Neil Whitehead is slightly crazy.

Perhaps my title is too colloquial for a research blog, but it is in no way insulting to Whitehead and his article "Post-Human Anthropology". What other reaction would be appropriate for someone who formed a Goth band in order to do an ethnographic study of sexuality and violence?

Clearly, he is not what one might consider a typical anthropologist. Yet his argument is exactly for that: that none of us should continue with typical anthropology. Our focus instead should be on a field, "in which the human subject is no longer the exclusive center of attention."

While this may seem counter-intuitive to a field that is by name and nature completely people-focused, our own research can greatly benefit from his ideas. With many of the anonymous communities online, mainly Anonymous itself, we are dealing with ideas devoid of identity, interaction without relationship. Community without humanity?

This is where my focus on PostSecret works as a bright-sided contrast. In a way, it is reinjecting raw humanity into these otherwise post-human interactions. Yet at the same time, it is still more of a mirror than a window. It connects with disconnection; anonymity still plays a huge role. In doing so, it more deeply connects people with themselves or parts of themselves that were previously unknown.

This comes back to the question I posed in my previous post: how can we be sure of authenticity if there are things we don't know about ourselves? In Whitehead's article, he mentions "partible persons (i.e. material beings whose identities are not fixed but dependent on the forms of sociality in which they are engaged)." Though I believe this is in reference to people groups who do not give each individual a fixed name, elements of this are definitely seen in online interaction.

In fact, I would argue that this is one of the reasons that PostSecret has the effect it does. The endless options provided by online communities to re/mis/define oneself allow anyone to not only be anyone, but to be anyones: multiple, distinctive identites depending on the network in use. In the presentation and maintenance of all of these facets of the self, it is no wonder that there are things we might not know about ourselves.

That may be why many people experience emotional distress in recognizing such a thing on PostSecret: that recognition is a violence to the part of the self that does not want that secret to be true, or has been living as if it is not true. Perhaps this is very different from the sort of violence that Whitehead and the members of Blood Jewel have been examining, but there may be a loose connection.

I hate to end this with a cliff-hanger (if you are even so enthralled to consider it one), but I haven't quite developed my idea beyond this.

So more on this later...

-Katie