A Different Mode of Knowing for a Nuanced Digital Anthropology in Vietnam - Catching the World through Individual Empowerment

A Different Mode of Knowing for a Nuanced Digital Anthropology in Vietnam Catching the World through Individual Empowerment Stan BH Tan-Tangbau, School of Communication & Design RMIT University Vietnam (Hanoi Campus) Email: stanbhtan@me.com Abstract: Vietnamese Anthropology is dominated by a particular mode of knowing akin to an experimentum model of acquiring knowledge, where the privileged expert acquire knowledge through a highly sophisticated and exclusive scientific process However, there is also another means in which knowledge could be produced and acquired Experientia is an alternative model where laypersons could acquire knowledge through experiential learning in the lived everyday and accumulation from the common experience shared by all We have arrived at a new historical juncture in the globalizing digital present where ordinary individuals could play (and are already playing) an active role in the complex process of acquiring knowledge of the social They could be “produsers” in the digitally connected globalizing present rather than either simply “producers” or “consumers.” In other words, digital empowerment of the individual could help us better capture the world sans pervasive ethnographic authorship of the anthropologist Several pertinent questions arise from this consideration Are ordinary individuals who take on the roles of produsers considered scientific players? What is the academic or scientific “deliverable”? How we learn? Is this mode of knowing mediated by the social and the affective senses thus rendering it effectively multiple, relational and ephemeral? 1! of !19 Anthropology in Vietnam and Digital Change Two trends underscore the context of anthropology in Vietnam The first trend tells of convergence across the globalizing social sciences among academics and researchers across different intellectual traditions in different countries and continents in the pursuit of global universities ranking As a major requirement enabling academics to contribute to this game of insitutional ranking, academics look to publish research essays in “globally reputable” scientific journals often dominated by the English language medium and driven by dominant undercurrents of academic or paradigmatic concerns of elite groups of scholars in respective fields This in turn drives the convergence of concepts, theories and topics across the diverse world The academic’s participation in this ranking competition is in turn also beneficial to his/her own career, earning accolades such as an “internationally recognized expert who has published in high impact international scientific journals” in his/her profile description along the way, not to mention tenure and promotion The scientific contribution of the social science academic is thus measured (as if it should ever be measured!) by number of authored publications (preferably single author) in “reputable international, peer-reviewed scientific journals.” Two things we can take away from this trend First, the social science academic has now an elevated scientific status to speak on behalf of the subject matter of which he/she is an expert Second, creation of scientific knowledge is fundamentally measured in terms of the number of international publications (read “English”) in endorsed channels (read commercial academic “publishers”) Globalizing social sciences, it seems, have very little to with the very the people these publications talk about It belongs squarely in the realm of the experts A second trend is one that engulfs us all, social scientists (we are ordinary people, too!) and ordinary individuals (that social scientists re-categorize with specific sets of criteria into research subjects) This is the ongoing digital revolution that permeates our lives as ordinary people From this very iPad with which I am typing this manuscript that saves my document in the cloud to the intelligent and internet-linked refrigerator that tells me beer supply is running low, we could always be connected digitally And we are no longer surprised, such as in a hypothetical scenario that I am very sure has played out for many anthropologists in the field, when in the remote mountainous periodic market, our local ethnic minority field collaborator whips out an Oppo to maybe call a motorbike over to take us to the next periodic market As we finish a conversation with the local peddler, our local field collaborator takes a welfie of everyone, uploads to a Wechat Moment with a short caption to tell of our encounter and the peddler’s day, and immediately tags the local peddler whom she befriends in person and on Wechat It is probably not too long before the peddler comments with a “hello” and “come visit me” with her own Wechat account and a friend waiting at the other periodic market leaves a comment with her own picture of a stall selling similar things in that market Every ordinary person who could be connected to the internet could create content to share and could respond to shared content It might not be too 2! of !19 exaggerated to state that anthropological agency has been returned to the individual, no longer solely in the hands of the anthropologist (or any social scientist) per se (Tan-Tangbau, 2016-2017) In this sense, my understanding of digital change partly agrees with Ruppert, Law and Savage (2013: 29) when they suggest “it is the ‘liveliness of data’ and the making of transformational agents” that require our attention in how social science methods might change to better understand lives as a result of the pervasiveness of the mobile digital device These two trends set up an almost oppositional tension in the context of change facing anthropology in Vietnam On the one hand, the positionality of academics as experts has never been placed on such an elevated pedestal than before On the other hand, digital change has radically restructured the knowledge architecture that fundamentally changed what possible roles ordinary individuals could play in the production, dissemination and consumption of knowledge As individuals, ordinary people might not challenge the expert knowledge of experts But as individuals who experience first hand the phenomenon social scientists study, ordinary people offer something experientially, in its raw form and in a large and messy quantity that experts try to redact into a seamless and logical argument, theorize into an abstract concept and finally reify into an optic to see the world (Law, 2004) As a crowd, ordinary people offer the possibility of massive and inclusive participation in the production, dissemination and consumption of knowledge that social scientists could only fantasize in the pre-digital era Social scientists being experts, this possibility of massive inclusivity is quite often seen as enhancing existing scientific paradigms with a promise of greater reliability by means of having a much larger data sample size than before, or even studying the entire population! Hence, the dominance of data sciences, big data and data mining in current perceived understanding of social phenomena (Lohmeier, 2014) Despite the fact that anthropological agency has been reverted to ordinary individuals, globalizing social sciences is fundamentally still driven by a specific mode of knowing that has changed very little And anthropology in Vietnam is fundamentally dominated by this particular mode of knowing, too The Asymmetry Between Researcher and Subjects Our current globalizing social sciences is dominated by a particular mode of knowing in which the Researcher (Expert) and the “Researched” (Subjects) are set in asymmetrical roles By mode of knowing, I am following Law (2016) when he poses the question “how should we know the world?” (18) and acknowledges that in the globalizing social sciences, “knowing is embedded in practices” (19-21) and regimented by institutional continuities that “has little space for unruly passions, messy materials and bodies, excesses, the idea that knowing might be situated, the possibility of formlessness, or performativity” (22) The Researcher is a highly trained professional who has to play the game of the academic guild, is rigorously trained and whose work is subjected to scientific peer review by 3! of !19 fellow experts The Researcher is well read and logical in the use and creation of conceptual underpinnings, systematically trained in the art of research design to craft an inquiry and capable of both using and innovating sophisticated methodologies to extract data from the messy world out there The Researcher is highly perceptive, scientific, systematic and specialized, and thus placed in a privileged position of authority entrusted to tell us how best to understand social phenomena I am quite sure, in the course of our fieldwork, we have encountered instances when very well read or informed “research subjects” made reference or even defer to books written by Researchers when asked about their history and how they live their lives! Research Subjects are “things” (both human and non-human actors) to be studied by the Researcher In the research process, Research Subjects merely exist to be studied But your qualification as a Research Subject is to be determined by the Researcher; only when the checks in an expertly designed rubric are sufficiently accumulated then could an actor (human or non-human) be included in the research process So for example, the Researcher determines if X is Kachin or not, based on conceptual underpinnings developed to define “ethnicity,” and therefore to be included as a Research Subject or not according to the research design In this sense, the Research Subject, placed on the subjectification end of this asymmetry, is a product of “Othering” that John Law (2004: 85) speaks of that “bracket, conceal and forget” in order to funnel and filter a messy world into one that is “specific, determinate and identifiable.” Thus, according to Law (2004), our prevailing social science methods are underlined by a process of “Othering” that arranges the discordant world into a pattern that we could make sense of and could explain His point is simple, it is still a messy world out there although our methods make it orderly and readable Law (2004: 2) provocatively suggests, “[p]arts of the world are caught in our ethnographies, our histories and our statistics But other parts are not, or if they are then this is because they have been distorted into clarity .” Along this line of thought, to know the world is to make sense of it, to understand it, so that we can manipulate, change, correct and improve So that decisions can be made Some things we need to know Some things are not so pertinent in addressing our queries Some things are relevant to help us identify patterns, to see the causal relations Some things are irrelevant, obscuring our crisp understanding of how things actually are beneath the layer of messiness Treating the world as a laboratory, the Researcher, trained in his/her respective disciplinary theories and methodologies, systematically extract information about the Research Subject A typical explanation of this process could read like, “I identify village X as an exemplary sample field site because it is inhabited by a majority X percentage of Kachin who have been living there for at least three 4! of !19 generations I identify Kachin as people who fulfill the specific criteria I discuss in detail in Chapter Only a small X percentage could be identified as belonging to other ethnicities who lived there as slaves and spouses Using a combination of participant-observation and focus-group interviews, I developed a pilot survey instrument to guide a more in-depth ethnographic study I carried out this survey among subjects selected from across a range of age groups, gender, occupation and presumed social status With this, I established a set of key concerns relating to pertinent events and questions crucial to the Kachin people specific to this locality and in general across the region At the same time, I participated in the everyday lives of the villagers un-invasively using participant-observation to develop a grounded and rich understanding of the Kachin in village X I lived with the subjects for X amount of time and was accepted as a member of their community I carried out indepth ethnographic interviews with XXX number of subjects over a period two years and accumulated XXXX pages of field diary and XXXXX hours of interview recordings I analysed my field data using XXXX method and XXXX software ” With this, the Reseacher establishes both scientific and social authority to speak on behalf of the Research Subject Through fieldwork, the Researcher successfully generates data and using the analytical framework prescribed in the research design develops enlightened understandings of the Research Subject This asymmetry between Researcher and Research Subject is perhaps most clearly highlighted in Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies (2012), an indignant and powerful treatise on how Research as we know it is essentially a most insidious tool of colonialism that continues to shape our understanding of the once colonized world and its people Smith (2012: 1032), however, does not advocate a rejection of Research as we know it, but implores indigenous academics to reinvent Research as a way to place front and center the concerns and priorities of the researched and developing theory and understanding from the indigenous perspectives and for indigenous purposes She introduces Kaupapa Maori Research as a form indigenous methodology that seeks to understand Maori’s form of knowledge in their own terms and their “living in the world” (Smith 2012: loc 3816) Smith (2012) outlines three key characteristics of Kaupapa Maori Research, namely “involving Maori people as individuals and communities” (loc 3885); seriously addressing “cultural ground rules of respect, of working with communities, of sharing processes and knowledge” (loc 3891); and incorporating “processes such as networking, community consultations and whanau research groups groups, which assist in bringing into focus the research problems that are significant for Maori” (loc 3891) She concludes that when the asymmetry between the Researcher and the Research Subject is removed or alleviated, research as an activity will be fundamentally different and as a result, “[q]uestions are framed 5! of !19 differently, priorities are ranked differently, problems are defined differently, and people participate on different terms” (Smith 2012: loc 3937) Experimentum vs Experientia To remove the asymmetry between Researcher and the Research Subject is to recognize that there is science beyond academia In their extended essay on Technical Democracy, Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe (2009) shows how rapid development and adoption of scientific knowledge, without fully considering its social and ecological consequences for the very people who have to live with their world thus understood, in the way that has been happening in the world for a long time, is underlined by an outmoded distinction of scientific experts (our Researcher) and laypeople (our Research Subject) The ability to act, in order to overcome a problem with a technical solution, in such a scheme of things is marked by a “clear cut” decision model where the expert professional is legitimately privileged with the authority to decide what the world is and how the world should be without including laypeople stakeholders (Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe, 2009: 222) “Specific, determinate and identifiable” answers could be extracted when our presumed understanding of the world is made certain through expert knowledge As a result, walk among the crowds in the city we live in, immerse ourselves in the nostalgic countryside or traverse the two ends of the spectrum in our performance of ethnographic fieldwork, invariably academics (not all!) ask if is there a masterfully written ethnography or well-researched sociological text that could educate us about this society or the group of people we are interested in? And professionally we believe we could produce one such study That mess of a mass of revving and honking motor vehicles on the streets of any developing Southeast Asian city, or hidden amidst a rolling terrain in the uplands and boundless ricefields in the plains are made readable, compelling and definitive in an ethnographic text Indeed, Clifford (1986: 98) reminds us that ethnography is marked by a pervasive authorship and expert emplotment weaving messy data into a coherent narrative, a “performance emplotted by powerful stories.” John Law turns such a predominating mode of knowing on its head by suggesting that it is precisely this set of “methods, rules and practices” running the “fact-producing industry” that in fact produces the “reality” we presumed (Law 2004: 5) In ethnography, we could hardly deny that in the first place, we simply not get to observe everything in the field; we not put everything we observe in our field diaries; not everything in the field diary is put into writing; and not every writing is published There are methods in translating the messy world out there, from the things being observed and asked, to what is being put in writing (or images/moving images for visual ethnography), after clearing the hoops of institutional practices To make sense of this complex world, according to Law (2016: 19), this dominant mode of knowing “bracket, forget, and conceal much.” And 6! of !19 I might add, by way of an asymmetry privileging the “expert” researcher over the research subject; a most emaciating treatment of the people/things being “researched.” I find the discussion by Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe (2009: 37-70) about how expert knowledge is fundamentally a kind of “secluded research” useful in further illustrating this asymmetrical relationship between the Researcher and the Research Subject This knowledge is constructed on the basis of a separation between laypersons and scientists (or experts, elites and the specialists, etc.), creating such a chasmic difference that it is almost impossible for laypersons to call into question the findings of the scientist According to Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe (2009: 43-44), a crucial element here is the distinction between two positions concerning the acquiring of knowledge On one end is experientia, one in which laypersons could acquire knowledge through experiential learning in the lived everyday and accumulation from the common experience shared by all On the other end is experimentum, one in which only the privileged, in terms of status, training, resources and time, i.e., the scientists, could produce knowledge through the “singular, original experiment, accessible only to the small number of this who have been invited to witness its organization.” Through a triple process of translation, scientists acquire experimentum knowledge that could not be disputed by laypersons First, an identified phenomenon is transferred from the real world (field site) into the laboratory (office and lecture hall), making a clear “break between experientia and experimentum” in what they call a translation from “the macrocosm to the microcosm” (Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe, 2009: 48) This is a process in which the complexity of the world out there is reconstructed into an orderly complex This reconstructed microcosm is then pulled apart, tested and manipulated to study what it is, how it works, and why it happens Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe (2009: 51-59) call this a second translation process, one that requires the assemblage of human and nonhuman actors to mimic the world in the laboratory Conclusion of the tests in this second translation process is then verified by exporting it for corroboration, reproduction and clinical trials in the real world outside the laboratory, the third translation process This third phase of the process, according to the authors, is often supported by what Latour (1988) calls a “laboratorization” of the world, the modification of the real world by manipulating components of the world to facilitate an assemblage of the conditions of the laboratory and reinterpreting the real world phenomenon according to the ecology fabricated in the laboratory But Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe (2009: 70) are critical of this undemocratic process, branding it, “ a machine for changing the life of laypersons, but without really involving them in the conception and implementation of this change Is this exclusion, which is no 7! of !19 doubt one of the reasons for the proliferation of socio-technical controvesies, inevitable?” The Researcher translates clinical analyses into neatly packaged research publications governed by practices of the academic guild, peer reviews by fellow expert researchers, use of diligent citation practices and a formal, objective and scientific style of academic writing Written in the language of the research or academic circle in which the researcher is active, these deliverables are treated as illuminated knowledge and these inscriptions are disseminated on an elevated pedestal – peer reviewed scientific reports/papers/books – to the “public,” often at “reasonably” exhorbitant prices and limited access It does not quite matter that the Research Subjects might not be able to read in that language, or could not fathom the dense style of writing that is the hallmark of academia It is after all, not hagiography Not everyone has the capacity to carry out a research project, not every researcher could produce a good scientific paper or monograph, and definitely not anyone could have the ability to read a scientific tome Indeed, as Van de Port (2016: 168) remarks, the emotions and sensibilities of the stakeholders and the world we encounter in the field are rather unsatisfactorily translated into a logical, orderly and analytical text, but there is no other way that is institutionally acceptable; it is “utterly unbending.” Furthermore, the dominant mode of knowing in the social sciences is embedded in institutional practices, academic deliverables of papers, reports, dissertations and monographs that define the university, and failure to play the game could, to borrow Law’s words (2016: 21), lead to “silence or expulsion.” Marcus (1986: 265) himself notes a limitation to the extend that academia could actually take up the challenges raised in Writing Culture when he admits the anthropological dissertation has tended to be “a conservative exercise” because it determines the acceptance, or not, of joining the professional circle of being an anthropologist But he also reminds us that critical endeavours happen, but only after promotion and tenure Play the game well enough and you could anything Nevertheless, we seldom escape the prescribed deliverables of this dominant mode of knowing Van de Port (2016: 168) is spot on when he hints at the “utterly unbending” formats of academic deliverables in claiming to represent the world But professional researchers have limited or no alternatives Academic ways of knowing are basically, still, underscored by a rigid and limited way of telling about the world we experienced as social scientists Van de Port (2016: 168) points out, “[a] much discussed – but unfortunately much less practised – ‘literary turn’ sought to face the inadequacies of academic modes of representation, and opened up a space for the fuzziness, ambiguity, and indeterminacy that pervades life-as-it-is-lived [t]he critical reflections that were put forward in these debates have been reduced to 8! of !19 an option (‘ah, I see, you are into “Writing Culture”! How interesting!’), rather than an epistemological turning point.” In Figure 1, I visualize this dominant mode of knowing in the schema of a funneling mode of knowing Treating the world as a laboratory, the Researcher, trained in his/her respective disciplinary theories and methodologies, funnels enlightened observations about the Research Subjects through a set of exclusive analytical framework The Researcher then funnels clinical analyses into neatly packaged research publications governed by practices of the academic guild Treated as illuminated knowledge, these inscriptions are disseminated on an elevated pedestal – scientific reports/books – to the public for a uni-directional consumption through this exclusive line of academic institutions Figure Funneling Mode of Knowing Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe (2009: 99) sees knowledge created through experientia by laypersons as knowledge developed through “research in the wild,” rather than just “lay knowledge.” For them, it is crucial to restore “a symmetry that is denied by the usual distinctions between learned and common knowledge ” They list three important 9! of !19 considerations why it is crucial to respect knowledge created by “research in the wild” (Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe, 2009: 98) First, experts might not always formulate inquiries in a most relevant way for the stakeholders or the concerns of “concerned groups” are simply not the concerns of the experts’ scientific pursuits Second, the enclosed and exclusive nature of scientific inquiries (applies to social science and humanities as well) limit engagement beyond circle of experts the “objects and methods of research.” Third, expert production of knowledge per se might not always be capable of capturing the “richness and complexity” of the real world As such, Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe (2009: 17-36) also speaks of a more democratic mode of knowing that is a hybrid of experimentum and experientia knowledge building where experts and laypersons come together to exchange what they know, what they experienced and most importantly, get involved The authors call this a “hybrid forum,” not just because experts and laypersons are involved, but also “because the questions and problems taken up are addressed at different levels in a variety domains,” making it inclusive, multidirectional and collaborative (Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe, 2009: 17) This hybrid mode of knowing, according to Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe (2009: 134-136), engenders a dialogic democracy opening up new spaces for inclusion and participation by members of society As the laypersons in Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe (2009: 36) declare, “We not accept the monopoly of experts! We want to be directly involved in the political debate on questions that our representatives either ignore or deal with without speaking with us!” The outcome is a mode of decision making guided by precaution built on a “series of rendezvous” among different stakeholders, experts and laypersons, resulting in small steps, “measured action” that are “reversible, open to new information or to new formulations of what is at stake” Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe (2009: 222-223) We are less certain of what we know about our world, but it might not be a bad thing Knowing our world is not the divine privilege of experts per se #kachinlifestories: From Subjects to Individuals Accepting lay knowledge into the fold of the social sciences is to allow ordinary individuals to play the roles they could rather than subject them to roles for what the expert think they should be Ordinary individuals might not have gone through the specialised training, indoctrination and peer review controlled environment as the expert But what they bring to the table are experientially accumulated understanding and/or sensitivities, real-time and/or grounded status updates, and unbridled passion for the subject matter that often eludes the professional framework of the expert More importantly, ordinary individuals could contribute through the uncollective of the crowd in terms of massive numbers that could not be shepherded in a singular direction just because a theoretical paradigm dictates so ! of !19 10 or just because it is trendy In the globalising digital present, what this means for the global social sciences is to earnestly embrace agency of the individual, embrace the possibility of massive participation, and following Law (2004), embrace messiness After all, as reminded by Clifford (2013: loc 120), we could speak of “globalization from below, or from the edge” only simply because it is the “multidirectional, unrepresentable sum of material and cultural relationships linking places and people, distant and nearby.” In the age of mobile computing, user-generated content and social-engagedness, agency is already reverted to the individual in the user-centered environment of Web 2.0 Failure to take heed of this could only serve to delimit the voluntary participation of individual users thus closing the gateway to the crowd There is an immense possibility of the number of individuals who could be included in the process of knowing As Ruppert (2016: 306) notes, “ digital mediums reconfigure the relations between researchers and the researched by offering new opportunities for engagement through innovative forms and modes of presenting and conducting sociology in ‘live’ mediums (e.g social media platforms).” All you need is continued availability of affordable equipment, access to internet and a platform They could create, they could share and they could learn The success of SNS is predicated on being able to participate in a wider range of social interaction via the buffer and bridge of virtual connectivity And this digital space is at once a private and public space that allows them to tell their stories, share information and record their memories The outcome is the user-generated world of Web 2.0 that enables the produser economy that created the corporate empires of Uber, Grab, EBay and Alibaba But beyond that, we get eyes on the ground, citizen journalism, gaze of the citizens, outlet for individual creativity and esotericism outside the paradigms of corporate capitalism and established scientific paradigms And we get life stories #kachinlifestories is a conglomeration of snippets of life story narratives of Kachin people in the forms of text and hypertext shared on major social-media network systems (SNS) and electronic platforms (eBooks) This conglomeration of narratives, in multiple media forms, is generated through autoethnographic volitions of individual Kachin around the world in the absence of meticulously designed research questions, insightful curation of raw data or sophisticated analyses of the expert The stories are left “as it is” and as a conglomerated mass (some would call it a mess) I call #kachinlifestories a Digital Autoethnographic Narrative Database (DAND) It is a collaborative ethnography created under anthropological conditions of the globalizing digital present Digital Revolution and the penetration of IoT in everyday life gave voices to previously supine ethnographic subjects and passive consumers of ethnography, turning these individuals into “Produsers” of ! of 19 11 ! ethnographic knowledge; taking up all at once the roles of producer, disseminator and consumer of (auto)ethnography (Tan-Tangbau 2016-2017; see also Bruns and Highfield, 2012) #kachinlifestories started as an attempt to encourage Kachin people to record and share snippets of life stories through their autoethnographic volitions It was ambitious; we had hoped to generate a movement whereby we would mobilize a large number of individuals to begin telling their stories and therefore generate a narrative database But it was also modest; in that we focus on the individual, hoping that individuals who came forward or those whom we approached, would start sharing stories from the everyday and memories about their life as an individual Between late and 2012 and 2016, #kachinlifestories gradually grew to become a formidable connector for anyone seeking an incredibly rich resource of living autoethnographic knowledge about the Kachin, and more importantly, for Kachin who wish to represent their own individual selves in a larger collage of being Kachin Paradoxically, #kachinlifestories is a singular hashtag connector opening access to a conglomeration of diverse life stories on different SNS platforms that implores the user to embrace multiplicities in place of monological authority The existence of #kachinlifestories demonstrates that a project predicated upon the autoethnographical volitions of individuals to create a crowdgenerated database is feasible, practical and timely But what could one learn from #kachinlifestories? Could one develop a more grounded understanding of Kachin people's rituals, customs and beliefs? Could one develop a more quantitative evidenced qualitative argument of the Kachin people's support for the KIO/ KIA (Kachin Independence Organization/Kachin Independence Army)? Could one develop a deeper understanding of indigenous resource management knowledge so that we could devise more appropriate solutions to environmental problems? Could one bring out the forceful voices of locals to structure a scientific argument against the construction of the Myitsone Dam? Could #kachinlifestories bring about enlightening and practical solutions to uphold human rights, resolve conflict and bring about peace in Myanmar? These are all urgent questions to ask concerning the Kachin people These are all pertinent questions according to the existing dominant mode of knowing, where the world could be orderly categorized, analyzed and represented through high quality academic publications But is #kachinlifestories a product of the existing dominant mode of knowing? Are these the questions to ask concerning #kachinlifestories? #kachinlifestories is a project about nothing It asks no “how” and “why” questions There is no premise to spring a question Instead, the project is primarily concerned with the experientially accumulated understanding and/or sensitivities that individual Kachin could tell about their own individual lives As I put it in Tan-Tangbau (2016-2017: 46), ! of !19 12 [a] public project about life stories, and specifically about a group of people who see themselves categorized as Kachin, must necessarily be about “nothing.” Yes, about “nothing.” If the project centers on life stories, who am I, or anyone else, to decide for another person what aspects of life for a person, are worth recording and worth sharing, i.e., to be specifically about “something?” To center on life stories, the project must be about “nothing.” Indeed, I call it “a project about nothing.” And I borrow this concept of “nothing” from Seinfeld, the popular American sit-com that dominated North American television during the late 1990s It is really just a project about individual Kachin in their ordinary capacity sharing stories, excerpts and snapshots of their lives, mainly to digital platforms, from SNS to electronic archives (e.g eBook libraries), and conglomerated with those shared by others through a connector hashtag, i.e #kachinlifestories If there is any methodology at all, it is merely a set of methodological principles, life stories It is, after all, a project about nothing What could possibly result from a conglomeration of life stories shared through the autoethnographic volitions of individual in the absence of premises, that is uncurated and uncontrolled? These stories, quite often, are told in bits and pieces through real-time and/or grounded status updates shared via individual social media accounts on Instagram, Facebook and sometimes, Youtube It is a mess Mundane, repetitive, irrelevant, ambiguous, elastic (time and space), indulgent, sometimes extraordinary, sometime less ordinary, and often incoherent (see Tan-Tangbau, 2016-2017) Yet, these are stories that each individual wishes to tell These are the stories that actually happened These are stories in their lives This is a conglomerated data universe that is unfiltered, lived and still living, and unreified It is a small-data replication of the messy world out there And we have no grounds to dismiss it Or we could, by designing the right questions they could address, or better still, it like FaceBook or Google by studying the analytics of all the things they share, “listening” without actively involving them as symmetrical partners in the whole scheme of things They are merely Research Subjects who would benefit from prescribed advice dispensed with expert knowledge But is this “how far” we have progressed in the empowering environment of Web 2.0 in the digital revolution? In #kachinlifestories, however, there is no research question driving what kind of stories and information that should be shared It is entirely up to the individual’s autoethnographic volition Who says being a Kachin obliged one to only tell stories of old folk tales, customs and traditions? Why would ordinary Kachin individuals be interested and motivated in contributing to such a project that has no clear cut deliverable and concrete rewards for community and self? No single individual or group of people could get credit for being the author of these life stories And certainly no single individual or group of people could claim ownership for #kachinlifestories The stories belong to individuals who tell and share these stories Yet, ! of !19 13 there was clearly unbridled passion for the subject matter among Kachin contributors as within a year between 2013 and 2014 #kachinlifestories grew to become a dominant hashtag on Instagram and Facebook When funded project activities, namely capacity building workshops and get-togethers ended by the end of 2015, the stories continued to be told and shared, to this very day Echoing the laypersons in Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe (2009: 36), our Kachin contributors were simply rejecting the monopoly by experts to represent their stories to the world As stories hashtagged #kachinlifestories begin to regularly appear in the status updates on Facebook and stories shared on Instagram, we were able to persuade individual Kachin to put in writing snippet of their life stories of their own autoethnographical volitions that went beyond the usual topical concerns in studies about cultural aspects of ethnic minorities, Kachin as refugees, ethnic separatism and politicized religion movements (Tan-Tangbau, Koh-Maran and Maru, 2016 and Tan-Tangbau and KohMaran, 2018) These writings are published in a book series entitled #kachinlifestories Anthologies distributed for free via the project’s webpage and Apple iBookstore The role of the expert has been removed from the scheme of things In its place, we have a facilitator, or groups of seeders In doing so, we effectively replaced the asymmetrical relationship between reseacher and subject with a symmetrical relationship comprised of a hybrid expert knowledge - lay knowledge configuration (see Figure 2) Figure Symmetrical “Researcher” and “Research Subject” Relationship in #kachinlifestories Building the project on a symmetrical relationship between the researcher and “research subject,” #kachinlifestories possesses an inclusivity that allows ordinary individuals to self-define their relationships with the knowledge generated about being Kachin Although #kachinlifestories starts off with a label - Kachin - assigned to a presumed group of people conceptualized from more than a century of professional anthropological studies, the primary unit of engagement is clearly the individual It is simply about an individual, one who identifies as belonging or affiliated to the Kachin community These individuals tell their own life stories from the everyday and stories that they recollect at that particular juncture Rather than having the expert researcher decide who qualifies to be included as a research subject, #kachinlifestories removes the funneling structure and opens up possibilities by allowing participants to make that decision Using as an example the use of crowd data in the 2012 Obama re-election campaign that helped to better focus resource and shift strategy to win that election, Mackenzie (2016: 116) shows how rather than relying ! of !19 14 on presuming that individuals are already “collected, grouped, ranked, and trained in populations characterised by disparate attributes,” the campaign strategists paid more attention to studying what people would at an individual level and conglomerate these micro understandings into actionable analyses Similarly, #kachinlifestories begins with a most parsimonious (which could also be seen as “vague” and “unprecise”) way of thinking what qualifies a person to be Kachin, but operates without presuming for the stakeholders what elements they should consider to be thought of as a Kachin and what methodology they should apply There is no census instrument checking off the boxes in an ethnological rubric to qualify someone as being Kachin or not in order to contribute stories to #kachinlifestories It does not quite matter if the government or some ethno-political/religious group identifies you as a Kachin or not when you are telling your own stories from your own user account Furthermore, post-demographic understandings of data, according to Mackenzie (2016: 116) treat individuals “not simply as members of a population (although they certainly that), but themselves as a kind of joint probability distribution at the conjunction of many different numbering practices.” You not really have to choose only one, or any, for that matter; you could be in multiple categories or even create your own As a result, there actually exist multiple levels of overlapping, interlapping and disjointed groupings when we unpack the black box that is the individual In the era of crowd data, Mackenzie (2016: 285) tells us, we could no longer rely on pre-digital revolution era "statistical treatment of populations" premised on categorizing individuals in “partitioned spaces and ranked order” that Foucault (1977) is critical of By centering on individuals as the constituent backbone of the project, using only a parsimonious and porous entry through the label “Kachin,” the project starts off as an inclusive one, with the potential to capture the world out there in all its different renditions and discontents To borrow the words of Mackenzie (2016: 132), “ we might need to reconceptualise individuals less as the product of biopolitical normalisation and more as a mode of including the world.” What this suggest is the capacity in #kachinlifestories to allow individual contributors to navigate across the multiple identities through their own volitions One’s mother might be Kachin and father might be Karen, but one could still tell stories in one’s life that is about being Kachin and vice versa, Karen Beyond that, one could still tell stories of being from Myanmar or even the host country that one currently resides, be it in Singapore or Thailand Figure illustrates the possibility of how this multiplicity and interlapping might play out Because Web 2.0 allows individuals to represent themselves, conglomeration of their narratives unveil the multiplicities of which being Kachin is merely only one layer Through the narratives of the individuals, we find connections with others at different points with different motifs, giving rise to multiple layers of conglomeration beyond the singular identity of being Kachin By starting with the individual, we begin to capture the world in a loose ! of !19 15 inclusiveness To follow Anamerie Mols (2016), we should perhaps ask, “how these stories hang together?” Figure Diagram of Multiplicity and Interlapping Inclusion in #kachinlifestories The act of sharing story with a combination of still images, moving images, sounds and text is performative in #kachinlifestories It is not simply a matter of putting the stories out there It is as much about seeing the responses to the stories and how one’s stories feature in the broad canvas of all stories captured through the hashtag #kachinlifestories In this sense, one could see his/her own participation Storytellers might tell the same kind of stories over time, or they might not They might continue, they might not There need not be an overarching outline to inform In this sense, the stories become anthological When you try to visualize the broad canvas painted by #kachinlifestories, what you get is multiplicity consisting of the many layers of stories that are interlapping, overlapping, isolating, centering and decentering But this multiplicity, to follow Mol (2016: 248), is not the outcome of a “composite object in which worlds come together.” Instead, it is merely a conglomeration of what have been shared so far and therefore, what could “coagulate.” When one attempts to follow the stories, it takes us across space, back and forth in time, and transcends categories There is fluidity as more stories are shared and different stories intersect In other words, there is no fixity; “shifts and changes of just a single element may lead to the gradual or sudden disintegration of its composite” (Mol 2016: 251) With this conglomeration of stories, we are brought into the world as lived by real Kachin individuals And these contributors ! of !19 16 make no attempt to represent others are beyond their own stories Yet, a defined conception of “who is a Kachin” eludes us Or is it just a gateway to the world where these people actually live? It just is? “For words may a lot: they may describe a situation, express a concern, call up a memory, convey an order, encourage a sensation, seduce an acquaintance, substitute for a sigh, and so on – but at some point they hit their limits Here is one such point My clafoutis was soothingly warm, surprisingly tasty, pleasantly textured, and caringly filling But that it was a true clafoutis depends on more than these qualities alone It eludes articulation It was just so.” (Mol, 2016: 258) #kachinlifestories is ephemeral in the sense by engaging, by following, you are alerted to the stories of the moment and could react according to the mood and affects, but revisiting later, the stories convey something different Of what use then, is #kachinlifestories? What can you with it? These are the kind of questions one would ask for the research outcome delivered from a funneling mode of knowing In the case of #kachinlifestories, perhaps one should ask, “Are you connected? Do you engage? What have you learnt about yourself from sharing your stories? What have you learnt about yourself from reading other people's stories?” #kachinlifestories requires the user (not necessary the produser) to be engaged, to follow, to feel and ideally, to be reflexive #kachinlifestories, as one of our seeders, Mr Nhkum Tang Goon describes, is a post-research project and the “biggest book in the world,” being written and continuously augmented (not re-written) by individual users through their own volitions by virtue of attaching the hashtag #kachinlifestories To ethnograph is to emplot and privilege the author and the pervasive singular dimension of writing Crowd generated collaborative autoethnography such as #kachinlifestories using multiple media forms creates an enveloping experiential universe The process of knowing requires the interested to step in and be engaged, but you will not exit by acquiring a certain product Instead, you become part of an autoethnographic community Is Vietnam ready for this mode of collaborative digital autoethnography? Bibliography Bruns, Axel and Tim, Highfield 2012 “Blogs, Twitter, and Breaking News: The Produsage of Citizen Journalism.” In Produsing Theory in a Digital World: The Intersection of Audiences and Production in Contemporary Theory, edited by Rebecca Ann Lind New York: Peter Lang Callon, Michel, Pierre Lascoumes, and Yannick Barthe 2009 Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press Clifford, James 2013 Returns, Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century Cambridge: Havard University Press Kindle edition ! of !19 17 Clifford, James 1986 “On Ethnographic Allegory.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E Marcus Berkeley: University of California Press Foucault, Michel 1977 Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, New York: Random House Latour, Bruno 1988 The Pasteurization of France Cambridge: Harvard University Press Law, John 2004 After Method: Mess in Social Science Research New York: Routledge Law, John 2016 “Modes of Knowing: Resources from the Baroque.” In Modes of Knowing: Resources from the Baroque, edited by John Law and Evelyn Ruppert Manchester: Mattering Press Lohmeier, Christine 2014 “The Researcher and the Never-Ending Field: Reconsidering Big Data and Digital Ethnography.” Qualitative Methodology (13), 75-89 Mackenzie, Adrian 2016 “Distributive Numbers: A Post-Demographic Perspective on Probability.” In Modes of Knowing: Resources from the Baroque, edited by John Law and Evelyn Ruppert Manchester: Mattering Press Marcus, George E 1986 “Afterword: Ethnographic Writing and Anthropological Careers.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E Marcus, 98–121 Berkeley:University of California Press Mols, Annemarie 2016 “Clafoutis as a Composite: On Hanging Together Felicitoursly.” In Modes of Knowing: Resources from the Baroque, edited by John Law and Evelyn Ruppert Manchester: Mattering Press Ruppert, Evelyn 2016 “A Baroque Sensibility for Big Data Visualisations.” In Modes of Knowing: Resources from the Baroque, edited by John Law and Evelyn Ruppert Manchester: Mattering Press Ruppert, Evelyn, John, Law and Mike, Savage 2013 “Reassembling Social Science Methods: The Challenge of Digital Devices.” Theory, Culture & Society, 30 (4), 22-46 Tan-Tangbau, Stan BH 2016-2017 “#kachinlifestories - A Project About Nothing.” Collaborative Anthropologies (1-2) Fall-Spring, 40-78 Tan-Tangbau, Stan BH, Cecilia Koh-Maran and Charity Lu Lu Seng Maru, eds 2016 #kachinlifestories Anthologies Volume I Apple: iBooks Store Tan-Tangbau, Stan BH and Cecilia Koh-Maran, eds 2018 #kachinlifestories Anthologies Volume II Apple: iBooks Store ! of !19 18 Tuhiwai Smith, Linda 2012 Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples 2nd ed London & New York: Zed Books Kindle edition Van de Port, Mattijs 2016 “Baroque as Tension: Introducing Turmoil and Turbulence in the Academic Text.” In Modes of Knowing: Resources from the Baroque, edited by John Law and Evelyn Ruppert Manchester: Mattering Press ! of !19 19 ... epistemological turning point.” In Figure 1, I visualize this dominant mode of knowing in the schema of a funneling mode of knowing Treating the world as a laboratory, the Researcher, trained in his/her... – ‘literary turn’ sought to face the inadequacies of academic modes of representation, and opened up a space for the fuzziness, ambiguity, and indeterminacy that pervades life-as-it-is-lived ... beneath the layer of messiness Treating the world as a laboratory, the Researcher, trained in his/her respective disciplinary theories and methodologies, systematically extract information about