Amber Case on Cyborg Anthropology

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Q & A: Whose Identity, Whose Representation?

Louise Pettersson asks…

Sounds interesting but I don’t understand what you’re up to except studying swedish identity? As a swedish citizen who have even taken some courses in anthropology and ethnology myself it ‘s always fascinating someome tries to study your “own culture”. I might find it interesting to know if you come up with something in the future. But the first question as always, whos identity and whos representation… (source)

Well Louise, you ask an excellent question. There are two parts to my answer: (1) how I view identity and (2) what this has to do with Sweden.

How I View Identity

What I write here is a sum up and not at all a comprehensive statement on how I view identity. If you are interested in a longer discussion, please read my master’s thesis, which is available online for free.

Identity is a loaded term that has many meanings. The most common, popular understanding of identity is a list of characteristics that are prescribed to a named identity, which is meant to describe an individual or group of people. This version of identity is roughly synonymous with the stereotype concept. For example, under this version of identity, Swedish identity could be described with terms like coldness, shyness, independence, and homogeneous whiteness (Daun 1989).

This is not how I view identity. Many anthropologists and other social scientists before me have rooted out the problems with using this form of identity in anthropological work. In a nutshell, the idea is essentialist; it reduces diversity in people too simplistic conceptualizations and perpetuates powerful discourses that prescribe action based on those simplistic conceptualizations. As Åke Daun presented in his book Swedish Mentality (1989), the characteristics listed above hardly fit every Swede. Daun attempted to avoid essentialism in his work by seeking to find differences in tendencies by studying several societies and comparing statistical data from surveys and psychological tests. He found only loose tendencies that were more or less prominent than in other societies. However, I found that Daun’s representation of identity was still far to simplistic for my tastes.

My viewpoint is balanced on two general ideas.

(1) Identity is both knowledge and practice.

Identity is knowledge in that identity is a collection of meanings that are created and negotiated through social discourse (e.g. everyday interactions or content of medias). Identity is practice in that individuals represent themselves and others using the complex web of identity knowledge in social discourse in an attempt to achieve goals and meet desires.

This is different from the popular idea of identity as it portrays identity as a social reality that is subject to the desires and interpretations of people rather than an objective reality that literally describes a people. In this way, essentialism is accepted as part of the social practice of identity not as the lived reality of a person’s understanding of self. This means that identity-knowledge is fluid, constantly shifting and changing.

(2) Identity is context specific.

The ways that people represent themselves and others are dependent on a seemingly infinite number of factors as they attempt to fulfill desires and meet goals, both entrenched and long term goals or fleeting desires that change from moment to moment. This means that depending on the situation, the identities an individual conjures to represent themselves with may differ from the identities the individual puts forth in a different context. As Katherine Ewing argued, individuals portray the illusion of a whole identity, while in practice representing fractured and often contradictory identities (1990).

This isn’t to say that people are intentionally misleading or devious about their self representations. I mean to argue that one’s knowledge of one’s self-identity is as fluid as the social discourses. And that we accept this fluidity without acknowledgement except when some social norm is violated, such as a misrepresentation, or when revealing the contradiction suits the desires or goals of another person.

What This Has to do With Sweden

Combined this seems to paint a picture of identity that is virtually unattainable to the anthropologist. If the meanings are constantly changing and from context to context, then how does one approach the subject?

I do so by not aiming to collect inventories of identities to describe a people, such as Swedes. Instead, I aim to examine how people practice identity in everyday life and in extraordinary circumstances. I want to understand how powerful people, institutions and discourses influence those instances of identity practice. I want to understand how the internalization of an identity can inspire action. I want to understand the processes that lead to the longevity or brevity of a meaning’s attachment to an identity in popular discourses.

In looking at Sweden, I do not intend to inventory Swedishness or represent Swedishness by sampling individuals then extrapolating to the whole. I intend to study how the set of variables that are unique to Sweden, such as Swedish history, politics, and power structures, influence the way individual Swedes practice identity in order to better understand identity as concept and theory.

I hope that answers your question Louise!

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Daun, Åke. 1996[1989] Swedish Mentality. Jan Teeland, trans. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Ewing, Katherine P.1990 The Illusion of Wholeness: Culture, Self,and the Experience of Inconsistency. Ethos 18(3):251-278.

@Sweden / I’m Not Fickle, Honest

Map of Sweden

When I started my master’s thesis, I chose to work with Muslim-Americans, not because I have an undying fascination with Muslim-American culture, but because I thought that they would be an easy group in which to observe everyday acts of identity practice. After 9/11, my study population were forced to put identity work to the forefront of nearly every activity, as their identities were being frequently contested in the global, national and local discourses. My female informants had to convince grocery store clerks that they could indeed hear through the fabric of their hijabs and random motorists that they did not, in fact, require their husband’s permission to drive. On a larger scale they struggled with whether to be more offended by the fact that people did not know enough about Islam to know that the, then, presidential candidate Barack Obama was not a Muslim or by the idea that so many people in the country of their citizenship saw being a Muslim as something that disqualified one from being a U.S. president. This constant barrage of identity talk made studying how one navigates social situations through representation and how one processes and understands the knowledge gained from those experiences vastly easier.

What I learned from my ethnographic experience was more about identity than about Muslim-American culture. In fact, a key point of my master’s thesis was that anyone arguing that there is a “Muslim-American culture” was at best diluted and at worst essentializing an extremely diverse, complex population.

My experience with Muslim American women, before, during and after my fieldwork, has impressed on me that members of this identity are exceptionally diverse, including women who rarely share similar ethnicity, nationality, class, or culturally defined race. Further, they do not universally agree on the requirements of Islam. As a group, little besides the belief that there is one God and Mohammed is his prophet, can be prescribed to all or the majority. Even this most basic tenant is situated in the women’s lives in varying degrees of intensity and interpretation. This is not to downplay the seriousness of the religion of Islam or its believers; instead I wish to demonstrate that a study claiming to represent the identities of such a large and diverse group is dubious at best. (VandenBroek 2008:10)

So, why bring this up in a post titled @Sweden? Well, I have had some struggles in convincing others, particularly prospective faculty advisors, that I do not want to continue to study Muslim-Americans. When I was a young undergraduate, a faculty member once told me that anthropologists either specialize in a culture or in a topic. I am definitively a topic specialist. When it is comes to studying populations, I practice serial monogamy and my approach is comparative. It just so happens that my first large scale endeavor into ethnography was with a Muslim-American population. Therefore, when I say that I would like to do my dissertation fieldwork in Sweden, I am not making a drastic shift in my research interests or abandoning my previous experience.

After completing my thesis, I was left with many new questions about identity. Mainly, I wanted to understand how identity functions among populations who are powerful and setting the tone of discourses, rather than those who are the subjects of these powerful discourses. As I have said before, how can I truly understand powerful identity discourses by studying only the consequences of these discourses rather than the actions that create them.

My first inclination was to move directly into the question I most immediately wanted to answer, “How do discourses of identity bias fester and permeate popular discourses in the United States?”  However, after some careful consideration and some welcomed words of advice from peers and mentors, I have come to understand that such a research question at this time in my career is too close to my own biases, personal passions and identities. How can I objectively approach this subject when just the idea of U.S. politics makes my blood boil?  When I am being honest with myself, I know that I cannot. This left me questioning what I can do to get to a better place to approach such an endeavor.

I believe that the best course of action is to get some experience, some distance and some perspective. My mother told me when I was young that I should date many boys (responsibly, of course) before I gave away my heart forever. She told me that each boyfriend would teach me something about what I wanted in a partner and something about myself. My years of dating taught me that I wanted a man who wants a partner and not a mom, a man that is as passionate about something in his life as I am about anthropology, and a man that has no qualms about mixing up the traditional gender roles of our relationship. I learned that I have a weakness for men who need me, I like to be in charge, but I like a man who isn’t afraid to stand up to me. When I met my husband, I knew what I wanted and I understood better what kind of partner I was, both the good and the bad. I believe my marriage is much better for it. Now, this lesson from my mother will help me again by helping me develop an approach to my anthropological interests. I want that big question about U.S. discourses and politics to be my last partner and before then I want to do research in many areas that will each teach me something new about identity and something new about myself as an anthropologist and my relationship to my work. So that, when the time comes, I can be honest about my biases and my connection to my work and, thus, study and present my work on U.S. culture more objectively.

So, I started with what it is that interests me about identity in the United States. There are many answers to that question, however, I settled loosely on the role of secularism and religion in the ways people represent themselves in their daily lives and how those representations influence political activism and action.

Sweden, as one of the most “secular” countries in the world, has been on my radar for some time. However, it was Hanna Fange, a Swedish truck driver, who really captured my imagination. Hanna was the sixth individual to serve as a curator of Sweden using the @Sweden twitter account. In December of 2011, the Curators of Sweden initiative was created by the Swedish institute and VisitSweden, both part of the National Board for the promotion of Sweden. The Curators of Sweden initiative puts a seemingly random new Swede in control of the @Sweden twitter account each week.

I was fascinated both by the charisma of Hanna and the manner in which an official Swedish agency was representing Swedishness. The curators seem to be unlimited in what they can post. Except, of course, the first rule of fight club (you do not talk about fight club). When @the_turtle asked Natashja Blomberg, the fifteenth curator, “@sweden when they give you the account, do they put any restrictions on you? Did they want you to be able to write in English, for example?” she responded, “@the_turtle im not allowed to discuss the project but yes i had to write in english.” The curators have used the @Sweden account to talk about everything from sex to Swedish traditions and used the account as a platform for talking about breastfeeding in public, stereotypes about Muslims, politics of war and many other topics that would make most publicists or marketing  managers cringe.

The curators have been diverse and do not seem to represent “ideal” Swedes as you would expect from a marketing campaign. Jack Werner, the first curator, began his biography by stating, “After finishing high school with questionable grades…,” and ending on, “But being 22 and having no education—what the hell, I might as well have ended up cleaning sewers.” This hardly sounds like a person that one would expect a country with one of the best education ratings in the world to cherry pick to represent them. After Jack the lineup has included heterosexuals and homosexuals; a Muslim woman and a female Christian minister; a sheep farmer, a librarian, and a firefighter; a mom and a grandpa; and, currently, a Polish-born Swede living in New York. Finally, the Curators of Sweden website keeps an easily searchable archive of every tweet. The anthropologist in me fell over with giddy delight. This was fascinating identity stuffs.

Since first subscribing to Hanna as @Sweden, I have been reading history books, reading ethnographies, subscribing to English-language Swedish news feeds, blogs and twitter accounts, and attempting to wrap my tongue around the many “o” vowel sounds in the Swedish language. I am fascinated by the play of identity in these bits of Swedish culture. I am still narrowing in on the details, but I am confident that I would like to find my next partner in some portion of the Swedish populace. And, I do not feel that I am being “fickle” or “abandoning my previous work.”

Great PhD Hunt Update

It’s Spring Break! One of the best benefits of working in academia is the joy of being on the academic calendar for breaks. Luckily this year, I do not have any projects that need to be done over the break; so I get to have some time off. For me, this means focusing on doctoral application research.

About Eliminating Tennessee

University of Tennessee Knoxville's Pretty Campus

In an earlier post, The Great PhD Hunt, I showed off my Google map of schools. I want to clarify that I didn’t eliminate the University of Tennessee because I have a bias against Tennessee. As one reader pointed out, my map originally had UTK listed as “Eliminated for location.” However, this is a left over from an earlier version of the map where I had originally eliminated all of the schools in the Southeastern United States and the Midwest. I have spent the last seven years living in the Southeast and the previous twenty-one years living in the Midwest. As a young, childless woman, I would like to use this time in my life to move about and gain new experiences. So, early on in my search process I eliminated all of the schools in these areas. However, as time went on, I found that there were very few faculty members in the U.S. whose research interests were inline with what I am looking for. So, I went back and considered all of the schools in the Southeast and Midwest anyway to get a larger pool of potential schools. Somehow, UTK slipped passed me on the second time through. Therefore, I apologize to Ethan Fulwood and any other reader who thought I was sneering at the state of Tennessee .

Requests for the Map

I have had a few requests to build a map for other’s to use for their searches. If you would like to use my data to start your own map, simply download the KML file then log into Google Maps and under “My Places” create a new map. Then click the “Import” link above the textbox for the map’s title. Then import the KML file of my map. You now have your very own map of the anthropology doctoral programs in the U.S. You simply need to replace my icons and information with your own. If you want to give me a shout out and link back for compiling that would be very sweet, but I won’t cry if you don’t; so use it freely.

About Being Busy

The last time I posted about the Great PhD Hunt, I said that the next step was to read the latest two to three articles written by each of the faculty members I am interested in working with in the yellow and green schools. Well it has been nearly four weeks and all I have managed to do is print them off and read one article. Lame, I know. However, in my defense, I have been working on other projects for work and for my students. At Rowan-Cabarrus Community College, where I work as a web designer, I am working with a few folks to revolutionize the way that we manage our programs of study listing online and in the catalog. This project involves me adapting WordPress to be a storage bank for the data and writing scripts to display the data in HTML and output it XML. The XML version will then be imported into InDesign templates that I am working with our graphics department to create. All very cool stuff. However, the project is massive and exhausting.

Then of course it is that time in the semester when my students are working on their “for educational purposes only” Institutional Review Board proposals for their mini-ethnography projects. The great thing is that this semester my students seem to be very engaged and excited about the project. Unfortunately for me, this means that most of them have sent in multiple drafts for feedback and did rewrites for a better grade. With all of this, the last four weeks has been completely devoid of work on the Great PhD Hunt.

Luckily, I have the next nine days off of work and only one paper rewrite left to grade. This means reading time for me. As I go along, I plan to write about some of the things I am reading, the ideas they spark and my favorite pieces. So, dear reader, you can look forward to those soon. I hope all of you out there on Spring Break have a safe and productive/relaxing break!

Facebook Page for How to be an Anthropologist

How to be an Anthropologist on Facebook

I have been receiving a lot of traffic from Facebook lately. So, I have set up a page for How to be an Anthropologist on Facebook. Just another way to stay in touch. On the new page, you will find all of my new posts and the items I share from around the web. When you get a chance, come by, like the page and say hi!

How to Get a Job as an Anthropologist

Learn how to market yourself as an anthropologist.

I deeply sympathize with Adam Fish over at Savage Minds. Getting hired as an anthropologist is no easy task, particularly within academia. However, I must protest at the idea that we should be teaching young anthropologists to hide away their anthropologist identities. Adam suggests that in order to get a job one must,

Stop being an anthropologist.

Some of my mentors, none of which are in anthropology departments, prefer to say “trained as an anthropologist, so and so, investigates…” as opposed to “so and so is an anthropologist.” If you are on the job market this may be hard to do as you are likely to have just become a PhD wielding anthropologist for the first time in your life and quite proud of the moniker and achievement but the shift in self-definition is important for you and your future academic home, I would argue. [Source]

Throughout the post, he seems to argue that to be interdisciplinary, to study non-traditional cultures, or to use unconventional methods you must leave behind your anthropological identity or else greatly reduce your chances for employment. In response to commenters who had success with their anthropologist identities, he responded,

I am arguing that your success is precisely because of your post-anthropological identity. Your engagements with technology and entrepreneurialism is exactly the type of non-orthodox practices which I am attempting to celebrate as a way forward. However, I have little of the romantic affinity to capital A anthropology. That is the kind of sentimentality that I am opposing and seems to me to be the death-knell for the field and a road block for employment. [Source]

First, I do not disagree that successful job candidates with degrees in anthropology are bolstered by interdisciplinary cooperation and engagement with technology. I am perturbed by the notion that this is un-anthropological or “post-anthropological.” I look around at the cohort of anthropologists to which I belong and I see a flurry of innovation that goes far beyond traditional anthropology into new areas of research, such as western culture, technology and business, and into new sectors of employment. However, this does not make them any less anthropologists or something beyond anthropology. They have simply shifted and stretched what it means to be an anthropologist.

I have argued before that anthropology’s struggle with its public image is an issue of marketing and identity management. Adam’s arguments bother me because they seem to equate anthropology with stagnation and inflexibility and people who call themselves anthropologists with blurry-eyed romanticism. This won’t help future anthropologists find employment; it only further sullies the name of anthropology and adds to the impoverished reputation that our discipline holds, which makes it more difficult for new anthropologists to get jobs.

Identities, such as the moniker “anthropologist,” are not bounded, unchanging symbols. Identities are negotiated through social interaction and subject to all the complexity and power of the contexts in which they are used. Anthropology is no exception to this. As anthropologists, we have the ability to represent our anthropological identity in ways that reflect the changes and advancements within the field and to highlight the portions of that identity that are best suited for the situation. I have found, while working both inside and outside of academia, that my success in “being an anthropologist” is hindered only by my own skill to represent myself as both an anthropologist and a good candidate for a position. In the interview room, all parties present know that I am the expert on anthropology and so it is my responsibility to show how it makes me a better candidate. I have never had a perspective employer contradict me or pass me over because I was an anthropologist. I have been passed over because I lacked specific desired skills or because another candidate represented themselves better.  The anthropologist title on my résumé, however, has never been the problem.

With that said, here is my advice for getting a job without abandoning your identity as an anthropologist or burning the bridge for those coming behind you.

1) Get comfortable with the idea that anthropology is a constantly evolving discipline and that as an anthropologist you define what its limits are. This means that with some creativity and some research you can make your anthropology work in virtually any situation. Make sure that you can ethically use your skills for the position you are interested in and then use those anthropology skills to better understand it.

2) Learn to explain what anthropology is and why it is applicable and learn to do it in a way that a non-anthropologist and/or non-academic can understand. Before applying to a job, I try to explain in one or two sentences why being an anthropologist makes me a good candidate for the position. When applying to jobs in web design and development, I explain that not only can I write HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP, but as an anthropologist I have insights and the skills to understand the attitudes and behaviors of users and I use that to build more intuitive designs that resonate with the target audience. Being an anthropologist means more than having a set of qualitative research skills; being an anthropologist means that you look at problems and situations from an anthropological position with all of the history, knowledge and skill that entails.

What seems to be common, practical knowledge to an anthropologist is not to another person. In interviews, I like to give a simple example from my experience. As an anthropology student, I worked in retail to pay my tuition. At one clothing store, my supervisor believed that to sell more clothes, you needed more clothes on the sales floor. He moved all of the racks closer together and increased the stock on the floor by roughly 150%, much to my protestation. In the following month, sales in my department, women’s plus-sizes, drastically fell.

My supervisor was confused. Without an anthropological background, he relied on what he knew, which was that more stock meant more visibility for products and the more people saw an item the more likely they were to purchase them. As an anthropologist, I relied on my knowledge of human behavior. First, the store I worked for sold expensive clothes and overfull racks crowded into a small area signified cheap, bargain shopping. When customers saw the high prices on the tags, they felt the anger and betrayal that accompanies a false representation. Second and more importantly, the women’s plus-size department has a very particular clientele, overweight and obese women. In the United States, this identity is generally ridiculed and the shopping experience can be particularly painful to a woman who has her overweight/obese identity thrust to the forefront by forcing her to shop in a special department and try on and purchase ill-fitting clothes. When my supervisor added the extra racks, he removed the large open spaces between the racks, forcing plus-sized women to have to turn to the side and shuffle between the racks, frequently knocking items to the floor. Without knowing it, my supervisor had signified to the customers that this space was not for them. After the plummet in sales, my supervisor agreed to try moving the racks back on my suggestion. Sales then returned to normal.

By telling this short story, I can quickly and easily demonstrate how being an anthropologist can provide a dimension to the employer’s team that provides a fresh and useful perspective supported by a wealth of knowledge.

3) Be flexible with which jobs you are willing to apply. In this, I wholeheartedly agree with Adam Fish. Most of us dream of a tenure track job in a prestigious anthropology department. However, it is unrealistic in today’s economy and political climate to expect to find such a position and get it in any short amount of time. Be willing to try interdisciplinary and applied positions. You may find yourself in an unexpected and pleasant position. At the worst, you will gain diverse experiences that will only help you find more jobs in the future.

However, don’t lose touch with anthropology: stay current and keep communicating. Otherwise, your new experiences may be seen as taking you further from anthropology rather than as expanding on it.

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This procedure, I hope, is the direction that anthropologists take when out on the hunt for a job. As this perspective enhances anthropology as a field and will help to propagate the current state of anthropology beyond academic anthropology departments, opening doors for future anthropologists instead of closing them.

The Great PhD Hunt 2012

As the new year is now into full swing, I have begun the Great PhD Hunt of 2012. I have reviewed the website of every doctoral program in Anthropology in the U.S. (based on the AAA eGuide) and created a Google map to catalog my progress.

View Larger Map

Pins: Red are eliminated, Yellow require more research, Green are currently my top choices.

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In this round, my main goal was to narrow down the field to a reasonable number of faculty to read up on. Schools were eliminated mainly because the faculty did not share my interests or the department’s focus was in another subfield. At this point, I am looking for faculty broadly interested in identity, representation, politics, power and inequality, particularly, but not necessarily, in the U.S. and Europe. I am also interested in finding faculty who appreciate, even if they do not partake in, deep ethnographic studies of the particular and everyday lived experiences.

With this phase of the Great PhD Hunt 2012 over, I am now starting the arduous, but intellectually more interesting, task of reading the latest two or three publications from each potential faculty member in the yellow and green schools. This will allow me to narrow the list down to people I want to contact and be prepared to discuss how their work intersects with my interests.

So, dear reader, do you know of someone I have missed? Do you have a friend or colleague who might be interested in guiding and advising an eager student with my interests? Please, comment or email me at akvbroek@gmail.com and I will add them to my list of potentials to learn more about.

Ethan Zuckerman on Social Media and Activism

Today has been a great day for shared videos. Thanks to Carmel Vaisman for sharing.

I can has language play: Construction of Language and Identity in LOLspeak

This is an interesting lecture. Thanks to Deanna Weibel for sharing it.

Better Anthropology

I am sad to have missed the AAAs this year. Although, I must thank the wonderful anthropologists who have blogged and tweeted their thoughts and observations throughout, helping those of us stuck at home stay involved.

The post by Jason Antrosio on the presidential address by Virginia Dominguez, Anthropology’s Challenge: We can be better, was one of those exciting posts that makes you want to throw your fist in the air and say “Hear! Hear!” I regret having missed the original address, but Antrosio’s summary was still enough to get my fingers typing.

Antrosio broke down Dominguez’s address into three challenges: to be better, stronger and bigger. Three comparative adjectives on a mission! However, it was the “better” portion of the post that really sparked my desire to write.

Better

I generally agree with the notion that we take our own liberalism for granted and that the AAA and the anthropological population in general has much to do to move away from racist, sexist and imperialistic practices. Reading the Commission on Race and Racism in Anthropology’s (CRRA) Final Report was filled with embarrassing observations of our “liberal” discipline.

I was particularly taken aback by Karen Brodkin’s observation that many anthropologists refuse to answer demographic questions about race because, ”Many of us don’t like these questions, because we believe either that ‘race is socially constructed’ or that we live in ‘a color-blind’ society.” (CRRA 2010:2) My first thoughts were to a lecture I gave to my introductory level anthropology class on race just a month ago. I explained to my students how, despite the fact that race is social constructed and that true color-blindness would be wonderful, that racism exists as a fundamental thread that permeates every context of everyday life. So, to approach any situation from a “color-blind” stance denies the reality of the lived experience of racism and thus exacerbates the problem more than it solves it.

Antrosio, the CRRA and others are now calling for better practices of mentorship, recruitment and  professional encouragement. Although these are much needed and valiant efforts, I question how successful such ventures will be when our self knowledge as anthropologists tells us that we are not racist, sexist or imperialist and yet our actions represent us to marginalized groups as just that.

Anthropology was not developed in a vacuum. The same underlying biases that plague society at large are the fundamental root of our own biases. Anthropologists are not born and raised in anthropological environments. We are raised in societies and in homes with complex histories that form our characters, biases and self knowledge for nearly two decades before most of us are even exposed to the idea of anthropology in college. So, by the time anthropologists become professors, mentors and colleagues, our habits and biases are already entrenched in our personalities.

This is not to say that we can’t or don’t change, as most every one of my peers in college and graduate school had many awakenings throughout their educations and careers. However, some biases are represented in our speech and behavior in such subtle and nuanced ways that they are imperceptible to any who do not feel the lash of their consequences.

For example, I work as a web designer/developer and adjunct faculty member for a community college. My office is located in the middle of an office suite in the IT department. To get to my office, you must pass the generally open doors of four of my male coworkers. Yet, the majority of the visitors to our office suite pass all four of these offices and stop at mine for directory information, to deliver mail, turn in paper work and other tasks generally handled by our administrative assistant. Last Spring, when there were two other women in the front offices of our suite, I was very rarely asked by visitors to perform these duties.

I would never downplay the work of an administrative assistant; my experience is that such individuals are the binding agents that keep departments from falling apart. However, the determination that I, a woman in an IT department, must be an administrative assistant, is irksome.

I would venture to guess that these visitors who classified my position by my gender would not consider themselves sexist. Neither would I assume that my gender was a conscious part of their decision making. Yet, as a woman, who has felt the sharp pain and frustration of sexist behavior in many contexts and situations throughout my life, I notice what is invisible to others.

Even Better

With the understanding that these biases are rooted in something deeper than our roles as anthropologists and that these biases are often hidden to us, how can a simple call for being better really help us progress?

Anthropology, when dealing with internal issues and debates, often fails to use the tools that make the discipline so formidable when dealing with these same issues externally. After last year’s #AAAFail, Alex Golub over at Savage Minds argued for ethnography as a solution to the science debate and PR meltdown. However, in this case, I argue not for ethnography of anthropology, but for ethnography of bias in our societies. And, I do not mean of the victims of bias, I mean that we must ethnographically engage the abusers.

My thesis fieldwork was performed working with Muslim women living in Louisiana. Yet, after completing it, I felt that, while I had, to the best of my ability, represented the women’s plights (and strengths), I failed to truly understand the rampant bias against my informants because I had not put ethnographic scrutiny on those who perpetuated and acted on that bias. How could I truly comprehend the ways that Islamaphobia festers by examining consequences rather than actions?

My mentors and peers have nearly all attempted to dissuade me from pursuing such ethnographic endeavors on the basis of ethical engagement. How do you ethically work with informants while rooting out their racism, sexism, and other biases, especially in the name of social justice? However, how are we to ever understand the roots and functions of these practices in society if we do not turn our attentions to them? How are we to understand how to make progress in our own behavior if we fail to understand why we behave as we do?

It is not enough to look from the marginalized perspective and say that such biases are bad and should be stopped. Just as the responses to biases are complex and embedded in a thickly woven tapestry of projects and desires, so are the biases themselves. Thus, any attempt to stamp out or reduce biased action in ourselves or others must come from a more informed position.

I am heartened by the proposed changes to the AAA’s code of ethics toward questioning engagement with ethical issues rather than a “do no harm” outlook. As well as by Nancy Sheper-Hughes fieldwork on the trafficking of human organs, which involved deception and the betrayal of her informants to the police. This is something that is commonly considered unethical by many anthropologists. Yet, Sheper-Hughes and many others have found her actions to be ethical and carefully considered while she was able to uncover the culture of the negative behavior.

I believe that more work in this direction (both in the ethnography of abusers and in the careful consideration of the ethics of working with such groups) could open anthropology into new “even better” understandings of society and ourselves.