Urban Legends Interview: Discovering Language

  In an online age, what is “social” about social distancing? 

• What does this pandemic mean for the world(s) we continue to build our careers studying, and how should we take it into account when advising students whose own research projects coincide with this period of upheaval?
• Moving methods online may be one part of the answer, but ethnographers should also look at the Covid-19 pandemic – and more explicitly, at the expansion of digital communication technologies and platforms within it – as a “revelatory crisis.”
• They are a series of “cues” for ethnographic attention in this moment of multiple cultural, material, and political transformations. 
• Three themes that anthropologists might attune ourselves to in this period of global disruption.
• In the movement of labor and personal relationships to digital platforms, what differentiations – implicit or explicit – emerge between the kinds of relationships that can be materialized digitally, versus those that require face-to-face contact? What are the implications of these differentiations for power, and vulnerability?
• The movement of life to online forums is a form of privilege, available largely to those whose work was computer-based before the pandemic. 
• It reveals and exacerbates inequalities between those whose paychecks are secure and those whose paychecks are not. 
• But reliance on digital media is not only a function of privilege, and not always in the ways one might expect. 
• Digital platforms, for example, facilitate the continued employment of some “essential” work like Instacart shoppers, restaurant delivery workers, and an assemblage of increasingly insecure employees that make the Amazon empire possible. 
• Digital media are also important forums for sharing information, like news about unemployment benefits and employment opportunities, as well as government advisories and medical advice. 
• The “digital divide” – between those online and those not – is real, but not stark; it takes on unexpected contours, increasingly visible under current conditions. 

• three-tiered system: (1) labor that can be performed remotely has largely shifted to work-from-home online platforms; (2) “essential” labor, which cannot be performed remotely and is necessary for the functioning of basic health and economic systems continues, ideally under social distancing guidelines; (3) and work that cannot be performed online and is not “essential” has been curtailed. The formation and deepening of labor and social differentiations is one focus of research

• Ethnographers might consider, for example, the gendered implications of these convergences of labor, or track how and for whom these shifts in time-use and responsibility endure as the scaffolding of stay-at-home orders begins to dissipate.

• Ethnographically, we are compelled to ask: how do digital forums offer possibilities for extending care, and caregiving, when face-to-face contact is inadvisable? Where do they fall short? What forms of relating are curtailed, and what novel social relationships do they enable? What insights may be gained by thinking comparatively about labor, grief, and digital technologies across contexts before, during, and after the pandemic? 

• How are collective experiences imagined/enacted through social media? What is the role of algorithms and other forms of amplification in creating collectives (or the illusion thereof), and across what scales? 
• For many under stay-at-home orders, interactions with social and digital media (e.g. Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, online journalism, etc.) have taken on outsized importance for social interaction and learning. 
• media creates narratives that help people make meaning of this period of time (including various iconic images)
• As ethnographers, we can track the contours of these debates and the claims made within them. In the process, we can (and should) contest simplistic explanations of contemporary political difference as forms of “tribalism.” 
• As stay-at-home orders are lifted, what are the ensuing effects of public health efforts to trace, count, and manage populations, or failures to perform these actions? And what role do digital media play in these efforts or omissions?
• numbers play key roles in developing intelligibility from the unintelligible; of making the incomprehensible comprehensible, and governable. 
• digital media and private markets for “big data” seem likely to define how tracking and tracing are integrated into the development of a new sense of “normalcy,” in the vein of what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism.
• Even while the Covid-19 pandemic opens opportunities for connections across geographic space, it also foregrounds the “local,” and the material, embodied experiences of locality. 
• The spread of the virus requires physical encounter. These encounters link human lives not only with each other, but also with the more-than-human, including microorganisms, bats, pangolins, and our shared, non-living mediums of existence, like air, water, and surfaces. 
• The importance of locality is also reflected in representations of lived experience. Images shared on social media underscore unfamiliar experiences of familiar environments (like streets, monuments, and mountain ranges) seen through newly clean air, and absent of people. 

• Digital technologies, including physical devices, apps, and social media platforms are already playing a role in how these events are developing, and in how they are communicated, interpreted, and enrolled in other projects.  (1) This role may not be entirely negative; if used well, these platforms may enable more just and effective public health interventions, widen the reach of social safety nets, or amplify voices of protest. (2) Even in this moment when the classic research designs and methodologies of ethnography are disrupted, we have the opportunity to track new phenomena as they emerge by turning our ethnographic attention to these digital platforms and their intersections with lives offline. 

The Disappearance of Everyday Life & Fieldwork as we Know it-IMPOSSIBLE to do REASEARCH?

• For anthropologists, the COVID-19 pandemic brings with it immense challenges for work and research. 
• the heart of our research, the activity from which all of our findings are derived – namely the observation and analysis of the everyday sociocultural world – is not possible without direct contact with the people living these lives. 
• --There is little discussion of how the corona restrictions affect research in the social sciences. But social science is also based on empirical research, and many researchers are confronted with much the same difficulties as their colleagues in the natural sciences. And this includes anthropologists. 
• The “laboratory” that social anthropologists use is not located within the walls of their research institute, but in society itself, and their “experiments” are the social processes that take place there. Thus, when we pull the plug on social life, anthropologists are deprived of the source from which they produce knowledge.

Empty Streets, Closed Doors

Ethical Responsibility during the Crisis

• The official order to reduce social contact to a minimum made it impossible to build relationships with the local people – an activity that forms the backbone of ethnographic research. 
• public spaces for people to meet and mingle are empty, the conversations of the regulars at the village tavern have gone silent and people seek out the safety of their own four walls, and so...anthropological research also has to be put in hibernation. 
• we have a responsibility to carefully consider the consequences of all our actions and avoid causing harm to the people who will serve as partners in our research. Because anthropologists constantly circulate among their contacts, moving between various households, social groups, and people, engaging in such activities during an acute outbreak of a pandemic means to risk contributing to the further spread of the virus. 

Reinventing Anthropological Research

• many anthropologists have adapted their methods to online research - online tools and social media platforms offered a way to stay in contact with our research sites and the people who live there. 
• Online observation can only provide insight into the very specific spaces of the online world, where other rules apply than in the realm of offline social interactions. 
• Online research must depend heavily on narratives, but one of the strengths of ethnographic research is the way that it sees more than just the information that people give us in interviews. 
• Only long-term immersion in the realities of a place enables us to observe phenomena in their full complexity and notice and analyze the inexplicit, unwritten rules that govern the social world.

Understanding the Pandemic and Its Implications

• There is a growing mistrust directed towards political decision-makers, the dissatisfaction with the media and its reporting, and the (dare one say) viral spread of conspiracy theories. 
• Through its ability to distill knowledge from people’s lived experiences, social anthropology can play an important role in understanding the socio-political upheaval created by the coronavirus. 
• Questions of belonging and alienation have become even more important in the wake of the societal transformations set in motion by the pandemic. 

Bearing Witness:

• At its most general level, bearing witness is a valuable way to scrutinize violent encounters, traumatic events, dislocations, and structural inequalities. It can help obtain support from those who might feel distant from those events, diffuse pressure from communities most directly affected, and bring about change. 
• Bearing witness can take the form of communicating traumatic personal experiences or documenting for others the dislocations, institutionalized violence, and kinds of difference-making that often escape social examination. 
• A time for ACTION...It is a time to push back against those who think Black, disabled or elderly people don’t have lives worth saving. 

Writing From The Quarantine:

• The Great Quarantine, - three reflections on ethnography after COVID-19, centering on design, theory, and the digital. COVID-19” will become part of the social fabric. 
• The challenge of COVID-19 is unprecedented,--ethnographers have contended with disruption before. 
• This has included global events like World War II, which resulted in the “culture at a distance” framework best known from Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946). 
• It has also included more individualized events like the loss of one’s fieldnotes due to arson, as in the case of M. N. Srinivas’s The Remembered Village (1976). 
• These disruptions presented opportunities for innovation—for instance, the “culture at a distance” framework is recognized for helping establish the anthropology of mass media. 
• So often the most powerful ethnographic insights are not present in a proposal, or even known while conducting research—they emerge through the work of analysis itself. 
• Something that appears to be research for research’s sake might produce interventions of more lasting relevance than a hundred proposals crafted around a response to the immediacy of the pandemic. 
• Anthropologists must move beyond treating the digital as a necessary evil or inauthentic substitute, not least because such prejudice flies in the face of how billions of persons engage with digital socialities. Such dismissals threaten the relevance of anthropology after COVID-19 and deny ethnographers outside anthropology the contributions we have to offer.
• a greater share of human sociality will move online, and this will reshape offline socialities, and that anthropology must take this into account. 
• Digital anthropology is a methodological resource but it is also a domain of inquiry like medical anthropology, legal anthropology, or economic anthropology, and this should be recognized in our disciplinary frameworks. 
• We should steer a ground between either valorizing the digital as a magical solution to ethnography in a time of pandemic, or dismissing the digital as an intimidating, unpleasant thing we address as minimally as possible so that we can “get back to the real.”
• Going online creates new social intimacies. It is not necessarily a last resort: it is often a familiar space, even a new frontier. It is not always a second-best substitute for the physical, and digital socialities have their own meanings and implications. 
• Anthropologists excel in the study of particularity, and there is a real need for digital ethnographic work that explores the similarities and differences between online games, virtual worlds, social network sites, texting and message, memes and image-based socialities, and so on. 
• Additionally, in many cases digital socialities allow for greater anonymity than in the physical world, and less surveillance as well. 

How to acknowledge the entrenched injustices that COVID-19 lays bare and the new inequalities the situation reveals.

A “can’t do” framework for research methods under a pandemic

• There will be many people so preoccupied with the coronavirus crisis that they will be unable to discuss,  show interest, or concentrate on any other aspect of life that the anthropologist might want to draw attention to.  A lot of our interlocutors will be facing serious financial hardship.  They will have lost their jobs and become unemployed.  They will be trying to pay rent, incurring debt, and paying or trying to pay bills and in need of actual, practical help from the anthropologist, including, where possible, financial assistance. Many will be displaced as migrant laborers or refugees, and as people who are experiencing domestic violence.  Having a disability may make it impossible for many to use online resources
• Consider the point of view of interlocutors assessing the reliability or trustworthiness of the anthropologist.  They may not be sure they want to have a conversation with somebody they haven’t met in person or known for a considerable length of time. Some interlocutors will worry about being recorded during their interviews even if they haven’t given consent, because they’re not able to observe what is happening in the Zoom room the anthropologist is working from.  And some might feel intruded upon by the technology and may have ethical misgivings about being researched in this way.
• Beyond turning online resources into an instrument for research, an engagement with online methods will also need to take on board the forms of conceptualization that have emerged from work in digital ethnography. 
• Some of this work has contributed to a re-imagining of intimacy and a re-theorizing of social relations. 
• Rather than just trying to boost our technological adeptness and get to grips with technology as if it were simply a tool for research under extraordinary circumstances, we will also need to think about the changes that the use of Zoom, Skype, and Whatsapp is bringing to social relations across the board. 
• A whole lot of questions about how we constitute our sociality, gender relations, intimacy, and sexuality have been revived and are being revisited. 
• Going on lockdown, being furloughed from work or working from home, taking care of one’s children 24/7 without relying on supporting institutions such as schools, or being unable to attend the funerals of family members in person has brought ‘the social’ under a magnifying glass. 
• the way we now have to relate with one another and about how that differs from how we used to engage prior to the pandemic.

• Likewise, reflections on intimacy have exploded: what is friendship at a time of Covid-19? what is love? how will one live one’s sexuality? As fundamentally differentiated as the answers to these questions would be, reflections on them have come hand in hand, as well, with gender, class, and race theory. 

• The deeply uneven way in which the pandemic has hit people by reference to their social differences has elevated critical reflections on inequality to a level unforeseen. People have become anthropologists of themselves and their own societies. CRISES AND DISASTERS ALWAYS REVEAL INEQUALITY (of all sorts).