andsalons has always been their opportunity to move beyondconventional limits by tentatively exploring new ideas inways drawing on the freedom provided by the provisionalityof the setting; the best blogs draw on these same dynamics,although in the fleeting permanence of this medium, eventhe most flippant of comments remain whirring on archivedhard drives and virtually preserve that which would haveotherwise long ago ceased to be remembered.

Writing quickly without editorsas many bloggerstend to dobrings grammatical risks and increases inci-dents of logical fallacies, but the opportunities to exploreideas and arguments, share knowledge, and develop writingvoices in a public arena without the controls of consensusand the gatekeeping of traditional publishing outlets makeblogging an effective testing ground for anthropologists atall stages in their academic careers. Given the free and in-teractive nature of the medium, blogging also presents op-portunities to engage nonanthropologists by directly sharingfindings and analyses with the public, making it an impor-tant venue for expanding anthropologys audience and forthose interested particularly in public anthropology. Blogspresent vital opportunities to allow publicly engaged an-thropologists to break through the often-narrow analysis oftraditional corporate-media outletsif anthropologists canwrite in clear and nonjargon-filled prose about topics (e.g.,war, race, inequality, health care reform) of general interestto the public.

The best academic blogs are multivoiced, drawing ei-ther on multiple writers or on the multiple voices of thefeedback they generate. Blogs have become vital resourcesfor scholars, although they obviously require different formsof discrimination than are needed in reading academic jour-nals. Although blogs dialogic form presents opportunities toengage in exploratory exchanges with colleagues, the nature

Public Anthropology 141

of the webs pseudoanonymity often lowers the bar of aca-demic civility and can bring on all sorts of pseudonymedshenanigans from sock puppets, flamers, and trolls. How-ever, the best blogs roll through such structured outcomesspawned by the flexibility of identities on the web, while theweaker become increasingly restrictive and risk poisoningtheir fruit by eliminating anonymous posts.

Like any other writing project, the time required foreffective blogging can be enormous and with some of thehigh scholarship shown in detailed and thoughtful postingsand exchanges by scholars at blog sites like Savage Minds,Zero Anthropology (formerlyOpen Anthropology), or Cul-ture Matters, there are reasons to wonder about the unre-warded disciplinary usefulness of establishing and maintain-ing such valuable public commons. The political economyof academia is not structured to reward individuals build-ing things for a common good outside of the peer-reviewprocess. It has long been true that many of the most usefulacademic resource tools (annotated bibliographies, refer-ence books, and the like) are undervalued or unrecognizedby formal academic assessments. For now at least, academicblogs seem to be an electronic extension of this troublingphenomenon.

Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in AnthropologyA Group Blog (http://savageminds.org/) began in 2005and has become the central online site of the North Amer-ican anthropological community. Savage Mindss value isfound in the quality of the posts by the sites central con-tributors, a cadre of bright, engaged, young anthropologyprofessors and graduate students writing on topics rangingfrom anthropological (post)theory and disciplinary historyto syllabi and teaching techniques, individual research, andmedia coverage of anthropological issues. Savage Mindsscentral bloggers include Alex Golub (who writes under theblogger name Rex), Chris Kelty (ckelty), Kerim Fried-man (Kerim), Dustin Wax (Oneman), and a variety of in-vited anthropologist guest bloggers drawn from the ranks ofacademia.

Savage Minds is worth reading every few weeks becauseof the devotion of Golub, Kelty, Friedman, and others toproduce thoughtful posts, but it also provides an electronicequivalent of a Hyde Park speakers corner, where anyonecan reflectively weigh-in or simply shoot ones mouth off inreactionary fashion. Like the proverbial university cafeteriadebate, this volatile mix is the heart of a good academicblog.

One example of the value of Savage Minds is foundin its detailed analysis of the controversy surroundingthe $10 million defamation lawsuit facing Jared Diamondand the New Yorker magazines parent company after Dia-mond published an article claiming that a member of theHanda clan had been involved in a revenge killing. OnSavage Minds, Golub and a variety of other invited NewGuinea specialists posted their analysis of these events,joined by an invited guest blog on relevant ethical issuesby Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban and reader comments ranging

fromwisecracks to thoughtful informed analysis (see http://savageminds.org/category/people/jared-diamond/).

While Savage Minds models the potential of bloggingas a collective enterprise led by dedicated and knowledge-able scholars willing to suffer the slings and arrows oftransient readers, since 2007, Zero Anthropology (http://zeroanthropology.net/) has showcased the potential of asingle strongly voiced anthropologist-bloggera voice sostrong that at times it evokes vitriolic responses fromreaders.Maximilian Forte, an associate professor of anthropology atConcordia University, with field research in the Caribbeanand wide-ranging political interests, writes a prolific blog(often posting several thousands of words a week) that typi-cally focuses on the military uses of anthropology and issuesof academic freedom and U.S. foreign policy. Forte uses thewebs full potential, adding links to his Twitter and to multi-media content on his own Zero Anthropology TV page, onwhich he collects and critiques an impressive variety of videocontent on things anthropological (http://vodpod.com/maxforte/openanthropology). Forte sometimes blends hiscritique with dark humor, and most of his work blends an-thropological and political critiques. His posts range fromsatirical analysis of the U.S. militarys Human Terrain Teamprogram (e.g., Forte 2009) to an impressive code of ethicsfrom the bottom up designed to protect studied popula-tions from meddling anthropologists (Forte 2008).

The AAA has been slow to adopt an active onlineblog presence, adding a limited blog presence in the lastfew years. It has recently moved from hosting membercomments on one-off pressing issues (e.g., the HumanTerrain Team program) to maintaining rotating blogs(http://blog.aaanet.org/) on issues of interest (e.g., laptopsearches at U.S. borders and IRB considerations for onlineresearch) with comments from members and nonmembersalike. The AAA blog is maintained by association staff andnow provides an important venue for members to learnabout and respond to association policy and especially AAAtask forces, committees, reports, and other documents. Asa space representing a professional organization, the AAAblog tends to be more news and policy oriented, but it isbeginning to explore its potential to host exchanges on thecentral issues of the discipline. If the association wishes itsblog to take on a more central role in hosting anthropo-logical discourse, it can draw on the successful examplesfound at Savage Minds, although I suspect the pressures toreduce friction between different factions in the associationwill likely lead the AAA to leave the hosting of cutting-edgedebates to others like Savage Minds or Zero Anthropology.

David H. Price Department of Anthropology, St. Martins University,

Lacey, WA 98503

REFERENCES CITEDForte, Maximillian2008 How to Protect Yourself from an Anthropologist:

142 American Anthropologist Vol. 112, No. 1 March 2010

A Code of Ethics from the Bottom-Up (2.0). ZeroAnthropology, September 9. http://zeroanthropology.net/2008/09/09/how-to-protect-yourself-from-an-anthropologist-a-code-of-ethics-from-the-bottom-up/,accessed November 25.

2009 Zombie Humanitarians: Its Obamas Human Ter-rain System Now. Zero Anthropology, May 29.http://zeroanthropology.net/2009/05/29/zombie-humanitarians-its-obamas-human-terrain-system-now/,accessed November 25.

Reviews

Anthropologist as Prognosticator: Gillian Tett and the CreditDerivatives Market

Michael G. Powell

Cultural Anthropologist and Brand Strategist Shook Kelley

Gillian Tett, financial reporter for the London-based Fi-nancial Times and Ph.D. in cultural anthropology, not onlypredicted the current financial meltdown but also claims tohave relied on her anthropological training to do so.

Although Tett never explicitly proclaimed a specific dateor timeline for the impending disaster, she did spell out thepotential for disaster in a series of daily and weekly articlesfrom 2005 to 2007. What made her call for concern anact of critical insight was that, in an era of optimism andprosperity, the unwritten rule in the culture of high financeseemed to be that no one should utter any word of bubbles,recessions, or impending storms. At elite gatherings, suchas Davos, Switzerland, in 2007, financial mandarins chidedTett for needlessly stirring fear in the markets. Yet, in anironic way, this criticism itself revealed just how importantand influential Tetts critical voice had become, eventuallyhelping raise debates concerning whether the growth of thecredit-derivatives market was good, because it spread riskthroughout the system, or potentially catastrophic, as Tettpredicted.

Beginning in 2005, Tett began reporting on the emer-gence of this credit-derivative market and its specialized in-struments, such as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs),which are bundles of fixed-income debts, and credit defaultswaps (CDSs), which are agreements to insure a loan in caseof default. Subtly moving beyond straightforward report-ing of these financial trends, whose details were consideredobscure and tedious at the time, Tetts articles articulatedtheir implications. In her most compelling articles, Tett be-gan to raise important what if? questions concerning thepotential repercussions of these risky instruments, whichshe recognized as increasingly central to the global financialsystem. As far back as April of 2005, when many inex-perienced investors began to put their money into theseoften-misunderstood markets, Tett asked, Do investors re-ally understand what theyre buying? In particular, Tettquestioned whether investors, blinded by massive profits,really understood the correlation risk created by thesenew instruments. Tett recognized that because loan defaultsrarely occur as isolated events, a few defaults might launch

a chain reaction, presumably leading to the entire systemsmeltdown. And it was precisely this fear of a chain reactionthat would later catapult the credit-derivatives market intoa spectacular collapse in 2008.

Of course, this impressive achievement bodes well forour discipline. But it also raises the following question:What bearing does her anthropological training have on hercritical analysis of the credit markets? In an interview withthe British newspaper the Guardian, Tett claims that [as ananthropologist] youre trained to look at how societies orcultures operate holistically, so you look at how all the bitsmove together.Andmost people in theCity [Londons WallStreet] dont do that (Barton 2008). The second benefitcame from interpreting human behavior in cultural context,or as Tett states: bankers like to imagine that money andthe profit motive is as universal as gravity. . . . And its not.What they do in finance is all about culture and interaction(Barton 2008).

But although Tett employs classic frameworks of cul-tural anthropology, her series of articles do not seem toengage with or benefit from more contemporary anthropo-logical currents. One example, from the emerging subfieldof the anthropology of finance, is Hirokazu Miyazaki andAnnelise Riless (2005) call for ethnographers not to perpet-uate the mystique of finance that has increasingly dividedWall Street from its real-world implications. At times, Tettproblematically leverages her anthropological background todescribe financial tribes, employing a degree of exoticismin her descriptions. Much in the way classic ethnographyshaped its object of study as a separate cultural world, Tettswriting often separates these tribes from their real-worldimplications. Its revealing that Tett has likened her financialjournalism to her Ph.D. fieldwork experience, stating, Ithought . . . this is just like being in Tajikistan. All I have todo is learn a new language. This is a bunch of people whohave dressed up this activity with a whole bunch of ritualsand cultural patterns, and if I can learn Tajik, I can jollywell learn how the FX market works! (Barton 2008). Andwith that goal of deciphering a unique culture in mind, Tettimportantly elucidates a part of the financial world for herreaders.

While Tett successfully gets us inside the tribe ofbankers, her story is not completely satisfying. Part of the


problem may have to do with the way newspapers and theirjournalists are divided and organized by subject matter. Byconcentrating almost solely on the credit-derivatives mar-ket and the world of high finance, Tett never follows thestory into the subprime housing industry and the cultureof excessive lending in the everyday world of personal fi-nances. Later, in her book-length treatment of the story(2009), Tett corrects this, but she still never provides amore on the ground ethnographic account that might helpreaders understand the complex social relationship betweenthe overleveraged credit frenzy among middle-class U.S.citizens and the overleveraged credit party on Wall Street.There is never a full sense of how the everyday culture ofthese financial tribes ends up impacting bigger economicissues for regular people around the world.

Tetts work highlights the issue of timeliness for ananthropology of contemporary social forms. Although an-thropologists have published work on financial derivativesin academic literature (e.g., Maurer 2002; LiPuma and Lee2004), Tett managed to capture in real time the develop-ment of a credit-derivatives market that barely made animpact on the system initially but a mere five years laternearly caused complete collapse. Yet, because of the time-liness of such events, both journalists and ethnographerstypically make trade-offs in their work. Whereas journalistsmay press their analysis for the sake of a deadline and have amore limited purview, they arewell able to capture the spiritof a moment. The ethnographer works on a longer schedulethat generally prevents immediate reporting but that can

provide penetrating cultural insights about a larger scopeof behaviors and social forms. Although we might debatewhich form is preferable, Tett shows that journalists withan anthropological sensibility have the ability to provide far-reaching, insightful, and critical analyses of contemporarysocial currents.

REFERENCES CITEDBarton, Laura2008 On the Money. Guardian, October 31. http://www.

guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/31/creditcrunch-gillian-tett-financial-times, accessed October 4, 2009.

LiPuma, Edward, and Benjamin Lee2004 FinancialDerivatives and theGlobalization ofRisk.Durham,

NC: Public Planet Books, Duke University Press.Maurer, Bill2002 Repressed Futures: Derivatives Theological Unconscious.

Economy and Society 31(1):1536.Miyazaki, Hirokazu, and Annelise Riles2005 Failure as Endpoint. In Global Assemblages: Technology,

Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. A. Ong andS. J. Collier, eds. Pp. 320331. Oxford: Blackwell.

Tett, Gillian2005 CDOs Have Deepened the Asset Pool for Investors but

Clouds May Be Gathering. Financial Times, April 19.2009 Fools Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J. P.

Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleasheda Catastrophe. New York: Free Press.

Human Rights on the Border

Ruth Gomberg-Munoz

The University of Illinois-Chicago

The border between the United States and Mexico too oftensymbolizes illicit flows, dangerous deals, and military-styleoperations. For millions who live and work near the bor-der, the threat presented by increasing militarization of theborder region is not symbolic: it is the stuff of everyday life.The policy recommendations outlined by the U.S.MexicoBorder and Immigration Task Force in Accountability, Com-munity Security, and Infrastructure on the U.S.Mexico Border(2009) and its 2008 predecessor, Effective Border Policy: Se-curity, Responsibility, and Human Rights at the U.S.MexicoBorder, address the concerns of border residents in relationto border policing. Prepared in anticipation of impendingimmigration-reform legislation, the documents are intendedfor legislators who draft U.S. immigration policy. They alsomay be of interest to anthropologistswho are concernedwithhuman rights issues associated with globalization and labormigration.

The policy papers were authored by the U.S.Mexico Border and Immigration Task Force (http://www.bordertaskforce.org), a coalition comprising over 50 indi-viduals and organizations, including local law-enforcementofficers, local government officials, community advocates,business and labor interests, and academics such as anthro-pologists JosiahHeyman andGuillerminaG.Nunez. The pri-mary concerns of the task force are to enhance the protectionof civil and human rights for all people along the borderregardless of race, ethnicity, or citizenship statusand tomake border communities safer and stronger. Their recom-mendations broadly support reduced militarization of theborder region and enhanced oversight of border enforce-ment agencies and activities.

Many of the specific recommendations proposed in thedocuments address rights violations associated with increas-ing militarization of the U.S.Mexico border over the lasttwo decades. These include racial profiling, inconsistentpractices at checkpoints and ports of entry, avoidable deathsof crossing migrants, and human and civil rights abuses by


immigration officials. To redress these problems, the docu-ments outline over 70 specific recommendations that focuson three core areas: (1) improving accountability and over-sight of border and immigration enforcement; (2) enhancingcommunity security and preventing border violence; and(3) investing in infrastructure and ports of entry. Overall,the documents emphasize the need for comprehensive, in-clusive immigration and border policies, instead of military-style operations and border walls.

Although the enforcement-oriented trend inU.S. immi-gration policywhich has powerful advocates in business,government, and popular mediais not likely to be re-versed in the near future, the recommendations advanced inthese documents could help bring broader consensus towardupcoming immigration reform. A perspective that priori-tizes the rights and security of all border residents offersan important counterbalance to prevailing militaristic ap-proaches. But this human rights emphasis is largely gearedtoward practical, short-term fixes, rather than complex,long-term solutions. For example, recommendations in thefirst core area, accountability and oversight, are concernedwith training and oversight of law-enforcement agencies,including streamlining the complaint process and establish-ing an independent monitoring agency. Such measures mayhave short-term success in reducing instances of abuse bylaw-enforcement officials, but they do not address unequalpower relations that render immigrants and Latinos vulner-able to such abuses in the first place.

From an anthropological standpoint, this is where thedocuments are weakest. A dearth of historical and political-economic analysis means that recommendations advance di-rect responses to local problems and are less concerned withthe long-term implications of accelerated labor migrationwithin global capitalism. Still, what the papers lack in the-oretical sophistication, they gain in short-term pragmatism.The documents ground the relationships among transmi-grant workers, national residents, and neoliberal policy

which anthropological scholarship typically considers in theabstractin everyday interactions and matter-of-fact lan-guage. For this reason alone, the papers should provideample food for thought for anthropologists of globalizationand transmigration.

In addition, these documents provide a model forhow anthropologists can be engaged actorsand not justobserversin their ethnographic fields. Heyman, Nunez,and their colleagues contributed teaching, research, andwriting skills to developing the documents. Heyman, forexample, was instrumental in synthesizing relevant researchand composing drafts of the documents. These practical con-tributions have helped produce a well-researched, clearlywritten, and effectively argued set of papers. Yet, as Hey-man and colleagues (2009) emphasize, their intent was to gobeyond contributing research to the policy process and totake an active role in crafting policy itself. As researchers andborder residents who have deep ties to the immigrant com-munity, their engagement with immigration policy demon-strates a commitment to a holistic, collaborative approachto anthropological praxis.

REFERENCES CITEDHeyman, Josiah McC., Maria Cristina Morales, and Guillermina

Gina Nunez2009 Engaging with the Immigrant Human Rights Movement in

a Besieged Border Region: What Do Applied Social ScientistsBring to the Policy Process? NAPA Bulletin 31:1329.

U.S.Mexico Border and Immigration Task Force2008 Effective Border Policy: Security, Responsibility, and Hu-

man Rights at the U.S.Mexico Border. Washington, DC:U.S.Mexico Border and Immigration Task Force.

2009 Accountability, Community Security and Infrastructure onthe U.S.Mexico Border: Policy Priorities for 20092010.Washington, DC: U.S.Mexico Border and Immigration TaskForce.

Archaeology and the Problem of the Public

Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh

Denver Museum of Nature and Science

In recent years, many archaeologists have come to recog-nize that their discipline does not serve one simple anduniform public but, rather, multiple publics with varyinginterests, perspectives, and needs. Complicating the idea ofthe public, however, has challenged heritage managers tofind ways to actively and equitably serve diverse commu-nities while responsibly protecting and preserving archaeo-logical resources. The three reports reviewed herewhichwere produced in the NPS Technical Briefs Seriesaddresskey questions about how and why different publics can beinvolved in archaeology.

Theresa S. Moyers Archaeological Collections and thePublic (2006) explores how archaeological collections canbenefit public audiences and, in turn, how public use benefitsthe collections. Archaeologists have habitually prized exca-vation and acquisition over the study of extant collections.The traditional career route in the field has long involvedthe discovery and exploration of sites, too often leavingmuseum collections untouched and underappreciated. YetMoyer emphasizes the immense financial investment andscholarly commitment we make in the long-term care of ob-jects. Museum collections, she writes, are not the end pointof excavations but, rather, a vital part of the ongoing workto study and care for the material past. For collections toaccumulate value, they require dynamic use and intellectual


engagement. In short, Moyer argues that the field must be-come ever more committed to working with the objects thatalready pack museums and collection facilities, supportingnew research and enabling new kinds of public access. Fivecase studies are examined. Although not all the programsdiscussed are especially inspired, some indeed aresuch asthose at the Alutiiq Museum and Archaeological RepositoryinKodiak, Alaska,which directly serves the local communitythrough a range of collections-based programming. Moyerdoes not address more problematic areas of collectionsfor example, sacred objects or human remainsand in thissense the report does not critically examine the range ofcomplex issues involved in caring for collections. But thereport is a compelling argument, indeed, that museum ob-jects will sit idle and forgotten on shelves unless collectionmanagers proactively create opportunities for their studyand use.

In Developing and Implementing Archaeological SiteStewardship Programs (2007), Sophia Kelly explains howthe threats of looting and vandalism to historic places canbe mitigated by the work of volunteer monitors. Many landmanagers are responsible for protecting thousands of sitesspread across vast landscapes, and often they do so withlimited financial and human resources. Site stewardship pro-grams serve multiple purposes, including facilitating com-munication between private land owners and governmentofficials, tracking and documenting damage as it occurs, ed-ucating the public, and providing a rare opportunity for or-dinary citizens to become active stewards of crucial heritageresources. Kellys report, aside from laying out the benefitsof these programs, provides straightforward and sage adviceto land managers on how to launch a new site-stewardshipprogram. From leadership to budgets, volunteer manage-ment, and Native American involvement, Kelly covers animpressive range of issues that mean the difference betweena programs failure and its success.

Although Moyers and Kellys technical briefs are ba-sically practical how-to guides, in Archaeology and CivicEngagement (2008), Barbara J. Little andNathaniel Amdur-Clark evaluate the theoretical potential of archaeology tostrengthen community ties and promote democratic dia-logues. Since the 1960s, U.S. federal heritage laws haveobliged government agents to actively consult with differ-ent kinds of publics, including American Indian tribes, localneighborhood associations, and national advocacy groups.However, Little and Amdur-Clark emphasize that althoughconsultations are fleeting, civic engagement is lasting: inthis mode, archaeologys ability to tell hidden stories fos-ters a sense of community belonging and common history.At the heart of this manifesto is the idea of social capital,which can be thought of as connections of trust, reciprocity,shared values, and networks among individuals (Little andAmdur-Clark 2008). Little and Amdur-Clark argue that ar-chaeology should be used to accumulate social capital for thewell-being of individual communities as much as of entirenations, generating archaeology projects that give a sense ofcorporate heritage and identity. Real civic engagement, the

authors posit, is not merely a by-product of research butrequires deliberate intentional effort (Little and Amdur-Clark 2008). In particular, these projects should move be-yond celebrating a national past to understand the journeyof liberty and justice, together with the economic, social,religious, and other forces that barred or opened the waysfor our ancestors, and the distances yet to be covered (Littleand Amdur-Clark 2008). To illustrate what these principlesmean in practice, the authors present six case studies. Al-though rather disparateranging from the Harvard YardArchaeology Project, which looks at the American Indianexperience at the storied university, to the Cypress FreewayReplacement Project, which used the concept of environ-mental justice to include the historical voices of AfricanAmericansthese examples vividly illustrate how archae-ology can be employed to craft deliberative dialogues thatbroaden peoples view of others and themselves.

The NPS Technical Briefs Series provides timely andconcise reports on topics important to applied archaeology.They are not policy papers per se; rather, they offer limitedstudies on focused though diverse technical issues, from sitestabilization to promoting preservation and implementingfederal laws. One general criticism is that the reports donot fully take advantage of their online format, offering littlein the way of hyperlinks or color figures. Also, given thatthey are free and on the web, the NPS could more activelypromote the series for wider distribution. (A web-basedsearch confirms the briefs have a very short online reach.) Itis perhaps ironic that these papers about public archaeologyhave yet to reach a wide public audience. Hopefully, thiswill change because these are important papers that canprovide help and insights for all anthropologists working forthe physical preservation of places as well as those seeking tofoster the kinds of public participation that ultimately givesheritage sites and objects their meanings.

REFERENCES CITEDKelly, Sophia2007 Developing and Implementing Archaeological Site

Stewardship Programs. Technical Brief 22 (May). Wash-ington, DC: Department of the Interior ConsultingArchaeologist/National Park Service Archaeology Program.http://www.nps.gov/archeology/pubs/techbr/tch22.htm,accessed July 23, 2009.

Little, Barbara J., and Nathaniel Amdur-Clark2008 Archaeology and Civic Engagement. Technical Brief

23 (November). Washington, DC: Department of theInterior Consulting Archaeologist/National Park ServiceArchaeology Program. http://www.nps.gov/archeology/pubs/techbr/tch23.htm, accessed July 23, 2009.

Moyer, Theresa S.2006 Archaeological Collections and the Public: Using Re-

sources for the Public Benefit. Technical Brief 19 (Febru-ary). Washington, DC: Department of the Interior Con-sulting Archaeologist/National Park Service ArchaeologyProgram. http://www.nps.gov/archeology/pubs/techbr/tch19.htm, accessed July 23, 2009.


Sidewalk Radio: Anthropology as Resource to PromoteHealth, Labor Rights, and Visual Media (http://www.sidewalkradio. net)Jim Igoe

Dartmouth College

In a clip from the ethnographic film Thangata (2002), visualanthropologist and creator of the website Sidewalk RadioMarty Otanez draws viewers into a terrifying event thatdisrupts many of anthropologys standard boundaries. Thescene is a demonstration byMalawian trade unionists againstthe negative socioecological impacts of economic policy intheir country. Suddenly, soldiers arrive andfire tear gas at thedemonstrators, and the viewer is caught up in the frighteningdisorientation of the moment as Otanez, his camera still on,flees along with the demonstrators.

Although this moment is reminiscent of Clifford Geertzsflight from the Balinese police in Deep Play: Notes on theBalinese Cockfight (1973), it is not about the transforma-tion of an outsider to an insider. Otanezs films, which arefeatured throughout hiswebsite, insist that there are no insid-ers and outsiders. We are all connected in a world economyin which a tobacco-producing household in Malawi is paidless than 0.01 percent of the value of the 100,000 packs ofcigarettes that it produces every year.

These kinds of connections form the premise of Side-walk Radio,which breaks down barriers between theoreticaland applied anthropology by presenting theory and transfor-mative action as critically interlinked. So too, Otanez em-phasizes that the ethnographer is a socially positioned actorin the world that she or he documents.

Otanez, the main producer of Sidewalk Radio, com-pleted his Ph.D. at the University of California, Irvine,where he worked with Victoria Bernal and James Ferguson.Before his Ph.D., he studied and worked in labor organizingbefore completing an M.A. in pubic health at the Univer-sity of Ibadan in Nigeria. He produced Thangata withoutprior filmmaking experience, with the goal of making hisdissertation research on the global tobacco industry accessi-ble to a wider audience. Thangata was shown in high schoolclassrooms of Orange County Public Schools the year of itsrelease.

The chronology of films presented on Sidewalk Radioreveals a progressive refinement of Otanezs filmmakingskills, although none reproduces the ethnographic imme-diacy of Thangata. That said, the later films reveal greatercollaboration and broadening networks of influence. Mostnotable are six short films created from the Legacy To-bacco Documents Library, produced in collaboration withtobacco-documents researcher Ann Landman and artistsAshlee and Holly Temple. The films engage in artistic de-tournement (Debord 1995:145146) in which elements ofdominant media are used to destabilize the normalcy of thatmedia.

One of these videos features promotional films fromPhillip Morriss aborted Marlboro Train Campaign,while another features satirical scrapbooks with quotesfrom tobacco-industry executives. A third film created byscientistactivist Wara Alderete focuses on the tobacco in-dustry in her home country of Argentina. Produced in col-laboration with the Center for Policy Analysis on Trade andHealth, a fourth film in this series centers on the healthimplications of free-trade agreements.

The films chronologies are also significant in terms ofcontent: the first reveals the hegemony and spectacle ofbig tobacco with a montage of industry propaganda. En-suing videos use data, images, and a diversity of voicesto deconstruct this hegemony. As part of that project,the videos demonstrate the structural connections betweendebt servitude in Malawi and tobacco-related health is-sues in the United States. They also document the negativeenvironmental impacts of pesticides and herbicides used intobacco cultivation, the links between tobacco processingand tropical deforestation, the declining value of Malawistobacco exports relative to the profits of transnational com-panies, and the negative effects of tobacco on local foodproduction.

At the same time, Otanez could improve the structureand interface of Sidewalk Radio because the site neither high-lights the importance of its own content nor spells out itsbroader theoretical implications. A quick glance also revealsthat the site has not been updated since 2007. Yet, in evalu-ating projects like Sidewalk Radio, it is necessary to bear inmind the structural barriers to this kind of engaged publicanthropology. Such projects are frequently undertaken ontop of existing professional responsibilities by ethnographerswho have taught themselves to produce videos, make web-sites, and to engage with a wide diversity of audiences. Con-sequently, they are also undertaken with minimal financialresources and are afforded littlemerit at tenure-review time.

Suchbarriers threaten to thwart the promise ofmultime-dia websites as a critical tool for anthropology as a discipline.Anthropologists stand to gain a great dealincluding greatersocial relevance and increased attractiveness to future gener-ations of scholarsby giving greater institutional support toworks like Sidewalk Radio and integrating them into our dis-cipline. Sidewalk Radio, for instance, reveals complex inter-connections thatwould requiremany pages of scholarlywrit-ing and that would not be accessible to a broad diversity ofnonspecialist audiences. Moreover, Otanez has maintainedmethodological and bibliographic rigor by including a videoon methodology, explanatory texts, and document links.The site is thus a valuable resource for theory building, edu-cation, policy making, and advocacy. Indeed, content fromthe site is used in workshops by the Johns Hopkins Institute


for Global Tobacco Control, and Otanezs work was re-cently featured by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation(Hill 2009). Otanez has indicated that he plans to updatethe site soon, including a feature on the power of digitalstorytelling for influencing public-health interventions.

REFERENCES CITEDDebord, Guy1995[1967] The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone.

Geertz, Clifford1973 The Interpretation of Culture. New York: Basic.

Hill, Jess2009 Malawis Child Tobacco Labourers Suffer Nicotine

Poisoning. Australian Broadcasting Corporation, August26. http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2009/s2667295.htm, accessed September 6.

Otanez, Marty2002 Thangata: Social Bondage and Big Tobacco in

Malawi. Online video. http://www.sidewalkradio.net/?p=23, accessed October 2, 2009.

Ethnography for the Digital Age: http://www.YouTube/Digital Ethnography (Michael Wesch)

Alaka Wali

Field Museum

Classic ethnography was an account. Postmodern ethnogra-phy is a narrative. Digital ethnography is hypermedia (definedin, appropriately enough, Wikipedia as graphics, audio,video, plain text, and hyperlinks intertwine[d] to createa generally non-linear medium of information [Wikipedian.d.]). A project created by Kansas State University profes-sor Michael Wesch, Digital Ethnography uses hypermedia ina short video format to analyze the way that digital formsof organizing data are changing the character of social re-lationships, information access, and identity. Already thewinner of several awards for this work, Wesch and his stu-dents have turned digital ethnography into a YouTube site(http://www.youtube.com/digitalethnography), a webportal (http://mediatedcultures.net), and other interactivefeatures.

Wesch started experimenting with digital formats in thelate 1990s, but his digital-ethnography project really tookoff in 2007, with the posting on YouTube of The MachineIs Us/ing Us (2007c) which explores how xml script led tothe democratization of information creation by enablingdata to be exported free of formatting constraints. Weschexplained in a lecture at the Library of Congress in Juneof 2008 that after the video was reviewed on filter sitedigg (http://www.digg.com), it went viral, surpassing tenmillion views. Subsequently, he posted several more videosand launched a collective project with his students to studyYouTube. Weschs project represents a transformationaladvance not only in ethnographic forms but also in the waysthat ethnography can be taught and used to engage studentscoming of age in a post-text world.

In two of the ethnographies, Information R/evolution(2007b) and The Machine Is Us/ing Us (2007c), Weschexplores the changed character of information storage,retrieval, and creation. Both videos are fast paced and set to

a variety of background music (credited at the end of eachvideo). Here, Wesch contends that the web has changedinformation in fundamental ways, principally by divorcingform (or formatting) from content.

Information R/evolution begins with video of a filecabinet (the music is piano and violins) to show how infor-mation used to be stored and retrieved; then it moves (shift-ing to electronic music) to show how the web is changing,especially with linking and tagging devices that eliminateany fixed form of ordering information.

The Machine Is Us/ing Us explains that, with no codeto learn, any person can create and organize informationand, thus, teach the machine. In turn, the machine usespeople to create links between different information streamsand between its users. For example, as soon as the viewerselects Weschs videos, she or he is linked to music sites,similarly themed videos, websites, and posted comments orcritiques. Hence, hypermedia ethnographyan investiga-tion of cultural processes that is interactive and nonlinear.Although the videos are only four to five minutes long, thelinks can lead to a deeper exploration of the theme.

In a third video, A Vision of Students Today (2007a),Wesch collaborated with 200 students in his class to surveyhow student learning and academic engagement has beenchanged by new technologies (among them, cell phones,Internet access, and texting).

Can these short video ethnographies compare in depthand explanatory power with 300- to 500-page publishedbooks? They do not contain the thick description of the bestethnographies, but the videos are clearly informed by theo-retical insights exploring the interrelated aspects of commu-nication structures and changing social relationships as me-diated by technology. Left unanswered are questions aboutwhat we cannot see: for example, who controls the filtersthat determine which bits of information become widelyaccessed and which remain obscure? Some of this deepstructure can be found on the mediated cultures website


and in the lectures Wesch has also posted on YouTube.Ethnographies posted by Weschs students also expand onthe themes of the first three digital ethnographies.

Although Wesch acknowledges that the informationrevolution has a dark side, he mostly focuses on the crit-ical optimism (as he states in his blog [Wesch n.d.], cit-ing Yochai Benkler and Henry Jenkins) that it is generat-ing as millions of people are taking control of the formatto create connections across cyberspace that can spill intophysical space (e.g., the use of texting that in Spain re-sulted in the overthrow of the government after the Madridbombings of 2005 or the twittering that fuelled the protestsand global support for supporters of the opposition par-ties in Irans 2009 election). For public audiences and an-thropologists alike, Weschs work represents a compellingportal into a global shift in a fundamental component ofculture.

REFERENCES CITEDWesch, Michael2007a A Vision of Students Today. 4:44 min. Digital Ethnogra-

phy, posted October 12, 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o&feature=channel, accessed October4, 2009.

2007b Information R/evolution. 5:28 min. Digital Ethnogra-phy, posted October 12, 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM, accessed October 4, 2009.

2007c The Machine Is Us/ing Us. 4:33 min. Digital Ethnogra-phy, posted January 31, 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE, accessed October 4, 2009.

N.d. Digital Ethnography @ Kansas State University. http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/, accessed October 4, 2009.

WikipediaN.d. Hyperlink. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink, ac-

cessed October 4, 2009.