Something for posterity or hostage to fortune? Archiving anthropological field material (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

What do anthropologists do with all the data (both primary and secondary) they accumulate while doing fieldwork? Most continue to draw on it for many years, but there is increasing pressure (e.g. from the ESRC) to place much of it in archives, usually in electronic form. What kind of material could be deposited? What use may be made of such material by others? What are the ethical dilemmas which face anthropologists in depositing confidential data? Are there differences between paper and electronic archives and between textual and other forms of material, such as photos and sound recordings? How can anthropologists best protect their sources? Does anthropology become a form of historiography when its raw data are archived? What forms of ‘knowledge’ are created by archiving?     

Post‐truth anthropology

Countless commentators have announced the advent of the post‐truth era, but while everyone seems to be talking about it, there is little agreement about what it really means. This article argues that anthropology can make an important and distinctive contribution to understanding post‐truth by treating it ethnographically. Commonly proposed explanations for post‐truth include changes in political culture, in the structure of information in the digital age and universal cognitive weaknesses that limit people's capacity for critical thought. While all these are likely important factors, they do not account for the role of culture in creating and sustaining post‐truth. In fact, it is likely that culture, especially in the form of metacognition, or thought about thought, plays an important role by providing knowledge practices, techniques for allocating attention, and especially competing theories of truth. Ethnographic methods provide anthropologists with a distinctive window on post‐truth cultures of metacognition.     

Archiving anthropology in Portugal

This article examines some of the issues surrounding archiving in anthropology. It provides an account of archiving in the Portuguese context and seeks to problematize anthropology archives, contributing to the as yet timid debate over this question in the field. There are various ways of recording ethnographies and saving the ensuing records. Anthropologists often reflect on their archives, but rarely make these reflections public. Nor do we know much about what anthropologists in general plan to do with their fieldnotes, diaries, images, maps, drawings, audio and video recordings and objects, once a specific research project is complete. How do anthropologists store their data? What should be done with these materials? What stories can they tell? Will the ethnographic materials produced in the present be considered historical archives in the future?     

Bridging anthropology and its archives: an analysis from the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives

Much has been written about the need to open up archives as part of the decolonial turn and decolonizing methodologies. What does this look like in practice for anthropology? Despite increasing interest in archives and ‘the archival turn’ among anthropologists, our study at the National Anthropological Archives (NAA) found that anthropologists who use archives in their work lack familiarity with organizational principles and histories that would help them navigate and gain access to these records, as well as critique them. Beyond reporting this recent research, we posit that the disconnect between archives and anthropology is not isolated to the NAA or the US, but is pervasive in the discipline. In sharing this work, we hope to inspire other similar institutional moves and to promote archival education and scholarly engagement in anthropology and its training programmes.     

Framing the past: situating the archaeological in photographs

Archaeology continually reproduces its own images. Speaking archaeology’s visual language is one way we prove membership in the discipline. Many aspects of this visual language have become so naturalized within archaeological representation as to be almost unquestionable: the cleaning of the site, the use of scale, and particular framings and perspectives. How, then, is the production of particular photographic images of archaeology related to the practice of archaeology? Does archaeology look a certain way (in photographs) or are archaeologists reproducing an archaeology according to the way it is thought it should look? Using examples of early photographs from Latin American archaeological expeditions, this article investigates not only photography as an applied technology for scientific recording, but also its power to situate archaeological knowledge. Drawing on recent reflective and critical developments in both the history of archaeology and visual anthropology, it uses five focal points – trace, objectivity and authenticity, sight/site, still lifes, and still lives – to argue that early-twentieth-century archaeological photographs of Latin America participated in the generation of an ‘authentic’ past rather than simply paid testament to it.     

Anthropology in the news? (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

It is part of our informal culture of anthropology to complain about the way the media portray us, and yet there has been little systematic analysis of media representations of anthropology. I look at stories about anthropologists, stories that quote anthropologists and opinion pieces by anthropologists over a six‐month period in The New York Times. I conclude that biological anthropology and archaeology are over‐represented in these stories, and that the media portrays anthropologists primarily as authorities on exotic others abroad, or ritual behaviour at home. Anthropologists who write about neoliberalism and militarism have had difficulty getting into the high‐end mainstream media, where it is economists rather than anthropologists who are seen as experts on general human nature.     

Climbing heritage: The lines and aesthetics of rock climbing

Climbing is an experience born of the interplay of aesthetics and heritage. Nowadays, climbing attracts people in droves, all eager to join the contest between body and rock. In this article, the author addresses the refined social background of climbing. He asks how the intangible heritage left behind in rocks by generations of climbers manifests itself in the aesthetics of movement and the experiences embedded in the lines that form the climbing routes. How might anthropologists study the mind-body experiences and traces left by generations of rock users? How are we to understand the multisensory craft of climbing?     

Networked Spirits and Smart Séances: Aura and the Anthropological Gaze in the Era of the Internet of Things

2015 has been declared the year of the “Internet of Things”, the promised (or threatened) era when our commodities communicate among themselves. But even the most optimistic prognostications cannot conceal deep ambivalences about objects and agency. How do we think about our things when they communicate and act independently of us? How do we frame our relationships with them? How do we articulate distributed intelligence? And how are others imbricated in those relationships? Yet, anthropologists have been asking these questions for some time, and, in this essay, I revisit some ghosts of anthropology's past in order to prompt spectral evocation of these anthropological futures. Through revisiting anthropological fascinations with the nineteenth-century séances, phantasmagoria, commodities and auras, this essay looks to nineteenth-century confusions not only to reflect on the confusions of the present, but also to gesture to possible futures where our lively things might help us challenge suspect dichotomies of human and non-human.     

Objectivity and the writing of history

How do historians approach objectivity? This is addressed by Mark Bevir in his book The Logic of the History of Ideas (1999) by his argument for an anthropological epistemology with objectivity in the historical narrative resting on the explanation of human actions/agent intentionality equating with meaning. The criticism of this position is at several levels. As sophisticated constructionists historians do not usually ask ‘Can history be objective?’ Rather, they work from the balance of evidence reflecting the intersubjectivity of truth and they acknowledge the problematic nature of inferring agent intentionality and the difficulties in equating this with ‘what it means’. Why Abraham Lincoln issued the 1863 emancipation proclamation is a case in point. No historian would claim to have located its true meaning objectively in effect doubting Mark Bevir's claim that ‘objective knowledge arises from a human practice in which we criticise and compare rival webs of theories in terms of agreed facts’ (The Logic of the History of Ideas, 1999, p. 98). There are also further challenges to an over-reliance on rational action theory and the problems associated with the selection of evidence. Equally, most historians in practice doubt objectivity emerges from an accurate knowledge of the motives that can be matched to weak authorial intentions and that this leads to action via decisions. Few historians today accept that their narrative mimics past intentionality and that this provides true meaning. The article offers four reasons for rejecting Bevir's position and concludes with a defence of the narrative-linguistic determination of meaning. This suggests that history is subject to the same narrative and imaginative constraints as other forms of realist writing, rather than being privileged by an access to knowable intentionality and that this constitutes objective historical knowledge.     

Objectivity and the writing of history

How do historians approach objectivity? This is addressed by Mark Bevir in his book The Logic of the History of Ideas (1999) by his argument for an anthropological epistemology with objectivity in the historical narrative resting on the explanation of human actions/agent intentionality equating with meaning. The criticism of this position is at several levels. As sophisticated constructionists historians do not usually ask ‘Can history be objective?’ Rather, they work from the balance of evidence reflecting the intersubjectivity of truth and they acknowledge the problematic nature of inferring agent intentionality and the difficulties in equating this with ‘what it means’. Why Abraham Lincoln issued the 1863 emancipation proclamation is a case in point. No historian would claim to have located its true meaning objectively in effect doubting Mark Bevir's claim that ‘objective knowledge arises from a human practice in which we criticise and compare rival webs of theories in terms of agreed facts’ (The Logic of the History of Ideas, 1999, p. 98). There are also further challenges to an over-reliance on rational action theory and the problems associated with the selection of evidence. Equally, most historians in practice doubt objectivity emerges from an accurate knowledge of the motives that can be matched to weak authorial intentions and that this leads to action via decisions. Few historians today accept that their narrative mimics past intentionality and that this provides true meaning. The article offers four reasons for rejecting Bevir's position and concludes with a defence of the narrative-linguistic determination of meaning. This suggests that history is subject to the same narrative and imaginative constraints as other forms of realist writing, rather than being privileged by an access to knowable intentionality and that this constitutes objective historical knowledge.     

Jeremy Bentham on Utility and Truth

SUMMARY

Jeremy Bentham has two very strong commitments in his thought: one is to the principle of utility, or the greatest happiness principle, as the fundamental principle of morality; the other is to truth, as indicated, for instance, in his opposition to falsehood and fiction in the law. How, then, did Bentham view the relationship between utility and truth? Did he think that utility and truth simply coincided, and hence that falsehood necessarily led to a diminution in happiness, and conversely truth led to an increase in happiness? This article addresses this issue through two bodies of material: the first consists of Bentham's writings on religion under the heading of ‘Juggernaut’ and dating from 1811 to 1821; the second consists of the writings on judicial evidence dating from 1803 to 1812 and which appeared in Rationale of Judicial Evidence.     

Transitions in the Ottoman Waqf’s traditional building upkeep and maintenance system in Cyprus during the British colonial era (1878–1960) and the emergence of selective architectural conservation practices

How did the Waqf, a widespread Islamic historic institution in the non-Western world which promoted traditional building upkeep and maintenance systems, cope with the emerging architectural conservation understandings of the modern era? How did colonial transfers of knowledge, expertise and political considerations influence these systems? The present study explores these questions by examining the case of the Ottoman Waqf (Evkaf) institution in Cyprus. By collecting and analysing archival evidence on conservation projects, initiated during the British colonial period between 1878 and 1960, a model framework of initiation, authorisation and implementation processes of the upkeep of the Waqf maintained properties has been identified. This framework has been used to show the transitional role of the colonial influence at different stages, which finally led to the dissolution of the Waqf system’s sustainable elements, and initiated the emergence of selective architectural conservation practices. By shifting the focus of conservation discourses to look specifically into the background dynamics of the institutional practice, a new argument has been developed. This revealed how heritage conservation practices are negotiated with the existing institutions and how they are transferred and/or transformed at different levels of institutional governance.     

Telling More: Lies,Secrets, and History

This essay argues that secrets and lies are not forms of withholding information but forms by which information is valorized. Lies are constructed: what is to be lied about, what a lie is to consist of, how it is to be told, and whom it is to be told to, all reveal a social imaginary about who thinks what and what constitutes credibility. Secrets are negotiated: continual decisions about whom to tell, how much to tell, and whom not to tell describe social worlds, and the shape and weight of interactions therein. All of this makes lies and secrets extraordinarily rich historical sources. We might not see the truth distorted by a lie or the truth hidden by a secret, but we see the ideas andimaginings by which people disclose what should not be made public, and how they should carry out concealing one narrative with another. Such insights involve a step back from the project of social history, in which an inclusive social narrative is based on experience and individuals' ability to report it with some reliability, and suggests that historians need to look at social imaginings as ways to understand the ideas and concerns about which people lie and with which people construct new narratives that are not true. The study of secrets, however, links the study of social imaginings with the project of social history, as the valorization of information that results in the continual negotiation and renegotiation of secrets shows individuals and publics imagining the experiences labeled as secret because of the imagined power of a specific version of events.     

The parable of the footbridge: Creativity and change in the between

In this article, the author suggests that anthropologists use the creative power of ‘the between’, an imaginative space of invention, as one way to heal the wounds of contemporary social life. His model for such practice is the sohanci, the sorcerer among the Songhay people of Niger in West Africa. The sohanci is a liminal figure who is always between the village and the bush, between health and illness, between life and death, a vantage that makes him or her a spiritual guardian, a person who dares to use the power of the between to transform social turbulence into social harmony. Like the sohanci, anthropologists have long experience of being between things, and as such, the author argues, they can use the insights derived from their experiences between things to chart paths that lead us to innovation, invention and a future of greater social harmony and social justice. What could be more important for the future of anthropology? What could be more important for the future of us all?     

Seeing into hearts and minds: Part 1. The Pentagon's quest for a ‘social radar’ (Respond to this article at https://www.therai.org.uk/publications/anthropology-today/debate)

In this two‐part article, explored are the many funded programmes by which security agencies and private companies mine ‘big data’ and attempt to measure the sociocultural and psychological states of whole populations. How is failure or success measured? What kinds of new institutions/practices might these give rise to? Part 1 ‘The Pentagon's quest for a “social radar”’, published in this issue, comes to terms with today's many sociocultural modelling and forecasting efforts, looks in detail at one company in particular, and ends up reviewing the role of anthropologists in their development and critique. Part 2 ‘“Big data”, algorithms, and computational counterinsurgency’, to be published in a future issue, will analyze the rise of ‘predictive policing’ and its Pentagon connections, reviews two programmes, and poses these in the context of scientists' concerns over artificial intelligence and long‐term human survival.     

论永嘉事功学派的史学思想

永嘉事功学派是南宋浙东史学的重要分支 ,在史学思想上具有经世致用、经史并重、求真务实等基本特征 ,对当时以及后世史学的发展都有深远的影响     

Is native anthropology really possible? (Respond to this article at https://www.therai.org.uk/publications/anthropology-today/debate)

Although native anthropologists are often understood to be quite different from non‐native anthropologists, this paper argues that the distinction is not as clear as is often presumed. Both types of anthropologists are partial outsiders who are positioned at a relative distance from those they study in the field. This is illustrated with a discussion of the author's own fieldwork with Japanese Americans as a ‘native anthropologist’. Ultimately, the cultural differences we experience with the ‘natives’ are productive for fieldwork and essential for anthropological knowledge.     

Intra- and inter-regional knowledge spillovers: Evidence from European regions

Is the knowledge creation process linear or characterized by feedback relations among actors involved in the regional innovation system? How can the innovation process of ‘lagging’ regions be strengthened? What is the role and extent of inter-regional knowledge spillovers? The paper aims at providing satisfactory answers in investigating a knowledge production function framework adapted to the specific questions and which is tested on an extended sample of European regions. On the basis of the results, concrete policy measures are derived aiming at upgrading the knowledge creation capacity of European regions.     

The Body–Power Relationship and Immanent Philosophy: A Question of Life and Death

According to Foucault, the human body is the targeted object of modern power systems. In his genealogical studies, Foucault describes the manner in which these power systems leave an imprint on the body and utilize knowledge of the body as an indirect means of exercising subtle forms of control. In recent years, several researchers have claimed that the status of the body, subsumed as it is by modern power networks, has become a means for conducting a unique political critique in which the human being is viewed as an agent of oppression and freedom. This article takes a fresh look at Foucault’s notions of life and death that underpin the critical understanding the body–power relationship. While this approach recognizes the completeness of subjective structuring processes, it also enables the formulation of new insights regarding the status of the modern individual as the subject of separate and independent modes of speech and action.     

Bonesetting: the algebra of genocide

ABSTRACT

Genocide rulings should not care about numbers. Legally, proving the intent to destroy a people in whole or in part is what counts. Yet numbers are vital actants in the often decades-long lead-up to trials. Aggregate numbers give weight to the specificity of individual testimony, statistical estimates can transform missing people into cold, hard facts, and algorithms can reveal ‘excess death’, even when forensic anthropologists cannot find all the bones. And because of this power, numbers are highly contested in both truth commission findings and trials like that of Generals Ríos Montt and Rodríguez Sánchez. In this article I analyse the disentangling work of statisticians and anthropologists in exhuming and counting bodies, and how particular numbers (200,000; 1,771; ninety-three per cent) are made, then re-entangled in efforts to count. The modern ideal of a universal subject of rationality and abstraction that positions women and natives as those who cannot count contributed to their historic exclusion and dehumanization. Counting, as in adding things up, is part of the historic achievement of the trial to make Maya-Ixil women and men count, in the sense of to matter.