Sometimes I feel ashamed to be close with my friends.
“How come you’re so distant? Just come over here, it’s no problem, you know.”
I’m not allowed to have a small heart.

Gusti Ayu Ketut Suartini, a young Balinese woman, shares how hard it is to be close to her new-found friends; they have to remind her that they are not afraid of her unusual movements, grunts, strange facial expressions and unexpected tics, the symptoms of her Tourette Syndrome. She remembers too well how the neighbours in her home village made fun of her awkward tics, calling her ‘bird dancer’ because her odd movements – so out of line with Balinese norms of placid, graceful comportment – resembled Manuk Rawa trance dancers, possessed by spirits. The neighbours even suggested she might be suffering a kind of permanent possession by the spirits who only temporarily inhabited the dancers.

We meet Gusti, and see how her life is shaped by the way other people interpret her tics, spitting, and uncontrollable movements, in Robert Lemelson’s movie, The Bird Dancer. The Bird Dancer doesn’t show us Tourette Syndrome (TS) as a disease, or discuss its neurological underpinnings. Instead, the movie is an exploration of Tourette as ‘illness’: local, meaningful, social, demoralizing, and driving Gusti and her family to despair.

Using video collected over more than a decade, Lemelson tracks Gusti’s life with illness, discusses the origin of her suffering, her attempts to find ‘healing,’ and her own understanding of her condition. Eventually we see how, even though her disease is not cured and her symptoms persist, her illness can be partially escaped, including through several subtle interventions that Lemelson makes in her life. The trailer of the movie is available for general viewing and embedded below; the whole film can be purchased from Documentary Educational Resources or ‘rented’ from Amazon (if you’re in the US).

The Bird Dancer trailer: http://vimeo.com/15539709

The Bird Dancer is one of six films in the series, Afflictions: Culture and Mental Illness in Indonesia. This post, however, focuses entirely on Tourette Syndrome and The Bird Dancer, both because the disorder is fascinating, but also because it’s Tourette Syndrome Awareness Month. TS is a source of fascination and amusement in the West, especially one of its rarest symptoms, coprolalia: inappropriate swearing or uttering of obscenities. But the condition is also a model disorder, both neurologically and neuroanthropologically.

Neurologically, TS arises from a complex interaction between developmental, neurobiological and behavioural mechanisms (see Jankovic 2001). Neuroanthropologically, TS is fascinating because, although it can cause minimal direct impairment to the sufferer in some cases, the condition requires the sufferer to manage an unruly nervous system and deal constantly with the social repercussions of the inability to abide by norms of personal conduct and bodily comportment. Tourette is, as neurologist and Tourettic Peter Hollenbeck (2003) writes, an ‘illness of the observer,’ afflicting carriers primarily through perception and interaction management problems by undermining the appearance of being ‘normal.’

In The Bird Dancer, we join local observers of Gusti’s condition. Rob has opted to keep the discussion in the video non-technical and minimally intrusive, leaving greater space for discussion, exploration and compassion for an individual trying to cope with TS in an inhospitable social environment; we gradually become accustomed to Gusti’s tics and see more clearly her desperation. The Bird Dancer shows us how Tourette symptoms collide with the interpersonal expectations of Balinese life, the social aspirations of one Balinese sufferer, and the resources of both traditional healers and biomedical practitioners.

Gusti is not alone in suffering from symptoms that are as much social as neurological; research on TS in the United States and elsewhere in the West highlight the challenge of living what Hollenbeck (2003) calls a ‘jangling’ life, managing a ‘constant problem of self-presentation’ posed by one’s own irrepressible gestures, trying to render these gestures semantically meaningless rather than stigmatizing, frightening, or even offensive (Buckser 2007: 256). Although the tics can be almost incapacitating in the most severe cases, many with TS have normal cognitive and psychological abilities (for an extreme example, see Guy D. Francis’ YouTube channel, including his ‘Tourette karaoke’, for firsthand discussion by a brave and very funny man living with severe TS and Asperger’s Syndrome).

Since 15 May to 15 June is Tourette Syndrome Awareness Month in the US, I thought that this post was particularly appropriate, especially as a bit of a come-back post for me (news on why I’ve been away sometime soon). Here in Australia, we’ve just gone through our Tourette Syndrome Awareness Week, which wrapped up on 12 May.

Rob Lemelson, Afflictions, & declaration of interest

Rob Lemelson is a psychological anthropologist and documentary filmmaker at the Department of Anthropology and the Semel Institute of Neurosciences of UCLA, as well as the founder of the Foundation for Psychocultural Research. Rob is also Director of Elemental Productions, which produces documentary film, and Vice President and Secretary of the Lemelson Foundation, established by inventor Jerome Lemelson to encourage creativity and innovation.

Lemelson said (in an interview with Ajay Singh) that he originally went to Bali as a psychological anthropologist to investigate claims that the prognosis for recovery from psychiatric conditions was better in the developing world than in wealthier countries (which I discussed in an earlier post at our old site):

My original project was looking at issues of outcome and recovery from severe mental illness, following the World Health Organization’s studies that people in the developing world have better recovery outcomes: If you develop schizophrenia in Bali, India or Nigeria, you’re more likely to return home and to work and have fewer hospitalizations.

Specifically, as the film guide for The Bird Dancer explains, Lemelson was investigating the Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders associated with Streptococcal Infections (PANDAS) hypothesis (Tucker 2011: 3). The PANDAS hypothesis is a controversial theory that children with a genetic vulnerability can have an autoimmune overreaction to streptococcus that attacks the nervous system leading to obsessive-compulsive disorder or tic disorders, like TS (for more on the controversy, see de Oliveira and Pelajo 2010; Robertson 2011; Singer et al. 2011).

The videos in the Afflictions series, instead, are a longer-term outcome of Lemelson’s research in Indonesia. Rather than focusing primarily on the question of prognosis or disease etiology, the series explores from an intimate perspective, up close and sometimes painfully personal, how individuals live with mental illness in Indonesia. Because of this long-term project, The Bird Dancer, like the other videos in the series, was difficult to put together. In a review of three of the Affliction videos, Karen Nakamura (2011: 656) recognizes the challenge, but also Lemelson’s achievement: ‘Because the films are a compilation of research footage as well as contemporary material, some of the editing is a bit choppy with temporal continuity sacrificed for the narrative arcs.’

Nakamura points out that Lemelson ‘appears in the film both visibly and through voiceovers that are more reflexive than didactic.’ I found Lemelson’s voiceover and presence on screen minimal and non-intrusive, helping to explain the narrative, but also a bit awkward, almost as if he would prefer not to have to be there. His discomfort, however, matches his subjects’ reticence, their difficulty talking openly about such private, embarrassing conditions, or about mental illnesses that are simply difficult to understand, and the likelihood that some of what they are saying is being voiced for the first time. Some of the awkwardness also arises because the people Lemelson interviews defy a Western audience’s expectations for self presentation, as the film guide provided for the movie cautions:

Some viewers of the film may be surprised to notice Gusti or her family members smiling as they speak about sad or stressful matters or when they are in uncomfortable situations. As a caveat, this demeanor should not be interpreted as her family not caring about her situation or as them actively laughing at her. Rather, it may be seen as the expression of a Balinese approach to emotion management. Balinese people generally strive to maintain a pleasing and bright appearance, even in situations where they may be internally experiencing sadness, strife, anger, or physical pain. Their attempts to appear cheerful include laughing and smiling during circumstances where other cultures might find it inappropriate or even rude to do so. (Tucker 2011: 8 )

The effect, overall, is poignant; smiling family members, at times suddenly choking back sobs or breaking into tears, in remarkably beautiful surrounds, discussing the wrenching problems thrown up by mental illness. Beautifully filmed, and with surprisingly good music, these are not slick, funny or easy-to-watch videos; they stick with the viewer, in part, because they are so raw emotionally, uncomfortable, and even jarring in these juxtapositions. As reviewer Nakamura adds, ‘Even jaded students are sure to be captivated by the intensity of the images and the skillful storytelling’ (2011: 656). I agree. The spare voiceover and pace of the video allow the viewer to live his or her way into a life that is doubly alien for most: both culturally and psychiatrically a world apart.

But before we go further, however, I have to declare that this is not a blind review; I have a vested interest in promoting Rob Lemelson’s work, not only because of what he has done for me and my colleagues, but also because of what he has done for psychological anthropology in general. Rob’s a driving force in psychological anthropology, as his list of affiliations above suggests, through his own research, writing, and editing, but also because he organizes and sponsors so many activities through the Lemelson Foundation, the Foundation for Psychocultural Research (FPR), and personally. When Daniel and I were trying to pull together our conference on neuroanthropology in 2009 (which resulted in a book that will be out later this year), we received support from Rob, the Lemelson Foundation, and the Society for Psychological Anthropology.

Right now, I’m already counting sleeps until I get to go to the 5^th FPR-UCLA Interdisciplinary Conference: Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Methods, Applications, in October (more on that as it gets close). Because of my home university’s new absurdist travel policy (file under ‘perverse incentives’), I would not be able to attend without Rob’s and the FPR’s support.

So I owe Rob. I don’t normally do video reviews. Hell, I don’t normally go to movies. But if every psychological anthropologist with a practical or intellectual debt of some sort to Rob refused to review his work, you’d be knocking out a fairly large chunk of the people who could discuss the Afflictions series.

Tourette Syndrome: An ‘illness of the observer’

Georges Gilles de la Tourette, who undertook advanced study at Jean-Martin Charcot’s clinic in the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris alongside Sigmund Freud, first described nine patients with the condition that would bear his name in 1885. He didn’t ‘discover’ the disorder; the Marquise de Dampierre, the first case, was described by Itard in 1825. The Marquise was especially noteworthy because her coprolalia was so incongruous with her noble birth. According to Wikipedia, her most common epithets were ‘merde’ and ‘foutu cochon’ (‘shit’ and ‘filthy pig’). The Marquie de Dampierre case established a pattern that the paradigmatic cases of TS had the most spectacular and exotic symptoms: uncontrollable barking of obscenities, violent gestures, self harm and odd behaviours like echolalia, or the tendency to repeat what others say.

In fact, coprolalia is quite rare; only 10-15% of all Tourette Syndrome sufferers in the United States have the symptom which so captivates public imagination. In Japan, only 4% of those with TS have coprolalia, although the frequency can go much higher in some contexts; some samples suggest rates as high as 60% (see Lemelson 2004: 51). Gusti has coprolalia, at least for a while, distressing her family by calling out ‘bastard dog’ and other obscenities at inappropriate times.

But, as neurobiologist Peter J. Hollenbeck, diagnosed with TS in adulthood, writes, the visible and audible tics are just the outward sign of the internal experience of Tourette urges. He suggests that these explosive tics and vocalizations provide the portrait of a disorder that is more complex to the person living it:

The most common neuropsychiatric illnesses command our attention and challenge our imagination so deeply that they inspire popular metaphors. There is the dismal gray cloud of depression, the debilitating fire-and-ice of bipolar disorder, the waking nightmare of psychosis. But off at the edge of public awareness, out in the satellite parking lot of clinical attention, sits my personal affliction, Gilles de la Tourette syndrome. If it requires its own metaphor, I suggest something like “the car alarm” of neuropsychiatric disorders.

The sounds of this alarm, the outward symptoms of Tourette, consist of abrupt, repetitive physical movements and the production of sounds that in rare cases rises to the blurting out of words. From the moment in childhood that these movements, called tics, arise, their nature, frequency, and intensity vary in a bewildering progression. The less apparent, internal symptoms involve the buildup of sensations and urges that precede and impel the tics. Tourette is odd enough that some writers have afforded it an idealized, vaguely romantic treatment; it is startling enough that stand-up comics and B movies present it in ribald caricature. This abrupt, twitchy, bone-rattling condition has been my constant companion for as long as I can remember.  (Hollenbeck 2003)

The chief symptom of Tourette Syndrome, according to the DSM-IV, is a persisting pattern of multiple motor and one or more verbal tics which occur in bouts, many times a day. The number, frequency and complexity of the tics change over time, and appear to respond both to situations like stress and to suggestibility, but must last longer than one year to meet the diagnostic criteria (Robertson 2000: 427). The nature of these tics can vary quite a bit. For some, the bouts of tics can be so rapid and severe that they are practically immobilized; but for others, the tics are subtle and those with TS become so adept at managing them that they can go undiagnosed for years, as Hollenbeck did. Buckser (2007: 259) details:

Physical tics range from simple muscular movements, like eye blinks and shoulder rotations, to complex movements of the face, body, and hands. Oral tics range from peeps, whistles, and throat clearing to the repetition of specific words or phrases. Individuals vary greatly in the number, kinds, and severity of their tics. Not only does each sufferer manifest a different combination of tics, the combinations shift and change over time, giving every individual a distinctive tic history. Tics also vary in their visibility. Most are relatively unobtrusive, and some may be completely imperceptible to an observer, such as clenching of the back muscles or the larynx, or oral tics involving the drawing in of breath. Others, however, involve large-scale physical gestures like darting the hands about, touching objects or people, and hitches or skips in the gait, all of which draw attention.

A tic, however, is not an unconscious or uncontrollable movement, like a seizure. In certain situations – tired, stressed, or exhausted from trying to conceal their peculiar movements – a Tourettic may find that the tics become more pronounced, frequent, and urgent. But under the right circumstances individuals with TS can seek to manage, stifle, redirect or mitigate their tics. Hollenbeck (2003) describes how, for an hour-long lecture before 400 students, he can focus intensely and go without tics. But when he finishes, he writes that he feels like he is holding back ‘God’s own sneeze.’ Hollenbeck must retreat to his office like a dolphin coming up to breathe (his metaphor), to tic freely until the intense urge subsides, like a ‘terrible itch.’

It may seem hard to believe that they are all involuntary: a blinking eye, rotating head, flailing arm, a sniff, a whistle, a phrase muttered under the breath, a halted stride, a little hop. But they are. Don’t ask me to stop ticcing right now. I am a disciplined person who can run 30 miles, shovel snow for hours in the bitter cold, or go without eating for a couple of days. But on a morning like this, I cannot halt my tics, at least not for long. (Hollenbeck 2003)

Anthropologist Andrew Buckser, based on field research with Tourettics in Indiana, offers this explanation of the combination of compulsion with partial control:

It is not movement itself that is uncontrollable in Tourette, but rather the urge to move, the feeling that a movement must be made. A Tourettic who experiences the need to, say, raise an arm, will not find the arm shooting up against his will. Rather, he will feel a powerful urge to move the arm, an urge that can be relieved only by making the movement. The best comparison, and one often made by people with TS, is with a sneeze. A person who needs to sneeze must do so, and sooner rather than later, but the action can be repressed, at least temporarily, and the actor will have control over its form. This degree of control means that a person with Tourette can often defer a tic until it will go unnoticed, or else combine it with another movement so that it looks less like a tic. (Buckser 2007: 262)

Gusti’s brother asks her, begs her to control her actions, but Gusti describes this urge as being like ‘ants under her skin’: maddening and unrelenting.

The problem with TS, as Hollenbeck describes, is not the urge to act or make noise; the disorder is not debilitating or progressive. In fact, many sufferers of TS find their compulsions waning with age and, unless they have another psychological condition (and many do, especially obsessive-compulsive disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), does not necessarily cause any cognitive or health problems. Rather, Hollenbeck (2003) tells us, ‘In large part, the discomfort, annoyance, and intervention of onlookers are what make me a Tourette sufferer. If I have a tic and there is no one there to mock me, is it a tic?’

Managing observers of Tourette Syndrome

Tourette does not shorten life, limit mobility, or impair cognitive or emotional function. It does, however, impose a constant problem of self-presentation, a need to manage the confusing and misleading impressions that tics make on other people. While the genesis of TS is neurological, its most important symptom is semantic, the ongoing need to attach meaning to what are quite literally empty gestures. (Buckser 2007: 256)

Both Hollenbeck’s and Buckser’s accounts suggest that those with TS have to adapt to the ways that other people respond to their tics as much as they have to learn to adopt to the bodily tics themselves. ‘The result is a constellation of social symptoms (misunderstanding, deception, suspicion, and occasional embarrassment) that are as diagnostic of the experience of Tourette as the tics and vocalizations themselves’ (ibid.: 265). Buckser describes this problem perceptively as a ‘semantic’ one; the bodies of those with TS constantly send unintended messages to onlookers, messages that may provoke fear, bring stigma, or cause offense because of the way that they are read or understood.

Most individuals with Tourette Syndrome become quite good at concealing that they have the condition, becoming adept at providing alternative meanings to their unusual gestures and vocaliations. Using a combination of strategies that Buckser (2008) label displacement, misattribution, and contextualization those with TS seek to manage away the possibility that their unruly actions or vocalizations will lead to stigma, embarrassment or conflict.

With displacement, Tourettics seek out times or places where their tics will not be noticed, sometimes even during face-to-face interaction by carefully observing when it is safe to ‘release’ a tic. Buckser (ibid.: 176), for example, interviewed a judge who presided over cases for years while concealing his TS, finding ways to avoid onlookers in court noticing his tics by carefully observing sight lines, people’s attention, and how he positioned himself. Other subjects talked about dropping school supplies when in grade school so that they could tic under cover of their desks, or finding safe, secluded spaces to release tics where they wouldn’t be noticed at work. Hollenbeck retreated to his office; Guy Francis has to stay home, sometimes amusing himself by making karaoke videos when his coprolalia and other tics are debilitating.

In contrast, misattribution as a management strategy involved the individual with TS convincing onlookers that a tic was really some other activity; a bout of blinking was the result of an awkward contact lens, facial tics were covered by pretending to blow the nose, a head jerk was passed off as dodging an insect or suddenly noticing something. One subject worked as a cashier in a grocery store and passed off his tendency to touch his equipment frequently as a result of having obsolete, finicky equipment rather than a tic (ibid.: 178). He turned down an upgrade in his equipment because the old check-out computer provided such a convenient explanation for his tapping and other gestures.

Finally, in contextualization strategies, a person with TS will explain their actions, often by suggesting that they have a ‘medical problem’ (ibid.: 180). One factory worker who had been the butt of cruel teasing explained his syndrome to a co-worker over lunch; shocked to learn that he had been teasing his co-worker for a ‘medical condition,’ his co-worker called the shift crew together and explained TS to the whole group, bringing an end to treatment so harsh that it nearly caused depression. Buckser points out, however, that contextualization strategies pose their own costs: the TS sufferer must be willing, not only to teach others repeatedly about his or her condition, but also to be redefined by the condition. Redefinition includes running risks associated with having a ‘medical condition’ or ‘mental illness,’ or being considered ‘disabled,’ when many people with Tourette do not feel they are impaired.

In fact, the majority of Tourettics are so successful that the condition is much more prevalent than most people realize. Tourette Syndrome affects approximately 1% of children aged 5 to 18 years of age across cultures, although most cases in the United States, for example, are ‘undiagnosed and mild, without distress, impairment or coprolalia’ (Robertson 2011: 101; see also Robertson 2000). Because of comedic portrayals in the media, the American public, for example, often expects Tourette to be spectacular, jarring, and dramatic. The irony is that, because those with TS become so adept at concealing their tics, and the public expects TS to lead to outrageous behaviour, Tourretics’ ability to adapt and misattribute tics

subtly shapes the way that the larger culture sees Tourette. It submerges the small gestures and sounds that constitute the great majority of the disease’s symptoms into other categories, leaving the illness to be defined by its more florid manifestations. It makes Tourette seem to be much rarer than it is, to be a disease that ordinary people very seldom see—because when they do see it, it almost always looks like something else. (Buckser 2008: 178)

Especially in young people, many of the less dramatic cases of TS-related tics are ‘wrongly attributed to hyperactivity, nervousness, habits, allergies, asthma, dermatitis, and other conditions’ (Jankovic 2001: 1184). Experts on the disorder say that they frequently spot individuals with TS ‘passing’ in everyday life, managing so that their symptoms escape notice by non-expert eyes.

Although TS was long (and wrongly) thought to be very rare, the unusual mannerisms, facial tics, and compulsions of the syndrome, at the same time, have become signature marks of madness in the West. As Buckser (2008: 187, note 16) points out, in movies like The Pink Panther Strikes Again and Matchstick Men, actors signal that they are mentally ill by adopting an eye twitch, hallmark of TS. In Blake Edwards’ Pink Panther series, for example, Inspector Clouseau’s nemesis, former Inspector Herbert Dreyfus (played by Herbert Lom), escapes from an asylum where he is confined after being driven mad by working alongside the bumbling Clouseau. Dreyfus is steadily reduced to greater and greater madness, and more and more emphatic twitching, by his inability to kill Clouseau, so that, at the end of the movie, he is simply a single twitching eye (the whole story involves a doomsday weapon, … look, the point is not that it’s a plausible scenario, only that it’s meaningful to the audience). Similarly, one of the most obvious portrayals of TS in a popular albeit painfully bad movie (at least according to online search) is ‘Ruth,’ a woman with TS and severe coprolalia, played by Amy Poehler, in Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo.

So TS symptoms are hallmarks of ‘madness’ in Western imagery at the same time that those with TS, far more common than the public realizes, are experts at concealing most of their symptoms, except in those situations where it is simply impossible (some school children with TS, for example, report that the stress and expectation of complete silence in exams make these settings a nightmare for self management). Because of the stigma attached to the most dramatic signs of Tourette, those who can ‘pass’ or conceal their condition do; society as a whole is left blinkered to just how widespread the condition is, and, at the same time, how well people with it are able to cope. For a neuroanthropologist, it’s a fascinating and utterly diabolical dynamic for those individuals with severe TS symptoms, as neurological peculiarity intersects and coping strategies intersect with public perception in ways devastating to some sufferers.

Having Tourette Syndrome in a Balinese village

When Gusti tells us that she is ‘not allowed to have a small heart’ near the end of The Bird Dancer, she speaks through a combination of tears and smile. We see her watch video of her own life – some of the same footage that we, too, have seen in the video– at a public screening, now from the position of a woman who has overcome much of the isolation, suffering and despair apparent in the early footage.

Gusti was born in a small rural village in Central Bali called Tengkulak, to a Kesatria, a high caste, family. In her own village, her Tourette Syndrome was inescapable, in large part because of the semantic confrontation between her symptoms and local undersandings:

Totally unfamiliar in rural Bali, Gusti’s Tourette symptoms elicited grave concern from herself and her family, significantly affecting both the daily and the long-term course of her life. Gusti has spent many years struggling to overcome the stigma and suffering that has resulted not primarily from her TS, but from the web of cultural significance spun around it in the context of Balinese values and belief, social and familial structure, and health care practices.

Over time it became clear to her family that these behaviors were out of Gusti’s control. This led to only more worry, however; Gusti’s jerky movements looked like those of trance dancers who are temporarily possessed by spirits in certain Balinese dances such as Manuk Rawa, or the Bird Dance. Neighbors started to openly mock her by calling her “the bird dancer,” and also began to worry aloud whether she had been permanently possessed and therefore was spiritually ill. Others in the village feared that her illness was contagious, and began to shun or avoid her. (Tucker n.d.: 1 & 2)

For Gusti, the semantic field in which her teeth clenching, jerky arm movements, spitting and cursing appeared – a rural village in Bali – made her burden especially heavy. Villagers did not know if she was acting up, making fun of them, crazy, possessed, contagious. Her siblings fluctuate between sympathy for their little sister and anger, because her condition stigmatizes all of them, makes it difficult for them to marry. Who wants to marry into the family, especially from an appropriate high caste, if one of the potential in-laws is so obviously and disturbingly impaired? Her family lashes out at her sometimes, her brother mimicking her uncontrollable movements, kicking her until she wets herself, she tells us.

In response, the family sought out traditional medical practitioners and healers (balians), some of whom diagnosed the cause of her condition as black magic, visited upon her because of her own goodness. Although the diagnosis may have offered some consolation, the treatments did little to stop the tics, the spitting, or the growing weight of stigma on Gusti. One healer that we see in The Bird Dancer finds ‘stones’ while painfully massaging her body; these stones are the traces of the witchcraft that have lodged in her body to produce her disorder like magical bullets. Like other healers – around a dozen we learn elsewhere in Lemelson’s (2004) writing – he promises relief, but Gusti isn’t confident; she’s seen too many healers by this time to hold out much hope.

The frustrating, seemingly futile search for a cure to a condition that threatens the entire family’s future produces tremendous stress, shame, and guilt, leading Gusti to contemplate suicide and exacerbating her TS:

Rather than her Tourette’s, Gusti was perhaps most troubled by her feelings of worthlessness within her family system and depression as a result of these ongoing feelings. In an interesting corollary note, there is a proven interaction between stress and tic behaviors; often tics will increase in frequency and severity when a person is under stress, and dissipate or even go into full remission when the person is relaxed or focused on a pleasurable activity. Therefore it is possible that the judgment and frustrating quest for a cure was actually exacerbating Gusti’s troubling symptoms. (Tucker n.d.: 13)

Mental illness and healing in Bali

During his field research, Lemelson examined the efficacy of indigenous healing traditions for mental illness, a topic important to psychological anthropology. Lemelson shares that that he even ‘went to the field with the subconscious assumption that the different forms of traditional healing should be efficacious’ (2004: 67). He discusses earlier theorists, like Wolfgang Jilek (1993), who argued that, because meaning and social support was so important to coping with psychiatric illness,

traditional healing is at least as effective and frequently more so than modern medical and psychiatric approaches for a variety of disorders, including various mood disorders, psychosomatic and somatoform syndromes, acute or reactive psychotic states, and alcohol and drug dependence. He [Jilek] notes further that traditionally healed patients’ experiences are restructured through a culturally validated system of symbols and meanings; the perceived etiological act, agent, or person is identified and a course of remedial or protective action taken. Jilek believes that this naming process has significant therapeutic aspects and often causes symptom remission by itself. (Lemelson 2004: 52-53)

Lemelson (ibid.: 67) affirms that there are ‘numerous times and contexts in which traditional healing appears to be the most efficacious form of treatment.’ He singles out acute psychosis, for example, reporting that traditional healing is used frequently and to great patient satisfaction (ibid.: 71).

But what Lemelson found was also the ‘striking’ pattern that, in cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and Tourette Syndrome, sufferers felt a ‘lack of efficacy of traditional healers and the powerlessness of traditional healing to relieve their suffering’ (ibid.: 67). Of forty cases of OCD and TS in Bali interviewed by Lemelson, twenty had visited traditional healers. Seven had gone more than five times; and several had gone more than ten times, Gusti among them. Only one of the patients perceived any improvement from a traditional healer, and this respite was only temporary (ibid.: 68). Lemelson reports that preliminary results from a survey on TS in Java showed a similar pattern: traditional healing didn’t relieve symptoms or suffering (ibid.: 69).

Lemelson explains that, probably due to the neurobiological basis of these disorders, traditional healing, just like psychoanalysis, cannot reach the ‘underlying neurophysiologic bedrock’ (ibid.: 70). In addition, I would argue, traditional healers cannot produce an effective change in the community interpretation of Gusti’s symptoms in the Balinese context, nor can they provide her with a suitable social role where her unusual behaviour would make sense. The ‘meanings’ that healers provide, as Lemelson discusses extensively, do nothing to alleviate either the physical symptoms or those social symptoms that Buckser highlights, like stigma and derision.

But one of the more subtle scenes in The Bird Dancer, however, also allows us to glimpse how biomedical approaches to TS run up against local obstacles and fail to provide relief in Bali. Gusti sought help from neurologists and psychiatrists, some of whom prescribed medications that, although they blunted the Tourette symptoms, also depleted her energy, caused nausea, and made it hard for her to function. She gave up on the psychiatrists even more quickly than she gives up on traditional healers, who at least offer a variety of strategies.

Patients with TS in Indonesia are likely prescribed a neuroleptic, a dopamine-receptor–blocking drug like haloperidol.  The side effects that Gusti describes, including lethargy and depression, are common enough that many patients in the West also choose not to be medicated. But in the developing world, the pharmaceutical treatment of Tourette is complicated still more, as the film’s study guide explains:

However, there is a significant structural limitation that may negate the biomedical treatment for psychiatric disorders. Throughout the developing world there is trafficking and sales of counterfeit medication. Indeed, upwards of 50% of medications sold openly in pharmacies in Indonesia may be counterfeit. This means that the active ingredients are either present in the wrong amounts, contaminated, replaced by similar acting substances, or entirely missing altogether. It is probable that some of Gusti’s negative reaction to her medication was caused by her ingesting these counterfeit medications. (Tucker n.d.: 11)

In other words, both biomedical and traditional techniques fail to heal Gusti. She is trapped by the inevitable clash between her unruly nervous system and the expectations of the social world around her. When a kind young man seeks her hand in marriage, the family reluctantly turns him down because he is of a lower caste. When Gusti’s despair grows intolerable, her family locks the young woman up to prevent her from running away with her inappropriate suitor.

Alleviating an illness without eradicating a disease

In this impossible situation, we learn that Gusti resorts to escape. She flees her small village to the city of Denpasar, gets a job as a maid, earns her own income, and cultivates a new circle of friends, who she tells us accept her disorder, even though she still holds back and fears what they will think. As anthropologist Nakamura (2011: 655) explains in a review of Affliction,

Freed from the tyranny of small-village life, she is considerably happier even though medically her symptoms haven’t changed much. Lemelson muses in a voiceover that when he first met Gusti, he was initially concerned about her neuropsychiatric disorder and its symptoms, but he now recognizes that her family and her social ostracism were the true causes of her distress.

We see Gusti spend her own income, awkwardly board an escalator, talk on a mobile phone, visit her family, and hold hands with one of her new friends, who do not flee from her condition fearing that she might be contagious or dangerous.

Although Gusti, herself, and her new circle of friends must get much of the credit for her new ‘prognosis,’ Lemelson himself and the video project about Gusti also appear to play important roles. First, in the meetings with the research team, we see both Lemelson and an Indonesian psychiatrist trying to explain Tourette Syndrome to the family, who were at first so baffled by Gusti’s behaviour.

Then, Lemelson introduces Gusti to Dayu, another woman with Tourettes, but also with a university degree, a job, and a devoted husband, in addition. Dayu’s tics are more pronounced than Gusti’s; even when she is not under stress, Dayu cannot control the expressions that seemingly ripple across and stretch her face constantly. Dayu and Gusti talk in the video and, though they sit awkwardly at either end of a couch, we can see the back and forth of recognition. Gusti is fascinated by Dayu, liberated to talk about her own condition; and Dayu, eventually, cries as she hears how Gusti is treated in her village, by neighbours and a family who do not understand her peculiarities.

Although he does not emphasize his own role, Lemelson demonstrates through his own interaction how alleviating Gusti’s condition involves social action as much as treatment of an individual’s nervous system, first, when he explains the disorder and introduces her to Dayu, and, later, when he screens the video about her life to her own community, a scene that made me cry when I first saw it.

A screening was arranged in her home village, and we see Gusti arriving, almost clinging to one of her new tall city friends for protection. Arriving like a returning celebrity, Gusti’s steps are punctuated by the flash photographs taken by the event photographer. It’s hard not to see this as a kind of ‘red carpet’ film opening with immense heart. Afterward, as the researchers take questions in front of the audience with Gusti and Dayu, a local businessman stands up and admits that he has a friend with Tourette. He thanks Gusti and the video crew, saying that he did not know he could treat the friend as, well, normal.

Lemelson tells us in the voice over, however, that, with all her success adapting and finding supportive friends, Gusti has not yet married or had children. The absence of a partner undermines her sense that her life is complete, showing us that her ‘healing’ is still in progress. Being unmarried ‘remains the primary cause of much of her distress in her adult life,’ Lemelson reports. Gusti tells us she’s searching for ‘a match. Someone who can understand me. I want to have a happy family, that’s all.’ Caste concerns still shape where she can look; ‘if it’s possible,’ she wants to marry in her caste. She laughs awkwardly as she talks about becoming grandparents with her husband, that ‘no one will be able to tear us apart.’

The Bird Dancer as film and resource: final thoughts

The Bird Dancer, overall, creeps up on you. Lemelson’s explanations are minimal, delivered dispassionately, and the subjects themselves fight to conceal their emotions as they describe their suffering and fear. Lemelson does not medicalize Gusti’s condition, nor does he make explicit the subtle ways that he and the research team have influenced Gusti’s life; the video project itself is a model of applying anthropological practice, not just a documentation of a life with Tourette Syndrome. As we return again and again to meet Gusti, we see her despair grow, but then, eventually, subside as she finds blams to the social correlates of her condition, in part through interacting with a world outside her village. Ironically, both traditional healing and medication prove inadequate to heal her; she tolerates the outrages of traditional healing techniques, but also rejects medication that comes at too high a price. Gusti chooses to endure her condition rather than sleep, but she eventually chooses to flee the social world where her symptoms impose an unnecessary burden.

If, like me, you teach psychological anthropology, The Bird Dancer, and the series of six videos of which it is part, deserve to be on your short list for consideration. Aesthetically, the videos work especially well. The length of each episode, at first daunting, gives the viewer time to digest the various layers of difference: the visual difference of Bali, the cultural variation in practices and issues like self presentation, and the sometimes disturbing disjunction of the lives of individuals with mental illness:

For ethnographic filmmakers, representing mental illness visually is very challenging. Individuals with various mental illnesses may appear normal, as much of what is going on is in the interior of their minds. As a result, it can be difficult to show through film what it personally means to live with a mental illness—or what it means to live with a family or community member who has a psychiatric disorder. (Nakamura 2011: 655)

One of the greatest achievements of the pacing, cinematography and score of The Bird Dancer is that the viewer comes so far both culturally and in terms of psychiatric distance, to really develop compassion for Gusti.

When Karen Nakamura wrote her review of three of the films in the series, no study guides were available, but as I write this, the website for the series has comprehensive study guides free to download available for four of the six videos (see individual video pages, like The Bird Dancer, to get the pdfs). The study guides add immeasurably to the value of the films, both as documentary projects and as teaching materials.

The Bird Dancer is an excellent opportunity, not only to see the social dimensions of mental illness, but also to shine a spotlight on Tourette Syndrome, especially given that this month is TS Awareness Month. The lack of greater understanding in the community, in the West as well as in a small village in Bali, makes too many of us a part of the affliction of an ‘observer’s illness.’

Links:

Documentary Educational Resources: The Bird Dancer
Information, purchasing, and other resources.

NIH Pub Med Health information on Gilles de la Tourette syndrome
Tourette Syndrome Association (USA, TSA)

Tourette Syndrome Association of Australia (TSAA)

Ajay Singh, 10 Questions for Robert Lemelson, UCLA Today

Inspirational Tourette’s Syndrome Sufferers 1: Kids with TS.
Kids really make it clear how their Tourette-related problems are as much social and interactional as physiological and neurological in this video.

Living with Tourette’s Syndrome
A video about Florida State University neuroscience student Michael Butler, who has TS, made by his roommate. (Sound’s not great in parts, but it’s really personal and down-to-earth.)

Congrats Samuel Comroe on Taking 1st Place in Soup or Bowl Finals!
Samuel J. Comroe, comedian with Tourette Syndrome

Guy D. Francis’ YouTube channel: TheMainMeals Tourette’s / Autism Adventures
Guy has both TS and Asperger’s Syndrome, and he has a whole series of videos, including videos of himself doing karaoke when his tics are really debilitating him. As he explains, ‘oh yes, I have Tourettes (full blown, you know, swearing and aggressive jerking…) and I have Asperger’s syndrome….Basically, I’m a dream come true.. no not really, that’s just silliness….’

He’s the father of three and, as he also puts it, deals with his neurological conditions ‘in a number of ways.  One of them is Karaoke.’

http://www.touretteskaraoke.com/

Credits:

Photos of Gusti and Rob Lemelson from Tucker, Annie. n.d. (2011?). The Bird Dancer: Film Guide. Gusti Ayu Suartini: Difference and Suffering in the Context of Culture. Robert Lemelson, ed. Design by Yee Ie. Pacific Palisades, CA: Elemental Productions.

Awareness poster about Tourette Syndrome from TheLadyKris, 2010, offered on a Creative Commons license at http://www.flickr.com/photos/theladykris/4697057476/in/photostream/.

References:

Afflictions: Culture and Mental Illness in Indonesia [The Bird Dancer, 40 min.] Robert Lemelson, dir. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources, 2010.

Buckser, A. (2006). The Empty Gesture: Tourette Syndrome and the Semantic Dimension of Illness Ethnology, 45 (4) DOI: 10.2307/20456601

Buckser A (2008). Before your very eyes: illness, agency, and the management of Tourette Syndrome. Medical anthropology quarterly, 22 (2), 167-92 PMID: 18717365

Hollenbeck, Peter J. (2003). A Jangling Journey: Life with Tourette Syndrome. Cerebrum 5(3): 47–60.

Jilek, Wolfgang G. (1993). Traditional Medicine Relevant to Psychiatry. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press.

Lemelson RB (2004). Traditional healing and its discontents: efficacy and traditional therapies of neuropsychiatric disorders in Bali. Medical anthropology quarterly, 18 (1), 48-76 PMID: 15098427

Nakamura, Karen. 2011. Review of Afflictions: Culture and Mental Illness in Indonesia. American Anthropologist 113(4): 655-656.

Oliveira, S., & Pelajo, C. (2010). Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infection (PANDAS): a Controversial Diagnosis Current Infectious Disease Reports, 12 (2), 103-109 DOI: 10.1007/s11908-010-0082-7

Singer, H., Gilbert, D., Wolf, D., Mink, J., & Kurlan, R. (2012). Moving from PANDAS to CANS The Journal of Pediatrics, 160 (5), 725-731 DOI: 10.1016/j.jpeds.2011.11.040

Robertson, M. (2000). Tourette syndrome, associated conditions and the complexities of treatment Brain, 123 (3), 425-462 DOI: 10.1093/brain/123.3.425

Robertson MM (2011). Gilles de la Tourette syndrome: the complexities of phenotype and treatment. British journal of hospital medicine (London, England : 2005), 72 (2), 100-7 PMID: 21378617

Tucker, Annie. n.d. (2011?). The Bird Dancer: Film Guide. Gusti Ayu Suartini: Difference and Suffering in the Context of Culture. Robert Lemelson, ed. Design by Yee Ie. Pacific Palisades, CA: Elemental Productions.

I outline some interesting neuroscience research that can inform the specifics of applied neuroanthropology, then examine how to draw on anthropology to expand our sense of how we approach applied work, and finally circle back to an applied program that implicitly uses an anthropological approach while drawing on neuroscience and behavioral health research for inspiration in working with troubled teens.

Neuroscience and Applied Neuroanthropology

I am particularly intrigued by new types of interventions using memory retrieval and exercise, and how these approaches offer ways to couple ideas of plasticity and learning with the structuring of environments and activities for people.

For example, recent work pairs memory recall and extinction training to help attenuate memories of drug cues in addicts, and thus lower craving (news article here, Science paper here). Pairing watching a video of drug use activity and repeated exposures to conditioned cues to lower reactivity lead to significant reductions in craving up to 180 days later. One of the keys was the timing of the pairing – too far apart, and the same intervention outcomes were not achieved.

Work published in PLoS One last year (paper here, news here) shows how exercise lead to reductions in marijuana use and in cravings during the study period. Study participants did not want to stop using marijuana, but nonetheless, running on a treadmill cut craving and marijuana use up to 50% over the two week study period.

The combination of a structured environment (the study), a specific activity (exercise or memory recall), and targeted techniques (extinction training) is one that makes sense to me for a broad range of neuroanthropology-inspired approaches to intervention. I’d also add that the intention and interpretation that participants bring to what they do also matters. In the case of exercise, it is more than just physiological arousal leading to neural plasticity; there is a strong case for the joy and framing of exercise to make a difference in the effects achieved.

This approach to intervention and policy is one that recognizes context, behavior, and meaning as equally important components alongside more targeted techniques that fields like psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience have developed. We know from previous work with mental illness that in general, a pharmacological treatment and a psychotherapy treatment work better together than either one on its own.

This approach pushes that formula one step further, recognizing the anthropological dynamics of applied work and the ways we can achieve targeted effects both matter. On the targeted effects side, I definitely think it’s interesting to think of novel ways that we can create biological effects besides pill popping. As the Science article puts it, “The memory retrieval-extinction procedure is a promising nonpharmacological method for decreasing drug craving and relapse during abstinence.”

Nonpharmacological methods for change are good. As Peter Martin, one of the authors of the exercise and marijuana study: “Exercise can really change the way the brain works and the way the brain responds to the world around us. And this is vital to health and has implications for all of medicine.”

Yet what still needs development is the anthropological side of intervention. What does change look like in the real world, outside of hospitals and clinics and treatment programs? I fear that unless we further develop how anthropology works to make a difference, then the established ways – extinction training, cognitive behavioral therapy, and so forth – will remain predominant, and remain tied to an approach to change that highlights professionalization and institutionally-driven approaches. And for people who can’t access high-level professionals or are vulnerable to institutional power, not much will change. I’d rather get the tools of change further out into the real world if possible.

On Anthropology and Change

Anthropologists are good at grasping other people’s point of views. We are good at examining meaning and intention, and how those relate to other aspects of people’s lives, such as their social relationships, their cultural heritage, and their socioeconomic position.

This point about the anthropological perspective, and how it might relate to applied work, was clarified by Tanya Luhrmann’s recent New York Times op-ed, Do as I Do, Not as I Say, where she examines the divisions between democrats and republications, as typified by liberals and evangelicals.

Luhrmann has just published her new book When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, based on long-term ethnographic research. She gets where evangelicals are coming from.

If you want to understand how evangelicals conceive of their political life, you need to understand how they think about God. I am an anthropologist, and for the last 10 years I have been doing research on charismatic evangelical spirituality — the kind of Christianity in which people expect to have a personal relationship with God.

Luhrmann then pushes that analysis:

When secular liberals vote, they think about the outcome of a political choice. They think about consequences. Secular liberals want to create the social conditions that allow everyday people, behaving the way ordinary people behave, to have fewer bad outcomes.

When evangelicals vote, they think more immediately about what kind of person they are trying to become — what humans could and should be, rather than who they are. … This perspective emphasizes developing individual virtue from within — not changing social conditions from without.

The question then becomes how to match communication with grasping how a certain group understands the world. As Luhrmann puts it, “If Democrats want to reach more evangelical voters, they should use a political language that evangelicals can hear.”

And what motivates evangelicals in thinking about politics and change?

They should talk about the kind of people we are aiming to be and about the transformational journey that any choice will take us on. They should talk about how we can grow in compassion and care. They could talk about the way their policy interventions will allow those who receive them to become better people and how those of us who support them will better ourselves as we reach out in love. They could describe health care reform as a response to suffering, not as a solution to an economic problem.

Grasping the other’s point of view can lead to policy recommendations. I am also interested in how it can become a part of an applied approach, one that can help inform anthropology’s more “everyman” engagement rather than proceed down the credentialed, professionally-delivered route.

An Example of Neuroanthropology in Action

A recent article at the site ACEs Too High describes a new approach to student discipline developed at Lincoln High School in Washington State, which had lead to a dramatic drop in the number of suspensions, expulsions, and referrals there. This approach – basically listening to the hard-knock students who create many of the worst discipline problems – is derived from research on neuroscience and human development, in particularly understanding the effects that stress and trauma can have on childhood development.

The article goes over the creation of this approach in considerable detail, including how John Medina, author of Brain Rules, and research on Adverse Childhood Experiences, helped provide the intellectual background for how this Walla Walla high school now deals with discipline issues.

What I want to focus on here is the applied side. Natalie Turner, who works at Washington State’s Area Health Education Center, developed core principles for how to engage with kids who had difficult childhoods, are often involved in gang and other delinquent activities, and can lack parental involvement and stable home circumstances.

There are just two simple rules, says Turner.

Rule No. 1: Take nothing a raging kid says personally. Really. Act like a duck: let the words roll off your back like drops of water.

Rule No. 2: Don’t mirror the kid’s behavior. Take a deep breath. Wait for the storm to pass, and then ask something along the lines of: “Are you okay? Did something happen to you that’s bothering you? Do you want to talk about it?”

It’s not that a kid gets off the hook for bad behavior. “There have to be consequences,” explains Turner. Replace punishment, which doesn’t work, with a system to give kids tools so that they can learn how to recognize their reaction to stress and to control it. “We need to teach the kids how to do something differently if we want to see a different response.”

Kids need adults they can count on, who they know will not hurt them, and who are there to help them learn these new skills, Turner tells the Lincoln High staff. If it’s not happening at home, it had better happen at school. Otherwise that teen doesn’t have much of a chance at life.

Jim Sporleder, Lincoln High’s principal, contrasts the new approach to student discipline with the old approach.

With the Old Approach to Student Discipline, this is how it went down:

A student blows up at a teacher, drops the F-bomb. The usual approach at Lincoln – and, safe to say, at most high schools in this country – is automatic suspension. Instead, Sporleder sits the kid down and says quietly:

“Wow. Are you OK? This doesn’t sound like you. What’s going on?” He gets even more specific: “You really looked stressed. On a scale of 1-10, where are you with your anger?”

The kid was ready. Ready, man! For an anger blast to his face….”How could you do that?” “What’s wrong with you?”…and for the big boot out of school. But he was NOT ready for kindness. The armor-plated defenses melt like ice under a blowtorch and the words pour out: “My dad’s an alcoholic. He’s promised me things my whole life and never keeps those promises.” The waterfall of words that go deep into his home life, which is no piece of breeze, end with this sentence: “I shouldn’t have blown up at the teacher.”

Whoa.

And then he goes back to the teacher and apologizes. Without prompting from Sporleder.

“The kid still got a consequence,” explains Sporleder – but he wasn’t sent home, a place where there wasn’t anyone who cares much about what he does or doesn’t do. He went to ISS — in-school suspension, a quiet, comforting room where he can talk about anything with the attending teacher, catch up on his homework, or just sit and think about how maybe he could do things differently next time.

For me, three things stand out about the approach that Lincoln High takes: (1) Listening to others, (2) Grasping where students come from, and (3) Asking what is going to create change, rather than enforce social structure or institutional power.

All three things are deeply anthropological, and provide a way for us to think seriously about what anthropology can do as an applied discipline. They provide ways we might think about operationalizing an understanding of people, social context, and meaning and couple that with the sort of targeted methods described in the first section of this post.

The lengthy article, Lincoln High School in Walla Walla, WA, tries new approach to school discipline — suspensions drop 85%, also points to a video that outlines this new paradigm for discipline. Both the article and the video capture the inherent interdisciplinary approach used (including the innovative Lincoln High Health Center), and also represent well the different social actors – including the students – in this work.

Neuroanthropology and Interventions

Some basic lessons from this range of work that can inform applied neuroanthropology:

-Draw on innovative research and thinking about how to develop interventions, and match those with an anthropological paradigm that focuses on how local environments and people’s behavior can impact the brain

-In developing policy and applied programs, use anthropology’s strengths in grasping the other’s point of view and understanding where people are coming from

-Use listening and social communication in a proactive way, coupled with an interdisciplinary approach that can address people’s varied needs and desires, as we develop targeted interventions and applied programs

How is it that a field that is so good at being interdisciplinary cannot do a good job interdisciplinary-ing itself?

In an interesting way, I think many of the frustrations that Kate expresses are similar to frustrations expressed in the book Unwrapping the Sacred Bundle: Reflections on the Disciplining of Anthropology. That book, largely written by cultural anthropologists, questioned the continued emphasis on anthropology as defined by four fields (biological, cultural and linguistic anthro, and archaeology) with an overarching commitment to “holism,” whatever that means.

Yet what brings many students into anthropology, and still impassions me about the field, is that it does approach the question of “What does it mean to be human?” in the broadest, most interdisciplinary way. And it strikes me that we have some core analytical approaches to that question that matter, and that this style of thinking is what really makes up the holism of anthropology, rather than a particular commitment to four-fields and working across the different sub-disciplines. This human lens includes a comparative approach, an attention to variation across time and space, a recognition that we as researchers inevitably bias our own data, and, yes, a commitment to drawing on multiple strands of research.

One of Kate’s strongest points, and one deserving debate, is that being interdisciplinary is not the same as being good at everything. We need to be a little bit hedgehog if we are going to end up as foxes, to re-interpret Isaiah Berlin’s classic dichotomy of hedgehogs who really dig into one area and foxes who move cannily from area to area.

Being interdisciplinary isn’t the same as being a little good at everything, consistent with the saying “jack of all trades, master of none.” … Students who want to become good biocultural anthropologists must first become experts in biological or cultural anthropology. Scholars need a base from which to reach out to other disciplines. If you are not thoroughly trained as one or the other, you will have a lot of trouble bridging them, or using your critical thinking skills to help ease you into a new field.

Being Interdisciplinary: It’s More than Just Knowing Stuff

Adam Van Arsdale in Biocultural Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Work points out some of the risks involved in pursuing synthetic work as a young scholar, and one structural reason why we might need to be become experts first in one area – simply to keep having a job.

Engaging in interdisciplinary work as a junior faculty member poses risks regarding project failures because of the potentially increased likelihood of collaborative difficulties, unanticipated problems that arise as a result of reaching beyond your core area of expertise, or simply slower research progress. Unless the work you are doing as a graduate student is already well within an interdisciplinary sphere, and I think there are only a few places in the U.S. where graduate students consistently do this kind of work, initiating such work prior to tenure is hard. This is ironic, because from my experience it is my fellow junior colleagues, recent Ph.D.s and graduate students who are most eager to engage questions from an interdisciplinary perspective.

I agree with Adam’s assessment, and find this point one of the most indicting of our present approach to award tenure based on basically five years of professional work. The present system does not reward the risk taking and the reaching out that interdisciplinary work requires. It’s set up precisely against being ambitious in an interdisciplinary way, whether that means biocultural work, engaging new technology and social media, or trying to make your work both theory and applied-driven.

One way around this is to set up collaborative work, which universities do seem to have embraced more than encouraging interdisciplinary careers from the start. John Hawks makes this point in his post, Interdisciplinary interdisciplinarians:

Going deep into an interdisciplinary problem may mean working with other people who have thought long about the other fields you need. It also means working long enough with those people to be able to perceive the times when you’re not speaking the same language.

Besides knowing different languages – getting a sense of how other fields work with problems – I think John highlights one main problem with pursuing expert or master status in one field first – students and young scholars don’t learn to wrestle with intellectual problems in an interdisciplinary way. We learn how to be interdisciplinary through that engagement with other people and with the various facets of specific problems. That’s why I encouraged people, in a long comment over at Scientific American, to make sure students get data from different types of methods, so they could begin that crucial process of playing with different types of data and figuring out how they might fit together in interesting ways.

On Teamwork and Disciplinary Divisions

I also think that anthropologists have not gotten bitten by the collaboration bug for work within our own field. We are quite good at collaborating outside of anthropology. Biological anthropologists working on problems in human evolution do this all the time; cultural anthropologists are lending their expertise to interdisciplinary projects in other countries; linguistic anthropologists work with linguists (often with some conflict!) on a consistent basis; and archaeologists work with historians and other history-oriented disciplines consistently. Out of the four fields, archaeologists are likely the best at team-based approaches with colleagues within anthropology. But archaeologists are not the ones trying to bridge the bio antrho/cultural anthro divide, so it becomes harder for more explicitly biocultural anthropologists to find good models for how do this. Over both the short- and long-term, learning how to work together on anthropological problems is key to advancing a holistic/biocultural endeavor.

Greg Downey, my neuroanthropology colleague, also leaves an important comment on Kate’s post, writing about how we set up boundaries precisely so we don’t have to ask hard questions. (A better approach might be to work with anthropology colleagues who, um, could address those hard parts…) He writes:

Most biocultural anthropologists, in my experience, are biological anthropologists trying to get a grasp on some cultural theory, either because they’re talking about the evolution or emergence of culture or for some other reason.

Not a lot of cultural anthropologists get into biological theory, in part, as I’ve argued before, because socio-cultural theory has invented a whole vocabulary that allows us to talk about things that are sort of biological without ever having to dip our toes into biology. We can talk about ‘race’ without ever mentioning genes; ‘cognition,’ ‘signification,’ and a host of other topics without ever mentioning the brain or nervous system; the list could go on. We’ve created a surprisingly Cartesian layer of insulation so that we never have to deal with biology or hard sciences (although we’re happy to criticize Descartes).

In my own lengthy comment on Kate’s strong essay, I echo Greg in talking about disciplining happens:

There is one really big BUT to the “being good in one field first” approach. In training, each field works to actively discipline their students, to shape them into a particular mode and to encourage certain types of foundational knowledge and methods as more valued than others. This process happens implicitly and explicitly.

In other words, students get a value system along with a knowledge system, and for the most part, that value system works against interdisciplinary work. So from the bio anthro side, the importance of evolutionary theory, the need to look at biological mechanisms, the necessity of quantitative methods – if this is what you are supposed to do, then it becomes more difficult to actually end up doing what you should really do, which is the interdisciplinary work.

To end, I want to return to one of Kate’s points about the problems that a biocultural approach addresses:

Identify the core questions that a biocultural approach can tackle better than any other. If a bio or cultural approach would satisfy the question, but you are tacking on the other field because it seems sexy, your grant proposal or manuscript submission is unlikely to make it through. But if you can recognize a problem that only this approach can solve you will be able to better develop the theory.

I think there are actually several core problems that biocultural anthropology asks but that we don’t separate them enough, and thus often create a mish-mash of stuff that gets an overall biocultural label. Certainly this “throw everything biocultural/interdisciplinary in” approach didn’t work as well as I hoped with my course on biocultural medical anthropology. The course didn’t provide enough structure for them to understand the different problems and approaches . It gave them familiarity, but not enough guidance and depth in particular arenas. That’s why I’m excited to teach neuroanthropology at the graduate level this next fall, to really dig into one area that aims to integrate biological and cultural anthropology and be interdisciplinary at the same time. The specificity matters.

So while I encourage grappling directly with biocultural research and multiple types of data, I also do think we need to develop enough specificity and depth in defined areas. My hope is that in the future, this depth might encourage training and the development of expertise and jobs within the biocultural domain itself, rather than still needing a home base within one of the major sub-fields of anthropology.

Five Areas of Biocultural Research

And, oh, what are those core problems? I see five basic ones, all different versions of anthropology’s core motivating question, What does it mean to be human? They overlap and can mutually inform each other, but seem distinct enough to my eyes that research groups are forming around each one.

What is the nature of human variation? Here human biologists and bioarchaeologists examine the patterning of human variation. To quote from a recent job ad for a biocultural anthropologist at Oxford, ” Biocultural approaches explicitly recognise and work with the dynamic interactions between humans as biological beings and the social, cultural, and physical environments they shape and inhabit.”

How do social structure, political economy, and inequality shape human life? Rather than looking in-depth at the dynamic interactions of biological mechanisms and the environment, this research highlights how social roles, discrimination, and inequality can drive human biology in specific ways. It requires an attention to critical thought and social theory in ways that are often not part of other types of biocultural approaches.

How did we evolve as biocultural beings? More specifically, how did culture evolve and feed back to shape who we are as humans? There is a great ferment of interdisciplinary work on this topic right now, from genetics to cultural modeling to linguistics to primatology to archaeology. I think it’s one of the great questions happening in science right now, and thus broader than biocultural anthropology itself. But the answers that anthropologists develop to this question will be crucial to developing a firmer intellectual basis for why we should do holistic research. It’s an area where, I hope, cultural anthropology will engage further, because that expertise is truly needed.

How does enculturation happen? How does culture get under the skin, and from there, become part of the cultural dynamics that shape our everyday lives? This question is one of the core ones facing neuroanthropology. It is also the question that most specifically requires a developmental approach. This area also demands more attention to cultural and social theory than other varieties of biocultural research.

How does science, both as a form of knowledge and a form of ideology, shape our lives and the governing and marking off how we are similar and different? This question is the one most addressed by people on the cultural side of things, with their approaches to biosociality, biopolitics, and the like. It’s a rich arena, yet also in need of a stronger appreciation of how science works and the actual biology of our lives. Put differently, this area analyzes the cultural production of knowledge. This knowledge production – and the uses to which it is put socially and politically – is increasingly based on interdisciplinary notions, including many ideas (a lot of them bastardized) from anthropology. Biocultural anthropologists are well positioned to do more of this kind of work, to understand how our knowledge production works and how interdisciplinary knowledge of biology and of what it means to be human (or not) circulates and is used in society.

I left out an explicitly applied angle, I know. I think each arena will have its important applied component – forensic anthropology and human variation, social policy and political economy, public outreach and evolution, education and enculturation, and the critique of our own knowledge. And I’m hopeful that in a couple years, we will be able to point to a more specific applied question within the broad range of biocultural approaches.

What is that question? Well, let’s get to work answering that…

Link to Kate Clancy’s I Can Out-Interdiscipline You: Anthropology and the Biocultural Approach

Link to Adam van Arsdale’s Biocultural anthropology and interdisciplinary work

Link to John Hawks’ Interdisciplinary disciplinarians

She hung the canvas on the wall of the studio. I’d seen her start paintings dozens of times, but for some reason – perhaps because of how things turned out – this one has stayed with me. The canvas was square, a little taller and wider than her reach. The surface was primed bluish white, thick enough to mask the texture. Despite its bulk the frame was empty, a window onto snow.

So opens the novel The Names of Things, by writer and anthropologist John Colman Wood.

The Names of Things explores fieldwork in the deepest sense of the word, the transformative effect of moving our lives to another place, often a strange place, for months or years at a time. What work does the field do on us?

The novel is also the story of a journey, a seeking of truth or at least revelation, and the inevitable gaps and betrayals and transcendence such journeys can bring.

Set in a windswept wilderness menaced by hyenas and lions, The Names of Things weaves together the stories of an anthropologist’s journey into the desert, his firsthand accounts of the nomads’ death rituals, and his struggle to find the names of things for which no words exist.

Wood examines friendship and marriage, two of our most basic human relations, and how they – like fieldwork – work through the encounter with the other, strange than familiar than strange again. While we might think much of that work happens through knowing – through having the names – Wood shows us how much skill and experience and emotion play into our understanding of this life.

John Colman Wood is a professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina Asheville. As he writes there, “I snuck into anthropology late. When I finished college, I got a job as a newspaper reporter and spent the next ten years writing stories about crime, politics, public policy, science, poverty, the environment, and even a few circuses.”

The Names of Things is published by Ashland Creek Press, and they have kindly provided the first 30 pages of the novel on their website.

Or you can go directly to purchasing it! Here’s are Amazon hardcopy and Kindle links.

John Colman Wood also has a new blog, Im/placed: “My writing – as all writing – plays the edge of fiction and nonfiction, truth and invention.”

You can find more excerpts from The Names of Things there, as well as reflections on writing and ethnography, and this wonderful vignette, Camels on the Moon, from his fieldwork days.

To end, another glimpse of this remarkable novel.

The silence woke him. The sheep and goats were quiet. It was like they’d all died. He raised his head. Small stock were never quiet, not even in the middle of the night, not en masse. Everything was at rest. Even the air was still. He could hear Ali breathing deeply over by Elema’s tent.

He lay his head down and turned on his back and looked up at the black cloud forms against the stars. He remembered that the wind often slowed or stopped in the middle of the night before it started up again an hour or so before dawn. It was the same midday. He thought it had to do with being far, in the earth’s rotation, from the edge of light and dark.

Link to Ashland Creek Press’ site on The Names of Things

Link to Amazon hardcopy of The Names of Things

Link to Amazon Kindle of The Names of Things

We at the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), along with our colleagues at the American Anthropological Association and other learned societies, have taken a stand against open access. Here at the AIA, we particularly object to having such a scheme imposed on us from the outside…

This letter is a more extreme version of what the AIA submitted to the White House last December, where the AIA aligned itself with the initial American Anthropological Association’s position against open-access (which later shifted in response to public outcry; update: see Joslyn Osten’s comment below on the official AAA stance).

Founded in 1879, the AIA is the largest organization in North America devoted to archaeology. With more than 220,000 professional, student, and lay members belonging to more than 100 local societies throughout the US, Canada, and overseas, it represents a very diverse population joined by an interest in learning about the material remains of the past.

One of the primary tools for advancing its mission of education is the scholarly quarterly American Journal of Archaeology (AJA), whose annual print length is approximately 800 pages. While AJA does present some primary archaeological reports (i.e., through its occasional “field reports,” data gathered in the field) almost all of its content deals with archaeological interpretation rather than the primary reporting of archaeological data.

We agree with the AAA that “while the government might have a right to the unfinished work product (i.e., the research data or ‘findings’) of researchers to whom they provide financial support, it does not have the right to journal articles that are the cumulative result of the significant time and financial investment of reviewers, editors, copywriters, designers, technology providers, archivists, publishers and distributors of such journal content—none of which is supported by federal research dollars.”

Chris Kelty has a step-by-step dismantling of the Bartman AIA letter in his post Not that kind of “living in the past” AIA obfuscates the issues involved, from what the federal legislation would do to what counts as open-access.

In particular, the AIA uses a slight-of-hand to imply that professional companies are the ones who take charge of the arduous peer-review process, and thus significantly improve the final publication:

When an archaeologist publishes his or her work, the final product has typically been significantly improved by the contributions of other professionals such as peer reviewers, editors, copywriters, photo editors, and designers. This is the context in which the work should appear.

In other words, for-profit companies provide the necessary context for research. Well, in archaeology, context is everything!

If the context were simply one where for-profit companies compete to provide a service to professional organizations – taking charge of submissions and type setting and distribution – then I wouldn’t have much of a problem. Companies would compete, and that would drive both innovation in that service and help keep prices low for providing that service. In turn, the companies provide significant money to organizations like the American Anthropological Association and the Archaeological Institute of America, which is used to support the organizations’ activities.

But of course the context is not so simple. The companies make a profit off of the research; little of that money flows back to the researchers and communities involved. The majority of the editing and peer-review is provided for free as well by professional archaeologists in university settings. Finally, the companies make their money largely through university libraries paying exorbitant fees for access to research produced in university contexts – we give it away, and then have to pay to get it back. At every step, companies take the work done by researchers, reviewers, and librarians and uses that work for their own benefit. Put bluntly, the AIA as a professional organization is reaffirming the rules of a rigged game to the detriment of its own members.

The other pernicious effect is that companies, by taking charge of the production process, have legal rights over the final products – the papers reporting the research. These companies do not always act in the best interests of the researchers who did the research, or of the communities where the research was done. They limit access to the public, including 220,000 professional, student, and lay members, because it is through restricting access that they can charge higher price – that’s basic supply and demand.

But most research is driven by the discovery of new knowledge, and the recognition that archaeology has much to say about peoples’ pasts. Restricting access for others’ profits needs to be justified against the importance of sharing knowledge and giving communities’ access to knowledge about their own past. Should companies own that knowledge? Or should researchers and communities?

The Archaeological Institute of America has come down on the side of companies, who use the legal framework imposed by the federal and state government to take ownership of research. Then the companies and the AIA profit from the money generated.

Old Man In Nursing Home Reacts To Hearing Music From His Era

I was touched by how close to anthropology this video is, a story, an ethnographic vignette, rich with the voices and views of the different actors. I wish more anthropologists would do this sort of work, and that this sort of work would count at least as much as just one more peer-reviewed article.

I encourage neuroanthropologists to think of the important applied dimensions of our work represented in this video – that a simple cultural intervention has such a powerful impact on someone’s brain. And then showing that impact through a video that already has 3,000,000 views on YouTube.

The vignette is also full of theoretical implications, that what anthropologists describe as culture does not intersect equally with our varied brains, young and old, and that matters. That a cultural context of care – this woman doing her work – is powerfully motivating. That music and God and nursing home mean and do things, and we can see and document and show that. And that part of why music and God and care have their impact is how our brains light up, or not, and that process of lighting up is both individual and encultured, the joy and skills and experiences of this man from his youth.

A playful take on the classic (and wrong) image of human evolution. No matter how we try to get beyond the “rise of man” story, it comes back, zombie-like, even when it should R.I.P.

Hat-tip to John Hawks, who tweeted about the delightful Tumblr site, AnthroFail, where zombieevolution appeared.

AnthroFail has some other great ones – perspective, sovereigntyordeath, and essence of anthropology students.

I started the morning particularly interested in finding a good book that covers the brain and neuroscience, so any recommendations on that side are definitely welcome. But I am just as open to recommendations of all sorts – critical neuroscience, ethnographies, implications of neuroscience, and whatever you think might be useful.

I know there are other people out there planning their own neuroanthropology courses, so your recommendations could be useful for all sorts of different courses. And I am already planning an undergraduate version of neuroanthropology for the following year, so the more recommendations the better!

Matt has also worked hard at collating different statements about the AAA digital anthropology group into one coherent document. So we now have a potential mission statement. I’ve posted it below. Please add any thoughts or reactions below, and also head over to the Savage Minds post on the new interest group and the mission statement to check out and add to the comment stream there.

Also, we’re still deciding on the name. Right now it’s called the Digital Methods group. But you can register your own vote for what name you like from different proposed options using this Survey Monkey.

Another couple notes: (1) This is just a first step, and the interest group already plans to work with non-AAA members – we just need registered members to get this thing going. Hopefully it will become a larger initiative; and (2) If you have any interest in an Open Access panel at the AAAs, also contact Matt. He’d even be willing to have someone take charge of organizing that!

Initial Mission Statement:

The Digital Methods Group is a network of anthropologists interested in how Internet driven platforms of social exchange are challenging the way research is done, how anthropology is taught, and how anthropologists communicate with each other, the public, and our subject communities. Organized as an interest group under the American Anthropological Association it acts as a forum for sharing ideas, promoting online activities, and advancing our professional concerns.

Our aim includes seeking out connections with similar efforts in other disciplines and professional associations who are interested in promoting the professionalization of online activities. We envision creating and maintaining an online presence through multiple formats including a website that will archive all of the interest group’s work and serve as a hub where anyone can freely participate, access material and information, and communicate.

The goals of the Digital Methods Group include:

• To make connections across all major subfields of anthropology by examining how researchers are using digital methods in data collection, analysis, and storage as well as their application in peer-reviewed publications.

• To consider how anthropology courses, classrooms, labs, and field schools at the undergraduate and graduate levels might be transformed by the introduction of net platforms in lecture, seminar, student collaboration, and course assignments.

• To encourage communication among anthropologists through blogging and online social networks, promoting the good work already being done and recruiting others to join the conversation.

• To raise anthropology’s profile among the general public through online communication.

• To document how net platforms might impact the ways in which anthropologists nurture long term ties with subject communities, research participants, and other stakeholders.

• To discuss and refine ethical use and best practices for the above by hosting workshops and roundtables that consolidate our experiences, successes and failures, and spread the technical knowledge necessary for using these platforms with ease.

• To promote the professional interests of its members by framing discourses within the discipline of anthropology concerning digital methods of research, teaching, and communication so that the practice of using such net platforms becomes more widespread.

I am going to give an overview first, and then provide choice sections from each of the nine essays.

What comes across most clearly in this issue is that we as anthropologists are among the 1%. We as US anthropologists, with access to AAA journals and universities with incredible built-up assets, can spend our time in research and commentary, backed by a wealth of time and a privilege of education to do work we love. Most of the 99%, inside or outside the United States, have nothing like that in their lives. What are we going to do about that?

This is our Writing Culture moment. We have realized that we are in an unsustainable position as a field, one that is both ethically and methodologically off. But this time more “reflexivity” is not the answer. Indeed, the problems are more like those that have been gradually overcome between the fixed positions of sociobiologists and post-modernists, each convinced they are right and with little ground in the middle. Overcoming that opposition took several decades, and happened through a gradual process of engagement and reaching out on both sides, and yet it still comes up to bite anthropologists in the ass, such as happened with the word “science” in the AAA’s vision.

Put differently, there is not an intellectual solution to our own political economy (our publishing), nor a singular answer to how we engage with change pragmatically and ethically and theoretically (what “occupy” highlights). But these issues do require serious reflection and serious doing. They also challenge anthropologists to “get on the right side of history.” And making that move is difficult, precisely because it can seem so antithetical to our well-honed ivory tower reflexivity and the assumptions that we have carried forward from the divisive debates of the past, that science is the answer or that we are infinitely flexible and all perspectives are equally valid.

So I see this special issue raising important discussion related to three important issues:

-Production of and access to our research and ideas

-How we relate to social change and social and economic justice and to participatory forms of change and engagement

-The shift to a pragmatic anthropology, a moral anthropology (and what that means), an anthropology that makes a difference

Okay, onto the issue itself. I want to start with the last piece, written by Ryan Anderson. In “Anthropology and Occupy,” Ryan engages with the considerable amount of literature that has already been written since last fall (almost all of it online). As pointed out on Information Fluency about some of my own work in this area, this coverage is a new type of literature review – gathering together and reflecting on what is happening related to vital topics in a field, at a pace and with a breadth of coverage (and links!) that just cannot be matched by literature reviews in journals. As Information Fluency puts it:

This is a new kind of literature review, a way of collating, summarizing, and analyzing an issue as it erupts across the web. [These] literature reviews will be less comprehensive and more about filtering out the most significant scholarly publications on an issue.

There are three other pieces that center on the occupy movements, my own piece on Why We Protest, Laurence Cuelenaere’s Picturing Direct Action, where the photo above appears, and Kyle Schmidlin on Occupy Austin. I particularly like Kyle’s piece for the way it explores the ambivalence of the Occupy movement, and the ambivalence of an anthropologist’s engagement with it. This sort of sorting through of what something means on the ground and inside ourselves is a crucial part of how this scholarship can move forward.

The other four pieces focus more on open access, but often drawing inspiration from the occupy movement. Together these four show why open access matters professionally, ethically, and in the context of powerful economies changing the academy. Doug Rocks-Macqueen in The Last Days of Rome is particularly powerful on that last point, that the present publishing model used by the academy is unsustainable and is particularly detrimental to libraries and to people who want to publish book. Jason Jackson delivers a powerful essay on why ethically we need to change as scholars in how we approach publishing in his piece We are the One Percent: Open Access in the Era of Occupy Wall Street. How can we be so informed and critical towards those outside the academy, and then such bumblers with blinders on when looking at ourselves?

Barbara Fister presents us the occupy view from libraries themselves in The Public Versus Publishers: How Scholars and Activists are Occupying the Library. I so like the way she ends, for this point is so easy to forget as I type away here at my home and get my articles through online access through the USF library. Her words point to a broader vision of what libraries have been and must be going forward:

Libraries are a recognition that scholarship and culture are more than the business of creating and consuming. They are a human conversation, and libraries provide common ground where that conversation can take place and be remembered. By taking aim at the right for the public to maintain this conversation and its memory, publishers have shown us what we have to lose. It’s time we resisted the outsourcing of our common heritage by occupying the library.

Finally, Kim and Mike Fortun deliver the brass tacks of how we can actually take a journal, including one as prominent as Cultural Anthropology, and make it open access with their piece Liberating Cultural Anthropology. Their post covers the financing and the editorial process for such an open-access journal. This is that pragmatic anthropology, aimed directly at how we can better manage our own political economy rather than simply take it as given to us by others.

That’s my overview. Head over to Anthropologies to access all the articles in their entirety, and to comment on specific ones. But I also want to do some of my own “literature review” right here, and provide those quotes that struck me as capturing something important in each, and thus help us have a larger vision of why anthropology can open itself up with its own effort to occupy our daily practices.

Ryan Anderson, Introduction: Anthropologies of Access

Anthropology is fairly behind the times when it comes to OA, and we could pick up a thing or two from others… We just have to be open to learning, listening, and thinking creatively when it comes to writing, publishing, and sharing anthropology.

What is the whole Occupy movement really all about? What were people trying to do? At heart, I’d say that those movements and protests were about voicing frustrations. Frustrations with not only the big, abstract global economy–but also the local economies and politics that affect people in their day to day lives… When it comes to academia, then, what’s the equivalent of pitching a tent and making claims about the direction of our academic commons?

Barbara Fister, The Public Versus Publishers: How Scholars and Activists are Occupying the Library

Over the past ten years, scholarship has been massively privatized; library access to journals is now almost largely outsourced to corporations, and soon scholarly books will be licensed the same way, in digital bundles. Public libraries, coming to the digital fray late, are battling commercial book publishers who, one by one, are refusing to allow libraries to loan books published in digital form. Already endangered by cuts in public funding, public libraries are now being told by publishers that sharing in any form is a threat to their business model and will no longer be tolerated.

Kim Fortun & Mike Fortun, Liberating Cultural Anthropology: A Thought Experiment

Less than a decade ago, the AAA self-published all its journals and newsletters. Despite – or perhaps because of — this, AAA today does not think that self-publishing is a sustainable strategy, and believes it needs the services (copyediting, metadata-ing, promoting and marketing) and revenues Wiley Blackwell provides…

Whatever the “value added” to a journal article by any commercial publishing partner, it is a pale shadow of the base value provided freely by passionate authors, generous reviewers, and committed editors. This core strength of the system is astounding, and astoundingly important, and should never be minimized or dismissed. This is our work, made from and with our interlocutors and colleagues, and we insist that it be available to anyone who wants to read it…

The process and budget put forward here is one sketch, open to additional refinement and revision. We put it forward to advance discussions of alternative publishing models that is aware of the “brass tacks,” and motivated by an ethical and political economic sense that change is necessary

Jason Baird Jackson, We are the One Percent: Open Access in the Era of Occupy Wall Street

How it is that the same scholars who can produce such nuanced, complex, critical accounts of the workings of power and capital, of mediascapes, of speculation, of neoliberalism, of privatization and enclosure, of circulation, of exploitive labor practices, of union-busting, of social change, of technology, of educational practices, of inequality, of law, of injustice, of everything that matters—past and present—could seemingly be so out of touch when it comes to the political economy of the scholarly publishing system to which they contribute free labor as editors and peer-reviewers, through which they circulate their research findings, and from which their scholarly organizations increasingly extract rents that their home institutions, their students, and their societies cannot afford (and should not need) to pay? …

Especially for a field that studies, and relies upon the goodwill of, people (the 99%) and that aspires to be, and certainly can be, engaging, accessible, and useful outside the groves of academe, the reality of 1% access and the dream of 3% access should be absolutely unacceptable (Kelty et al. 2008:564). In a world filled with lifelong learners seeking knowledge, desperate social problems needing redress, rapid cultural change to be negotiated, and nearly boundless deprivation and suffering, we have unprecedented need for an anthropological scholarship that is widely and freely available.

Doug Rocks-Macqueen, The Last Days of Rome: The Rise of Open Access and the Fall of For-profit Publishers

The reprieve given by the big deals can only last so long and in the meantime many journals are still being squeezed out of publication. As noted by the outgoing editor of Cultural Anthropology, in an open letter to the AAA Committee on the Future of Print and Electronic Publishing , subscriptions to several key AAA journals fell by 20% between 2007 and 2009 (American Anthropologist 1683 to 1361, American Ethnologist 887 to 720, Cultural Anthropology 485 to 387) with fear that these numbers would drop even more once institutions leave their contracts (Fortun 2010). Decreasing subscriptions can only lead to increasing prices.

Moreover the increasing costs of journals, while down from peek increases of 20% (figure 1), are still not at a sustainable level and libraries are quickly running out of room to manoeuvre their budgets. In an ironic twist on the AAA statement that their journals help monographs (AAA 2011), journals are actually killing off books at an incredible rate. The number of books university libraries buy has fallen from 2-3,000 per book run in 1970 to below 200 now (Gardiner & Musto 2004; Greco &. Wharton 2008; Thompson 2005). Most universities now only spend 20% of their acquisition budgets (Publishers Communication Group 2011), in some cases less than 10% (Wiehle 2007), on books. Books once commanded two-thirds of these same budgets. Libraries can no longer cut books in hopes of keeping pace with rising prices of journals.

This situation is how Open Access wins in the end. The current publishing model of hiding content behind a pay wall cannot cope with the large amounts of research being produced. There is simply not enough money available to pay for the current publishing model.

Kyle Schmidlin, Occupy Austin

Characteristic of the movement is a vague sense of directional anger, much like the Tea Party, and their anger is focused in the same general direction – moneyed politicians and financial institutions. Actually, my central disagreement with Occupy from the outset was its focus on economic matters, which don’t particularly interest me. But despite the freedom of anyone to speak at the General Assembly, there is a real reservation on my part to use the podium as a preaching opportunity about ending wars, decriminalizing “sin” activities like drug use, prostitution and gambling, and wiping out personal debt, among other things.

This, to me, is why Occupy has stalled. Meetings have focused on what the movement should do next, but by and large the political and social issues are not discussed in any depth – except in the case of the reading group, which has been my main avenue of participation.

Ryan Anderson, Anthropology and Occupy

As I said at the outset, this is just a cursory look at what’s out there when it comes to anthropology and the Occupy Movements. Surely there is more–and please feel free to share your links and citations in the comments section. My main question here, at the end, is what role anthropology can play in understanding complex, contradictory, and contested social movements like this. What can anthropologists tell us about what happened? What perspectives can they add that differ from the sound bites and short clips on the six o’clock news? I am also really fascinated with the question of participation–should anthropologists actively take part in these sorts of movements? If so, to what extent?

Daniel Lende, Why We Protest

Antrosio’s work highlights a third notion, as does Parker’s cartoon. It is also a notion that Margaret Mead embraced, that anthropology can be a light towards the future, against our own misguided, indeed unscientific and uninformed notions. Even more, it can help us inform our strivings towards progress, towards a better place for ourselves and those we love.

As we talked about in class today, one derived thing that distinguishes us from ants, and even from chimpanzees, is a synthesis of emotion and value and social convention, coupled with our ability to reflect on the future and to exercise agency towards something better for ourselves. That is our anthropological nature, revealing the possibility of many anthropologies – or ways of being – for ourselves.

The photo at top comes from Laurence Cuelenaere’s photo essay, Picturing Direct Action.

These pictures, taken at the Occupy Boston encampment on Dewey Square, are not intended to document the struggle for social justice (always imbued by discourses on rights subject to the approval of the state), but to join the action taken against the belief in endless progress that binds the logic of capital to the state.