“BAD HABITUS: ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE AGE OF THE MULTIMODAL” AT THE AAA'S

CEE RECAP OF THE 2018 ROUNDTABLE

Stephanie Takaragawa sits beside the roundtable participants while addressing an audience question on the specific problems raised by digital vs. analog technologies.

by Alissa Jordan, PhD (University of Pennsylvania)

At Friday Nov 16th's roundtable, “Bad Habitus”, organizers Dr. Stephanie Takargawa (Chapman University) , Dr. Trudi Lynn Smith (University of Victoria), and Dr. Kate Hennessy (Simon Fraser University) called into question the uncritical techno-centric habits that increasingly characterize the multimodal turn in anthropology. Dr. Coleman Nye (Simon Fraser University) described the experimental graphic novel ethnography that she built with collaborators over the past year, highlighting how visual mediums can be used to craft multilayered political and artistic citations. Yet, Dr. Nye and collaborators encountered numerous institutional barriers in attempting to fairly compensate participating artists using academic funds. Dr. Patricia Alvarez Astacio’s (Brandeis University) discussed her collaborative multimodal ethnography of color in the Peruvian Andes, where women weavers farm and process cochineal insects in order to produce vibrant red dyes. Alvarez described the challenges she and collaborators faced in selecting a media format that could both adequately convey the hapticity and materiality of the farming process while also remaining widely accessible to participants. Following Dr. Alvarez, artist-anthropologist Trudi Lynn Smith  narrowed in on the organic processes of entropy currently transforming archival 16mm color film reels of ethnographic footage held throughout museums in British Columbia (and beyond). Originally produced as “salvage” ethnographic recordings, Dr. Smith described how these materials are now themselves imperiled by processes of time—-considered “fugitive materials” in the archive as their colors slowly disappear leaving only a pale pink tone. 
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Organizer Dr. Stephanie Takaragawa followed Smith, problematizing the structural alliances that multimodal anthropologists form when uncritically applying technologies as liberatory “new” tools. Taking off from Dr. Takaragawa’s critique, Dr. Shalini Shankar (Northwestern University) addressed how politically and socially marginalized communities have created new forms of organization using digital platforms. At the same time, Shankar warned anthropologists that digital platforms may significantly narrow dialogs according to geopolitical hierarchies, echoing long-established divides of literacy, resource access, and more.  Following Dr. Shankar, discussant Dr. Jenny Chio (University of Southern California) inquired after the material and immaterial excesses and waste generated by digitally-centric anthropologies, imploring anthropologists to meaningfully engage with the leftovers of technical processes. Dr. Deborah Thomas (University of Pennsylvania; CEE), the final discussant, emphasized the double nature of technologies as tools that can be wielded both to support and dismantle existing structures of power. Concluding the round table with questions of technology and it’s audiences, Thomas asked 1) “who is the audience for [the materials] we produce”; 2) how do our uses of technology succeed---or fail---to speak with them in ways that resonate and; 3) what kinds of archives are we creating, and who are we creating them for?

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