July 28, 2005
It worked!
I'm sitting here with my mom in Maui, showing her how we spent class this morning. I just asked her if she would like to comment, and she said, "I'm impressed."
Posted by Jennifer at 01:02 PM | Comments (3)
July 27, 2005
Swimming and Surfing
Yes, Mary Francis, I am in Hawaii, swimming with the turtles by day and surfing the Internet for class stuff by night.
Posted by Jennifer at 11:44 PM | Comments (1)
July 26, 2005
The Promise of the Virtual Classroom
Oh, the "promise" of technology, and I, with my utopian vision of greeting the class through my webcam and proceeding with wonderful discussions on "narratives" and "cyberspace" and "place," yet at 3:30am and 6000 miles away from Cambridge, I just stared at my webcam in disbelief after realizing in horror that no one would be staring back.
Posted by Jennifer at 11:37 AM | Comments (1)
July 20, 2005
Flowers for a Stranger
A classmate suggested in her blog to give flowers to a stranger, except I don't have a picture of a flower to give to the strangers (you) who are reading this blog. I'll offer a Maussian disco ball.
Posted by Jennifer at 11:40 PM | Comments (1)
July 19, 2005
Taking out the Trash
Wiggling deeper into the corner of the couch, I carefully adjust the red fleece blanket over my crossed legs while balancing an open laptop. Having written and explored online communities in this position for hours, my clumsy words only peer back at me from the screen. They seem to huddle in cyberspace like shy teenagers on the first day of school. Ignoring them, my lazy eyes wander over to the screen’s shiny tinsel frame, the edge of cyberspace, and atop the ruby red fleece covering my squirming legs I watch it rise and fall like a silver dolphin on a scarlet sea.
The "edge" of cyberspace is one I can physically see on my aluminum Mac but remains blurred in my mind; distinguishing between these domains as “physical space” and “cyberspace” feels too Cartesian to be believable. Yet beyond this less than metaphysical "edge" I see my cluttered coffee table supporting some strewn papers, pens and a pair of sunglasses, a hair band, some opened mail, a dirty dish and several empty cans of Diet Coke. I have not thrown out the mail or empty cans because my kitchen trash is full, a weak but successful attempt at temporarily avoiding the inevitable.
I empty my virtual trash much more often than my kitchen trash. Ironically, my virtual trash, indicated by a "trash can" icon on my OS 10.3.3 desktop, will never be “full.” But my kitchen trash is not so enjoyable to empty, currently stuffed with soup cans and dirty napkins squished with grape stems and hairballs and orange juice cartons. Even worse, the icy winters and humid summers in Boston amplify the effort and risk needed to complete the task, including a change of clothes or the danger of slipping on icy stairs or simply the horrid, muggy smell. The primary difference between these activities seems sensory; perhaps sensation is the most powerful distinction between living in "physical space" and "cyberspace."
My classmates helped me decide on a website today—EverQuest Widows—an online community where individuals who are in relationships with someone addicted to EverQuest can seek support and advice. EverQuest is a "Massive Multiperson Online Role-Playing Game" (MMORPG) with over twenty thousand(?) members, many of whom claim they are addicted. Yet, after having lost or been threatened with the loss of their partners because the cyberspace community is perceived as more valuable than the physical community in the home, the "widow(er)s" ironically defer to the very source of their anguish for support: an online community. I wonder what I'll learn from these individuals about how to love or leave someone who might be a slacker when it comes to "taking out the trash."
Posted by Jennifer at 12:53 AM | Comments (1)
July 14, 2005
Triumph the Insult Dog Examines an "Imagined Community" and Concludes: Star Wars Fans Will Die Alone
As promised to my classmates, here is the video to Conan O'Brien's most popular guest:
http://www.milkandcookies.com/article/924
On another Star Wars note, when the final episode came out a few weeks ago, I asked about twenty people at CSAIL to what percent they regarded Star Wars as formative in bringing them and other MITers from childhood towards a career related to technology, to which they all immediately replied: 100%.
Posted by Jennifer at 01:24 PM | Comments (2)
July 13, 2005
Pixel Fire II
"Every new technology disrupts previous rhythms of consciousness."
Joseph Nechvatal
Shortly before I moved to Cambridge, I found myself at some party, scowling at the others in the room with my judgmental, ugly eyes. They were engaged in the kinds of repulsive acts that made me cringe with horror—the way someone meticulously ate her fruit and cheese, the way another slurped his beer, the way still another laughed or touched me knowingly on the arm, without knowing. So I sped away and found myself driving onto PCH toward the Malibu cliffs, past the old Getty museum, past the band playing at Moonshadows with people spilling out the windows and past Neptune’s Net, the bar filled with hundreds of bikers who park their Harleys out front in careful disarray. I sped around the farmlands of Oxnard and Ventura and Huehuehe Naval Port where authentic military planes are displayed on poles like plastic model airplanes, beyond the truck stops and the thrift shops and the tractor repair stores, and when I suddenly reached a secluded lake within a deciduous forest of Ojai, I stopped, and decided to camp for the night.
Once the sun had gone down and I was snug with a sleeping bag near my respectable fire, I sat and stared at its dancing, crackling fingers.
The velveteen trees rose high into the black-tarped sky, and I tried to count the stars. Only the crickets and the popping fire could be heard. But the fire was forever shooting off tiny sparkle-bombs into the stars, so I made-believe that every one in a million sparkles survived through the atmosphere and eventually reached a star, joining its gigantic circus mass of light.
Fire. I stared at the fire all night. It reminded me of Nechtaval’s virus, virtual and biological, changing and adapting until it is defeated or divided into rebirth. I imagined the red, blue, and green numeric codes for each pixel as the actual fire changed colors with each movement, zealously, desperately searching for the algorithmic key that would lead to a new eight-string sequence and thus generate life. Odd, most would use virtual fire to imitate the actual, instead, I create the physical fire and imagine the virtual.
Late into the night, only soft red embers remained of the fire. I closed my eyes and fell asleep among the protective blanket of deciduous trees by the cool, crystalline lake, and dreamed of becoming a fire-star.
Posted by Jennifer at 02:47 PM | Comments (1)
July 12, 2005
Pixel Fire
Joseph Nechvatal's Virus Project 2.0 “simulates a population of active viruses (max 1000) functioning as an analogy of a viral biological system. Viral algorithms, based on a viral biological model, are used to define evolutionary processes…The world is modeled as an image via a set of pixels. Every pixel’s color is defined by R, G, B real number vectors which represent the red, green, and blue components of every pixel’s color. The image world has no edges. Every square on the edge of the image is adjacent to another on the opposite edge. A virus can move around the image and impact the image world as different colors actually correspond to resources used for survival by the viruses."
http://www.eyewithwings.net/nechvatal/virus2/virus.html
“The premise of the project is the rhizomatic exploration of host/parasite omnijectivity (the metaphysical concept stemming from the discoveries of quantum physics which teaches that the mind and matter are inextricably linked) under the influence of today’s high-frequency, electronic, computerized environment…This viral viractuality is the most erudite, the most aware, the most conscious, and the most cluttered area of our consciousness as it is the depth from which we beings emerged as child parasites into our now precarious existence.”
Posted by Jennifer at 08:04 PM | Comments (0)
July 10, 2005
The Screen
Question: Isn’t this radical uncertainty brought about by Virtual Reality likely to challenge man’s vision of himself and the world?
Jean Baudrillard: Certainly, because it is the system of representation that is at issue. The image that he has of himself is virtualized. One is no longer in front of the mirror; one is in the screen.
While Baudrillard draws from Plato’s notion that we must only look into the mirror of art to see ourselves, Baudrillard argues that humans are now conceptually in the screen, that we can see ourselves in the art of the computer screen. Yet if the question is rooted in our system of representation as Baudrillard contends, then I suggest that we are not merely in the screen: rather, we are the screen. For while we create, transform, exchange, and destroy our “virtualized” persons, we increasingly privilege the genetic code as central to the essence of our person. We click, cut, and paste; we are yet another technological screen that can be manipulated through genetic therapy and testing. Perhaps our understanding of our genes defines the beginning and the end of this period in history. In this language we find what we believe to be ourselves.
Posted by Jennifer at 06:06 PM | Comments (2)
July 09, 2005
Canto Grande
As this is an AnthroBlog, and as I am a studying Anthropology, perhaps my introduction to the discipline is fitting. Having completed a degree in English Literature and had my fill of existential philosophy, the Kafkaesque murmurings in my head suddenly began to be replaced with a song I heard by the Gypsy Kings: Me voy caminando a la montaña donde nací. The song invoked a vision of walking along a mountain, perhaps not a mountain where I was born but one where I could be reborn, a mountain where I could breath clean air in the solace of its heights and hear its stones trickle down the splashing rivers. Yet the mountain of my vision was not in Andalusia but in the Andes, so I gave away most of my things, bought a backpack, and climbed aboard a plane to Peru. Without knowing anyone, I asked around and came upon the school district of Fe y Alegría, located primarily in squatter settlements, and a teacher in one of the schools graciously invited me to live with her family in Canto Grande—a community called Great Song.
By day, I taught in the local secondary school Fe y Alegría and coordinated with members of the school youth for a mural project funded by the Fulbright Commission. By night, the multi-generational family with whom I lived described the rich oral histories of their community. But the Peruvian media consistently reinforced negative associations of the squatter settlements with gang activity, crime, ignorance, poverty, and violence—each article and newscast bringing into sharper focus the political process of “writing” history. Thus, when I first glimpsed the old and yellowed pages of the Manuscrito Quechua de Huarochirí, I searched desperately for an alternative approach to writing history in one of the oldest ethnographic accounts of Andean oral tradition after the fall of the Inkan Empire. Over four hundred years after its writing, I huddled in delight under the alpaca blankets of my room each night to read the Manuscrito, squinting at its weathered pages beneath the moonlight that escaped through the cracks in the ripple tin roof above me.
The Manuscrito begins: “If the ancestors of the people called Indians had known writing in former times, then the lives they lived would not have faded from view until now.” The introduction brutally reminded me of the power of written traditions in history, perhaps determining whether certain people and their life stories will “fade from view.” Each night, as the chapters unfolded new descriptions of life in sixteenth century Huarochirí, my interest in the family’s descriptions of their own community broadened as well. During the intimate moments of the traditional evening meal of café con leche, fresh bread, and cheese or avocado, I heard about life in the squatter settlements.
The grandparents, eight brothers and sisters, and their children described the settlements called pueblos jovenes or “new towns,” communities that burgeoned during the height of political violence in Peru less than fifteen years ago. Since then, over three million people had migrated from the Andes Mountains and Amazon Jungle to Lima, nearly doubling the population of the capital. They described how entire towns were inaugurated overnight through what has been termed as invasions, when individuals and families would stake and claim plots of land on the outskirts of the city. In contrast to the negative images for which the pueblos jovenes were seen and “remembered” through the Peruvian media, Lurigancho members described their community to me as a complex tapestry of Andean and Amazonian beliefs and experiences, dynamically juxtaposed with urban culture and social life of Lima. For two years, we chatted and discussed alternative versions of their oral histories in the family’s home of estera or woven straw, nestled in the barren and dusty hills of the vast metropolis of Lima.
But when I finished reading the story of the Manuscrito, I felt conflicted. One of the central themes of the Manuscrito surrounds the relationship between the female deity of the coastal valley, Chaupi Namca, and the male deity of the mountains, Paria Caca. In the end, the coastal Yunca people and the Yauho mountain people come together and intermarry, and the event is portrayed as a collective strengthening of the people because the powers previously distinct to each group could now be articulated in the unified traditions of all. At first sight, the ending appears to have a happy resolution, but some have argued that the author’s writing was an attempt to justify the Spanish conquest in order to encourage their reception among the people.
I wondered, though, for the three million people in Peruvian squatter settlements, who will determine how history will be “written” and what will “fade from view?” How will the constructed characters of Lurigancho, as depicted by the media, influence future historical manuscripts and their place in the collective memory of Andean history? The Manuscrito didn’t leave me with any answers or solutions but reminded me that the storytelling process is political. Yet beneath the ripple tin roof in Canto Grande, I realized that anthropology offers something that I had not found in religious studies, philosophy, or literature. Although the storytelling process in each of these fields is situated politically and historically, anthropology surfaces as an intimate gaze into the living history of human experience. The actors are not fictional characters but people who have invited me into their homes, and I am one of the actors.
Posted by Jennifer at 01:05 PM | Comments (1)
July 08, 2005
Fear
"Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same."
Michel Foucault
The idea of blogging terrifies me. Yet the syllabus for an Anthropology class lies calmly on the desk next to my computer, and no matter how often I reread the requirements they still include the assignment of keeping a daily blog. I have kept a journal since the day I learned to read and write, but blogging is different. Blogging feels too vulnerable, too accessible to the public, too transparent to the unknown You who is now reading and interpreting my words. Who are you? Why do you keep reading my shy and awkward word clusters? What inspired you to look up other people's blogs and read them? Are you searching for entertainment or hoping for a visceral connection to humanity through the words of a stranger when the touch of those around you feels shallow? The irony is that while I admit my judgment of you, your judgment of me is the thing I most fear.
Perhaps this is how people have felt after being interviewed by anthropologists, revealing their life histories to a stranger while knowing that the stranger will be judging and interpreting their words and actions. We all judge, but would we be as disturbed in having our "persona" judged by an online community during a game? Do we not construct and present a "persona" in every situation, available to those in that environment for disdain or confusion or fascination or desire? Why am I so afraid of being judged if I am merely creating a "persona" on this blog, one that I can more easily transform, exchange, and destroy than the personas I have created in my other environments?
Geertz's definition of the "Western" person as a "bounded...and dynamic center of awareness" (From the Native’s Point of View) seems revealing in the context of my blogging fears, for it leaves even the transformable persona of my blog vulnerable to any other "dynamic center of awareness" who can claim that mine is not so "dynamic."
Perhaps blogging in Morocco would feel less disturbing, at least, according to Geertz, where "selfhood is never in danger," for while a Moroccan is categorized according to tribe, territory, language, religion, and family, these categories are meant to "classify him but it doesn't type him; it places him without portraying him." Essentially, one can know things about you, but a deeper experience of knowing you is "left to be filled in by the process of the interaction itself." The distinction reminds me of the Spanish verbs meaning "to know:" conocer and saber. Conocer means to be acquainted with something or someone, while saber means to have full knowledge or understanding of something. Thus, one could never use saber when talking about a person, for one can never claim to have full knowledge of a person.
Posted by Jennifer at 11:25 AM | Comments (2)