The only definition of “community” that makes any sense to me is “a group of people who think or act collectively.” This is the central theme of these visualizations. People don’t act truly independently, randomly spreading themselves out across geography and belief and behavior. Our lives are clustered along many disparate dimensions, which is just another way of saying that humans are social creatures. There must be as many different ways to visualize communities as there are types of human action.What really interests me in this post is that I see it in the larger historical tradition of attempting to give shape and define what constitutes the self and the exchanges we engage in among diverse spheres of activity. It touches upon a topic that I have been investigating myself through research on Oregon Old Believers, and encounter frequently in my study on Russian peasants in the nineteenth century. While Stray's examination into community visualization focuses on the near-present, the investigation into what constitutes the formation of communities, and the identity shaping forces they exude, is one that governments and those in power have pursued since antiquity. In the past three centuries, with the rise of liberalistic ideas in governance and economy, the quest to define the individual took on accelerated importance as increased sophistication in both data collection and surveillance techniques made available to the powerful the potential to engage in methods of control (or, to put it another way, the exercise of hegemony) previously unavailable to the rulers of the medieval era.
Suddenly, governments realized the benefits more detailed knowledge of the population could provide. This is not to say that questions of population did not come up before, as governments surely endeavored to collect taxes or define hierarchies of power through constructs of nobility or rule by consent, only that in the modern period, in conjunction with the rise of rational scientific viewpoints, accumulating knowledge of a population became far more feasible and yielded far more information that could be used to further the interests of those in authority or seeking to expand the domain of power. Michel Foucault famously investigated this phenomena in both expansion and definition of medical and judicial power (The Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish) and the recent publication of his lectures at the Colleges de France, in particular the 1974-75 'Abnormal', 1977-78 'Security, Territory, Population' and 1978-79 'Birth of Biopolitics' lectures, provides a more in-depth look at the increased utility governments found in collecting data and defining the various communities under their purview.
While Foucault's analysis is thought provoking, in terms of its scope and subject, his evidence is ultimately drawn from the ideological and literary tradition of Western Europe. What I would like to attempt to explain below is how attempts to define 'community' and 'population', the same process noted by Stray in his post, were not only central themes for the absolutist and multi-ethnic empires of Austria (later, Austria-Hungary) and Russia but also the means by which radical shifts in their polices regarding assimilation and definition of what constitutes a citizen came to evolve over the course of the nineteenth century. The issues raised by Foucault in his monographs and printed lectures demonstrate how debates over the scope and implementation of liberal ideas in economy and governance reshaped Western European powers, such as France or Britain. Questions and concerns over population encountered in the West certainly could be applied to multi-ethnic lands of Eastern Europe and Russia, but they could not be done so exactly. As new methods of governance related to knowledge of the population emerged out of Western Europe, rulers in the Hapsburg and Romanov realms took notice. Nationalism (a movement tied to liberal ideology) was proving to be a potent force, and the absolutist empires of the eastern portion of Europe spent the duration of the nineteenth century attempting to craft solutions to the 'national identity question' that would preserve their power while satisfying increased demands for individual rights as advocated by liberalistic ideals.
Esther Kingston-Mann addresses this question specifically in the Russian historical context in her work, In Search of the True West. Looking at how Imperial Russian intellectuals received, and then debated, the power, potency and applicability of liberal economic doctrine believed to be the driving force behind, then perceived, British superiority in the great power system, Kingston-Mann demonstrates that Western liberal ideals were not accepted carte blanche but instead underwent a reconfiguration that endorsed some aspects of the liberal program while maintaining traditional forms of absolutist control. These ideas, in turn, spread from Russia back to the West where they left 'analog traces' of influence in letters and discussions. Central to the Russian experience was the question of the serf population and the merits of private land ownership. The first half of the nineteenth century saw vigorous debates as to the role the peasant commune could or should play in the reshaping of the perceived 'backwardness' of the Russian economy. Essentially, the debate on how to build the power of the Russian Imperial state hinged on perceptions of the serf 'population'. Who were these people? What types of crops or agricultural methods should be utilized to increase productivity? Should peasants have ownership of the land they work? Would that destroy the Russian system and thus be ruinous for the state? Issues of the 'community' were especially prevalent in the thoughts of several generations of policy makers in Imperial Russia.
To come at the issue of community from another angle, questions over population were of a central concern to the multi-ethnic empires of the Hapsburgs and Romanovs as they attempted to conceive of a 'national unifying myth' that could incorporate their disparate peoples into an identity based on civic virtues instead of ethnic qualifications. (Much of this argument I borrow from Laura Engelstein and her collection of essays, Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia's Illiberal Path) One tool used to craft this national myth was the census. A census served a dual purpose; it not only attempted to give an accurate count of people living in an area but it also used its question based identity sorting matrix to enforce normative ideals. In the Russian example, the only empire-wide census attempt was carried out in 1897 and the debates surrounding the results provides some interesting clues as to how Imperial bureaucrats attempted to define 'community'. Juliette Cadiot, in her article on the 1897 census 'Searching for Nationality', states that, for the Tsarist government, nationalism was weakly defined and the census results exposed deep-seated uncertainties with how to deal with multi-ethnic people in the quest to create a national ideal that, increasingly, became tied to emulation of the Russian ethnic ideal.
The census was primarily concerned with gathering data on language use, estate classification and religious identification as these were considered the defining characteristics that could measure the sense of 'identity' among the far-flung members of the Russian lands. (They also asked questions on physical and mental handicaps, economics, education, among others) 150,000 census takers embarked to survey a population of 129 million. The results, immediately, demonstrated flaws in the Imperial approach. Sorting the population according to estate, a hallmark of pre-modern Russian bureaucratic organization, no longer proved granular enough to define the increasingly diverse aspects of population then coming into the gaze of governmental authority. Members of the Ust' Olensk community in Siberia claimed they were 'peasants' in response to the language question, hoping to clearly link the expectation of the espoused estate (peasant) to the obviously preferred ethnicity (in this case Russian, instead of the more accurate Iakut). Imperial statisticians themselves believed the correct method to determine the nationality of a subject questioned was to compare their answers on language and estate, yet the sum of these qualifiers, as proved by the Ust' Olensk above, was not a guarantor on veracity.
Cadiot notes that as this deficiency became more readily apparent Tsarist authorities began to move away from viewing estate as a qualifier of Imperial identity, instead preferring ethnic classifications that were considered differentiated from the process of assimilation. Knowledge of the population prompted a definitive shift in Imperial policy towards pro-Russian assimilationist tactics (the embracing of Russification and increased preference towards ethnic Russian subjects) and ultimately cemented conceptions of who belonged in the Imperial community and who could only aspire to similarity, a line drawn sharply according to perceived ethnic definitions. The 1897 census debate over community crystalized the split between the perviously pursued goal of an imperial identity based on civic qualifiers to one that defined imperial identity in ethnic terms. (These debates, in turn, would have significant impact on the later formulation of Bolshevik 'nationality' policy in the 20's and 30's- but that's a topic for later examination)
When discussing communication networks, Jonathan Stray noted a similar phenomena in his post that speaks directly to the concerns of Imperial statisticians, noted above:
There’s often a difference between what people say and what they do. Looking at social network connections is a little like asking someone who their friends are — relevant, but subject to little white lies, perceptual biases, the limitations of memory, and complicated personal judgements.Issues of mixed allegiances made apparent by social connections came to the fore in the historical/cultural analysis of a statue unveiled in 1879 and located in the presently Czech town of Buděĵovice (100 km south of Prague and in Bohemia- the statue's appearance occurred during Austro-Hungarian rule). Imperial Royal Shipmaster Lanna, the man depicted in statue form, was at first 'culturally' claimed by the German speaking authorities from its dedication until the break-up of Austria-Hungary in 1918, at the conclusion of the First World War. With the rise of a Czech nation-state, interpretation of Lanna's life underwent historical revision as the new cultural masters of Buděĵovice sought to emphasize the Czech, rather than German, background of the statue's subject. During communist rule the statue was removed, and its return in 1989 indicated that Lanna was firmly entrenched in the cultural legacy of the Czech people.
Jeremy King, who contributed the chapter on the Lanna statue as part of the larger collection of essays found in Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration in Hapsburg Central Europe, 1848 to Present, argues that it was the weak-national ties Lanna cultivated during his life through membership to both German and Czech culturally oriented clubs, as well as participation in the larger Hapsburg state organizations (his title was only one of many he could assume, yet i.r. Shipmaster carried connections to the larger Hapsburg state rather than just local or ethnic traditions), that allowed future authorities to lay claim to his legacy as part of the larger 'historical' narrative of German or Czech origin, depending on who was re-telling his life. Because he did not endorse one particular cultural legacy over another, as opposed to other figures from Lanna's time who were more decidedly pro-German or pro-Czech, his life and deeds proved easy to shape to different nationalist needs, according to how they viewed Lanna's social connections. It is interesting to note that while the statue itself did not change, save for small bits of erosion, the interpretation of the depicted man's life altered significantly as various communities sought to define themselves through this stone proxy. The mere fact that i.r. Shipmaster Lanna could not easily be categorized in one cultural legacy made him a far more enduring figure for the constantly changing sense of self and community that occurred (and still occurs today) over the course of the 19th-20th centuries.
Again, Stray makes this point early on in his post, stating:
"Real people don’t move in homogeneous herds, nor can any one person be neatly assigned to a single category. Someone might view themselves simultaneously as the inhabitant of a town, a new parent, and a leader in the amateur astronomy community. Now multiply this by a million, and imagine trying to describe the overlapping patchwork of beliefs and allegiances."This was the headache both Romanov and Hapsburg rulers faced when attempting to 'define' and 'classify' their diverse populations. Crafting a civic identity that reinforced imperial norms proved to be an incompatible venture, precisely because in both empires the essential characteristic defining a citizen came to be viewed in strict ethnic terms instead of a civic notion that would have allowed the transition from subject to citizen for non-homogenous populations. This shift, from civic to ethnic definitions of 'citizen' that occurred over the course of the nineteenth century, typified the autocratic regimes attempt to reconfigure the modes and models of western liberal ideals into forms acceptable for the illiberal tendencies of both the Romanovs and Hapsburgs. Yet the key to this shift was the emergence of 'population' questions centered on the perceived identity of citizen and subject alike.
I could go on an on about the historical trends associated with mapping communities or perception of networks used to generate and certify knowledge on, or for use by, a community. Two ready examples come to mind, the first being Philip J. Deloria's Indians in Unexpected Places and the second being Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650-1900 by Kapil Raj. Deloria looks at how, among other things, Native Americans were continually reevaluated by the evolution of language on their movement and violence potential (use of terms like outbreak, or massacre) which eventually led them to become an invisible force at the end of the nineteenth century that could hope for, at best, similarity with, but not assimilation into, the larger American culture. Raj looks at how circulation of medicinal ideas between European agents in South Asia and the home countries achieved different levels of 'certification' based largely on the networks used to accrue and cull indigenous knowledge on helpful plants- if the collected knowledge was codified in Latin, for example, it had a much larger chance of being circulated among learned communities in Europe, even if competing texts, written in the vernacular or being perceived to be the product 'inferior' native sources, contained far more accurate and applicable knowledge. Visualizing communities existed in the seventeenth century and this perception of reality possessed a powerful influence on scientific development and defining cultural norms.
However, as Stray demonstrates clearly in his post, modern day computing power and the capacity to harness peer-production for sorting and tagging large data sets has the potential to unlock deeper understanding of communities, both contemporary and historical. I have written on ideas to take documents related to Russian peasant life (disturbance reports, petitions, newspapers and proclamations, the Imperial postal delivery system) and parse the larger meta-data in order to produce a map with robust search and filter settings that both professional and layperson alike could use to learn more about Russian peasant life. One key component to this 'mapping' would be the ability to see peasant behavior develop and respond over time- the implementation of the 'time slider' Stray says every network analysis should contain- so that issues such as collective defense among communities, marriage patterns, dispersion of rumors, etc… could begin to be connected to larger themes, like peasant use of markets and goods traded or the spread of official edicts or disease. While journalists are, understandably, looking for a way to better parse the increasing size and availability of 'data dumps', Historians should also be lending their considerable expertise of past societies towards building a better understanding of networked behavior through the integration and examination of historical 'data dumps', like those collected documents that exist depicting Russian peasant life and behavior. Far from being a study of obsolete networks, empirical historical analysis can provide clues as to how traditional networks influenced, and continue to influence, the transmission of knowledge.
There is already some exciting modern research that hints at the role more traditional networks of kinship or reciprocity continue to play in shaping networked behavior and reconfiguring knowledge at the local level. Xiaolin Zhuo, Barry Wellman and Justine Yu, performing a preliminary dissection of the recent Egyptian Revolt, found that 'informal networks' were still vital to social movements- a point that should be obvious, yet often escapes many present day commentators on the Revolt and the Arab Spring in general. Here is a quote from their findings, presented in Peace Magazine and titled, "Egypt: The First Internet Revolt?":
"Informal networks of friends and relatives have also been important in initializing and sustaining social movements. One survey reports that word of mouth from family and friends was widely used (by 72% of Egyptians) to get information about “the events of January 25,” with only television (97%) being used more widely. The importance of mobile phones in Egyptian life is seen with SMS (texting) being the third most widely relied on for information (28%). Internet sources were less widely used: Facebook (15%), internet news sites (13%), email (2%), and Twitter (1%). Moreover, the social media percentages may be high due to disproportionate sampling.
But, this doesn’t mean that Friedman was right in scoffing at the internet. Once we get past either/or thinking, we find that social media has expanded the traditional word of mouth to inform a range of people broader than the kinship and friendship networks."Essentially, social media amplified both the range and speed at which information, often generated through traditional networks and reconfigured in those networks as well, could travel not only through established communities but also 'bridge' to larger or more diffuse communities traditional networks support but often cannot influence. A recent anecdote that lends support to the findings above is the story of Jaborandy Yande, a 27 year-old member of the Tupinambá de Olivença tribe located in northeast Brazil. Jaborandy travels around to the other tribes in the northeast in order to teach the local peoples how to use digital tools so that they can coordinate and project their voice on a broader stage. Digital tools are not meant to replace the traditional methods, only augment their capabilities and improve their efficiency in terms of circulation and reconfiguration. Jaborandy labels the work he engages in as a 'digital arc':
There is no contradiction in wanting to continue native traditions and using Web 2.0 logic. “For me, it’s a digital arc,” says Jaborandy serenely. “I’m contributing equally to my community this way as if I were hunting.”
Blogging, chatting, sending e-mails, and putting videos on Youtube – it’s revolutionary for the indigenous people who live in remote villages and never make it “to the city” to sell their goods. Although the “ancients” seem to be adapting well despite viewing the technology under their traditional lens. “They dictate messages for us to write into e-mails,” said Jaborandy smiling.The example of Jaborandy brings me back to the initial observation, brought up by Stray, on how to define a community: "The only definition of “community” that makes any sense to me is “a group of people who think or act collectively.” What I have tried to show above is that elaboration/definition of what constitutes a community, and the visualizations drawn from these elaborations, is part of a larger historical trend that played out in different manners across both Western Europe and the multi-ethnic lands of Eastern Europe and Russia. Stray ends his post with the following:
"In the most general sense, I am concerned with community visualization because I am concerned with representation. That is why I want these maps of the masses to be available to all. It is vital to represent the public to itself, so mapping how people are already acting together, out there in the world, seems like a critical activity for society. It is especially critical because we can expect that governments and corporations will expend huge sums pursuing this mapping for their own ends; in these maps there is the power to influence, and to divide or unite, and I don’t think we want that entirely in private hands. But there is also the power to understand who we, collectively, are. It’s easy to toss around labels like “left” and “right” or “Hispanic” or “drug user” but who are these people, actually, and what other identities do they have? And who are we not thinking of at all?" (Emphasis mine)Stray is correct stating that the use of maps and defining communities have enormous power potentials, yet the effects of this quest by government and corporations is not a new process. Like many aspects of digital culture and the reshaping of knowledge digital means bring to the meek and powerful alike, the phenomena observed is not entirely novel- it is only the next step in an already storied history of defining 'community'.
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