Bohannon – Shakespeare in the Bush

Shakespeare in the Bush
An American anthropologist set out to study the Tiv of West Africa and was taught the true meaning of Hamlet

by Laura Bohannon

[Bohannan, Laura. 1966. “Shakespeare in the Bush.” in Natural History.. August.]

Points & Quotes:

• Bohannon—an anthjropologist of the West African Tiv people—was chatting with an English friend:

“You Americans, often have difficulty with Shakespeare. He was, after all, a very English poet, and one can easily misinterpret the universal by misunderstanding the particular.”

I protested that human nature is pretty much the same the whole world over; at least the general plot and motivation of the greater tragedies would always be clear—everywhere—although some details of custom might have to be explained and difficulties of translation might produce other slight changes. To end an argument we could not conclude, my friend gave me a copy of Hamlet to study in the African bush: it would, he hoped, lift my mind above its primitive surroundings, and possibly I might, by prolonged meditation, achieve the grace of correct interpretation.”

• Bohannon, finding that during the rainy season everyone among the Tiv sits around and drinks, decides to tell the elders the story of Hamlet, proving her point that the basics of narrative are rather universal…

• Highlights of the Retelling:

[Bohannon] “One night three men were keeping watch outside the homestead of the great chief, when suddenly they saw the former chief approach them.”

“Why was he no longer their chief?”

“He was dead,” I explained. “That is why they were troubled and afraid when they saw him.”

“Impossible,” began one of the elders, handing his pipe on to his neighbor, who interrupted, “Of course it wasn’t the dead chief. It was an omen sent by a witch. Go on.”…[Bohannon] “The dead chief’s younger brother had become the great chief. He had also married his elder brother’s widow only about a month after the funeral.”“He did well,” the old man beamed and announced to the others, “I told you that if we knew more about Europeans, we would find they really were very like us. In our country also,” he added to me, “the younger brother marries the elder brother’s widow and becomes the father of his children.”…[Young Tiv Man] “For a man to raise his hand against his father’s brother and the one who has become his father— that is a terrible thing. The elders ought to let such a man be bewitched.”“No,” pronounced the old man, speaking less to me than to the young men sitting behind the elders. “If your father’s brother has killed your father, you must appeal to your father’s age mates: they may avenge him. No man may use violence against his senior relatives.” Another thought struck him.“But if his father’s brother had indeed been wicked enough to bewitch Hamlet and make him mad that would be a good story indeed, for it would be his fault that Hamlet, being mad, no longer had any sense and thus was ready to kill his father’s brother.”There was a murmur of applause. Hamlet was again a good story to them, but it no longer seemed quite the same story to me….

The old man made soothing noises and himself poured me some more beer. “You tell the story well, and we are listening. But it is clear that the elders of your country have never told you what the story really means. No, don’t interrupt! We believe you when you say your marriage customs are different, or your clothes and weapons. But people are the same everywhere; therefore, there are always witches and it is we, the elders, who know how witches work. We told you it was the great chief who wished to kill Hamlet, and now your own words have proved us right.”…“Listen,” said the elder, “and I will tell you how it was and how your story will go, then you may tell me if I am right. Polonius knew his son would get into trouble, and so he did. He had many fines to pay for fighting, and debts from gambling. But he had only two ways of getting money quickly. One was to marry off his sister at once, but it is difficult to find a man who will marry a woman desired by the son of a chief. For if the chief’s heir commits adultery with your wife, what can you do? Only a fool calls a case against a man who will someday be his judge. Therefore Laertes had to take the second way: he killed his sister by witchcraft, drowning her so he could secretly sell her body to the witches.”

I raised an objection, “They found her body and buried it. Indeed Laertes jumped into the grave to see his sister once more—so, you see, the body was truly there. Hamlet, who had just come back, jumped in after him.”

“What did I tell you?” The elder appealed to the others. “Laertes was up to no good with his sister’s body. Hamlet prevented him, because the chief’s heir, like a chief, does not wish any other man to grow rich and powerful.”…

“That was a very good story,” added the old man, “and you told it with very few mistakes. There was just one more error, at the very end. The poison Hamlet’s mother drank was obviously meant for the survivor of the fight, whichever it was. If Laertes had won, the great chief would have poisoned him, for no one would know that he arranged Hamlet’s death. Then, too, he need not fear Laertes’ witchcraft; it takes a strong heart to kill one’s only sister by witchcraft.”

“Sometime,” concluded the old man, gathering his ragged toga about him, “you must tell us some more stories of your country. We, who are elders, will instruct you in their true meaning, so that when you return to your own land your elders will see that you have not been sitting in the bush, but among those who know things and who have taught you wisdom.”

Boas – What is Anthropology?

What is Anthropology?

by Franz Boaz

[Boas, Franz. 1928. “What is Anthropology?” in Anthropology and Modern Life, 11-18. New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Company.]

Points & Quotes:

• Anthropology is often considered a collection of curious facts telling about the peculiar appearance of exotic people and describing their strange customs and beliefs. It is looked upon as an entertaining diversion, apparently without any bearing upon the conduct of life of civilized communities. This opinion is mistaken. (11)
• “In short, when discussing the reactions of the individual to his fellows we are compelled to concentrate our attention upon the society in which he lives. We cannot treat the individual as an isolated unit” (15)
• “He must be studied in his social setting, and the question is relevant whether generalizations are possible by which a functional relation between generalized social data and the form and expression of individual can be discovered; life in other words, whether any generally valid laws exist that govern the life of society.” (15)
• “The only valuation of discoveries that can be admitted by pure science is their significance in the solution of general abstract problems. While this standpoint of pure science is applicable also to social phenomena, it is easily recognized that these concern our own selves much more immediately, for almost every anthropological problem touches our most intimate life.” (16)

Horst & Miller – The Digital and the Human

The Digital and the Human: A Prospectus for Digital Anthropology

by Heather Horst & Daniel Miller

[Horst, Heather A., and Daniel Miller. 2012. “The Digital and the Human: A Prospectus for Digital Anthropology.” In Digital Anthropology, 3–35. London ; New York: Bloomsbury Academic.]

Points:

Six main principles

1. The first principle is that the digital itself intensifies the dialectical nature of culture
2. Our second principle suggests that humanity is not one iota more mediated by the rise of the digital
3. The commitment to holism, the foundation of anthropological perspectives on humanity, represents a third principle
4. The fourth principle reasserts the importance of cultural relativism and the global nature of our encounter with the digital
5. The fifth principle is concerned with the essential ambiguity of digital culture with regard to its increasing openness and closure
6. Our final principle acknowledges the materiality of digital worlds, which are neither more nor less material than the worlds that preceded them

“The primary point of this introduction, and the emergence of digital anthropology as a subfield more generally, is in resolute opposition to all approaches that imply that becoming digital has either rendered us less human, less authentic or more mediated. Not only are we just as human within the digital world, the digital also provides many new opportunities for anthropology to help us understand what it means to be human” (13).

“In effect, the digital is producing too much culture, which, because we cannot manage and engage with it, renders us thereby superficial or shallow or alienated” (15).

“At the level of abstraction, there are grounds for thinking we have reached rock bottom; there can be nothing more basic and abstract than binary bits, the difference between 0 and 1. At the other end of the scale, it is already clear that the digital far outstrips mere commoditization in its ability to proliferate difference” (16).

“Digital anthropology fails to the degree it makes the nondigital world appear in retrospect as unmediated and unframed. One of the reasons digital studies have often taken quite the opposite course has been the continued use of the term virtual, with its implied contrast with the real” (22).

“Rather than seeing predigital worlds as less mediated, we need to study how the rise of digital technologies has created the illusion that they were” (23).

“Social science had demonstrated how the real world was virtual long before we came to realize how the virtual world is real” (24).

“the term real must be regarded as colloquial and not epistemological. it should be clear that we are not more mediated. We are equally human in each of the different and diverse arenas of framed behaviour within which we live” (24).

“Materiality is thus bedrock for digital anthropology, and this is true in several distinct ways, of which three are of prime importance. First, there is the materiality of digital infrastructure and technology. Second, there is the materiality of digital content, and, third, there is the materiality of digital context” (34).

“We would therefore suggest that the key to digital anthropology, and perhaps to the future of anthropology itself, is, in part, the study of how things become rapidly mundane. What we experience is not a technology per se but an immediately cultural inflected genre of usage” (38).

“Being human is a cultural and normative concept. As our second principle showed, it is our definition of being human that mediates what the technology is, not the other way around” (38).

“The faster the trajectory of cultural change, the more relevant the anthropologist, because there is absolutely no sign that the changes in technology are outstripping the human capacity to regard things as normative” (39).

Gillespie – The Politics of Platforms

 

Page 1, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “The politics of ‘platforms’ new media & society 12(3) 347–364 Tarleton Gillespie Cornell University, USA Abstract Online content providers such as YouTube are carefully positioning themselves to users, clients, advertisers and policymakers, making strategic claims for what they do and do not do, and how their place in the information landscape should be understood. One term in particular, ‘platform’, reveals the contours of this discursive work. The term has been deployed in both their populist appeals and their marketing pitches, sometimes as technical ‘platforms’, sometimes as ‘platforms’ from which to speak, sometimes as ‘platforms’ of opportunity. Whatever tensions exist in serving all of these constituencies are carefully elided. The term also fits their efforts to shape information policy, where they seek protection for facilitating user expression, yet also seek limited liability for what those users say. As these providers become the curators of public discourse, we must examine the roles they aim to play, and the terms by which they hope to be judged.”

Page 1, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “In October 2006, Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion, cementing their domi-nance in the world of online video. ”

Page 2, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “A few months later, YouTube made a slight change to the paragraph it uses to describe its service in press releases. This ‘website’, ‘company’, service’, ‘forum’ and ‘commu-nity’ was now also a ‘distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small’ (YouTube, 2007c). ”

Page 2, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “YouTube’s dominance in the world of online video makes them one of just a handful of video ‘platforms’, search engines, blogging tools and interactive online spaces that are now the primary keepers of the cultural discussion as it moves to the internet.”

Page 2, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “As such, again like the television networks and trade publishers before them, they are increasingly facing questions about their responsibilities:”

Page 2, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “In the context of these financial, cultural and regulatory demands, these firms are working not just politically but also discursively to frame their services and technologies (Gillespie, 2007; Sterne, 2003).”

Page 2, Underline (Red):
Content: “(Gillespie, 2007; Sterne, 2003).”

Page 2, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “They do so strategically, to position themselves both to pursue current and future profits, to strike a regulatory sweet spot between legislative protections that benefit them and obligations that do not, and to lay out a cultural imagi- nary within which their service makes sense (Wyatt, 2004).”

Page 2, Underline (Red):
Content: “(Wyatt, 2004).”

Page 2, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “In this article I will highlight the discursive work that prominent digital intermediaries, especially YouTube, are under- taking, by focusing on one particular term: ‘platform’. The term ‘platform’ has emerged recently as an increasingly familiar term in the description of the online services of con- tent intermediaries, both in their self-characterizations and in the broader public dis- course of users, the press and commentators.”

Page 2, Underline (Blue):
Content: “In this article I will highlight the discursive work that prominent digital intermediaries, especially YouTube, are under-taking, by focusing on one particular term: ‘platform’. The term ‘platform’ has emerged recently as an increasingly familiar term in the description of the online services of con-tent intermediaries, both in their self-characterizations and in the broader public dis-course of users, the press and commentators. The point is not so much the word itself; ‘platform’ merely helps reveal the positionthat these intermediaries are trying to establish and the difficulty of doing so.”

Page 2, Highlight (Yellow):
Content: “‘platform’”

Page 2, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “The point is not so much the word itself; ‘platform’ merely helps reveal the positionthat these intermediaries are trying to establish and the difficulty of doing so.”

Page 2, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “As a term like ‘platform’ becomes a ‘discursive resting point’ (Bazerman, 1999), further innovations may be oriented towards that idea of what that”

Page 2, Underline (Red):
Content: “(Bazerman, 1999),”

Page 3, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “technology is, and regulations will demand it act accordingly (Benkler, 2003). Moreover, such such terms ‘institute’ a way of being: as Bourdieu (1991: 119) put it, they ‘sanction and sanctify a particular state of things, an established order, in exactly the same way that a constitution does in the legal and political sense of the term’. And using the word ‘plat-form’ makes a claim that arguably misrepresents the way YouTube and other intermedi-aries really shape public discourse online. ”

Page 3, Underline (Red):
Content: “(Benkler, 2003).”

Page 3, Underline (Red):
Content: “Bourdieu (1991: 119)”

Page 3, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “‘Platform’”

Page 3, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “This discursive positioning depends on terms and ideas that are specific enough to mean something, and vague enough to work across multiple venues for multiple audiences.”

Page 3, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “Like other structural metaphors (think ‘network’, ‘broadcast’ or ‘channel’) the term depends on a semantic richness that, though it may go unnoticed by the casual listener or even the speaker, gives the term discursive resonance.”

Page 3, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “The OED notes 15 different uses, in what I see as four broad catego- ries; the emergence of ‘platform’ as a descriptive term for digital media intermediaries represents none of these, but depends on all four.”

Page 3, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “Computational Architectural”

Page 4, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “Figurative Political”

Page 4, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “All point to a common set of connotations: a ‘raisedlevel surface’ designed to facilitate some activity that will subsequently take place.”

Page 4, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “place. It isanticipatory, but not causal. It implies a neutrality with regards to the activity, though less so as the term gets specifically matched to specific functions (like a subway platform), and even less so in the political variation. ”

Page 4, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “Drawing these meanings together, ‘platform’ emerges not simply as indicating a func- tional shape: it suggests a progressive and egalitarian arrangement, promising to support those who stand upon it.”

Page 4, Underline (Blue):
Content: “‘platform’ emerges not simply as indicating a func- tional shape: it suggests a progressive and egalitarian arrangement, promising to support those who stand upon”

Page 5, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “In the discourse of the digital industries, the term ‘platform’ has already been loos-ened from its strict computational meaning. Through the boom and bust of investment (of both capital and enthusiasm), ‘platform’ could suggest a lot while saying very little.”

Page 5, Underline (Blue):
Content: “In the discourse of the digital industries, the term ‘platform’ has already been loos- ened from its strict computational meaning. It should come as no surprise then that the term would again gain traction around user- generated content, streaming media, blogging and social computing.”

Page 5, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “It should come as no surprise then that the term would again gain traction around user-generated content, streaming media, blogging and social computing. ”

Page 5, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “There has been a proliferation of ‘platforms’ just in online video: These join the blogging platforms, photo-sharing platforms and social network platforms now jostling for attention on the web.”

Page 6, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “Users, advertisers, clients”

Page 6, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “It is the broad connotations outlined earlier – open, neutral, egalitarian and progressive sup- port for activity – that make this term so compelling for intermediaries like YouTube as a way to appeal to users, especially in contrast to traditional mass media.”

Page 6, Underline (Magenta):
Content: “YouTube and its competitors claim to empower the individual to speak – lifting us all up, evenly. YouTube can proclaim that it is ‘committed to offering the best user experience and the best platform for people to share their videos around the world’ (YouTube, 2006c) and offer its You Choose ’08 project as a ‘platform for people to engage in dialogue with candidates and each other’ (YouTube, 2007a). architectural, in that YouTube is designed as an open-armed, egalitarian facilitation of expression, not an elitist gatekeeper with normative and technical restrictions. This more conceptual use of ‘platform’ leans on all of the term’s connotations:”

Page 6, Underline (Magenta):
Content: “This fits neatly with the long-standing rhetoric about the democratizing poten- tial of the internet, and with the more recent enthusiasm for user-generated content (UGC),”

Page 6, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “But YouTube has been particularly effective at positioning itself as the upstart champion of UGC. This fits neatly with the long-standing rhetoric about the democratizing poten- tial of the internet, and with the more recent enthusiasm for user-generated content (UGC),”

Page 6, Underline (Magenta):
Content: “amateur expertise, popular creativity, peer-level social networking and robust online com-mentary (Benkler, 2006; Bruns, 2008; Burgess, 2007; Jenkins, 2006). Of course these activ-ities, as well as the services that host them, predate YouTube. But YouTube has been particularly effective at positioning itself as the upstart champion of UGC.”

Page 6, Underline (Red):
Content: “(Benkler, 2006; Bruns, 2008; Burgess, 2007; Jenkins, 2006).”

Page 6, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “The promise of sites like YouTube, one that of course exceeds but nevertheless has found purchase in a term like ‘platform’, is primarily focused on ordinary users. The ‘You’ is the most obvious signal of this,”

Page 6, Underline (Magenta):
Content: “The promise of sites like YouTube, one that of course exceeds but nevertheless has found purchase in a term like ‘platform’, is primarily focused on ordinary users. The ‘You’ is the most obvious signal of this, and has itself found broader cultural purchase, but the direct appeal to the amateur user is visible elsewhere. YouTube offers to let you ‘Broadcast Yourself’, or as they put it in their ‘Company History’ page, ‘as more people”

Page 6, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “YouTube offers to let you ‘Broadcast Yourself’, or as they put it in their ‘Company History’ page, ‘as more people”

Page 7, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “capture special moments on video, YouTube is empowering them to become the broad- casters of tomorrow’ (YouTube, 2009a).”

Page 7, Underline (Magenta):
Content: “capture special moments on video, YouTube is empowering them to become the broad- casters of tomorrow’ (YouTube, 2009a).”

Page 7, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “This offer of access to everyone comes fitted with an often implicit, occasionally explicit, counterpoint: that such services are therefore unlike the mainstream broadcast- ers, film studios and publishers.”

Page 7, Underline (Blue):
Content: “This offer of access to everyone comes fitted with an often implicit, occasionally explicit, counterpoint: that such services are therefore unlike the mainstream broadcast- ers, film studios and publishers.”

Page 7, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “The business of being a cultural intermediary is a complex and fragile one, oriented as it is to at least three constituencies: end users, advertisers and professional contentproducers. This is where the discursive work is most vital. ”

Page 7, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “Curiously, tropes like ‘platform’ seem to work across these discourses; in fact, the real value of this term may be that it brings these discourses into alignment without themunsettling each other. ”

Page 8, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “Intermediaries must speak in different registers to their relevant constituencies, posi-tioning themselves so as to best suit their interests in each moment (Gieryn, 1999). However, ‘platform’ unproblematically moves across all three registers, linking them”

Page 8, Underline (Blue):
Content: “Intermediaries must speak in different registers to their relevant constituencies, posi- tioning themselves so as to best suit their interests in each moment (Gieryn, 1999). However, ‘platform’”

Page 8, Underline (Red):
Content: “(Gieryn, 1999).”

Page 8, Underline (Blue):
Content: “‘platform’ unproblematically moves across all three registers, linking them”

Page 9, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “into a single agenda.”

Page 9, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “For advertisers, YouTube can promise to be a terrain upon which they can build brand awareness, a public campaign, a product launch; for major media producers, it offers a venue in which their content can be raised up and made visible and,even better, pushed to audiences. At the same time, the evocative rhetoric of ‘you’ and UGC fits neatly, implying a sense of egalitarianism and support, and in some ways even in the political sense, i.e. giving people a public voice (Couldry, 2008).”

Page 9, Underline (Blue):
Content: “into a single agenda. For advertisers,”

Page 9, Underline (Blue):
Content: “the evocative rhetoric of ‘you’ and UGC fits neatly, implying a sense of egalitarianism and support, and in some ways even in the political sense, i.e. giving people a public voice (Couldry, 2008).”

Page 9, Underline (Red):
Content: “(Couldry, 2008).”

Page 9, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “Policy”

Page 9, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: ” That the term ‘platform’, for describing services like YouTube, has moved beyond its own hyper-bolic efforts and into common parlance, does suggest that the idea strikes some people ascompelling. But the way in which an information distribution arrangement is character-ized can matter much more, beyond it merely fitting the necessary sales pitch or taking hold as part of the public vernacular. These terms and claims get further established, rei-fied and enforced as they are taken up and given legitimacy inside authoritative dis-courses such as law, policy and jurisprudence. ”

Page 9, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “As society looks to regulate an emerging form of information distribution, be it the telegraph or radio or the internet, it is in many ways making decisions about what that technology is, what it is for, what sociotechnical arrangements are best suited to help it ”

Page 10, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “achieve that and what it must not be allowed to become (Benkler, 2003; Lyman, 2004). This is a semantic debate as much as anything else: what we call such things, what prec-edents we see as most analogous and how we characterize its technical workings drive how we set conditions for it (Streeter, 1996). ”

Page 10, Underline (Red):
Content: “(Benkler, 2003; Lyman, 2004). (Streeter, 1996).”

Page 10, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: ” As Galperin (2004: 161) argues, ‘Ideological paradigms … do not emerge ex nihilo, nor do they diffuse automatically. There must be vehicles for the creation and transmis-sion of ideas. Several organizations perform this function, among them universities, think tanks, trade groups, companies, government agencies, advocacy groups, and so on. For any policy issue at stake there is no lack of competing paradigms to choose from.’ ”

Page 10, Underline (Red):
Content: “Galperin (2004: 161)”

Page 10, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “YouTube’s parent company Google, in its newly adopted role of aggressive lobbyist (Phillips, 2006; Puzzanghera, 2006), has become increasingly vocal on a number of policy issues, including net neutrality, spectrum allocation, freedom of speech and political trans- parency.”

Page 10, Underline (Red):
Content: “(Phillips, 2006; Puzzanghera, 2006),”

Page 10, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “Sometimes its aim is to highlight the role of some Google service as crucial to the unfettered circulation of information: whether to justify further regulation, or none at all, depends on the issue.”

Page 11, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “Historically, policy debates about emerging technologies and information intermedi-aries have been marked by key structural and spatial metaphors around which regulation has been organized (Horwitz, 1989). For instance, before their deregulation the tele-phone companies were bound by two obligations: first, they must act as a common car-rier, agreeing to provide service to the entire public without discrimination. Second, they can avoid liability for the information activities of their users, to the extent that they serve as a conduit rather than as producers of content themselves. Both metaphors, com-mon carrier and conduit, make a similar (but not identical) semantic claim as does ‘plat-form’. ”

Page 11, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “Unlike ‘platform’, there is the implied direction in these terms: bringing information from some- one to somewhere. In the age of the ‘network’, another spatial metaphor that does a great deal of discursive work in contemporary information policy debates, an emphasis on total connectivity has supplanted direction as the key spatial emphasis.”

Page 12, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “Edges”

Page 12, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “Whether these interventions are strategic or incidental, harmful or benign, they are deliberate choices that end up shaping the contours of public discourse online. Take, for instance, YouTube’s recent announcement (in a blog entry titled ‘A YouTube for All of Us’) that it would strengthen its restrictions on sexually suggestive content and profanity,by three means: first, the removal of videos deemed inappropriate according to a new standard; second, the assignment of certain videos to the adult category, which limits what under-age registered users can see and requires all users to click an assent to watch-ing objectionable content; third, and most troubling, the institution of technical demo-tions: ‘Videos that are considered sexually suggestive, or that contain profanity, will be algorithmically demoted on our “Most Viewed”, “Top Favorited”, and other browse pages’ (YouTube, 2008a). ”

Page 13, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “site indexes that purport to represent user judgments will in fact do so only within parameters unknown to users.”

Page 13, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “In December 2008 and January 2009, Warner Music Group (WMG) sent thousands of takedown notices to YouTube users, in what critics called a ‘fair use massacre’ (Jansen, 2009; von Lohmann, 2009). The videos targeted were not only copies of WMG-owned works, but also amateur videos using their music in the background, or musicians paying tribute to a band by playing live along with the commercial recording as a backing track (Driscoll, 2009; Sandoval, 2009). ”

Page 13, Underline (Red):
Content: “(Driscoll, 2009; Sandoval, 2009). 2009; von Lohmann, 2009). (Jansen,”

Page 13, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “(Driscoll, 2009; Sandoval, 2009). WMG could issue so many takedown notices so quickly only by using ContentID. This kind of content fingerprinting, being both easy and oblivious to nuance, encourages these kinds of shotgun tactics.”

Page 13, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “But it is YouTube’s complex economic allegiances that compel it to both play host to amateur video culture and provide content owners the tools to criminalize it.”

Page 13, Underline (Blue):
Content: “it is YouTube’s complex economic allegiances that compel it to both play host to amateur video culture and provide content owners the tools to criminalize it.”

Page 13, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “Conclusion”

Page 13, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “A term like ‘platform’ does not drop from the sky, or emerge in some organic, unfettered way from the public discussion. It is drawn from the available cultural vocabulary bystakeholders with specific aims, and carefully massaged so as to have particular reso-nance for particular audiences inside particular discourses. However, these terms matter as much for what they hide as for what they reveal. Despite the promises made, ‘platforms’ are more like traditional media than they careto admit. As they seek sustainable business models, as they run up against traditional regulations and spark discussions of new ones, and as they become large and visible enough to draw the attention not just of their users but of the public at large, the pres-sures mount to strike a different balance between safe and controversial, betweensocially and financially valuable, between niche and wide appeal. ”

Page 13, Underline (Blue):
Content: “A term like ‘platform’ is drawn from the available cultural vocabulary by stakeholders with specific aims, and carefully massaged so as to have particular reso- nance for particular audiences inside particular discourses.”

Page 13, Underline (Blue):
Content: ” these terms matter as much for what they hide as for what they reveal. Despite the promises made, ‘platforms’ are more like traditional media than they care”

Page 13, Underline (Blue):
Content: “to admit”

Page 13, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “They raise both traditional dilemmas about free speech and public expression, and some substantially new ones, for which there are few precedents or explanations.”

Page 13, Underline (Blue):
Content: “They raise both traditional dilemmas about free speech and public expression, and some substantially new ones, for which there are few precedents or explanations.”

Page 14, Highlight (Cyan):
Content: “We do not have a sufficiently precise language for attending to these kinds of interven- tions and their consequences. And the discourse of the ‘platform’ works against us developing such precision, offering as it does a comforting sense of technical neutrality and progressive openness.”

Page 14, Underline (Blue):
Content: “We do not have a sufficiently precise language for attending to these kinds of interven- tions and their consequences. And the discourse of the ‘platform’ works against us developing such precision, offering as it does a comforting sense of technical neutrality and progressive openness.”

Page 14, Underline (Red):
Content: “Berland, J. (2000) ‘Cultural Technologies and the “Evolution” of Technological Cultures’, in A. Herman and T. Swiss (eds) The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory, pp. 235–58. New York: Routledge.”

Page 15, Underline (Red):
Content: “Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Social Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruns, A. (2008) Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Burgess, J. (2007) ‘Vernacular Creativity and New Media’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, URL (consulted April 2009): http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00010076/01/Burgess_PhD_FINAL.pdf”

Page 15, Underline (Red):
Content: “Gieryn, T. (1999) Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.”

Page 16, Underline (Red):
Content: “Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.”

Page 17, Underline (Red):
Content: “Sterne, J. (2003) ‘Bourdieu, Technique, and Technology’, Cultural Studies 17(3/4): 367–89.”

Page 17, Underline (Red):
Content: “Terranova, T. (2004) Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto Press.”

 

Fischer – Emergent Forms of Life

Emergent Forms of Life: Anthropologies of Late or Postmodernities

by Michael M.J. Fischer

[Fischer, Michael M. J. 1999. “Emergent Forms of Life: Anthropologies of Late or Postmodernities.” Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1):455–78.]

Points

Really good overview of social theory and anthropology of the po-mo 1990s, and brief encapsulation of general social theory in the twentieth century

• “Emergent forms of life’ acknowledges an ethnographic datum, a social theoretic heuristic, and a philosophical stance regarding ethics.
  • The ethnographic datum is the pervasive claim …  that traditional concepts and ways of doing things no longer work …
  • The social theoretic heuristic is that complex societies …  are always compromise formations among … emergent, dominant, and fading historical horizons.
  • The philosophical stance toward ethics is that “giving grounds” for belief comes to an end somewhere and that “the end is … a sociality of action, that always contains within it ethical dilemmas or … the face of the other.” (456)

• Anthropologies of late modernity … provide challenges for all levels of social, cultural, and psychological theory, as well as for ethnographic field methods and genres of writing. There are three key overlapping arenas of attention.

  1. The continuing transformation of modernities by science and technology, 
  2. The reconfiguration of perception and understanding, of the human and social sensorium, by computer-mediated and visual technologies and prostheses. 
  3. The reconstruction of society in the wake of social trauma caused by world war and civil and ethnic wars; collapse of command economies; massive demographic migrations and diasporas; and postcolonial and globalizing restructurings of the world economy, including the production of toxics and new modalities of long-term risk.” (457-458)

   

• “The general social theories of modernity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have to do with the dynamics of class society and industrial processes (Karl Marx); with bureaucratic, psychological, and cultural rationalization (Max Weber); with repression and redirection of psychic energy from gendered and familial conflicts (Sigmund Freud, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno); with abstraction of signs and tokens of exchange (CS Pierce, F Saussure, Georg Simmel, Thorstein Veblen); and with the complexification of the conscience collective with the division of labor (Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss).
• In contrast, general theories of the postmodern or late modern era stress the processes and effects of the “third industrial revolution” (electronic media, silicon chip, molecular biology), as well as of decolonization, massive demographic shifts, and the cross-temporal and cross-cultural referentiality of cultural forms.” (458)

• “computer-mediated communication provides also a design studio for social theory. It provides materials for thinking about a conjuncture of two kinds of science that can no longer do without one another: (a) explanatory structures that are breaks with normal experience, that can only be arrived at through the prostheses of instruments, experiments, models, and simulations, and (b) experiential, embodied, sensorial knowledge that acts as situated feedback.” (469)
• “No longer is it possible to speak of modernity in the singular. … 
  • “The rubric “alternative modernities” acknowledges the multiple different configurations that modernities have taken and the recognition that modernization and globalization are not homogenizing processes.” (470)
  • “Among the important makers of these alternative modernities are the tremendous disruptions of the second half of the twentieth century: World War II, the struggles for decolonization, the collapse of the Soviet empire and its command economies, civil wars in Africa and Cambodia, and the “disappeared” in Argentina.” (471)

• Composing ethnographically rich texts on emergent forms of life generated under late- and postmodernities that can explore connections between changing subjectivities, social organization, modes of production, and symbolic or cultural forms, is a challenge that the anthropological archive is increasingly addressing. … The new is never without historical genealogies, but these often require reassessment and excavation of their multiplicity. 

Abstract

Anthropologies of late modernity (also called postmodernity, postindustrial society, knowledge society, or information society) provide a number of stimulating challenges for all levels of social, cultural, and psycho- logical theory, as well as for ethnographic and other genres of anthropological writing. Three key overlapping arenas of attention are the centrality of science and technology; decolonization, postcolonialism, and the reconstruction of societies after social trauma; and the role of the new electronic and visual media. The most important challenges of contemporary ethnographic practice include more than merely (a) the techniques of multilocale or multisited ethnography for strategically accessing different points in broadly spread processes, (b) the techniques of multivocal or multiaudience-addressed texts for mapping and acknowledging with greater precision the situatedness of knowledge, (c) the re- working of traditional notions of comparative work for a world that is increasingly aware of difference, and (d) acknowledging that anthropological representations are interventions within a stream of representations, mediations, and unequally inflected discourses competing for hegemonic control. Of equal importance are the challenges of juxtaposing, complementing, or supplementing other genres of writing, working with historians, literary theorists, media critics, novelists, investigative or in-depth journalists, writers of insider accounts (e.g. autobiographers, scientists writing for the public), photographers and filmmakers, and others.”

Escobar – Welcome to Cyberia

Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture

by Arturo Escobar

[Escobar, Arturo. 1994. “Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture.” Current Anthropology 35 (3):211–31.]

Points

• “The point of departure of this inquiry is the belief that any technology represents a cultural invention, in the sense that it brings forth a world; it emerges out of particular cultural conditions and in turn helps to create new ones” (211).
• “the priority accorded science and theory over technical creativity has led moderns to believe that they can describe nature and society according to laws. Rather than as the effect of practice nature and society appear as objects with mechanisms and are therefore treated instrumentally” (213).
• “cyberculture” refers specifically to new technologies in two areas: artificial intelligence (particularly computer and information technologies) and biotechnology [… to] the realization that we increasingly live and make ourselves in techno-biocultural environments structured by novel forms of science and technology” (214).
• Anthropological research into cybercultures should be guided by four inquiries:
  1. What are the discourses and practices that are generated around/by computers and biotechnology?
  2. How can these practices and domains be studied ethnographically in various social, regional, and ethnic settings?
  3. What is the background of understanding from which the new technologies emerge?
  4. What is the political economy of cyberculture? (215)
• “The anthropology of cyberculture holds that we can assume a priori neither the existence of a era nor the need for a new branch of anthropology” (216).
• “technoscience is motivating a blurring and implosion of categories at various levels, particularly the modern categories that defined the natural, the organic, the technical, and the textual”
  • “Bodies,” “organisms,” and “communities” thus have to be retheorized as composed of elements that originate in three different domains with permeable boundaries” (217).
• Possible ethnographic domains and research strategies:
  1. The production and use of new technologies
  2. The appearance of Computer-mediated communities
  3. Studies of the popular culture of science and technology, including the effect of science and technology on the popular imaginary
  4. The growth and qualitative development of human computer-mediated communication, particularly from the perspective of the relationship between language communication, social structures, and cultural identity
  5. The political economy of cyberculture (217-219).
• Then a bunch about complexity, including:
  • “The discovery that “inert” matter has properties that are remarkably close to those of life-forms led to the postulate that life is a property not of organic
    matter per se but of the organization of matter and hence to the concept of nonorganic life (de Landa 1992)” (221).

Terms

• interface anthropology—put forth by Laurel (1990, 91-93), it is a “focus on user/context intersections, finding “informants” to guide the critical (not merely utilitarian) exploration of diverse users and contexts” (218).
  • appended to that definition is this cool footnote: “Walker (1990) distinguishes five phases in the history of user interfaces (1) knobs and dials, (2) batch (a specialist computer operator running a stack of jobs on punched cards), (3) timesharing (,4) menus, (5) graphics windows. The next phase will take the user directly ‘inside’ the computer, through the screen to cyberspace, so to say. This will be a three-dimensional space such as the one achieved by virtual reality today. The hope of designers is that it will replace more passive viewing with active participation” (218)
• Poeisis—Heidegger’s term for the essence of Being. It’s present in the arts and certain Eastern philosophies. See The Question Concerning Technology
• Social constructivism—a methodology and theoretical stance based on the idea “that, contrary to the technological determinism of past times, contingency and flexibility are the essence of technological change; by showing that social processes are inherent to technological innovations, they deal a fatal blow to the alleged separation of technology from society and of both of these from nature” (212).
• interpretive flexibility—”the fact—long known to anthropologists—that different actors (“relevant social groups,” in the constructivists’ parlance) interpret technological artifacts in different ways” (212).

Abstract

Significant changes in the nature of social life are being brought about by computer information and biological technologies to the extent that—some argue—a new cultural order, “cyberculture,” is coming into being. This paper presents an overview of the types of anthropological analyses that are being conducted in the area of new technologies and suggests additional steps for the articulation of an anthropology of cyberculture. It builds upon science, technology, and society studies in various fields and on critical studies of modernity. The implications of technoscience for both anthropological theory and ethnographic research are explored.

 

Dumit – Is It Me or My Brain?

Is It Me or My Brain? Depression and Neuroscientific Facts

by Joseph Dumit

[Dumit, Joseph. 2003. “Is It Me or My Brain? Depression and Neuroscientific Facts.” Journal of Medical Humanities 24 (1–2): 35–47.]

Points

• Wittgenstein says that there are certain points about which we no longer ask for an explanation or a test of its truth, and explanations come to an end:
  • “Giving grounds, however justifying the evidence, comes to an end; —but the end is not certain propositions’ striking us immediately as true, i.e. it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting” (On Certainty, p. 204) (39).
• We might call the set of acts that concerns our brains and our bodies deriving from received-facts of science and medicine the objective-self”
  •  The objective- self consists of our taken-for-granted notions, theories, and tendencies regarding human bodies, brains, and kinds considered as objective, referential, extrinsic, and objects of science and medicine. That we “know”we have a brain and that the brain is necessary for our self is one aspect of our objective-self” (39).
• “Furthermore, objective-selves are not finished but incomplete and in process. With received-facts we fashion and refashion our objective-selves.
  • Thus it is we come to know our bodies as endangered by poisons like saccharine, our brains as having a “reading circuit,” and humans as being either mentally ill or sane or borderline.
  • I call this “objective-self fashioning” to highlight our own activity in encountering “received-facts.”
  • I emphasize “received-facts” rather than just “facts”to highlight the activity of translation that has taken place in order for the results of a scientific or medical project to reach us.
    • Each of these movements of facts from one media to another is also necessarily a transformation of the fact. Science studies scholars Bruno Latour and Michel Callon call this process “translation,” a term connoting both movement and change in meaning. We all know that a fact established in a lab is not known immediately by everyone, everywhere. It must travel through specific channels” (39).
• “Each of the aspects of our objective-selves has this personal history (of coming-to-know via received-facts) and also a social history. (39-40)
  • “Some human kinds that we are starting to take for granted, e.g., depressives, require attending to broader social and institutional forces in order to understand how it is that we look to the brain for an answer” (40).
  • “These social histories enable and constrain science at every level of fact conception, experimentation, publication, and dissemination and reception, but this does not imply that science is culture. Science produces facts in spite of and because of these constraints—laboriously, continuously, and creatively” (40).
  • “And we fashion our objective-selves with the fruit of this labor in the form of received-facts in our own continuous and often creative manner, no matter how skeptical we are. This way of living with and through scientific facts is our form of life” (40).

 

• Examining sufferers of mental illness pints Dumit to a type of selfhood he wants to “a pharmaceutical self whose scale is one of days and weeks.
  • Contrary to a Heideggerian phenomenology in which one is passively thrown into moods, here one’s abnormal neurochemistry actively throws one into depression or mania. Sometimes one can respond to this by taking drugs that, days or weeks later, throw you into yet a third state—not normal, but better.”
• This pharmaceutical Self brings forth “three critical aspects of objective-self fashioning for our purposes.”
  • First, there is a tremendous flexibility and openness of explanation of the objective-self”
    • Even in the face of specific received-facts about ourselves such as brain images, there is room for negotiation and redefinition. Sociologists and anthropologists of psychology have called this the “pandemonium” of folk psychology. But they also note that even as we can play with mind and brain, motivation and behavior, we also ultimately must satisfy local common sense” (44).
  • “The second aspect … is the need for a nuanced, complex cultural, historical and institutional as well as scientific or biomedical understanding of context.
    • Objective-self fashioning is an ongoing process of social accounting to oneself and others in particular situations in which received-facts function as particularly powerful resources because they bear the objective authority of science” (44).
  • “The third critical aspect of objective-self fashioning is the fundamental connection between the brain as objective-self and one’s own personal identity.
    • When genes are invoked as the cause of one’s objective-self and aspects of one’s personality they can become synecdoche for one’s identity. If one has a gene for depression, one can fear becoming depressed.”
    •  “We can note here that brain images further confuse the part with the whole—even though brain images only show a slice of the brain, they show the slice as representing the whole brain, which in turn is the person” (44).
• “Individual sufferers are trying to both understand their illness and live with it. These are activities that are not necessarily compatible. Using the notion of the pharmaceutical self, I would suggest that they have entered into a relationship with their brain that is negotiated and social” (46).

 

Terms

objective-self—our taken-for-granted notions, theories, and tendencies regarding human bodies, brains, and kinds considered as objective, referential, extrinsic, and objects of science and medicine (39)

objective-self fashioning—”an ongoing process of social accounting to oneself and others in particular situations in which received-facts function as particularly powerful resources because they bear the objective authority of science” (44)

identification— borrowed from psychology and semiotics, “we can characterize our relationship to culture as identification.In Kenneth Burke’s definition, identification includes the “ways in which we spontaneously, intuitively, even unconsciously persuade ourselves” (Burke, 1966, p. 301)” (36)

 

Abstract

This article considers the roles played by brain images (e.g., from PET scans) in mass media as experienced by people suffering from mental illness, and as used by scientists and activist groups in demonstrating a biological basis for mental illness. Examining the rhetorical presentation of images in magazines and books, the article describes the persuasive power that brain images have in altering the understanding people have of their own body—their “objective self.” Analyzing first-person accounts of encounters with brain images, it argues that people come to understand themselves as having neurotransmitter imbalances that are the cause of their illnesses via received facts and images of the brain, but that this understand- ing is incomplete and in tension with the sense that they are their brain. The article concludes by querying the emergence of a “pharmaceutical self,” in which one experiences one’s brain as if on drugs, as a new form of objective self-fashioning.”

Coco & Woodward – Discourses of Authenticity in a Pagan Community

Discourses of Authenticity Within a Pagan Community: The Emergence of the “Fluffy Bunny” Sanction

by Angela Coco & Ian Woodward

[Coco, Angela, and Ian Woodward. 2007. “Discourses of Authenticity Within a Pagan Community: The Emergence of the ‘Fluffy Bunny’ Sanction.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 36 (5): 479–504.]

Points

• Discussing “fluffy bunnies” is “a group boundary defining exercise based on moral judgments.”
  • It explores pagan ethics associated with the deployment of pagan artifacts and spiritual understandings.
  • Implicit in the discussion is a sense of a “them” who are seduced by media images and popular practices, or implicated in producing them, and a (serious, authentic) “us” who presumably distance ourselves from such things (480).
• “In a consumer society one purchases objects—commodities such as Tarot cards, ritual tools, medieval dress—that enhance, edify, improve, and sustain self.
  • These objects then act as material boundary markers that suggest things people wish to cultivate about themselves and exclude polluting aesthetics/others” (482).

 

• pagans are conscious of and practically engage in discussions about constructions of pagan identity and commodification of the craft which is exemplified in the notion of the “fluffy bunny” (499).
• “A range of tensions emerges which we argue indicates the ways pagans in late-capitalist (or postmodern) society reflexively create meaning-structures around the production and consumption of goods and services that have become popularized as “pagan.” The nuanced features of these tensions reveal the conceptual distinctions and symbolic boundaries pagans create in establishing an “authentic” pagan identity” (483).
• “The establishment of an “authentic” pagan identity is formed partly by one’s ability to discern the proper limits of commodification and consumerism in the pursuit of religious practice” (499).

 

• Fluffy Bunnies defined:
  • “those people who gain a surface grasp of pagan practices but fail to incorporate pagan beliefs into their day-to-day life practices” (500).
  • “uninformed, immature, and lacking in their understanding of the forces of nature and consequently dangerous because they may misuse magic”—informant (500).
  • “a person who doesn’t know what they are talking about, or as was said not steadfast in there (sic) beliefs. I am sure that we have all met the 12 year old who is a high priestess and the leader of huge demonic armies and has alliances with the elves!!!!”—informant (500).
  •  “perhaps what bugs me most about these type (sic) is not so much the superficiality (which the ‘fashion-witch’ has in spades) but the hyposcrisy (sic) which often enables them todo harm whilst preaching love and light, and never once recognizing the results of their own actions”—informant (501).
  • “They refer to the superficial practitioner’s tendency to focus only on the light, happy side of life without balancing it with the dark and difficult aspects of experience” (501).

 

Abstract

The commodification of the religious impulse finds its most overt expression in the New Age movement and its subculture neopaganism. This article examines discourses in the pagan community in an Australian state. Pagans, who have been characterized as individualist, eclectic, and diverse in their beliefs and practices, network through electronic mail discussion lists and chat forums as well as through local and national offline gatherings. We explore community building and boundary defining communications in these discourses. In particular, we examine interactions that reveal the mobilization of pagans’ concern with authenticity in the context of late-capitalism, consumer lifestyles, and media representations of the “craft.” Our analysis highlights a series of tensions in pagans’ representations of and engagement with consumer culture which are evident in everyday pagan discourse. These notions of in/authenticity are captured by invoking the “fluffy bunny” sanction.

Heidegger – The Question Concerning Technology

The Question Concerning Technology

by Martin Heidegger

[Heidegger, Martin. 1977. “The Question Concerning Technology.” In The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, 3–35. Harper & Row.]

Points

Technology, to begin with, is not a thing, but rather a way of revealing truths.

• “Modern technology too is a means to an end.” “We will master it. The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control.” (pg 5)
• There are four causes (ways of being responsible for something else) involved in tech’s means
  • causa materialis—the material, the stuff a thing is made from
  • causa formalis—the form, the material takes, the template
  • causa finalis—the intended end use, ritual, application, etc.
  • causa efficiens—who (or what) actual forms the material, the craftworker, miner, technician, etc.
    • All four causes work together to facilitate the technology’s occasioning (it’s coming onto being in its specific context)
    • Plato says: “every occasion for whatever passes over and goes forward into presencing from that which is not presencing is poiesis, is bringing-forth” (pg 10)
• “Technology  is  a  mode  of  revealing.  Technology  comes  to presence  [West]  in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens.” (pg 13)

So what’s the problem?

• Modern technology is different because the type if revealing is different.
  • “What is modern technology? It too is a revealing. Only when we allow our attention to rest on this fundamental characteristic does that which is new in modern technology show itself to us.  [paragraph break ]  And yet the revealing that holds sway throughout modern technology does not unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of poiesis. The  revealing that rules  in modern  technology  is a  chal­lenging  [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand  that  it  supply  energy  that  can  be  extracted  and  stored as such.  [ … ]  The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining dis­trict, the soil as a mineral deposit.” (14)
• This type of revealing is based on challenging. Whereas the old-school peasant “challenge the soil of the field” (15), new technologies demand that the materials in the earth (like coal) are always ready for use as “it is stockpiled; that is, it is on call, ready to deliver the sun’s warmth that is stored in it” (15)
  • H calls this standing-reserve
• Since we do this, we tend to see the objects as only the resources contained in them, as an ordering revealing
  • in other words: “The unconcealment of the unconcealed has already come to pass whenever it calls man forth into the modes of revealing allotted to him. When man, in his way, from within unconcealment reveals that which  presences, he merely responds to the call of unconcealment even when he  contradicts it. Thus when man, investigating, observing, ensnares nature as an area of his own conceiving, he has already been claimed by a way of  revealing that challenges him to approach nature as  an  object  of research, until  even  the object disappears into the objectlessness  of standing-reserve” (19).
• H calls this propensity in humans enframing.
  • “Enframing  means  the  gathering  together  of that  setting-upon which  sets  upon  man,  i.e.,  challenges  him  forth,  to  reveal  the real,  in  the  mode  of  ordering,  as  standing-reserve.  Enframing means  that way  of revealing  which  holds  sway  in  the  essence  of modern  technology  and  which  is  itself  nothing  technological” (20).
  • OR “the way in which the real reveals itself as standing-reserve” (23)
  • OR “Enframing  is  the  gathering  together  that  belongs  to  that setting-upon  which  sets  upon  man  and  puts  him  in  position  to reveal the real, in the  mode  of ordering,  as  standing-reserve” (24)
• And Enframing is the essence of modern technology

DANGER!

• Enframing creates a situation wherein humans see the world around around them as a “calculable complex of the effects of forces” (26). We see only resources standing-reserve but no objects in and of themselves.
•  When we don;t see the objects as they are (in their truth), we fall for the illusion that humans are the only things around worth noting…
  • “as soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve [ … ] he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile man …  exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. [ … ] This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself” (26-27).
• AND “the challenging Enframing not only conceals a former way of revealing, bringing-forth, but it conceals revealing itself and with it That wherein concealment, i.e., truth, comes to pass” (27)
• “The rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could de denied him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth” (28).
  • (yeah, but wtf is ‘truth,’ H?)
• And FINALLY— “The coming to presence of technology threatens revealing, threatens it with the possibility that all revealing will be con­sumed in ordering and that everything will present itself only in the unconcealedness of standing-reserve” (33).

All is not lost

• “So long as we represent technology as an instrument we remain held fast in the will to master it. We press on past the essence of technology.  [ paragraph break ]  When, however, we ask how the instrumental comes to presence as a kind of causality, then we experience the coming to presence as the destining of a revealing” (32).
• Techne also used to mean “art,” so maybe art will be the ultimate savior?
• And who knows, maybe “the frenziedness of technology may entrench itself every­ where to such an extent that someday, throughout everything technological, the essence of technology may come to presence in the coming-to-pass of truth” (35).

Techne—”techne  is  the  name  not  only  for  the  activities  and  skills  of  the craftsman,  but  also  for  the  arts  of  the  mind  and  the  fine  arts. Techne  belongs  to  bringing-forth,  to  poiesis;  it  is  something poietic.    [paragraph break ] The other point that we should observe with  regard  to  techne is even more important.  From earliest times  until  Plato the word techne is linked with the word  episteme.  Both  words  are names for  knowing  in  the  widest  sense.  They  mean  to  be  entirely  at home  in  something,  to  understand  and  be  expert  in  it.”  [ … ]   “It is as revealing, and not as manufactur­ing, that techne is a bringing-forth.” (pg 13)

Willerslev—Taking Animism Seriously, but Perhaps Not Too Seriously?

Taking Animism Seriously, but Perhaps Not Too Seriously?

by Rane Willerslev

[Willerslev, Rane. 2013. “Taking Animism Seriously, but Perhaps Not Too Seriously?” Religion and Society: Advances in Research 4 (1): 41–57.]

Points

 

Abstract

How do we take indigenous animism seriously in the sense proposed by Viveiros de Castro? In this article, I pose this challenge to all the major theories of animism, stretching from Tylor and Durkheim, over Lévi-Strauss to Ingold. I then go on to draw a comparison between Žižek’s depiction of the cynical milieu of advanced capitalism in which ideology as “false consciousness” has lost force and the Siberian Yukaghirs for whom ridiculing the spirits is integral to their game of hunting. Both know that, in their activity, they are following an illusion, but still they go along with it; both are ironically self-conscious about not taking the ruling ethos at face value. This makes me suggest an alternative: perhaps it is time for anthropology not to take indigenous animism too seriously.