S E C T I O N N E W S December 2000 Anthropology News

here I offer you a taste from our ethnographic findings.

“AOL is a cult,” declares Amy, one of three young women who share a loft apartment. Amy sums up her view of the American mind and its relationship with the Internet:

“1 think it is so funny how for middle-America, AOL is synonymous with the Internet. To think that there is something outside of AOL is like frightening to them.” Her roommate Lina agrees, “AOL is awful (and) I always have this impression for some reason that there is a lot of censorship going on.“

“Yeah,” says Amy, “It’s very, like, sheltering. Yeah, AOL is evil.”

“You know who has an AOL account?” Lina turns to her two roommates who pause expectantly for her to reveal the gossip. “Lewis.”

“Really?!” Veronica shoots back, surprised.

“Isn’t that funny?” Lina goes on. “Like I told him, you can’t have AOL, you are Like an anarchist. You can’t have it-it just doesn’t work with you!”

Not everyone feels the way these young women do about AOL. The Internet plays big in Maria’s life and AOL is part of that. Maria Santiago is a twenty-year- old Hunter College student and first generation Dominican. In Maria’s opinion, AOL is “cool” and “liberal” because it has “chats for everything-like black and Latino chatrooms. AOL means so much to me. My life has changed ever since we got AOL. I have been able to surf the web and look for so much information that I needed that it’s not even funny. I definitely‘cannot imagine my life without AOL, and I hope it never goes anywhere.”

We noted two major “segments” in the young, urban market for new media: the Aspirm and the Privileged. Aspirers, more likely to be ethnic minorities from lower-income or working-class households, come to the market and their own futures well equipped with ambition and pride, strong home and neighborhood ties and knowl- edge about mainstream as well as their own “cul- tures of color.” The Privileged, more likely to be white and from higher-income households, come to the market and their own futures well equipped with “social capital’’-the fruits of well- resourced upbringings: quality schools, readily available and accessible tools, opportunity.

For Aspirers, “technology” represents the key to the future, the marker of success; the Internet that comes via AOL opens up possibilities and opportunities and provides a “wide-open“ play- ing field. For the Privileged, technology is also the key to the future-futures they are more likely to take for granted than aspire to. Some among the Privileged have adopted a “counter-mainstream” self-image. For them, America Online inhibits, limits, its full, “wide-open” access; AOL repre- sents the conventional to which they will not conform (at least on the surface).

Our research demonstrates that urban “mar- kets” are fundamentally social worlds shaped by the nexus of racelethnicity, gender, socioeco- nomic status and the built environment that encompasses neighborhood and technological

infrastructures. The study raises many social as well as business issues, all of which we have shared with the 15 major media companies- from AT&T Broadband and ICTV to placesofcol- or.com and HBO-that have purchased the research.

Your Turn I’ve told you what I do; now it’s your turn. Please get in touch if you want to contribute your piece or send news tidbits on your research, publica- tions, new positions and projects. Remember, your voice counts and I do want to hear from you: Surveys Unlimited, 1971 Palmer Ave, Larchmont NY 10538; tel 914/834-5999, fax 91418345998, AWaterston@aol.com.

Society 6 r the Anthropology of Work DAVID GRIFFITH, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

Journalism and Anthropology By now, well into the holiday season, most of us have heard of the accusations made by Patrick Tiemey concerning Napoleon Chagnon’s work along the Orinoco River. As I write this (Oa 2000), Tiemey’s article, “The Fierce Anthropol- ogist,” has just come out in The New Yorker and his book is about to be released. In the magazine piece, Tiemey seems to claim that just about everything that anthropologists he has read, known or investigated have said is wrong. The people whom Napolean Chagnon found warlike were actually peaceful. Yet the people whom Margaret Mead described as gentle actually prac- ticed violent rape. Instead of preventing the spread of disease, Chagnon and his mentor, James Neel, spread disease. While Chagnon was praised in North America, he was despised in South America. His vivid descriptions of warfare, aggression and the abduction of women became “the ethnographic text of the sixties” at a time of peace and feminist movements. And the Siapa Yanomami, whom Chagnon described as peace- ful, were actually warlike, greeting Tiemey and his associates with “drawn arrows.” My goodness. Can Chagnon, can anthropology, really have everything backwards?

I must admit to SAW members that I have always been a bit disturbed by the popularity of Chagnon’s The Fierce People and, particularly, its common use in introductory anthropology courses and its promotion of the idea that an- thropologists are only interested in the exotic. Yet in this day when anthropology and its texts have deeply informed such fine works as Anne Fadiman‘s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down and Jared Diamond’s Guns, G m , and Steel, it is more disturbing to me that Tiemey has exaggerated scientific disputes to a point that brings the entire discipline into question. He paints one of its best known and most highly rewarded practitioners as evil. I hope that readers will consider his arguments in light of the ten-

dency for hyperbole to overtake accounts such as these.

I am, tomorrow, on my way to a con- ference on pFesteria in Atlanta, hosted by the CDC. It is beiig billed as a “neutral, informative” exchange of ideas about this little dinoflagellate that has received so much publici- ty along the Mid-Atlantic coast in the past few years. Those of you familiar with my work on the little being in Human Organization know that I beliwe it to be a highly exaggerated public health risk, and I’m grateful that the CDC people want to hear my position on the beast and its relation to public health. I bring it up here because the book that was written about pFestmia was, I’m guessing, much like Tlemey’s work on Chagnon and Neel: full of innuendo, speculation, hyper- bole and borderline or outright lies. So-called investigative journalism has become so sensa- tionalist in recent years that it has become hard for me to watch even the network news without wondering about sources of information and questioning even those causes, like environmen- talism, that I have always supported in spirit.

As with the Pliesferia issue in the Mid-Atlantic, the casualty of these accounts is scientific credi- bility and authority as often as the poor scientif- ic practices that some of us, from time to time, are indeed guilty of. I’m not against exposing bad science or against writing a popular book, but to accomplish the former for the sake of the latter, in my experience anyway, usually results in stretching points here and there for the sake of story. What was it Bellow said? How one day‘s lies if converted to silt would choke the Mississippi, except that instead they are scattered all about like the nitrogen in potatoes?

New Book On to a more chipper subject: EstelIie Smith’s new book, Trade and Trade-00: Using Resources, Making Choices, and Taking Risks (Waveland). This gem came across my desk over the summer. I think SAW members might well find it useful for its rethinking of commonly accepted and highly influential concepts that come to us, principally, from economics. “What,” its blurb reads, “do globalization, the abortion debate and the deci- sion you need to make about what to do about dinner tonight have in common?” After you read it, you might wonder, as I often do, how it is that economists alone among the social scientists are eligible to win Nobel Prizes.

Please send any correspondence to GRIFFITHD@ MAIL.ECU.EDU or fa me a message at 252/328- 426.5. Myphonehice mail is 252/328-1748 and my snail mail address b ICMR, ECU, Greenville, NC.

Society for Humanistic Anthropology F R E D ~ C W GLEACH AND VIM SANIIAGO-IRIZARRY, CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Dec columns are always the most frustrating! By the time you read this, the Annual Meeting will

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