In a few years I want to organize a panel for the AAA called “The Liberalism of Anthropology and the Anthropologies of Liberalism” that opens the door to discussing the role of liberalism in the general anthropological project (notably in trying to breed tolerance) and how anthropological work, especially of the last twenty years (although really since its inception) has also worked to critically disturb the liberal project (in many ways, but including debunking the myth of the liberal subject and voicing the limits of liberal tolerance). I want to say more about the ways in which anthropologists have walked this line, but I have to read for tomorrow’s class and more than anything else I wanted to permanently jot this down so as to not forget my title.

The (overpriced) Amtrak train is rapidly hurling itself north toward New York City, the vanishing light gently illuminating the first snowfall of the year. I am heading back from the American Anthropological Association annual meetings, which were held in Washington D.C this year. After a year’s hiatus, I attended to present a short version of my paper on hacker conferences, which I have pushed along further to entertain more general questions and ideas about the role of conferences in ensuring forms of solidarity among publics that are dispersed geographically. While there are other events that are far more visceral or more profoundly produce what Emile Durkheim has called collective effervescence, conferences are probably one of the most common social forms for ensuring a steady state of moral solidarity among connected but geographically dispersed groups of people. Their importance and role is often overlooked, I think, because of their sheer ubiquity (and I am sure the fact that many are held in creepy corporate hotels populated by seriously over sized & gaudy furniture where you can sit and sip your overpriced Starbuck’s coffee does not help). But it is because they are so common that I think we need to take them a little more seriously as distinctly 20th century events that combine much older elements of ritual and pilgrimage.

Because I have attended so many developer and hacker conferences, which tend to be longer as well as far more more enveloping, festive, and, frankly, well executed than academic ones, I tend to think of academic conferences as tepid, lightweight versions. But as I make my way back home, I am pretty worn yet inspired from this one as I decided to sort of let go to give it my all, sleeping far less than I really should have. I usually hold back some, perhaps because most academic conferences I attend are smack in the middle of the academic year, so my mind is partially occupied with the pile of work that awaits me, somewhat depressingly, at the end of your journey. Academic conferences can also produce a fair bit of anxiety, especially for younglings like myself, given that you are performing your skills (or lack of) and ideas (or lack of) to people you respect and admire too. Perhaps it is also due to the hotel environment, which I find not only particularly uninspiring but in all honesty, sort of soul sucking, though albeit, *very* conveniently so.

This time, however, I was not going to let the hotel suck any more soul out of me because I was thrilled to see friends from time’s past, had a great time on my panel on digital subjectivities, and was excited to meet new folks and talk about those topics that I spend a lot of time thinking about. I also think the proliferation of (very cute) babies among my friends and the now visible crow’s feet adorning the smiling eyes of my friends made me feel the passing of time a little more forcefully than really I wanted to. So I did my best to turn that pesky faucet of time of off so as to give way to immersion, drawing those from past into the shared nest of the present, so that I would want to see them again in the future. And in the end, that is the point: social reproduction and shouldn’t procreation be fun? I think so…

Now back to that pile of work.

It is nice to read the New York Times and get some good news. Nadia Abu El-Haj was granted tenure after a bitter public battle opposing her appointment. As someone who has taken graduate courses with her in Chicago and who was advised by her, I know Columbia and Barnard made the right choice.

There is a debate raging in anthropological circles over the role of anthropologists in the military and the Iraq War Purse Lip Square Jaw has a nice round-up of of articles on the topic. I have only read bits and pieces here and there but this morning I finally gave my full attention to this intriguing article by David Price, which not only covers the vexing debate but discloses the rampant plagiarism in the The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

Recently a Debian user left a really nice note letting me know “It makes
me happy and proud to learn that boricuas are Debian developers! (Hopefully you are not the only one). This is for me the best Debian News since Etch released. Proud and happy for you.”

Here I have to confess, however that I am neither a DD nor really a true Boriqua. I have studied Debian for many years, but have never officially joined. In terms of PR, none of my family is originally from there as my father is Jewish American and my mom was born in Russian, wandered as war refugee for many years in Europe and eventually landed in Venezuela, where I was born. But I have made my home in PR for many years and do consider it one of my many homes.

Speaking of many homes, I also feel, even though I am not a DD, that Debian is an important touchstone in my life. It reminded me of a conversation I had with Manoj recently related to this topic, who almost mistook me for a DD:

[biella] who is that DD that wrote an anthro thesis on debian? [08:55]
[biella] he is brazilian

[manoj] I was gonna say that the dd who did an anthro thesis on debian
was you, then it struck me that you are not a dd, but I still
think of you as one now, and then it struck me further that
making you a dd might compromise your postiion as an observer

After many years following the project, I have grown quite attached to it, and every year, a few months before Debconf I am reminded of this attachment. I have managed to make Debconf only every other year, and usually when I face this fact, a sense of melancholia and slight sadness sets in, especially when I hear of everyone making plans to go. I always start to question my decision to stay back, then hit all sorts of websites for cheap tickets, and start to wonder if I can perhaps manage to complete some work there, which is the main reason this year I am staying away.

I then make myself confront REALITY and remind myself that the whole reason I love attending Debconf is because of its extreme vitality, which after a week, leaves you wrung out and tired, because you put so much of your attention and mind, soul and heart in the events. So even if I go for a week, or longer, you usually need a week ore more to recover. I am not sure I can spare such time this year, especially since less than a month after Debconf, I am packing my bags and moving back to the east coast of the United States. And as I learned last year and the year before and two years before, these sorts of long-distance moves take a lot of your time.

My longing reminds me of how important it is to celebrate those things in life you love. And while there is more to Debconf than a celebration, much of it is just that, a chance, a space, a place by which and where you celebrate. And since I sit only in the shadows of Debian, I imagine the pleasure and joy runs deeper and wider for those who sit at its heart. So if you are on the fence on whether to go, this is your friendly public service announcement that it is, indeed, so worth your while.

“A plains Indian had just placed food on a new grave, when a whilte man looking on jocularly asked, “Do you expect the dead man to come up and eat that food?” To which the Indian responded, “As soon as your dead come up to smell the flowers you place on their graves” [Story told by anthropologist Margaret Mead, and which I read about this morning (and laughed, seriously) in Taking Laughter Seriously by John Morreal]

My Ubuntu-counterpart, Andreas Lloyd, has written a nice response to Lars Risan’s interesting discussion of tensions between Ubuntu and Debian and in it, he visits, with great detail (or as much as a blog post will allow), the limits of launchpad. It is exciting to see more anthropologists conducting in-depth research on F/OSS projects with a keen awareness of the ways technology mediate or make possible certain social relationships. . .

Because the web 2.0 “crowd” is so “smart” the intelligence agencies are thinking of tapping into this so-called collective wisdom and you can read about new efforts designed to create open source spying in the NYTimes. And make sure to check out Chris Kelty (who was on my dissertation committee) excellent commentary

A few months ago I finished Play Money by Julian Dibbel and like his My Tiny Life before it, the writing style is simple yet sumptuous, or I guess just simply sumptuous.

Like the travel writings that pre-figured anthropological writing, Dibbel takes us to a “far-away” exotic land (but only a click or two away) that are populated by a motley crew of wizard (or is lizard)? slayers, gold-diggers, money-makers, and virtual-world-builders. For many, these MMOGsare no strange-lands but are becoming weaved firmly and intimately into the fabric of everyday life, whether as entertainment, sociality, and or for a cadre of folks, as a source of income generation.

I think the book has gotten enough coverage that I don’t need to rehearse its content in any detail but the basic story is that Julian embarks on a real world quest in the virtual land of quests to try to make enough money (to be specific make a little more than his monthly salary as a freelance writer) from trading and selling a slew of virtual objects and gold. In taking us along, he gives a compelling entry into the imaginative and morally complex world of these games. And better is that whether you know nothing about them or are a seasoned player, the book has much to offer.

One of the reasons I respect Julian Dibbel is because he takes his sweeeet time to churn out a book-length manuscript. In a day and age when there is so much pressure to release quick and often, especially when writing about anything in the so-called virtual plane of existence, he waited nearly 8 years from the publication of his last book on gaming, My Tiny Life before publishing on a considerably higher-tech phenomenon.

Following him on his most recent adventure, you learn that he threw himself into a variety of gaming environments persistently and consistently and did at least 3 years of research and writing (at one point in the book he confesses how excruciating writing for him, which is hard to believe as the words slip so nicely off the paper but whatever the extent of his writing angst is, he clearly spends a lot of care in crafting his sentences). And I am starting to think that if more people followed this ethic of long-term immersion, coupled with slow-brewed productive sparsity, we would get higher quality products (Yes, kinda like the Debian release cyclce).

Like any good ethnographer, he gives an intimate portrait of life in these worlds of copious play where various types of real world economies have mushroomed apace with new technological developments. That is, he gives us a taste of what it is like, as he cleverly puts it “to own unreality.” Couched within tales of gaming gone real world economic, are hearty reflections on the place of play in social and economic life, the close resemblance and conceptual affinity between computers and games (and not just computer games, and here he does a fantastic job at explaining the Turing Test), self-doubts about writing in general and in particular about this topic, commodity fetishism, and the changing nature of capitalism in a world of ever-greater abstractions. All of this makes for an enjoyable read that if used in the classroom (which like A Tiny Life, I am sure will become standard for courses on Virtual Worlds) allows you to bring in some good supplemental material whether Edward Castranova’s Synthetic Worlds, Greg Lastowka and Dan Hunter’s The Laws of Virtual Worlds and or older heavy-hitters like Max Weber and Karl Marx.

The only topic I think I would have liked to seen included is that of capitalist finance, because there are, I think, some real affinities, phenomenologically and conceptually, between finance capitalism and “gaming the virtual game.”

Otherwise some of my favorite sections were on hackers and the object of the computer, but of course, I am biased that way. So here I leave you with a tasty morsel of something that was sumptuous to ingest:

“It is this endlessly repeatable collusion of freedom and determinism-the warp and woof of fixed rules and free play, of running code and variable input—that sets both games and computers apart, together from the larger universe of information technologies they inhabit…. But only games share the universal machine’s game’s thoroughgoing commitment to the principle of recursion: the chained repetition of simple operations, each building on both the input of the moment and the outcomes of preceding steps. And only games, therefore, come close to capturing that precise mi of unpredictability and inevitability that makes the computer such a powerful simulator of our lived experience of the world.” p. 104

Read and perhaps sign the letter urging discussion for open access in Anthropology!