Who’s Running the Show?
I first read Bronislaw Malinowski’s ‘Argonauts of the Western Pacific’ as a social anthropology undergraduate.[i] It was a foundational text. Malinowski had been carrying out research at the London School of Economics on the relationship between exchange and economic systems, using data collected in studies of Aboriginal Australians. In 1914, he went to New Guinea to undertake fieldwork, just as the First World War broke out. As an Austrian he was deemed an enemy of the British Commonwealth and as such forbidden to return to the UK. Despite this, the Australian government allowed him to continue his studies in PNG, even providing some funds. Interned, he chose to go to the nearby Trobriand Islands, where he remained for several years.
There are a few photographs from those days, a pale and rather thin Malinowski dressed in full tropical gear talking to the dark-skinned and almost totally naked indigenous people on the island of Kiriwina. Despite looking so out-of-place, he knew what to do. A social anthropologist had to engage in detailed participant observation on a daily basis. His approach was clear: the goal of the ethnographer was “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world”. [ii] The result was a rich description of a people, their social, religious and political lives, their economy and their rituals. More recent research suggests he may have been hoodwinked some of the time, mainly over sexual mores, but trivial quibbles aside there is every good reason to see him as the founder of high-quality anthropological fieldwork.
Actually, there were three ‘greats’ back when I was studying social anthropology. In addition to Malinowski I would add Edmund Leach and Claude Levi-Strauss. Edmund Leach can wait for a commentary at another time, but Claude Levi-Strauss is relevant to this blog theme. Levi-Strauss was not a classical ethnographer. His one book reporting on fieldwork was ‘Tristes Tropiques’,[iii] but this was no dry academic study: it opens with the memorable lines “I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions.” [iv]
The book is fascinating, aggravating, and almost hilariously personal at times as he dwells on his various moments of unease and embarrassment, while at the same time providing insights into his philosophical approach to social anthropology. He was fascinated by symbolism, in decorations on objects and bodies, in the layout of villages, and in the rituals he saw. Early on he reveals that his approach drew on his appreciation of Marxism (he was said to be a Marxist thinker throughout his life), geology and psychoanalysis: in all three he saw the approach as demonstrating “understanding consists in reducing one kind of reality to another; that true reality is never the most obvious; and that the nature of truth is already indicated by the care it takes to remain elusive” [v].
He was also greatly discouraged by his inability to find any societies untouched by modern civilisation, as he sought places where he could observe a society as it had been before contact. Brief visits to the Bororo and the Nambikwara (both indigenous groups in the Amazon basin region of Brazil) and the Kuki (hill tribe groups in India, Bangladesh and Burma, as it then was) fulfilled that hope to some extent, but at the same time reinforced his understanding that whatever the ‘natural’ state of humans might have been, that past was irretrievably lost. Despite this, he concluded all societies are similar, showing the same lack of ‘perfection’! [vi] The book shows he found the underlying structure, logic and philosophy of a society his real interest.
Malinowski had more time to study the Trobrianders. He was intrigued by a complicated system of tributes that linked the Trobriand Islands with others nearby. The Kula ring was an exchange system, with shell necklaces (soulava) moving around a circle of islands in a clockwise direction, exchanged for shell armbands (mwali) going in the opposite direction. Each time an item was given, an armband say, it was transferred for the other, a necklace. The necklaces and armbands were not exchanged for use, but because of their symbolic value. Many had both names and a history attached to them, and some were the property of one person, so holding some meant the recipients were acting as a stewards for the owners. The Kula ring exchanges preceded bartering for goods: it reinforced the prestige of the partners, an important prologue to commencing trade.
The whole Kula ring was a complex set of arrangements, and I don’t want to do more than to indicate its importance. However, it is Malinowski’s comments about its operation that interests me, a perspective neatly overlapping with that of Levi-Strauss:
Yet it must be remembered that what appears to us an extensive, complicated, and yet well ordered institution is the outcome of so many doings and pursuits, carried on by savages, who have no laws or aims or charters definitely laid down. They have no knowledge of the total outline of any of their social structure. They know their own motives, know the purpose of individual actions and the rules which apply to them, but how, out of these, the whole collective institution shapes, this is beyond their mental range. Not even the most intelligent native has any clear idea of the Kula as a big, organised social construction, still less of its sociological function and implications….The integration of all the details observed, the achievement of a sociological synthesis of all the various, relevant symptoms, is the task of the Ethnographer… the Ethnographer has to construct the picture of the big institution, very much as the physicist constructs his theory from the experimental data, which always have been within reach of everybody, but needed a consistent interpretation. [vii]
If the language seems offensive now, with references to savages and their lack of understanding of things “outside their mental range”, the conclusion is important, one which has shaped much of the methodology of social anthropology ever since. The task of ethnography is to describe, but the task of the anthropologist is to analyse, to make sense of what lies behind observable behaviour. Malinowski did it by describing systems, and Levi-Strauss by analysing conceptual structures: in effect, both agreed it was about ‘reducing one kind of reality to another’.
As you might guess, that implies not every social anthropologist has to be an ethnographer, carrying out empirical observational studies (and vice versa). Today many social anthropologists may use the observations of travellers overseas, from missionaries’ diaries in the 17th and 18th Century to amateurs’ collations of fascinating facts and rituals from many parts of the world.[viii]
So, we can be anthropologists. Our ethnological research will be on people and how they use IT when finding their way by car. What do we observe? Several people wandering over to their vehicles clutching devices: For the sake of simplicity, we will look at three examples: these being the users of Garmin DriveSmart (a handheld navigation system), Waze and Google Maps.
Garmin DriveSmart is a GPS unit. It has a touch screen, accepts voice commands, and provides driving directions both on screen and by voice. It offers helpful traffic alerts (well, that’s what the website says), and you can link it with Bluetooth to the Internet (if your car has a 4G Internet link). Stick it in a holder, punch in or tell it your destination, and off you go, hopefully avoiding major roadworks. It also offers updates on points of interest (for many people, that seems to be when the next place for refill, either petrol or Starbucks coffee, is coming up). Easy driving.
Google Maps is an alternative which sits on a smartphone. Ah, an Android smartphone (there are some similar systems that are available on an iPhone). The advantage here is that you do not need a separate device, unlike the Garmin unit described above. It gives voice directions, offers traffic alerts, and, if you look at the screen, you can see restaurants, petrol stations coming up.
What about Waze? It is also an app, but in this case available on both Android and Apple devices. It has one advantage, which is that it is ‘community’ based: that means the system utilises information from drivers in real time. As a result, you can be alerted before you approach police, accidents, road hazards or traffic jams. Another difference is that maps are constantly being updated, again by other drivers, so accuracy is very high.
Enough to help us? I think so. There are now many GPS driving systems that are built into cars, and these share most of the characteristics of the Garmin unit I described first, so we can work on the basis they are adequately covered. Now we can go one step further and observe – even question – some users. Let us suppose we have done so. A quick survey reveals several points.
First, users of the traditional GPS system (Garmin or in-car) often appear frustrated before departing, as they program their device. Originally this used to be done on screen, but now voice commands can be used. It turns out these devices may not understand plain English! Well, that might be an exaggeration, but it would be fair to say accents can prove troublesome. However, once a destination has been programmed, the voice directions are fine. At the same time, we are also told some users get fed up with what they consider to be unnecessary instructions: the voice (it’s John Cleese on the system I use) keeps saying “Keep left” rather than saying nothing, when the instruction is merely ensuring the driver won’t turn off at a slip road and leave the highway.
Google maps is less frustrating for many users, as it is an application on a smartphone, and is familiar and easier to use. However, as with the Garmin GPS system, there is a temptation to keep looking at the screen. The smartphone can be placed in an easy to see holder: users report they shift between looking at the road ahead and looking at the screen for any other information it offers, a somewhat risky approach, especially when driving fast or in a busy environment.
As for Waze users, they are generally eloquent about the virtues of their system, as it is far more informative about upcoming problems of one kind or another, with the latest information ranging from parked police cars, to the site of an accident ahead, as well as the location of favourite restaurants and other attractions.
Getting bored? You knew all that. But we are anthropologists: remember the task is to see another reality rather than the one immediately in front of us. Look again: is there more? Imagine we are floating above the road network and can observe thousands of cars driven by people all using one kind of travel assistance or another. We see the flow of vehicles, and we can also see how obstacles are being avoided: where there are major roadworks, many vehicles turn off early, and rejoin the road further along, and the same is true for traffic accidents. We spot cars slowing down as a police vehicle waits by the roadside checking driving speeds. A car breaks down, and a truck appears and tows it away. It is as if the roads are like veins, and the cars are blood corpuscles, smoothly streaming through the arterial highway system.
In this reality, we can see it is information that is driving cars, and the apparent ‘drivers’ are merely responding to instructions. This is a reality with which we are becoming increasingly familiar. For example, seeking answers to a question you consult ‘Google’, and it offers you the data you wanted. In this case, we know our searches are analysed to offer advertising carefully focussed on our preferences and interests. What we often forget is the same kind of analysis is true for the enquiries themselves. The search results obtained by one enquirer are not the same as those another user will see, as searches mirrors the searcher’s already known characteristics.
George Dyson has put this well:
We assume that a search engine company builds a model of human knowledge and allows us to query that model, or that some other company (or maybe it’s the same company) builds a model of road traffic and allows us to access that model, or that yet another company builds a model of the social graph and allows us to join that model — for a price we are not quite told. This fits our preconceptions that an army of programmers is still in control somewhere but it is no longer the way the world now works.
The genius — sometimes deliberate, sometimes accidental — of the enterprises now on such a steep ascent is that they have found their way through the looking-glass and emerged as something else. Their models are no longer models. The search engine is no longer a model of human knowledge, it is human knowledge. What began as a mapping of human meaning now defines human meaning, and has begun to control, rather than simply catalog or index, human thought. No one is at the controls. If enough drivers subscribe to a real-time map, traffic is controlled, with no central model except the traffic itself. The successful social network is no longer a model of the social graph, it is the social graph. This is why it is a winner-take-all game. Governments, with an allegiance to antiquated models and control systems, are being left behind.[ix]
In this world, who’s running the show? As information companies manage the data around us, the more we become like code in a data field. This “gutting of our human subjecthood is currently being stoked and exacerbated, and integrated into a causal loop with, the financial incentives of the tech companies.”[x] Focussed on the day-to-day, like Malinowski’s participants in the Kula Ring, you might be missing what is happening: in today’s digital world, the data controls us, not us the data. Are you a recalcitrant grump, reading books and doggedly ignoring the smartphone screen? Sadly, while the digital takeover appears to be passing you it is covertly capturing your data points, only to ensnare you little later. To be clear, this show isn’t yours!
[i] B Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, reprinted as a Routledge Classic, 2015. My own copy was from the 1950’s edition by Routledge, but, it is not alongside me to consult!
[ii] This quote comes from Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Dutton 1961 edition, p. 25. His and her, of course!
[iii] The English translation was published by Cape, in 1973.
[iv] Ibid, page 17
[v] Ibid, pages 57-8
[vi] Ibid, page 387
[vii] Op cit, pages 83-4
[viii] Perhaps the most well-know of which is The Golden Bough by James Frazer, first published in 1890 by Macmillan, still bought today – described as a study of comparative religion, but really a collection of rituals, magic and folklore
[ix] https://www.edge.org/conversation/george_dyson-childhoods-end
[x] It’s All Over by Justin E H Smith, Examined Life, The Point, January 2019
