images of abstraction……over discussions of uncertainty.

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9/13: We submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF), titled Pan-Arctic Visions of Sustainability among Indigenous Peoples and the Hydrocarbon Industry (yay!).

The project calls for collaboration of American, Western European, and Russian scholars to study differences between individually and collectively constituted visions of sustainability. Such a fabulous drafting effort! I decided to create a post for the proposal. If funded, we need to document the entire project right here on Paparazzi Ethnography.

The Participants:

We plan for workshops in Norway and northwest Russia focusing on the folks affected by hydrocarbon development, including study of local investment schemes. The idea of workshops came from the “evil genius” — as I refer to my faithful assistant Annamots, seen here in our lair at Sutardja Dai Hall, UC Berkeley — Voilà:

Participants at workshops include folks living out on the land where pipelines and oil rigs cross pastures, hunting and fishing grounds, including Indigenous peoples and the oil industry laborers working on infrastructure alongside.

Florian Stammler, of Arctic Centre at Rovaniemi, suggested this approach, providing the relevant expertise on networks with reindeer herding communities in Russia, as seen here (r), asking critical questions at the Aleksanteri conference in Helsinki, Finland.

As to workshop structure, we will elevate the importance of local voices, assigning key leadership positions to local Indigenous members. Also, Norwegian-Russian cross border engagement through workshop participant exchanges will provide opportunities for communities in Russia to learn about Norwegian human rights in the context of oil and gas.

These ideas stem from Maria Stoilkova, Eastern European expert, as seen here left in New Orleans, Louisiana, attending the Anthropological Association Meeting. The workshops will be held in conjunction with quantitative research for mix methods comparative approaches to individual and collective visions of sustainability.

And this development comes from our collaboration with a Norwegian Research Foundation funded project, directed by Dr. Ilan Kelman, who is seen here in his office at the research institute CICERO in Oslo, Norway.

Our project mentors, Bjørn Berkli, seen below in his office in Tromsø, Norway, this past August, and Nina Poussenkova, shown in the main conference room of IMEMO in Moscow, where we had the opportunity of taking a tour of the building, provide important in-country expertise.














And we know who these two early career scholars are.

You guessed it.

None other than San Francisco’s own Samantha Catalyst, Photographist and International Travelry Specialist, and Octavia Shadowz, Cocktail Waitress and Faschion Designer, both uniquely involved in the project, working at what capacity, only they know best.

Well, that’s the participants. We will return in the coming months, when we begin to hear back from the National Science Foundation Cognizants!!

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6/28: On the heels of the Fulbright Award, I was offered the Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellowship at UC Berkeley, 2012-2013 (deferred to 2013-2014). While not publicly as well known as the Fulbright, the Ciriacy-Wantrup is unique among academic circles, because of its emphasis on qualitative economic knowledge. I was happy to receive the Fulbright, since there are 2 awards per life time, and my first award came 5 years ago, exactly the hiatus period (5 years) to apply for another award. But I really was taken aback by Ciriacy-Wantrup. Everyone I know who has had the award is a heavy hitter in social sciences and while I consider my work innovative on the planning side, I am never quite sure what it looks like on the operational side. The Fellowship dates conflict with the Fulbright so I requested a deferral for one year.

The project involves completing a manuscript that gathers perspectives on my North American (Canada, Alaska) and European (Russia, Norway) observations of energy development.

On face of things I want to create a typology of experience that contrasts corporeality of expertise (immediacy, inspiration, face-to-face) — to the deliberative, contemplative and isolated activity of reading intermediary reports. I have been thinking already over how the two modes of experience (corporeal and textual) may be contrasted by reference to Peter Sloterdijk’s two types of knowledge, ancient kynicism (corporeal, anecdotal) and modern cynicism (distanced reflection through textual familiarity) but also, by reference to Pierre Bourdieu’s Kantian and anti-Kantian aesthetic, the former tending toward a rejection of representations of the obvious in favor of principles of the esoteric, and the latter, a preference for the sensual, immediate and obvious. The discussion could be linked also to Norbert Elias‘ the civilizing process, what Max Weber called “progressiveness”, and what Georg Simmel referred to as “the blasé attitude”.

For anthropologists like myself, the textual and corporeal is a division marking a threshold of modernity. Literacy, for example, emphasizes abstraction, universalization and depersonalization and thus, makes it possible to dispense with spectacle and demonstration in securing the belief and obedience of others. By contrast, for pre-capitalist modes of obedience, relations of power are made, unmade and remade through personal interactions that rely on visible (conspicuous) expenditures of time and performance of the body. This is necessary to secure symbolic recognition, as shown in example after example, in that wonderful book The Gift, by Marcel Mauss. So, in a sense, corporeality raises the possibility that the legitimacy of expertise in a post-capitalist society is based not solely upon theoretical knowledge but instead, upon pre-capitalist modes of spectacle, charisma and enchantment – what Alfred Whitehead called the “staging of verification” in scientific experiments or Bruno Latour refers to as “inscription”.

There are other areas, but that is the general picture of this particular project.

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