Life at the Interface

Field Notes: Careful, you might end up in my dissertation.*

2012-01-25T12:28:00.000-08:00

*(Disclaimer: Don't worry - if I mention you in my dissertation, you'll know about it. I'm following research-ethics protocols...you'll have to sign an informed-consent form. :)

Back in Poland after a too-brief (two weeks) trip back home to the States for the holidays. I got back New Year's Day, and have been slightly panicked about the progress of my research thus far ever since.
I'm a bit embarrassed to admit this (although I'm sure I wouldn't be the first fieldworker to do so), but I spent the first few months of my fieldwork not knowing exactly what I was doing, or even being quite sure whether I was collecting any data. (Of course, everything one does in "the field" is somehow relevant, but it doesn't always feel like that as it's happening.) In addition to making research contacts, traveling, setting up interviews, and going about daily life, I've been taking photos of just about everything (at least in public places), collecting museum publications, familiarizing myself with the Polish-language literature on museums, memory/history, and national identity (this kind of "library fieldwork" is an interesting process in itself, to be discussed in some future post) and scribbling down field notes - or something resembling them - when I can.
Methodology, and methodological training, in cultural anthropology are notoriously vague - although perhaps necessarily so. For one thing, field sites and research situations are incredibly diverse, so while it's possible to train students in the basics of fieldwork - how to conduct interviews, a basic understanding of what "participant observation" means, etc. - generalizable methods are difficult to teach. For another, a major part of anthropological research, particularly for those of us doing fieldwork outside the culture we grew up in, involves getting to know systems of knowledge that may not necessarily correspond with our own worldviews and assumptions about what "research" and "knowledge" are, and about what counts as important. For this reason our research plans can only take us so far; part of fieldwork is realizing the limitations of our own cultural constructs, and letting the direction of our projects be shaped by what we encounter in our field sites.
Still, these realizations are only so helpful when one's train of thought begins to run something like, "I've been here three months and I've barely gotten any data yet! What if I get home at the end of this year and realize I don't have anything I can use? Is that even possible? What am I even doing with my life, anyway?!?"
In an effort to keep on track - to give my research some direction outside of the interviews and other research activities that are part of my formal research plan, and to remind myself that, even during the times that I'm not actively engaged in formal research activities, I am indeed learning something - I've started keeping a fieldwork log, as recommended in the excellent research methods book Research Methods in Anthropology, by H. Russell Bernard. I write down what I'm planning to do each day, research-wise, on one side of a notebook page (whether it's looking up a particular thing, contacting a particular person, going to a meeting or event related to my research, or otherwise). On the other side of the page, I write down what I actually did that day, including things I've learned or observed that relate to my project, or anything unusual, confusing, or that I'd like to learn more about. So far, it's been helpful, both as a sort of to-do list and in helping me keep track of what I'm learning
Any anthropologists/other fieldworkers reading this? If so, what are your methods for writing up field notes? How do you understand "fieldwork," and how do you deal with the ambiguity of what it means to do this kind of research?
After this week is our mid-semester break, and I'll be spending the first part of said break conducting research interviews in various cities in Poland. Do następnego razu (until next time)!

On “Fieldwork,” “Science,” and Meaning: Reflections on Two Months (and counting) in Poland

2011-12-13T10:11:00.000-08:00

(Originally written for the departmental newsletter, but re-posted here.)

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For a little over two months, I’ve been living in Poznań, a city in west-central Poland, conducting fieldwork on the presentation of national identity in new, multi-mediated museums – and the viewpoints of the museum workers and volunteers on this – here and in several other cities in Poland. Poznań is the fifth largest city in Poland, with a population of about 556,000, and according to legend, may or may not be the site of the founding of the Polish state.
Most of what I’ve been doing so far has involved meeting people here (by means of my admittedly limited Polish language skills – fortunately, many people here speak English fluently, and my Polish is improving!) and navigating life in Poland (including the unpredictable public transit system, which, like much of urban Poland, is under construction in preparation for the Euro 2012 soccer matches in June). Formal “research” has been a bit slower in getting started, and this has perhaps been the most surprising thing to me about fieldwork so far. On one hand, to an anthropologist, everything – from shopping in the grocery store to conducting formal interviews and surveys – is in a certain sense “research,” because by doing it, we learn more about the culture in which we are immersed. In practice, it’s a bit more complicated, as I discovered while trying to refine my formal research plan for my project. Where do we draw the line between life and fieldwork? When does a friend become a research informant, and vice versa? When do we step back from just being and pull out our field notebooks or voice recorders?
As social and cultural anthropologists, our most important research instruments are our empathy, our curiosity and openness, and our humanity in general; our research results and theories develop less out of rigorous lab tests than out of unpredictable, and often serendipitous, interactions with fellow humans. Anthropology is, as a quote often attributed to anthropologist Alfred Kroeber puts it, “the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities.” Indeed, I envision what we do as scientific. We come into the field with our “hypotheses” – not only our formal predictions about what our fieldwork will yield based on data gathered from previous experience and reading, but our own culturally conditioned assumptions, biases, and perspectives – and have these tested and, more often than not, challenged, through our life experience in the field. Our “experiments” are the stuff of everyday interaction – the stories, conversations, insights, and inevitable silly questions and “communicative blunders” (Briggs 1986) that come about not only through the formal research activities specified in our project descriptions, but through simply living. We work according to ethical standards and commonly accepted, time-tested fieldwork methods – although when one’s research concerns people, who are both research participants and interlocutors, the practice of research is often as much a matter of bricolage (Lévi-Strauss 1966) – specifically, of constructing meaning and insight out of available cultural materials – than of rigidly following a defined plan. And the significance of our research? In the best-case scenario, a genuine deepening of intercultural and intersubjective understanding – a recognition of not only the differences, but the commonalities, between ourselves and our culture and that of our research informants, and a development of theoretical understandings about human behavior and the world that cross and transcend cultural boundaries. In a time when politicians in the U.S. and other countries frequently discount the merits of humanistic disciplines – some using “anthropology” as a metaphor for a useless education (Savage Minds 2011) – this is, I believe, the necessary insight and importance our humanistic, and scientific, discipline can offer.
My question about how to draw the line between “life” and “fieldwork” raises a further insight for me: Formal fieldwork is, in a way, a sort of magnified, reflexive version of the processes we go through in encountering, and making meaning out of, any social and cultural environment in which we find ourselves. Fieldwork is, it seems, less a matter of drawing a strict line between life and research than of reflecting on, and finding the meaning in, what we encounter. As I still have at least ten months left here in Poland, I’ll keep you posted on my adventures, and on what I learn from them.

References:

Briggs, Charles.
1986 Learning How to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Social Science Research. New York: Cambridge.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude.
1968. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Savage Minds.
2011. “Governor of Florida: We don’t need no anthropologists.” Accessed 4 December 2011 from here.

The triumphant return of the famous and brilliant Research Blog™!

2011-11-02T10:38:00.000-07:00

(Okay, so in reality it’s neither famous nor particularly brilliant. But it has in fact returned.)
First, a brief update on what I’ve been doing for the past year, research-wise. I put together a more or less concrete project (specifically, I’ll be interviewing museum and cultural center employees/volunteers in several different Polish cities), finished writing up my proposal and position papers, passed my qualifying exam as of May 18 of this year, and just last week, received the go-ahead from the Institutional Review Board to start collecting data (although I still need to translate my forms into Polish). Progress!
Unfortunately I have not yet managed to secure funding for my project, beyond a departmental grant. Faced with the choice between putting off fieldwork despite having finished all my other requirements, leaving grad school after 4 years due to lack of funding, and doing the fieldwork one way or another, I chose option #3, which meant more student loans than I want to think about. Hopefully it’ll pay off, and in the meantime, I’m continuing to apply and re-apply for grants. Wish me luck, and send me any successful-grant-writing tips you may have!
As of today I’ve been back in Poland (this time in Poznan) for one month, one week, and three days. I’ve been mostly getting used to everyday life here, taking classes, and meeting people, and just got back from an amazing trip to Bialystok and the Podlasie area in eastern Poland, where we visited a variety of Catholic and Orthodox churches and Tatar Muslim mosques, other historic and cultural sites, and the Bialowieza Forest (oldest original forest in Europe!). My Polish is (slowly) improving, although I still have a way to go before I’ll be anywhere near fluent. I’m working on an article that’s due at the end of this month (I’ll probably post a summary/brief sketch of what I’m planning to submit on here within the next few days). I’m also going to a conference in Warsaw on memory in Central and Eastern Europe in a few weeks (I’m not presenting, but still should be interesting). And hopefully I should be able to start interviews and meetings in the next few weeks.
Off to get some reading done! Further updates coming soon.

Mapping Pre-fieldwork

2010-09-13T12:10:00.000-07:00

Since returning from Poland and trying to figure out exactly what all this information I've collected (pictures, brochures, notes, etc.) means and what to do with it - in particular, how to turn it into a project with clear-cut questions and goals - one thing I've been really struck by is the role of place (and materiality more broadly) to memory, and the complex relationship of these to digital media. Media and globalization allow people to more easily and quickly communicate with other people, and learn about places, events, and cultural phenomena, around the world. On one hand, this contributes to a sense of "placelessness" and mobility - the idea that individuals can physically move around and yet remain connected to familiar people, information, and social networks, or the idea that, as with Second Life, one can actually create and build contexts for interaction, apart from existing physical-world contexts. (Coming of Age in Second Life is a good recent ethnography that deals with this topic fairly extensively.)
On the other, technology is also being used as another means of associating meaning with physical-world locations and objects. (I'm very aware of this every time I attempt to find my way around San Diego, which is quite difficult without the use of my GPS.) This is, of course, continuous with much older technologies - e.g., maps, walking routes - but digital media allows for more interactive content, such as associating text, photos, videos, etc. with locations on maps, or even in the physical world - such as with QR Codes. I'd seen these around, but hadn't really paid attention or known what they were until I saw them attached to some of the historical sites in Łódź.
With regard to some of my own data, I've been playing around with ZeeMaps, which is a Web site that lets you add your own info tags and media content to Google maps. Organizing photos and information by place - e.g., tagging particular cafes, street corners, etc. - rather than by name, description, or album, like I would if I were labeling them on, for instance, Facebook, has proved an interesting sort of experiment in thinking about how memory is organized via digital media. Here's an as-yet-unfinished map of some of the places I visited during my trip this summer, some with photos and brief descriptions.

Krakow Part 2, Łódź, and Warsaw (again)

2010-08-06T10:30:00.000-07:00

After 19 hours of flying and hanging out in airports, I'm back in San Diego (and, after a day and a half, more or less over the jet lag)...still in the process of adjusting back to while trying to be moderately productive. Now to work on going back through all my notes and pictures and figuring out what I can come up with in terms of useful things for a fieldwork proposal.
I've been ridiculously busy (or possibly just lazy), and therefore haven't written on here in a while, so here's a (not-so) brief recap of my last week and a half in Poland. The second half of class went pretty well. I continued working on Polish grammar (although I'm still by no means fluent, especially when I'm speaking and can't think of the proper word endings on the spot, I think I understand it a little better now!) Now that I'm back home and no longer surrounded by native Polish speakers, it'll be somewhat more difficult to get speaking and reading practice, so I need to be disciplined about keeping up with studying. Our guide for some of the sightseeing tours around Krakow, an American guy living there who taught himself Polish while and before moving there, suggested reading some of the Polish newspapers online as a good way of getting language practice. I also picked up a few books (Polish-language graphic novels at Centrum Komiksu in Warsaw, and English-Polish bilingual poetry books published by Wydawnictwo Literackie) that will help me practice, as well as a few CDs of Polish bands. Yay for "fun reading" that also counts as research. In any case, though, I think I'll definitely need to take a few more language classes either before or when I actually get there for my fieldwork.
Other than that, during my second week in Krakow, I visited the Ethnographic Museum (Muzeum Etnograficzne). The slogan posted above the front door (in English and Polish) is "My Museum - A Museum About Me," which seems to reflect the museum's focus on the ethnography of Poland specifically (at least as far as I could tell from the exhibits that were up when I visited). The first floor had rooms for visitors to walk through and model buildings, representing typical houses and rooms from the late 19th and early 20th century in Krakow and the Podhale region. (There was also an exhibit called "Islam Orientation Ornament," featuring Islamic art from the Middle East and Africa, which required an additional ticket - given that I got there about 45 minutes before closing, I unfortunately didn't have time to check this one out.) In addition to houses, they had exhibitions of a fulling mill, a school, a potter's oven, and an oil mill. The rooms were either labeled "reconstruction" or "arrangement," but I wasn't sure if this implied anything about whether the objects were original or not, or whether this just referred to how the curators had arranged the objects. The second floor had an exhibit on life in rural Poland, with an extensive collection of objects ranging from newspapers to children's toys to kitchen utensils; it also, like the Warsaw ethnographic museum, included a section on annual rituals in Poland. I talked with a few of the tour guides, who told me that I had been the only English-speaking visitor there all day (although apparently they get French tourists fairly often). On the museum's top floor, there was an "object study" featuring chests from different Polish regions and different time periods, with information (in the form of a Polish/English bilingual brochure) about where they came from and what they were used for (mostly, in the case of the ones displayed, for dowries).
Later in the week, we took a tour of Nowa Huta (the "New Steelworks"), a district of Krakow that was originally planned as an ideal socialist city. It's well known as one of the most famous examples of socialist realist architecture, and during the 1980s, it became an important place for demonstrations and protests by the Solidarity movement. Near there is the Wanda Mound (Kopiec Wandy), which according to legend is the burial place of an 8th-century Polish princess. (Evidently this has never been verified by archaeologists.)
There's also an interesting public-art project going on in Krakow called Chopin in the City. The composer Frédéric Chopin is an important cultural/national figure in Poland (the airport in Warsaw is even named after him!) The project, according to the Web site, places public-art projects around the city (for instance, a walk-in dome made up of speakers playing Chopin's music, set up outside the Galeria Krakowska mall) to use "non-standard actions and modern technologies" to bring Chopin's music into public spaces in new ways. Pretty cool.
I left Krakow on Saturday and spent a few days in Łódź, which is between Krakow and Warsaw, and is basically a former industrial city in the process of re-inventing itself as a cultural and technological center. It's known as a center of Polish cinematography, with a famous film school and cinematography museum. Łódź also has the Manufaktura, a former factory complex that has been converted into a shopping and entertainment center with stores, restaurants, bars, clubs, a movie theater, a science museum, and even outdoor volleyball and bungee jumping. It's also an interesting place culturally speaking - they have the Festival of the Dialogue of Four Cultures, which showcases the town's multi-cultural history (of Polish, Jewish, German, and Russian residents). (Unfortunately, the festival wasn't taking place while I was there.)
The hostel I stayed in, Flamingo Hostel, was really nice - it had only been open for about a year, and so everything was fairly new (and apparently, not many people know it exists - I only had one roommate in a 6-person room for all three nights!) However, it appeared to be actively under construction while I was staying there. The first night, I attempted to take a shower in our bathroom, which featured a bathtub with a shower head and no curtain. When I woke up the next day, we had a shower curtain and a holder for the shower head, which was definitely not there the night before. Weird.
For my last night in Poland, I headed back to Warsaw and once again stayed at the Oki Doki Hostel, where I had been for my first few days there. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone planning to visit Warsaw - both the guests and the staff are very helpful and friendly, and they have tons of maps, brochures, etc. with suggestions of things to do around Warsaw. I headed out to the Stare Miasto (Old Town), then promptly got caught in a rainstorm and spent an hour or so hiding from the weather in a nearby Pizza Hut (the ever-so-traditionally-Polish dining establishment). After walking around Warsaw and Stare Miasto for a bit, I headed back to the hostel, where I attempted (with moderate success, I think) to speak Polish with some of the other people working/staying there. My flight was at 7 a.m. (again, for future reference, not the most pleasant time to be at the airport, but probably significantly cheaper than scheduling it later)...so I had to wake up at 4 a.m. and head to the airport. After 19 hours altogether of flights and layovers (first from Warsaw to Brussels, then from Brussels to Atlanta [during which my suitcase somehow lost its retractable handle in transit], then finally from Atlanta to San Diego), I finally got back home.
All in all, a great (and hopefully productive) trip. I picked up a ton of notes, photos, brochures, etc. that will hopefully help me write this dissertation proposal...so far I've got a few vague ideas about technology, memory, and the mapping of public space, tourism and the publicizing of culture and history/memory, and the relationships between public and private, and individual and collective, memory. Now to actually sit down and start writing...

Wandering in Kraków and Zakopane

2010-07-25T09:19:00.000-07:00

...and the adventures continue. I'm beginning to be marginally less confused by Polish grammar, although I still can't get the case endings (and, quite frequently, the verb conjugations) right, especially when I'm speaking and don't have time to think about it. Yesterday I went to Zakopane with some other people from the language school. We went hiking on one of the trails, which turned out to be pretty difficult (although amazingly beautiful). I eventually did make it to the little restaurant area at the top of the trail, although about 10 minutes after everyone else in my group got there. (Evidently I am ridiculously out of shape, although I already knew that.) Even so, I got some great pictures of the forest and rivers, and talked with some Polish kids on the way up. (Their English was much better than my Polish, although I guessed they were probably only about 12 or 13 years old...interesting commentary on the American education system's [lack of] emphasis on language learning, relative to that of the rest of the world.) After getting lunch at the restaurant there, we hiked back down (it was going to rain, so we couldn't spend much time up there). The views from the top of the trail were amazing. We could see the forests, and the tops of the mountains, for what looked like miles around (I'm pretty sure some of them had snow on them, even at this time of year). I've got some pictures and videos which I have not yet uploaded to my computer, but which I'll post on here and Facebook when I do that.
After the hike, we headed down into the town of Zakopane, which is kind of a resort town that's well-known especially for skiing and winter tourism. The main street was incredibly crowded, and a bunch of us spent the hour we had in town sitting at a cafe and talking. It's apparently also a culturally distinctive region in that the Górale live there. We headed back to Kraków around 5 p.m., then got some dinner at a vegetarian restaurant downtown which I forget the name of at the moment.
I spent this morning doing work on my computer at my host family's place, then decided that if I was going to have to do work, I should at least do it outside where I might actually meet some people. So I grabbed a zapiekanka for lunch, headed to a cafe in the city center, worked a bit more, and have spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around in Kazimierz, Kraków's historically Jewish area, which is full of really interesting old buildings and museums (including the Old Synagogue, which is a division of the Kraków Historical Museum).
I'm currently using the free wi-fi at Czajownia, a tea place just outside the aforementioned museum. It's semi-expensive, but the atmosphere is pretty interesting - they have a huge selection of tea (their menu is literally about 30 pages long), with extensive descriptions of each one, how it's made, where it comes from, and other random information (one was described as something like "ideal for drinking while reading the Russian classics," another as something like "perfect for after a walk alone in the park at twilight"). I'm also looking up travel information - I haven't yet decided where would be best to spend my last four days in Poland after my class finishes, both in terms of seeing interesting things and in terms of transportation logistics. (My plane leaves from Warsaw at 7 a.m. on Aug. 4, and so I need to be back there in time. Rather than booking a hostel room for a few hours, or taking one of the night trains which I hear are not exactly the safest or most pleasant, I figure that, unless I end up back in Warsaw for those four days, I'll just head back there by train or bus late in the day on the 3rd and spend the night in the airport...probably should have thought of that when I booked the tickets.)
And now I am off to find dinner and probably do some further wandering around Kazimierz and the Rynek Główny (super-touristy and usually very crowded city center area, which has got some pretty cool street performers and booths selling random things, as well as a statue of Adam Mickiewicz [Poland's national poet] and a church with a trumpeter who plays every hour to announce the hour). Do zobaczenia!

Nie rozumiem! (Or, adventures with Polish grammar)

2010-07-21T07:50:00.000-07:00

Just finished the second day of the two-week Polish language class I'm taking here (Monday wasn't officially a class day, since we just had our language tests and placements and then a pronunciation workshop). It's a lot more difficult than I expected - the classes are conducted entirely in Polish. Most likely this is one of the best and fastest ways of learning, and I'm learning a lot in such a short time, but I feel like I'm having a really hard time keeping up. I'm not sure if this is just my own frustration at thinking I understood something and then realizing I had no idea, or if I really am getting behind in the lessons. On top of that I've been randomly getting up at 6 a.m. and therefore going about my day tired and annoyed because I haven't slept enough. Yay, jet lag.
Either way, I suppose this kind of frustration is something anyone spending any amount of time in another culture or learning another language runs into...I guess the important part is recognizing it.
Prior to coming here, I studied Polish for a year (3 quarters) through Rosetta Stone and LiveMocha (basically a free version of Rosetta Stone, and with a social networking component...rather awesome site), and also met up with a few Polish speakers around the San Diego area. UCSD doesn't have Polish classes per se, but they do have a program through the linguistics department called the Language Lab (which is amazingly awesome for those of us who want to learn languages that aren't as commonly taught at the university). Students can sign up for a 2- to 4-credit class, which gives us access to self-teaching materials (there are several different curricula you can choose from; one is Rosetta Stone, and they also have textbooks and, I think, video courses of some sort). We learn on our own using the material, and then take a midterm and a final each quarter. There is an instructor of record who assigns grades, but the exams are scored by the software.
Having gone through the Rosetta Stone program was pretty informative with regard to basic vocabulary and common expressions, and so I'm able to communicate at a very basic level and, at least some of the time, be understood (I hope). However, the Rosetta Stone software works by showing pictures and the corresponding words in the target language - there are no translations at all. (Incidentally, LiveMocha's is structured the same way, but you can click on a button and get a translation if you want.) Which is good because it forces you to think in the language you're learning, but it works better for some things than others. Grammar, for instance, is really difficult to get across without explicit explanations. Some of the time I could infer what was going on, but more often than not I had to post on forums, ask someone, or just guess.
The class I'm taking here is really helping to fill in the information I'm missing with regard to grammar, rules of the language, etc. (Now if I could only keep up with all of it!) Polish is a much more complicated language than I realized! First, there are the verbs and their conjugations to learn. (I'm not going to go into much detail since I'm pretty sure there's a lot I don't understand yet, but Polish Blog, among other sites, has some useful explanations.) The verbs (as in many other languages) are conjugated according to first/second/third person, the number of people involved, (sometimes) gender, etc...there are a few different categories of verbs that have different conjugations, in addition to the irregular ones.
In addition to basic verbs, there are different prefixes and derivations. Sometimes these form completely new, but related, words, and sometimes they distinguish between perfective verbs (having to do with actions that have been or will be completed) and imperfective verbs (having to do with actions that are taking place, but are not necessarily completed). (For instance, the verb "czytać" means "to read," but if you add the prefix "prze-," which means roughly something like "in front of" or "before," to it, you get "przeczytać," which can either be a perfective form of the verb or can mean something like "to look over"...I think. If any Polish speakers are reading this, please correct me!)
The nouns and adjectives also change, though, because the Polish language uses declension. I had seen the word changes while I was studying with Rosetta Stone, but wasn't sure what they meant. There are a lot of other languages that use it too (Latin, Greek, and German, as well as other Slavic languages, are a few, but there are a lot more), but I had never learned it explicitly before (the only other two languages that I've studied, other than English, are French and Japanese, neither of which uses anything like it). So I spent this morning trying to teach myself what the different cases referred to in preparation for encountering them in Polish. (Surprisingly, the WikiBooks entry on the Polish language has actually been pretty helpful.)
These are just a few of the grammatical aspects of Polish. Interesting stuff, but incredibly complicated, especially when I'm feeling pressured to learn all I can while I'm here and surrounded by Polish speakers. I'm also, intentionally or otherwise, learning a lot about the limitations of language self-teaching, as I'm now encountering all the (as it turns out, fairly important) things I didn't learn from Rosetta Stone. Hopefully by the time I head back to San Diego, I'll have enough of a foundational knowledge of both vocabulary and grammar to keep learning and practicing without being completely bewildered.

More Museums, Language Classes, and Further Excitement

2010-07-19T02:13:00.000-07:00

I'm now in Kraków! Just took my language placement test (apparently I'm level 1B, which is roughly advanced beginner). I got here yesterday afternoon after taking the train from Warsaw, which took about three hours. It was pretty crowded, and so I had to sit on my suitcase in the little entrance area between train cars. (Also, when we passed through a storm, we got rained on inside the train. Excitement. There was a nice view of the countryside and some little villages from the windows, though.) There were some interesting people sitting near me, though - some students from Poland and some travelers from England - who I talked to on the way here.
I took the taxi to my host family's house - they live a bit outside of the main city, but the tram which goes directly into downtown (for only 2.5 zloty, or about $1, each way) is only a block away. I actually managed to hold a conversation with them in Polish! (Well, rather ungrammatically and with lots of hand gestures on my part, but still, I was quite proud of this.) Later, I went into town and found a Coffee Heaven (essentially the Polish version of Starbucks, and just as ubiquitous here. Considering that it's air-conditioned and has free Wi-Fi, the name has proven rather appropriate.) I Skyped my parents to let them know I'd gotten here OK, then figured out tram directions from where I'm staying to the language school with the help of a Polish guy who lives in San Francisco, but happened to be visiting Kraków. After leaving the cafe, I got a first-hand experience of the infamous Central/Eastern European weather...got caught in a downpour without an umbrella. :/ (Luckily, I managed to find a store selling them on the way to the tram stop.) At least it's cooled off a bit now...it's been really hot and humid the past few days, and carrying most of my stuff with me while walking around the city hasn't helped. (Since the hostel had been switching my room each night, I figured it was easier to just take anything I might need throughout the day - laptop, books, etc. - with me instead of going into and out of the cloakroom until I could check back in.)
Before heading here from Warsaw, I also had a chance to see quite a few other interesting things on Friday. I visited the State Ethnographic Museum (Państwowe Muzeum Etnograficzne). The first floor had an exhibit on the history of the museum itself, how it got its collections, etc. They have objects from anthropological field expeditions all over the world, but Polish anthropology also seems to include a lot of fieldwork within Poland as well, particularly on rural areas and folk art/craft. There's a gallery devoted to "folk art," which seems to designate non-professional artists and includes both contemporary and historical works. There's also one with artifacts showing traditional handicraft (which they define as manufacture for household use). On the top floor, there's an exhibit on traditional Polish annual rituals for holidays and seasons.
I spent about three hours in the museum, then headed out to the main street, where EuroPride was happening. This was the first year it was being held in a Central/Eastern European country. It was pretty heavily policed - there were officers standing in the street and we weren't allowed to cross until the parade had passed by - and there were a few counter-protesters here and there, but seemed overall to be fairly peaceful, at least from where I was standing. Here's a BBC News link to a recap of the event: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-10670489
I also visited the Warsaw Rising Museum. It's fairly new and apparently has been pretty well received in comparison to many other museums in the area for its use of interactive exhibits and multimedia. Because of this, I figured it might be informative fieldwork-wise to see it. There are three floors, arranged chronologically as you walk upstairs from the events leading up to the Warsaw Uprising to the event itself. The museum's floors and walls are designed as if you're actually walking through the city in 1944, and there are different kinds of displays - historical objects in cases, information on the walls to read, and handouts for visitors to pick up (most interestingly, little calendar pages that have each date and what happened then in 1944). There's also a big screen showing films shot by people involved in the Warsaw Uprising in the center of the museum, which you can see as you walk around on the different floors.
After leaving the museum, I managed to get lost looking for the bus. There are no centralized transport schedules, at least that I could find, so I basically got around by asking people which bus to take to the central train station/Palace of Science and Culture. I was hoping to also see the Poster Museum, but it closed at 6, and by the time I figured out which bus to take, it was 5:30. I headed back to the city center, did some shopping in the areas nearby (the Empik media store is pretty cool - didn't buy anything there, although I did conclude from the displays that people in Poland are just as inexplicably obsessed with Twilight as are people in the States), and then back to the hostel, where I hung out in the cafe/bar with some of the other people staying there.
I'm currently in a cafe about a block from the language school. I have discovered that Facebook evidently gets very confused when you go to another country and try to log in...first they asked me to verify my account, then they tried to send me a text message with a confirmation code (absurdly high international roaming charges aside, my phone doesn't get service here anyway). It did eventually let me log on, though. Good to know for future reference. Free Wi-Fi seems to be pretty readily available, though, so if nothing else I can keep posting on here.
My first language class starts in 20 minutes. Off to go learn about Polish pronunciation!

Warsaw, Day 2 (7/16/10)

2010-07-17T13:30:00.000-07:00

Got up much later than I wanted to, and then had to switch rooms (and carry all my stuff around in a backpack all day!), so I didn't end up leaving the hostel until about 11:30. One of the archivists from the KARTA Center e-mailed me back that I could meet with her this afternoon, so I had some time before that. I explored some of the area near the hostel – there are some bookstores on the street on the other side of us (Marszalkowska is on one side of the block where I'm staying, and it seems to be one of the fairly major streets in this area. Facing the doors where we leave the hostel is a park, and on the other side of the building is Kredytowa street, where the bookstores are). I bought some Polish-language newspapers (not sure how much of them I'll actually be able to read, but I'll try!) and some language learning books. I stopped by the Muzeum Etnograficzne (Ethnographic Museum) and found out that admission is actually free tomorrow, so I think I'll come back then. :) I did end up walking around the bookshop and buying a catalogue put out by the museum, called “Etnografia Nowa” (New Ethnography) - it's mostly in Polish but there is some English content, and it describes the ethnographic museum, what it means, how it is changing, and whether it is still relevant. Quite useful for my research interests.
After navigating the Metro (not too hard, since there's only one line going north and south), I headed to the KARTA center. On my way there, I found a comic book store where I got some graphic novels in Polish, by Polish authors. I wonder if any of them will be attending Comic-Con in San Diego this year? I'll still be out of the country for that.
After that I met with the KARTA archivist and talked with her for about an hour and a half, and got to tour the building and the archives. Their entire collection is open to the public, except in July when they're closed (although people are still working there, hence the reason I was able to visit and meet with them). KARTA is an organization that collects and archives historical documents, especially those having to do with the repression of people under state socialism as well as the opposition to it (particularly in the form of the Solidarity movement). It started as a sort of underground journal publishing analyses of life under repressive conditions as well as art, poetry, etc. in the early '80s when publishing certain types of political material was still illegal. (The journal itself is still publishing, although obviously looks much different by this point.) They focus a lot on preserving and documenting individual histories and memories in particular, as opposed to official narratives of history. I was amazed at how a collection of documents and information that I imagine must have been incredibly difficult to collect and maintain, and that had to be distributed among individuals rather than having a centralized location, has now come to be archived and organized in one location. It must have taken an incredible amount of effort on the part of the people who had kept the documents in the first place, as well as the people who put the central archive together and are currently working on it. That, and the fact that people took such care to preserve these documents is now providing an incomparable collection of primary sources for Polish history...preserving, and continuing to add to, documentation of histories that might have otherwise been forgotten, but that are now able to take material and textual form and be heard by the public. That said, I was also surprised by the building itself. The KARTA center is this unassuming little office on a street full of apartments and across from a park; the only indication it's even there from the outside is a sign on the wall outside the door.
On a completely unrelated note, my camera seems to be officially broken. It figures. I took some videos with my iPod and bought two disposable cameras, and I'm also going to try and use my phone camera (Verizon doesn't get reception here anyway, so there's no chance of someone texting me and me ending up with a $1000 phone bill...I hope.)

Warsaw, Day 1 (1/2)

2010-07-16T00:35:00.000-07:00

I'm in Warsaw! Actually got here yesterday afternoon, but have been too busy to post anything. I checked into my hostel around 4 p.m. Turns out there was a mix-up with my reservation and they thought I hadn't confirmed, but luckily they had rooms open, so I'll still be at the same place for all three days. (Different rooms, though.)
After getting settled in my room, I headed out for a walk around the surrounding area...having no idea what was really around this particular area, but just to check things out. I ended up visiting the Palace of Culture and Science (Pałac Kultury i Nauki, or PKiN, in Polish). It's the tallest building in Poland, with 52 floors, and it was built in 1955 as a gift from the (then) Soviet Union to Poland. It apparently is, or at least was, somewhat controversial due to both the associations with the Soviet Union and its aesthetic appearance - according to my guidebook, it has the nickname "The Wedding Cake" because of its multi-layered look. I don't necessarily know if that's the first association I'd make - my first impression was of some sort of clock tower - but judge for yourself.
After paying the 15zł (around $4.72) admission, I went up to the 30th floor, where there's an observation deck from which you can see pretty much all of Warsaw. I got some great views of the city (and, perhaps most prominently, the advertising around the city center), which I'll post as soon as my camera starts working correctly. I think I may have to venture into one of the electronics stores here and buy a new SD card, since mine seems to be corrupted. There was also an exhibition on art, science, and the environment going on - some of the things featured were digitally altered photos of landmarks having been overtaken by nature (think that History Channel show "Life After People") and photos of families around the world with the different types of food they ate in a week. Interestingly enough, I saw some similarly-themed exhibits around San Diego a few months ago, at the Calit2 gallery on campus. Most of the rest of the building, other than the observation deck and cafe (on the same floor) and the exhibit on the first floor (some of which was also displayed around the observation deck area), seems to be either theaters or offices.
There seemed to be a fair amount of people still there for it being almost closing time (I got there at 7 p.m.), both tourists and people from here. There's also a little park around the Palace, which I walked through a bit before heading back to my hostel.
Anyway, off to go explore the city some more and hopefully get this camera working...

Pre-Fieldwork Adventures, Part 1

2010-07-15T02:18:00.000-07:00

(Update: I wrote this post this morning. Since then, I have found Internet! I had to pay for it, though.)

So I've made it through two absurdly long flights (on top of not having slept much the past few days anyway because of packing, and the amount of unrelated work stuff I had to finish while I knew I would still have reliable Internet access), and I'm now sitting in the lobby of a Courtyard by Marriott hotel outside the Prague airport, waiting for my laptop battery to charge. (Turns out I don't need to use the voltage adapter for it, by the way – the plug converter worked just fine, and my computer hasn't caught on fire yet. Yay.) Unfortunately, there is no free Internet in this particular lobby, and I'm writing this in OpenOffice. By the time you read this, it will be the future! ::cue sci-fi-music:: (Yes, I obviously need sleep.)

I got here a little after 7 a.m. (local time), and my flight to Warsaw doesn't leave until 2:30 p.m., and I have to change planes and re-check-in anyway...so I figured I would go outside and walk around a bit instead of sitting in the airport for the entire time. Hopefully having left the airport won't make the check-in process too much more complicated. Also, because of having to go through customs, I now have a stamp on my passport from a country I've actually visited (as opposed to just ones where I've only stopped in the airport). One lifelong goal accomplished! :P

So...pre-fieldwork. What does this mean, anyway? Anyone's guess is probably as good as mine, although Open Anthropology Cooperative has a good brief summary of pre-fieldwork and its purposes. Mainly I'm trying to go see in person some of the places I've spent the past year reading about, meet potential research contacts for when I come back to do my “real” fieldwork, and work on refining some of my research questions. Right now my explanation of what I study, when people ask me, is some variation of “memory and history practices in Poland, how this is played out in the relationship between individual and collective/public/cultural memory, and how and whether these practices are being changed by the introduction of digital media.” A clearer project proposal than this time last year, but still vague and a bit internally disconnected. I hope to have it slightly more refined by the time I go back to San Diego.

I purposely didn't schedule too many specific activities during this trip, other than taking a two-week language course, because I figure the more uncommitted time I have, the more time to meet up with potential fieldwork contacts and just generally take advantage of interesting opportunities that come up. (There are certain things I definitely plan to see and do, though.) The most important thing, I think, was getting here in the first place, then once here, trying to get out of my comfort zone, linguistically and otherwise, as much as possible. I know I won't be doing any official interviewing, since I don't have an IRB and my grasp of the Polish language is as yet nowhere near where it needs to be to do in-depth interviews. (I am hopeful that the latter of these two will improve, even if not be entirely rectified, after I've taken this class.) Still, probably the biggest thing I'm worried about is that I won't manage to do anything useful research-wise...for instance, that I'll only manage to meet other English-speaking travelers, or that I won't be able to find anyone who has time to talk to me at the museums, etc. that I'm going to visit. (Of course, there is the view that anything I do while in Poland will be informative for potential fieldwork, even if it only involves learning how not to do fieldwork.)

I can't check in until 12:30, so that gives me 3 ½ hours to wander around Prague. Goals for the next few hours: find Internet access (preferably free) [done]; get a phone card and/or access Skype through said Internet access [done]; call my parents and let them know I got here OK [done]; send off transcripts I did while on the plane [done]; e-mail people from the places around Warsaw I'm planning on visiting tomorrow; figure out whether I'm actually going to try and do anything tonight or just go to sleep when I get to my hostel.

In light of recent events...

2010-03-03T16:43:00.000-08:00

Anyone who's reading this has likely heard about the recent racist events happening at UC San Diego...if not, here are some sites that have been posting updates regularly:
http://stopracismucsd.wordpress.com/
http://battlehate.ucsd.edu/
http://www.ucsdguardian.org/
http://teresawu.tumblr.com/
...and, of course, Twitter and Facebook.

This has all been said before in one form or another, but really...this whole situation is just awful and a mess for all involved. On the positive side, though, some much-needed changes and dialogues on campus are beginning to come about as people talk about the issues raised and what needs to be done.

Anyway, the grad students in our department, like many other UCSD departments, have come up with a statement on the events. We were told to "disseminate widely," so here it is:

Department of Anthropology Graduate Student Statement of Support

The graduate students of the Anthropology Department stand in solidarity
with the Black Student Union, their allies, and all those who have been
affected by and/or are protesting against the recent racist incidents on
and off campus. We condemn all racist and sexist acts with the
understanding that such events are not isolated but are situated within a
broader context of institutionalized inequality. UCSD administration,
faculty, staff, and students must address these conditions. The BSU list
of demands offers a constructive model for dismantling the institutional
forces that limit the representation of and support for historically
marginalized and disempowered groups in our university. We must hold the
administration accountable for addressing the demands in a concrete and
timely manner.

At this critical moment when substantial hikes in UC fees and tuition and
the increasing privatization of the university system threaten to further
restrict the representation of underprivileged groups in our campus
community, we recognize the urgent need for structural change that can
increase retention, yield, and access. Further, the BSU’s focus on
increasing spaces that encourage students to interrogate issues of race,
ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality is crucial given proposed funding
cuts to departments and programs that threaten to reduce the availability
of such spaces. In the midst of this crisis, we strongly support measures
designed to preserve and encourage critical thinking.

As we monitor the administration's actions, we are compelled to reflect on
the ways that we as students, faculty, and staff may also be implicated in
institutional and interpersonal racism and have a responsibility to enact
substantive change. The graduate students from the department of
anthropology acknowledge that current events have incited a sense of fear
and mistrust within the university. We reach out with empathy to all those
affected and remain committed to addressing injustice as members of the
campus community and as anthropologists. We would like to thank the
organizers for their tireless work and dedication.

AAA Roundup, Part 1

2009-12-17T15:47:00.001-08:00

So I’m back in San Diego, done (more or less) with end-of-the-quarter stuff, and finally have time to actually write something other than random tweets about the American Anthropological Association (AAA) annual meeting, which happened Dec. 2-6 in Philadelphia. (Only, what, two weeks late...?)
It was great being home, relatively speaking (I grew up in Pennsylvania, but on the other side of the state, in the Pittsburgh area)...I even got to see some snow while I was there. This does not happen in San Diego (although we have been having some rather un-Southern California-like rain this past week). Unfortunately, I didn’t get to do much sight-seeing while in Philly…any time not spent at the actual conference was devoted to either getting ready for our presentation at the “Africa Remixed” panel on Friday afternoon or finishing up papers and studying. Still, I saw some fascinating talks, and there were even more talks and panels (as well as film screenings, workshops, etc.) I wish I’d gotten to attend…there were just too many interesting things going on at once to see them all (as is usually the case with the AAA). So, here are a few summaries of the panels I did attend. (I am, unfortunately, working from notes that are two weeks old, so if I’ve gotten anything wrong or left anything important out, please let me know and I’ll update these!)
On Friday, I went to the “Creativity and Labor: Artists, Anthropology, and Knowledge-Making” session. Unfortunately I got there a bit late and missed the first talk. Zhanara Nauruzbayeva’s paper on commercial artists in Kazakhstan discussed how post-Soviet artists there have distanced themselves from Soviet trends in art; Soviet commercial artists were trained to create a particular style of art which contained elements of realism, but asserted Soviet ideology despite everyday living conditions. Contemporary artists, according to Nauruzbayeva’s paper, tend to reject the Soviet-trained style of art in favor of a more democratic style of artistic production and to work in forms such as new media and photography. Eran Livni’s paper on Bulgarian pop-folk discussed the “trashy” and “kitschy” quality of this genre of music and its relation to Bulgaria’s problems in adopting democracy and modernity. Bulgarian pop-folk performers often play recorded music rather than performing live; this is one way to decrease cost and attract concert attendees. Whereas politicians in Bulgaria are careful not to be associated with pop-folk, according to Livni’s paper, it is employed during election campaigns, and many Bulgarians identify with this music and its meanings. Thet Win’s paper, “In the Company of Artists,” in contrast to Nauruzbayeva’s and Livni’s, focused on artists in the San Francisco Bay Area. Win’s presentation dealt mainly with one informant, Diane, a Bay Area artist. For her informants, a societal opposition between art and labor (such as working in commercial art) complicates their subjectivities and affects; they live within these oppositions even as they struggle against them. According to the discussant, Christopher Steiner, all of the papers examined the fairly recent distinction prevalent in the U.S. and Europe between art and other forms of material visual culture, such as religious material culture and utilitarian craft. Another thing that tied the papers together, according to Steiner, was the theme of the shift from ordinary capitalism to neoliberal capitalism, which is associated with new definitions of art and labor, the status of artists, and related political anxiety being played out in these conflicts.
I also attended the panel “Intellectual Activisms and the Making of the New Europe,” reviewed by the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, where one major theme seemed to be the interconnections between national identities and the European Union. Douglas Holmes’ paper introducing the panel, “Ends of Identity,” discussed the challenges being faced in developing a multi-cultural identity for the European Union, among them the rise of extreme-right parties and movements that define themselves in terms of sentiments against minorities such as the Roma. William Schumann’s paper, “Integrating through Resistance,” discussed strategic engagements of local development assistance in Wales, including issues of determining what is legitimate development work and how local people engage with national and international organizations in this area. In Neringa Klumbyte’s presentation on European integration and the politics of laughter in Lithuania, she talked about the emergence of “political buffoons” – politicians who build their platform on laughter, irony, and cynicism – in Lithuania and argued that laughter can be used as a political mechanism that reshapes values, identities, citizenship, action, and the relationships among them. The politics of laughter, according to her paper, is an example of “antagonistic democracy” informed by difference and solidarity, intolerance and tolerance, and it defines the European political landscape. Jaro Stacul’s paper, “Shaping the New Europe in Post-Socialist Poland,” explored the meanings Poles attach to Europe as a cultural and political domain, particularly in the context of material sites and objects. Stacul’s fieldwork took place in Gdansk, site of the Gdansk shipyard where the Solidarity (Solidarność) trade union movement was founded in September 1980. Poland, at the center of Europe, represents a place where some of the continent’s ideological conflicts have been played out in extreme form. Poland’s EU accession is understood by many as a return to rather than a joining of Europe, and Gdansk is seen as a city with a European identity. Gdansk’s redevelopment in the context of postsocialist and EU accession is meant to revitalize a city in a state of decay, but it has also taken on political meaning as it has served to rewrite the city’s recent history at a time when the Polish economy is being reformed. The Gdansk shipyard, originally a material embodiment of socialism, came to symbolize Polish freedom after the Solidarity movement came about there, and it, too, is being redeveloped as part of a long-term project to revitalize the city’s image. The current revitalization of the history of Gdansk and Solidarity serves to establish a relationship of continuity between these events and Poland’s modernity. Discussant Douglas Holmes, in a response to this paper, elaborated on this theme of establishing continuity between past and present, discussing this initiative and the planned building of a “European Solidarity Center,” a museum that will commemorate the activities of Solidarity and other opposition movements, at the site as part of a larger vision of European modernity. Discussant Noelle Mole talked about the European identities that are being created through both material (such as the site Stacul studied) and immaterial (for instance, the collective sentiments and memories mentioned in Klumbyte’s and Stacul’s papers) dimensions. According to Holmes, many of these European identities are future-oriented. However, unsettling dimensions are also being revealed; for instance, movements that focus on ridiculing and/or vilifying the “other,” such as the groups Holmes mentioned in his introduction. Holmes also raised the question of what, with regard to these new identities, is taking place in youth culture as a possible direction for interesting future research.
Later that afternoon was a panel titled “Reflections on Subjectivity, Psychoanalysis, the Virtual, and the Imaginary,” which was reviewed by the Society for Psychological Anthropology. As it turned out, this panel included a diverse range of interpretations of this theme. One paper was by Lynn and George Vincentnathan, who studied a YouTube Eucharist desecration site. A major question was, “was this Web site an expression of hate?”, as well as questions of why the site’s creator would have posted these videos. Commenters on the Web site expressed a variety of opinions from support on the grounds that the site’s creator had freedom of speech, to offense on religious grounds, and various positions in between. The presenters’ analysis dealt with this phenomenon’s relation to identity on the Internet in a postmodern context of multiple identities. Another question raised dealt with whether militant atheists can be considered a community, as this community, it could be argued, constitutes itself around a lack or negation of belief rather than a belief system. A related question was how, then, activism is mobilized around this identity. Patricia Gherovici’s paper “Why Trans-Disciplinarity is Necessary to Deal with Transgenderism: From an Anthropology of Gender to a Psychoanalysis of Sexuality” argued that to understand the experiences of transgender people, we must look at the conjunction between the body and material reality from the perspectives of the individual, the psychosocial, and the historical. Yoram Bilu’s paper “‘We Want to See our King’:Virtuality, Iconophilia, and Apparitions in Messianic Chabad” argued that participants in the Chabad messianic movement is guided by a “virtuality” – a making of the absent Rebbe, identified as the Messiah, present through the use of objects and practices such as visual images, dreams, and apparitions.
The extremely fascinating, but unfortunately sparsely attended due to the 8 p.m. time slot, panel “Are the Sacred Tropes of Anthropology Worth Keeping? Lessons from Information Technology Studies” looked at traditional anthropological concepts including ritual, the superorganic, and memory in light of studies from computer technology and digital media. One of the major challenges to anthropology in the digital age is how our discipline, traditionally oriented toward cultural specificity and the local, will handle the multi-sited contexts becoming increasingly possible, and increasingly common, due to digital media. Panelists focused on specific concepts historically important to anthropology, linking them to phenomena in information technology. Thomas Malaby’s paper “Making Room beyond Ritual” argued that the rise of digital technology had made the institutional use of games possible on a broader scale, and this institutional use of games may be replacing the use of ritual. There is a distinction between the mode of experience known as playfulness and the cultural form of the game; however, in recent years, game-like elements and playfulness have increasingly entered into environments traditionally associated with work. Malaby argued that we can use ritual to study this phenomenon; in doing so, previously unknown insights might be possible. Games are understood by reference to their indeterminacy, whereas rituals are supposed to bring about a desired outcome; however, ritual can go wrong, and its outcome is thus likewise contingent. Some test cases Malaby gave for his argument included Linden Labs’ Second Life, a virtual world which provides users with a mixture of constraints and possibilities, and Web sites such as Google’s image labeler game and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, in which companies get Internet users to do work (e.g., in the case of Google, tagging its images) by framing it as a game for participants. The question of open-endedness versus authority in games is a long-standing one; anthropology, Malaby argued, is ready to contend with it.
Heather Horst’s paper dealt with kinship and social networks in the digital age, and her questions dealt with whether new media produce social connectedness, fragmentation, or both; despite the increased possibilities for communication, these media may not compensate entirely for broader shifts in which society is characterized by isolation. Her paper featured a case study of “Ann,” an 18-year-old girl in Silicon Valley. Ann’s personal space on MySpace resembled her room at home appearance-wise, decorated in the same colors and themes. Although her parents forbade her from using MySpace on the grounds that it was a bad influence, she experienced pressure from her friends to have one; they made one for her, but as she looked forward to going to college, she lost interest in MySpace in favor of Facebook. For North American adolescents, individuality and its development are particularly valued. Social-networking Internet sites, for teenagers, represent spaces for interplay between the private and the public. Sites like MySpace and Facebook shape the way adolescents express their individuality. For them, the use of social networking sites is intertwined with everyday life; online and offline lives reaffirm one another. The self in this context, according to Horst’s paper, is constructed as an “aesthetic” based on balance and continuity among relationships, places, and objects. The paper argues that this seems to be part of a wider normative order encouraging participation in the public sphere.
F. Allan Hanson’s paper, “New Wine in Old Skins: Resuscitating the Superorganic,” discussed the idea of the superorganic as an alternative to methodological individualism, or the idea that social phenomena can be explained by reference to individuals. However, since superorganic phenomena did not have a shared physical substance in the same way that individuals did, the concept of the superorganic eventually lost favor. New phenomena, Hanson argues, necessitate new ways of thinking and thus call for its resurrection: for instance, genetically hybrid plants and people whose bodies incorporate prosthetic devices. Where, in light of these phenomena, are we to draw the boundaries of the individual? The idea of the superorganic, Hanson argues, has parallels with actor-network theory, distributed cognition, composite agency, and other theories. A problem lies in the fact that although all components of such a system are taken to have agency, not all have moral agency, and only those with moral agency can have moral responsibility. Even so, the majority of the actions that define our lives cannot be completed by individuals alone; Hanson thus argues that the superorganic has always been with us, and remains useful to think with for thinking about these new phenomena.
Lina Dib’s paper “Sensecams and Furry Robots: Information Technology’s Bid to Transform Memory” was based on her fieldwork in the UK. Machines, she argues, are redefining what counts as memory – does our memory, for instance, include digital and technical objects, or recording devices? She discussed “lifelogging” – an idea epitomized by Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBits project, in which he records virtually everything he sees and does. The underlying ideal seems to be perfect memory; however, as is pointed out in, for instance, Viktor Mayer-Schonberger’s recent book Delete, human forgetting has historically served important purposes. The challenge facing multiple disciplines, then, is how to understand human memory and to augment it with technological support. In this context of digital memory, Dib’s paper points out several important questions arise, including questions of how the relationship between public and private is being redefined with regard to memory; who these digitally captured memories belong to; what happens to memory when it is separated from the body; and how agency and moral competence are being redefined.
Jan English-Lueck was the discussant for this panel. She pointed out that these concepts are metaphors we think with, and studying digital technology allows us to refresh these “sacred tropes.” In addition to her specific comments on the papers, she pointed out that some questions anthropologists need to ask in this context concern the beliefs and practices revealed by these technologies, and what this tells us about the use of these tropes.
Well, that’s it for Wednesday’s panels (finally)…more to come!

Obligatory Introduction Post

2009-11-22T18:31:00.000-08:00

So...first post. Here's a bit about this blog and why I'm doing it.
I chose the title "Life at the Interface" because it reflects several of the things I'm interested in. As a psychological anthropologist, I focus on the interactions between individuals and their cultures. However, the binary between "online" and "offline" life and interaction is also fascinating. At the same time that it's becoming more blurred (for instance, many of us carry around Internet-connected cell phones and laptops as we move about our everyday life, taking our connections everywhere with us, whereas many of us also form friendships and relationships in virtual spaces), it's also becoming more interesting.
Digital media is without a doubt changing a lot of things - how we get our news and information and how we communicate with friends and family, just to name a few. But is it fundamentally changing the way we think, understand the world, socialize, and interact, or is it just providing a new context in which we do the same things? My guess is that it's a little of both.
In my opinion, much of traditional social science needs to re-assess its models of how culture and social interaction work in order to see if they still apply in the digital age. On the flip side, however, many studies of digital media (although by no means all, especially in recent years) have historically focused on the possibilities (whether positive or negative) of the technology, more so than looking at what unique, culturally and socially situated individuals actually do with the technology. Life online allows us, for example, to have multiple identities and to present ourselves however we want (e.g., user names, avatars, etc). However, do most people actually experience it this way?
I don't know the answers to any of these questions...however, these are some of the issues I plan to explore in my research. I'd love to hear from anyone else with thoughts on these things as well!