Methods Post-Human Anthropology

Whitehead, Neil. (2009) "Post-Human Anthropology" Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 16: 1-32

This article explores performance ethnographic work that Neil Whitehead did while studying the Goth Industrial music scene and cyber space.
Whitehead addresses the sexualized nature of violence, a difficult topic for the average scholar or everyday American to deal with. Whitehead writes that, "violence is always more than its material appearance, that part of the instrumentality of violence coudl be its endemic and persistent affects on imagination and subjectivity" (Whithead p. 2). Within the virtual world's disembodied communication space the possibility to engage socially taboo forms of sex and violence become possible and suggests that sexual experience is seperated from the physical experience. Think of the massive amounts of online pornography or virtual sex within communities such as Second Life.

Whitehead explains the expression of sexuality and violence from a psychoanalytic perspective - the internet blurs our notions of reality and fantasy, violating the structures of reality and thus may be what Freud entitles, "uncanny". Lacan refigured desire in relation to lack and desire. But these perspectives do not speak to production within a pomo world - and over focus on lack denys the larger networks and societies ---so we must understand desire a bit differently.

Understanding desire requires a larger understanding of the cultural world of cyberspace and Whitehead draws on Deleuze and Guattari's (1983) idea of desire as "being productive rather than imaginary ("not theatre but a factory") and about the "desiring machines" which we become as a result of these productive and socially situated desires" (Whitehead p. 3)

Whitehead formed a group Blood Jewel that had 50,000 hits on YouTube before being deleted for profanity. For his ethnography Blood Jewel was on myspace, LiveJOurnal, Vampirefreaks, LiveVideo, FaceBook, and HateBook. Whitehead entered the field he was studying, "in order to understand desire we must become desiring subjects ourselves." (Whitehead p. 5).
In order to account for a silence about violence and sexuality within anthropology Whitehead calls to changes in methodology that leaves behind participant observation in order to also participate in a study. Methods of ethnography that fail to pay attention to the ethnographers participation in the culture they study have led to repression of sexuality and violence, as he writes:
"reinforce a status quo in which Western observers are invited to perpetually colonize the bodies and imaginations of others, resulting in an 'ethnopornography'" (Whitehead p. 6)
His performative ethnography undoes the binaries subject/object, vistor/visted to question the ethnographic method itself and theorize the desire of an ethnography which leads to a certain perspective about the world.
His work embraced mixing audio/visual/video expression in order to help students understand the ways in whihc Western modes of violence and sex are a fetish. Embracing artistic mediums was a way for Whithead to mix creativity and critical learning.
"Artistically fetishized sexuality is represented as a medium for self-empowerment and an erotic response to the threatening and potentially toxic nature of off=line sexual encounter, escpecially for women...the major portion of our active fan base is women" (Whitehead p. 11)
My research on Suicide Girls found similar results, unlike Playboy, Suicide Girls an alternative erotica page that featured myspace like profiles of its members featured women who performed their sexuality through tattoos piercings etc. and their membership features more women than sites such as Playboy.
"The Blood Jewel project is focused on not so much sexual fluidity in gender terms as how gender imaginaries generate erotics, and particularly a gender imaginary which is heterogeneous rather than homogeonous. In othe rwords, the power and erotic dynamic of sexual othering using ideas of gender." The site used sexually provocative images of female bodies, he claims this is not a philosophical or scientific choice - I take problems with his justificaiton as beign inable to deal with male bodies because it is not avaible as an object of contemplation. But I greatly appreciate his attempt to theorize the desire of his subject of study - and his honesty about how scholarly projects choice of subject is never sceintific rather "iti is subjective and a prgmatic reflection of who with, and where, we feel we can achieve a given intellectual purpose" (Whitehead p. 20)
Whitehead explores the construction of fluid identity within Amazonia as challenging post-humanism for tow reasons.
1-Amazonian ways of understanding the world and self explore the blurring between human and animal which the West has recently turned to - extending the rights of humans onto animals
2-Amazonian understandings of the human as distinct has not always existed, and dehumanization has been a political goal such as during colinization saying Indians were not humans.
The englightenment created a rational world view which created a collective humanity laying the groundwork for modernist world view. This world view is focused around an empirical epistimology and sees the self as a Cartesian subject who knows and then acts upon the world. Thus he asks if the post-human is around the corner. As we become technological subjects and disembodied through cyber relationships.
"The post-human condition then is a reconfiguration, rather than erasure, of embodiment; however it is a reconfiguration in which the human subject emerges episodically, almost as a cipher for a form of subjectivity rather than functioning as the boundary of, or necessary condition for, the experience of being human. One of the most dynamic cultural fields for this unfolding process is cyber-space." (Whitehead 24)

---What it appears is needed now as we enter a post-human stage is "enscapulation of the human spark" ----What is the spark that can realize our desires in order to understand and positively use them to engage in creating a post-human future where the individual is an active creator? I see his project as well as ours as taking something that is deemed 'bad' by a superficial glance through engaging the medium - YouTube - Blogs- Etc. In order to write about the process of realizing our own desire, our desire to create something new - something positive -something empowering - this requires both production and realization of our own desires.



Performative Ethnography - moving the method from "discreet" performance Whitehead is addressing the idea of ethnography as cultural tourism.