Eric Fischer- Twitter and Flickr World Map - CC Cultural Product Copyright 2011

Eric Fischer of Oakland California has produced a stunning set of maps of flickr photos and Twitter tweets from geolocation tags in the posts.  These respatialize the world as lit up by these particular forms of new media/Web 2.0 use.  A higher resolution image of the world map is also online.   I especially like the North American map with its annotated areas and zoomable detail.  A Toronto Star article gives more detail, but browse the photostream of cities.  What is interesting is to see the lack of popularity of flickr in a city such as Jakarta or Singapore, and the obvious importance of blue twitter in suburbs (see Toronto).  Twitter follows main roads, suggesting the importance of tweeting from automobiles and public transport.  Mobility:  Twitter as commuting, flickr as tourist travel?   Spectacular tourism sites such as Banff and Jasper in the Rocky Mountains appear as red-orange flickr concentrations without tweets. These media settle like mists, differentially on the topography and the activity-scapes of everyday life.

-Rob

Reviewed by Marcel LaFlamme, Department of Anthropology, Rice University (US)

On the first Monday of September, the townspeople of Hegins, Pennsylvania would assemble in the park to kill pigeons. Birds rounded up in the railyards of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia were transported to Hegins by the crate, where they would be blasted out of the air by shotgun-toting sportsmen. By the early 1990s, when anthropologist Hoon Song began his fieldwork in Hegins, animal rights activists were descending on the pigeon shoot in droves; the apparent senselessness of the killing inspired in them a passion, Song writes, “unmatched by the plight of a million cows” (19). Yet the fervor of the protesters and the ensuing media circus seemed only to fuel the brutality: as the television cameras rolled, ecstatic onlookers decapitated the wounded birds with a flick of the wrist, squashed their bodies underfoot, and even smeared their children’s upturned faces with fresh pigeon blood.

[cc photo credit: Mohd Hafizuddin Husin]

The field, as Song finds it in Pigeon Trouble, is already mediatized, spectacularized, and Song’s informants are powerfully aware of their presence in the representations of others. The protesters have no illusions about winning converts in Hegins; rather, their yearly appearance allows them to gather visual and narrative “raw material” (33) for an audience of supporters who are understood to be elsewhere. The resulting newsletters and direct mailings make Hegins available for consumption as an otherwise inaccessible space of rural depravity. Meanwhile, the working-class hooligans who delight in baiting the out-of-towners also run home during the shoot to monitor the news coverage as it unfolds. Song emphasizes the lapse of time between the moment of being seen in the park and the moment of mediated seeing on the TV screen, a temporal lag that might have been eliminated if the shoot had continued into the smartphone era. As it is, the shoot was canceled in 1999 under threat of litigation, meaning that Pigeon Trouble is, among other things, a record of historically and technologically contingent modalities of “seeing oneself seeing” (205).

Anthropology, as a discipline, fancies itself particularly savvy about the politics of seeing oneself seeing, and the so-called reflexive turn of the 1980s did usher in a new attention to the positionality of the fieldworker. Yet Song is openly skeptical about reflexivity as a textual technique that, by offering some additional context, somehow renders representation unproblematic. “The gaze of power is confessed to have been…coincident with the anthropologist,” he writes, “and the reflexive anthropologist volunteers to capture the heretofore invisible anthropological eye ‘from behind’” (208). But where is this “from behind,” he wonders, and what are the ethical and ontological stakes of occupying it? Song’s rejection of such a space of transcendence both informs and grows out of his own experience of foreignness in Hegins: as a Korean in a mostly white community with little enthusiasm for immigrants, as a shy, birdphobic intellectual more at ease with “people of the kitchen” (68) than the gruff, homosocial world of the pigeon killers. Song does gain a remarkable degree of access to the private gun clubs and drinking establishments where the sportsmen would congregate. Yet he remains, irredeemably, an outsider, and he uses this experience of apartness to link the problem of the ethnographer to the problem of the animal.

Song acknowledges the appeal of a “representationalist” reading of the Hegins pigeon shoot, in which racial violence or economic malaise are displaced onto the body of the pigeon. This, in a sense, was the logic mobilized by then-candidate Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign, when he infamously suggested that people in small-town Pennsylvania “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them…as a way to explain their frustrations.” The line was political poison for Obama, but Song suggests that this line of thinking also reifies the very social formations that anthropologists are out to understand. To that end, Song sets out to ask “not what animals are ‘about’ positively and legibly but what they are negatively and illegibly; not the end product of how we render them legible with human meaning but the illegible gulf or difference that facilitates such a reading in the first place” (149). Indeed, Song concludes that this gulf may separate ethnographer and informant just as surely as human and animal. Therefore, for Song, sociality consists not in a shared experience of intersubjectivity or creaturely life. Rather, it consists in “a willing submission to dislocation and desubjectification, that is, a becoming-object to the Other’s gaze” (212). This radical renunciation of the subject’s sovereignty is, for Song, the beginning of ethics. It is a measure of what we owe one another.

Pigeon Trouble suffers, at times, from theoretical digressions that stray far from the lifeworld of Hegins, Pennsylvania. It is as though Song’s dense prose threatens to give way to the “ruins of speech” (119) that he ascribes to his conspiracy-minded informants. Still, the book remains an ethnographically rich and formally ambitious account of a rural community caught in broader webs of signification. It also comes as close as any book I know to offering a phenomenological account of a bird in flight, drawing on Song’s apprenticeship with an enigmatic pigeon trainer named Monk. Through Monk’s eyes, across the species divide, we glimpse the darkness of the trap into which the pigeons are placed, the murmur of the crowd, and then the release into a violent, dazzling brightness.

Adam Pańczuk – Karczeby (2008-2009)

“In one of the dialects spoken in the east of Poland, which is a mixture of Polish and Belorussian, people strongly attached to the soil they had been cultivating for generations were called ‘Karczeby’. With their bare hands Karczeby cleared forests in order to grow crops. The word karczeb was also used to describe what remains after a tree is cut down — a trunk with roots, which remains stuck in the ground. This also applied to people — it was not easy for the authorities to root them out from their land, even in the Stalinism times. The price they paid for their attachment to their soil was often their freedom or life. After death, buried nearby their farmland, a karczeb himself became the soil, later cultivated by his descendants.”

via

I find myself increasingly asking similar questions, and given how many recent posts have been about new high-tech cities, I thought I could balance things out by pointing readers to Justin Partyka’s gorgeous photos of rural people and places in England.

For his collection The East Anglians, Partyka writes:

“For the last nine years I have been traveling the back roads of rural East Anglia, passing down drove and lane, track and way. On my journeys I discovered the remnants of the agrarian community that was once widespread throughout this region. For most people this is a world that no longer exists. It is a place where traditional methods and knowledge are still very much depended upon, and the identity of the people is intimately shaped by the landscape on which they live and work. Small-time farmers, reed cutters and rabbit catchers, these are the East Anglians – the forgotten people of the flatlands who continue to work the land because the need to is in their blood.”

“Central to an agrarian culture is the idea of land: not just working the land, living on the land, and owning the land (all which are important) – but that much deeper concept of being part of the land; the process of it becoming both physically and psychologically engrained in the human experience. It is impossible to escape the presence of the landscape. It creeps from the fields into the home. It enters through an open window, or a crack under the door; engrained in the palm of a hand, or on the sole of a boot. Leeks sprout from the curtains and the table top is fenland peat. The agrarian farmers I have come to know are so deeply rooted to the land, it is as if they have grown up out of the soil like a tree. Such an intimate relationship comes from what the rural writer, farmer and activist Wendell Berry, describes as “knowledge in place for a long time.”

“To enter into the agrarian world of the East Anglians’ is to experience a rural culture that has a direct lineage extending back to the region’s peasant farmers of the early Middle Ages. The agrarian farmer always has one foot firmly planted in the past. The old ways are proven to work and can therefore be relied upon. Everything is visibly engrained with history. Buildings are often cobbled together and are a ramshackle mix of wood, tin, and stone. And the agricultural machinery is a patchwork of rust, mud, and oil stains in which the past is embedded.”

“The agrarian farmer knows in fine detail the histories and biographies of his local landscape. After years of familiarity with the land he knows what is the best cycle of crop rotation on any particular field, where it lies wet in winter, and how best to plough, sow, hoe, and harvest that field to reap the best from it. Unaided by a map, he can negotiate the complex network of local droves and tracks by day and night, and walk the fields and woodlands, fen and marsh equally so. Inside the agrarian mind are the local wind patterns and river currents; along with the life stories of the local inhabitants, wildlife habitats, and tree and plant species past and present. I have been told of farmers who have come and gone, from what direction the fox will come to steal a chicken, and who planted a particular oak tree and when.”

“But during the last sixty years an agrarian way of life has become increasingly irrelevant in a modern society, and the East Anglians find themselves living on the margins. Most of the small family farms in East Anglia are now gone, while the fields of agribusiness have grown bigger, swallowing up the landscape as they go. The result is the depopulation of the rural landscape, and with it the loss of the knowledge of local place and the traditional skills of working the land that are so important to an agrarian culture. As one old-time farmer said to me, “It’s just one big tractor now and a thousand acres. There’s nobody on the land today.” “But” he continued, “there will always be those that straggle on – the awkward ones who remain.”

“I have spent many hours in the fields, patiently watching how man and the landscape intimately shape each other. If I am looking closely, occasionally I am offered a glimpse into the mystery of this ancient relationship. It is a fleeting moment; I click the shutter; and I wait…”

via Design Observer