Lexis to Praxis

Science is often equated with quantitative measures -- as if so-called "hard" science is the only real science. Surveys, statistics, and lab experiments are all common ways of knowing more about the world and the issues that affect us. They contribute a lot of information -- and they, like any method, have their pitfalls. The major drawback of lab experiments is that animals, people, and virtually every other thing function differently in a laboratory than they do in their natural environments. It is impossible to control for every variable in a lab setting. Surveys often come up with numbers that can be interpreted in a variety of ways -- and the interpretations, and results, are often determined by the way the questions are phrased, the kinds of categories researchers used in the first place, and the various ways in which people responded to the questions based on their own cultural programming.

The principle method of data-production used by anthropologists is ethnography. Ethnography is a lot like epidemiology, an established research method often used in public health and medicinal studies whose goal is to observe what people do in natural settings in order to learn about disease patterns. Epidemiology has contributed a great deal to what we know about medicine today. Ethnography is like epidemiology on a broader scale, not limited to medicine but applicable to every facet of human life, and based on a theory of naturalism that is the foundation of American anthropology. According to this theory, you can observe specific peoples or "cultures" in their natural habitats, just like you can observe anything that is a part of this world or any ecosystem, in order to understand more about humankind in general, and to learn the ways in which we are different and the ways in which we are the same. Anthropology is also tradionally focused on the holistic -- the biological, evolutionary, environmental, historical, and cultural contexts in which a given culture lives and how these factors shape people's lives. Another hallmark of anthropology is the notion of "cultural relativism", that shredded white flag of an idea that says that each person (and culture) lives in a sort of bubble shaped by particular experiences and upbringing, and that therefore people from one culture cannot judge the viability of another, and to claim that there is only one perspective is ethnocentric (biased toward one's own perspective). Obviously, given these philosophical and at times dogmatic tenets, anthropologists can't help but be political, no matter how culturally relative they claim to be, and so anthropologists have historically been involved in arguments about race and racism (on both sides, but the majority of anthropologists since Franz Boas contributed significantly to the Civil Rights movement), evolutionism, Marxism and other deterministic theories, war, humanitarian concerns, and environmental issues, among others.

Anthropology has since evolved, as all things do; ethnography, too, has matured and specialized and broadened. What is commonly termed the "crisis of anthropology" refers to a certain turning point when a lot of minority and under-represented voices joined the scene -- often those who were "studied" or descendents of those who had been "studied" -- and called into question some of those hallmark ideas which, as it turned out, were ethnocentric and imperialist in practice (the typically white male Western-educated anthropologist goes to study a group of people and, under the guise of cultural relativism, hangs back despite whatever's going on there, affects things just by being there without fully admitting the impact his presence has, and leaves to bring the knowledge -- which was produced from his own perspective and upbringing and whatever lenses he used to interpret others' behaviors, and which was often biased toward a male-centered perspective -- back to that Western anomaly we call academia to feed into discussions about what these people were like). This conundrum became known in debates as "the politics of representation". Postmodernism hit with its disintegrative, "what the hell are we doing here?" tinge and for a while many anthropologists hit the books and started working with texts and spinning a lot of theory around because the entire field and its purpose had been called into question, and rightfully so.

But we survived postmodernism, perhaps with a few scars and even tattoos and other studyable bodily effacements, and came out the other side with new theories of how to practice our science. We still use ethnography -- the idea that you can learn a lot about people by understanding their history, their politics, and the ins and outs of a thing, that is, the story behind a thing -- but now we tend to focus on issues, rather than trying to get the entire holistic snapshot of a "culture". Ethnography has its limits, now recognized and discussed a great deal in anthropology classes -- and of course we are all biased, hard scientists too, no matter what we do. We bring our own perspectives into every study and there is no sense in pretending that there is some sort of objectivity to be had. In any case, we've learned a few lessons, or at least would like to think so: we are not gathering data, we are producing them; we are learning from the people we speak with, whom we call "informants", because they are the experts and our job is to try to bring together what several people say about a topic, analyze it, and produce something useful in the academic world and hopefully something useful in the practical world; and while most of us are fairly relativistic, we have a basic duty to those we work with, and the issues we attempt to understand, to attempt to discuss and solve problems in a way that will benefit people.

At least that's the way I see it ...

Recent events have exhibited the need to understand how technology can be used in unexpected ways to address the needs of collectives thrown in limbo. The blogosphere is known as a place for political and ideological discussion groups, personal creative spaces and journals, and identity and role- and status-validating social and dating networks. In recent years, however, another use has emerged: the web has become a place where people can quickly unite around urgent issues and communicate across geographic and ideological boundaries in order to solicit assistance and address crucial needs, from the therapeutic need for storytelling and validation to basic survival needs such as food and shelter.

Addressing this phenomenon is particularly relevant to understanding how people construct themselves and their roles in relation to the needs of others, as well as how communication technologies such as the web enable the formation of new communities that are able to deal with transformative events and massive trauma in unprecedented ways. Also of interest is the nature of the web itself, whose developments having been largely unplanned and unregulated, has in a way become an amorphous evolving and dynamic "organism" which reflects and perhaps transforms the ways in which people conceive of identity, agency, and communication. Its existence raises many questions: if something like the web as an amorphous conglomeration of new technologies is left alone, in what sorts of unforeseen ways will people take advantage of the technology available to them? How does the web conduct, inspire, or limit innovation? How does the web change and affect the way in which people unite around common themes, causes, and disasters? How does online communication and networking affect human relationships in the "real world", and is the gap between "real" and "virtual" realms getting smaller? As new technologies transform common methods of communication and association, it will become more imperative for anthropologists to enter and participate in the virtual realm. Doing so will enable us to better understand how people negotiate themselves and their roles within the social sphere, how people deal with change, trauma, violence, and community need, and how people take advantage of resources available to them in unpredictable ways.

As the internet has become a dominant or prevalent mode of communication for many people, it continues to expand as a resource for those who might have had to pursue other, less efficient means of communication and outreach in the past. An example of this can be seen in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, whose impact in the southern regions of the United States led to a flurry of related activity within the blogosphere. Comments and discussions about Katrina began to appear in individual blogs as people expressed their feelings about or relationships to the disaster, as well as their sympathies for those devastated by the tragedy. Political blogs raised discussion about issues such as the FEMA response and how the President should react to national disasters, poverty, and racial segregation. Beyond the whirlwind of opinion, something else interesting happened: people began to offer help and assistance, including food and shelter, to people in New Orleans and surrounding regions. Others organized food and clothing drives. Often offers and pleas for help were organized around lines of ethnicity or ideology; for example, one blogger who identified as Goth, who lived in Denver, and who operated a personal blog in which she had posted often about the Denver Goth scene, offered help and even residence to any Goths who had been displaced by the disaster. Some discussion groups and communities were formed with the specific goal of sharing stories and organizing support in response to Hurricane Katrina, while still others incorporated other natural disasters, or talked about forming online networks of support and relief efforts for dealing with disasters throughout the hurricane season.

By looking at these events and how these online networks were formed in response to a disaster, we can better come to understand how people interact and how something like the blogosphere, whose influence on communication and networking systems has defied prediction, may offer new insights into how we understand the individual as a practitioner or performer within a larger social sphere, and how new social spheres of interaction can be formed, perpetuated, and changed through the interactions of participants. It is also useful to speculate how internet worlds complicate the notion of identity and, as a result, affect the way in which identities are negotiated in the nonvirtual world. It is also useful to understand previous ideas about culture reproduction and change, and how people respond to disaster and change, in terms of new understandings brought about by the internet and other technologies.