Michael Agar
Ethknoworks LLC

Web page tune-up 7/​26/​10

A manuscript that will one day allow me to write the shaggy review story of all time will be coming out in Language and Communication. A preprint can be downloaded from the top of the column on the left. It is a weird piece, looking at ethnography as translation in a way that includes translation theory, linguistic anthropology, and artificial intelligence. But running the publication gauntlet through a few different journals has been a lengthy ride in the paradigm bumper cars concession at the post-disciplinary academic county fair. Fortunately Language and Communication likes off-beat manuscripts. And the article on organizational development from an ethno-complexity angle finally appeared in Organizational Research Methods. The preprint still lurks in the left-hand column. Took a couple of years. Publishing in academic outlets while working outside the university is like playing a Charlie Parker solo wearing oven mitts.

Last weekend the Santa Fe Watershed Association opened up the usually secure watershed area to a public hike. About twenty of us showed up, registered in advance, with ID's in hand, to be admitted through a locked ranch-style gate that it would have been easy enough to climb over. The watershed provides about half of Santa Fe's water, starting with a stream flowing out of Lake Catherine in the mountains and winding its way down to the Rio Grande on Cochiti Pueblo land.

Four different people spoke to us during the hike, all experts in their angle of vision on the history and politics of the watershed. One of them, to my surprise, was Bill, with his dog Kafka, a guy I'd met during a project years ago to coordinate fire response in the Santa Fe city/​county jurisdictions. We'd enjoyed talking then, because we share a premise rare in Santa Fe Anglo society. It is the official definition of cynicism, the suspicion that noble statements of motive usually conceal self-interest.

So as we sat around for Bill's lecture at the mid-point of the hike through the watershed, I was curious how he'd frame it. He framed it by quoting Aldo Leopold, who wrote of the disconnect between humans and nature that accelerated with modern life. Food is what you buy in the supermarket; water is what you get from the tap; heat is what comes out of a furnace. It's a simple point, like most profound things, and in the context of where we were it explained the stories of Santa Fe water that we'd heard as well as stories Bill told about the right way to handle forests versus the wrong ways that became policy. Cynicism applied very well, not to Bill or the other experts on the hike, but to the humans in the stories they told.

It made me think of my first ethnographic experience in South India again, the theme of the previous home page. As Bill talked, I remember the series of shocks, fascinating ones to me right after I arrived, at the disappearance of the culture/​nature boundary. I don't mean to tell any idyllic "back to nature" story here. Nature was anything but idyllic on Deccan plateau wasteland during the hot season. It was not your friend.

But, you know, you could actually read by moonlight. Water came from clay pots that women carried for a mile on thick woven rings they placed on their head. Heat came from burning dry dung and it cooked the food and boiled the water for the bath at the same time. The bathroom was a sheltered area outside the village where you cleaned yourself with water you carried in a small metal pot. The staple grain to make roti came from nearby fields after the plant was harvested and threshed by family members. The occasional treat of mutton on a feast day came from a sheep whose throat was cut, whose blood was collected for later ceremonial consumption mixed with flour, and who was then skinned and butchered and distributed to families in the village.

Never mind the old saying, you are what you eat. You lived with what you ate and ate what you did.

There was really nothing mystical or romantic about it, no Rousseau-ian glow, just a temporary shock to the college kid from Northern California who had been the perfect example of what Leopold wrote about. I've never forgotten it, nor have I forgotten my reaction when I returned to Northern California. "Jesus, look at all this useless stuff."

Now the thing is, Bill and the other three experts had a mission, and their mission was to restore that feeling I had when I arrived in the South Indian village, restore it to everyone, as soon as possible. So when you flushed a toilet with precious drinking water from the Watershed you'd feel the stupidity on a personal level and do something about it. Or that when you cranked the thermostat, you'd be angry that you encouraged the BP's of the world and handed political leverage to closed-minded tyrants who oppressed their citizens. You'd feel like one of the mob of idiots they rely on and do something about it. Bill and his colleagues wanted to make us feel nature up close and personal--my shock in the village--even when its workings were far away.

It made me wonder how to do that with human differences, my ethnographic job.

As far as the two main projects I work on nowadays, they keep on keepin’ on. The language/​culture software project, which I last reported had lost its thrill, changed again. Now I'm taking the popular concept of culture, which makes any halfway sober anthropologist break out in a rash, and trying to make it fit task specific miscommunications with massive impact on person evaluation, not so far away from my old teacher John Gumperz's work on "contextualization cues," and much of what I've been trying to do in Culture: An Upgrade, the book from hell. The ecology project remains fascinating, though, to the extent that diving into the details of urban annexation laws and how they change is fascinating. You have to be there, I guess. The book from hell--Chapter One is still in the left hand column--is still floating among Dante’s higher numbered circles. I’m remembering Edward T. Hall, “Ned” as he liked to be called. We’d met at an intercultural communication conference in Germany, so when I came to Santa Fe to work for a week some years ago I called and found out he was in the hospital. I visited him in the evening, smuggling in a couple of beers at his request. Here’s a guy who’s done several best-selling books, The Silent Language was the first and maybe most famous, and he warned me about writing books on the edges of categories. And he was doing it when the book Writing Culture wasn't even a distant glimmer in anthropology's eyes. But then the nonfiction trade market is no walk on the beach, either, to put mildly. Having written for several different kinds of outlets, I want to think about this some more, especially in light of what our media world is turning into, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Or maybe it's just that I'm more interested now in communicating for project-specific effects, not exactly a winning style for a general market of any kind.

Speaking of project effect, I just heard that a project I did for a VA hospital last year led to a first paper on using agent based models to better understand and improve clinical practice. The trip to England as a “methodological innovator” is over and done with. There's a blog entry about "innovation" if you're curious. The visit to CASA, an urban research center in London, went well. A copy of that abstract is on the blog. Recently a bio-encyclopedia project asked me to lay out my checkered past for an applied linguistics reference book. That was kind of fun, looking at life from a different angle. It was like constructing a different person. It's on the blog.

Lots of other things in the air right now--too soon to talk about them--and like I wrote in the last update, I’m swimming in a stew of ideas with even more ingredients now that I’d like to research and write about. I’ll get to it sooner or later.

Life is interesting.