How could you not love Lucha Libre?

 

How could you not love lucha libre after reading Heather Levi’s ethnography, The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, revelations, and mexican national identity??  I’m hooked and I’m only half way through the book (I’m laying the blame at NamBloPoMo’s door for writing about books two days in a row).

 

 

 

Besides having the coolest cover I’ve ever seen on an ethnography, the book is riveting – I never thought I would be so fascinated by wrestling and men in tights, but I guess that’s the magic of a well done ethnography.  So far this one has been an excellent mix of fieldwork revelations and explanations combined with theory on cultural performance, mexican politics and a crazy mix of class, morality and gender play.  Seriously, I find myself pausing after every chapter and muttering to myself in surprise, ‘Damn, that was great’.

In an interview with the LA Times, Levi explains some of the poetic contradictions and political power that are embedded in lucha libre:

“It did several things at once,” says Levi, who trained as a wrestler in Mexico while researching her book “The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National Identity.” “It figured both as a display of these larger-than-life heroes but heroes that everybody . . . knew came from their social class or quite possibly [were] their neighbors.”

It even parodied the political system, because it was an unspoken secret that the results of lucha matches were decided in a smoke-filled room long before they began — just as many Mexicans suspected the outcome of most elections was predetermined.

Fittingly, the most popular and successful luchadores have come to represent political causes; some crusaded for animal and gay rights or for women’s equality and the environment.

The most powerful of these, the red-and-gold-masked Superbarrio, rose from the rubble of a deadly earthquake to advocate for the homeless and working poor — with surprising results.

“When Superbarrio addressed politicians, politicians who were very good at this very slick self-presentation, they would start to stammer,” Levi says. “They wouldn’t know where to look or how to look at [him]. And so the power dynamic shifted.

“There was no way to co-opt him because he didn’t exist. He was incorruptible because he both existed but at the same time didn’t exist.”

American Ethnography Quasimonthly has a quality lucha libre/wrestling issue, which is how I initially discovered Levi’s book.  The AEQ spread features an excerpt from Levi’s book, which is what convinced me to buy it, as well as some incredible old photos of lucha libre wrestlers and a magazine pictorial of a phenomenon known as apartment wrestling – the whole issue is well worth a look.

Stay tuned for a real review, sans the words ‘cool’ and ‘damn’, when I finish the book.

Photo in the post from ProAeroPhoto’s flickr stream

Au revoir Lévi-Strauss

Since yesterday, the anthropology blogosphere has been filled with reports of Lévi-Strauss’ death just shy of his 101st birthday and the many contributions  he made to anthropology and the social sciences in general.  I’ll just point you towards some of these tributes – singularly & collectively they provide a better look at the man and his work than anything I could hope to write.

Beginning with the blog which takes its name from Lévi-Strauss: Rex at Savage Minds explains what readers and students should appreciate most from Lévi-Strauss’ writings, and even includes a tender critique of his work.

Material World and Somatosphere note his passing and provide relevant links.

The AAA has a more clinical obituary, but includes links to news articles.

Max at Zero Anthropology pledges to continue grappling with Lévi-Strauss’ work.  He also posts a series of Lévi-Strauss interviews from 1972.

Erkan’s Field Diary laments the passing of the last anthropologist to occupy “the very center of global intellectual production” and signals the passing of anthropology’s “golden years”.

Lorenz points towards his series of articles about media coverage surrounding  Lévi-Strauss’ 100th birthday.

Culture Matters points to the NYTimes obituary as a testament to his stature in the world – and also singles out one of the comments: “He will be mythed!”

I think that sums it up

Updates

Over at the AAA blog Richard Price reflects on his time studying under Lévi-Strauss.

A follow-up post at Savage Minds directing readers to more obituaries plus interesting bits of Lévi-Strauss’ writings circulating around the web at the moment.

Freedom, art & open source

Last Thursday evening I made my second trek of the day out to the west side of Manhattan and sat in on an awesome talk that was part of the Upgrade! NY series focused on activism and creative practice.  It was a discussion called Free as in what? A debate on open source vs. free culture and featured Gabriella Coleman and Zack Lieberman as anthropologist/activist and artist, respectively.

I had heard of Coleman because she’s writing the forthcoming article on digital anthropology for the Annual Review. I was expecting a discussion which would have Coleman playing the part of academic and heavily covering the theory territory, while Leiberman would provide the ‘on the ground’ perspective of the day to day interaction with open source.  The talk did have these aspects, but I was pleasantly surprised that the dichotomy between the two roles was minimised.  Leiberman did cover his first hand experience, relaying some entertaining and instructive stories about free/open source conferences he had attended and also his experience with licensing his own work.   But Coleman frequently referenced her own on the ground fieldwork experiences – with hackers and other coders – to bring their voices and points of view into the discussion.  Yay!  I’ve left so many talks and conferences where the anthropologist never mentions their fieldwork that produced the data or experience that they’re talking about (I don’t know why this is – was it really that bad of an experience, or does everyone just assume that it doesn’t need to be mentioned?)It’s always seemed weird to me.  In any case, it was a relief to see someone talk about their fieldwork research as if they actually enjoyed it and found it productive, and mentioned it in a way that recognised it as producing crucial data.

Coleman opened the discussion outlining the changing definitions of freedom that have occurred throughout the evolution of the free/open source software movement (FLOSS). And Leiberman closed the pre-Q&A session by sharing his hopes that the part of open source which focuses on creating and sharing will remain a strong ethos in spite of the tedium of licensing.

Key and interesting points:

• tracing the idea of ‘free’ and ‘freedom’ in FLOSS from the idividual to an institution, then being grounded in social practice and finally being seen in a set of politics or political ideals
• “narrow moral politics” often present in FLOSS as opposed to those in activist groups such as Rise Up which utilise free/open source software
• participation in open source projects give rise to/brings about awareness of a moral order
• associations between free code and free speech
• difference between web 2.0 and FLOSS – there should be a distinction between FLOSS web 2.0 technology and proprietary web 2.0 technology.  there is an inherent imbalance of power between owner and participants that runs contra to FLOSS ethos in much of web 2.o tech – no data portability – your labour and data goes into a platform, but you can’t easily get it out – there is also the possibility that you loose access to it altogether

Things to follow up:

• story of Microsoft trying to tag FLOSS as socialistic in en effort to bring about its downfall
• the differences between all the licenses – BSD, GPL, CC – I thought I had a general grasp on them; it turns out I don’t
• the difference between free software (social movement?) and open source (development technology?)

And if you happen to be in NYC on 9 Nov there is a talk on the relationship between art & activism: Tactical Art for Social Shaking.  I’m loving spending time in this city!

Imponderabilia

New international student anthropology journal.

Imponderabilia is about dialogue, exchange and interaction. Read the articles and think about them, but don’t stop there. Respond with comments and reflections. Propose counterarguments and criticisms. And contribute to the next issue.

Take a peek at Imponderabilia

Via.

An MA in Digital Anthropology!

I’m hanging up the posters around my department now.

From Material World:

AT THE DEPT. OF ANTHROPOLOGY, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON

STARTING SEPTEMBER 2009

Please inform undergraduates and other potential students about this new MA programme for which further details can be found at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/digital-anthropology

The new MA is based in the Material and Visual Culture group at UCL. It reflects the fact that more and more of our projects, both students and staff, have been focused on the impact of new digital technologies, and this is something we expect to see increase still further in the future. Recently we were joined by Graeme Were (museums and collections) who has been working on digitalisation projects for museum collections, and Paul Basu (appointed to the Institute of Archaeology) who has an extensive new project on digital curation. Both of them were originally trained in our group and will lecture on the new MA. Also Paolo Favero joined us on a temporary basis and has been working on the digital city in Delhi and the impact of Flickr. We have been enabled by UCL to strengthen this team with the appointment of a permanent member of staff dedicated to this MA (see advert below). All of this suggested a movement in the direction of digital technologies as a research topic. Further as you will see in the details on our site we have a wide range of digital PhD projects from brain training games to mobile phones in Romania to more museum related projects.

We hope that the new MA in combination with this new research will help make UCL a centre for such digital anthropology projects and complement our strengths in more traditional material and visual culture such as photography, consumption and heritage. This does not replace the current MA in Material and Visual Culture which will continue.

Digital technologies have become ubiquitous. From Facebook, Youtube and Flickr to PowerPoint and Second Life. Museum displays migrate to the internet, family communication in the Diaspora is dominated by new media, artists work with digital films and images. Anthropology and ethnographic research is fundamental to understanding the local consequences of these innovations, and to create theories that help us acknowledge, understand and engage with them. Today’s students need to become proficient with digital technologies as research and communication tools. Through combining technical skills with appreciation of social effects, students will be trained for further research and involvement in this emergent world.

Slow blogging…it must be article time

There has been scant blogging around here lately.  I’ve been working on a paper for a conference on environmental, cultural, social and economic sustainability.  I was accepted as a virtual participant, which basically means I write an article and it gets peer reviewed for publication in the journal associated with the conference.  So that’s where my paper is now – the shadowy world of peer review.   I think the organisers have struck gold with virtual participation, especially for a conference on sustainability.  The end result is broader participation with fewer air miles expended and more people reading their journal.  More conferences should have this as an option.

Anyway, here’s the abstract:

In this research I focus on bloggers’ participation in the environmental sustainability movement. The objectives are to explore the ways bloggers connect their local environmentalism with the global sustainability movement.

The investigation revolves around the role of texts and metaphors in blogging, and what these reveal about bloggers’ conceptions of the relationship between nature and technology, as well as the position of the self in the world. This ethnographic examination of the collaborative and socially constructed setting of sustainability blogging uncovers a hopeful picture of the global sustainability movement, while also highlighting its deep relationship to online virtual culture.

Listening online

My last three posts have been a tad wordy.  I’ll keep this one short and just point you toward some interesting anthropology or anth-related podcasts/broadcasts.

John Camaroff discusses The Obama Moment on Open Source Radio.

The Digital Campus podcasts come out about every two weeks and are a good spot to listen in on digital technologies/new media and their impact on academia and scholarship practices.

Also, if you’re into storytelling and oral histories check out the podcasts at StoryCorps.  (thanks CitizenReporter for dragging this one out of the depths of my memory).

Have fun

Blog authors and audiences

I wrote a bit yesterday about conceptualising the blogosphere as one type of virtual world; one that is predominantly a written world.  And as such it has embedded within it some of the issues that I am interested in more generally with this project such as notions of authorship and audience and the changing relationship between these two.

Authorship on a blog is a bizarre thing.  Author, authorise, authority.  All are etymologically related and all suggest a power to tell, whether it is to tell a story or to tell in the sense of directing others.  According to Blum, recent notions of authorship have changed significantly and it is largely thanks to new media.  Earlier notions of the author as a solitary figure crafting his works of genius in an intellectual vacuum have given way to more flexible and multiple versions of the self, and this self is at ease with collective forms of knowledge and knowledge creation.  (Check out the Living and Learning With New Media findings just released for more in how new media and digital technologies are reconfiguring interactions and understandings of online interaction.)

Blogging provides a platform for authors that almost by default makes their work collaborative.  I’m not writing for myself.  I’m writing with the hope that I receive feedback from other bloggers.  I’m also writing with the aim of taking some of the authority out of traditional authorship.  This seems especially important in anthropology.  Blogging should be considered another next step in leveling access to knowledge production and consumption.

Blogging has an important role in changing the relationship between author and audience.  Undoubtedly, blogs are still author-centric; ultimately the author has the choice whether to allow comments and pingbacks, and whether to engage in a dialogue with the commenters.  But I have yet to come across an anthropology blog that has disabled the comments section…or any of the blogs I read for that matter.

In terms of the relationship between author and audience in anthropology, blogging has the potential to do two things.  First, it can alter the understandings of what publishing is in anthropology, and as a result alter who is considered the anthropological audience.  Anthropological publishing is typically in journals with the intended audience being other academics.  Blogging about your research means people outside of academic institutions, or even people outside the anthropological field, as Owen highlights, will be more likely to come in contact with your work.  Secondly, blogging about your research means that your participants can be involved throughout the authorship process.  This takes some level of the ultimate authority that usually rests with the anthropologist and places it in the hands of the participants.  As a result, the path to the final out-of-the-blog-published result is a more transparent one, and also one with a digital footprint that is able to be recalled and contested.

I’m still getting my head around the audience aspect of blogging.  I find the fact that the audience is largely invisible slightly weird, although I can’t pinpoint why.  How does a blogger know who they are writing for, and what the audience is interested in?  For instance,  I can see from the stats on my blog’s dashboard that almost 50 people looked at yesterdays post, but there are no comments.  I’m just curious, who are you?  How did you find my blog?

Works referred to in post:

Blum, Susan 2008 The Internet, the Self, Authorship and Plagiarism.  In Anthropology News 49(3):8-9.

Virtual Worlds

I just came across a Tom Boellstorff interview in Anthropology News which sent me off to re-read some of the blog posts that had previously popped up about his Coming of Age in Second Life book.  Boellstorff did a guest post at Savage Minds where he picks up the virtual world discussion where his book left off.  One of the issues he mentions revolves around virtual worlds not being mass media.  He writes,

Because virtual worlds are places, they are not mass media, though they may contain mass media within them (everything from magazines, books, and embedded websites to streaming audio and video media). Virtual worlds need not mediate two or more places, since they are places in their own right. If anything, it is more accurate to think of a virtual world as a “medium,” in the sense of a material in which one crafts things. This has consequences for the use of mass media theory for understanding virtual worlds: we cannot assume ahead of time how such theories will need to be reworked for virtual-world contexts.

His emphasis on virtual worlds as places in their own right resonates with me.  My focus is on the blogosphere as a virtual world, and specifically the corner of the blogosphere that focuses on issues of environmental sustainability.  I have been exploring the literature on virtual worlds and the literature on blogging, and I’m finding it difficult to bring the two together. I’m having a hard time using them as two pieces in the same puzzle.

Much of the writing on blogs categorises the blogosphere, not as a virtual world, but as a new form of mass media.  However, often the areas of the blogosphere that are referred to as forms of mass media rely heavily on partisan politics or focus on the arts/entertainment and popular culture. I think sustainability blogs take a very different approach to blogging.

In Coming of Age in Second Life, Boellstorff defines virtual worlds as consisting of three basic elements: they must be 1. places, 2. inhabited by people, and 3. enabled by online technologies.

I don’t have any trouble conceptualising the blogosphere as a virtual world, but what makes it more of a place than a form of mass media?  In the interview in Anthropology News, Boellstorff says that he “wanted to study [Second Life] without always having to rush to talk about how it is related to the physical world. Despite constant traffic between the two worlds, there are also boundaries.”

I might be erecting more boundaries between the virtual world and the actual world than bloggers may see themselves.  Part of the reason for this, as Boellstorff points out, is just a shorthand tool–to keep it clear which ‘place’ you are referring to.  Conceptualising ‘place’ in the blogosphere is still presenting me with some problems though.

One aspect of Second Life that definitely makes it more clearly a place and a virtual world than the blogosphere is the visual nature of it.  It resembles the actual world in many instances–it is populated with avatars, who are modeled on humans, people build houses, etc.  It is much easier to imagine SL as a place when it resembles the places around you in the actual world. The blogosphere, in spite of the recent additions of audio and video, is predominantly textual and lacks these representative visual cues.  What keeps bringing me back to framing the blogosphere as a virtual world, or as a place, is something that is embedded in Boellstorff describing a virtual world as a “medium, in the sense of a material in which one crafts things”.  The sustainability blogs that I am looking at are crafting a vision of the world that they want to live in.  But in doing this, they are also blurring the boundaries between the virtual world and the actual world.  What I want to figure out is where the lines exist for them.  What exactly are they crafting?  Is it a blog, or in the process of blogging and the actions that inspire it, are they crafting their environment?

Works referred to in post:

Boellstorff, Tom 2008 Coming of Age in Second Life: An anthropologist explores the virtually human. Princeton University Press

Winnick, Dinah 2008 On ‘Coming of Age in Second Life’: An interview with Tom Boellstorff.  In Anthropology News 49(7): 21.

BOOM fest blunders & the impact of ‘No Impact Man’

I had high hopes for the BOOM festival, especially after pouring over the website. I arrived at the festival intrigued by the idea that 30,000 people can live together sustainably for one week. I left the festival feeling a bit deflated. I had a great time, but the sustainable living didn’t quite pan out.

BOOM has a decade-long history as a music festival and has been moving towards recreating itself as a sustainable festival year by year during this time. It has also moved beyond being just a music festival. The focus this year was on harmony, consciousness raising and education, and it probably goes without saying, some consciousness altering. I think, despite all the efforts of the organisers, its history as a psy-trance festival overshadowed its efforts at reincarnating itself as part of the broader sustainability movement.

The website highlights some of their sustainability initiatives like the composting toilets, recycling vegetable oil to run the generators, and collecting waste water.

The entire week was premised on the idea of creating a sustainable village, a temporary city that could be erected and then removed without leaving a mark on the environment. This is the ideal picture the website paints. What actually happened was that people got too fucked up to use the toilets correctly, left their litter all over the grounds, and let chemical soaps leach into the soil when they bathed at the water taps.

This brings me to the point of this post: the chasm between the ideal and the actual, and the ways online and offline efforts relate to each other to bridge this chasm. My research focuses on blogging about sustainability, and looks at the relationship between text and the world. That’s very vague, I know. But my experience with the BOOM website, and then the festival itself raises questions about the ways text operates differently on websites and blogs.

I’m thinking specifically of a few posts on No Impact Man’s blog. He blogged about a less than ideal encounter he recently had with a New York Senator. No Impact Man was biking and the Senator was driving. You can imagine where this story is heading: car nearly squashes biker, biker informs car of his life flashing before his eyes, driver gives biker the finger and a few curt words as a parting gift.

No Impact Man writes an open letter to the Senator and posts it on his blog, asking the readers to call the Senator’s office to request a meeting with No Impact Man to discuss safer streets for cyclists. The campaign is a success. It only takes the Senator one day to agree to a meeting, and his office has to call No Impact Man to request that the phone calls are curtailed.

Three days later, No Impact Man has discovered that many of the people who rang the Senator’s office were nasty to the secretary. His post is inquisitive and remarks on the effects peoples’ words have on the world.

Today, No Impact Man has posted a question: why did the story about the Senator resonate so strongly with people that it made them take action. According to him, the post went viral: “Twenty thousand visitors read the post that day, many sites reposted it, and over 100 blogs linked to it. Most importantly, 100s of people from across the country and even the world phoned Senator Klein’s office to support my request for a meeting.”

No Impact Man’s text, his initial blog post, told a simple story that got enveloped by a larger tale, one that (at current count) spans across four blog posts and hundreds of comments by readers. His question in the most recent post, Why?, echoes my questions about blogging. What is it about the texts that appear on blogs that resonates with people and keeps them reading, and what do they take with them into their daily lives?

The fundamentals of blogging, which I am just beginning to appreciate, are implicated in this.  It is the participatory level, and the ability to be present in the same virtual space at different times which distinguish blogging from other forms of text creation. But it is also the combination of a specific technology, the internet, with this specific form of text creation that makes it so compelling and effective. And yet, this method of creating text and presenting it to the doesn’t have the same effect from a website. BOOM’s focus on sustainability didn’t translate into sustainable festival-goers. No Impact Man’s blog post did translate into a meeting with the NY Senator.

While websites and blogs exist in a virtual space, they refer to events that take place in the actual world. For websites like BOOM the gap between this virtual space and the actual world (I should say that I’m using these terms as a shorthand, not that I believe these are two entirely separate spheres of existence) seems to mirror the gap between the ideal and the actual. The opposite seems true for blogs like No Impact Man. It manages to bring notions of the ideal (safe NYC streets for cyclists) and the actual (near death experiences) together in a space that interpenetrates the virtual and actual worlds.

The gap between the ideal and the actual is a disjuncture that everyone experiences, and anthropology has a long history of discussing it, especially in terms of conducting fieldwork. I guess this post is just the first step in getting my head around what this disjuncture means in terms of my fieldwork.