Category: digital anthropology

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.

A Search for Activism in the Attention Economy

Posted on by rae.hackler

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.