Description of Group “Applying Anthropology to supranational networks and systems.”
Members of this group share ideas about the evolution of cultural systems above the level of states. Upon observing the network of corporations that dominated the mining systems in southern Africa in the 1960s Alvin Wolfe described what he saw as a “supranational system”resulting from the interaction of political states and business corporations.
As this evolution proceeded throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, business firms became wealthier and more powerful while states, themselves corporations that depended more on their populations than on their capital, weakened.
During this same period theories and methods to study complex networks evolved to the point that understanding supranational systems is now possible and anthropology is the discipline that should be doing so. After all, this is culture, and culture is our business.
Comments
Thanks, John, for your comments of 9/30/13. Your Trajectory #1: Standards and the ‘Tripartite Standards Regime is highly relevant to my interests, and, I hope, to those of this group.
I definitely want to read more about “The Center for the Study of Standards in Society,” (CS3), for it sounds like an example of the kind of cultural evolution that I see occurring. In your case, focusing on “social and ethical dimensions of standards, e.g., as strategic devices negotiated among a complex of public/private actors, creating what Busch (2011) referred to as ‘recipes for reality.’ Other members may appreciate knowing the reference: Lawrence Busch, Standards: Recipes for Reality.(MIT Press, 2011).
I am also interested in your Trajectory #2: Überveillance and ‘Ubiquitous Monitoring.’
As you say: “This requires enormous coordination and standardization across public and private actors and many multiple scales of integration. The term ‘uberveillance’ has emerged in reference to this emerging system (or more appropriately ‘web’) of linked ‘item-specific’ to ‘sector-specific’ to ‘inter-sector’ information sensing, sharing/monitoring/disciplining/standardizing technologies – the network of the networks of multiple surveillance systems.” For you and me, that is clearly “applying anthropology to supranational networks.” How many other anthropologists are in your group?
I look forward to readaing that chapter on ubiquitous monitoring in the book on uberveillance --here (http://www.igi-global.com/book/uberveillance-social-implications-mi... -- ours is Ch. XII) and here (http://www.amazon.com/Uberveillance-Social-Implications-Microchip-I...).
--Alvin Wolfe
Continued from above:
Unlike Bentham’s panopticon, the uberveillant network is both distributed and centralized – distributed insofar as the sensing devices (non-human actors) are ubiquitous, and centralized insofar as they are standardized (and what I suppose remains to be seen, i.e., per NSA/Snowden et al., ‘controlled’). Think IBM’s “Smart Planet” initiative (http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/overview/ideas/index.html?re...) (are you an IBMer?), or HP’s “Central Nervous System for the Earth” (http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2009/oct-dec/cense.html). Mind you, these are proprietary private uberveillant systems, and these are the folks working to standardize uberveillant infrastructure, the ‘wizards behind the curtain,’ as it were, creating the reality as we speak. Only one doesn’t “vote them out.” And there’s also nothing necessarily nefarious about this, as the TSR described in Trajectory 1 is all legally sanctioned. One might even think of it as ‘supra-national networks framed in neo-liberal market context.’ If one thinks of social power as the ability to set the rules that others (must) follow, then standards represent a form of codified power reflecting the interests of those groups with greatest social access to and influence within standards-setting processes. If my network thinking serves me well, both ‘access’ and ‘influence’ (and thus, indeed, ‘power) are social network qualities that can be mapped at various levels of integration. I would think that uberveillant networks – consisting of both the technological infrastructure and perhaps most importantly the human actors who create the reality through standardization – could be fertile ground for network studies – employing actor network theory as well as social network analyses. This would, at a minimum, merge literatures on TSR, supra-national networks, and uberveillance.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention ‘sousveillance,’ which is sort of the inverse of uberveillance – distributed media in the hands of the masses, coordinating to keep a watchful eye on the watchers, if you will. I know less of this, though it strikes me that the keepers of the technology would nonetheless control the system. Still, this may also present interesting fodder for network thinking in the social sciences.
In any event, I promised my thoughts on this would be ‘brief.’ Ha!
Cheers,
jvs
Continued from above:
Trajectory #2: Überveillance and ‘Ubiquitous Monitoring.’ We held several grants focusing on the social and ethical dimensions of standards for ‘agrifood nanotechnologies.’ Much of this work pointed to the development/deployment of new ‘nano-enabled’ sensing technologies, for instance, to monitor nutrient levels or pest infestations in farm fields (among many other emerging applications). I won’t belabor that research suffice it to say that we began to see suites or ‘networks’ of interrelated (and importantly ‘standardized’) sensing and monitoring technologies. That is, it’s one thing to be able to ‘sense’ something, quite another to be able to transmit that information to another agent (or more appropriately ‘other agents,’ human and/or non-human), and quite another still to integrate the agglomerated information vertically within a given sector of economic activity (in this case, global agrifood systems) and horizontally across other sectors. This requires enormous coordination and standardization across public and private actors and many multiple scales of integration. The term ‘uberveillance’ has emerged in reference to this emerging system (or more appropriately ‘web’) of linked ‘item-specific’ to ‘sector-specific’ to ‘inter-sector’ information sensing, sharing/monitoring/disciplining/standardizing technologies – the network of the networks of multiple surveillance systems. For those who are interested (and I must apologize here for a shameless self-promotion), my colleagues and I have a chapter on ubiquitous monitoring in a newly published book on uberveillance, further information about which may be found here (http://www.igi-global.com/book/uberveillance-social-implications-mi... -- ours is Ch. XII) and here (http://www.amazon.com/Uberveillance-Social-Implications-Microchip-I...).
Hi Al, hello All:
Just a few brief thoughts on this compelling discussion. So brief, in fact, that I will have to break them among several posts as together they exceed the 4,000 character limit. Al was the heavy on both my MA and PhD committees, so I'm sure this comes as no surprise to him!
First, I’m afraid my observations will be framed in the context of at least two of my recent research trajectories and experiences. My comments here reflect a somewhat extemporaneous notion that these trajectories might somehow (perhaps through a keenly thought-out network study?) be extrapolated to/intersect with the broader context of Wolfe’s “Supranational Networks.” For those interested, where appropriate I will provide links to sites for further reading.
Trajectory #1: Standards and the ‘Tripartite Standards Regime.’ For the past 10 years or so I worked in various capacities with a research & policy center at Michigan State University, most recently known as “The Center for the Study of Standards in Society,” (CS3). I’m grossly oversimplifying here, but our work focused primarily upon social and ethical dimensions of standards, e.g., as strategic devices negotiated among a complex of public/private actors, creating what Busch (2011) referred to as ‘recipes for reality.’ Emanating from this and related work, my colleagues and I developed the concept of the “Tripartite Standards Regime,” or TSR, to refer to the complex set of relationships among national and international bodies that (a) accredit (public, private, NGO; international and national) entities to (b) develop standards (aka ‘Standards Development Organizations,’ or SDOs) and (c) process for separate bodies that certify compliance with ‘accepted’ standards established by accredited SDOs. In some instances, accreditation bodies share board membership with SDOs and certifiers: “As such, formal standards are part of a “tripartite standards regime” (TSR), which is a regime of quasi-public/private governance that together “performs the global market economy.” Surveillance is but one means, one might argue, of ‘conformity assessment,’ to borrow the neo-liberal vernacular, of so-called ‘consumer-agents’ in this global-market context (cloaked in ‘national security’ rhetoric.
Stay tuned for trajectory 2...
Cheers,
jvs
Hello from Louisiana:
My work is a lot like Merrill Eisenberg who works with communities and obesity. My work group almost applied for the CDC grant, which funds here work. We formed an inter-governmental group between local government, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and Southern University in Baton Rouge. Our work on obesity was already funded by the Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation so we did not apply for the CDC grant. I work for local government as a city planner. I was trained in anthropology with a MA at University of Kentucky (1982) where Art was a dean, (although I never took classes with him). I never took any planning coursework. All of my training was self taught or mentored when I worked with master of their craft on the job. I was very lucky that way because I took and passed on my first try the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP), which is very tough certification exam for planners. Never a day goes by that my anthro coursework is not fundamental to what I do. There is a small cadre of us who work in both fields here in Louisiana, but Merrill is the first that I have heard of outside of our little group.
We are seeking to develop food networks and transmit cultural learning between generations of Francophone Cajun and Creoles, as well Anglophone Afro-Americans living in the urban core of the City of Lafayette, Louisiana. Much of the core is in the process of disinvestment with abandoned lots. This however create an opportunity to implement in community garden which will organize communities into producing and consuming traditional foods.
I would be interested in exchanging research methodologies with Merrill's group.
We are working at ground zero for the effects of corporations that have created marketing strategies that do not acknowledge the great diversity of traditional cuisine, and local food production. Our Cajun and Creole food has been marketed to the general public who do know the real thing. As I see, that cuisine, production, and distribution system is being marketed back to the originators of the tradition as authentic. The result I believe is too much of a good thing in enormous servings with highly seasoned, high fat foods, with a lot of sugar. Those elements were certainly part of my diet as a young boy, but there were not marketed so that we ate like that only for celebrations. Everyday foods were quite different. The traditional diet was the basis for very hard work, which now has been supplanted by physical inactivity. The result is that Louisiana has one of the largest proportion of obese people on the planet; but if the popular press is to be believe, we are one of the happiest. Strange is it not that people understand their obesity as happy.
Thanks for letting me participate in the is group,
Here are some online resources of our group:
http://trumangarden.wordpress.com
https://twitter.com/Seed2Table
Mike LeBlancLafayette, LA
Please see the next comment. Somehow, this one was skipped.
Mary Gray Rust
Mary Gray Rust joined the group with this comment yesterday:
"
. Suffice it to say for the moment that I see indications of corporations heavily involved in NSA surveillance as a means of acquiring more power. The empire needs both to expand its power globally. Maybe I should cut and paste this email into the community section.
What do you think?"
--Alvin
Before we started the SfAA Community Group “Applying Anthropology to Supranational Networks,” I had sent some statements on such issues to some network scholars and anthropologists. A few days ago I gave you some comments I had received from Art Gallaher. Now I want to give you some that I received from another Kentuckian whose views I also respect. These are from Stephen Borgatti, an anthropologist and network scholar who is now Paul Chellgren Endowed Chair of Managem ent in the College of Business and Economics at the University of Kentucky. His network credentials are also strong, for he was a major developer of UCINET, a major software package for the analysis of social network data.
Like Professor Gallaher, Professor Borgatti, has not yet joined this SfAA community group, but I will share some of his earlier comments anyway. Below are excerpts from my July statements followed by Steve Borgatti’s comments of August 5. I urge you to get into this discussion.
AWW: From my several perspectives -- anthropologist, network scholar, and concerned citizen -- I have lots of concerns, among them the increasing autonomy of business corporations in their relations with the U.S. Government. Much as I want to address my own concerns, I really want to make sure each of you feel motivated to comment from your own perspectives.
[Steve Borgatti] I’m not sure what you mean about the autonomy of corporations in their relations with the government, but I agree that the level of govt surveillance and control will eventually be a major problem. Terrorism is the perfect irritant for creating a totalitarian state, which is then virtually impossible to undo. Marc Smith (of NodeXL fame) argues jokingly that he’d be willing to share everything with the NSA if they would serve as a free backup service for him. at least it is an exchange of value, and you know what they have about you. Similarly, I could see benefits of somewhat reduced privacy if the information were available to all.
AWW: No doubt to some of you, the government’s “spying on Americans” using very advanced data mining techniques developed by governmental and multinational enterprises may seem primarily a news story, a current issue. For me, it is another step in a longer term cultural evolutionary pattern in which corporations, culturally defined entities invented by humans, are interacting with states in developing a supranational system above the level of states. A half-century ago I described this evolution of corporations and states as it was occurring in the mining industry in southern Africa (1963) and fifteen years later explained the evolutionary aspects of it, how that evolution fit into and supported the development of a new level of integration, the “supranational” level (1977).
[Steve Borgatti] I totally agree with supranational orgs bit. I enjoy science fiction about that, like Metatropolis (http://www.amazon.com/METAtropolis-Jay-Lake/dp/B004E3XEH0). I’m not sure there is a necessary connection with collaborating with government on surveillance. I know current situation is google, Verizon etc sharing with governments, but NSA could do it independently if necessary. More importantly, the rising power of multinational corporations also means they can be more independent of nations than in the past. So I think there are two phenomena of interest here, increasing surveillance and corporate power, and each is important and interesting on their own.
Hello, I am just checking in. I know I will learn much from this group!
The main reason why I focused on NGOs for my dissertation was that they seemed to play a more important role in dictating conservation policy in Central Africa. I did include each countries' Natural Resources ministries/institutes but not corporations, although I am fully aware that large NGOs like WWF and CI have serious corportate connections. Since I was focusing on cultural models of conservation, I concentrated on individuals' narratives and not on the larger level policies. Maybe for my next research project :)
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