In my capacity as a fellow in our faculty research center, I’ve been doing a
lot of support work for the unexpected shift to learning-at-a-distance.
At my uni, very few of us have experience teaching online. The faculty
(generally) aren’t especially enthusiastic, and there hasn’t really been a lot
of institutional support. So, I wasn’t surprised when most of the
questions I was fielding took the form of: “I do X in my class. How
can I do X online?” Not surprised because that’s the ideological
frame distance education has relied upon: an exact homology between offline-
and online teaching, with the physical classroom replaced by the discussion
board, the lectures by videos. But actual online courses (not our band
aid efforts to stitch together something in a few days) are structured very
differently than their physical counterparts. The best classes maximize
their digital affordances and don’t try to simply “reproduce”
face-to-face education.
Something similar has happened with ethnography. I have read dozens of
semi-panicked posts: if I can’t go into the field, perhaps I can go into the
digital field? Well – there have been several, thoughtful posts from
digital anthropologists on this sentiment, including a recent one in GeekAnthropologist. Reading these, though, I can’t help but notice that these
would-be digital anthropologists don’t really want to be digital at all.
And they’re not really proposing digital anthropology. If you’re studying
the lives of people in their (physical) communities, can you really do digital
anthropology? In other words, if people are undertaking online/offline
lives (whether under quarantine or not), are those lives best understood
through digital anthropology? Or are you talking about what my colleague,
Matthew Durington, and I have called “networkedanthropology“?
In networked anthropology, we acknowledge the skein of digital and physical
connections in people’s lives, and we try to recognize and enable the
capacities of people to represent those lives through networked,
media platforms that make sense to them.
In a quarantined world, what’s
missing from the social scene? With regards to the production of
ethnography, at least one element is missing: the anthropologist. But
only that. Even without the anthropologist, social and cultural life
continue. And more than that–the documentation and theorization of
social and cultural life continues as people record and comment on the things
that happen in their lives and in their communities. In this sense,
networked anthropology is about capitulation–perhaps we really weren’t that
important anyway? But we can certainly help people in their own efforts
to represent and communicate their identities and communities, and this is, I
think, what (at least some) of our colleagues should be doing.
Last summer, we worked on a project in a small neighborhood in Baltimore
undergoing rapid gentrification that was leading to the displacement of a
long-standing community of African American residents. Collaborating with
children at a community center, we helped them (co)produce maps, photographs,
video and audio interviews that we put together for an app tour, an exhibit and
a performance. It was a great project to work on, and the article that we
are submitting on this includes all of them as co-authors. In light of
our present pandemic, and in the interest of protecting communities from us, it occurs to me that we (me and Matt Durington) didn’t really
need to be there at all. Sure – we needed to talk to people and see what
they were up to. In the end, though, the images and interviews are
produced by people in the community. My point: if we never actually
stepped foot in that neighborhood, that would not make it digital
anthropology. We would just be doing networked anthropology –
anthropology with people who were physically (not virtually) in their
communities.
I don’t know when the infection rates and death toll of the pandemic will
subside. But it seems likely that we will not be able to undertake our in
situ research for some time. Even if we can go into the field, it may be
in fits and starts, with pandemic flare-ups mandating our social distancing
once again. But just because we are not in situ doesn’t mean that people
in the communities where we work aren’t in situ! By now, we are all used
to that peculiar hypocrisy in anthropology that decries colonization and its authorizing
gaze, but that still seems to insist on presence in order to undertake
anthropology. Perhaps enough of
that?
