A reflection on Neil Whitehead's "Post-human"

As we approach our ethnographic studies of anonymity and identity on the Internet, we find ourselves facing an incredible challenge of significance - we have a desire to learn, and to share what we learn with others, not only so that they can learn from our work, but so that we can learn from their responses - thus, we must not only be knowledgable about the subject of our ethnography, but we must also be sure that it conveys a message that is meaningful to our audience. This class, from its beginning, has taken a very unique approach to ethnography - the medium of video, not only in the documentary form, but in the form of vlogs, where students reflected on the topics of their research and even interacted with their audience through exchanges of video responses. Now, as we, this latest group of students, tackle this new topic, we approach it with video, as before, but already, we see the need to explore other forms to express this that will convey more and different meanings, and perhaps be increasingly significant to our audience. It was with this challenge in mind that I read the article "Post-human" by Neil Whitehead.

Whitehead, by far, has had the most unusual and interesting approach to ethnography that I have ever seen - he calls it "performative ethnography" and the process by which he learns about his subject turns the byword of our discipline, "participant observation," on its head - he calls his method "observant participation," a far more active method of learning. He speaks of desire as a motivation for the material, rather than the reverse, and points out that it is desire which fuels ethnography, though this desire is hidden, covert and trivialized. He approached his research on sexuality and violence by a creative musical endeavor, creating, with the help of several others, a popular Goth/Industrial band known as Blood Jewel. This band, as he pointed out, and the creation of art as a form of "visual lyric" to accompany the music and convey its messages of empowering violence and sexuality, was not a mask by which he could conduct fieldwork, but the fulfillment of a desire to create, and to explore violence and sexuality in a bodiless, "safe" medium which is becoming more and more desireable today - the Internet. This gives his research a sense of authenticity that a lot of ethnographic work in the recent past has lacked - while anthropologists engaging in self-reflection often produced ethnographies that seemed more like biographies than actual studies of the people they engaged with, Whitehead's work, his "self-ethnography," allows both him and the reader to learn about not only ourselves, but the society around us. It is self-reflective, but it is also far more productive.

So what can we take from his work that will help us in the production of our own work? This practice of observant participation could certainly carry us a long way, and though it doesn't give us a new medium to convey our message, it does give us a new method of discovering just what that message really is, what it means to us, and what we want it to say to the people who see it. By actually being the subjects of our research - by embracing the role of the faceless on the Internet rather than simply observing others who do, we can more keenly understand what it means to be anonymous - what constraints it places on us, what freedoms it grants us, and just how powerful our words can be when no one knows who we are.