Tag: social anthropology

Rest At Ease: State Power in Arnos Vale’s Sailors Corner

Posted on by rae.hackler

Military graves are often associated with orderliness, and Arnos Vale is no exception. Even in non-military contexts the graves are seen as rigid: think of some network TV actor with teeth “like soldiers’ graves”. It’s commonly expected that military graves be organised and uniform, whereas civilian plots are often decorative and individualised. The questions remaining are why this might be the case, and how an influence is maintained on soldiers’ lives so much that they reflect this in death.

State Power vs(and) Pastoral Power

Foucault argues in “Discipline and Punish” (1977) that since the modern nation-state emerged in the 18th century, the threat of state power has taken on a much subtler form than fear of execution, which was more characteristic of earlier forms of government, like absolute monarchy or feudalism. While violence previously exerted control, now internalised societal norms do. Foucault links this to the beginning of the rehabilitating and reforming prison structure, characterised by lenience and correction being prioritised rather than violence. He argues that state power is still being enacted subtly in this setting, however it is transferred through environmental norms, like the construction of a strict routine and the surrender of personal liberties like privacy. As these conventions are normalised over time people internalise the taught behaviours and begin to self-correct any deviances, conforming to state power without violent influence.

The prison system and the military are both state security institutions containing vast norms of conduct; arguably many of the norms established within the prison sector of the judicial system extend to the military as well. This could extend to one’s last will, ensuring even the body’s posthumous movement occurred within these norms, especially if posthumous ritual was enacted within a military context.

Garcia’s work on pastoral power acts as a means of explaining how state power structures have an influence on ritual surrounding death, with self-discipline continuing posthumously. Pastoral power is explained in two aspects linked to the ability to heal: the first is the aesthetic ideal of the pastoral harkening back to Arcadia and Idyll, an idealised stretching countryside, characterised by a simpler life capable of inner healing; the second is the pastoral relating to the pastor, regarding the power of a priestly or generally religious presence to heal. Both aspects and their intersections are explored in “The Pastoral Clinic” and mingle in the setting of a military gravesite as both an interaction with the environment and a sacred site. Pastoral power normalises salvation as the ultimate healing in a group, and this is sought after through priestly guidance and the landscape in the Espanola Valley setting of “The Pastoral Clinic”. Although in “The Pastoral Clinic” this salvation is reached while alive through rehabilitative processes, which is itself like Foucault’s observation regarding the removal of executionary power in the nation-state, the salvation in Arnos Vale is a posthumous goal.

Combining both approaches helps explain a place of salvatory and military importance, like a soldier’s gravesite.

Arnos Vale and Sailors Corner

Sailors Corner is composed of two evenly spaced lines of forty naval headstones of sailors who died in Bristol hospitals during the Second World War (Figure 1). This is different to many of the other plots, which are often directly next to one another, crooked, ornate either in design or decoration left by visitors, descriptive, and featuring above-ground box plots in a multitude of colours. Sailors Corner is notable as well for the headstones’ smaller shape, muted grey colour, and limited information and decoration, particularly as it comes to characteristics of personality.

The main manifestation of Foucauldian notions of state and pastoral power in the Sailors’ Corner is the internalisation of disciplinary and salvatory norms accumulated in the militaristic setting of the sailors’ service. Militaristic norms of routine and unity are reflected posthumously in the same shape and colour of stone, the same font, the same symbols engraved in the headstone for minimal decoration and the same information given on each of those buried (Figure 1). Foucault argues that a notable difference between typical state discipline and a pastoral power is that the pastoral power is acted on a group, as though a flock of sheep, and as such the uniformity may also reflect influence on a group led by religious rather than state discipline.

For instance, the existence of identical graves in other areas of Arnos Vale suggests under certain circumstances or with certain opportunities one could opt out of being laid in the Sailors’ Corner, exemplifying a multidirectional movement of power and jurisdiction over one’s remains which does not solely depend on the state. This aligns further with Foucault’s (1982) thinking, and thus suggests burial in or out of Sailors Corner is dependent on disciplinary influences in the sailors’ posthumous matters.

Joseph Albert McGill

Foucault argues state power can act subtly through control of the intimate life. In Sailors Corner this manifests as most of the headstones being congregated there, away from their families, but also as the headstones of sailors not in the Sailors’ Corner, like Joseph Albert McGill (Figure 2). Sailors dying in Bristol during the Second World War, not putting their headstone in Sailors Corner, and still retaining their naval headstone in an unrelated plot exemplifies a level of conformity to these norms from not only themselves but their families and estates, as it becomes clearer a member of such oversaw the sailor’s will. This also shows the leading of a different group in these subtle forms of power.

However, although these sailors died in Bristol hospitals, that does not mean they were Bristol inhabitants who would have had family plots in which to be buried: their presence in Arnos Vale at all does suggest instead a Foucauldian subjectivity that would trump this suggestion – their militaristic life was chosen over their familial. Their presence in a military site marks them one-dimensionally as soldiers posthumously, but their presence in a site in Bristol ties their citizenship and their salvation explicitly to the place of their last service, regardless of any familial ties. This works to subjectify them as in service to the state over any other institution and is a further example of Friedman’s display of how the state can exercise control over intimate life, only in a different context.

On his family’s headstone Joseph McGill is considered first a husband, whereas on his sailor’s headstone he is considered most in his connection to the navy. The phrasing on the headstone is particularly subjecting, with Joseph McGill’s occupation in the navy not mentioned, only his rank – the cohort he was part of represented in a record of which ship he served on. The demarcation of ship creates a uniformity and group further to the one relating to norms of routine and the pastoral: each sailor is uniform in death in the Sailors’ Corner, but each was uniform in life as identifiable solely as part of a whole ship, returning to ideas of a group. Further, the inclusion of rank allows for a posthumous exercise of power between those buried, continuing to display power as diffuse. Overall, McGill’s plot suggests the creation of several directions of Foucauldian subjectivity.

For King and Country

Pastoral power becomes most explicit when considering the United Kingdom during the Second World War as a Christian state. State power and the power of the Church exist nearly as one and the same, with much political overlap, such as the presence of bishops in the House of Lords. To serve King and Country, then, as the sailors in the Sailors’ Corner had sworn to do, was to serve a pastoral power and a state power at once, this power thus being multidirectional and subtle in its complexities. There is material evidence in the gravesite for this position of equal prioritisation in the choice of engravings on the sailors’ headstones. Joseph McGill’s (Figure 2) features an anchor and a crucifix at roughly the same size. This suggests an equal importance of both service to the country and faith being pushed by the norms of culture (including symbols) of the military at the time, as well showing the tight partnership of church and state being exercised to create this specific subjectivity.

A second example of pastoral power is the countryside setting of Arnos Vale. A common thread among more propagandising military literature speaks of being granted peace in the rich earth and flowing pastures of the United Kingdom, such as in “The Soldier” by Rupert Brooke or “And did those feet in ancient time” by William Blake. In these situations, the aspect of pastoral power as priestly salvation comes through the rural as conducive to spiritual health and ultimate peace. This connects salvation to a green landscape, like in Idyll and Arcadia, within the context of a burial fit for a British defender. In this way, Arnos Vale’s landscape perfectly encapsulates the promise of the pastoral.

Conclusion

Foucault’s approach to self-discipline and pastoral power, particularly its application by Garcia, is very useful in understanding the networks of self-discipline present in a military setting, even one without any active personnel, like a gravesite. This is certainly true of the United Kingdom, where the State and the Church for a long time were valued as equals, creating a unique intersectional subjectivity of soldiers.

 

Developed from coursework in Social Theories unit at the University of Bristol Department of Anthropology and Archaeology 

Author

Imogen McAra is an MPhil student in Anthropology focusing on English Change Ringing.

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.

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

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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. 

Anthropology for the Study of Drugs and Society

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Anthropological Research

Image 1

Anthropology is the study of human communities, their history, behavior, patterns, and diverse social functionalities.

Because of this focus and methodology, anthropology is a valuable discipline to study the communities created around legal and illegal drug use and illegal drug markets.

The research in anthropological drug studies can focus on gender perspectives of drugs, on theoretical approaches, history, and others.

However, we believe that anthropological theories, such as ethnography, can support different approaches to our current anti-drug policies and can, for example, help with the demystification of drug use. Or, as stated by Carlson et al, ethnographic research on drug users also contributes to understanding and improving public health.

Ethnographical Drug Research

Ethnographic research on drug communities is mostly focused on real-life interactions of the drug markets or users‘ culture.

However, because of its illegal status, there are enormous challenges in researching groups that are involved with drug communities.

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Online Drug Culture

More recently, Anthropology has started to focus on online cultures.

One example on the Surface Web is the research made by Lisa Krieg, in which they examine the virtual community on Erowid – a drug education website –  through Big Data sources.

However, there is a new focus on online academic research: the drug markets on the Dark Web.

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Masson and Bancroft did ethnographical research using interviews and non-participant observation in crypto forums. They aimed to understand how users claim the crypto market as a space of morality, empathy, trust, reciprocity, knowledge transfer, harm-reduction, and self-limitation.

Rachael Ferguson also discusses methods and the differences in online versus offline concerns and risks. The author concludes that these sites offer access to far larger data than we could obtain in offline ethnographical fieldwork.

Conclusion

Anthropological research on the drug communities is beneficial for society because it can help us to understand how people get involved with it, how strong their bond with the community, and how policies can support them.

Developed from coursework in the Drugs and Society unit at the University of Bristol Department of Anthropology and Archaeology

Author

Rafaela Carvalho is a master’s student in Anthropology. She is an international student and has an undergraduate degree in International Relations from the Universidade Paulista. Her research interests include the illegal drug market, illegal drug policies, and the dark web.