Member name

[Keith Hart]

The Administrators of the Open Anthropology Cooperative have, in the light of recent discussion, decided upon a policy of asking members to use a personal name, ideally a full one. If your name does not conform to this guideline, please could you create a new member name. We welcome your participation and suggest this in the hope of keeping the group open. At least the first and third words in our collective name would suggest that hiding behind an abbreviated, fictitious or artificial name is hardly compatible with our principles of association. Anyone is welcome to read the contents of this site without joining. If you join, you are at liberty to keep posted personal information to a minimum. Within the site, private communication is encouraged in the form of sending messages to friends rather than posting public comments on individuals' personal pages. All that we ask is that your primary membership name should show who you are. If that seems like an excessive demand to you, perhaps you don't belong here. This is the only formal restriction that we try to impose on the membership. And even that is open to discussion.

[Eliza Jane Darling]

Since the preference for full names seems to be okay with 99% of members, setting the precedent that member names be actual names and not something cutesy or cryptic presents a more straightforward admin response when a member named KittyLover, jdkw28483 or HotStuff99 joins. Or are monikers like that okay?

You're assuming that the place is static. Aren't you anticipating (hoping for) further growth? You've already walled it off from some through Teh Rules. Personally, I don't give a monkey's if people call themselves Professor Bob J. Important or MonstaTruckLuvva206, but more importantly, I think it's a dubious assumption that people will act in good, respectful ways simply because their real names are attached to their posts. People do rotten things under their real names all the time, on and off the internet.

I would therefore respectfully disagree when you attribute to me the comment, "I don't need to hide my identity, I'm willing and able to be open, so why shouldn't others think the same?" That's misleading.

I don't think it is, because as soon as you said "I didn't say that," you said it again: "How could I expect people to trust in my commitment to this site if I hadn't even revealed my identity to them?" That's extrapolating from your own worldview and making assumptions about others based on it. There are bloggers in parts of the world who have put themselves in danger simply by blogging; some have even been imprisoned. In such a case, witholding identity might not be an indication that you can't trust them, but that they can't trust the state or other authorities to protect freedom of speech. Instead of a blanket, inflexible rule, why not allow for people to at least appeal for an exception?

On the other hand, hiding so that you needn't be held responsible for your actions, to commit to what you're saying, or, in other words, masking your persona in order to 'take' from a community without 'giving' in equal measure

How do you propose to police that? What constitutes an acceptable level of giving and taking? How do you even define those things?

before eschewing any connection to academia and scholarship on this site...I don't see why we should cringe when the world 'scholar' is mentioned.

I don't either. Who is eschewing and cringing?

In my own mind, probably as a result of my experience with moderating other sites, I see admins as members with extra duties, not members with extra rights.

What you have is extra access, however you square it in your mind. I haven't necessarily argued against that; someone has got do do the mundane work if the site is to function. I'm not specifically arguing with admin; it just seems to be members of admin who hold a position I disagree with.

[Francine Barone]

Eliza Jane Darling said:

I'm not specifically arguing with admin; it just seems to be members of admin who hold a position I disagree with.

That's precisely why the argumentative side of this discussion has no beginning and no end, but thank you for reiterating your position in support of member anonymity.

I do "give a monkey's", and, whether we disagree or not on both fundamental and minor points of the administrative process, I will continue to do my best in support of this site and its members, now and as it grows. New members will bring new perspectives and ideas which require an ongoing negotiation, adjustment, or even removal, of what minor and elastic guidelines have already been tentatively proposed. I take this challenge on board wholeheartedly, as I can safely offer is also the case with the other members of the current (and temporary) admin team. I hope that this also holds true for the other members of this network in general. It falls upon all of us to be flexible if this community is going to fulfill what we each want it to.

So, I trust that whenever our behavior does not meet your standards, you will not be shy about letting us know.

Thank you again for your comments.

Fran

[Kathleen Lowrey]

I just wanted to clarify that although I did give examples of fora in which pseudonyms are useful, I went on in my original comment here to explain why I don't think this is a forum of that kind. I wanted to be clear that I am not disdainful of pseudonyms *at all*, but view them as allowing a different kind of engagement to go forward than the kind of engagement I see as being at the heart of the OAC (or whatever we're currently calling it, the AC perhaps). I certainly do appreciate why others might feel otherwise, but I want to clarify my own original position. I continue to be in favor of encouraging the use of real names here that connect contributors' everyday selves to their AC selves, for reasons I already explained.

[Kathleen Lowrey]

Since I raised the issue of feminist blogs, where allowing pseudonyms is important, I wanted to also emphasize that feminist bloggers are very well aware of what a double-edged sword that choice creates. They want to create a safe space for sharing experiences, and so allow pseudonyms. Partially because of this, and partially because of the subject matter (many people will find our lefty cultural critique equally provocative), they are also as a result riddled with nasty trolls that the admins have to spend *enormous* amounts of time on: deleting hideously abusive commentary, keeping tabs on repeat offenders who pop up under different pseudonyms to get disgusting, violent content on the site for as long as possible -- I really, really, think it would be good to learn from that.

[Eliza Jane Darling]

So, I trust that whenever our behavior does not meet your standards, you will not be shy about letting us know. Thank you again for your comments.

Fran, there's no need to be so patronising. You're moderating a forum, not selling insurance. Admin opened it up for discussion through this thread. Ask for comment, comment is what you get.

[Igor Alcyon]

I really think that Martin Fotta has an important point here :

"i agree with eliza. i am not convinced that you need to control-ask people to use real/real-looking name. more importantly, has anything already happened or are we just creating rules to prevent anything in potential? this ´potential´ might be something other than missusing a membership to sent around message ´martin is a empiricist idiot´... maybe something that would attribute towards opening this place.... " [my emphases :) ]

The "official" position seems to be the following (correct me if I am wrong) : The OAC strongly encourages the use of real names.

I'd like to give my point of view, first by analyzing the "pros" for such a policy, and then by presenting arguments in favor of anomymity, in the precise context of that social network. But let me be clear that my aim is not to propose or set an official policy, but rather to give arguments that are to be debated (if deemed relevant).

So far, the reasons I have read for encouraging the use of real names are :

1. Allow people that meet each other on Ning to also meet offline as well as online.
2. Diminishing the risks of having "free-fire zone" type of debates, as anonymous users can more easily feel free of any responsibility.
3. Author name is the best kind of metadata that anthropologists can have.
(Did i forget anything ?)

The flaws I see are the following :

1. The Ning network allow for private messages. Hence anonymity and real-life encounters are not incompatible.
2. True. But there is no way to prevent people from inventing a real looking name if they wih to come here for insult-games.
3. True if knowing the real name allow you to know who the person is, socially speaking. Knowing the name of an obscure student (or a factory-worker or peasant for that matter) won't help much as meta-data.


The debate about using real-name versus nickname can be directly related to the question of anthropology as a field (in Bourdieu's sense, in french it's "champ", I don't know about english translations). The most powerful people (and legitimate speakers) in that "champ" has obvious reasons to use real-names, and much more so to encourage others to do so. That is, to protect them against agents that would find anonymity a way to partially escape the forces of the "champ".
The people less powerful in the field has obvious reason to use anonymous names in that social network, if their aim is to engage in anthropological debate in a much direct manner than they are used to. Let me give just one example. If one finds that the discourse of such or such scholar is much too determined by his class position to be honest, one would hardly be able to talk about it and debate it in traditionnal academic settings. And I think it might be risky to do it here under a real name (and the lowest (and weak) in the "champ" one is, the more so).
If that Ning network is to be something else than an academic facebook for anthropologists that reproduces all the forces of the "champ" of anthropology , I think anonymity can play an interesting role.

[Eliza Jane Darling]

I think that's a valid point, and Bourdieu is especially pertinent as he's speaking specifically to the power relations of anthropology as a field. I'd also suggest the work of Marilyn Strathern on "the tyranny of transparency." She's writing primarily about the audit culture of higher education in Britain, contextualising this within her work on highly visual rituals in Papua New Guinea and taking her cue from Haridimos Tsoukas on "the tyranny of light," but I think there are some instructive parallels between the transparency of social identity and the transparency of personal identity - and indeed, in this discussion the two are linked for some posters, who would like not only names, but institutional affiliations and other bits of what are euphemistically called "metadata."

Strathern writes:

The arena is one which the notion of surveillance would seem to have made familiar, where visibility as a conduit for knowledge is elided with visibility as an instrument of control....What intrigues me is that here people both deploy, and are sceptical about deploying, visibility as a conduit for knowledge. Higher education professionals at once accede to the idea of accountability and regard performance indicators as highly constructed and artificial means of measuring real ouput. As the term accountability implies, people want to know how to trust one another, to make their trust visible, while (knowing that) the very desire to do so points to the absence of trust. At this point visibility no longer seems securely attached to knowledge and control, and the idea of audit as an obvious instrument of surveillance is thrown into doubt. Instead, a question arises: what does visibility conceal? (from "The Tyranny of Transparency," British Educational Research Journal 26(3):309-321).*

My sense here is that those here who champion the brigher side of the identity spectrum seek to engage in a kind of pre-emptive personal audit insofar as it would make them feel more comfortable in trusting the strangers who might come to gather here - to make them less "strange" by securing them to an identity rooted in (depending on how much information people want, and from what I've gathered, this varies) gender, race, class, place, space, nation and organisation (bits of information which are in turn likely to lead to more fine-grained types of audit, such as publication, teaching, etc.). In addition to the questions of power this entails, which have been evoked by several posters on this particular discussion (Dylan on the reproduction of Euro-American academic hegemony, Igor on class and champ, Kathleen on feminism and institution, Stacie on scale and anonymity), I'd suggest we also question our assumptions about what visibility gets us. I think that's Strathern's point, though she's applying it to a different context - that accountability through visibility sometimes adds up to less real knowledge or trust than the calculus of identity would seem to promise.

*I can provide this PDF for anyone who wants it - give a shout to my inbox.


Igor Alcyon said:

I really think that Martin Fotta has an important point here :
"i agree with eliza. i am not convinced that you need to control-ask people to use real/real-looking name. more importantly, has anything already happened or are we just creating rules to prevent anything in potential? this ´potential´ might be something other than missusing a membership to sent around message ´martin is a empiricist idiot´... maybe something that would attribute towards opening this place.... " [my emphases :) ] The "official" position seems to be the following (correct me if I am wrong) : The OAC strongly encourages the use of real names.

I'd like to give my point of view, first by analyzing the "pros" for such a policy, and then by presenting arguments in favor of anomymity, in the precise context of that social network. But let me be clear that my aim is not to propose or set an official policy, but rather to give arguments that are to be debated (if deemed relevant).

So far, the reasons I have read for encouraging the use of real names are :

1. Allow people that meet each other on Ning to also meet offline as well as online.
2. Diminishing the risks of having "free-fire zone" type of debates, as anonymous users can more easily feel free of any responsibility.
3. Author name is the best kind of metadata that anthropologists can have.
(Did i forget anything ?)

The flaws I see are the following :

1. The Ning network allow for private messages. Hence anonymity and real-life encounters are not incompatible.
2. True. But there is no way to prevent people from inventing a real looking name if they wih to come here for insult-games.
3. True if knowing the real name allow you to know who the person is, socially speaking. Knowing the name of an obscure student (or a factory-worker or peasant for that matter) won't help much as meta-data.


The debate about using real-name versus nickname can be directly related to the question of anthropology as a field (in Bourdieu's sense, in french it's "champ", I don't know about english translations). The most powerful people (and legitimate speakers) in that "champ" has obvious reasons to use real-names, and much more so to encourage others to do so. That is, to protect them against agents that would find anonymity a way to partially escape the forces of the "champ".
The people less powerful in the field has obvious reason to use anonymous names in that social network, if their aim is to engage in anthropological debate in a much direct manner than they are used to. Let me give just one example. If one finds that the discourse of such or such scholar is much too determined by his class position to be honest, one would hardly be able to talk about it and debate it in traditionnal academic settings. And I think it might be risky to do it here under a real name (and the lowest (and weak) in the "champ" one is, the more so).
If that Ning network is to be something else than an academic facebook for anthropologists that reproduces all the forces of the "champ" of anthropology , I think anonymity can play an interesting role.