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The Chilean Estallido, Plebiscite 2020, and Legacies of Truth-Telling

15/7/2020

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On November 25, 2019, Chilean feminist collective, Las Tesis, gathered in Santiago’s Plaza de Armas. Against a backdrop of anti-Piñera graffiti painted on government buildings, museums, and Catholic church properties, some 50 members of the collective wearing black blindfolds began to chant a rhythm now heard around the world.

The patriarchy is a judge
that judges us for being born
and our punishment
is the violence you don’t see…

The lyrics continue on to connect patriarchal state structures to femicide, disappearances, rape, the police, judges, the state, the president, and perhaps most importantly, impunity. The most powerful phrase, repeated twice, is:

The oppressive state is a rapist.
The rapist is you.

(lyrics from Women’s March 2020)

To read the full article, click here to go to Anthropology News
También se aparece aquí en español, después del inglés 

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Before They Erase It: Memory and the social media archive

13/11/2019

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Baird Campbell and I have written a blog post, available on Platypus, the blog of the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing. The blog details the ways we see Chileans distrusting traditional media outlets and using social media as an archive...yet an archive that is already assumed to be unstable. 

This rift in the types of videos that we received privately, rather than posted publicly indicates a particular understanding of the uses of Internet-based communication. In fact, it seems to indicate an anxiety about digital communication related to its potential ephemerality, a shortcoming that can only be remedied by widespread sharing and archiving across diversified social networks across the globe.

To read the full blog post, click here to go to Platypus.
O haz click aquí para leer en español 
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mis queridas cebras y #justaddzebras

23/3/2017

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​The social media sphere is all abuzz with the hashtag #justaddzebras this week, after John Oliver featured Bolivia’s traffic directing Cebras on his Sunday evening show. I have been a big fan of the Cebras, and even tried to join the “Cebra por un día” program, though research obligations foiled my attempt. I’ve also known a few young people who have worked as Cebras, who think of it, not as a job, but as a personal commitment. Needless to say, I immediately let out a gasp of pleasure, when I saw where John was going with his monologue, then retroactively tagged all my Instagram photos with Cebras.

​After a show on Trump’s budget, Oliver used the Cebras to lighten the air, which to be clear I not only support, but was thrilled by. ​But what I want to talk about is the lead up Oliver provided to the bit on the Cebras—he began by introducing Bolivia with an inset map in which Colombia was highlighted. Then pointed out that the highlighted country was not Bolivia, but Venezuela, Then switched the highlighting to Venezuela saying it was Colombia. And after a short bit switching highlighting around to different countries, claiming them as Bolivia, he finally showed the right country, and moved on. He pulled the same stunt on February 23, 2015, in which he showed Ecuador and Paraguay highlighted instead of the correct country, introducing a segment in which he notes that the only country that elects judges in a process similar to the United States is Bolivia. After showing the confusing map images, John comments, “This gag is never not going to be fun.”

And I’m sure it is fun for him. But I find it annoying. Perhaps it does have some educational value, but it also makes fun of and in doing so validates U.S. Americans’ utter lack of geographic knowledge about most of the world. Rather than viewers feeling as if they should know where Bolivia is, they laugh along at how silly it would be for them to know where this country is, that apparently has nothing to offer but examples of poorly designed judge selection and dancing animal-costumed traffic directors. This joins the unfortunate media portrayals of Bolivia in Sandra Bullock’s remake of the documentary Our Brand Is Crisis, in which the campaign of former president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada is highlighted without any reference to the despicable human rights violations he oversaw the following year (See Linda Farthing’s review of the film here). It also joins the portrayls of Bolivia I highlighted in my Ph.D. Dissertation, including the film Horrible Bosses in which a character suggests chemical waste should be sent to Bolivia, and Woody Allen’s Manhattan which references “those barefoot kids from Bolivia who need foster parents” (p 190, find the full document here).
 
All together these portrayals highlight the incommensurability, exoticism, and Otherness of Bolivia as compared to the United States. It is a place of strange customs, a third world wasteland, and proof that U.S. politics are screwy, indicated by their similarity to this obviously (implicitly indexed) Banana Republic-esque underdeveloped nation. On one hand, John Oliver’s most recent #justaddzebras bit at least extends us beyond the political and “inequal” to focus on the lively culture of my favorite country. But his framing did the bit a disservice. Only by taking seriously the context of Bolivia as a complex nation with more to offer than “barefoot children” and shady politics, will the humor of the Cebras really work in productive ways. 

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vernacular and vulgar humor on Chilean tumblrs: negotiating national and local belonging

13/5/2016

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this fieldnote was originally posted on The Geek Anthropologist
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Social media is no longer the geek domain it once was, with the Americas and Europe approaching a fifty percent penetration rate, and an overall global penetration rate of over thirty percent. But as these platforms and apps become more widely used, they also become more specialized to certain kinds of use intended for certain kinds of audiences. And as audiences shift, new types of communities emerge through social media.

In field Alto Hospicio, a marginal city in northern Chile, some of the most interesting ethnographic details have to do with the ways young people use collaboratively managed Tumblr accounts to create a sense of a community through language play and humor, extending beyond the local area to a nationally imagined community. This identification with a national community is actually quite an anomaly, because in many senses the people of Alto Hospicio often distinguish themselves from people in other regions of the country, considering themselves to be more marginal and exploited than the average Chilean citizen. The city is located in a booming copper mining area, but most residents are low-level workers in the industry, and watch as the massive profits end up in the national capital of Santiago or abroad in Europe, North America, and Australia. In general, most citizens envision themselves as economically disadvantaged and politically (and geographically) marginalized. While marginality is often used as a category of analysis within the social sciences, generally to describe the conditions of people who struggle to gain societal and spatial access to resources and full participation in political life, in the case of Alto Hospicio, marginality is incorporated into the ways citizens view their own position in contrast to those people the see as more powerful in the center of the country. In actively distancing themselves from cities such as Santiago – both in daily life and through their online activity – residents of Alto Hospicio see their marginalized city as part of the way they perceive them- selves – not as victims, but as an exploited community that continues to fight for its rights. Yet they strongly identify as Chileans, citing their cultural affiliations rather than political power.

​Please read the full blog on THE GEEK ANTHROPOLOGIST
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un manjar

12/5/2016

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this fieldnote has also been posted on the WHY WE POST blog at University College London
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In Chile, “manjar” is a kind of sweet sauce, similar to dulce de leche or caramel. It’s often used as filling in layer cakes or atop pancakes. It is almost universally loved for its smooth rich flavour. But ‘manjar’ is also used in slang to mean ‘rich’ or ‘sweet’ in other contexts as well. One may refer to a delicious holiday meal as ‘un manjar’ or equally to their love interest.

I had heard these uses of the word in Chile, and also being a fan of the sweet sauce, it made sense that it stood in for something to be savored. Yet when I attended a concert by American rock band Faith No More in Santiago, I was bewildered by the crowd’s repeated chanting of ‘un manjar! un manjar!’. Sure, the music was good, something to be savoured in the moment, but the food metaphor just didn’t seem apt to me. And the fact that it was being chanted in unison by thousands rather than whispered with a wink as that especially attractive acquaintance passed by, puzzled me even more.


read the rest of this entry on the WHY WE POST blog

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aesthetics and digital media in alto hospicio

22/6/2015

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I recently gave a talk in the department of anthropology at my home university Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile about normativity and aesthetics as they appear on social media in Alto Hospicio. The talk was in Spanish, but I of course organized my thoughts in English first, particularly since it was based in party by a chapter of my forthcoming book, Social Media in Northern Chile (with University College London Press). After the presentation I created some pdfs of the talk, complete with all the images that accompany it, which can now be found in English here and in español aquí.

Hace un mes, di una charla en la facultad de antropología en mi universidad Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile en el tema de normatividad y la estetica en las redes sociales de Alto Hospicio. Hice la charla en español, pero por supuesto organicé mis ideas primero en inglés porque la charla era basada en un capítulo de mi libro, se llama Social Media in Northern Chile, que aparecerá en 2016 con University College London Press. Después de la charla, creé pdfs de la información que presenté, con los imagines, ahora en este sitio, en español aquí y en English here. 
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meme humor: self-deprication

23/3/2015

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this fieldnote has also been posted on the WHY WE POST blog at University College London

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I  recently wrote about the ways that northern Chileans express normativity on social media, using Kermit the Frog and contrasts between “Expected” and “Reality” memes as examples. But perhaps what demonstrates a desire for normativity even further is the way many individuals in Alto Hospicio express self-deprecation.

read the rest of this entry on the WHY WE POST blog
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normativity on social media

17/1/2015

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As many entries in the blog affirm, local cultural aspects are often reflected or made even more visual on social media. As I have written before of my fieldsite, there is a certain normativity that pervades social life. Material goods such as homes, clothing, electronics, and even food all fall within an “acceptable” range of normality. No one is trying to keep up with Joneses, because there’s no need. Instead the Joneses and the Smiths and the Rodriguezes and the Correas all outwardly exhibit pretty much the same level of consumerism. Work and salary similarly fall within a circumscribed set of opportunities, and because there is little market for advanced degrees, technical education or a 2 year post-secondary degree is usually the highest one will achieve academically. This acceptance of normativity is apparent on social media as well.

One particularly amusing example of this type of acceptance is especially apparent from a certain style of meme that overwhelmed Facebook in October of 2014. These “Rana René” (Kermit the Frog, in English) memes expressed a sense of abandoned aspirations. In these memes, the frog expresses desire for something—a better physique, nicer material goods, a better family- or love-life—but concludes that it is unlikely to happen, and that “se me pasa,” “I get over it.”

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Similarly, during June and July of 2014 a common form of meme contrasted the expected with reality. The example below demonstrates the “expected” man at the beach—one who looks like a model, with a fit body, tan skin, and picturesque background. The “reality” shows a man who is out of shape, lighter skinned, and on a beach populated by other people and structures. It does not portray the sort of serene, dreamlike setting of the “expected.” In others, the “expected” would portray equally “ideal” settings, people, clothing, parties, architecture, or romantic situations. The reality would always humorously demonstrate something more mundane, or even disastrous. These memes became so ubiquitous that they were even used as inspiration for advertising, as for the dessert brand below.
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For me, these correspondences between social media and social life reinforce the assertion by the Global Social Media Impact Study that this type of research must combine online work with grounded ethnography in the fieldsite. These posts could have caught my eye had I never set foot in northern Chile, but knowing what I know about what the place and people look like, how they act, and what the desires and aspirations are for individuals, I understand the importance of these posts as expressing the normativity that is so important to the social fabric of the community.
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it’s all in the comments: the sociality behind social media

2/12/2014

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this fieldnote has also been posted on the WHY WE POST blog at University College London
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As I begin to write my book about social media in Northern Chile, it’s great to see little insights emerge. One of the first of these insights is that interaction is essential to the ways people in my fieldsite use social networking sites. Facebook and Twitter are the most widely used, with 95% of people using Facebook (82% daily), and 77% using Whatsapp with frequency. But with other sites or applications, use falls off drastically. The next two most popular forms of social media are Twitter and Instagram which are used by 30% and 22% of those surveyed respectively.

So what makes Facebook so popular but not Twitter? My first reaction was that Twitter doesn’t have the visual component that Facebook does. This was partially based on the fact that many of my informants told me that they find Twitter boring. Yet Instagram is even less well-used than Twitter. And as I began looking more closely at the specific ways people use Facebook and Twitter, I began to see why they feel this way.
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​read the rest of this entry on the WHY WE POST blog
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perhaps we should call it youradio?

13/11/2014

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In Northern Chile, most families have the radio on in the home at least 12 hours a day. The radio plays on public transportation busses, private cars, taxis, restaurants, and in service businesses like copy shops and food stores. Older residents report that music has been ever-present this way as long as they can remember. When a song they dislike begins to play they may change the radio station, but they quickly find something more to their taste.

Younger people, however, are pickier. They like many genres and bands that are not played on the radio. They usually dislike Cumbia music (local to the Andes) and Reggaeton (a global form of club music that mixes dance and reggae rhythms), which are the primary songs featured on the radio. For that reason, many younger people prefer to play music with their mobile phone and computer. In fact, this is one of the only ways to select music as the only other place to get music is from vendors at the local market which sell illegally copied cds (called "piratas"-pirates). 

These radios are becoming less prevalent in homes in Alto Hospicio 
as computers and smartphones are more often the devices used to play music. 
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Using these devices, they usually simply search for a song on Youtube. They turn up the speakers as high as possible and and enjoy this self selected music. They rarely pay attention to the video, because to them it is simply a byproduct of the important part--music. Though a few  young people report having Soundcloud accounts, on my survey of 100 residents in the city, only 1 mentioned any music-related social media activity other than using Youtube. Not only do these people use Youtube to listen to music, they also post the links on their Facebook page in order to share the songs with their friends, but also send audio files recorded on their phones through Whatsapp and even use Youtube to capture songs in order to set them as the background music to their Tumblr blogs. In essence, what the radio once was--an omnipresent passive form of listening to music has been transformed into an active, yet still omnipresent, form of music listening using Youtube in combination with different devices and social media forms.
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