RafaelFajardo

When I told peers of my plan to conduct fieldwork among hackers, many people, anthropologists and others, questioned it. How does one conduct fieldwork among hackers, given that they just hang out by themselves or on the Internet? Or among those who do not understand the name, given that they are all “outlaws”? Often playfully mocking me, many of my peers not only questioned how I would gather data but also routinely suggested that my fieldwork would be “so easy” (or “much easier than theirs”) because I was studying hackers in San Francisco and on the Internet.
The subtext of this light taunting was easy enough to decipher: despite the transformations in anthropology that partially sanctioned my research as legitimate, my object of study nonetheless still struck them as patently atypical. My classmates made use of a socially acceptable medium— joking—to raise what could not be otherwise discussed openly: that my subjects of study, primarily North American and European (and some Latin American) hackers, were perhaps too close to my own cultural world for critical analysis, or perhaps that the very activity of computing (usually seen as an instrumental and solitary activity of pure rationality) could be subject only to thin, anemic cultural meanings.5
By the turn of the twenty-first century, although anthropology had cer- tainly “reinvented” itself as a field of study—so that it is not only accept- able but one is in fact, at some level, also actively encouraged to study the West using new categories of analysis—Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2003, 13) has proposed that “anthropologists reenter the West cautiously, through the back door, after paying their dues elsewhere.” As a young, aspiring anthropologist who was simply too keen on studying free software during graduate school and thus shirked her traditional dues, I knew that for myself as well as my peers, my project served as an object lesson in what constitutes an appropriate anthropological “location” (Gupta and Ferguson 1997) for study—in particular for graduate students and young scholars.