2021/05/04 by Patricia Alvarez Astacio, Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan, Arjun Shankar
Social Sciences · #Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture #Anthropological Studies and Insights #Misinformation and Its Impacts
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/aman.13565
For those of us located in the Global North, 2021 began with a barrage of media content documenting a coup attempt in the United States, the United Kingdom's split from Europe after four years of Brexit deliberations, and talk of mass vaccinations amid the uneven global devastation of COVID-19. For the three of us, with our connections to South Asia, Latin America, and West Africa, current Euro-American mediatized stories were supplemented by ongoing narratives of state-sponsored sectarian violence in India and Brazil, police brutality in Nigeria, and “Southern” stories related to the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences. In each of these cases, social media has fostered contradictory participatory potentials. On the one hand, social media has the potential to foment the creation of shared and iterative conspiracy theories, disinformation, and right-wing plots. From QAnon to antimask and antivaccine discourses to anti-immigrant “Leave.EU” campaigns in the United Kingdom, the circulations of images, texts, and videos have sowed the seeds for an amplification of white supremacist violence, a rejection of public health guidance, and a rearticulation of virulent nativist political thought in an age of capitalist dispossession. On the other hand, just as multimodal making and circulation strategies on social media have played a role in fomenting right-wing violence and homicidal disinformation, they have also played an integral part in social movements towards justice. Grassroots mobilizations of images, videos, and texts collocating collective imaginaries towards various projects of recognition and solidarity in and across Chile, India, Thailand, Argentina, and Puerto Rico, just to give a few examples, demonstrate the ways in which the “multimodal” plays an important role in generating the potential for visualizing, articulating, and conceptualizing different futures, both online and off. It is in this context that we take up the mantle as editors of the Multimodal Anthropologies section of American Anthropologist. On the one hand, we are thrilled to continue the important work of supporting, facilitating, and eliciting multimodal anthropology projects that “dive into a broad range of methods for doing our work” and that strive “to understand and define what counts as knowledge production in increasingly expansive ways” (Chin 2017). Indeed, in the last several years, anthropologists have embraced multimodality as an opportunity to collaborate and invent with our participants, to create alternate pathways for the circulation of anthropological knowledge, and, more broadly, to rethink, recalibrate, and reimagine ethnography as the epistemological grounds for our discipline. For those already working within the strictures of visual anthropology, multimodality has offered the opportunity to bring various forms of technical and conceptual expertise to the multimodal table. Indeed, a growing number of anthropologists and those working in adjacent disciplines have affirmed and expanded on the potential of extratextual forms of representation, communication, and theorization and continue to look for guidance and potential collaborators. For those bent towards an activist and engaged anthropology, multimodal approaches build on earlier imaginings of a “shared anthropology,” only now there is the potential to meet our participants in the shared realms of social media and together create projects that circulate more widely and, we hope, help to address the pressing social and political challenges of our time. In short, multimodal experimentation has been and continues to be an important growing edge of the discipline, and one we hope to serve in our tenure as editors of the section inaugurated under the editorial leadership of Deborah Thomas and curated in wonderful and unanticipated ways by Samuel Collins, Matthew Durington, and Harjant Gill. However, even as we are excited about engendering and enacting a multimodal anthropology, we are also ambivalent about its trajectory, given the broader media-saturated world-historical context in which we are living. We are particularly wary of noncritical engagements with digital communications technologies, which have been fetishized as the foundational medium for multimodal work. An uncritical engagement with the new digital tools at our disposal can easily aid in reproducing and sustaining the “bad habitus” of capitalism—as it reifies projects and structures of inequality (Takaragawa et al. 2019), reinscribes and propagates problematic representations of the so-called Other, and incites extreme forms of speech (Pohjonen and Udupa 2019) that fuel xenophobic nationalist projects while also potentially overshadowing other nondigital and embodied forms of multimodal knowledge production. Our ambivalence is grounded in a recognition that the illusion of democratic circulation of media in the digital realm makes it easy for us to either embrace a romanticism that the digital will somehow save us (Noble 2018) or amplify an anxiety that the digital itself is the root cause of rupture (rather than the imperial and colonial histories that are the foundations of our shared global condition) (Udupa and Dattatreyan, under review). Algorithmic orders, in short, make it easy for us and those with whom we are in close conversation to fall into a never-ending loop, mostly anchored in events unfolding in the Global North, that reproduce ahistorical and geographically limited understandings of the present. Merriam-Webster dictionary defines ambivalence as the “simultaneous and contradictory attitudes or feelings (such as attraction and repulsion) toward an object, person, or action.” Paying attention to these contradictory affects as they are linked to objects, persons, ideas, and so on helps us to orient ourselves differently to the world (Ahmed 2006). An orientation to multimodality that takes seriously one's mixed feelings reminds us that narratives that paint the digital world as a democratic space or that offer opportunities to simplistically “even the playing field” are dangerous fictions. An embrace of our ambivalence towards anthropology, we suggest, helps keep us honest about tendencies within the discipline to reproduce liberal assumptions, unreflexive understandings, and colonial frameworks even when our practices are reimagined on different grounds. As such, we depart from Ciara Kierans and Kirsten Bell's (2017) ableist theorization of anthropological ambivalence as a “bi-polar” register that pits moral imperatives against relativist ones. Instead, our turn to ambivalence as a methodological and ethical stance is an embrace of what Sara Ahmed (2021) calls “killjoy commitments” to engage in world-making that begins with an apprehensive but hopeful recognition of the unequal worlds we inherit and our positions in them. Part of our hopeful killjoy commitment is to constantly remind ourselves that any multimodal endeavor we dream up must be contextualized in the broader digital proliferation of content and its fraught political potentials. For us, an ambivalent multimodal anthropology “stays with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) and perhaps even makes trouble. Rather than pivoting on false binaries, an ambivalent multimodality recognizes and critiques the ways in which the digital (re)produces neocolonial forms of extraction, exclusion, inequality, and representational problematics. Yet, an ambivalent multimodality doesn't necessarily stay at the level of critique or recognition; it also seeks to open spaces of hope and speculative possibility. An ambivalent multimodality allows us to utilize the detritus of capitalist technoscience and encourages us to hack its latest advances to invent new pathways for shared representations, all the while staying with the reflexive recognition of knowing that we are, in multiple ways, complicit. It helps us produce work that contends with the fact that neither us as anthropological makers or the technologies we use are outside the frame of imperialism and capitalism. Ambivalence, we suggest, is a particularly productive techno-material-affective register and political stance that holds the potential for helping us move past the problem of reproducing a “stir in the same old anthropological frame” (Minh-Ha 1992) that promotes avoidance strategies when it comes to contending with the larger structures of power that shape the ways in which we work and the objects/tools we work with. This short essay—written as a manifesto and an invitation—engages with an ambivalent multimodality in three different frames: the visual, the collaborative, and the sensorial. Our manifesto is a means not just to participate in the vibrant theorization of multimodality that has unfolded over the last several years in the discipline but to embrace an ambivalence towards its promise and potential and to offer an invitation for you to do the same. In short, our embrace of “the manifesto” as a rhetorical device is as much a call to action as it is about theorizing the affordances and limits of multimodality in the present conjuncture. In what follows, we briefly mark the ways in which an ambivalent multimodality has the capacity to draw our attention to the different problematics of doing ethnography in the contemporary moment while recognizing, simultaneously, the tremendous opportunity it presents for us to imagine anthropology on different grounds. We believe that when we account for those problematics in creative-critical ways—including the ways we are deeply embedded in and complicit in them—we open speculative possibilities and potentially enact anthropology otherwise. We conclude this short essay by discussing the experiments we will take up to create a different sort of review process for this type of work, one that is transparent, dialogic, and guided by the key tenets of our manifesto. 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