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Digital Anthropology of the Senses: Connecting Technology and Culture Through the Sensory World

 Adriana Moreno  July 23, 2024

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With the ubiquity of the Internet and the overwhelming number of screens that mediate our daily practices, the predominance of the image in daily life is indisputable. The image’s omnipresence has guided countless academic works focused on the visual. For example, visual studies and specialties such as visual anthropology highlight the ethnographic value of images, which, analog or digital alike, have become powerful vehicles for the construction of knowledge (Zirión, 2015; Gómez Cruz, 2012). However, given the predominance of the visual, we have neglected research regarding other senses; this gap widens even more if we consider its intersection with digital studies. (read more...)

Cards and Codes: Spirituality and Magic in the (Bio)technological Era

 PEDRO DE MEDEIROS  July 11, 2024

Este conteúdo também está disponível em Português.

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This is not a scientific or technological project, but perhaps it is a project about science and technology. My proposal is to create a magical tool, a tarot deck, that provokes thought about how mystical and religious elements permeate the advancement of science and technology, especially in the field of biotechnology, and are in constant confluence with all aspects surrounding it: academia, startups, investors, and the like. (read more...)

To Witness: Cell Phone Cameras, Immigrant Communities, and Police Accountability

 Jessica L. Olivares  July 2, 2024

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“There is nothing like an iPhone …to show people the problem…” -Alex Vitale, The End of Policing As I contemplate the momentum of the 2024 presidential election cycle, my focus turns to the potential consequences of a renewed Trump presidency. Drawing on my expertise as an ethnographer, I recall the socio-technological impacts of his initial presidency, which fueled activism and organizing for civil liberties. What follows is a reflection on my fieldwork in Houston, Texas during 2018 and 2019, focusing on how anti-surveillance advocates at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas used cell phones and their cameras as resistance tools. The ACLU has been an active proponent for those in need of protection from government surveillance by educating people in the US on their constitutional rights, advocating for the protection of civil liberties, and taking legal action to stop violations of those rights and liberties. During my eighteen months of research, I engaged with anti-surveillance advocates at the national, state, and city levels who prepared organizing efforts and legal cases limiting unlawful surveillance capabilities. For this piece, I focus on promoting cell phone camera usage in ACLU’s “Know Your Rights” workshops and through the ACLU Blue and ACLU La Migra mobile applications. Throughout the piece, I reckon with what Deborah Thomas calls “the often difficult-to-parse relationships between surveillance and witnessing” (2000, 717). Witnessing the precarity of past ethnographic junctures can highlight injustices, bring them to attention, and formulate strategies for their alleviation. Thus, bearing witness to the past moments may help gain agency over unpredictable futures. (read more...)

Anthropology of a Dream: The Stakes of Studying Addiction in America

 Sean Muller  June 25, 2024

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In America, the desire for a dream echoes in personal, popular, and political narratives like a refrain promising inevitable progress. I regard addiction as the mirror of this dream in which capitalist processes of production and consumption are embodied at their imaginable limits and addicts appear as perfected capitalist subjects. Drug addicts produce to consume and consume to reproduce themselves, a cycle of reproduction that tightens as their world shrinks, as they increasingly withdraw from social relations to become an economy of one—an autonomously productive and consumptive individual who destroys themselves to reproduce themself (Pine 2019). Addiction emerges as a problem alongside the fantasy of a “good life” characterized by “upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy” (Berlant 2011: 3). What habits and histories shape the endurance of this dream and why do we imagine anything different as a failure? (read more...)

On Disability, Infrastructure, and Shame

 Elizabeth Roberts  June 18, 2024

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Content note: This piece centers an evolving journey with internalized ableism and accompanying feelings of virtue and shame, particularly around public transportation, driving, and accessibility. Readers can step back from this piece if it is too difficult to read right now. I did not expect Northern Europe to make me more disabled than the United States and Mexico—more disabled and more ashamed. In 2015, I began experiencing chronic nerve pain on my right side—hip and shoulder—which developed in response to a complex musculoskeletal condition. By 2019, I could not walk more than a few blocks or lift much with my right arm, and if I climbed too many stairs in a day, I would pay for it later. In addition to walking, I stopped being able to bike, swim, or hike. Some days just moving around the house or doing the dishes would activate agonizing pain. Over time, I stopped going to places where I couldn’t drive. (read more...)

Being Heard as Experimental

 Jonathan Givan  June 11, 2024

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Hip Hop is a musical genre and cultural movement that has been the birthplace of ingenious creativity and novel methods of music making that incorporate new and old technologies (Driscoll 2009). These technical innovations can be seen in the redeployment (Fouché 2006, p. 642) of the turntable through moving the record backwards and forwards to generate new sonic textures and generate hypnotic repetition through breakbeats. The MIDI Production Center (MPC) by Akai and Roger Linn—a MIDI sequencer, sampler, and drum machine that was initially designed to give musicians and producers an easier way to create more natural sounding drums in their recorded music—was almost immediately taken up by Black Hip Hop producers in the United States and used to sample longer pieces of audio from a variety of sources and then re- sequence them to create new melodies and drum rhythms. However, the histories of marginalized people’s exploration of new sounds and technologies for the sake of creative music making seems to largely diverge from the histories of what is traditionally labeled experimental music within the western musical canon. In this post, I want to explore histories of experimental music and contrast it with histories of Hip Hop to better understand who is allowed to be labeled as experimenting within music and how the answers to these questions exist along particular lines of race, space, and time. (read more...)

The “Doing” of Collaborative Ethnography

 John Neufeld  June 6, 2024

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There is no simple way to tell the story of the recent history of Sainte-Thérèse Island, known as IST (Île-Sainte-Thérèse) by members of the Montreal Waterways research collective, a group based out of the Concordia University Ethnography Lab. Once you start, there is little certainty as to where the story may lead, as its tellings often open different and overlapping pathways for understanding the landscape. Therefore when it came down to the question of how to tell the story of an island—one with a diversity of characters, histories, and happenings—Montreal Waterways made the decision to create a multi-authored compilation of ethnographic texts in the form of a book, entitled An Island is More Than a Park and available online—as part of its research outcomes. The title of the book came from a direct quote made by one of the island’s residents during an interview conducted at a rather difficult time. In the months prior, the community of IST had been preparing to legally defend themselves against a government which had labelled them as squatters, and which was committed to expropriating the seasonal inhabitants to make way for an eco-park. In the time Montreal Waterways spent engaging with the island’s residents and its landscape, it became evident that an island is more than a park: an island is actually a composite of a great number of things that hold meanings that sometimes conflict or contradict each other, especially when so many actors are invested in a version of the island’s story. There was understandably some apprehension on behalf of IST residents, who were suspicious as to why a group of anthropology students were interested in learning about the park, their expropriation, and a project involving collaborative ethnographic research. (read more...)

Premediations of Carcerality: Notes on Targeted Surveillance in Postcolonial India

 Mehak Sawhney  June 4, 2024

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This post explores the surveillance of letters across two time-periods in postcolonial India: mail letter interception immediately following India’s independence in 1947, and the contemporary use of letters as incriminating evidence against human rights activists in the ongoing Bhima Koregaon-16 (BK-16) case. The BK-16 is a group of activists including academics, journalists, lawyers, artists, poets, and dissenters who were imprisoned through a series of coordinated arrests by the police in different parts of India June 2018 onwards. They were arrested under the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), India’s anti-terror law that empowers the government to arrest citizens without any judicial process. Many of them are Dalits, representing India’s most marginalized caste. The BK-16 advocate for the human rights of India’s poorest and most oppressed communities, and overtly oppose the ideology of Hindutva, a Hindu supremacist nationalism espoused by the ruling Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) since 2014. (read more...)