I first mused about the end of the Corona epoch (a.k.a “COVID-19″) two years ago. I did it again a year ago. In both cases I took into account both my (lived?) experience in the various polities I usually and more or less regularly inhabit (family, church, shops, university), as well as what I found out about the evolution of governors’ mandates, including both those I had to live by in New York City or France, and those I read about. My usual examples involved restaurants, their closure, their re-opening, the mandates about masks while sitting or moving in restaurants, etc.

First, some ethnography:
At Teachers College, one could trace various endings over the past two years. The building was reopened to selected personnel, then to all. There shifts in vaccination reporting and checking, etc. And then, on April 20, 2023 we were told that, among related matters:

This was justified as [resulting] “from the ending of the COVID-19 Federal Health Emergency declaration and decreasing COVID-19 cases among TC community members and across New York City.”

All this is to happen on May 12, 2023, thereby closing the epoch that started sometimes in early March 2020 (the actual starting point could be considered either the first message about the “coronavirus” [it had not yet been named “COVID-19], or the actual physical closing of the buildings when “do not enter” signs were pasted over the doors).

The TC announcement went to every one in the “community” (faculty, staff, students, etc.) and did not cause much of a ripple. When I mentioned it in class someone retorted that she got the message on the same day one of our her friend tested positive. To persist on my theme, governors can re-open restaurants, the virus continues its life career—if viruses are “alive.” something that appears to be controversial among the authoritative scientific experts. As these same experts do tell us: whether alive or not, the virus is with us for the foreseeable future.

So “SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the Covid-19 disease” was noticed by human beings in the Fall 2019 and remains with us while “Corona” (as culture epoch) started in February or March 2020 and has been ending to the point when many now use the past tense when talking about “COVID-19,” the current, common, and apparently uncontroversial, label.

And now, to play at anthropology:
• Given that Corona has obviously been a (social) construction (by and for about the whole 9 billion human beings).
• And given that Corona will continue to evolve in narratives and other forms of discourse (art, policy, science, etc.).
Can we also say that the virus was constructed?

Both current speculations about the origin of the virus involve human activity and complex, though quite different, actor-networks. As some tell it, perhaps a worker in the local lab did not clean up quite well and carried the virus out of the lab. This leads to question about why the lab was making viruses, why it was located where it was, who funded it, etc…. Alternatively, perhaps a merchant bought an infected animal from some hunter and then sold it to some customer. This hypothesis would then lead to investigations into the traditions (cultures) that make some wild animals edibles “there and then” (though they might not be “elsewhere and elsewhen”). And then, in either case, the spread of the virus depended on much that is human (airplanes, policies, etc.).

And yet … the virus itself is not human. Humans cannot talk to it, threaten it, regulate it, teach it—or any of the other acts that human can perform on each other. At most humans can attempt to control each other in the hope that, in that fashion, they might control the virus. And this brings us back to governors issuing mandates on partially resistant populations.

In other words, human beings, when confronted to the dangerous “thing-ness” of an object in their experience will do something (culture) but the thing remains, possibly hidden but always susceptible to re-emergence … as the next virus will do.

Or
On the ignorant in capitalistic action

Like about everyone else I started the week of January 25, 2021, from a position of total ignorance about GameStop, Reddit, the Robinhood “Commission Free Trading & Investing App,” and the epic battle between hedge funds and young ones (mostly men I believe) As far as I can tell this is the position of many besides grandfathers who are not any more “dans le vent” as I might have said of my grandfather half-a-century ago. I am just one among the hundreds of millions who, like me, were completely ignorant and were also altogether irrelevant since we were not participating in the battle. This irrelevance may be changing as some among this crowd, like me writing this blog post, are starting to participate though mostly as an audience to a drama playing itself on a distant stage.  As we watch we discover significant actors, their networks, their conflicts, their tactics, their armaments and their uncertainties in a very dubious battle.

The more interesting ignorance, for a social scientist, is that of the significant actors—those whose activities might have a direct impact on the activities of others.  Many of those actors probably thought, a few weeks ago, that they were knowledgeable experts, and then found out that this was not true at all. Among these actors are the millions who knew about Robinhood and used whatever it provides.  And there are also the smaller number who populate the “hedge funds” and also discovered their ignorance about actors they apparently had not noticed or had dismissed.  As an ethnographer, I would open what should not remain black boxes (“hedge funds”) to reveal their internal organization.  I might chose as my site Melvin Capital who appears in the media as one of those funds who lost the most last week (possibly half its value a month ago). According to  Google, Melvin Capital has several “chiefs” (Chief Investment Officer, Chief Operations Officer, etc.). It probably also has hundreds of employees many of whom are those I believe are known as “traders.”  I suspect many of those are hired young men (and now probably also some women) who are in charge of actually doing the work of the firm.  I am sure ignorance was well distributed among all those. I would also not be surprised to learn that some of the new traders have now been fired for not noticing what was happening and for having almost bankrupted the firm. At some point the chiefs must have become aware of the losses and then discovered who were the actors producing these losses. How could they have imagined that young (some as young as 13!) men (where are the women in this fight?) would find a way to organize to defeat a bunch of famous experts at their own game: make a lot of money with little investment by playing on obscure possibilities?

I am not saying here that the young ones are more knowledgeable. They appear not to have known that the chiefs could organize themselves to demolish the young ones’ positions for the few hours it would take to mitigate losses (and probably make a lot of the young ones loose money some of them might not have been able to afford). An early story in the New York Times (1/31/2021) only mentions young men making money, not losing it.
While Rancière might celebrate the fact that they are mostly “self-taught” (that is that their education was not controlled by any authority besides each other), the grandfather in me suspects that only a very few will end up with more money than they started with. As far as I know, one rarely wins battles against “the Market” (and those end up managers of hedge funds…). As it is often put, the young ones are going to “get an education”…

Money is being made and lost on a grand scale. If much of this money is not essential for survival anyway, then one suspects that all this is also “fun” in the way deep play can be. So, let’s leave aside the money aspect for a while, and recognize what has been happening as, also, involving active explorations of possibilities given what one might call the “affordances” of the epoch. This would include the affordances of new software, the collapse of schooling as control of young bodies for hours on end, Zoom boredom, social media dares that may be less dangerous than others (no sex, no Trump, just “ready money” that is not quite needed for survival). And then, as the young ones could no longer be dismissed by the chiefs, there is the chief own explorations of aspect of Wall Street affordances they had not noticed before. I am about sure that those the chiefs manage will now use what the young ones discovered. I am reminded of Souleles’s work on private equity funds that surprised Wall Street in the early 1970s (2019a, 2019b). At that time a few young men had discovered a possibility, and soon many followed suit.

But Souleles had to work from 40-year-old documents, and reminiscences from some of those who followed the pioneers. What I  hope will now happen is that someone will keep ethnographic tabs on the actors in this GameStop moment in order to develop better models of what I understand as ongoing education through collective difficult deliberations (2007, 2019). I trust this kind of research would help move the field away from easy “explanations” that end with the mention of “capitalism,” “neo-liberalism,” “greed,” “white privilege,” and any other such purported root cause. Obviously, the moment is part of a broader epoch that started with Reagan and Thatcher, or the Bretton Woods agreements, or Adam Smith, or … But none of these, as moments in the history of capitalism, are, precisely, causes. They are at most new conditions (constraints and possibilities) in an ecology with affordances that keep emerging and evolving. Neither the chiefs nor the young ones of the GameStop moment are just billiard balls with habitus careening on some billiard table.

So, I propose to look at the event as a sequence of moves by life forms responding poetically to various triggers. From my reading of media reports (and expanding on my post of January 28, 2021):

Time 1 — GameStop was a failing business.  Its stock was  moving lower, perhaps to 0;

Time 2 —  Some hedge fund managers (probably low level ones at first) noticed this, imagined that the “overly” high price was driven by the ignorant (see the young ones above), and decided to make money by betting that the price would go lower;

Time 3 —  young men in various basements continued buying the stock and its price kept on getting higher (I wonder why they would do this: ignorance of business fundamentals? Nostalgia from the time when the shop was their utopia where to spend Christmas money?)

Time 4 —  some of the young men noticed that they were bothering New York hedge funds and organized to buy even more stock (with the idea they would bankrupt the funds).

Time 5 —  the chiefs of the managers noticed that they were getting played and got together to apply raw economic power over the actual market place (Robinhood) where the buying was taking place and got the price to get down;

Time 6 —  the young ones mobilized further and exercised their own raw political power by making the media notice, thereby leading to a backdown from some actors—though after some of them had limited their losses;

Time 7 —  …….. [to come] ……….

To generalize, we have here a conversation or deliberation during which the ignorant teach each other new possibilities even as they make some new ones and there by produce consequences that are far more than “texts” or “narratives.”

Recently, Audrey Le successfully defended a most interesting dissertation about “hackathons.” Like me a while ago you may have no idea what those would be… Well, they are events when (very much mostly) young (mostly) men play/work over a weekend at developing some “thing” (app, process, and who knows what else) that involves some computer programming (or can be analogized to computer design). Until Le started teaching me about them, I had never heard of hackathons–like I had never heard of DoItYourself biology labs, venture capitalists, equine therapies, video badge games and so many other wonder-inspiring stuff that first appeared in the late 20th century. There is indeed much “new” here for anthropologists looking for the odd human beings they thought could only encounter up the Amazon or the Congo. An anthropologist just has to go down the corridors of Columbia (Harvard, MIT, etc.) to meet never-yet-imagined “others.”
Continue reading On hackathons, machines, and flamingos →

I always wonder about the way research on interaction gets reported in the media only (or about always) when it is conducted by psychologists.  Easy to chalk to “American individualism,” as institutionalized, and to its sub-forms like “culture of poverty,” or “child development.”

This time, my antennas were agitated by an interview in the University of Chicago glossy publication for alumni.  It is titled “Little scientists” with the descriptive subtitle “Think of children as pint-sized psychologists, says parenting expert Erica Reischer, AM’96, PhD’00.”

Not too surprisingly, the editors of the magazine chose, to illustrate, a picture of a child, writing in a notebook.  Many will notice that the child is a boy, white, with auburn hair, wearing a blue t-shirt.  I notice that he is by himself.  If there were a caption, it might be “the scientist at work”…

Irony aside, the underlying work is one I wish I could use when writing about family education.  The story starts with a common place: obedience class for dogs is really about training humans.  Having just been working on Jennifer Van Tiem’s chapter on horses and human (for our When is education), I know now how extensive the anthropological literature on animal/human interaction has become.  But, of course, the editor quotes Reischer for saying something about “teaching us how to think like a dog … so that [the dog] would learn positive behaviors.”

Note the emphasis on thinking for the human, behavior for the dog, and a causal link between separate entities.

On to children, analogically.

“What we really need … is pay attention to our children’s behavior”  (as if any human being could NOT pay attention) …. “[then] we can make choices about what we are going to do about [it]” (as if NEXT acts, in an improvised sequence, could ever be matters of choice under separate control).

Most interesting is the metaphor of the scientist (a conceit, really) Reischer proposes and the editor uses as title for the piece: “Kids are doing experiments because they have to figure out how the people in their lives work. I sometimes say, ‘Pretend your kids are wearing little white lab coats, and carrying little lab notebooks, and making notes all day long about what works and what doesn’t work with you’.”  Now that could have developed into something Rancière or Garfinkel might have written as instructions to researchers (and parents): notice intelligence at work; notice the noticings and the improvisations on suggested themes given tools and affordances.

Except, of course, that the editor goes back to the atomistic, individualistic, narrative and the “secret sauce” [sic] to happy parenting: Learn how to manipulate your child like a trainer manipulates dogs.

Pavlov? Skinner?

I have not read Reischer’s book.  So I am not sure how close the magazine story comes to what she wrote, what she “believes,” or what she could be shown to do when face to face with her own children if we had videotapes of the interaction.  My experience with the editors of such magazines is that their priorities are not mine, and may not have been Reischer’s.  Public relation editors must translate for their audience: alumni who are mostly not scholars, but may be imagined to be most comfortable with stories about human interaction written in terms of causation between separately acting (free) individuals.

And yet, one might go back and rewrite the story, the book, and maybe even the research (though there many not have been any in this case) to show how the child is indeed, a “scientist” with (ethno-)methods for figuring out what happened in collaboration with (and thus in struggle with) parents as consociates as, together, they improvise the family that will have been.  One cannot be a scientist by oneself.  And researchers who specialize in individuals will never understand humanity (or why psychology is hegemonic in America).

Imagine a situation (from experience in a small town in Southern France):

Person A announces “I do not speak to person B” which, in French, might be reported by A to X, Y, or Z, as “On ne se parle pas.”  “On” here is an indefinite pronoun often used in French for “we.”  The declaration constitutes a community of A, B, X, Y, Z with the rule “A/B do not speak when they encounter each other.”  The rule is both description and prescription, or perhaps more precisely differentiated instruction about the meta-pragmatics of an interactional style.

NotSpeaking is a complex speech act, and a trigger for further speech acts.

NotSpeaking requires instruction since, everything else being the same, it is performed at a moment when the two could and should speak, as, say, when walking by each other in some parking lot.  In rural Southern France, at the turn of the 21st century, such moments start with an expression of acknowledgment that the encounter has started (smile, re-organization of the body, etc.), possibly preliminaries, then “la bise” (three “air kisses” on alternate side of the head with no body contact), and then either developments that might last very long, or else a brief comment about being in a hurry, leading to various closing statements about, say, “having aperitif before we leave.”  NotSpeaking, as speech event, involves turning away of the head at the time when the expression of acknowledgment should have appeared (or other bodily movements as, for example, turning away into a side street).  NotSpeaking ends after the two bodies have passed and return to their earlier state.

As Bourdieu explained in one of his best passages about ritual insults in the Mediterranean ([1972] 1977: pp. 10ff), Maussian gifts (of which NotSpeaking is a peculiar case)  do place obligations on both participants but the response is not automatic.  Much is involved.  For example, one or the other of the party might make an exaggerated display of greeting by directly looking at the other and saying something like “Bonjour!”, perhaps with a smile.  In this case, not NotSpeaking may actually be an insult, whether in intent or in subsequent assessment.   In any event, the field is very well organized indeed for what is definitively hard work!

In brief, NotSpeaking happens within what has also been called a “community of practice.”  But this is not the nice, cosy “community” of Wenger (1998).  It is a dark place as many, in the Summer of 2016, have found, whether in Paris, Nice or other such sites of interaction and political violence.  I prefer to us the work “polity” for the groups that emerge as someone or other starts doing something to others that what was not until then part of their “normal” but now becomes inescapable.  One cannot make war by oneself, and one cannot not respond to acts of war.  Anthropologists will have to think further about this.

One way to start is to wonder about the emergence of temporary polities when people become significant to each other (whether in love or war).  The question of emergence does lead to questions about beginnings and ends, as well as questions about participation.  NotSpeaking may start when one of the protagonists decides not to speak to the other the next time they met.  And it may be that this next time is when B finds out that A does not speak to him anymore—and that may be the “start” for B.  One could even look for the instructional moments when A asserts to B, in body movement if not in words, “I do not speak to you anymore” (or the reverse as these things do change).  Conversely, the actual performance of NotSpeaking can be said to start when the two notice each other and to end a few seconds later.  What is central to me here is that NotSpeaking is specific to particular persons at particular times and requires the setting up of the encounter as a NotSpeaking.   Not speaking to billions of strangers is not relevant here.  Only NotSpeaking to a non-stranger is relevant (whether the non-stranger is an erstwhile intimate, or an erstwhile total stranger).  NotSpeaking, at the turn of the 21st century, in Southern France, is a syntagm that inscribes something in history.

There may be a way of thinking about the emergence of a new polity in history (or the re-organization of an old polity) that I have never seen used in anthropology.  It would involved borrowing from physics what is called “termination shocks.”  I learned about those a while ago in an article in Discover Magazine about Voyager 1 entering interstellar space.  Termination shocks are ubiquitous (check you bathroom sink where you can make one by running water hard into it).  NotSpeaking, (making war, falling in love) similarly arises in the interaction between contradictory forces that makes something very real: a boundary marking different kinds of normal, and difficulties when crossing the boundary.  NotSpeaking catches people who may be hurt by it.  And then its effects fade into inter-communal space where the tiny drama can be safely ignored.