- Okay, hello everybody, and welcome
to the Wenner-Gren's
75th Anniversary Panel
stroke roundtable on
Anthropology and the Public.
Before I launch into the topic
of Anthropology and the Public
and getting our word out
which is so important
in today's political circumstances,
I wanna tell you just a little bit
about Wenner-Gren's 75th Anniversary.
We just done the official history
of the Wenner-Gren Foundation
and published it in a open access issue
of Current Anthropology.
There's copies of these
available in the exhibition hall
both in the Wenner-Gren table
and the University of Chicago Press table.
We have a weird and wonderful history.
And what's amazing about
Wenner-Gren is that our endowment
of 2 million US dollars in
1941 has never been added to
and it's now worth close to $170 million
and we are able to give five to $6 million
a year to the field.
And one of our new
initiatives at Wenner-Gren
is our website SAPIENS.org
to help popularize the field
and get the word out.
And again in today's
world, it is so important
that the results of
anthropological knowledge
are presented to the
general public in a way
that they see the importance
to their daily lives
in the same way we see the importance
to our own academic lives.
Now, what our purpose
is in this roundtable
is to touch on some of
the many and varied ways
that anthropology is
trying to reach the public.
So what we have is a line-up
starting with Emily Martin
from Anthropology Now.
And this was one of the
very early initiatives
to try to get anthropology
to a general audience.
We have Alisse Waterston from the AAA,
who's going to give us
a very short description
of what they're trying to do
in terms of public outreach.
We have Alex Golub from Savage Minds.
We have Tanya Luhrmann,
who's one of the most popular
current op-edist from our
field, and has gone a long way
of getting the word out
in a very palatable way.
We have Erin Taylor from
PopAnth, which was one
of the first popular web
portals for anthropology
and she'll be talking about
the challenges and all
of trying to get something like this going
when it's basically do-it-yourself.
We also have Chip Colwell,
who is our editor-in-chief
from SAPIENS who's going to
talk about our initiative,
and again our successes and challenge.
We have Anya-Milana
Sulaver in the back there,
who's going to talk about
popularizing our field
from the outside.
And at the very end, and certainly
not because it's unimportant,
we have Natalia Reagan
from the BOAS Network
who's initiative is video-based.
Now what I've told
everybody is they'll have
around seven minutes to
introduce their initiative,
talk about their successes,
talk about their challenges.
And what I would like is each of them
to give a word of advice to any of you
whose interested in launching into
a popular anthropology initiative.
Now what we wanna do is make
as much time as possible
available for discussion at the end.
So if you have particular questions
that are related to points
that have been introduced
or anything new that you find relevant,
we really do wanna hear from you.
Because this is supposed
to be a discussion,
this is supposed to be brainstorming
to help us all as a
discipline get our word out
to places that it really matters
in our rapidly changing political world.
So what I wanna do is
start with Emily Martin,
who's gonna give us her
experiences with Anthropology Now.
And we also need to apologize.
This isn't exactly a roundtable setup,
but we sort of take what we get.
And just advance there.
- Good morning, thank you for coming,
and thanks to Leslie Aiello
and the Wenner-Gren Foundation
for organizing this panel.
I feel, myself, it's imperative to state
that we are holding this event
in the wake of an election
that many American voters
and others around the world
regard as our catastrophe.
Protections, partial as they
were, for people of color,
women, children, the elderly, LGBT people
and workers rural and urban
are going to be rolled back.
It's important to say
that the work you're about
to hear about in this session has become
even more important as
Leslie just said today
than it was before November 8th, 2016.
So now to a few words
about Anthropology Now,
from the beginning the
goal of Anthropology Now
is to produce print and electronic form,
clear, compelling writing about
how anthropological research
informs current social
and political issues.
We didn't really envision news exactly,
but rather enlightenment of the news
through anthropological
insights and analyses.
We are totally committed to do
this without simplification,
or dumbing anything down.
We seek writers who are doing
anthropological research
that illuminates the
pressing issues of the day
all around the world, from A to Z,
from Indian Quinoa beer
and the crisper hack
to water the XL pipeline and Zika.
A word about the history
of how anthropology
came into being.
It began in 2001 with support from NYU
and the Paradigm Publishers
owned by Dean Birkenkamp.
Then with the help of a
Wenner-Gren initiatives grant,
we posted our first website
in 2001 using Dreamweaver.
I don't know if anybody
even remembers Dreamweaver.
There was, of course,
no Facebook, no Twitter
and no Web 2.0.
Then as now, we wanted
everything under one roof:
articles, different genres
such as visual essays,
beautiful covers, print
and electronic versions,
we wanted peer reviews so
that junior anthropologists
would be able to contribute and get credit
toward promotion and tenure.
And this slide,
hello, slide.
There it is.
This slide are the first four,
show the first four covers
starting in 2000 and
something, I forgot (laughs).
As time went by and technology
changed, we added genres,
podcasts, and undergraduate
Zine and extended
our coverage of topics to
art, museums and science.
This is the current issue cover.
It's a picture of a
memorial on a Paris street
after the Charlie Hebdo event.
We wanted to relate to
the AAA, but remained
editorial independent
so that we are grateful
to have had a years long arrangement
with the largest AAA section,
GAD the General Anthropology Division,
whereby the electronic
version of Anthropology Now
comes with a GAD membership.
We're very grateful for this.
What have we accomplished?
We've moved in a stable and orderly way
through our superb general editors.
First Kate McCaffrey, then Maria Vesperi,
and we are now in transition
to our third general editor
Rylan Higgins, who is luckily
a Canadian anthropologist
from Halifax, Nova Scotia.
So how does it work?
Primarily, the general
editor helps anthropologists
rewrite their submissions.
This is a huge time commitment
compensated to the editor
only by modest teaching relief.
Department editors generate
content on their topics,
photo essays, many of them
from Magnum Photographers,
book reviews, timely essays on education,
the arts or political movements.
The board of editors, 16
academic anthropologists
in different geographical
areas and working
on different topics in areas of the world
help generate contributions.
And our webmaster, social media editor,
Zine editors all contribute.
All of this is pro bono.
Unexpectedly but happily,
Anthropology Now was bought
by Routledge publishers
in 2015 and is now handled
by their journalist
division, Taylor and Francis.
Taylor and Francis bundles
journals and subscriptions
to libraries around the world,
so it's part of this practice
Anthropology Now suddenly became available
in over 2,200 libraries internationally.
And we, of course, joined social
media as soon as it existed
and our Facebook group
now has 20,000 members.
Here's a picture of the
webpage showing the Zine
and some of the other departments.
What are our challenges,
as Leslie asked us.
I will name three.
First, how do we compensate participants
for the immense amount of time
and labor involved in this enterprise?
We're like the housekeepers
of anthropology.
We bring in the newspaper,
we haul out the trash,
but we do not have funds
to pay for all this labor,
we have to rely on intangible rewards.
Second, the main time sink
is revising academic writing,
kind of graduate programs
and other publications,
help train anthropologists
to write in ways
the general public can understand.
And three creating social value.
Recall the various congressional efforts
to label academic research as unworthy
of funding by NSF or NIH
efforts that will surely
get more intense after November 8th.
As a discipline to
survive, we need to have
our social value recognized.
As they say, many hands make light work.
So I'm happy to have so many other efforts
join our commitment to
extending understanding
of anthropological approaches
beyond the academy.
All of you are welcome to join us.
Submit article proposals,
join the Facebook group,
volunteer to become a department editor
all in the service of
enabling the general public
to comprehend what
anthropology has to offer
in the effort to overcome
income inequality,
de-industrialization, and hateful acts
based on invidious
distinctions involving race,
religion, gender, or class.
These efforts had become
even more important today
than they were before November 8th, 2016.
Thank you.
(audience applause)
- [Leslie] Okay, and what we'll do
is we'll just move on.
So if you have questions or points,
save them for the discussion at the end.
Okay, our next is Alisse Waterston.
- (clears throat) Thank you so much.
And thank you and, Emily, I won't repeat
what you said at the start of your remarks
that we are in a very difficult
time to say the least.
So we know, we know that anthropology
has a lot to say about
the human condition,
about social change,
about cultural meaning,
about causes and consequences
of the most critical
issues facing the world,
how we got here from there,
and what the world needs to know about
if we want a better future for humankind.
We also know that our discipline struggles
with communicating this knowledge
to audiences beyond our own narrow circle.
Yet, I believe we have come
a long way on this effort.
It's not a new problem.
We've been struggling
with it for a long time.
I do not think it is
true that anthropology
or anthropologists never
reach wider audiences.
I think we do, and I think it's important
to acknowledge that.
Of course, we may not do so sufficiently,
but I think it is important
to acknowledge advances
that have been made and
identify those places
where we can do more or do better,
which is why I think this
roundtable is so important,
and thank you, Leslie,
for putting it together.
It enables us to hear about what works,
or what seems to work,
and what doesn't work,
or doesn't seem to work,
and why we think that is so.
So I look very much
forward to our discussion.
This conversation also
enables us to see the ways
in which we each, as
individual anthropologists
and as anthropological organizations,
and I'm representing AAA today,
collectively contribute
to and can contribute
to efforts to bring
anthropological knowledge
into the public conversation
on the critical issues
more important today than even last week
when it was important.
We need to conceptualize
our combined efforts,
in my view, as a collective
creative movement
towards achieving a common goal.
I also think this conversation
can help us identify
what we might need to focus
on looking to the future.
That said, I'd like to share
a little bit about AAA's
general approach to communications
and then offer a few
examples of current projects
that are efforts to
reach larger audiences.
These represent part of the
contribution to the common goal.
And let me see if I can
get this thing to work.
Does that work?
Ah-ha!
(foreign language)
In this slide, you can
see that at the center
of AAA's communication
approach is an effort
to increase awareness
among various audiences
of the value of anthropology
and its contributions to society.
This chart shows who AAA is talking about
when it talks about audiences.
Because I have only a
few minutes to speak,
I will simply list these audiences.
They include you, AAA members;
students, both undergraduate
and graduate students;
college and university departments;
it includes those anthropologists
who are not part of the association
who do self-identify as an anthropologist;
and it includes those
who no longer identify
as an anthropologist because
of where they are employed, for example;
it includes non-academic employers;
it includes policymakers
and it includes the media;
it also includes
educators, school children,
middle schoolers and high schoolers;
and among the larger public
readers of serious non-fiction,
Like basically everybody.
So in the few minutes I have
left, I wanna share with you
a brief description of three AAA projects
that I believe each contribute to the goal
of bringing anthropology
into the public conversation
on critical issues and policy debates.
The first is Open Anthropology,
the association's first
digital-only public journal
that opens up anthropology
by focusing on a timely topic
offering a selection of archived articles,
introducing nearly the full archive
of AAA journals, past and current,
to readers who may not
even know these exist
and making this content available free
on the public internet
for a period of time.
And by means of the editor's
framing introduction
to each issue opening up the discipline
to the non-specialist reader.
In 2016, Open Anthropology's
editors Jason Antrosio
and Sallie Han had published three issues.
One on cultural heritage, one on food,
and one on elections, all timely topics.
Of course, we're still
trying to figure out
who's reading these issues.
We know numbers, how
many, but we don't know
who the folks really are.
The second is AAA's public
education initiatives,
which are specific projects that provide
various public audiences,
accessible information
rooted in deep scholarship
that is disseminated
by various means by multimedia,
online sources and resources,
through traveling museum exhibits,
local bookstore reading, story gathering,
storytelling and storysharing
events and with popular books,
also bibliographies
and scholarly articles.
The RACE Project is AAAs
first and very successful
public education initiative.
And by the way, the RACE
exhibit is here in Minneapolis
right now at the science museum.
I think it's about 20
minutes away from here.
The association is now
trying to get off the ground
a new initiative called World on the Move:
100,000 Years of Human Migration.
It is a great and, of
course, timely project.
It is for this moment, right now
we're looking to secure some solid funding
to give legs to World on the Move.
We've got the design, it's all in place,
we just need support to
give it the legs, as I said.
So I'm spending, and Ed
Liebow, and I, and others
are spending a lot of time
knocking on doors begging.
So if anybody can help us
out, please let me know.
Finally, I want to let you
know about the newly formed
President's Working Group on
Tenure and Promotion Guidelines
for Writing and Publishing Forms.
The goal of which is to help
tenure and promotion committees
assess new forms of
writing and publishing,
the kinds we are discussing today.
At the center of this
project is the recognition
that anthropologists are
writing for broader audiences
and are taking advantage
of the opportunities
the new communications tools allow.
Yet, most departments and most tenure
and promotion committees
don't necessarily know
what should or could
count and how to recognize
these new forms of communicating.
So I have called upon Carole McGranahan,
Elizabeth Chilton, Kate
Clancy, and Bianca Williams
to work with me to
evaluate existing tenure
and promotion assessment criteria
at colleges and universities
and all over the country
and to develop a set of usable guidelines
for tenure and promotion committees,
guidelines we expect to
have ready in the next year.
This is the kind of project that the AAA
has the capacity to do and to provide you,
as well as your departments,
as well as your universities.
These are sampling of AAA projects
that I consider parts of a larger endeavor
that is Anthropology and the Public,
where each of us, as individuals again,
and as organizations make complementary
not competitive contributions.
Thank you very much.
(audience applause)
- [Leslie] Okay, and
next we have Alex Golub,
who's known to many of
you through Savage Minds
and he's gonna talk to us about blogging.
- Hello everyone.
It's good to see everybody here today.
Let me put on my timer here.
Okay, yeah, so my name is Alex Golub,
I'm a professor of anthropology
at the University of Hawaii at Manoa,
and I run a blog Savage Minds
along with several other people.
We've been running this
blog for about 10 years.
I think I've been blogging
for a couple of years
earlier than that.
So we're a collective, we don't have any
sort of formal structure.
When somebody wants to
post on the blog, they do.
We have guest bloggers
who come on for stints
of a couple post at a time,
we also have occasional posts
where if somebody wants to write something
we can publish it under our
name and then just credit them
and then go ahead and
give them that content.
We also have an occasional paper series,
which gives us a chance to take blog post
or other longer pieces that we think
it might still be useful to have in a kind
of more chunky textual PDF-ed form
and put them online as well.
So we've experimented about that.
I think today when we
talk about the challenges
and the successes that we face,
there's several things
that we should talk about.
The blog when we began it was started
because no one had done a
group anthropology blog,
but people had done group history
and group political science blogs.
That was the plan.
It was not a very complicated situation.
And through virtue of just being around
for quite a long time,
we've managed to last.
And when social media was
invented it really brought
a lot of additional eyeballs to the site.
So we have been unexpectedly popular.
And if you don't want to
read us, you don't have to.
It'd be great to have less pressure.
I think people feel SM has a kind of,
"I'm the only person on this
platform who'll tell you that."
(laughter)
And people feel like SM
has a kind of presence,
and we feel like we have a
bit of a responsibility now
to the community.
So I wanna talk about challenges
and what the challenges are
that we think that we are
gonna face in the future.
Okay, my timer is turning off there.
What we do in Savage Minds
we describe not as public anthropology,
we call it doing anthropology in public.
So we're not really trying to
communicate research results
in a way that we think
other people want to hear,
because we're not sure that we know
what other people want to hear.
And I think if there's one
thing that we've realized
since 11/9 is that maybe
those of us in this room
don't understand what
people are ready for,
what they wanna hear
and what the best form
to communicate with them is.
So what we want to do is try to find a way
to let people see the seams,
let people see the work,
let people see the way that the facts
that we generate scientifically
and through and our scholarly work
are stable, important and true,
but also very provisional
made by real people,
they don't come from on-high
with some sort of deity
and a lab coat who has objective science.
I think the days when
people are ready to hear
that kind of message have sort of passed.
So in the past, we've
been very big proponents
of open access and making
sure that scholarly content
and really all content is
available for everyone to read.
And I think one of the
things that I'm interested
in talking about now is
a switch from the focus
on open access products or
finished opened access content
to a shift to open access
process, letting people see
how it is that we get
the results that we get,
letting people understand why
they should have confidence
in what we wanna say.
I think that there's a
danger in today's America
that we're gonna be in a situation
where the only people who thinks
that we are experts about race is us.
So we need to demonstrate
our value, not assert it.
And we need to show the people
who are consuming our OA content
that the processes that
we're going through
are their processes, that the
kind of thinking that they do,
that science is a kind of
practice that is accessible
and intuitive to everyone once
you explain how you do it.
So one of the things that I think blogging
is still really important
for is trying to get people
to think at greater length
and in greater depth
about the facts that they
see go by all the time.
And I think this is gonna
be a particularly important,
if my PowerPoint disappears.
All right, where is this,
what's happening to me?
Did I--
- [Leslie] Yeah, you just go back.
- [Alex] I don't even know how to go back.
(laughter)
Yeah.
- [Leslie] We need to put it back on.
- [Alex] All right, maybe
I don't need the slides.
I can just finish talking.
- [Leslie] But you only have one.
- [Alex] I should have three.
- [Leslie] You only sent one, I think.
- [Alex] Okay.
- [Leslie] But--
- [Alex] Okay, well, one of the main ways
that we need to do this is
to demonstrate to people
that when we have an
engagement we talk about race,
which is a conversation we're gonna have
to have again from scratch.
When we talk about things like,
"Did the Holocaust happen,"
when we talk about things like,
"What is the origins of
the electoral college,
"how are laws made, what are
the values that we hold,"
all of these things are
conversations that we're gonna have
to have who are interlocutors are treated
at the same level as us that we believe
that they are people who
are capable of engaging
in the same kind of discourse,
in the same level of discourse as us.
They might not spend
as much time and depth
thinking about what happened
in Cameroon in 1997, 1998,
we are content experts in that way.
But I think that it's just
important to recognize
that the kinds of discussions,
the kinds of controversies
that we have inside the
academy we need to have them
outside of the academy as well.
And blogging is still a
valuable place to do that,
because you can get a message to people
that is longer than a sentence, yeah.
So all of the discussions,
all of the citations,
all of the research we
need to put that online,
because in some ways the
democratic promise of America
has been realized,
everybody really does vote,
everybody does really
participate in the public square,
and it's up to us to try
to create a public square
and a public that's in alignment
I think with American values today.
And doing that is gonna
have to show to people
that (phone ringing)--
Oh my goodness, first my PowerPoint goes.
It's gonna have to show
people that the way
that we've learned to handle knowledge,
reason, claims, evidence
that's the way that everybody
should be handling knowledge today,
not just because we're in charge
and not just because we're important,
because it's actually the best
and the most accurate way to do it.
So I think that's what we need to see
on the internet more often.
I hope it takes place in a lot
of places, including blogs.
Thank you very much.
(audience applause)
- [Leslie] Okay, our next
speaker is Tanya Luhrmann,
who is one of the most successful
anthropological op-ed writers
and she'll give us her perspective.
- Thank you, Leslie.
It's good to see you here.
So I've written over 30 op-ed
pieces for the New York Times,
over 30 reviews and short pieces
for places like the LA Times, the TLS,
like the New York Times book review.
I've written longer essays
in American Scholar,
in Raritan, in Wilson
Quarterly, in Harper's,
I'll be writing for
Harper's again this winter.
I don't think of myself as
primarily a public intellectual.
I still publish in the scientific
and scholarly journals.
The last two year, in the last two years,
I've published in the
British Journal of Psychiatry
and in Schizophrenia Bulletin
to rural psychiatry science journals.
I've published in topics
in cognitive science,
in current anthropology,
in Cambridge anthropology.
My last book, or the
book that just came out,
came out with the University
of California Press,
and the next book will
come out with Princeton.
And then I'll return to
writing books that come out
with Knauft or with some
crossover trade publication.
So why do I do that?
I do it because I think
of myself as a writer,
I identify as a writer,
I've got a literary streak
and a scientific streak and
that's just the way I'm made up.
I used to worry about
whether that made sense
in the profession that I'd
chosen, and now I've decided
it's just the way I am, that's what I do.
But why bother to write for
the public domain at all?
If you're a writer, you want to be read
and you want to figure
out how to write well.
And my message today is that
writing in the public domain
is the single best way of
teaching yourself how to write,
because nobody has to read
anything that you have to say.
If you're writing an academic
book, typically you're writing
something that somebody
hopes will be available
to sophomores and will be
assigned in their classes
and they will have to get
through your manuscript.
If you're writing for The Times,
if you're writing for Harper's nobody has
to get past the first two sentences.
And so it is a fabulous
discipline to make you
craft your sentences so they do for you
what you want them to do in the world.
What are the challenges of doing this?
Well, it's super hard.
It is a lot of work to write clearly.
I think it's substantially
harder to write pieces
that can be read by your
mother, and your aunt,
and your uncle than it is to write in ways
that our anthropology
journals allow us to write.
You have to know exactly
what you're arguing.
You can't hide behind
theory or complex language.
My colleague Jim Ferguson talks about
the magic language of anthropology
and there's something really true in that
and there's something
kinda wonderful in it,
but you can't use it if you're
writing for broader public
and that means you can't
hide behind the magic.
You are rejected more
often by the public domain
than you are by an anthropology journal.
By the time you're four
times in to your revision,
revise and resubmit for
American Anthropologist,
you're pretty confident that
you can get published there.
That doesn't happen
when you send something
to The Atlantic or the New York Times.
Your editor at these public settings
is substantially meaner than your editor
at the Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute.
That's his or her job,
it's his or her job to say,
"This is not a useful sentence, rewrite."
It is substantially more time sensitive.
I mean I remember the first time
that somebody from The Atlantic said,
"Oh, I'd be entrusted in this from you."
And I behave the way an academic behaved,
I kinda thought about,
I refretted about it
and six months later I turned it in.
That was way too late for him.
When an editor at Harper's
or the New York Times says,
"Revise and resubmit,"
he means this afternoon,
by the end of the day, cancel
the rest of your appointments
and get it done.
It's just a feature of
writing in this kind of world.
And that's hard, that's what it's like.
It's extra.
I don't think it can substitute
for academic writing.
I think that crossover books do work.
So my last two books of
the Knauft did work for me
as a kind of a means of
academic advancement,
committees understood what I
was doing with these books.
And they were sort of larded
with a footnote apparatus
that I would use for a scholarly text,
the structure of the sentences
was just a little different.
But I actually think it's
right, although I recognize
that there's an argument,
I actually think it's right
that my op-ed pieces don't count
for promotion and
advancement in the same way
as an article in American Anthropologist.
I think that they do a different
kind of job in the world
and they are super important
job, they advance my career,
but I don't think they should
speak to tenure committees
in the same way as my scholarly writing.
So they're extra, that's hard.
Finally, people yell at you.
The first time I wrote a
piece in the New York Times,
I had over 600 comments
and the vast majority
of the comments were not complimentary.
(laughter)
I mean people just say stuff,
that's why they're writing
and that's what it's like to participate.
I write something in the New York Times
that I thought was innocuous.
And the chair of the psychiatry department
at Columbia University
went on a public rampage
in like Medscape or something.
That also makes it hard.
At the same time, I think this teaches you
an enormous amount about how to write.
I'm confident that this ease and speed
with which I write in any
domain is made more likely
arises from my training in
writing in the public domain.
I think that writing in the public domain
makes me able to sing
just a little bit more
in all the things that I write.
And for a writer to be read,
and every so often somebody
will say that they've
cried because they've read
something you've written, or
you've changed their mind,
or they've thought about
something profoundly differently
it gives you a high that
I don't think you can get,
or I don't think I can
get, in any other way.
So I fully recommend it.
(audience applause)
- So I think the take home message there
is to get out and do it.
(laughter)
Okay, next stop is Erin Taylor,
who's gonna tell us about PopAnth
and (phone ringing)--
And oops.
Sorry about that.
I'm trying to keep even my cellphone time.
So, Erin, fire away.
- Thank you very much.
Hello everybody, thanks for coming.
I'm very happy to be here.
First, I would like to start by saying
I completely agree with Tanya
that writing for the
public is so much harder
than writing for an academic audience.
You really have to know
what you want to say
and you really want to
try and get some sense
of what you want to say across
in the very first sentence of your article
which can make it very challenging.
And I'd also like to
reiterate what Alisse said,
which is that anthropologists do indeed
reach wider audiences
and this is not just an occasional thing,
we reach people all the time.
But when we started PopAnth back in 2012,
I didn't realize that.
And in fact, the reason why PopAnth exists
is because I was part of a conversation
on the Open Anthropology Cooperative
about why we're not doing
much Popular Anthropology.
And some of you might know Greg
Downey of Neuroanthropology,
he made the comment that, "The point is
"we need to just start
doing popular anthropology
"and see what works."
And so my husband Gawain,
who's in the audience,
responded to that immediately.
Within five minutes he said,
"Right, I'm going to make
some structures here."
So he bought the PopAnth domain,
he made our Twitter account
and Facebook account and
so on thinking that then
we would just take that over.
Little did he know that
then he had to build
the whole website for PopAnth.
So while he was busy
building this website,
I actually had a look
around on the internet
to see what actually was out there
in terms of popular anthropology.
You know, was they really so
little or was it just hiding?
And it took quite a while
and a lot of research,
but in fact I did discover
that there is a huge amount
of popular anthropology
all over the place.
It's just that most of
us don't know about it,
which is a bit of a concern
because if us anthropologists
don't realize the extent
of what we're doing
how is anyone else suppose to know?
And if you think about people complaining
that economists get so much press time,
economists will know, more or less,
that economics is a popular discipline
that they had this big
impact, but we're not aware
of what we were actually able to do.
So another thing we did is besides,
PopAnth we considered to
be not just the website,
although it's our flagship feature,
it is part of what we do.
So knowing that in fact there was
all this popular anthropology out there,
in fact having realized you
can't go more than five minutes
without encountering something written
by an anthropologist or that
quotes an anthropologist,
we set out to turn PopAnth into something
that would actually emphasize
the breadth of that work.
So even our website on which
we publish original articles
written mostly by anthropologists,
Gawain set it up so that
it's full of links out
to other work elsewhere,
other popular anthropology.
On our author bio pages we have links
to people's popular books
that they've written,
on every article we have
suggestions for further reading
which mostly links out to things
that are written by anthropologists
or that are broadly anthropological.
Another thing we do is we
use our social media accounts
extensively to promote
popular anthropology
in all times and places.
And so wherever it's been published.
So just about every week I'll
go through an RSS feed I have
with different science
and I'll find things
that I can then retweet in our accounts
and I use a third-party program
called Buffer to do that.
So I only have to do it once and a program
will send it out for me weekly.
So that's a good way of making
sure I can have some effect
in terms of getting people
aware of what's going on
without putting five hours in every day
to do the social media accounts.
And SAPIENS is being great
'cause it's one more thing
on our list that I can now
start to retweet all the time
which is fabulous.
Another thing we do is
we, two years ago actually
we had an installation at
the AAA in Washington D.C.,
which actually Natalia Reagan was part of
and also Agustín Fuentes, and for that
we made a booklet which is a composition
of different popular anthropology articles
written by people around the world.
And we put a lot of effort
into trying to find out
who was writing, not just
in the United States,
or in Australia, or even in Europe,
but also in Africa and
South American to make
some sort of product
that would show people,
"Hey, anthropologists are
doing this everywhere."
So I'll come back briefly
to just explain the website
a little because it is our main feature.
So basically the way it's set
up is it has four sections,
we went with kind of
the four field approach
because we wanted to
see, as Greg Downey said,
"What would happen with
that, who would submit things
"and what they would be about?"
And the way it works is that
actually anyone can submit
an article to us, you don't
have to be an anthropologist,
you don't have to show us
your AAA membership card
or anything like that.
And the articles will go
into a review process.
We have a team of around eight editors,
so the articles will go to them,
they all have two weeks to review it
and come back with comments.
And mostly their comments are
about the style of writing
and whether or not it is
anthropological enough,
because we have been
working on trying to think
a lot about what counts
as popular anthropology.
So then I will take the comments
and I'll go back to the author
and let them know what the comments were,
which ones they really
must think carefully about
and which ones are optional,
they can make up their own minds
whether to take them on board or not.
Then they submit an article back to me
and I will do the final editorial work
of just really making sure
that it is actually fit
for public consumption,
not too much jargon
and so on and so forth.
So the audience we go
for, we don't just go
for necessarily just across
the board general audience,
some of our articles are suitable
to pretty much anyone to pick up and read,
some of them are more specialty articles.
So we're trying to maintain
a variety in that sense.
So we've been going for four
years now and in that time
we've published 161 articles
by a total of 72 authors,
and we've had roughly around
half a million visitors
which is actually pretty good considering
that we're a fairly small
size, completely volunteer-run,
no funding whatsoever and we don't do
an extensive amount of social media work.
We do a little, but what we
find overall is that people
will simply pick up our stuff
through social media somewhere
that's been shared around
all through a term search.
So what have we discovered in that time?
Well for me, one of the
most interesting things
that's happened out of PopAnth is to see
what people choose to write about.
It became obvious very,
very quickly that there are
a whole lot of anthropologists
out there who have
all these ideas of things
that they could write about
but they have nowhere to publish them.
These ideas are not suitable for journals,
they're not suitable
for books necessarily,
and a lot of them are
not actually suitable
for mainstream media because
they're quite experimental.
So we've had articles on things as diverse
as migrant material culture in the USA,
why cyclists can't read maps in Australia,
which is an interesting article
and someone told me yesterday
they use it in their teaching,
great attitudes to cash
off at the economic crisis
and that was one that I actually solicited
'cause I wanted some commentary
on that issue at the time,
researching emotions in Cape Verde,
and our most popular article to date
was actually one I wrote
on a whim which was called
10 Things I've Learned
about the Portuguese
that went completely viral
around the Portuguese communities,
attracted around 300,000 readers
and still getting comments today
because it tend to copy quite,
I wrote it in a way that was
quite humorous, I thought,
but the audience was completely divided
as to what they thought about it.
As Tanya said, "People
can become quite intense
"in their comments and people tend to be
"in complete agreement with my take
"on Portuguese culture
or completely against."
And those kinds of articles are fantastic
for what they can tell you
about the range of ways
in which your material which you think
is completely innocuous might be received.
So in other words, I think
our main contributions to date
are in three areas.
One, for authors, what we
provide for people is a space
for experimentation
more than anything else.
We do do a lot of mentoring
because we receive
a fair few, new authors, as well as people
who are more established.
Tanya herself has published on PopAnth,
we're very grateful for that.
But that experimenting
is absolutely key in that
and by far has been the best thing
coming out of PopAnth for me.
The other thing we provide,
of course, is for the public,
we provide that material.
So things that would
otherwise probably never seen
the light of day available
to be read and commented on.
And also, I suppose, thinking of students
as a kind of public, people
say to me that they like using
our articles in teaching
because they really give
the students sort of an insight into what
an anthropological thinking might be.
And the final group, of course,
is the anthropology community
precisely because we are
trying to do that work
of bringing together all
the different sources
of popular anthropology,
especially short-formed writing
and at least make them visible,
get them some sort of way
to get out there among
anthropological audience
as well as public ones.
So just quickly in terms of
the problems we've encountered,
they haven't necessarily
been what you'd expect.
So one thing that surprised
us is that even though
setting up PopAnth was a lot of work,
and I would caution anyone
thinking of starting a new site,
the first year or so is rather difficult,
but became stable very quickly.
We ended up with a stable
amount of submissions come in,
our editorial team became very stable
and so in fact after
that initial year or so
PopAnth actually became very
easy to run and to keep going.
We're also not too concerned
about our readership levels.
It would be lovely to know
more about our readers
and get their feedback on
what we're putting out there.
But our analytics too show
a fairly healthy readership
and people do obviously have their ways
of finding our material.
So our main problem actually
that we've encountered
is being outreached to
authors around the world.
We do very much try to
create a global site
that reflects global issues
and it includes authors
from all around the place.
But the outreach to potential
authors is by far in a way
the most time consuming
aspect of the website.
And if anybody feels
like volunteering to help
we would love more people to try
to get other people around the world
to submit articles to PopAnth.
So just, of course.
My question for the audience
is how can we work together?
Because what we really need to do, I feel,
is to come together to cross
promote each other's work
in order to get those kinds
of possibilities we want.
Thank you.
(audience applause)
- [Leslie] Okay, and next
is a very similar endeavor,
it's perhaps the newest
initiative on the panel,
and that's SAPIENS, that's
Wenner-Gren sponsored.
- Good afternoon.
Like many of my colleagues,
I'm going to begin
by talking about November 8th.
After the election, like
so many of my colleagues
and people around the world,
I fell into a spiral despair
reflecting on the turmoil of the election
and America's awaiting future.
And as I thought about
what had just happened,
I was fumbling in the dark for some hope.
And as I was doing that,
I saw a beckon of light
in Ruth Benedict's powerful argument
that the purpose of anthropology
is to make the world safe
for human differences.
And in the last week that that quote,
that argument has resonated
more and more with me
and I've become less desolate
and more motivated than ever
to help anthropology address
the world's turning chaos.
If we think about everything
from Syria to Brexit,
natural disasters and climate change,
health disparities, economic
inequalities and on and on
we've needed anthropology
before the election
and now we need it more than ever.
At the same time, we need to
find space to pause and reflect
on the wondrous aspects
of the human experience
of art and love, of beauty,
of resilience and survival
and we need to remember those as well.
The need for anthropology coincides
with the discipline's eagerness
to make itself relevant.
In recent years I've met
dozens of anthropologists,
if not hundreds of them, who
want their work to extend
beyond their academic goals.
All of the organizations
and individuals here
and I recognize many of you out there
are deeply committed to making sure
that anthropology is a window to see
into the experience of other people
and also a mirror to reflect on our own.
The Wenner-Gren Foundation
joined this movement
by launching SAPIENS on
January 28th of this year.
SAPIENS is an online magazine
that aims to become an
important public voice
for the field by publishing great stories
that spark meaningful
conversations around the world
about anthropological ideas,
theories, and thinking.
SAPIENS is geared towards
your neighbor, your cousin,
your barista, assuming your
barista doesn't have a BA
and just couldn't get
a job in anthropology,
the very people outside of our field
are the people that we're trying to reach.
In the last 10 months
we've published 150 pieces,
predominantly essays features in op-eds,
although we've also published videos,
photo essays and reviews.
Like I'm sure all my colleagues up here
that have these sites, I
would very much invite you
to look at the site and
consider submitting pieces
as we're always eager for new
anthropologist to work with.
One thing that we do is bring
together anthropologists
with journalists, we want
our pieces deeply grounded
in anthropological research.
But we want to use the best
of journalistic storytelling.
Today, we've had about
750,000 unique page views
from nearly every country in the world.
We're still working on North Korea.
Many of our pieces have also been read
by tens of thousands of people
through syndication
partnerships with Slate,
Discover Magazine and Scientific American.
And further successes are indicated
by one of our articles being debated
in the pages of The New York Times.
And one of our authors was approached
by major literary agent based
on the success of her piece.
And so in terms of opportunities,
as we are asked to
reflect on for this panel,
I wanna begin by emphasizing
three big picture points.
First, there's a real
need for anthropology
in the public's fear.
Second, there's a real
desire by anthropologists
to help shape public conversations.
And third, that SAPIENS
and these other outlets
are helping to prove
that public anthropology
does have a ready audience.
They're waiting for us.
We just need to find ways to
get out there and reach them.
The challenges are many and
we've heard some of them
and I'm sure we're gonna hear many more
throughout the morning.
But for me, some of the
primary ones include
encouraging anthropology programs
to offer in-depth training
for public communication
and specifically writing.
I'd echo Tanya's comment,
writing is a craft,
it's like learning to
become a brick layer.
You need to cultivate the practice of it
to become successful at it.
I'm also finding with SAPIENS
that it is a very much
a crowded digital market
space for news and information
and that's probably
only going to increase.
And so breaking through that and finding
a space for yourself can be difficult.
And then thirdly, we
need to I think continue
to develop tools to foster
a kind of deep engagement
with anthropological ideas.
This maybe goes back to
Alex's point on some level,
not just kind of a superficial
reading of anthropology
at the headline level.
And so while these challenges of many
that have already been addressed,
I think are very real.
I think most of them can be overcome.
And I think they need to be overcome
if we're going to heed
Ruth Benedict's argument
that we need to make the world
safe for human differences.
Thank you.
(audience applause)
- Okay, next stop is Anya-Milana,
and she's from Peeps Magazine.
And I think she has some handouts there.
(indistinct talking)
Why don't you come up and talk
and we'll have someone
else circulate it for you.
And Anya-Milana's initiative
is a bit different
from everything we've heard so far.
- I've grown quite accustomed to people
saying things that I do
are a little bit different
from things that they've heard so far.
It tends to be a status quo for me.
I am in fact with Peeps
Magazine and we are,
as Leslie has indicated,
a little bit different
from the other initiatives on the panel.
Primarily because we are
not an academic initiative,
rather that we are a product, oh,
I ran, I'm a little out of breath, I'm--
(laughs) Sorry folks.
Well we have three platforms
that we function on.
Our focus is primarily on the production
of an independent magazine.
And the reason for that is because we feel
that there's something very important
about honoring information,
especially information
that's deeply researched as the material
that we have in our magazines
in a permanent and material form,
something that people
can reference back to,
something that people can
hold dear, and encounter,
and engage within a sensory experience.
(clears throat) Excuse me.
So Peeps Magazine is
an independent magazine
that tracks cultural
shifts around the world.
That's our way of saying
that we take the work
of both practical and
academic anthropologists
and repurpose it in
narratively engaging stories
that are then paired with
world class photojournalism,
oops, yeah, world class
photojournalism and illustration,
and then packaged by our
incredibly talented founders
who are the designers of the magazine.
As it's being passed around,
you'll see it fits in
with an aesthetic that
is uniquely identifiable
as an independent magazine.
And something that is a market
that is growing quite rapidly,
less so Canada and the United States
because of distribution challenges,
but very, very strongly in
other parts of the world
most especially in Europe.
England has a number of stores
that are devoted exclusively
to the sale of independent magazines
and the development of
this particular market.
So the reason we do this
is in no small part,
because the founders of this magazine
have encountered the
work of anthropologists
as they've done their
design work over the years
and they've become impassioned believers
in the quality and importance of the work,
and most importantly
the incredible stories
that come out of this that are
deeply informative and engaging.
And so they have developed this format
and then in space for
anthropological research
to be highlighted and shared in a way
that they themselves
would choose to read it.
Everybody on the team sits
outside of the academy,
there is nobody on the executive
panel who actually works,
or the executive of the company,
that actually works within the academy.
Any information that we
carry in the magazine
has been peer-reviewed
in external resources
and external spaces and is repurposed
within our magazine for distribution.
And I've kind of gone off
(laughs) of the direction
I wanted to go on because
I felt deeply inspired
by so much of what all of the
folks on the panel are saying.
Tanya Luhrmann is exactly right.
Writing is a craft, but
so is the production
of a publication.
There is thought and there
is incredible complexity
in producing a publication
that A shows and rises
to the standard of the writing
that is paired with it,
that is an important
aspect of the publication
of a magazine, and a website as well.
And we have a unique opportunity
to be able to have folks
who are deeply invested in this project
put all of their skills into that
without necessarily costing us,
what it would necessarily cost somebody
to pay a designer of this caliber
to be able to do the work.
So a bit about independent
magazines, backing up a tiny bit.
Many people don't know much about them,
they know that they exist but
people tend to assume that
because mass market magazines
are actually going down
in terms of sales and in
some case of credibility
in terms of content that
the magazine industry
and the print industry
is going to disappear.
It's actually quite the opposite.
There's an incredibly prolific industry
in independent magazines.
These 16 are a fraction
of the 300 magazines
that were submitted to the
Stack Magazine Awards this year
for consideration for
independent magazine awards
and that in turn is just a
fraction of the magazines
that are available for sale in the world.
What differentiates an
independent magazine
from a mass market magazine
is that it is a small run,
generally between 2,000 and 10,000 copies,
and it is produced less
frequently in many cases.
We are biannual, we are,
pardon me, semi-annual
and there are others
that publishes frequently
as once a month but it's very rare,
generally speaking it's
quarterly to twice a year.
Additionally, what distinguishes
it is that these magazines
are niche market-driven.
They are exceptionally
in-depth, they are very studied
and they cater to markets
that are very interested
in a particular area.
So in looking at where
Peeps sits in that market,
by bringing anthropological
research to the readership,
if we were to cater simply to people
who are interested in anthropology
we wouldn't necessarily have the market
we would need to be able
to sustain ourselves.
What we are appealing to is an interest
on the part of readers
in something that is,
in storytelling that engages
a deeper understanding of human culture,
particularly putting
context before events.
In other words, instead of reporting
on events somewhere in the world
we tell the stories of these cultures
and then reference events
that may or may not
be world issues, bringing
them into the story
so that they actually are presented
within a larger framework or perspective
of the culture that's being depicted.
Independent magazines run between,
because they are a niche
market and small run,
run between 14 and $25 per issue
and people are glad to have them.
It's considered a signifier
of their personal brand, if you will.
But most importantly, and that's the kind
of shallow version of it but
the more exciting aspect of it
is that we have folks
who are looking at this
as something to display the knowledge
that they're acquiring,
again in their coffee tables,
in their homes so that they
can share it with their friends
in a permanent media and sensory way.
So our formula at Peeps
is to take embedded years long research
engaging it with visual
and textual storytelling
because all of our stories are paired
with the work of world
class photojournalists,
those photojournalists
actually take the stories
beyond the stories themselves, they go in.
And generally speaking we try
to work as often as possible
with photographers from the areas
in which the work has been done.
So it gives the
photographers an opportunity
to be able to comment
back and or push further
into the stories that are being
told by the anthropologists.
The setup of the magazine is
a bit unique and so far as,
because we know that we're appealing
to a wide spectrum of potential readers,
those who are interested in say
the practical applications
of ethnographic research,
the people who are doing
research on let's say
the habits of Americans
in morning rituals,
and how to better design a toothbrush,
or somebody who is interested
in the cultural impacts
of economic and social change
in one part of the world
and another part of the world.
We get to contain both of
these within our magazine
because both of these
are studied and analyzed
by people who work in ethnographic
and anthropological practice
which is amazing to us.
But these attract different readers.
So as a way of visually
distinguishing between the two,
we've setup a yellow section
which is our business section,
and a white section which is
our larger social section,
and the analogy wasn't
deliberate, it wasn't,
for those of you who remember
phone books (laughs),
it wasn't deliberate to make
it yellow pages and white pages
but that's how it actually
turned out and I think it holds.
So as with any other project,
we have indicators of success.
And for us the indicators
include how alert is leadership
and who comprises that
leadership, who are our sponsors,
do we have a good mix of
ethnographic research firms,
academic institutions,
professional organizations,
anthropological or otherwise,
social medial engagement,
dissemination of our content,
either through classrooms,
links, blogs, et cetera,
and awards and recognition.
And so we are new and we are
small so we aren't necessarily,
we aren't necessarily expecting
huge strides to be made yet,
but we're very proud
of the accomplishments
that we have made.
Social media is quite active
for us and quite supportive.
Missy Eiswen's comment came after,
immediately after the
production of our first issue
which was challenging
and a bit heart-wrenching
as it's the production of
the first issue if anything,
any project.
And her comment that we were one
of the most visually unexciting,
unintellectually exciting
magazine was a solve for us.
And when we were recently nominated
for both best magazine launch
and best original non-fiction
story at the Stack Awards,
we actually agreed with Katie Ellenberger
who indicated that to her that was a sign
that there was a space
for public anthropology
and that this was a successful endeavor.
So aside from this, the
other indicator that we like
to bring up when we're
talking about the magazine
is the subscription services.
There are a number of
services available globally
that curate magazines, sure,
I'm one minute away, thanks,
that curate magazines for
distribution to people
around the world who wouldn't necessarily
be looking explicitly
for, this is their way
of exposing themselves to new things,
both for these subscription services
have come on with us
for issue three as well
and are incredibly supportive
of the work that we're doing.
The feedback and the
reviews we've received
from their readers have been astonishing.
So to us, that says there is a place
for this kind of magazine.
The challenges we face, as
Leslie has asked us to indicate,
are actually there are a number of them,
but with reference to this audience,
the ones that are most kind
of relevant for us are,
first of all, getting
academics to trust that writing
in a narratively engaging way
will increase the interest
and trust that the readership
will have in their materials.
And I think that Dr. Luhrmann
actually commented brilliantly
about the importance of being
able to craft your materials.
I think it's also about
trusting your editor,
especially when we sit
outside of the academy.
I think that's frightening
and we understand that.
But if you learn to trust
us, we will help you
get stuff out there
and people will read it
and they will love it (laughs).
We have seen it.
And lastly, Peeps as a
magazine is very unique,
even within the framework,
even within the industry
that it's working with in or the market
that it's operating in.
And it can act as an
ambassador for anthropology,
primarily because it's user-driven,
because it's reader-driven,
because our team
are the people who love your work
and want to get it out there.
We will do the translation
for you (laughs)
and we want you to succeed.
And if we can get you
using us in that way,
then we will feel that we
have succeeded tremendously.
Thanks (laughs).
(audience applause)
- Okay, and we have one more.
Last but not the least is Natalia Reagan.
(laughter)
- Hello everybody.
So I am co-founder of BOAS Network.
How do I show, just the first slide or--
(indistinct talking)
There you are.
So that's BOAS Network, my
website that I co-founded
with a friend of mine who's
a cultural anthropologist,
I being a biological
anthropologist we joined forces.
And we wanted to create
a site in the beginning
that was going to be all things
and all you can eat buffet
of anthropology but we are now
focusing on just doing videos
because we realized with a two-person show
you can only do so much.
And like everybody else here,
well last week's election
really rattled both of us.
And I definitely feel like we're living
in truly interesting times
and I've been able to speak
at the AAA, this is
the third year in a row
and I'm very thankful to be able to speak
about anthropology and the public
and I always likened it
and this is unfortunately
way too close to home.
So voting, if you're given the opportunity
to discuss your work and how you did it
and your results and really kind of put it
into the context that it needs to be in,
seize that opportunity.
'Cause like an election,
if you don't vote you can't
complain about the results.
And if you don't take that
opportunity and discuss your work
you can't bemoan how it's
represented or misinterpreted
by perhaps a writer that
maybe got it a little off,
'cause I know that for me
when I do televisions shows
and things of that sort
sometimes they'll give it a title
that is scientifically
inaccurate and I pull my hair
and I get all upset and
luckily I can work with people
to maybe change the title
to make it accurate.
But sometimes you don't
have that opportunity
if it's already written and out there.
So I always say, "Go ahead and be open
"to talking about your work,"
whether it is for an article,
or if you're asked to
appear on a television show.
And I think now more than ever,
we need to democratize science.
I'm all about science for social change.
And anthropologists, we are storytellers,
that's first and foremost,
we talk about the past,
we talk about the present, we talk,
we hypothesize about the
future based on things
that have happened in the past.
And given what has
happened in the past week,
this is the perfect time to do it.
So as far as what I tell
people that wanna do video
there's a million
suggestions I could give,
but one of the key suggestions is have
a 30-second elevator
pitch of your research,
have a sound bite whether
it's got a little bit
of humor infused if you don't study
that's humorous, maybe it's sort
of a very lasting
impression, a good quote,
that can't get diced up too
much because sound bites
can't get diced up and made,
I hosted a bigfoot show a few years ago,
bigfoot TV show and boy
did they try to make it
sound like I believe in
bigfoot, he is out there
even though I said, "I do
not believe in bigfoot.
"He is not out there."
But they would do anything
to kinda cut it around and twist it.
So finding a concise sound
bite that really wraps up
what you do I think is very important.
And I'm actually gonna
be at the expo later
with a camera equipment if you guys
wanna come and practice
I'll have a booth there.
But a little bit about BOAS Network.
The reason why we started this is we felt
that anthropology was fascinating.
I always joke that anthropologists,
there's the most interesting
man in the world,
we are the most interesting
people in the room.
You know, if you go to a
party usually people are like,
"Wait, what, you're an anthropologist?"
They either ask, "What the heck is that,"
or, "Wow, tell me more,
what do you study?"
And usually you have to explain to them
that you're not Indiana
Jones, but that's the thing.
The more we have different
people from anthropology,
all four fields represented out there,
the more people are
going to have questions
that are not, again explaining
why you're not Indiana Jones.
But people are interested in what we study
and I feel like with this whole idea
of science for social
change, right now obviously
what's going on in the country,
talking about human variation,
marginalized populations,
how we are more similar
than different in many ways,
and how even though we are different
those differences make us
beautiful and interesting
and can unite us in some ways.
So I think anthropologist definitely have
I think an ethical
responsibility to discuss
what we know about our species
and how that can bring us together.
In terms of challenges, just to give you
a little background about myself,
I was an actor and I
did comedy before I fell
into this wonderful world of anthropology,
I didn't think I could
become an anthropologist
'cause I didn't excel in math
and science in high school.
So I was like, "I'm gonna go be an actor."
And when I went back to school,
I fell in love with
anthropology specifically
and I wanted to meld the two,
I feel like science and comedy
is just the dynamic duo.
I read, no, seriously, I
read a peer-reviewed article
and I mean there's some really great
punny article titles out there,
but sometimes they're not even intentional
and I'm laughing my proverbial ass off.
So if some of you were,
and that's the thing
is when you do get interviewed
I always tell people,
and I've worked with some
wonderful anthropologists
who are in the audience, Dr.
Karen Strier, Dr. John Marx,
Agustin Fuentes all have been
wonderful people to interview,
but there's an idea.
If you're going to be on a
show that is a comedy show,
if you're gonna be on the Daily Show
infused whatever you're
talking about with some comedy,
if you're gonna be on Today's Show
you don't have to dumb it down,
but maybe make it a
little bit more palpable
to a early morning audience.
So there's ways that you can work
to make your work easy to understand
without dumbing it down.
So as far as challenges for
me, in the BOAS Network,
we're a two-person show, Kohania and I
have different careers
and we have to kinda go
where the money is and we've turned
our BOAS Network into a non-profit.
And so right now we're
applying for grants,
because in the future
we would like to produce
a curriculum-based web series.
So I have a web series
called, it was called
Talking Shit with Dr. Todd and Natalia.
I hosted it with Dr. Todd Disotell,
a molecular anthropologist at NYU,
and we changed it to Talking Science
because we want money.
And (laughs), but we would
like to turn that into,
taking a biological anthropology class
and putting together 15 different videos
that have to do with each particular class
or linguistics or intercultural.
But we wanna bring other people into that.
So if anybody is interested
in being interviewed,
because I do a lot of
interviews at these meetings,
I'm available for that.
And also one of the things
that we've been able to do
is we've teamed up with the
AAPA and IDEAS project and NSF
to put together videos
that promoted or looking at
how we can be more inclusive in the AAPA
making it a more diverse field
since we do study human diversity
and variation it makes sense.
And also, I do, with
conjunction with BOAS,
we produce videos and
trailers for people's books.
So if you have a book
that you wanna make fun
and exciting I make these commercials
that I think it speak
to a broader audience
and hopefully we'll get
more of our work out there
and read by the layperson.
So thank you so much and here's to science
for social change.
(audience applause)
- Okay, and now it's over to you.
Because there's a few things
that I think have come out of this.
Everyone on the stage here has sort
of put themselves on the line
to more or less believe in their dream
of communicating anthropology.
They've all done it in different ways.
And the one message that's come
out of it is it's not easy.
You know, it hurts your ego
when your pieces are attacked,
it's difficult to write
for a popular audience,
it's difficult to get funding
for any of these initiatives
and I think everybody
here on the stage has put
a tremendous amount of
effort in their own time,
and their own money into
getting their initiatives
off the ground.
But what we also have are
a lot of opportunities here
and there's many other opportunities
we could've included on
the panel, but we wanted
to select a spectrum of what's there now.
One of the issues for
me that also came out
was how do you get this out?
Because we've got fantastic stuff going,
and I'm sure that some
of you in the audience
didn't know of individual
of these initiatives
and we're in the field and
we should know about it.
So before we have the panel talk anymore,
do we have any questions
from the audience,
or points that you wanna
raise, or things that you think
we might be missing in these initiatives?
Everybody's happy with what's being done?
Yes.
Do you wanna--
Yes, wait, we have a mic.
- Are you opening up
to general discussion?
It's on, is it working?
My name is Rena Lederman,
I'm at Princeton,
and I was also involved in
co-authoring the AAA's response
to initiatives that had
to do with the revision
of the IRB regulations that
I'll get around to in a second.
But what I'm interested in, in relation
to all of what you've
said, I strongly support
Alisse's comment about
how we are out there
and all of that.
And I think that what you
all have demonstrated that,
and I think that's fantastic,
and I really appreciate
this whole panel.
What I'm wondering
about that's been raised
in sort of implicitly is
how we assess how people
are receiving.
In other words, reception
is a big question.
You can quantify clicks and so on,
you can quantify how many people
have seen your site perhaps
but how people actually
makes sense of how people
are reading these things
is a big question.
Tanya addressed this question,
you're getting reviews so
to speak, or responses,
but this is what I'm wondering about,
how we assess people's
reception or understanding
of what we're putting out there.
And the reason why I mentioned
the work that I've done
with respect to
the regulations having to
do with regulatory ethics
and the revisions of the code and so on.
The people that I've been interacting with
outside of the academy are policymakers
and government regulators in particular
and the various academics
who put themselves
in those positions, they don't value us
and many of them are deeply dismissive
of the kinds of sort of,
let me call it qualitative
but more specifically interpretive work
and I've been battling
this stuff for years now,
made progress that gets
evaporated very quickly.
I don't hear a lot, I hear a
lot about public in general,
but not about targeted
tough cookie type publics
that actually are doing things
that have a direct impact
on our ability to reproduce ourselves.
So I'm wondering about
reception in general
and then policy reception in particular.
- Okay, I think Emily is going to--
- Is this on?
- [Leslie] Yes.
- Thanks, Rena, for a very
important series of points.
The reception, I'm sure each of us
would have a slightly different
answer to the question
of how we know what we're doing.
It is being received in what spirit.
I would just say, we have comment
fields all over everything
and people (laughs)
don't hesitate to answer
or to express themselves, let's just say.
I'm being trolled at the
moment, because I've put
some things on the Anthropology
Now on Facebook page
that a certain number of unhappy people
felt we're not anthropology,
they were about the recent election.
And so I got a straight
message very quickly
and in very strong terms about that
and then I had to chose to try to respond
and give another picture of
what anthropology could be.
So there's this simple comment
fields all over the web.
The other thing I think is really recent
is when we became part
of Taylor and Francis
and got into all these libraries,
thousands of libraries,
internationally we've been flooded
with submissions, flooded.
The editor can't even begin to handle
the number of inquiries that have come
from people reading the publication
and thinking, "I wanna do that too,"
and then writing, we require a pitch
in the publishing jargon,
and we've just been flooded.
So that's, I'm trying to
be a little optimistic.
Of course, we really don't know
the vast majority of
reactions, but some, some.
Oh, and one more thing,
oh, and the policy piece,
the hard, what did you call them?
Hard heads?
- [Audience] Tough cookies.
- Tough cookies, thank you.
The tough cookies, okay.
I don't know how to to the tough cookies,
but we have a list of
people we want to reach,
we've been thinking about this
and they're famous people.
And they include all
the science journalists,
Roz Chast, Gary Larson, Ursula Le Guin
and Stephen Gyllenhaal
all of whom have some
sort of crooked connection to anthropology
and could help but it's
a work in progress.
- Yeah, what I'm gonna
do is ask Chip Colwell
to make some comments,
because we're the most recent startup.
We've put a lot of time
into thinking about metrics
and managing our success.
- Yeah, thanks.
Thanks for the good question.
And so, yes, at SAPIENS it's something
we've tangled with very much.
How do we know that we're
reaching the audiences
we're aiming to reach?
And there simply aren't a
lot of good direct measures,
there are though a lot
of good proxy measures
that you can use.
So we use a number of digital tools
that look at the reach of our pieces,
how much they're being discussed online.
You can also look at the
number of visitors and a range
of demographics that
surround those visitors
and readers to the site.
And so essentially when you
combine all of those together
I think it does give you
a pretty good picture.
It's not absolute and often not specific,
but it does give you a good
sense of your readership.
- [Leslie] Anyone else?
- [Alisse] Can I just add?
- Yeah, Alisse.
- I just wanna add.
Rena, thank you that was a great question.
And part of what you're
saying, you're talking about
who's your audience or who's
your imagined audience.
And who you imagine your audience may be
for whatever projects
may not be who they are.
So at AAA, for example, the RACE Project,
I don't have the numbers but it's reached
lots and lots of people both online
and through these museum exhibits which,
so we know that it's being,
we get feedback from the museum folks
who are telling us how the
material is being used,
how the teachers are using
it, how the kids are using it.
So it really depends on the
product and then who you're,
and where, and what the venue is.
In terms of those tough cookies,
AAA also has behind the scenes
constant sort of advocacy of trying
to get out the word to
them about the value
of anthropology as a science,
as well as humanities
depending on the context.
AAA can't be a lobbying group,
so we can't directly lobby
but we can talk to people
about who we are, who anthropologists are
and what the contributions can be.
And it is on the agenda, it's
constantly on the agenda.
In terms of open anthropology,
that's why I kind of said
that we don't know, we have
those numbers, those metrics
reaching people all over the world,
but we don't know who they are
and we've talked about,
"Oh, should we have a popup
"when you're reading it
and say, who are you,"
and we thought we didn't we wanna do that.
But on a personal level, when
I was the founding editor
of Open Anthropology
and I would post it on,
and I'm really weak when
it comes to social media
except posting my grandchild on Facebook,
but when I posted on my Facebook
I mean the first issue this woman wrote me
who was a friend of a
friend of a friend who said,
"Oh my God, I spent the whole night,"
she's an English literature professor
who does Victorian
marriage and the first one
was on kinship and marriages,
and she stayed up all night
and read every single article.
So that was very welcome,
but still we don't know
if it's just anthropologist
who are reading this content
because it is actually
written for anthropologists.
So it is an important
question but, of course,
who's your audience?
(indistinct talking)
- Okay, yes.
- [Audience] So I have a
little bit of different problem
that I'd like to post than Rena did.
As a North Americanist, I get invited
into policy conversations
and those aren't my talent in publics
and I'm really grateful
to be in the university
that has financial support
and structural support
for grad students to
do public scholarship.
But I'm wondering if you
could talk about the risks
of doing this kind of work.
You know, at the University
of Michigan recently scholars
have been getting death threats
and for people who don't work on,
people who aren't engaging in like
explicitly political discussions,
or people who are looking at histories
of racial difference, for example,
and that's very scary
and I am deeply committed
that public anthropology
would never allow that
to stop me, but it's real.
And I would be interested to hear you all
talk about those kind
of challenging publics
and what that means to think about
as a publicly engaged scholar.
- Natalia.
- That's a great question,
'cause I feel like a lot of people,
I didn't get to mention this
but in the age of the internet
everybody is an expert
and everybody wants,
and even though we are
experts in our field
people think very quickly
that if they read two articles
on Wikipedia that they
could just rip you apart.
But I did do a video, aside from BOAS,
I'm a science communicator
with NatGeo and Discovery
and I did a video on the
fact that the science
or lack thereof race and
the fact that there was
no real biological basis
to racial classification
and anybody that was an anthropologist
would watch the video,
most anthropologist would,
yeah, of course, this is
something that we all know.
But death threats,
people taking the video,
making comments about my person, my looks,
my statement, using the science that
using actual, the science that I was using
to back up my argument,
they were backing up
their argument just twisting it,
using pseudoscience to back up their bias.
And so it's terrifying,
but at the same time
as long as you're working
with hopefully a university
or somebody that can back you up
because Discovery, for the most part,
would monitor the comments
and things like that.
We were mentioning comments, yeah,
I always say, "Don't read
the comments (laughs),"
just because they can be so hateful,
but at the same time it's
good to have network of people
around you that know that that's a problem
if you are getting death
threats and things of that sort,
talk to people, get it out there
and I say don't back down
especially in the next four years.
- I think death threats are
actually relatively rare.
I did go through a period
of time when I stalked
that had nothing to do
with my public writing,
it had to do with the fact
that I was doing research
among people with schizophrenia
and that was a little difficult.
The university's job, I was
actually offered 24-hour
armed escort.
I didn't think that that
was appropriate but,
I'm just sharing that I was offered this.
It is your university's
job to help to protect you,
but I do think it's pretty rare.
I've never had a death
threat based on anything
that I've written.
But I also should say that I don't read
most of the comments.
- [Audience] Well, we've had to recently
in the last couple of weeks
at the University of Michigan
to anthropology faculty who are doing work
and some of them have won major awards
from Smithsonian Foundation and the more
the farther they're out there.
I just think it's happening.
I think it's changing.
- [Leslie] Someone in the back there.
- Leslie, can I just
make one quick comment?
- [Leslie] Sure, yeah.
- Really quick, before
you ask your question.
I think this is one of the
reasons I wanted to do this
working group on tenure and promotion,
because we have to provide
some sort of infrastructural
or structural--
- [Leslie] Can you hear?
- Can you hear me?
You know, infrastructural,
structural support
to encourage, if we are serious
about engaged anthropology
and supporting these multiple forms,
people are writing for Savage Minds
and why should they take the risk,
and I'm talking about risk in general,
if they're just going to be discouraged?
So I think it's important if the work is,
if we consider it valuable
and that the content
is reliable which it's not
just it does go through
editorial reviews and things
are read and processed
and that's what I heard in all of these
other publications as well
then we need to provide
a tool to enable you to,
this is just one tool
to enable you to be able to
have the support you need
to be the brave person in
light of whatever threats
that are out there.
So that's why again I
say, we all do our little,
our bit and so that
project that I described
is one little bit.
- [Helen] Okay, thanks very much
for a fascinating panel.
Helen Lambert, University of Bristol.
I want to slightly respond to the question
about what more or what
else could be doing.
I was gonna ask about readership,
but it does sound to me,
although you don't know,
that the likelihood is
that Open Anthropology
and Anthropology Now are indeed being read
by other anthropologists.
And almost all the
initiatives we've heard from
are attempts in one way or another
to get the publics, whoever
they are, to come to us.
I just wanted to ask
you about going to them.
In science, one of the most important ways
people have of responding
is through mechanisms
generally known as rapid response,
and that might be indeed
op-ed or letters to a journal
or it might be intervening
through public media,
TV or newspapers.
And the problem it seems to me is one
that I think only Tanya
on the panel referred to
which is the time sensitivity of all this.
And I think anthropologists
are incredibly good
at kind of sitting around and cogitating,
but not really necessarily
at just getting out there.
And it seems to me that
partly this is to do
with the question of
whether we want people
to recognize what anthropology
has to contribute generically
or whether we really want to share
our specific knowledge of
specific events and issues
with those publics in a timely way.
And I've been really struck
by the incredible absence
in processes such as Brexit or our recent
even more disastrous
experience that you've had,
although anthropologists
with all their knowledge
of migration and economic interest
not intervening in that public space.
I don't know how we can do this,
but I wonder whether the idea of a sort of
college of anthropologists
who are signing up
to being galvanized sufficiently to, yeah,
take the rest of the afternoon off,
strike the line for their appointments
and write something that very day
or the next morning to get it out there
might not be a really good way to go
if we really want to go
public with our anthropology.
- I'm gonna have chair's prerogative here
and make a comment directly on this.
Because in my career I spent
30 years in the UK and London
and when I moved back to the states
one of the biggest differences I saw
was the cultural difference of the media.
Because when I was in
London, the BBC journalist
had Rolodex's of anthropologists
and people from many other disciplines.
And as soon as something hit the press
they would be right on to
the appropriate person.
And during my career there,
I spent quite a bit of time
on the BBC and the equivalent
of public radio and all
and one thing that I think we could do
is begin to cultivate the journalists
through public broadcasting
or whatever it might be
to convince them that there
really is a interest out there
for well presented anthropological work.
Does anyone, yeah, Alex
has in common idea.
- Yeah, I think your
point is an excellent one.
And we're talking
recently about the amount
of editorial work that goes
into all of these things,
it's very important to know that there's
no editorial work at all in Savage Minds,
we just write the posts and
hit return and it goes up.
So we're very different in that way.
And we are quicker, we
can be much quicker.
I think a lot of times
anthropologists are still learning
to let go of the production process
and they're not willing
to just get it out there
in the world immediately.
We have a bunch of projects here
that operate in a lot of different spaces
and in a lot of different tempos.
But we don't really yet have someone
like Steve Bannon when he was blogging,
or Daily Kos or Ta-Nehisi Coates
where there's somebody who's online,
who is producing 2,000 words a day,
a lot of it is blog entries
where you're just cutting
and pasting from other
relevant blog entries,
or this happened today and the
answer from anthropologists
is this, someone said this in
this New York Times article
that's getting traction.
And the answer from an anthropologist
that we know is this.
And there's sort of two reasons for that.
The first reason is that
you need to have someone
who can just do that full
time which is, I've done it.
There have been various periods in my life
when I've blogged that way and I've been
on social media that
way and it's exhausting
and no one will pay you for it.
And you have an obligation
to your students
if you're a professor.
So the first thing is the
massive time investment
for doing that instant response.
Something comes across on
Twitter, a half hour later,
20 minutes later you got 300 words.
That kind of turnaround
is really time intensive
and it burns you out very quickly.
The second problem is is that
I think we're really worried
about getting expert knowledge,
something is happening in Burma,
I have this friend, let me talk to them,
they say they can do it next week,
now we have to spell check it.
You know, a lot of the kinds
of things that we need to do
when we blog or do social
media for public audience
is fall back on the kinds of things
that we're not experts about,
but that we teach in introductory classes
the standard lessons of anthropology.
Someone says this about race.
Okay, I know this
because I'm a generalist.
I think one way to get that
rapid feedback on social media
is to be willing to
return the fundamentals
and deepen our knowledge.
For cultural anthropologists,
we need to articulate
with biological anthropologists.
I think there's just no way around that.
I think that that's really necessary
and important at this point.
So I think you need to find
people with a lot of time
and people who would go broad,
not necessarily deep, yeah.
- Okay, unfortunately we're
just coming up to the hour.
And I know we could
continue the conversation
for at least another hour,
but I hope you've gotten
something out of it.
If nothing else, the context
that would be an easy access
for you into the public
sphere, because I know
that everyone sitting here
would be more than happy
to talk with you to see
how you might be able
to become involved in their initiatives
or give you really down to earth advice
on launching off on your own
if that's what you wanna do.
The conversation has
been going on here at AAA
for at least three years now.
I hope it continues because there,
perhaps there's nothing more important
in our discipline than
getting our word out
to the general public to the policymakers
and to other places that really count.
So only it's left of me
to thank our panelist
for giving us such a nice introduction
to what they're doing, their
challenges, their problems,
and importantly why they
think it's important.
And the very last thing is
I would like to invite you
to the Wenner-Gren 75th
Anniversary reception
which is tonight at 7:45 in Symphony III.
It's the only reception at
the meeting with an open bar.
So please come and
celebrate our anniversary.
- And prior to that, from
five to seven at the local,
will be the Savage Minds tweet up.
So get started, having something to eat
and then go to Wenner-Gren.
Local, just across the street,
five to seven, Savage Minds.
- [Leslie] Okay, and do that
because we're putting
our money into the booze
and not so much to the food.
(laughter)
Okay, thank you very much.
- [Woman] Thank you.
(audience applause)
