Adam Reed

‘My blog is me’: Texts and persons in UK online journal culture (and anthropology)

Much anthropological critical reflection has centred on the act of text production. In particular, anthropologists have become concerned to understand the strategic status of their own texts and to seek to impose new constraints on their writing. In this paper, I want to explore further the kind of knowledge anthropologists can have of text. However, my focus is not on the dynamics of language and composition, but rather on the consequences of reception. This emphasis derives from my ethnography of UK webloggers (online journal keepers), a group of text producers for whom publication is automatic, the beginning rather than the endpoint of any claim to knowing. Their concern is with the practical mediatory role of weblogs, which includes exploring the kinds of persons these digital texts can become and the kinds of relations they can be shown to contain.

Introduction : towards an ethnography of meeting.

This introductory essay describes a novel approach to meetings in relation to broader literatures within and beyond anthropology. We suggest that notwithstanding many accounts in which meetings figure, little attention has been given to the mundane forms through which these work. Seeking to develop a distinctively ethnographic focus to these quotidian and ubiquitous procedures, we outline an approach that moves attention beyond a narrow concern with just their meaning and content. We highlight some of the innovative strands that develop from this approach, describing how the negotiation of relationships ‘within’ meetings is germane to the organization of ‘external’ contexts, including in relation to time, space, organizational structure, and society. The essay offers a set of provocations for rethinking approaches to bureaucracy, organizational process, and ethos through the ethnographic lens of meeting.

An office of ethics: meetings, roles, and moral enthusiasm in animal protection

This essay explores the relationship between meetings and organizational ethics in an animal protection charity in Scotland. Here, recent ‘professionalization’ has seen the late introduction of an ‘ethics of office’ and accompanying impersonalization of roles. A consequent struggle emerges over what the relationship should be between the core message of the organization, as an office of animal ethics, and the ‘personal’ principles or ethical commitment of individual staff members. All of this comes to a head when persons, and office-holders, meet.

Snared: Ethics and Nature in Animal Protection

ABSTRACT This paper will examine how animal protection investigators, lobbyists and campaigners in Scotland consider the relationship between nature and ethics. Specifically, it will look at the complex ways in which activists deploy the categories ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ in order to interpret realms of animal suffering and judge the actions of human and non-human agents in those fields. The paper is also concerned with charting the ways in which animal protection activists develop strategies for persuading various audiences of the rightness of their position; these include not only charity supporters and prospective donors, but also politicians and civil servants involved in the legislative process in the Scottish Parliament. More broadly, the paper engages with debates in the emergent fields of the anthropology of ethics and human–animal relations. It is interested in the relationship between ethics and appearance and in the distribution of agency in claims or judgements of ethical or unethical behaviour.

Ageing with a Captive Society in London: Audrey, Ron and Smokey at the Zoo

ABSTRACT This essay considers the spatio-temporal capacity of a set of relationships as they are identified by a group of older people who are regular visitors to London Zoo. It explores the intersections between the time of retirement and the scales and directionality of time commonly invoked by zoological forms of knowledge about species and biodiversity. This includes a look at how both positive and negative theories of futures, including the future of the zoo itself, become a prism through which individuals examine their relationships to time towards the end of life. In addition, the essay focuses on those visitors who seek, in a hopeful manner, to reorient themselves in the city through engagements with individual captive animals.