it.html
Section 1
Regarding machines for the suppression of time.
Dr David Zeitlyn,
Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing,
Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology,
Eliot College, The University of Kent,
Canterbury, CT2 7NS, UK.
Tel. (44) 1227 76400
Fax (44) 1227 475471
Email: D.Zeitlyn@ukc.ac.uk
In this paper I present a set of different observations on aspects
of visual anthropology and IT. In between I consider issues to do
with technological determinism at the level of anthropological methodology
before returning to issues of visual representation.
a) Farnham Rehfisch in the field: fieldwork photos
Here is a fieldwork photo. Taken in 1953 or 1954 the subject was not
recorded by the late Farnham Rehfisch - who did not actually take
this photo - as I discuss near the end of the paper.
It was not available to me when I visited Warwar where Rehfisch worked
so I have not had the opportunity to track down the children or grandchildren
of this man.
Until now the photo has been seen only by Rehfisch’s family and
their visitors in Khartoum (where Rehfisch was Professor for many
years) or Hull. So the number viewing the photo has massively increased
by my use of it here. Rehfisch never showed this slide to me so I
do not know if he remembered the name of the man shown here. Now
everything is different: the glass mounted slides in a box in his
study have been loaned by his widow to another anthropologist. The
slides have been duplicated and the duplicates digitised. From a
digital image on a computer screen a print has been made onto an overhead
transparency. On the overhead the colours are poor by comparison
with the vibrancy of the original Kodachrome slide (although it is
easy to compensate for forty years of fading). The photo now needs
explaining in a way never necessary when Farnham showed his slides.
The possession of slides, the act of display are part of the everyday
accomplishment of being a fieldworking anthropologist. How different
it is for me to show his slides not my own. But I can explain - I
just have! If I am the anthropological son of Farnham Rehfisch then
it is intellectually proper for me to work with his materials - as
long as intellectual and legal acknowledgements are given.
But what if I were to make these photos available on the Internet
- it would be easy for me to do this. It poses more and harder questions
about the sorts of contextualising information needed to view the
photos - as I will demonstrate later. A further point - I have already
commented on how the overhead transparency is of lower quality than
the original slide. Access to the Internet is critically affected
by bandwidth - by the speed at which the digital signals can be pushed
through the wires. At the moment (late 1996) this means that few
people can either afford or practically obtain from the Internet the
large sized files that high quality graphics requires. This means
that lower quality images (with smaller, more accessible files) must
be used. So, in effect, breadth of access is inversely correlated
with quality of image which poses intriguing questions - although
it may also provide solutions to some of the concerns about image
copyright on the net.
B) Machines for the suppression of time: looking at the technology
of enchantment.
What I shall do in this part of the talk is take Lévi-Strauss
seriously! This is a shockingly radical thing to do these days. I
shall not just take him seriously but literally and this connects
us to Alfred Gell’s inspired idea of the technology of enchantment.
When discussing myths Lévi-Strauss talks of:
Cette relation au temps est d'une nature assez particulière:
tous se passe comme si la musique et la mythologie n'avaient besoin
du temps que pour lui infliger un dimenti - l'une et l'autre sent,
en effet, des machines à supprimer le temps. 1964: 24
This relation to time is of a particular kind: it all goes on as if
music and mythology need time only in order to deny it - the one and
the other are in effect machines for the suppression of time (gloss
- DZ)
I intend to take the metaphor at face value and to examine the mechanics
of it all. In this I am guided in part by Woolgar in his call (1991)
to treat people and machines as presumptively equal - just as different
“races” “sexes” and “physical abilities”
are now taken to be.
To this I add Morphy (1994) and his use of film to give repeated access
unmediated by memory - though of course mediated by other things such
as the film itself - the move from the technology of memory (if I
may call it that) to the technology of film and video. Thanks to Alfred
Haddon we can watch a few fleeting seconds of some Torres Straits
Islanders dancing in bright sunshine at the behest (order?) of the
ethnographer. That this is qualitatively VERY different from reading
a description of the same event is clear, but what follows from that
difference? Describing or otherwise assessing the event based on
recall is different from the same operations based on some mechanical
record of the event - as sporting referees know all too well when
they have to justify the decisions they make based on their single
impression of a fleeting instant, and then have it compared with the
results of repeated slow motion replay of the event in question. This
is what Morphy was getting at in his Malinowski lecture, based both
on his field research and his devotion to Arsenal (as seen on TV).
Hindsight may not be perfect but technology may be of considerable
assistance! Now some words of caution: I am NOT being a technological
determinist. I am all too aware of the ways in which mechanically
produced documentation may mislead - just as much (though possibly
in different ways) as either contemporaneous or remembered accounts
may mislead. The politics of representation is not solved by the
invention of cameras and I do not want to be accused of suggesting
that. But one of the reasons for harping on about the changes that
technology may bring is that I think we tend to lack sensitivity about
the complex and interconnected web of relationships surrounding technologies
of representation and the representations themselves. To make this
more concrete consider an example which also demonstrates progress
in anthropology: contrast the transcripts contained in Malinowski's
book "Coral Gardens and their Magic Vol. 2: The Language
of Magic and Gardening" (1935) with a more recent work
in which the transcription is available alongside the tape recording
(and especially a recording of an event which was not organised in
order to make the recording)
1. Malinowski had to transcribe
by hand from informants who spoke slowly and clearly as he wrote.
Even the best possible transcription in the world in such conditions
can never be a representation of actual performances. Now, we can
record an event and struggle with the transcription afterwards. The
actors do not have to worry about the ethnographer, the ethnographer
does not have to attempt to control the event in order to make even
the most basic of transcripts. This is a crude contrast but it’s
sound. And it is worth reflecting upon - this takes us back to Morphy’s
anti-Proustian point about repeated access without recourse to memory.
Equipped with a recording we can later ask actors questions about
what was going on - we can ask about their later perceptions based
on a present viewing/hearing of a past event or sequence of events.
The result is a far more reflexive - and openly so - type of documentation.
It is possible to distinguish layers of documentation,
commentary and analysis, and that points to a more open discursive
anthropology - which I take to be a desirable outcome.
Monsters 1
As we approach the millennium there is a spectre haunting Europe.
The spectre is Frankenstein. Technophobia is all the rage and technophobes
are prone to raging. (Technophobia may be found in some versions of
‘new age-ism’ (but this is far from its only site)) Yet,
at the same time, the technophiles delight in the boundary transgression
which makes Frankenstein so fascinating. Interactive multimedia enables
new mixed types of interaction. So there is much excitement in the
media about Cyborgs and cybersex. Much of this is a massive over-reaction
- and ironically one which invokes a lot of technological determinism
of which anthropologists should properly be wary. Personhood is surely
caught up in machines but this is not a C20th phenomena. The argument
goes that using some versions of interactive computer networking (often
but not necessarily involving reference to sexuality in one form or
other) the participants can freely choose aspects
which are socially taken to be natural givens.
As an example of the hyperbole
2 consider this opening passage:
Electronically mediated communications have proliferated
in recent years, introducing a fragility and tenuousness into traditional
systems of signification, expanding social worlds, and generating
new forms of community, social bonds, networks and intimate relationships.
Wiley 1995: 145
So, in a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon or Domain) or a MOO (Mud Object-Oriented),
I can choose my gender, my sexual orientation, my race, class and
physical enablement. How liberating! How much this tells us about
ourselves! Yes, but wait minute. Let me step through some other technologies
and consider how they may achieve the same ends. First, consider
real-time, multivalent, analogue, aural, remote networking - the use
of the telephone! If you connect your personal handset to one of the
many telephone chatlines you can choose how you present yourself -
within the limits of your ability to mask sex related voice timbres
you can choose all sorts of things about yourself. How liberating,
how revealing. So too the older technology of newspapers printing
letters from readers. Some soft porn magazines print letters from
readers - I have no idea to what extent these have been written by
journalists on the staff of the magazines but even the possibility
of them publishing material from readers provides individuals the
opportunity to indulge in a fantasy and have that distributed. It
may not achieve immediate feedback but at least some of the channels
are there - we can see the limits of possibility, the types of ideal
or fantasy life that is considered...
And finally a real speculative possibility that is probably impossible
to get any data on. I wonder if there is any accuracy in TV and Film
portrayals of young Catholics going to confession and making up dirty
things to discomfort the hapless priest. It could have been happening
for centuries (though this is VERY unlikely), and as such it points
back to some long established way of exploring the possibilities of
self-hood: carnival, ritual-reversal and other liminal spaces so beloved
of anthropological analysis. One response then to the use made of
Haraway by e.g. Wiley is a Mr Jourdain- like one - we have always
been cyborgs but simply didn't know it.
Views on the Internet - Project X and visualisation - the Tyranny
of newtonian Space. Limits on the possibility of representation
Project X presents the user with a spatial metaphor with which to
navigate the Internet. In effect a bridge is made between video games
and the world wide web - we can trawl the web as if from the bridge
of the USS Enterprise - boldly. So, in a window on your screen words
appear. The words label conceptual groupings. Moving the mouse left
and left shifts your view point. Holding the mouse button down moves
you in to the picture, if you press down command key at the same time
you move back. With these abilities to move in the virtual 3D space
of the picture you can navigate the Internet. You can approach the
words that interest you, and avoid those you dislike. Words are like
worlds or galaxies (depending on your metaphoric propensities). Some
are more than that - they are bridges or wormholes into other similarly
structured 3D spaces. The Internet then appears as a series of rooms
which are multiply interlinked (perhaps like the different components
of an Escher drawing - where “standard looking” parts link
in defiance of Newtonian space. Windows in one room act as bridges
into the centre of another. No house can be built from such rooms.
This points to some of the weakness of the underlying metaphor - the
web of links is not directly represented except through the shading
which captures the ‘density’ of related concepts.
The intention of the Project X designers is to help us think of the
Internet as a multidimensional vector space - constructed from the
explicit interlinkages of cross-reference as well as from conceptual
analysis of content. It should then be possible to take a 3D sub-space
and navigate it through the more complex space just described. A 3D
version of moving a small 2D window over a painting or text document
which has been popularised by GUI (Graphical User Interface) interfaces
using a WIMP (Windows Icons Mouse Pulldown-menus) metaphor
3.
To create the spaces which Project X uses the designers have used
a variety of fuzzy matching algorithms to map the conceptual spaces
onto a 3D spaces in which the user moves. Brains are within
Psychology and near to minds. With that at the centre
the anthropology is somewhere over there on the left.
The lesson we can learn from this is that of the tyranny or hegemony
of three dimensional thought. Indeed it seems quite plausible that
we as a species cannot really think of anything but a quasi-Newtonian
3d space - or at least we may be able to think multi-dimensionally
but we cannot represent it as such other than mathematically.
Let me summarise the situation. Since Einstein’s 1916 general
relativity paper the consensus among physicists is that matter and
space are intimately connected, and the universe has a basic dimensionality
of 3+1
4 (but these are not newtonian
dimensions). At more or less the same time an interpretation and formalisation
of quantum mechanics was developed as a multidimensional vector space
which instantiates itself in the space described by Einstein.
Philosophically and empirically we can have little confidence in the
Newtonian 3 dimensions. We can, however, be confident that there are
an odd number of dimensions
5_
but there is absolutely no reason to suppose that we are
merely 3d beings - we could be a 3d subset of a larger dimensioned
space....
I am thinking now of the parable of Flatland a fable of two dimensional
beings and their encounter with 3d beings. One of the important consequences
of no little importance to anthropologists is the issue of enantiomorphism
or handedness. In a 2D world so-called “elbows”
have handedness - they are enantiomorphs - there is no transformation
(within the space) that will turn one into the other. This is exactly
the same as the way that left and right hands are similar but different
- there is no transformation (in our 3D space) that takes a left hand
to another - a mirror simulates a rotation in a fourth spatial dimensions.
So handedness is NOT a property of hands but of the objects in the
particular space in which they are embedded. In a 4D world it would
be straightforward to take a Left hand and spin it round so it is
a Right hand. (I remain undecided as to the implications of such theorising
for Mauss and Needham).
Perhaps I’m being frivolous and overly literal at the same time.
But this has relevance when using Project X. What it presents us with
is a set of 3D spaces that are interlinked. The complexity of the
interlinkage points to the underlying multi-dimensionality of the
structures being modelled but I suspect the appeal
of this model (using a 3D metaphor) points to its inadequacy: the
Internet is not a 3D space. This may be why users
are prone to feeling bewildered and lost. And such feelings may result
because the Internet defies cosy representation - 3D being the cosiest
representation of all which Project X seeks to instantiate.
An anthropological alternative may be genealogy - with the vagaries
of genealogies of which we are familiar such as degrees of cousinhood
and uncertain parenthood. Anyone who has tried to draw a genealogy
for a group of intermarried people of more than some thirty or so
individuals will have a vivid appreciation of a multidimensional space.
Hence one of the conclusions of this paper is to offer genealogies
as anthropological hostage to computer science!
