Notes toward an anthropological process

Three things I do: 

1. Dossier

“Dossier on the Site of a Shooting,”[1] published by GaussPDF in March 2015, presents pieces of evidence I gathered in an attempt to better understand the Trayvon Martin murder, the George Zimmerman acquittal, the lack of protest in Sanford emphasized in the news: notes from the site visit, silent iPhone video recording of the site, written site description, interviews with residents of Sanford, Google Maps screen shots, and other web media such as news accounts.

A review by Paul Soullellis in Rhizome describes the form this way: “Gallagher’s piece ‘reads’ like a dérive through a haunted crime scene, at times poignant, but my own interest is in its performative quality as a publishing event. In confronting her own understanding of the perplexing series of events, she challenges our own expectations — what to call it, what form to give it, how to disperse it.” He says the project allowed him to “shadow her movements in some way, just as she traced a path through the … events. I physically performed the dossier — moving, dragging, watching, engaging with Gallagher’s material in a relational way. Reading.”[2]

Soulellis suggests his engagement with “Dossier” invokes the contemporary experience of reading. Shifting across forms, platforms, and types of “information” is actually how most of us know what we think we know about the Trayvon Martin murder. I find this method of handling volatile, heavily mediated social materials more troubling and revealing than if dealt with through the highly disjunctive language of modernism, or even just language alone. Many situations worth writing about now need some engagement of the changing landscape of how we get information. The dossier model presents to readers a set of disjunctions between platforms, sources, and media, and like the file of a citizen-detective, insinuates readers in a reexamination of the case.

2. Transcription

I often see my work as presenting evidence. My job is to observe well and look in the right places, and part of that involves recording and transcribing. I love listening back to audio recordings; they reveal how consistently experience does not capture events. Audio recording doesn’t select like the human ear. Every sound is collected equally, landscape flattened into soundscape.

My first book, We Are Here, is ninety-nine examples of people reading maps, retracing steps, arguing over or discussing directions. For a period of time I brought my recording device with me everywhere. I found one thing consistently happened: much time was spent consulting maps and self-orienting — and the language of that was not only interesting but often funny. It is a weird, unsettling experience to hear yourself talking in a language you apparently use all the time — and so does everyone else — but no one has ever noticed. It reminded me of a quality of Georges Perec’s work I love: his capacity for capturing things that are so ubiquitous we don’t notice them. So I collected ninety-nine examples and published them.

Using recording technology is a truly contemporary practice. Not only is it woven into every moment of our lives, but using it as artists allows us to present evidence that perception and reflection never could.

3. Fictionalization

Most of the writing I do now is based in direct experience, including research experience, documenting efforts to find out “what happened” or playing with that concept. Among my influences are Zora Neale Hurston — her moving back and forth between anthropology and fiction, often using the same materials in both — and Tan Lin, who years ago started rewriting news stories as if they were about him, or his family and friends. In Seven Controlled Vocabularies, the painter Bruce Pearson, who loves food, is rewritten as a chef; in an untitled section of Lin’s as-yet unpublished novel Our Feelings Were Made by Hand, a news story of an old man who died and left a strange collection of objects is rewritten as a story about Lin’s uncle. Lin’s strategy not only plays with fictionalization and autobiography but also engages the role of mass media in our sense of identity, the ways in which identity is already ambient, diffuse, mediated.

Recently, this strategy has led me to a new approach to nature writing. I take reports of ecological disaster from around the world and rewrite them, blending them with both personal experience in Florida and eco-horror stories, anything from Lovecraft to popular film. It’s not enough to write a sad story about a cute, lovable dying species. The sweet story in The New Yorker about how friendly the soon-to-be-extinct Florida Scrub Jay is never mentions that, while nice to humans, they will swarm and peck out the brains of an enemy mockingbird through its eyes. Species and survival are complicated, messy, and so is our species’s likely future. It seems to me a certain amount of fictionalization helps increase the impact of the news, makes it even more true, unpalatable, more obviously undigestible in the way the truth of our own species’s death is undigestible.

At the same time, I like the idea of a nature writing that is already second-order, and that in some way reverses the formula of simple truth-in-witness empiricism. And then sometimes I still write from direct experience. I make no effort to distinguish. The effects of the writing are what matter.

1. Kristen Gallagher, “Dossier on the Site of a Shooting” (San Francisco: GaussPDF, 2015).

2. Paul Soulellis, “Digital Publishing Unzipped,” Rhizome, March 18, 2015.