Witnesspedia
child:
title: Aethnography
slug: Aethnography
parent: 15362
summary: Aethnography in Witness
keywords: worldbuilding, partipatory
image: https://edgeryders.eu/uploads/default/original/2X/d/d3bebdd0a3992efacdae6dd78dde0abad6f13873.png
Aethnography in Witness {style=“color: #fff; text-shadow: 2px 2px #000; padding-bottom: .4rem; font-weight: bold;” class=“leading-tight text-4xl”}
Aethnography is the study of the behavior of humans engaged in mutual interaction. {style="color: #fff; width: 80%; padding-top: 1rem; border-top: 1px solid white; background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4); " class=“text-2xl mt-4 mx-auto leading-normal”}
If some intersubjective notion were shared by all sentients, would it not, ipso facto, be an absolute, unalloyed truth? And if it were not, how would we know?
– Keiko Manka, Aethnography: a field manual, 11 OD
Don’t look at the data! Look through the data, and at the people behind it".
– Hans Rosling, The Data Lecture
Aethnography is the study of the behavior of humans engaged in mutual interaction. It explores the phenomena that those interactions give rise to, taking into account the point of view of the interactants themselves and maintaining a stance of openness to evidence of different kinds and coming from different directions, known as epistemic pluralism. While all social sciences are taught in the education establishments of Witness, aethnographic thinking plays a special role in informing much of decision-making, both in business and public policy.
Origins
Most aethnographers attribute great importance to the history of aethnographic thinking. The discipline’s lineage is well researched, and a relative consensus exists that aethnography emerged from four roots, each one contributing a founding principle.
- The first founding principle is the danger zone. It is the area of pre-Sundering research at the intersection of economics and anthropology. This was spearheaded by scholars such as Marcel Mauss, Karl Polanyi, Albert O. Hirschman, James C. Scott and David Graeber. Among these authors, the vision of a “unified social science” is recurrent: the collaboration between Hirschman (an economist) and Clifford Geertz (an anthropologist) at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study is seen as a precursor of modern-day aethnography.
- The second founding principle is the chemical wedding. By this tongue-in-cheek term, modern aetnographers refer to the application of mathematical methods to social science. Most modern authors point to Georg Simmel’s idea of Social Geometry as the precursor of this trend, which then continued through Jacob L. Moreno’s Sociometry and into quantitative sociology, as proposed by social scientists like Duncan Watts, Albert-Lászlo Barabási (both physicists by training). In the 21st century, data science was increasingly used to buttress social science research, contributing to the toolbox of what would become aethnography skills like data visualization, statistics, and programming.
- The third founding principle is the pluriversity, the idea that fundamental scientific ideas should be non-discipline specific, and instead be effective across different domains. Its name evokes the supposed ability of truth to infiltrate the most difficult barriers. This idea resurfaced several times in the history of science, only to find a mature expression in the pre-Sundering Santa Fe Institute. From the SFI, aethnography derives its embrace of transdisciplinarity and eclecticism, as well as its attention to epistemology. An accomplished aethnographer is supposed to be able to switch between different epistemic stances.
- The fourth founding principle is the broken tower, a reference to the academic “ivory tower” of centuries past. Social sciences, it is argued, are performative: any analysis is bound to alter the analyzed object. Aethnographers must have the integrity to embrace this, and play responsibly their role as scholars/agents of change. The ideal type of aethnographer is someone who is equally accomplished at high theory, applied analysis, and action in business, politics, administration or the civil society. Economist Albert O. Hirschman is believed to have personified this ideal as closely as it ever got: for this reason, the head of an aethnographic establishment is given the honorific title of hirschman.
History
By the early 21st century, the main elements that would constitute modern-day aethnography were all present, but scattered across disciplines such as anthropology, economics, data science, philosophy, network science, and statistics. Aethnography then coalesced around the Pluriversity project of the United Nations Development Programme. The project promised opportunities for prestigious publications, deep engagement with field activity all around the world, and the attention of powerful people who could mobilize substantial research funds if they liked what they saw. That made it very attractive to restless scholars, who prized the intellectual rigor and diversity of academia but wished to leave the ivory tower, immerse themselves in the world and “have impact”.
Universities around the world sat up and started paying attention. In many of them, brilliant misfits, respected but hitherto relatively marginalized from academic life, were suddenly pressed into service as the heads of new interdisciplinary institutes. Pluriversity leaders discreetly signaled that this was a welcome move, and that traditional departments were considered too “epistemically narrow” to get the job done. Some of these institutes obviously already existed, and had in fact been in existence since the 1970s.
The new institutes attracted cross-disciplinary misfits, idealistic young academics that wanted to “change the world by understanding its secrets”, and more than a few opportunists. All of them took ample advantage of the Pluriversity field grants, where academics would deploy in various countries, advising governments and inter-governmental organizations, businesses, and civil society organizations. In between deployments, researchers would go back to an educational and research institution. The habit of deploying set them apart from other academics. Soon a sub-culture started to develop. Many of them had substantial cultural anthropology skills, and trained the spotlight of their enquiry to the sub-culture itself; naturally, this accelerated the speed with which the sub-culture evolved. The word “aethnographers” is recorded as an in vivo code since the 2020s, more or less at the same time as the first REDR tournaments and the mock-rivalry between theors, augurs and incanters.
On Witness, aethnography is well established in the research and education establishments of all Distrikts Major, though senior academics in the Covenant pay lip service to the “epistemic opportunism” of aethnographers, which is believed to sit unconfortably side by side with a divine Revelation. The Assembly is probably where aethnographers enjoy the most attention and respect, with the most accomplished theors being treated as celebrities. The David Graeber Institute, the closest thing The Assembly has to a grande école, is conventionally considered to be the brightest beacon of aethnography in Witness, and its hirschman is called, with the usual aethnographic touch of irony, “The Hirschman”.
Domains of application
Aethnography is applied to the three domains of high theory, applied analysis and action.
- Aethnographers engaging in high theory are called theors. They reflect on general patterns and cross-domain intuition, invoking mostly the principle of the chemical wedding.
- Aethnographers deploying on the ground to understand a concrete, situated set of issues are called augurs. They immerse themselves into a river of observables, from which they extract intersubjective meaning. They invoke mainly the principle of the pluriversity.
- Aethnographers who leave their research institutions to engage in direct action take on the title of incanters. Invoking the principle of the broken tower, they shift to working in favour of a particular outcome: a reform, the starting up of a successful company, a military campaign.
An accomplished aethnographer is expected to have covered all three roles at least once during her career. Specialization is discouraged, though not unheard of.
Martial arts
REDR, a martial art based on situational awareness, strategy and hand-to-hand combat developed as an exercise for undergraduate aethnographers. Most aethnography establishment offer courses in it.