Tales from Facebook Chapter 2 Community

2 Community One of the problems in teaching anthropology is the awareness that so many people come to study this discipline because of some romantic idyll of kinship, the village or community. These seem to be imagined as some kind of paradise lost, remaining only in these enclaves studied by anthropologists. This romantic other- ness is largely used as a stick to beat ourselves with. All sorts of faul_ts and deficiencies are assumed to exist in our own society as against these others. One of the reasons I try to conduct research in areas as varied as London, Manila, village India or Trinidad is in order to contest such assumptions. We all.live equally in the present. Peoples studied by anthropologists in tribes or villages are not some evolutionary remnant of our own past. Anthropologists therpselves can be in thrall to the marginal and to the critique. So it seems almost heresy to want to use anthropology to affirm positively that which we can accomplish within the contempo- rary world we actually inhabit, rather than use it as some kind of lament and regret. But that is my desire and intention. Having said all this, although I barely know Alana, sitting in th}s quiet rural hamlet, it is quite hard to entirely escape from Fhls romance of community. [ can just feel sentimentality creep- ing up my spine, softening my resolve, despite all my attempts to filsown it. I blame the palm trees. But if I have let my guard slip it is more because Alana herself seems incredibly nice. There is, something about het that is warm and gentle and considerate and Community 17 seductive. Although she is twenty-five and good looking, this is not an erotic attachment. Actually, it’s more the feeling that you want her to be your mother, to comfort you when you get hurt, to keep your innermost confidences and protect you from horrible people. This sentiment naturally extends to her family who seem just as benign. Each of them seems to have a kind of maturity of vision of how to care for others, that natural sense of the balance between order and freedom, concern and autonomy that makes parenting work but is so hard to explain or achieve. It is conservatively gen- dered. The mother cooks while the father pontificates wisely about the future of the world and local politics. Both seem strong in the appropriately gendered fashion for Trinidadians. I confess I tend to be more drawn to the woman’s world, especially as it turns out that Alana’s mother is preparing a Christmas drink I adore called punch & créme. Now, the problem when I want to prepare this drink at home is that my own family is a bit fussy about downing raw eggs, which I had assumed was essential to this delectable concoction. But Alana’s mother has a recipe using cooked eggs. Basically mixing six tins of condensed with four of evaporated milk, heating this up with nutmeg, the rinds of three limes and other spices {unspecified ~ I can’t give away all her secrets) and then whisking a dozen eggs into the hot milk. Finally adding two and a half litres of strong rum and leaving at least overnight. Fortunately, this was one of those ‘here is some I made earlier’ cookety classes. But I honestly don’t think that my three glasses of punch & créme were the only reason I felt this benign glow in the company of Alana’s family. They all seemed to embody an ethical sensibility of concern for others’ well-being, but never as a matter of abstract principle, always with a touch of humour, and with those allowances for slippage and spoilage that are realistic about the actual world and its foibles. This attraction first for Alana and then her family leads back to that romantic ideal of community, since Alana lives in the kind of settlement which has become quite rare in contemporary Trinidad. Modern Trinidad is a pretty mobile place and one meets relatively few people of any age who live where they were born. But as one moves along the main East~West cotridor where much of the island’s population live, there are roads that lead out to the north, where, if you travel for a while, you can hear the forest echo with

18 Twelve Portraits the last voices of the original Amerindian populations of this land, where there is a sense of continuity and history. . Santa Anpa is known as a Spanish village. Spanish is a curious Trinidadian term, in that it can apply to a person who has abso- lutely no claim to any lineage that comes from Spain. Rather, it tends to imply a mixed descent, often a very mixed descent. You can have a bit of Chinese, Syrian (who are actually Lebanese), | Portuguese (who are actually from Madeira), Indian, African and French Creole (some of whom are British), the combina- . tion of which makes you quite clearly Spanish. Some dispute this, but my reading of Trinidadian history is that there are no people in the island today who can claim pure descent from the pre-colonial population. For a long period, Trinidad was under the titular rule of Spain, though it was pretty sparsely inhabited by either Amerindians, decimated by disease, or indeed Spanish. Both of these groups largely disappeared through the pores of later French and British colonialism. In the middle of Trinidad, there are Spanish settlements founded by people who migrated from Venezuela, but in most other areas Spanish really just means " mixed and old. Santa Ana is quite small. There are around twenty-five houses straddling a ridge in the foothills of the mountains that form a spine pointing north into the hills. These houses, with only two exceptions, represent the descendants of the same three or four core families. So by now pretty much everyone in the village is related to pretty much everyone else. When it comes to any kind of significant event, such as a wedding or a wake, then any remain- ing lack of relationship is ignored. To all intents and purposes, this village is a family writ large. All of which makes this the kind of place one imagines to approximate that romantic idyll of com- munity. And Santa Ana has that feeling of common identity, of solidarity and reciprocal concern. Working back downwards, this is the solidarity and common care that seems to be channelled through Alana’s exemplary family and thence to Alana herself. None of this means that everything in the village is actually peace and goodwill. Alana’s family has a running feud with their neighbour that has gone on for years. Every time a pause arises that might have led to a rapprochement it gets extended by dis- putes about where children shouldn’t be playing or when dogs shouldn’t be barking. They even have a classic confrontation as to Community 19 where exactly the boundary lies between the two houses, and who last moved the fence late at night to their advantage. If we stand around the village for an evening and gossip, it’s not going to be long before there are whispers about who has slept with who and really, really shouldn’t have. This is a real village. Was there ever a community so ironclad that you couldn’t find pockets that have been corroded deeply by illicit sex? If the newspapers regularly find this in communities of monks and ascetics, what hope for a Trinidadian village? Within this actual community, with all its troubles and potential claustrophobia, Alana has in fact thrived. She didn’t get to one of those elite secondary schools which are so often a passport out to other lands. But she did just fine at the local school. She worked hard, is naturally bright, and achieved the A level grades to take her to the University of Trinidad and Tobago (UTT). This is the new university that was set up six years earlier to try and expand tertiary education beyond the hallowed, impressive, but also now somewhat musty halls of the University of the West Indies (UWI). UTT, being less pretentious and more sympathetic to the applied side of academia, suited Alana perfectly and she has flourished there, doing well in her first degree and now embarked upon a master’s course in occupational psychology. Alana explains almost nothing about herself, as being simply an expression of her own individualistic whim. Everything around her is understood as connected to the networks she lives within. She was reluctant to come onto Facebook in the first place. But pressure from her younger cousins forced her to give in. And once on, she loved it. Today her main usage follows naturally from the social circumstance of her day-to-day life. It works exceptionally well within the ethos of collective education. This has turned out to be central to her course in occupational psychology where the teaching has a strong background in social psychology and family therapy. Typically, part of the marking system depends upon group work. The teacher had intended this to be carried out as a group blog but Alana and her peers felt things worked much more smoothly when tasks could be integrated between studying and social networking more generally. So they have opted to do all their group work through Facebook. The teacher agreed. It’s typical of the way the internet more generally seems to have become consoli- dated around Facebook over the last year in Trinidad.

22 Twelve Portraits Garlin. Another was at school with a well-known Rasta singer. A third has a link with a guy who isn’t just a member of the national cricket team but is also pretty cute. Much of the 80 per cent of communication that is not homework could be at least loosely described as gossip. So these little tit-bits of news and closeness to semi-celebs seem to add yeast to the general doughy gossip that bakes of a night. Then again, research was never something that was confined within academic boundaries. A person does well in class because they know how to locate the latest journal articles and the most recent internet debates about the topic they will be examined on. This may be the same person who is first to know how to find out what is in fashion and where the cool places are to be seen. It’s all research, and knowing how to know things first. Not necessarily new things. Alana has just been learning about an ideology that springs out of Rastafari. Called Bobo Shanti, it was founded in 1958 by Prince Emmanuel Charles Edwards who formed a kind of black trinity with Marcus Garvey and Haile Selassie. In Trinidad, they appear as more extreme than most Rasta, whether in what they wear or how they live. They also lean towards Jewish customs such as a Saturday Sabbath. Alana is no more than curious about them, but chatting on Facebook with someone whose close friend is actually part of the movement is a good way of satisfying this curiosity. She is someone who doesn’t like to be ignorant about anything much at all. It may not have any immediate purpose but at this point it’s hard to make a firm distinction between curiosity and research. The other side of gossip, though, especially in Trinidad, is scandal, leading to bacchanal. At the fringe of their group is a photographer who tends to take pictures of people having ‘scenes’, such as a couple quarrelling at a nightclub. It seems OK when he managed to show a policeman verbally assaulting a driver, but what of an ordinary couple spotted after a couple of drinks who unintentionally bring their quarrel out into the public domain? And then he posts it on Facebook or YouTube? Even abstractly, this was a problem. But then recently this same photographer took a picture of one of Alana’s classmates who was dancing with a guy when everyone knew she was engaged to another. It’s not like anybody thinks that an engaged woman will never dance with someone else. But, once it was on Facebook, it was bound to cause I b Community 23 problems in their relationship and to spread as the more insinuat- ing form of negative gossip. There are also too many instances of women being malicious to each other, as recently happened to a gitl who wasn’t too worried about her profile since her boyfriend is not on Facebook. Then another woman put up. explicit posts about how ‘I thought you already had a man’, causing her to defriend that woman. Trinidad is an island where there tends to be an assumption that women in general will maintain a certain level of simmering resentment and competition in relation to men. It goes with the myth that there are more women than men in the country. Alana fully acknowledges this problematic side to Facebook. As she puts it, you might trust your ten friends but then they trust their ten friends and a friend’s friend doesn’t have the same trust and commitment to you. So before you know it, things get circu- lated that shouldn’t. It’s not usually so bad or so common in her age group, though even she finds herself often tagged in photos. Quite a few times, she has moved swiftly to untag them. After all, she has most of her family also as friends on her site. But then she also monitors what she does in public because she knows this could happen. Where she feels Facebook really causes havoc is amongst the teenagers. Partly they simply haven’t learnt the self- discipline that this technology so evidently requires. But also they are the ones who play with taking risks; where the gitls compete in trying to look sexy. It is also at this age when sometimes girls can be complete bitches to each other, especially when your best friend, who told you all her sectets, is now suddenly your worst enemy. You could have this discussion with pretty much anyone who uses Facebook. But it is particularly significant to this research project to be having the conversation specifically with Alana, since who else could give a sense of what it means to call Facebook a community than someone who actually lives in a close-knit com- munity? Listening to her talk about the use of Facebook at night, amongst her peers, there is no getting away from the conclusion that Facebook creates, maintains and constitutes some kind of community, whatever we mean by that term. And through this common internet life are emerging some of the values that make community so special. On the one hand, there is the deeper knowledge and experience of fellow humanity that breeds care I I )

24 Twelve Portraits and concern, friendship and reciprocity, in short an ethical sen- sibility. Yet at the same time there is the invasion, the devasta- tion of privacy — the degree to which everyone knows everyone’s business. There is the speed with which gossip surges through the network and spills as grimy foam through the doors and onto the carpets of those living far from its source. There are the quarrels and the suspicions and, as the first portrait has shown, the actual breakup of otherwise viable relationships. This looks like the very opposite of those same ethics. It is that which pulls people apart into suspicion and revenge, rather than unites them in common concern, If we are ever going to understand these contradictions, we need to go much more deeply into what is meant when we talk about Facebook as some sort of community. The problem is that the word is used so easily by academics and others, almost none of whom have ever lived in such conditions. So the intention of this enquiry was to exploit the immediate juxtaposition in the lives of people such as Alana, who were qualified to compare the virtual community of Facebook with the rest of their lives. This is why " much of my conversation with her was not about Facebook but concerned her wider experience. What was it like growing up in and continuing to live in Santa Ana? She is a student at university and is used to thinking abstractly about such comparisons and concepts. What does she think community is and what are its consequences? She hasn’t the slightest difficulty in appreciating either the meaning or significance of this question. Her answer is clear and unequivocal. Everything I have said about Facebook is true for her and true to her. Yes, it creates these bonds that go well beyond those which you would normally expect from a bunch of classmates. Yes, it has a propensity for bacchanal and scandal and she has given me the anecdotes to back that up. But with respect to both aspects, Facebook is not a patch on the real thing. However much one blames Facebook for malicious or ill- informed gossip, Alana feels it doesn’t even start to approach what happens routinely in a small place like Santa Ana. She tells of how, in a community like this, people would look at how their friends’ children are growing up, or criticize the youths in the village. They wouldn’t take time to get to know themy; they would just sit and talk about whether a child is neglected or a youth is into drugs. She says: Community 25 Yeh, it’s much, much worse. I think people still have some level of respect on Facebook, well at least the people that I socialize with. They wouldn’t blatantly put something very offensive. Whereas if you having a conversation with somebody, they would tell yuh what they think about someone else in confidentiality . . . With the older people you would just probably hear an exchange of words but the youths they would start with the words and end up with the fist-fighting and stuff like that. We recently had a stranger that came in. I think he dating a girl out the road and she girl, she pretty young. And she and a guy in the village always had an exchange of words. Like throw talk for one another and stuff like that. So he was passing and something she said and her boyfriend get up and try swing a blade at him. And he hold it and pull it away from his hand. All his ligaments and everything gone. He came out of the hospital about three days ago. His tight hand, he can’t do anything right now. He have strings and stuff on his hand trying to get it back ... yeah, terrible.” As far as Alana is concerned, Facebook is a much safer version of community, a whole lot less malicious and vicious than the real thing. The point can also work in the other direction. People congre- gate online and help each other with homework. But that doesn’t represent the kind of commitment people make to each other in the village. Santa Ana is a place where you can spend the whole day cooking something up for a neighbour who is hosting some communal occasion. There had just recently been a wake that is celebrated on the first year’s anniversary of a death, with food cooked by many neighbours and the community playing cards into the night. In a village such as this, whatever the internal quarrels, there is still the foundation for deep and sustained solidarity in relation to any external threat. When someone is ill or in crisis, then you know instinctively what being in a community means, the responsibilities it gives you and the hold it has on you. Alana notes the extent to which people in Santa Ana itself who used to lime together physically now do so through Facebook. Cousins still do lime by Alana’s grandmother’s house, although quite often they now sit and talk about FarmVille and then may rush back to actually be part of the game. Given, however, that FarmVille is all about helping each other progress and friendly competition, there is no sense that they are thereby becoming more