Planting Anarchy

Posted on by rae.hackler
Aerial view of the site at Lower Hazel (photo credit HARP,2022). Archaeobotanical specimens (photographed using an AHRC funded Keyence VHX7000 3-D digital microscope (AHRC award AH/V011758/1) at Fort Cumberland Laboratories, Historic England.)
Aerial view of the site at Lower Hazel (photo credit HARP,2022). Archaeobotanical specimens (photographed using an AHRC funded Keyence VHX7000 3-D digital microscope (AHRC award AH/V011758/1) at Fort Cumberland Laboratories, Historic England.)

A recent pilot study investigated the archaeobotanical remains from our medieval site at Lower Hazel in South Gloucestershire. Charred botanical specimens were extracted from soil samples using flotation methodology and then analysed under a microscope to identify them and provide a better understanding for the use of plants in the diet and agriculture of the medieval period*.  

Plants, as biological organisms will decompose with time. Despite this, they can often survive within the archaeological record in myriad ways. The study of plant remains from archaeological sites is known as archaeobotany, and seeks to identify the external morphological features of, for example seeds, through a comparison of the ancient remains with their modern plant equivalents.  

Understanding the correlation between people, plants and the environment in which they exist is one of the main aims of archaeobotanical analysis. Plant assemblages can be used to answer questions relating to food such as what certain groups of people were eating and trade in food commodities, as well as questions relating to agriculture including differing approaches to crop cultivation, scales of production, and how these affect the regional flora. By exploring how these vary throughout pre-history and history we can gain better insight into this ever-changing relationship, which is increasingly important when considering existing fears surrounding climate change caused by human activity.  

Plant remains range from tiny microfossils such as pollen, to macrofossils, for example grains and seeds. Carbonised plant remains are those most commonly encountered on sites in the UK due to the climate here. These burnt assemblages provide an avenue through which to explore past anthropogenic action, such as crop processing or food preparation processes. The questions that can be asked are dependent upon the site being excavated due to biases in preservation*.

Soil sample processing at Lower Hazel using a siraf-style flotation barrel (Photo credit HARP 2022)
Soil sample processing at Lower Hazel using a siraf-style flotation barrel (Photo credit HARP 2022)

The medieval period characterises a significant stage in British history for the development of diet and agricultural practices in which cultivation of fruits and vegetables broadened and there was a shift from spelt, barley and emmerged as the main cereal crops, to barley, wheat, oat and rye which we still grow today. In addition, disparities in food provisions between different societal classes increased as connections between towns and rural areas developed.  

The study was designed to address the lack of any previous formal environmental investigation at Lower Hazel, and so, soil samples were taken during excavations in May 2022, for the extraction and analysis of any plant remains. Systematic flotation which separates the soil from the botanical specimens, was conducted on site using a siraf-style flotation barrel and sieve meshes of differing sizes in which to ‘catch’ the plant remains. These were then brought to the laboratory for analysis*.  

Although only a small study, it has nonetheless resulted in some interesting contributions to knowledge about the site at Lower Hazel during this period*. 

Charred Triticum aestivum/T. turgidumPhotographed using an AHRC funded Keyence VHX7000 3-D digital microscope (AHRC award AH/V011758/1) at Fort Cumberland Laboratories, Historic England
Charred Triticum aestivum/T. turgidum **

The crop plants found in the samples are indicative of the medieval period (Carruthers and Hunter Dowse 2019:132): wheat (Triticum turgidum/aestivum), and oat (Avena sp.). There is some uncertainty as to which free-threshing wheats are present since the chaff is absent in these samples and this is vital for diagnostic purposes. This is a common problem for archaeobotanical investigation since processing waste for free-threshing wheats would likely be created where it was harvested rather than near settlement buildings, thus rendering it less likely to appear in the archaeological record. The reason for difficulty of identification is due to the distortion of grains which happens when they are exposed to heat. Furthermore, since waste products from cereal processing were utilised in other ways such as for animal fodder or bedding for both humans and animals, as well as in building materials like thatch or daub, they would likely only become charred in a few circumstances such as when used for fuel or tinder.   

A single oat specimen was found in the samples, analysed and later radiocarbon dated using the Bristol Radiocarbon Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (BRAMS) facility. The result was an uncalibrated date range of 1031- 1162CE with a 95.4% probability which helped confirmed the theory that the site was in use during the Anarchy period*.  

A specimen of burnt straw as well as tiny fragments of daub were found in samples <2> and <3>. These are likely the materials used for the building structure. The lack of further burnt straw fragments could serve as evidence for the burning down of the property during the Anarchy period since it would indicate that the fire was of an intensity such that no further remains of the thatched roof were left*. 

Fields during the medieval period were sown with combinations of cereals which increased the likelihood of a successful harvest of one sort or another, for example ‘maslin’ (a mixture of rye and wheat) which was sown in winter, and ‘dredge’ (a mixture of oats and barley) which was sown in spring. The individual properties of different cereals often shaped the ways they were used. Just as today, free-threshing wheat was favoured for bread making since it produced the whitest and lightest loaf. Rye produced darker and more dense loaves but was able to survive in more hostile environments. Barley and oats were also used in bread making but both were more commonly used in ale production and for fodder. In addition to their role in medieval diet, cereal crops also had a wide range of other uses which included cereal straw as bedding, in building materials such as thatch and daub, temper for ceramics and as fuel.   

Archaeobotanical evidence shows that medieval fields also contained a diverse range of arable weed floras. These vary depending upon factors such as tillage methods and soil fertility. Understanding whether they are annual or biennial as well as their ecology allows us to identify field environments from which we can better comprehend techniques of production reconstruct seasonal sowing and crop rotation patterns. 

Previous finds from the site by the Thornbury Archaeology Group include large deposits of charred free-threshing grains*. These are morphologically the same as grains retrieved in this investigation which could be seen as evidence that the site is a Norman hunting lodge or Norman manor* since historical documentation indicates that wealthier households consumed a higher proportion of wheat and rye, whereas the poor, ate proportionately more barley. Further research on site could test this theory through examining crop ratios as suggested by Bogaard et al.

* Harman, C. (2023) ‘Planting Anarchy: Exploring archaeobotanical remains from the Lower Hazel 2022 excavation’, Undergraduate dissertation, University of Bristol, Bristol. Unpublished

**Charred Triticum aestivum/T. turgidum. Photographed usinging an AHRC funded Keyence VHX7000 3-D digital microscope (AHRC award AH/V011758/1) at Fort Cumberland Laboratories, Historic England

Text and photos taken from an undergraduate dissertation by Charlotte Harman, submitted to the University of Bristol in May 2023.  

Author

Charlotte Harman is a MPhil student in archaeology focusing on archaeobotany

Inward Gaze, Outward Vision: the subjective turn in social research.

Posted on by rae.hackler

As a final-year student undertaking a four-year anthropology program, I can confidently say that I have been able to delve deeply into the discipline’s toolbox and experiment with diverse approaches to conducting social research. As my academic journey came to an end, there remained a facet of modern anthropology that I had yet to explore. A documentary enthusiast, I encountered several cutting-edge anthropological movies that blended art and social research to bring to life a new way of seeing and thinking about the world. Attuned to emotions and sensoriality and driven by notions of retribution and justice, the framework for comprehending others and the social realms they inhabit introduced by these visual pieces struck me as groundbreaking. Embarking on my final placement, I was determined to take advantage of this experience and found a place working alongside the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) Film Festival through my university. ”Showcasing the best in groundbreaking and innovative anthropological documentary filmmaking from around the world,” the selection of films showcased at the festival was meticulously curated so that each creative piece seemed to add a layer, revealing an emerging form of complex anthropology, led by movements of decolonization in research methods and newfound conceptions of knowledge as plural and dialectic. 

 Reflecting on my past internships, summer jobs, and placements, I came to realize that my inability to find a balance between producing useful content and nurturing a sense of self-accomplishment had been a recurring theme. Whether I was blindly fulfilling required tasks without incorporating my perspective or impulsively diving into my interpretations of how things should be done, my previous approach to work had hindered my ability to strike that equilibrium between delivering valuable output and cultivating a sense of personal fulfillment. Taking lessons from these experiences, I approached my placement at the RAI with a firm intention of crafting a role for myself that would benefit the festival as well as satisfy my curiosity and push me to develop new capabilities. One of the available openings was for an editorial content creator position and involved providing viewers with contextual information about the films while infusing a sense of enthusiasm. Being a French student accustomed to academic writing in English, the prospect of embracing a more creative style enthralled me. Additionally, I found the task of adding meaning to the films by highlighting anthropological ideas and making them relatable to viewers quite fascinating. It was especially interesting as we were encouraged to explore our viewpoints and connections to the creative pieces. 

 While I acquainted myself with the program, I observed a consistent motif of self-awareness. Across numerous works, there was a clear tendency for the filmmaker’s introspection, revealing their preoccupation with their own perspective, filming approaches, and how they portrayed their subjects. At the extreme of this motif were filmmakers such as Karen Boswall in Sing My Sister, who fully surrendered their authorship, discarding voice-over narratives and encouraging subjects to guide the cameras themselves. Affected by their dedication to learning to speak alongside rather than speak for, I struggled with my own positioning as an author and the choice between self-effacement (objective tone) versus a subjective and self-aware standpoint. This issue was accentuated by the medium I was tackling, as I had to decide whether to evoke the topics of the documentaries as objective realities (e.g., a film about transgender issues in Colombia) or present them as the filmmaker’s own interpretation, an “act of personal witness.” 

 Exploring literature around the topic of subjectivity to guide my approach led me to Devreux’s relentless subjectivity principle: ”The subjectivity of the observer, he noted, influences the course of the observed even as radically as ‘inspection’ influences (‘disturbs’) the behavior of an electron.”  This observation led him to conclude that doing social research more subjectively will increase its objectivity. This relentless subjectivity principle requires that one is aware of their own subjectivity and its influence on the research undertaken and requires the ability to ”bring in our own experiences and perspectives to bear on the questions we ask and the answers we find” without ”rejecting ”all analytical standards or scholarly rigor” to ”engage in a dialogue in which we not only learn from our subjects but also from ourselves” as cultural anthropologist Renato Rosaldo articulates. This second requirement reveals a need for the ability to include oneself in the research, one’s own perspective, experience, and emotions in relation to what is observed, and addressing this dialogue between the self and the observed with scholarly rigor. 

 I set my focal point to be that of an ethnographic writer, considering each film as a singular universe created by the encounter between the filmmaker’s perspective, the observed subject, and the audio-visual medium. This led me to learn how to harness my immediate experience of a film, with my knowledge of documentary filmmaking and anthropological frameworks to add to the viewers’ understanding of the creative piece.  For instance, working on ”Sing My Sister” by Karen Boswall I aimed to highlight the complexity of this research piece, which draws on both ethnomusicology and visual anthropology to seamlessly stitch together a layered approach to the emancipation and empowerment of Mozambican women in a trilogy format. The ingenious underlying structure of the documentary and specific stylistic choices made by the filmmakers risked going unnoticed, affecting the overall appreciation of their work.  

 As an ethnomusicology documentary, I felt a large part of the ‘message’ conveyed by the film was in its rhythm although I was initially reluctant to expand on this. As I reflected and furthered my reading into subjectivities, I crossed paths with Ruth Behar’s eulogy to vulnerable ethnography and Clifford Geertz’s reflections on aesthetic forms of communication and their central role in the ways people construct and communicate meaning:  

‘‘Grasping other people’s inner lives like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke, (..) reading a poem”; ‘‘You don’t exactly penetrate another culture, as the masculinist image would have it. You put yourself in its way and it bodies forth and enmeshes you.”  

Encountering literature that legitimizes and extols a more sensitive understanding of cultural research gave me the freedom to give into a more lyrical tone to my writing (when of use in communicating meaning both theoretically and aesthetically). For example, while working on La Nave by Carlos Maria Romero (aka Atabey Mamasita) I relied heavily on the use of lyrical accents and a segmented structure to prepare the viewer for a documentary that functions as a collage of interviews and clips, weaving a portrait of segmented hybrid identities and they’re piecing together during the carnival of Barranquilla (Columbia).  

 Warned by Daphne Patai’s critique of the genre she defines as ”nouveau solipsism,” previous reflection on self-awareness came into play as I noted my writing was becoming excessively sensationalist. An evident downfall of including emotions and experiences is the risk of falling into ‘‘miniature bubbles of navel-gazing” or suffocating cultural research by choosing to focus solely on our own experience of otherness menacing to reduce social research and especially ethnography to a consumption of cultural experience. Self-reflection is not an end in itself. We have to ask ourselves: How do you write subjectively into ethnography in such a way that you can continue to call what you are doing ethnography? 

 In consonance with philosopher Roland Barthes‘ perspective, I believe anthropology, or any scientific research or artistic approach to the world in that matter, has never been about describing reality but rather adding or removing layers to evidence new possibilities for understanding the world.  Poetry and literature through their inherent ability to convey subjectivity and disrupt established ways of thinking can set solid grounds for the discovery of ”new meaning and a higher order of relations” and can therefore be an impactful tool in the bridging of worlds. To me the act of bridging subjectivities is fundamentally anthropological whether that is between a fictional world contained in a moving image and an individual, between two cultures or two languages, anthropology is about ”finding commonalities and connections between different ways of understanding the world,” holding space for the appreciation of ”multivocality” and the ”reimagination of our shared social worlds.” 

 Author

Lilas Privateer is a recent master’s graduate in Anthropology with Innovation. Her interest lies in looking at how art as a space can become a research tool in Anthropology.

Women’s work: Making discoveries in the Australian collection

Posted on by rae.hackler

Appeared orginally on the Bristol Museum blog

My research focuses on material culture from Australia and the Pacific Islands – an understudied part of the collection at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. In 2022 I undertook a placement at the Museum and my aim was to focus on the documentation for these collections.
During a 1970s storage move the curatorial team created index cards with information for each object and small black and white photographs were added to some cards.  

I systematically worked through approximately 2000 objects from across Oceania. It was a good way to ‘see’ the collection and I was able to add information to many existing records. The aim was to find objects that (although entered into the Registers) did not have a corresponding record on the database Ke Emu. In total I found 182 objects which would not come up in a database search. Most of these objects are from Papua New Guinea and New Zealand and include many important Maori cloaks.  

 I also made two exciting discoveries. 

 Firstly, this bag currently stored in the New Guinea collection had ‘no history’ (E1023). Looking at a photograph, I could see that this is a looped and knotted bag made in eastern Australia. The striking diagonal pattern indicates it is from the region from northeast New South Wales to southeast Queensland. Made by Aboriginal women in the mid-nineteenth century who soaked, dried and hardened fibres over ashes. These fibres were then knotted together diagonally. Some bags included coloured fibres of the plant which resulted in a graduating pattern. In a certain light, this bag has a pinky tone. 

Looped and knotted bag from northeast New South Wales or southeast Queensland. Acquisition details unknown
Looped and knotted bag from northeast New South Wales or southeast Queensland. Acquisition details unknown. Bristol Museum and Art Gallery (E1023), © Bristol Culture

Secondly, this shell necklace on the database as Solomon Islands can now be identified as a traditional necklace from Tasmania (Ea11010).  

I contacted Dr Ben Rowson, Senior Curator of Terrestrial Mollusca at the National Museum of Wales. He agreed that the shells are very likely Phasianotrochus irisodontes (known as rainbow kelp or maireener shells). They are found in the waters around southern Australia. 

Dr Gaye Sculthorpe (Research Professor at Deakin University) showed photographs of the Bristol necklace to two authorities – Pakana curator Zoe Rimmer and artist Julie Gough. They were excited by the discovery confirmed the shells to be maireener shells. 

 Maireener shells were harvested and polished by Pakana women who made necklaces by threading them onto plaited vegetable fibre cord or kangaroo sinew. The Bristol necklace is strung onto a black, plaited cord – which could be horsehair, making this particular necklace unusual.  

These necklaces are evidence of luna tunapri, women’s knowledge of natural history, the environment and the surrounding ocean. Made in large numbers in the nineteenth century, and sold and gifted to white visitors, they were relished for their fragility and beauty. They quickly became a commodity. They are a testament to the skill of women whose lives were being eradicated through colonial conquest and dispossession.

Maireener shell necklace made in Tasmania. Acquisition details unknown.
Maireener shell necklace made in Tasmania. Acquisition details unknown. Bristol Museum and Art Gallery (Ea11010, transferred from E3895) © Bristol Culture

Elsewhere in the South West, at The Box in Plymouth there is a variety of shell necklaces collected by explorer Gertrude Benham in 1905. At the time of Benham’s visit, non-Aboriginal people were making shell necklaces for sale in a similar style. One maireener shell necklace presented to Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum in 1905 is said to have belonged to one of the famous Aboriginal women, Truganini. This necklace returned to Tasmania in November 1997. 

 

Remnants of pierced shells have been found in burials dating back to the third century AD. Today women are once again stringing shells. This revitalisation of women’s cultural tradition ensures continuity and lineage. It is important to note that such shells are becoming harder to find as changing seas and climate are affecting their distribution. 

The bag and the necklace are both rare objects in museum collections. They are two examples of female and they show the skill and technical ability needed to produce aesthetically beautiful belongings. They also reveal a complex and deep knowledge of resources and an inherited understanding of the rhythms of Country.  

Although their provenance is still undiscovered, the good news is that they can now be made available for study.  

 Author

Polly Bence is a PhD researcher in archaeology at the Universtity of Bristol and the University of Exceter. Her PhD research is funded by the South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership. Thanks to Lissant Bolton, Tony Eccles, Julie Gough, Lisa Graves, Zoe Rimmer, Ben Rowson and Gaye Sculthorpe. 

 

Something a Little More Intimate: Citizenship, the State, and Making Things Personal

Posted on by rae.hackler

Intimate Citizenship 

Commonplace phrases are rarely as simple as they seem, especially when they have hefty legal implications to go with them. The term “citizenship” is one of these. Deceivingly tricky and complicated for its common place use, “Citizenship is a contested and a normative concept…[that] usually refers to full membership in a national state. [However] There are no authoritative definitions,” partially because different nation states – and the policy makers, factions, and people that make up those states – have different ideas of what citizenship entails. 

In our modern world, citizenship is closely tied to the idea of democracy.  Legally speaking, a citizen is somebody who has certain rights and obligations to a nation state. These are defined by the state they “belong” to – often thought practically as your passport state among transnational travelers. Citizens have certain obligations to that state and the national, political, or local community, and in exchange (supposedly) have certain rights provided by the state. Ideally, in democratic thought, citizens have voting rights or participation rights in choosing the leaders of the state and the laws that they are to abide by.  However, citizenship is not as simple as such a legal definition implies (and there is no one universal legal definition). As always, the world doesn’t exist in simple, definitive binaries. Things are messy.  As Meehan notes,  

“[o]n the one hand, people who are co-nationals of the same state may be denied the same citizenship rights as one another. On the other hand, residents in a state who are not nationals of it may be granted some of the same rights of citizenship that are enjoyed by those who are nationals.”   

Having a passport, birth certificate, or other paper documentation that claims you’re a citizen of somewhere – that you “belong” somewhere – doesn’t always guarantee the actual right to remain, the right to vote, to work, to live. On the flip side, lacking citizenship, official, documented belonging, doesn’t necessarily exclude you from some citizenship rights. Plenty of people own property in countries they’re not citizens of. International migrant workers work and live in countries they don’t “belong” to. I, as an international student in the UK, am given the right to work (20 hours a week), rent, and remain for the duration of my studies. I have been granted limited rights of citizenship under specific conditions (I’m studying in the UK). 

Due to the complex nature of the state and societies’ relation to culture and individuals’ lives, the term “citizen” has come to have more meaning than just a basic (yet still contested) legal one. To reflect this, social sciences have asserted that there are many different types of citizenship, including: cultural citizenship, urban citizenship, sexual citizenship, and intimate citizenship. These differentiations of citizenship allow for nuanced understandings of people’s experiences of belonging.  Let’s focus on one of these types of citizenship, intimate citizenship.  

Defining Intimate Citizenship 

Intimate citizenship explores how the state and societal norms mediate and at times regulate aspects of an individual’s “private life.”  As Plummer notes, “intimacy is often restricted to our romantic and sexual life; but I [Plummer] use the term to refer to an array of arenas in which we ‘do’ the personal life – doing body work, doing gender, doing relationships, doing eroticism, and doing identities.” This concept of “doing work” and “doing relationships” – of the daily activities of people’s lives is the intimacy that I am interested here. Plummer continues: 

“Applied to intimacies, citizenship implies the rights and obligations surrounding different intimate life styles, the participation of different intimate groupings and the recognition of people’s different intimate identities. Ideas around intimate citizenship have been increasingly placed on the political agenda. In much of the western literature on this, the great emphasis has been placed on citizenship as the right to choose: to choose your partner, your sexual activities, whether you have a child or not, or what you do to your body…Yet whilst recognizing the growing importance of this, there is also a need for intimate citizenship debates to focus upon the more traditional role of inequalities in considering citizenship” (Plummer 2004, para. 16). 

As a concept, intimate citizenship highlights the inequalities experienced in access to the claimed rights of a citizen, and where lacking (full) citizenship affects people’s private, personal lives.  Not all citizenship is the same or equal, and looking into how ideas and experiences of citizenship, or lack thereof, offer new insight into people’s lives, choices, and experiences.  Intimate citizenship looks at the experiences and lives of an individual on the daily and personal level, and how these are interwoven with social and legal definitions of citizenship and belonging to a particular community.   

The ability to participate in, or choose, particular lifestyles or “intimate groupings” and the (often) inequalities surrounding these choices is just one example of how intimate citizenship can nuance understandings of belonging, identities, and individual’s interactions with the state. A classic example, one that verges into the very related but more specific concept of sexual citizenship, would be laws surrounding same sex relationships. Whom a person engages sexually with in general, is largely considered personal, private business. However, in countries where same sex relationships are illegal or do not qualify for marriage (official recognition by the state), the state is affecting personal lives/matters. Another example is that of migrant/transnational families, where visa restrictions and legal right to remain affect family unification.  

Case Study: Citizenship Mediated Through Family 

The dilemma between wanting to be physically present for your children and the economic needs of providing a child with the best possible future is common among many transnational parents (Madianou 2014).  Issues of citizenship – particularly the citizen’s right to remain in a particular country – complicates this farther.  Many migrant domestic workers do not make enough money to sponsor their entire family and bring them over to the country in which they work.  However, the economic benefits of working abroad are too strong for many to go back home. 

Citizenship, or lack thereof, affects and mediates the possibilities for intimate ways of being.  Lacking the citizenship that you need to unify your family gets in the way of personal choice of having a family.  This is particularly true, for example, in the experiences of undocumented Mexican migrant parents constantly at risk of deportation, even while their children are US citizens.  Many of these parents struggle with whether they should risk being separated from their children, should they be deported, by raising them in the United States. The alternative is to be separated from them always, sending their children – even though some of them are American citizens – to Mexico to be raised by family. The intimate, daily lives of these families, of the citizenship(s) of these children, are full of shifting levels of belonging both in the United States and in Mexico.  It is not uncommon for young children who, though they are citizens of the United States, are deported with their parents back to Mexico. Their own citizenship is revoked or ignored because of the citizenship status of their parents.  Even legal citizenship, or particularly legal citizenship, affects the intimate lives of families. Not only an individual’s citizenship, but the status of other family members can also influence whether or not a person has access to the rights of their own legal citizenship.   

Past the individual level, citizenship here is tied to the family unit, and particularly to parents, adding another layer to parent-child relationships.  The experience of citizenship for these children is practically null compared to their peers with citizen parents.  Their right to remain in the country they supposedly “belong” to and are members of renegotiates definitions of citizenships to accommodate for personal (intimate) family relations and another individual’s citizenship. 

Conclusion 

To return to Plummer’s discussion on intimate citizenship:  

“Applied to intimacies, citizenship implies the rights and obligations surrounding different intimate life styles, the participation of different intimate groupings and the recognition of people’s different intimate identities”  

The ability to participate in, or choose, particular lifestyles or “intimate groupings,” and the choices and, often, inequalities surrounding these is just one example of how intimate citizenship can nuance understandings of experiences of identity and belonging.  Among migrants and transnational families, intimate citizenship can be used to frame how aspects of personal, daily life are affected by your – and sometimes your intimate relations’ – identities. Access to the rights of a citizen, of ‘belonging’ to the community you live in, are negotiated and curbed by the state through elements of your personal, private life.  In the case of undocumented Mexican migrants and their American citizen children, it become apparent that legal citizenship can be renegotiated through social and cultural citizenship, all in relation to intimate familial relations.  This is only the tip of the iceberg. Intimate citizenship highlights the inequalities inherent in ‘rights’ of belonging. Regardless of how much you contribute to the community you live in, if you pay taxes, are a good neighbor, worker, friend, family, citizen – how you portray yourself in the public sphere – aspects of your personal sphere can and are used to determine how much and when you can be a citizen. 

 Author

Rae Hackler is a 2nd year PhD student in Anthropology studying tea, identity, and citizenship among diasporas.

 

A Search for Activism in the Attention Economy

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We pay a price for the time we spend on social media, though not with money. Minutes of scrolling that turn into hours engender capitalist profit-generation and manipulation, leaving our attention spans frazzled – in return, we seem to receive little more than bursts of amusement, curiosity or disgust. My experience of running the Instagram of an environmental campaigning group, however, led me to consider whether social media can afford more than momentary stimulation for the price we pay. I’ll begin this post by accounting my initial scepticism towards social media as a platform for activism and some of the anthropological work that validates it. I’ll then explore my subsequent change of heart. More than short-lived amusement, Instagram provided new ways for my group to inform and connect. I was pushed to consider Instagram as an unlikely, but promising, way to sustain activism that often questioned the very economic system responsible for the platform’s design.  

In 2021, I volunteered with Friends of the Earth Exeter (FoEE hereafter) – an environmental activist group associated with the climate justice movement, often critical of the role of capitalism in the current climate crisis. I envisioned partaking in meetings humming with dissent and passionate protests, but to my dismay ended up spending equal measures of time running the group’s Instagram. I felt a gulf between the latter – producing sleek, eye-catching posts and stories, from photographs of wildlife to technicolour infographics – and the former, which I considered the ‘real’ activism. Any time spent producing such posts surely aligned me with the logic of neoliberalism’s attention economy, striving to catch users’ attention for a brief moment, before they scrolled on to the next flicker of stimulation? Worse still, it made the infinitely small global minority of Mark Zuckerbergs out there richer, turning the cogs of the very economic system the group so readily criticised for its ecological destruction.  

Figure 1: (2023) Capitalist style over activist substance?

Though it isn’t an objective one, users pay a price for their social media use and this paints a gloomy picture for digital activism. When using social media, our data is leaked and sold, generating an immense profit for a global minority. Using social media as a platform to criticise neoliberalism – which FoEE certainly did – might be considered hypocritical in this light. The data traffic it generates fuels Instagram’s profit mechanism. Social media not only undercuts anti-capitalist activism but activism more generally, through exposing its users to manipulation. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is a notable example of this, users’ data being used to manipulate their voting behaviour, their feeds being individually tailored to present them with “a picture of the world which [was] so emotionally compelling that it [was] beyond debate.” This phenomenon is not limited to such scandals. Algorithms, after all, govern the content made available to us daily to secure our enduring attention, suspending us in an echo-chamber-like environment simply because it is profitable. An environment where our most intimate views can be exploited, or our existing ones fed back to us merely to keep us hooked, seems a barren one for activism. It threatens to undermine the potential of activist groups to attract new members, or even to keep current ones.  

Social media further undermines the potential for users to engage in digital activism through fragmenting our attention. Paradoxically, this links to one of the few things Paasonen concedes that social media affords us. Despite being labelled the attention economy, information passes through us so quickly on social media that the concept of attention disintegrates – we live at a time where “we can share a family photo, a recipe, an amber alert… in the space of sixty seconds, and without any emotional variance.” An excerpt from Petit’s class on ‘emotions and the Internet’ is another fitting illustration of this: a student describes how their digital time consists of moments of “bored, not bored, bored, not bored, bored.” Did FoEE’s Instagram activism stand a chance if the attention users pay to posts is so short-lived? Ironically, the potential for affective intensity – flutters of interest, amusement, disgust – that drives us fleetingly from one post to the next, is suggested by Paasonen as one of the few things users gain from social media. Overall, this paints a bleak picture for FoEE’s efforts to engage in activism on Instagram. As my time volunteering with the group went on, however, I questioned whether it was really that simple.   

As my time progressed at FoEE, I found it harder to separate my time spent running the Instagram account with the ‘real’ activism that I imagined to exist only outside of the digital world. The team did carefully select alluring photographs to post, but not merely to inspire moments of compassion or curiosity. Rather, they housed links to petitions, informing users of sustained ways to act. Similarly, eye-catching graphics that the group meticulously matched to the colours of the group logo afforded more than a momentary peak in their viewers’ interest. Such posts carved out new pathways for sustained sociality. They broadcast details of upcoming meetings – much better attended thanks to their presence. The posts following these often celebrated the assembly’s success, their comments section a chance for attendees to further amplify morale (“well done everyone!” “so grateful for such important work!”) The glossy aesthetic of FoEE’s Instagram page, on the surface, appeared aligned with the logic of capitalism’s attention economy. But these aesthetics encouraged and maintained engagement that was more sustained: invites to act, to meet likeminded people and to celebrate steps in the team’s desired direction – albeit small ones. In doing so, Instagram fuelled an activist group which often criticised capitalism’s misdoings, rather than simply restricting them to perpetuating its continuance. 

Figure 2: (2023) A new form of connection

Campbell’s ethnographic account of Thailand’s Mae Sot industrial zone parallels mine – though it is situated outside of the realms of digital capitalism, it similarly suggests that capitalism can be challenged through exploiting its contradictions. Factories in the region increasingly employed migrant workers. Though North Atlantic narratives deem this kind of labour flexibilization to cause class fragmentation, in this context it appeared to have socially constitutive effects. As workers were placed in factory dormitories, close bonds formed – some even marrying. Co-workers helped each other to break factory rules discreetly and engaged in protests in a mix of everyday and open, collective defiance. The practices by which companies sought to create low-wage, flexible workforces – paradoxically – enabled new forms of sociality for workers. The resulting social cohesion allowed workers to question the very economic system that had dictated these conditions in the first place. In a similar way, Instagram – a platform defined by the pursuit of profit – provided an environment with novel possibilities for FoEE to further their activism, which frequently consisted of questioning the capitalist system that shaped the platform’s design.  

This phenomenon seems echoed in the theories of numerous scholars – perhaps the best-known being Marx. His notion of class recomposition suggests that capitalist restructuring results in occupational and demographic changes in the working class, but simultaneously creates new conditions of possibility for cohesion through collective struggle. This similarly highlights how new forms of sociality can develop not in spite of, but because of, changes made in the capitalist pursuit of profit. Mason brings this theory up-to-date, from a time of industrial capitalism to our free-market capitalist era. Neoliberal capitalism has unleashed exponential advancement in information technologies but it has simultaneously created a “route out” of itself. Why? Because in doing so, millions of networked people have been created, “financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away.” Platforms like Instagram might harvest our data for profit, but exploitation is not the whole story. In return for the price we pay to use such platforms, we are not just afforded fleeting amusement, but the possibility to educate ourselves and to connect at a scale that was not possible before. Seen in this light, my experience of FoEE’s Instagram presence seems no more at odds with ‘real’ activism than the protests and meetings I originally put on a pedestal.   

Social media appears an unlikely environment for activism to thrive – indeed, we all pay a price for our use of these platforms. However, my experience at FoEE suggested to me that this isn’t the whole picture. Beneath the surface of the aesthetic photographs and technicolour infographics of FoEE’s Instagram page lay new ways for activists to inform and connect. From the bleak conditions of the attention economy sprung new possibilities for a movement which called out capitalism’s misdoings. What this means for the future is unclear. The ethnographic instance explored here might be a drop in the ocean, or it might be something more – an indication of “swathes of economic life… beginning to move to a different rhythm.”   

Developed from coursework in Anthropology and Contemporary Capitalism unit at the University of Bristol Department of Anthropology and Archaeology 

Author 

Hannah Wright is a second-year student of the BA Anthropology course and am interested in economic, political and legal anthropology – particularly in relation to the topic of climate change.