Hello world! Challenges for blogging as anthropological outreach

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Hello world! Challenges forblogging as anthropologicaloutreach

Mar tijn de Koning Radboud University Nijmegen

Many anthropologists have voiced concerns about an apparent lack of influence thediscipline has on current debates about culture, identity, religion, globalization, andother topics. For some, blogging is held to be a particularly suitable avenue for extend-ing the anthropological voice to a broader public (e.g. Hawks 2011; Price 2010; Sabloff2011). For over a decade, blogs have been used as a means for anthropological out-reach. Many are well known within the field: Savage Minds, Neuro-anthropology,Culture Matters, Antropologi.info, Anthropology Report. The positive aspects of blog-ging seem clear – it allows anthropologists to share and promote their work andexchange ideas in multiple ways for publics who are often not exposed to such knowl-edge. However, is blogging really a solution for the lack of influence of anthropologi-cal knowledge? I will explore this issue by focusing on two questions: why do peopleblog and who is the audience of anthropology blogs? Based on the contributions ofseveral blogs, including my own, I’ve come to the conclusion that our reach is limitedto the extent that we appear mostly to attract fellow anthropologists in the West andthat our blogs are Western-orientated.

Although there are probably as many motivations to blog as there are bloggers, a lookat the rationales is useful. On their own blogs, many anthropologists have suggestedthat for them the primary reasons for blogging are self-realization, creativity andnetworking, sharing research experiences and outcomes, and commenting on currentaffairs. In many cases, anthropology bloggers note that it is ‘exciting’ to blog. Forexample, Kristina Killgrove (2012) on Powered by Osteons (a blog on archaeology andbio-anthropology) states:

[T]here’s excitement in knowing that people who probably wouldn’t touch my journal articles arereading about my work and about other developments in bioarchaeology; there’s joy when I getemails from up-and-coming researchers, as young as middle schoolers, who want advice on how tomake bioarchaeology a career; and there’s the interaction with my readers that doesn’t come across inthe unidirectional, static medium of a publication.

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Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 19, 394-397© Royal Anthropological Institute 2013

Here, I think, we encounter an interesting combination of self-realization and trying toreach out to a broad public. Killgrove’s public consists of ‘up-and-coming researchers’and there is a more interactive relationship than in the case of academic journals.

Related to this idea is also the need felt by some ‘to be connected’. In a recent blogpost by Lorenz Khazaleh (2012) of Antropologi.info, about the newly launchedPopAnth website, he notes:

Another thing that struck me as typical for our time is the cry for attention, the cry for being sharedand liked. Big sharing buttons everywhere, one of them even covers parts of the text, and makes itunreadable. And when we are approaching the end of the article, we get attacked by a huge popup withthe message ‘You’ll probably get a kick of these too’.

The ‘fun factor’ here is clearly paramount. PopAnth is indeed one of the most outspokenblogswhenitcomestopossibilitiesandthenecessityof sharing.Partof theself-realizationand development as an anthropologist pertains to helping researchers develop theirwriting and their ideas.Although the writing on blogs is often not as precise and nuancedas in texts in peer-reviewed academic journals and books, the accessible format and styleof blogging allows others who are not familiar with academic work to engage with theresearch. Preliminary ideas can be shared, one’s own questions about particular phe-nomena might be answered, methodological issues can be discussed, and so on (see, e.g.,Hayman 2012).Seen this way,blogging is‘thinking by writing’: testing ideas,concepts,andexperiences with regard to content and form (see, e.g., Schielke 2012). They can be usedin articles later on and they can function as a public repository for writing.

The creative function of blogging can only work when research is shared with others.Sharing research is done in multiple ways. Some anthropologists publish parts of theirfieldnotes on their blogs – an interesting way of becoming publicly accountable. It canalso make one’s research more collaborative, as informants, colleagues, and others canrespond to and enhance the value and depth of one’s notes with their feedback. Itbrings up some dilemmas, too, though. For example, how is anonymity maintained andhow can issues of privacy be taken into account? To what extent is it possible anddesirable to analyse publicly the events one is reporting about?

My own experiences with conducting research on Salafism, an Islamic reform move-ment, and updating blogs about events related to the position of Islam and Muslims inEurope may be instructive in this regard. On my blog, Closer, I only publish fieldnotesof public events I have attended and only publish general impressions of the events andfragments of my talks with official spokespersons (and sometimes anonymousbystanders who are not known by my informants). The notes are published about aweek after the event allowing inclusion of an overview of reactions in social media,newspapers, television, and news sites. In almost all instances a few colleagues, students,informants, policy-makers, and others have shared their thoughts and provided addi-tional information and alternative interpretations. This has led me to reinterpret myown findings and reconsider my perspectives on Salafism (see also Wang 2012).

Since my own fieldnotes are often published about a week after the event and includelinks to (and sometimes comments on) other reports, they are actually a mixture offieldnotes and social commentary. Blogging allows us to add immediacy to our work bycombining relevant anthropological research with commenting on ongoing social phe-nomena or current anthropological debates (Boellstorff 2011). An interesting example isthe live blog post by Krystal D’Costa (2011) on Thanksgiving at Anthropology in Practice,

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written while preparing the holiday meal and exploring how thanks, food, and familycome together in trying ‘to create a sense of holiday’. The dimension of immediacyguarantees feedback during or after controversial events but it can also be a nuisance andstressful; the ivory tower is often more peaceful and safe than the virtual world.

These different motivations provide us with a few clues as to what blogging contributesto public outreach and to what kind of audiences blogs reach. A quick survey of someanthropology blogs tells us something about the make-up of these audiences. In 2008

Savage Minds published a small survey of their visitors, showing that by far most of the400 people who responded were anthropology graduate students, followed by anthro-pology professors and anthropology undergraduates. Many others had a former relationwith anthropology (Friedman 2008).Most of the 5,000-plus visits of that week came fromthe United States and Europe. My own blog is somewhat different in this respect. Of theabout 2,000 visitors every week,75 per cent are from the Netherlands (approximately halfof the posts are in Dutch, the rest in English). Most of the 300 subscribers are people fromacademia (including students), journalists and policy-makers working on Islam andMuslims in Europe or the Middle East, and a few of my interlocutors in the Salafismresearch project.Most of the people responding,however,are not from those circles,withthe exception of a few Muslims. By far most of the reactions come from non-MuslimDutch people who express their concerns (or outright racist views) on Islam, Muslims,and the alleged rise of Islam in Europe. It could be that blogs about politicized researchthemes generate the most comments and are able to reach out to a public outside theacademic.JorisLuyendijk’sBankingBlogappears toverysuccessful intermsof comments(regularly between 70 and 150; sometimes much more) but it is difficult to say who thecommentators are except that they are probably regular readers of the Guardian’s site(sincehisblog ispartof that site).This isonlyavery limitedoverview,of course.Moreover,other research suggests that it is difficult to determine the wider audience of anthropologyblogs, because publics only ever exist discursively (Kjellberg 2010).

Based upon these reflections, we can tentatively say that anthropology blogs appear toreach out mostly to fellow academics. This would support the idea that much on-lineinteraction is about meeting ‘like-minded’ individuals (e.g. Forte 2011). But if we reallywant to know how influential anthropology blogs can be, we need a more sophisticatedmode of assessment. Yet, if anthropology blogs mostly reach colleagues and perhaps theoccasional journalist or policy-maker rather than a broader public, is that really aproblem? It is perhaps like teaching students; they are the ones who bring anthropologicalknowledge into wider circles. A few may become researchers but many will end up inbusiness, social work, policy, journalism, and so on, where they will apply some of whatwe taught them and discuss their anthropologically informed views with others.

Another aspect of the anthropology blogs concerns the kind of broader public wewant to address. Do we engage with people in a particular country? Or do we want toattract a worldwide public – something blogs are well suited to do? Most blogs dis-cussed here (as well as those listed on overviews such as Anthropology Report andAntropologi.info) are Western-orientated; most are based in the Unites States and(Western) Europe with bloggers from the same areas and probably attracting publicsfrom the same areas. But how do we reach out to publics in the Middle East, forexample? Or to blogs of fellow researchers in other parts of the world? Of course,language is a barrier here. I have focused mostly on English-language blogs and my blog

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has an English-language section and a Dutch section. But it appears that bloggers fromthe Middle East are mostly absent in our link lists (at least as academics). Also the topicsare often related to US and Western European events and circumstances; in this senseon-line communication has not yet been very successful in creating a more global andplural anthropological community, as Gustavo Lins Ribeiro (2005) has called for.

So far we have to conclude that the contribution of anthropology blogs to informingwider publics appears to be limited. We do not really know who our audience is, but itappears that we often lack a non-Western audience. This is remarkable since many ofour research endeavours are carried out in non-Western countries. I think it is time forbloggers to engage seriously with the issues raised here in order to realize the fullpotential for public anthropology by blogging.

REFERENCES

Boellstorff, T. 2011. Three comments on anthropology and science. American Anthropologist 113, 541-4.D’Costa, K. 2011. Live blog: field notes from Thanksgiving. Anthropology in Practice, Scientific American

Blog Network, 24 November (available on-line: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practice/2011/11/24/live-blog-field-notes-from-thanksgiving/, accessed 21 February 2013).

Forte, M. 2011. Beyond public anthropology: approaching zero. Lecture, 15 October (available on-line:http://vimeo.com/30480753, accessed 21 February 2013).

Friedman, K. 2008. Who reads Savage Minds? Savage Minds, 28 April (available on-line: http://savageminds.org/2008/04/28/who-reads-savage-minds/, accessed 21 February 2013).

Hawks, J. 2011. Blogs, academic discourse in economics. John Hawks weblog, 19 October (available on-line:http://johnhawks.net/node/28195, accessed 21 February 2013).

Hayman, C. 2012. Linguistic anthropology and electoral madness. Open Anthropology Cooperative, 14

October (available on-line: http://openanthcoop.ning.com/profiles/blogs/linguistic-anthropology-and-electoral-madness, accessed 21 February 2013).

Khazaleh, L. 2012. When anthropology is begging for attention: PopAnth website launched. Antropologi-.info, 24 October (available on-line: http://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/2012/popanth, accessed21 February 2013).

Killgrove, K. 2012. Blogs as anthropological outreach. Powered by Osteons, 9 February (available on-line:http://www.poweredbyosteons.org/2012/02/blogs-as-anthropological-outreach.html, accessed 21 February 2013).

Kjellberg, S. 2010. I am a blogging researcher: motivations for blogging in a scholarly context. First Monday15: 8 (available on-line: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2962/2580, accessed 21 February 2013).

Price, D.H. 2010. Blogging anthropology: Savage Minds, Zero Anthropology, and AAA blogs. AmericanAnthropologist 112, 140-2.

Ribeiro, G.L. 2005. A different global scenario in anthropology. Anthropology News 46: 7, 5-6.Sabloff, J.A. 2011. Where have you gone, Margaret Mead? Anthropology and public intellectuals. American

Anthropologist 113, 408-16.Schielke, S. 2012. Amshir. “You’ll be late for the revolution!” 9 March (available on-line: http://

samuliegypt.blogspot.nl/2012/03/amshir.html, accessed 21 February 2013).Wang, T. 2012. Writing live fieldnotes: towards a more open ethnography. Ethnography Matters, 2 August

(available on-line: http://ethnographymatters.net/2012/08/02/writing-live-fieldnotes-towards-a-more-open-ethnography/, accessed 21 February 2013).

Martijn de Koning has published on identity construction of Moroccan-Dutch youth, Salafi Muslims in theNetherlands, and the Dutch Islam debate. He teaches at the Department of Religious Studies at RadboudUniversity in Nijmegen and at the Department of Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam.

Department of Religious Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, Erasmusplein 1, 6525 HT Nijmegen, The

Netherlands. [email protected]

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Hello world! Challenges for blogging as anthropological outreach