Head under water, with a deep bow of thanks.

I’ve had a short break from teaching this last week. I thought I was going to explore potential fieldwork sites in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, but for a foreigner that requires permission and so far government permission hasn’t been issued. Instead, I’ve been catching up on hanging projects and visiting local Buddhist monasteries—and diving into social media a little more than I usually do. It feels distinctly like putting on a diving mask and clinging to a rickety dock whilst plunging one’s head into the waters of a teeming mangrove forest.

With the recent upsurge of political violence—the Keystone pipeline, the murder of Jo Cox, the riots in Chemnitz, the open election and appointment of fascist thugs in countries around the world, the open attacks on Indigenous people or on Palestinians or on Jews or on trans folk or goodness knows how many other target groups, the internment camps for migrants and for Uighurs, the pipe bombs and bombardments—I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by the level of violence in online speech on all sides. Even where I want to sympathise with the writers, as in recent discussions around unexamined colonial privilege, the upcoming midterms in the USA, the capture of the USA Supreme Court, Brexit, Scottish independence, Islamophobia…the implicit violence can get very ugly very quickly. It’s a lot worse that it was the last time I went for a dive, and I found myself feeling nauseated very quickly indeed.

Five points, then, in response to all of this.

First: Surprisingly often, somebody acts like an adult and sparks off a careful discussion of the causes and  kinds of violence involved. Suddenly, good folk try hard to talk to each other and lift each other up. I saw that happening in the threads around @BigIndianGyasi calling out Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test. In fact, while I was writing this paragraph I went to look at the thread, and he had just posted this:

Love to every single person who is trying to increase the amount of love, humanity and forgiveness in the world right now.

Over and over again I see Indigenous people especially taking a deep, deep breath and addressing not just what to say but how to say it in a horrifically constrained medium. Social media (what a twisted name for something so intensely antisocial) rewards egocentric shouts and tweets. It thwarts the long, slow conversations with lots of friendly silence and actual food that are needed to heal, restore, and craft new networks.

I am astonished and deeply enheartened by the commitment to goodness across a huge range of polarising issues. Many folk (myself included) still get sucked into the angry reposts and self-justifying rants—but we can do better. My dear friend Nigel Crawhall has clearly made a conscious practice of sifting through many channels of muck and retrieving moments of compassion and wisdom to share on several platforms, as well as transforming his own serendipitous life into further cheer-fodder—but he’s not the only one, not at all.

Second: anthropologists are either transforming completely, scalded and raw, collectively and singly challenged right through the bones and guts—I don’t know what we (we? do I pass?) will become afterwards—or crashing out horribly. The HAU fiasco really shows the worst of this, and the recent #HAUtalk storm is a fine example both of getting it so very badly wrong, and of trying very hard from many different directions to suggest how we might get it right. Perhaps the new board had the best intentions, but the letter that was published…it was a bit of a grim checklist of failures, really.

Yet I have discovered, through following various trails of barely-contained wrath around #HAUtalk, a number of remarkable voices whom I would never have met otherwise. From this distance, here in Chittagong, all I can do is click ‘follow’ and hope I manage to thwart the algorithms that would rather keep me in a soothing filter bubble. (All of you folks clustering around decolonizing and/or queer and/or multispecies critiques, I’m trying to keep an eye on you).

The greater succession of travesties has provoked some excellent long pieces; Sara Shneiderman wrote out a measured, devastating analysis of the farcical Kavanaugh Supreme Court investigation now published at Allegra Laboratories : it is fine anthropological analysis which does not avoid the injustice and looks deep into the structural violence.

Third: The view from here is becoming more surreal by the second. Chittagong is the crudest object of desire for the unreconstructed West: in the Chittagong Hills Tracts, there are Christian missionary NGOs busily improving the indigenous communities by converting them away from traditional Buddhist land ethics and rituals, and instead teaching them entrepreneurial values. Chittagong itself is powered by vast factories making disposable clothes and industrial waste processing, as it slowly drowns. We are, of course, also a deeply desirable deepwater port for Belt and Road imperialism; some grim analyses have shown how the Rohingya clearances are motivated by both China and India seeing advantages in using Rakhine territory. In AUW we actively promote English at the expense of a dazzling array of local and indigenous languages among the student population, and the women who study here may well forget their own languages as we teach them to read economics and public health.

The students know—they see, because they aren’t just connected to their own homes but also the homes of their friends—that we are teaching them mid-20th century liberal theory when what they need is tools for mid-21st century radical action. Some of the funders for this remarkable institution do, I think, see what we could and should be, but it’s hard enough running an old-style university under these conditions, let alone creating the kind of transformative process that we actually need. We actually have a cluster of five practicing anthropologists here at AUW, and together with the anthropologists and ethnobiologists at the University of Chittagong I hope we have the makings of a criticial, critical eco/social, mass. I will keep you posted.

Fourth: Consider this, then, an extended click on the ‘like’ button, and a vow on my part to do as so many of you are, to digest the poison but write only nectar. I don’t really know how to thank all you good people out there, most of whom I will never meet. Perhaps we will meet at some conference or another before air travel becomes unpardonably selfish, or perhaps we will find a way to develop a deeper friendship that resists commodification, branding, and resale by Twitter, Facebook and friends.

Last. A twofold offer of hospitality. First: if you are coming through Chittagong let me know. I am happy to arrange visiting seminars, whether they are on indigenous studies, anthropology, ecology, ethnobiology, gender studies, Buddhist studies or whatever. Second: part of my diving this time has been into alternative platforms for conversation. For those of you that don’t already know about it, look up the ‘fediverse’: Mastodon, Pleroma, and so forth. I am old enough to have built and used UUCP networks extensively (it was one of the easiest protocols for extending email networks into activist-hostile countries, back in the 1980s), and the new wave of distributed conversation communities feels very much like the old UUCP (or FidoNet, for folks that remember it). Each node is a village of sorts, but they speak with each other in wonderful ways. Perhaps because these communities evolved in distinct opposition to the horrors of FB, Reddit and so on, they are almost all creative and constructive with firm moderation in place to keep it that way. In gender terms they are wonderfully unbounded and in language terms they are hopelessly multilingual, though perhaps other diversities are not yet flourishing.

I understand, though, that investing in another online community is more than most folks can bear. Academics and activists both craft online identities as a way of trying to surf the edge between gaining a useful public presence and resisting commodification. The fediverse won’t get you that. A well-built node can bring in newsfeeds, and can connect to a wide collective of people all around the world. It’s also really easy to set up—Pleroma runs on a Raspberry Pi.  I know how to do those things, and I will set up a node soon, and anybody who wants the online equivalent of a neighbourhood coffee house where they can talk to friends without all the violence and anger, please let me know.