If anthropology is in the public eye, what is its image? Surely there are many concepts and perceptions of what anthropologists do (inspiring groups such This Is Anthropology!). But what about the bad press? Anthropology has a bad reputation argue guest columnists Ty Matejowsky and Beatriz M. Reyes-Foster in the Orlando Sentinel. They want anthropologists to reclaim their public “brand” and not have it defined by “others”. Sarah Kendzior talks more about anthropology’s public engagement in another interview over at Anthropology in Public.

Is there anything more public yet private at the same time as social media? How tools may contribute to work on development, and what role anthropology plays, is at the center of a debate in the Guardian. Also on the topic of blogging for and about international development: Tobias Denskus and Andrea S. Papan’s reflections. The public activity of blogging would appear to give a voice to those usually unheard: but does it? I’d be interested in hearing more about an anthropology of empowerment through social media, especially in the context of expensive technologies and access. Feel free to leave a comment below. If you are working on issues of digital media and anthropology, there is also currently a call for papers on the Ethnography Matters Blog.

Public vs. private: Ethnology and anthropology also play roles in the closed environments of corporations. Working in this field is Steve Portigal, who gives an interview on Ethnography Matters on the issue of interviewing users (and his book).

Finally, we all move between and beyond spheres of privacy and the public eye, and sometimes we break the (official or unofficial) rules of what behaviors belong to which sphere. Krystal D’Costa has written a short but fascinating piece on crying in the workspace. Her conclusion: While the workplace might be too restricted a place to let it all out, “neutral” public spheres like sidewalks or the subway are legitimate spaces to be both private and public. Do you find her division accurate? Please share your ideas on private and public spaces in the comments.

Notwithstanding possible personal discomfort with some of these tactics, everyone involved in the response to AIDS for the past four decades acknowledges the essential role AIDS activists have played as the “moral authority” in the response.  In the early years, activists pushed for new and faster drug development to keep people with HIV alive, and clamored for access to and availability of condoms to keep people from transmitting or acquiring infection in the first place.  As additional and more effective modes of treatment and prevention emerged, activists cajoled governments and funders into making them available at lower costs to people around the world.  Throughout the decades, AIDS activists also have drawn attention to the social inequalities reflected in the epidemic—with respect to who is disproportionately getting infected and the stigma, discrimination, and human rights violations attendant with vulnerability and infection—and they have held governments and communities accountable for these disparities.   This is the classic image of the AIDS activist—a member of a community who joins others in protest and pushes for changes in policy and funding.  And there will be thousands of them at AIDS 2012.

But, there will be another group of activists, who often are not thought of in this way, who also will populate AIDS 2012.  These are what I call “scientist-activists,” and they generally comprise two groups.  The first are those scientists—laboratory, clinical, behavioral, social—who pursue science with clear policy and social change objectives.  These are individuals who share many of the perspectives of community activists, and who use their perches in academic and other research establishments to advance science in service to social good—whether that be in the area of HIV treatment, care and support, prevention, or policy.  They help make the argument that the response to HIV epidemics should be evidence “informed” (if not “based”), rather than driven by ideological or political agendas or cultural belief systems (I know, these are contested notions, but bear with me for the sake of making a point); and they help provide the evidence itself and present it not only to other scientists, but to decision-makers as well.

The other group of scientist-activists are those, like me, who struggle within the scientific establishment to make changes to it to better address the HIV epidemic.  The most vocal cadre of such folks are social scientists who have been attempting for decades to broaden the scope of the HIV research response from its narrow and hegemonic biomedical paradigm, which focuses on the biological and behavioral processes of individuals and valorizes the randomized controlled trial as the gold standard of evidence of what works with such individuals with no recognition of the role of context and complexity in human life.  Some social scientists make it their project to lob critiques of biomedical science and dismiss it out of hand as flawed.  Others, like myself, work to integrate the sensibilities of social science into biomedicine, using some of the critiques of our comrades, but acknowledging that the social organization of the scientific enterprise—with its hierarchy of disciplines and reward systems that places social science at the bottom—means that the “game” is effectively the biomedics and we have either been invited or have forced our way into playing with them on their turf.

What this means is a daily experience of bashing one’s head against the wall, having to make the case for social science theory, conceptualizations and methodologies over and over again, and watching them continually forced back into the biomedical paradigm (“well, if we need to look at context, we can do cluster randomized controlled trials!”).  We are usually “an N of one” in the room full of biomedical scientists, so there is also the “token” role to play.  Whenever there is a reference to behavioral or social considerations, all eyes turn toward us as the resident, and often only, expert in the room, and the expectation that we will nod and smile with gratitude that they’ve thought to be inclusive.  But, more often than not, our suggestion of doing things quite differently is ignored, if not actively resisted (“How can it be HIV prevention if you don’t have an HIV incidence outcome in your study; and how can it be “evidence” if it isn’t from a randomized controlled trial?”).

Our activism from within science is also played out in the various volunteer activities characteristic of being part of the scientific community—planning committees for meetings and conferences; journal editorial boards, advisory groups for research funders, etc.   More often than not, our role on these bodies is to fight for the inclusion of social science topics and social scientists as speakers, authors, or grantees.

I would say that all this activism has had an effect.  At the least, the HIV field has grown to adopt what it calls a “combination” frame that articulates the importance of linking biomedical, clinical, social, behavioral, and policy analyses and responses.  Moreover, the biomedical community has adopted some social science constructs—the most recent being  “social determinants of health” – as important directions in basic and applied research.  But, at the same time, they have appropriated these constructs, acting as if they have just invented them, disregarding a robust extant literature in the social sciences, and putting their biomedical overlay onto them (witness the U.S. CDC’s agenda in “social determinants of health” and “structural interventions”).   In this situation, the job of social scientist activists, like myself, becomes that of re-appropriating the science and educating the biomedical community of all the work that already exists in this arena that need not be reinvented—just read.

In the end, most of us engaged in the struggle against AIDS are, in one way or another, activists.  Scientists are members of communities, too, and we carry our histories, identities, and personal connections to the epidemic no differently than so-called “community” activists.  Our tactics and venues may be different, but we all share a goal of shaking things up in the arenas in which we engage, to enable change to occur that we believe will have the greatest impact on ending the epidemic and the social disparities (including within the organization of science) it makes visible.

One of the more controversial interventions proposed for HIV prevention in those who test HIV antibody negative and perceived to be at risk is pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) – a daily pill comprising one or two antiretroviral drugs manufactured by Gilead Inc.  Besides the mixed results from multi-site randomised controlled trials (RCTs) seeking to establish the efficacy of PrEP (see iPrEX versus Fem-PrEP), concerns have been raised about PrEP’s potential to undermine condom use, its cost implications in locales where treatment provision is still lacking and elsewhere, its potential to cause unwanted drug side-effects as well as possible drug resistance in those it fails to protect.

Nevertheless, continuing new infections and evidence that high adherence produces a strong protective effect are mobilising many public health authorities to devise feasible implementation models.

Most remarkable about the growing interest in PrEP is the exclusion of the social sciences from major forums where this work is taking place.  One such example is a two-day forum held in the UK by IAPAC on the dual topics of treatment as prevention (TasP) and PrEP.  The only non-biomedical speakers listed on the programme were a psychologist (speaking on adherence), a bioethicist, activists and public health officials linked to various national epidemics.

Indeed it won’t come as a surprise to many to know that despite the millions of dollars to support RCTs for PrEP, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have so far declined to support a substantial programme of social research on PrEP.  In fact if we consider the bioethical requirements imposed on the conduct of RCTs for PrEP and other biomedical interventions, there is no ethical requirement for research on the social dimensions of the intervention during or post RCTs. This applies even when RCTs demonstrate candidate efficacy.

The multiple ways in which PrEP will unfold across the epidemic and the absence of social scientific approaches to grapple with this multiplicity is worrying. Without doubt it underscores the need for this particular blog and other forums designed to enliven the social science contribution and increase its visibility. But the absence of social science also raises the question of what sort of social research should be called upon in response to the biomedicalisation of the epidemic.

Although not wanting to diminish what has already been achieved to date by the social and biomedical sciences, it is worth pointing out that much of this work has relied on the presupposition of an ‘HIV prevention user’ who exists prior to and remains largely distinct from the means of prevention or RCT technology.  Always already conceived as independent of the means of prevention, ‘she’ or ‘he’ is assessed according to whether ‘she’ or ‘he’ does or does not utilize prevention. If not, it is because:

i)      She/he is deficient in knowledge or understanding necessary for adopting safe practices.

ii)    She/he is deficient due to asymmetries in power and situated in such a way to be without services that help mitigate against unsafe practices, for example: housing, food, education, safe forms of employment without discrimination.

iii)  She/he is deficient in responsibility causing her or him to be unable to act safely.

Leaving aside any preferences we may have for one or even two of these accounts of ‘the user’, all can be said to assume and, indeed, enact HIV risk as if consisting of ‘stand-alone entities.’ These entities— for example, users, bodies, knowledge, rights, HIV, condoms, drugs, routes of transmission and so on—are imagined as present in a stable form prior to the risk event and ontologically distinct. This thinking is especially prevalent in RCT design, sometimes even the explanation for failure. The MIRA trial (Methods for Improving Reproductive Health in Africa) found that women in the candidate arm who were asked to use a diaphragm with a condom in sexual intercourse were less likely to sustain condom use than women in the placebo arm who were recommended to use only condoms.  In other words, the combining of presumed distinct prevention technologies gave rise to women in the candidate arm being more at risk of HIV infection than those in the placebo arm. Here the ‘additional’ object (the diaphragm) did not enhance but, instead, diminished the capacity of the more protective object (the condom).[1] In sum, a logic of ‘stand-alone’ entities undermined prevention in the candidate arm, rendered ineffectual the statistical calculations necessary to a worthwhile trial and, it can be argued, raises the question of whether the logic of ‘stand-alone’ entities leads to a practice devoid of satisfactory ethics.

Importantly, the women in the MIRA trial, like many others negotiating the demands of HIV in the midst of complex and sometimes competing social relations, remind us that ‘objects’ such as condoms, diaphragms, pills etc. are not stable and distinct but emerge with heterogeneous effects in their relations with other phenomena.

Ironically, biomedicine also offers a reminder of the dynamic co-affective nature of the epidemic, even if those practicing it fail to fully comprehend their objects in this way: the virus is of consequence when it is with the human body or in a laboratory study, not when it is independent of other phenomena. Similarly antiretroviral drugs are made effective in their use; or through the monitoring of adherence; or through their capacity to induce ‘side effects’ and so on.  They, too, acquire their effect only in relation to other phenomena and, moreover, it is their effect that we are concerned with.

As a guide to how we might extend the social science of prevention, I want to propose a rethinking of prevention as that which is effective because it is ethical.  By hinging effectiveness to ethics, the relational aspects of intervention come into view.  Put simply, if prevention is to take place—in this instance through the uptake of PrEP—it must perform an aligning with the varying interests of those it is intended for and, at the same time, affecting. More specifically, it must weigh in on some affects—most likely those of pleasure although this is complex territory in itself —well over others—such as coercion and homophobia —and do so by appealing in such a way that the effective user is able to emerge as such.[2]

By anticipating ethics as immanent in the affective work of practice it also becomes possible to become sensitized to dynamics that work against prevention. Particularly pertinent here is the manner in which PrEP has emerged. Its controversial nature cannot be disentangled from the technology of the ‘efficacy’ testing RCT and the legitimation of this process by bioethics. The legitimizing of RCTs in their current form where only a delimited set of effects are of concern—those that may incur more risks than benefits within the parameters of the RCT—excludes precisely that which the more everyday use of the candidate may generate.  Here I am thinking in particular of concerns that PrEP may give rise to what is termed ‘risk compensation’ or may alter gender relations in such a way that women take responsibility for prevention as has happened with the contraceptive pill.[3] Crudely put, how has it come to be ethically legitimate to spend millions of dollars on the efficacy testing of a biomedical agent[4] without providing research into how it will affect the epidemic? Or, to turn the gaze on those who would otherwise neglect us and, at the same time, open for consideration the achievement of biomedical prevention more generally:  has bioethics usurped the role of social science as such by granting biomedicine greater license for its activities but less viability for its products?  These questions and a host of others could become part of a different approach to prevention, effectiveness and ethics. To reiterate, by conceiving of effectiveness as an achievement of ethical design it may be possible to shift the logic of the stand alone as evident in the deficit individual and as exemplified in the MIRA trial   and begin to work with PrEP as a highly relational entity. Working with PrEP means attending to how it emerges, including how it does so through the design of RCTs and, possibly, as part of the everyday relations involved in its uptake.

I am not afraid to confess feeling swept, against my will, into the whirlpool of news coverage from Zuccotti Park.  To begin with, initial media reports on Occupy Wall Street seemed almost proudly negligent in their characterizations of protesters’ manifold and serious grievances with the state of this country.  While New York Times protest reporters N.R. Kleinfeld and Cara Buckley claimed, for example, that “[t]heir politics zigzag wildly,” it was rather the corporate news coverage that found itself profoundly disoriented, and lashing out confusedly, when face-to-face with an event of undeniable political renascence.  If journalists weren’t branding the occupiers a bunch of latte-sipping Ivy Leaguers, with their high-end laptops and pda devices, they were being summarily dismissed as unproductive anarchist elements, new-age idealists, the deliberately unwashed or the serially unemployed.  Never mind Zuccotti Park’s complete absence of toilets and other sanitary facilities, or the early police enforcement cruelly prohibiting the use of tents.  Never mind the movement’s breathtaking political, religious, gendered and generational diversity, as  Nathan Schneider and the N+1 collective have reported, or the protesters’ ongoing organizational and political ingenuity.

One month into the protest, UNC-Chapel Hill’s Jonathan Weiler noted in his article The Media and the Five Stages of Grief over Occupy Wall Street, that the “psychology of our gatekeeper media,” at least the large corporate news outlets, had barely moved past their “denial” stage, the sarcasm of their reportage swinging wildly between “anger” and “bargaining,” with the horizon of “depression” and “acceptance” still looming far in the distance.   Everyone had some kind of diagnostic.   OWS was a Rorschach test for one’s position vis-a-vis the failures of American political leadership, or an ideological screen for the projection of myriad fantasies and nightmares.

I continued to watch the scene in Zuccotti swirling about from the relative distance of Ithaca, NY, where I teach.  The corporate news media kept spinning wave after wave of politically tendentious or disingenuous anti-OWS reports.  But when the first video footage of the OWS General Assemblies’ public mode of deliberation surfaced online, I could no longer resist fully immersing myself, or engaging in something akin to ethnographic “advocacy research,” in order to provide a more empirically sensitive account of the Occupation.  Even the most nuanced, holistic news coverage on People’s Mic seemed un-attuned to its lived and deeper political complexities.

The rising tide of counter-neoliberalism and its powerful symbolic undercurrents weren’t exactly new to me.  In the early 2000s, I had already served ethnographic witness to spectacular “crucifixion protests” against the unchecked privatization of urban space and zero-tolerance policing, and had documented the deleterious civil effects of neoliberal mass incarceration in my other hometown—Guayaquil, Ecuador.   As a cultural anthropologist, I also consider myself a Latin Americanist.   With one foot in Guayaquil and another in the greater NYC metropolitan-area teaching scene over the last decade, I’ve always viewed my professional task as one of critiquing hidden fidelities to privatization from a vantage point both geographically and morally situated in the global south.  But watching the OWS unfolding in New York reminded me that perhaps my relationship to the United States is more pan-Americanist than I previously had imagined.

What I understand to be singularly important about OWS, derives from a perspective both inside yet inherently alienated from U.S. political culture as currently constituted: I am referring to what is distinctly American about the General Assembly’s “People’s Microphone” phenomenon. Here are three examples:

This strange, effervescent and recently discovered mode of address is actually part-in-parcel with a much longer-standing American tradition of hallowed political speech—actively cultivating a sense of deep horizontal community and democratic process not felt on the Left in this country for what seems like generations.  (I started writing this report the day after 92-year-old Pete Seeger marched into Zuccotti at the head of thousands in solidarity with OWS, but more than 55 years after he famously plead the First Amendment, rather than the Fifth, before Senator McCarthy’s HUAC commissions.)  There is clearly an air of mass defiance in the park, fully present in body and spirit, regardless of the political ecumenicalism or the ideological polycentrism of OWS itself.  Here is video I took of a General Assembly, convened in Washington Square on October 8^th (the first time the Occupation had assembled en masse in another NYC location) to mark the protest’s third week, in which the speakers used People’s Mic and helped newcomers to recognize its demotic, edifying applications for an emerging body politic.  The impression you get watching this assembly unfold, from where I sat filming the video, is the exuberance of democratic self-fashioning:

My best guess is that few of us in Washington Square previously had any personal experience of direct, mass democratic assembly.  The citizens’ ideals of public participatory and representative flourishing, in my opinion, have withered beyond recognition under a decades-long and well-concerted financial assault (waged by liberals and conservatives alike) in which government productivity has been measured in new corporate ideal-typical models for public accountability.  One need not consult the full body of Noam Chomsky’s or David Harvey’s works to grasp the executive over-reach and moral failings of this top-down political economic program.  The General Assemblies’ capacity to allow for direct, mass political deliberation “subtracts” the aesthetics of demoralization associated with corporate-led, private-public initiatives as the only social channel for getting the work of politics accomplished.  Rather than deny this exuberance with impulsive skepticism, or decry its ‘naïve’ realpolitics offhand—“how can OWS possibly translate into concrete policy recommendations?”—, I would suggest that anyone who claims to write from the disaggregated and scattered Left first appreciate the depths from whence it emerged.

The problem with rising corporate influence and corruption across the United States is not limited to the odd legal status (the so-called “legal personhood”) conferred to these powerful, undying agencies, but also to the slow and seemingly implacable politico-juridical creep of regimes that constitutionally uphold their positive and negative rights.  It was Hannah Arendt who wrote most cogently on this deeper and typically unmentionable issue of the American political experiment:

“It was precisely because of the enormous weight of the Constitution and of the experiences in founding a new body politic that the failure to incorporate the townships and the town-hall meetings, the original springs of all political activity in the country, amounted to a death sentence to them.  Paradoxical as it may sound, it was in fact under the impact of the Revolution that the revolutionary spirit in America began to wither away, and it was the Constitution itself, this greatest achievement of the American people, which eventually cheated them of their proudest possession” (1963: 239).

What Occupy Wall Street has managed to unsettle, in my opinion, is precisely this deeper structure of constitutionally protected trans-local as well as international private agency, which typically undercuts any claims to “legitimate community” that do not immediately incorporate or disaggregate into private-public interest groups themselves.

Might we not argue instead that the political retrenchment of 18^th century constitutional ideals, which serves to reinforce 18^th century political and moral value systems, actually cheats the American public of its greatest earned-freedoms?  Today, the loudest advocates for so-called “Originalist” or “Textualist” constitutional interpretation (which metes out jurisprudence as if we still were living in the time of the Constitution’s framers) also lionize a narrowly imagined “real America” (usually comprised of the corporate executive board, private-public interest group, or religious congregation) as the only civic-moral and social foundation of America’s democratic system.  Yet what I discovered upon arrival in Zuccotti was the town hall “frontier assembly” par excellence, a radically heterogenous public gathering, cobbling together notions of the public good in a democratic process attentive to plurality and minority protections almost unimaginable unless you observed its public workings firsthand.

Recent U.S. political experience presents what can only be called the negative image of Occupy Wall Street.  Liberal media pundits during the 2008 election cycle repeatedly lambasted the Republican rhetorical conceit that only conservatives—in contradistinction to all Democratic candidates—spoke for America’s “small town values.”  This Republican claim was tinged with latent racism when the Democrats’ candidate for highest office happened to be African American, and when Anglo-Americans enjoyed a strong nationwide, particularly rural, ethnic majority.  But this argument also had a certain empirical, however tendentious, foundation in U.S. politics-as-experienced.  The nationwide electoral map shows nothing but Democratic blue in nearly all the country’s major cities; in urban contexts, the cosmopolitan ethic of mutual tolerance of and for cultural difference is just as deeply interwoven within the American political imaginary as the radially open-ended town hall meetings upon which much of our political system was originally projected upwards, but disavowed in practice.  In other words, “small town America” had turned into a catchphrase for the imaginative restoration of conservative rural and suburban modalities of “compartmentalized” or “complementary” political associations (where a host of other terms might be substituted for “complementary” and “compartmentalized”).  Yet here and now was a revitalized political Left, remaking itself in Zuccotti Park by staking a parcel of land upon which to build political community, a broad public gathering of the dispossessed and barely enfranchised in the heartland of world financial government.  The OWS proceedings that I experienced were at once a highly cosmopolitan environment and, through its use of the General Assembly, a highly affective town hall meeting, one that Arendt properly understood as the generative engine of the American revolutionary spirit.

Yet what could possibly tie the coming community together, in an age when every classroom or gathering is so easily interpolated with cell phone or e-mail interruptions, not to mention the omnipresence of our over-determined and over-extended professional lives?  The generative model of the town hall meeting often works against our contrapuntal, vocational and avocational, daily rhythms—saturating our mundane daily events with ceaseless movement between individual tasks and private entertainment.  Any possible answer begins with the People’s Mic.  The People’s Mic is described quite well in a variety of journalistic and academic venues, which note that OWS General Assembly is only feasible given this low-tech collective ritual, which allows for speakers to communicate and deliberate on proposals across Zuccotti Park’s large open spaces.  Hendrick Hertzberg of the New Yorker summarizes the People’s Mic most succinctly and colloquially:

 A speaker says a few words, then pauses; the audience repeats them, loudly and in unison; the speaker says a few more; the chorus repeats; and so on.  If the group is unusually large, the repetition radiates out, like a mountain echo.  The listeners register their reactions silently, with their hands.  Four fingers up, palm outward: Yay! Four fingers down, palms inward: Boo!  Both hands rolling: Wrap it up!  Clenched fists crossed at the wrists: No way, José!  There’s something oddly moving about a crowd of smart-phone-addicted, computer-savvy people cooperating to create such an utterly low-tech, strikingly human, curiously tribal means of amplification—a literal loudspeaker.

The Nation was among the first news outlets to identify the importance of the People’s Mic to OWS.  Al Jazeera’s own report is another go-to source. Nathan Schneider, the only journalist “embedded” with OWS from its very beginning, has discussed the strengths of this phenomenon in a suggestive online interview.  And cultural anthropologist Hannah Chadeayne Appel has dashed off a fascinating ethnographic sketch for Social Text’s blog site.  According to most protesters, this felicitous mode of public speaking is said to have originated spontaneously on the first day of the Occupation.  The protesters tell stories, which may or may not be apocryphal, about the battery-powered megaphone brought to Zuccotti not being cooperative when speakers wanted to use it.  It’s considerably more likely, however, that OWS protesters recognized or were cautioned by police that NYC zoning restrictions forbid noise-amplifying machines in marches or public protests.  Several commentators have noted the irony of an anti-noise ordinance serving as the basis for creating a “tactile media” technology that helps to produce such enduring individual and collective affect—along with the perseverance of a mass assembly the municipality would rather see leave (either by force, or the slow, police-regulated attrition of the protesters’ energies.)  One way or another, the OWS’s standardization of People’s Mic for mass deliberation is by nearly all accounts a novelty in the annals of church assemblies, small town meetings, revolutionary councils, and the like.  What I want to argue here, at least, is this:  given its procedural importance to the Occupy movements, the People’s Mic is a powerful new genre of political speech.

But People’s Mic as a technology of speech should not be defined as Occupy Wall Street’s own private or autochthonous invention, either; the historical similarities with other forms of message-carrying and political communication are simply too many to be ignored.  The tactic was frequently used last decade among protest groups who found themselves hounded by police or kettled into separate areas—allowing groups who are violently segregated to speak to one another in spite of their distance or separation.  A modified version of this tactic, more akin to the game of telegraph, was also used when marchers needed their voices projected up or down their ranks.  Amongst encampments of the indignados in Spain, the People’s Mic was quickly deployed and then abandoned as the movement to protest the country’s draconian national debt-restructuration models swelled and diminished last summer.   More anecdotally, similar forms of projecting a speaker’s words have been used among union organizing groups in Brazil, the A16 World Bank mobilization (2000) and EU Summit in Gothenberg (2001), and amongst the followers of early 20^th century unions and collectivist groups surrounding Jean Jaures and Eugene Debs.  Anthropologist David Graeber alludes to the People’s Mic-type practices over the last two decades in a recent dispatch discussing his role in the Occupy Wall Street movement’s early organizational development.   (If anyone can point me to other examples of People’s Mic, past or present, please don’t hesitate to e-mail me at ceg97 AT cornell DOT edu).  In any event, there are plenty of antecedents to be located and critically inspected, for instance in the age-old public office of ‘criers,’ who relayed critically important news over geographical space before the advent of electrically amplified speech.

I will have a great deal more to say about the People’s Mic in the weeks and months ahead.  But any preliminary sketch of its influence begins with an account of the phenomenological experience of being part of this body of public speakers.  Many news commentators have noted the physical strain of one’s daily participation in this group phenomenon.  The GA’s meetings can last upwards of two hours, often running from 7pm ‘til midnight, or later.  People’s Mic only works in practice if scores or hundreds repeat every word of a public speaker’s dense, usually impactful-as-possible commentary.  There is a certain euphoria in making one’s voice merge seamlessly with others’, an especially powerful force—in the sense of democratic influence—when you repeat words that you fundamentally disagree with for the benefit of democratic process.  My own vocal chords, I admit, were suffering from unfamiliar trauma after the two-hour mark, when I first plugged into the People’s Mic.  But your own dissent is perfectly embodied in this technology, too.  Disagree with a speaker, and you can make your disagreement silently known to all and sundry with a basic repertoire of hand signals, while continuing to listen to/cultivate attention for/engage with the person’s “soapboxing,” in OWS’s demotic parlance.

When Slavoj Žižek gave a speech before Occupy Wall Street using the People’s Mic on October 9^th, his argument turned on a claim that the “holy spirit” was present with everyone in the assembly.  “What is the holy spirit?,” he asked.  “It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other, and who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it.  In this sense, the holy spirit is here now.  And down there on Wall Street, there are pagans who are worshiping blasphemous idols.”  Žižek’s insightful observation, as abstractly persuasive as it may be, looks far beyond the distinctly Protestant genealogies of hallowed speech within the General Assembly.  That congregationalism forms a moral as well as a political community may serve, unfortunately, as justification enough for completely banishing non-coreligionists: in this case, Wall Street’s high-rollers.  But over-emphasis on this politico-theological element (its knee-jerk reliance on the friend/foe distinction) may overlook precisely the qualities of hallowed speech that comprise a more seductive, inclusive moral horizon for Occupy Wall Street’s political renascence.  People’s Mic has a very specific democratic genealogy, one that subtly differs from the Protestant ethic as the spirit of capitalism, though certainly contributing to its particular American formations.  The act of public speaking in the General Assembly— currently a town hall frontier assembly, as it was during the 18^th century—is to stand up and speak precisely when, and perhaps only when, the holy spirit (a gift of speech, of and for the patchwork of the demos) speaks through you.

I might add that one’s hallowed participation in the GA’s deliberative process is a deeply ascetic endeavor, to the extent that speaking up refashions oneself as part of the collective, mind, body and soul—as in Marcel Mauss’s understanding of the total human being (l’homme total social), which aims to mitigate the all-consuming influence of either the individual or the collective as the exclusive foundation of sovereign accountability.   The protesters’ admirable will to protest despite their “lack of demands”—the incredible perseverance of this new political community— lies precisely with the General Assembly’s self-identification through the People’s Mic.  Yet OWS’s unwillingness to assimilate may ultimately invite repressive force from those who seek to crush this project of nonviolent assembly, or to make use of it for their own political gain.  For this reason and many others, Occupy Wall Street may eventually fail, but the People’s Mic has cultivated and rehabilitated a version of the United States’ political Left that will survive the movement’s potential repression, and even, perhaps, its co-optation by larger, more entrenched political forces.   The fact that People’s Mic has been deployed in Occupy and (un)Occupy movements in cities and towns across the country, as well as overseas, where municipal ordinances don’t prohibit noise-amplifying devices, is our first indication of the vast democratic standing reserve of this new genre of political speech.

First off, I want to make clear that Jacob Hickman’s post on this issue does not necessarily reflect the views of all the contributors to Somatosphere.  That should be self-evident, but given that 1) we are a collaborative site, 2) that many of us understand “science” (be it “social,” “human,” “medical” or “natural”) both as an endeavor we are engaged in and as an object of study, and 3) that feelings seem to be running high on this issue, I want to emphasize that there may be a wide variety of views on this issue among our contributors.

The issue has already been widely debated, although regrettably often through a number of tired and deeply unproductive oppositions that sound like a rehashing of the 1990s so-called “science wars”: “truth,” “hard science,” and evidence versus “social construction” and “post-modernism” (by this point used almost entirely as an epithet). Daniel Lende has posted an excellent overview of the controversy at Neuroanthropology, including his own–quite nuanced–take on the debate.

I think that Daniel and Greg’s Neuroanthropology project (as well as other efforts such as Critical Neuroscience, not to mention the work of scholars like Margaret Lock and Vinh-Kim Nguyen) is important in this regard because rather than pitting cultural and social anthropology as somehow against the biological sciences, they see the social study of scientific knowledge as a necessary platform for conversation between the social and biological sciences.  In other words, the conceptual tools of cultural anthropology and science studies are not just means of critiquing “scientific” knowledge claims, but also the basis for meaningful engagement.

Alex Golub makes another subtle and important argument at Savage Minds, pointing out that:

[W]e don’t have to go that far afield to recognize forms of knowledge that are rehabilitated when anthropology jettisons its label as ‘science’: history, epigraphy, historical linguistics, and the humanities in general. The opposite of ‘science’ is not ‘nihilistic postmodernism’ it’s ‘an enormously huge range of forms of scholarship, many of which are completely and totally committed to accuracy and impartiality in the knowledge claims they make….

Now, someone might argue that historical work that is committed to accuracy, submits its claims to evidence and scholarly scrutiny and so forth is not actually a form of the humanities, but is itself a kind of ‘science’. In fact one person has made such an argument: Franz Boas.

Throughout his career — for instance in his classic short piece ‘The Study of Geography’ — Boas made a distinction between not between the ‘natural sciences’ and the ‘interpretive sciences’ but rather between generalizing sciences (which study things that happen over and over again, like gravity) and the ‘historical sciences’ (which study things which happen just once in history, like the Battle of Hastings)… Thus for Boas something could be ‘scientific’ even if it did not ape the manners of a chemist in his lab.

I think that this point is terribly important and we’d do well to pay attention to Boas’s distinction, as one that is potentially much more productive than the usual suspects.  This is how Boas frames the distinction in ‘The Study of Geography’(published in Science!):

“Naturalists [read: those practicing the generalizing sciences] will not deny the importance of every phenomenon, but will not consider it worthy of study for its own sake.  It is only a proof or a resutation of their laws, systems, and hypotheses (as they are deduced from true phenomena), which they feel obliged to bring as near the truth as possible. The deductions, however, are their main interest; and the reward of the indefatigable student is to review, from the summit of his most general deductions, the vast field of phenomena. Joyfully he sees that every process and every phenomenon which seem to the stranger an irregular and incomprehensible conglomerate is a link of a long chain.  Losing sight of the single facts, he sees only the beautiful order of the world.

The cosmographer [read: one practicing the historical sciences], on the other hand, holds to the phenomenon which is the object of his study, may it occupy a high of low rank in the system of physical sciences, and lovingly tries to penetrate into its secrets until every feature is plain and clear.  This occupation with the object of his affection affords him a delight not inferior to that which the physicist enjoys in his systematical arrangement of the world,” (Boas 1887: 139-140).

In the current debate, I think that there is some — at least rhetorical — agreement on the idea that the AAA’s statement of purpose should make room for both of these varieties of knowledge production, whether or not we call them both “science.”  Where I particularly sympathize with concerns such as those raised in Jacob’s post is in regard to wider perceptions of what it is that anthropologists do — particularly among those who make decisions regarding funding.  It is not hard to imagine the junior congressman or congresswoman who, during the drafting of a federal budget in the near future, will make a call for eliminating the NSF’s cultural anthropology program on the basis that anthropologists don’t consider their research to be “science.”  Similar arguments get rolled out almost every time research budgets pass through the legislature, and while they may not necessarily have their intended effects, do we really want to provide them with more ammunition? Perhaps, whether or not we identify ourselves as scientists, we can agree on that?

Two recent pieces in the Chronicle of Higher Education (available here and here) document something that happened at the past American Anthropological Association meetings that I was not aware of during the meetings. I went to the general business meeting to hear about some of these developments, but what is interesting is that this particular development occurred during the Executive Board Meeting, rather than being presented before the general AAA body for debate and a vote.

So, what am I talking about? In short, the AAA Executive Board has decided to strike all mention of “science” from the language of the AAA mission statement. One of the pieces I have attached shows all of the changes, omissions, and alterations in the new statement. The obvious thrust is to re-characterize the AAA’s work in non-scientific terms. In one of the Chronicle pieces, an apologist for the AAA Executive Board argues that the intention was not to attack “science,” per se. However, if this is the case, how does one justify substituting for ‘sciences’ the phrase “knowledge disciplines?” is that simply a stylistic move? I think not.

I am sure that amongst the HD crowd we are likely to find a diversity of opinion with regards to these issues, and I am quite interested in hearing about them. I recall one night last Spring, Abbe, Les, Teo, and I debated over dinner whether or not we (and our advisors) were “scientists,” and I must say that even with this small group I found a much wider range of opinion than I had expected (I will let you all characterize your own positions, if you care to!).

For me personally, I disagree with this move by the AAA Board, and I think it is counterproductive. Roy D’Andrade recently started a discussion on this topic on the Society for Anthropological Sciences (a AAA section) listserve (you can read the exchange here). I agree that this threatens what little legitimacy “anthropology” maintains outside of its own borders, in the public sphere. This is especially threatening at a time when funding for academic research is shrinking and we are finding ourselves harder pressed to justify funds to do research, such as carry out international fieldwork and hire research assistants.

For one, I don’t conceptualize “science” as narrowly as those who like to use “positivism” as an epithet. I regard science as disciplined, systematic inquiry that attempts some degree of transparency (i.e., NOT “objectivity) in staking claims about the world, regardless of the relative social constructedness of those worlds. In fact, I think that interpretive anthropology can be scientific. Geertz seemed to think so as well, as he states in his essay on Thick Description:

“Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”

It seems apparent to me that from this essay Geertz allows for more-or-less defensible interpretations to be made of any given cultural happening, and that one should be able to cite evidence to back up one’s interpretation. As far as I am concerned, this interpretive ‘science’ is just as fundamentally concerned with issues of reliability and validity as much as any other discipline, such as as quantitative psychology or sociology or physics. I don’t take anthropology to be any more or less scientific than any other disciplines typically found in “social science” divisions at universities across the world. Certainly, methods tend to vary from one discipline to another (despite many of our efforts to fight against a priori methodological biases), but methods don’t make research scientific. Engaging in qualitative analysis isn’t un-scientific unto itself any more than counting anything makes it scientific just because it involves counting (or structural equation modeling, for that matter).

In sum, I lament the move to eradicate “science” from the mission statement of the AAA. I think this represents the taking over of one particular political faction in the organization, and if anything it is likely to drive the discipline into further obscurity, further drive archaeologists and biological anthropologists (and many are even saying linguistic anthropologists) from the organization, and therefore drive the final nail in the four-field coffin. I honestly think that many of the anti-scientific sentiments pervading contemporary anthropology are perhaps essentializing “science” in a way that most of these critics would never allow to be done with “culture.” I also think that this move is largely political, yet another attempt to “stick it to the man,” even though we know that “the man” (or “the woman”, if you like) could care less what the AAA thinks. The world certainly doesn’t care whether the AAA recognizes the current government of Honduras (cf. the debate during last year’s business meeting), but I worry that eradicating science from the AAA mission statement will make the organization even more irrelevant, and prove to anyone that may actually listen that, in fact, the AAA *is* completely irrelevant.

SCIENTISTS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!!!

{fist raised in the air}

Thoughts?!?

“Some social scientists say Bourgois deserves credit for breaking a stalemate that long stymied the study of the American urban poor. In the 1960s, the anthropologist Oscar Lewis, who also wrote about East Harlem, helped to popularize the idea of a “culture of poverty”: Poor, urban parents passed along to children dysfunctional ways of thinking and acting. In the 1970s, leftist anthropologists pushed back, saying the poor should not be judged by the standards of the middle class, with the nuclear family, for example, held up as the ideal.

Fearful of being caught in the crossfire, many sociologists and anthropologists simply stopped looking, except via statistics, at poverty in the United States. Bourgois broke the deadlock in two ways, according to Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist at Columbia University and author of Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets (Penguin, 2008). He reframed drug dealers as people driven by essentially American aspirations: They wanted money, they wanted a career path that would offer new challenges over time, and they wanted the approval of their peers.

That subtle reframing points policy makers away from prison as a response and toward removing people from toxic networks or otherwise changing their incentives,” (Shea 2009).

While one of the themes of the article is that of Bourgois’s ability to bridge “theoretical” and “applied” concerns in the social sciences, the piece treats the theoretical engagements with a dismissiveness that I found surprising for the Chronicle of Higher Education. On the policy-related end of things, the article surprisingly doesn’t mention Bourgois’s NIDA-sponsored work on buprenorphine (and its potentials for extra-therapeutic use). However, its worth a read–if you’re unfamiliar with Bourgois’s work or if (like me) you’re interested in general media portrayals of anthropologists.

The mission of Anthropology Now is to promote anthropological perspectives about contemporary issues and events in a wider and more general public, and to reclaim an active voice in public debate. A second goal is to offer correctives and responses to misappropriations of anthropological research in mass media, popular culture and academia. Because perspectives from cultural anthropology are particularly underrepresented in public debate, the journal will primarily focus on this subfield. I anticipate that the journal will also be a fantastic teaching tool, especially in introductory and undergraduate courses.

What can you and I do to support this wonderful project?
Last week in SF I heard some good ideas from Susan Harding and Emily Martin, who are members of the journal’s Executive committee.

First, spread the word and encourage your library to purchase a subscription.

Second, volunteer skills and labor. As the journal grows, so will the need for people who can help with organizational, editorial, multimedia and other tasks.

Last, but not least, contribute. The journal embraces a range of genres including features, photo essays, reports from the field, excerpts of fieldnotes and articles. The editors and reviewers look for a good story with a sharp opening hook, accessible writing, and a clear anthropological argument that also highlights what the reader can learn about anthropology.

If you are interested in contributing something for publication, email an initial pitch to the general editor Katherine McCaffrey, or to one of the associate editors: Susan Harding, Emily Martin, or Ida Susser. Please include information about the subject you will explore, and how the anthropological perspective will be directed to the general public in terms of content and writing style.