Remembering & Memories: there's an app for that...

As we've posted about before, the adoption of new media and technology in our lives has an impact on our social lives in many interesting ways. In many ways, new technological platforms -- such as digital communications and social media -- are already embedded with certain cultural assumptions. At the same time, there are always unexpected outcomes and unforeseen ways in which the incorporation of new media and technology shape our relationships with others, our environments, and ourselves.

Facebook Memories

This relationship between cultural actors -- including the new digital "memory" systems in our lives -- is what Molly Sauter (PhD student in Communications Studies) addresses in Instant Recall (27 June 2017, Real Life). In this short analytical piece, Sauter addresses three types of memory system and how they have shaped our memories, and the act of remembering: predictive text, "data doppelgangers constructed for ad targeting," and more particularly, reminiscence databases (e.g. Facebook Memories).

Sauter explores how digital evocations of memory differ from physical ones, such as "yearbooks, photographs, cars, houses, trees, gravestones."

These physical evocations age, and their value and veracity as objects of testimony ages with them and us. They date, they fade, they display their distance from the events they are connected to and their distance from us. Digital memory objects, on the other hand, although they might abruptly obsolesce, do not age in the same way. They remain flatly, shinily omni-accessible, represented to us cleanly both in the everlasting ret-conned context of their creation and consumption. 

Contrast this algorithmic "remembering" with how another contributor to Real Life describes the nostalgic recreation of community online through her mother's experience using Facebook in "Post, Memory" (7 July 2016, Real Life). Kelli Korducki's mother had grown up in a small Salvadoran village, once decimated by civil war, and now rebuilt online as a closed Facebook group called “Memorias de ______,” boasting "a membership in the low hundreds, which is impressive given the village’s reasonably small size." 

In this digital community space, "long-lost neighbors and relatives resumed contact after decades of quiet separation, strewn from Virginia to Montreal to Los Angeles and points above, below, and in between." On Facebook, members and diaspora descendants of this scattered community came together, sharing and creating artifacts of the long-gone community, juxtaposed with images and details of the living village today.

What do these different insights onto the intersections of memory or the act of remembering with social media tell us about everyday life? How might these examples be useful in discussing social relationships, memory, cultural artifacts, or even imagined communities?


Quick links:

• Instant Recall (27 June 2017, Real Life)
• Post, Memory (7 July 2016, Real Life)
• You might also want to check out some of the other pieces in Real Life magazine, which all address aspects of living with technology -- including a number of articles that incorporate an anthropological perspective.
• Media, language, and social relationships (20 April 2017, anthro everwhere!)
• Anthropologizing Software and Design (12 January 2017, anthro everwhere!)

Water Politics Syllabus & Resources

We have been seeing some very interesting discussions and resources emerging around water politics recently.

Image from "The Rights of the Whanganui River" (Peeps)

In addition to the many discussions happening in relation to #NODAPL and the importance of water to indigenous communities and ways of life in North America, the struggles for access to clean and safe drinking water in places like Flint, Michigan and across reserves in Canada, in March, you may have read the news that a Māori community has been successful in their battle to have New Zealand grant the Whanganui River the legal rights of a person. (The anthropological magazine Peeps published a beautiful photo essay on "The Rights of the Whanganui River" in their second issue earlier this year -- unfortunately, not available online.)

In response to these shifts and public spotlights, we offer readers a couple of interesting resources for thinking and teaching about water politics.

First, we'd like to draw attention to the thematic issue of the Canadian journal of anthropology, Anthropologica, published this past fall (Volume 58, Issue 2): An Amphibious Anthropology: The Production of Place at the Confluence of Land and Water, guest edited by Karine Gagné and Mattias Borg Rasmussen. Contributors to this issue draw on their ethnographic research to share insights into water politics and issues in the Himalayas, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Peru, and North America.

Each of these articles from Anthropologica would be a valuable addition and anthropological contribution to this already well-rounded (anthropology, geography, environmental studies) syllabus: "Water Rights and Social Protest: Politics, Governance, and the Meanings of Access" designed by Jake Blanc and Stepha Velednitsky (graduate students at the Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE), Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison). 

Quick links and further reading:

• A New Zealand River Now Has The Legal Rights Of A Human (16 March 2017, NPR)
• Peeps magazine
• Karine Gagné and Mattias Borg Rasmussen (eds.). 2016. Anthropologica. Thematic Section: An Amphibious Anthropology: The Production of Place at the Confluence of Land and Water. 58(2). 
• The "Water Rights and Social Protest: Politics, Governance, and the Meanings of Access" syllabus
• This Cultures of Energy podcast episode featuring anthropologist Jessica Barnes (winner of a Wenner-Gren engaged anthropology grant) on water politics in Egypt
• anthro everywhere!'s page on Reading Lists & Syllabi Resources

More maps!

Maps are a useful tool for helping us make sense of our world. For anthropologists, they are also useful tools for critically thinking about the kinds global-local social phenomena and relationships that we study. In addition to our previous posts on mapping and map resources for the classroom, here are "40 more maps that explain the world" (2014, Washington Post).

Many of these 40 maps would be useful tools for sparking student discussion. For instance, pairing this map (above) of English, Dutch, and Spanish Colonial Trade Routes... 

with this map of the Nutella global value chain highlights the historical political and economic connections required to put that jar of chocolate-hazelnut spread on your local grocer's shelf. It also speaks to the cultivation of culturally specific tastes (a la Mintz' Sweetness and Power) over time, and contemporary processes of globalization that now compress time and space.

Other interesting maps divide the globe up into alternative communities based on shared languages, or trace non-European political dynasties, or highlight the prevalence of certain technologies. 

Related content from anthro everywhere!:

• Decolonial Atlas (29 August 2016)
• Africa is not a country! (6 April 2016)
• Mapping the world? (8 December 2016)

Naming and place: What Do You Call the Corner Store?

Depanneur in Quebec

This is a fun little piece from Atlas Obscura that teachers might want to bring into a discussion of language: What Do You Call the Corner Store?

Every city has something like this, the anchor tenant in many city-dweller’s mental maps of their neighborhood. But in many places, you’d be laughed out of the building for calling it a “convenience store”. It’s a bodega. It’s a packie. It’s a party store. What you call the store on the corner says a lot about where you live. 

Bodega in New York City

Instructors might ask students to unpack these examples and to think about how this social institution, and the name that we have for it connects to local contexts. How do histories (such as of migration), geography, and politics come together to shape urban spaces?

How does language shape our worldview?

Dinosaur Comics (Ryan North, 2005)

At least since the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, anthropologists and linguists have considered how language shapes how we understand and experience the people, places, things, events, etc. that we encounter in our daily lives. How the language you speak changes your view of the world (The Conversation, 2016) draws on a psychological research study to explain how German, English, and bilingual German & English speakers describe the same actions differently. When presented with images of people walking, speakers responded differently according to the language of their reply. Significantly, the differences in responses were not due to a simple issue of translation, but due to differences in how the languages shaped experiences:

The worldview assumed by German speakers is a holistic one – they tend to look at the event as a whole – whereas English speakers tend to zoom in on the event and focus only on the action.

Fernweh (German): feeling homesick
for a place you have never been to
Untranslatable words illustrated by Anjana Iyer

This article might be a useful starting point for thinking about the power of language. Instructors might also be interested in leading students in a discussion about how our worldviews might change if we had new or more words in our vocabulary or if we were missing key words to describe certain things, ideas, or emotions.

Quick links and further reading:

• How the language you speak changes your view of the world (The Conversation, 2016)
• Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (Society for Linguistic Anthropology)
• 38 Wonderful Foreign Words We Could Use in English (Mental Floss, 2015)
• 30 Untranslatable Words From Other Languages Illustrated By Anjana Iyer (Bored Panda, 2014)
• Dinosaur Comics on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and Gendered Nouns
• More psychological than anthropological, but interesting nonetheless: How Morality Changes in a Foreign Language (Scientific American, 2016)
• Other posts from anthro everywhere! on language

One person's trash...

One person's trash is another's treasure... or data, if you are an archaeologist or anthropologist working in a landfill.

Places where trash builds up can provide archaeologists important clues into past lives. For instance, in Toronto, Canada, when the Major League Baseball stadium was first built, archaeologists surveying the site found many interesting artifacts from what was then the lake shore in the early city. Most items had either been lost in the lake, or were part of the landfill extending the reaches of the city into the lake.

Archaeological teams have also dug into our more recent past. For instance William Rathje's Garbage Project, which "explores modern waste disposal, consumption, and recycling patterns" across North America. Or, the recent dig for Atari in a New Mexico landfill, which became a much publicized spectacle that "provided the necessary means to directly access the contemporary past for purposes of archaeological and historical research."

But, sociocultural anthropologists -- like Joshua Reno -- are also beginning to turn their attention to landfills and the people that work in this "secret world of activity that [is] utterly necessary to all of us, but completely hidden from most of us." In this interview, Reno digs into our social relationship with garbage.

What does trash, as material culture, tell us about our social worlds?

Quick links:

• "8 things they found when they dug under the Rogers Centre" (2015, Toronto Star)
• "Seeking the Truth in Refuse" (1992, New York Times)
• "Museums: The Truth is in Our Trash" (2002, Archaeology)
• "The Garbage Project & "The Archaeology of Us"" (by William Rathje, 1996, Symmetrical Archaeology)
• "Why We Dug Atari" (2014, The Atlantic)
• "The Anthropologist in the Landfill" (2016, the Atlantic)

Ghettos

Ghettos. We commonly associate the term today with places like "effective social or ethnic ghettos, from the favelas of Brazil to the mostly black urban neighbourhoods of the United States and the predominantly north African banlieues of Paris."

But this term, as we learn in "Inventing the Ghetto" (2016, 1843 Magazine - The Economist), has its own specific history that dates back 500 years to the establishment of the Jewish ghetto in Venice on March 29th 1516.

I like this piece for the ways in which it connects the history of this ghetto in Venice, with the treatment of its Jewish inhabitants, and the growth of the city, but also with contemporary issues of social inequality and issues of space and place. Instructors might like this piece as background for a lecture on social inequality, space and place, or gentrification. I can also see it being an interesting think piece for upper year students to think about how social contemporary issues have connections to broader historical, political, and economic processes and precedents.