“A pseudo-scientific Jewish assault on White European racial consciousness and identity…
As of the time I post this, if you search Google for “Boasian Anthropology,” at the top of the page you get this:
For those who know about the history of Boasian anthropology, the irony – and the insult – that is contained in both the website, and in Google’s decision to feature that as their “snippet,” is almost beyond bearing. While the utility of Boasian thought today might be questioned by a few, Boas had a historic role in combatting “respectable” racism in the United States that is undeniable.
Now, I don’t think that Google is a hub of white supremacy. But I’m sure that the people at the corporation that had “don’t be evil” as a motto will try to hide behind an algorithm, hoping that this launders their moral responsibility. It doesn’t. An algorithm is just another agent or factor (in the old sense of the term), and what this algorithm does they have to own. And best way to take ownership is to remove this as a snippet view, and sit down and discover what went wrong.
I’m hoping that by the time you see this, the snippet offered by the search term will have been corrected. But then, I remember that Google long ago left their motto by the wayside…
UPDATE: The search now yields something quite different – a wikipedia page for Franz Boas. The Verge put out a piece on this, which included the following statement from Google:
Google does not endorse or select responses manually. This content comes from the third-party sites that we do not control. The feature is an automatic and algorithmic match to the search query. We welcome feedback, as we’re always working to improve our algorithms. Users and content owners can give feedback on incorrect information through the “Feedback” button at the bottom right of the WebAnswer.
I’ll leave it to you to decide if this is a case of Google taking moral responsibility, or sloughing it off. I’ve certainly made my mind up on the issue. All I have to say on the topic right now is, to quote a friend of mine, algorithms are social, too.
Donald Trump, the Pacific Standard, and me
This is just a quick note that the Pacific Standard has published an article that draws heavily on my work, and particularly on my soon to be released book. As always, there is a considerable gap between academic writing and journalism (temporality, audience, funding structure, etc.), so I wouldn’t want to say that the author’s argument is my argument, or rather, if this was an academic piece that I wrote, it would come wrapped in a protective blanket of qualifiers and counter examples. But I can say that he is fair to the book’s arguments, and I also believe that for many conservative Evangelicals, the unlikeliness of Donald Trump as the “Christian Candidate” makes his surprising election seem all the more like a work of God.
New Book (and New Book Excerpt): A Diagram For Fire
As I think I may have mentioned earlier, I have a book coming out this spring as part of the University of California Press’s Anthropology of Christianity book series. The book is called A Diagram for Fire: Miracles and Variation in an American Charismatic Movement, and it is primarily about the Association of Vineyard Churches, a Charismatic Evangelical church-planting movement effectively founded by John Wimber. The Vineyard is a movement that has been given some significant anthropological and sociological attention before and is also starting to receive attention as a place for serious theological reflection. But without taking away anything from these other works, I still think that I have something new to contribute.
The book takes up as linked questions miracles and variation. Miracles are a problem because this is a movement that is centered on the miraculous – in fact, John Wimber taught a very controversial “applied” class on miracles at Fuller Seminary, which is arguably the premier Evangelical Seminary in the United States. Variation is a problem because individual Vineyard churches and individual Vineyard believers differ so much, and not just from each other, but they also self-differ over the course of time. They differ in politics, they differ in the level of commitment they have to the miraculous, they differ in how they self-govern, and they differ in class composition and in their levels of formality and ecstasy. I argue that the Vineyard is held together not despite all these differences, but because of them, through the miracle. The miracle can do this because it is an open and transformative way of re-organizing the world, the church, and the individual will. I also argue that the miracle is used at times as a way of both organizing and acting in what is normally understood as economic and political spheres. I do all this through a detailed discussion and ethnographic account of various Pentecostal-style miracles that are common in the Vineyard and in Charismatic Christianity: prophecy, healing, speaking in tongues, and battling demons are just some of the miraculous instantiations I address. This work makes much use of the French theorists Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the diagram, but it also takes up issues from linguistic anthropology, the anthropology of ethics and morality, and even from some of the discussions of ontology that have been occurring in anthropology as of late. And I close the book by expanding on and concretizing an argument about the category or religion that I have discussed before in this blog and in print.
While the book has a few pages of ethnographic passages that have appeared in other works, the vast majority is ethnography that I’ve never shared before, and the analytic passages are all new as well. It’s available for pre-order, but if you can’t wait (or if you are on the fence!) I have excerpts from the book’s forward and the introduction free to download here as a PDF.
Jon Bialecki 