Is the OAC "European"?

[Keith Hart]

The third element in the OAC's title is still more latent than actual. So it great to see the new group PopAnth, where Erin Taylor and Gawain Lynch are brainstorming the launch of a new attempt to popularize anthropology through a separate site. I still think our coop could sustain more projects of this kind. It just takes the energy and vision that Erin and Gawain bring to this one. There are many willing helpers waiting in the wings.

But that is not the point of this post. In the course of a wide-ranging discussion, neuroanthropology's Daniel Lende said "I feel there are a fair number of US anthro blogs that take the popularizing route, and it would be cool to have something with a more European flavor" (this something being the OAC). This is not the first time an American anthro blogger has mentioned the OAC's European character. I often ask myself what kind of network we are and this prodded me to look at the stats again.

The fact is that 45% of our members are from Europe (although the British, who are a third of them, are ambivalent about how "European" they are). North America accounts for another 30%, Asia 10%, Latin America 5%, Oceania 3%, Africa 2% and NA 5%. Of course this measures only the country that members post from and not their nationality. For example, I am British, live in France and work in South Africa. There are a lot of crossovers like that.

Our membership of almost 6,500 has been accumulated over more than three years, so these shares may not reflect the active membership. In the last month 125 new members have joined. Here is the breakdown, with 34 countries represented:

US  26  Australia 15  Britain  13  Brazil  9

Canada, Portugal and France  4 each

Iran, Nepal, Germany, Norway and Spain 3 each

Thailand, Turkey, South Africa, Serbia, Greece, Finland, China, India, Israel, Italy, Bulgaria, Denmark, Ireland 2 each

and one each from Poland, Sweden, Slovakia, Argentina, Mexico, Dominican Rep, S Korea, Austria, Colombia, Chile.

Another measure of current activity is visits over the last month (normally about 500 a day, but more like 400 in the Northern summer). Here are the current top ten countries of our readers in order of frequency:

US (30%), Britain (13%), France, India, Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy, Philippines, Japan.

These figures are much influenced by individuals who are regular users, such as me for France, M Izabel for Philippines and John McCreery for Japan. So who are our regular contributors? The OAC Members tag on the main page menu bar lists Top Contributors (15), the Information Team (4) plus Fran Barone and myself. The last six all have administrator status.  So who are these individuals?

8 are from Britain, 7 from the US and one each from Portugal, Japan, Philippines, India, Korea and France. Remember that this is not necessarily national origin, which would increase the Anglo-American share to 17 out of 21. This makes even more obvious the predominance of anglophone countries among active contributing members and readers. If countries were listed by official language rather than continent, this bias would be even more apparent and "Europe" might seem rather less dominant.

I must mention one last issue which has been highlighted by Savage Minds in July: the relationship between academic precarity and the production of ethnography. The OAC's stalwarts are a precarious bunch indeed. Of the 21 "leaders" only two have full-time academic posts. Several are students at all levels (undergrad, masters and PhD), several are retired. At least half have an indeterminate employment status, are unemployed or work outside academia.

We encourage a wide range of contributions, from quite academic exercises to more playful and popular efforts, not to mention our splendid collection of visual material. But we rarely ask how the offline social standing of our members affects or could be affected by belonging to the OAC.

I provide these memos in the hope that they might provoke some reflections about what we might do with who we are.

[John McCreery]

I would agree with those who perceive OAC as European. Why is that? Perhaps because the other places where I hang my anthropological hat are so very USAnian. On both Savage Minds and Neuroanthropology the majority of active contributors are USAnian in training if not in nationality or current residence. Underlying assumptions reflect the academic situation and the way anthropology is taught and practiced in the USA. Ditto for Anthro-L. Here the usual assumptions reflect a British or Continental training and events advertised are typically in Britain or Europe. The OAC press seminars have a similar flavor. 

I wonder if others' experience is different.

[Kate Wood]

From a recent joiner's point of view, I'd ask: are you speaking geographically or philosophically? For example, I post from England and my anthropology education is primarily in the British school (with a smattering of American cultural anthropology in my undergraduate years), but my passport says USA. Philosophically, I'd agree that what I've seen is mostly European in tone, though that's also not a unified thing - for example, how does pre-post-Soviet Eastern European ethnology fit in to "European anthropology"? 

[Keith Hart]

I think it is a directional term, not a geographical classification. Thus Jack Goody found in NW Ghana that the people he identifed as the LoDagaa were a cluster who tended to call people to the West Lobi and to the East Dagarti. They straddled the border between Ivory Coast and Ghana, being known as Lobi in the former and Dagarti in the latter.

It would never occur to me to call the OAC "European", but three Americans (four if we count you) have said its tone is European, relatively speaking. I was outraged by the claim when I first heard it, but am coming round to the idea that there might be something in it. But, as you say, what?

As the world becomes more mobile, in terms of both travel and communications, the idea of classifying people by current national residence makes little sense. But then nation-states are vital to controlling telecommunications. There is only one region in the world where mobile phone networks are transnational. Guess where. Payment for internet transactions is closely tied to national banking systems. Nomads like me have a hard time navigating this stuff. I once could not buy an airline ticket over the phone in South Africa: the guy freaked out and called in the security people when I offered a French credit card, a British passport and a South African mobile number and address.

I take all this to indicate the limbo that humanity now finds itself in, trapped between national and world society without adequate institutions to manage the transition. It's a real problem for anthropology, especially because of the ethnographic tradition of finding stateless mini-nationstates in exotic places.

I think "European" is a really problematic category. But, despite all our non-western members, the OAC is still largely a place by and for Westerners. I think of myself as an English-speaker and, despite being close to the French sociological tradition, I have never had a job in France, even though it has been my home for 15 years. Sometimes, when asked, I say I am a black exiled writer in Paris like Richard Wright or James Baldwin, but for some reason people don't believe me.

Kate Wood said:

From a recent joiner's point of view, I'd ask: are you speaking geographically or philosophically? For example, I post from England and my anthropology education is primarily in the British school (with a smattering of American cultural anthropology in my undergraduate years), but my passport says USA. Philosophically, I'd agree that what I've seen is mostly European in tone, though that's also not a unified thing - for example, how does pre-post-Soviet Eastern European ethnology fit in to "European anthropology"? 

[Daniel Lende]

Keith, if it makes you feel any better, "anthropology" too could be called a really problematic category... ;-)

 

My original comment was meant in two ways, I think.  First, I think it would be great if PopAnth (and anyone else too) can figure out how to leverage what's already here on Open Anth Coop into a more popular/general audience approach.  Like John, I do find a more European "flavor" here, in terms of events covered, assumptions, etc.  And I think that could be made into a strength.  Certainly I am not shy about embracing my American anthro approach!  And one thing I value about coming over here is that I'm going to get a different perspective on things, and that is good.

But I was also thinking more about potential audience, particularly for a popular effort.  Neuroanthro has people come from all over the world to visit, but in large part has a US audience. And we often cover US themes (from the AAAs to what's in the US news).  So from my point of view as a consumer of Open Anth Coop, I'm happy with getting something different.  So you might ask yourself, what's the audience for this network?  That's a different sort of question than "who we are?".

[Erin B. Taylor]

Hi all, as a newcomer to this site I haven't felt it to be particularly tied to any region. I've interacted primarily with people who have English as their first language, but not exclusively, and they have been based in many different places.

I think that PopAnth - both the website (once it gets going) and the OAC group - could be used to create a more broad-reaching community. Community, I think, is key to this. Daniel comments that Neuroanthropology gets readers from all over the place, and so does my website - I get people dropping in from all continents, except Antarctica so far. I imagine that the PopAnth website will have even more global appeal, and we could certainly invite anthropologists from all sorts of places to both get involved in the website and the broader discussions about popularising anthropology that are taking place on here.

In other words, OAC members' activities beyond the OAC site could give people a reason to be involved in the OAC community, thus transforming it.

[Keith Hart]

Thanks, Daniel. I am coming round to thinking of the label "European" as not necessarily pejorative, not least because of friends like you. I also love your switch to the notion of "audience", since this is one of my pet themes.

I remember walking down the steps out of the Chicago book fair over a decade ago with the publisher of the American edition of my book on money and the internet. The context was the time that the dot com boom crashed. I went on breakfast TV shows to defend my notion that the future of global commerce was the internet. But on this occasion my publisher remarked that print book sales had plummeted 25% in the previous quarter and no-one knew why. Was this the long-advertised revenge of the internet on the print industry? Was it a temporary blip (as I believed the dot com crash was) or falling off a cliff? The interesting thing was that he paid a specialist firm to market my book (my only venture into popular publishing since they paid me an advance of $50,000) and they had their slots on NPR, business TV, the New York magazines. But nobody knew who buys the books, even less why or what they make of reading them. So marketing was a sort of comfort ritual to cope with launching something into a void.

Writers, teachers and artists have to put up with very little feedback on their output. About 2 or 3 times a year I get an email message from someone who says "You don't know me, I sat in on your first year lectures at Cambridge. I just wanted you to know that they changed my life". Actually the deputy prime minister in Britain's hated coalition government said something like that in a Guardian interview. This kind of gratuitous feedback is so rare, but it keeps me going. I had a friend called Ruth, an 80-year-old former communist and euthanasia campaigner, who loved reading novels, biographies and poetry. She wrote to the authors she liked and expressed astonishment that she got back four-page handwritten letters, even invitations to dinner. "I didn't think they would have the time", she told me. "But Ruth you are the only one who writes to them!"

I taught at Yale in the late 70s when I was compiling a literature review on West African agriculture. Who was my audience, I wondered. Was it "anthropologists"? Certainly not, since the book was originally commissioned as a report for USAID to inform rural aid workers in the region. Then I asked what kind of book would appeal just to the 18 professors in Yale's four-field department, a group that included KC Chang, Floyd Lounsbury, Ben Rouse, David Pilbeam, Alison Richard, Hal Scheffler, Hal Conklin, Leo Pospisil. I realised that if I wrote a book that all of them could read, never mind enjoy, I would be writing for a general academic audience. And I wanted to reach practitioners too. So forget the "anthropological audience".

I have spent the last 15 years writing from a Paris attic. People ask me how I can write about social things when my life is so isolated. I tell them that I am not alone in my attic. I have lived a varied life in many different places. All those experiences of society live inside me, latent but soon activated. I write to satisfy myself, since any one of those voices could protest if I wrote something that contradicted what they knew. So society, in all its plural manifestations, lives inside me. It is not just out there. This is the social world I write for and to. I believe, but it is a matter of faith, that anything that has passed that internal test has a chance of finding readers out there with similar experience. But I have no idea who they are. The regional market for my work appears to include Scandinavia and Latin America. British social anthropologists generally don't want to know. You work it out. This leads me to my great unfinished essay, riposte to Barthes, "Death of the audience". In an age of cable TV and the internet, you had better forget who is out there and listen to your own socialized voices.

So what would be a method for determining the OAC's "audience". All we know is that some individuals joined, some (very few) post here and others, mostly invisible, read what is here. I assume that the relationship between the motives of writers and of readers is even more indeterminate than for more established media. I have started by asking who we are are in terms of measurable acts, but this is only slightly less obscure than knowing what people read us for. We do have sophisticated ways of breaking down visits to our site, but analyzing these is barely an advance on traditional marketing rituals. What is for sure is that our membership is divided between native English-speakers and people who speak English as a second language. The latter are much less likely to write than read. We did once have flourishing groups in a dozen languages, but the dominant Anglophone tendency drove them out. Our main hope of multi-lingualism at present is to build bridges to Brazil and Portugal.

The tension in all this comes from living in the American empire. The Europeans have been reluctant to differentiate themselves from the Americans since 1945, preferring to shelter under the umbrella of a more inclusive catagory, the West. The British have signed up as bag carriers for the American empire, taking comfort from the fact that the Americans have made English the world language. When the British empire ruled the world, our ruling class had a principle: let them keep their petty local cultures, as long as we control the important things and make them universal. So being told that we offer a certain diversity for the masters at command control doesn't sit easily with us.

But the main point is that the OAC is the most inclusive association of people with an interest in anthropology that has ever been assembled. We think we are global. We started out as a coterie of Americans and one Brit and a third of our members are still American. But we seem to be "European" to the Americans, presumably because we are not 100% content to be masters of the world, since we are losing our grip on that fast. The issue is a struggle for an anthropology -- or rather for anthropologies, both academic and otherwise -- that reflects the interests of all the world's citizens and not just those of the American empire at its core. This struggle is in its early stages and it is not limited to resisting the dominance of American anthropology (although the AAA does a great job of caricaturing imperial bureacracy). All the main imperial centres are in trouble, not least Britain and France. Anthropology is now practiced in many national centres and it is to this plurality that I look for some progress. It is uncomfortable to be reminded that, for all this aspiration, we can still be type-cast as "European", not without some justification, I have to admit. It is also the case that Americans have taken the lead in exploring the democratic potential of the internet for our common enterprise. That should be a basis for alliance, not just for the celebration of cultural diversity.

Daniel Lende said:

Keith, if it makes you feel any better, "anthropology" too could be called a really problematic category... ;-)

 

My original comment was meant in two ways, I think.  First, I think it would be great if PopAnth (and anyone else too) can figure out how to leverage what's already here on Open Anth Coop into a more popular/general audience approach.  Like John, I do find a more European "flavor" here, in terms of events covered, assumptions, etc.  And I think that could be made into a strength.  Certainly I am not shy about embracing my American anthro approach!  And one thing I value about coming over here is that I'm going to get a different perspective on things, and that is good.

But I was also thinking more about potential audience, particularly for a popular effort.  Neuroanthro has people come from all over the world to visit, but in large part has a US audience. And we often cover US themes (from the AAAs to what's in the US news).  So from my point of view as a consumer of Open Anth Coop, I'm happy with getting something different.  So you might ask yourself, what's the audience for this network?  That's a different sort of question than "who we are?".

[Gawain Lynch]

To be precise, this year Erin's blog audience has originated from 155 different countries.  I doubt that Jason or Daniel would in fact have a very different story either.  My point is that there is popular reach and then there is the wider reach, both are important as the latter gives room for growth.