But when applied beyond fiction writing, particularly in public relations and crisis management, this principle transforms. It's here where show-don't-tell evolves into something more calculated – it no longer functions as a mere creative technique but mutates into a medium (and message) separate from the explicit statement. It creates a shadow narrative that runs parallel to the stated one, with a crucial advantage: this secondary story unfolds primarily in the minds of the audience, requiring no additional effort from the communicator.

This shadow narrative replicates organically through online discourse, occasionally requiring only the gentlest nudge in a preferred direction. Such interventions are rarely necessary as public attention typically moves on before any deeper analysis takes place. In this space between what is explicitly stated and what is implicitly suggested, we find a rich territory for examining how digital communities construct and defend their ethical frameworks—often without directly acknowledging them.

A Case Study in Digital Attribution

When Australian recipe developer and cookbook author Nagi Maehashi of RecipeTin Eats accused social media baker Brooke Bellamy of plagiarising recipes1 in her bestselling cookbook Bake with Brooki she was doing more than merely stirring the pot2. What Nagi did was reveal how different digital communities develop distinct understandings of creativity, ownership, and attribution.

I'm not here to determine who copied whom. Plagiarism in creative communities like cooking is difficult to prove and even more difficult to litigate. This case will ultimately be decided by public opinion (all while providing grist for the drama mill). What this article aims to examine is something more nuanced: the collision between two digital cultures that appear similar on the surface but operate with distinctly different ethical frameworks. It's in these slight differences—between recipe developers and social media influencers, between testing-focused and aesthetic-focused content creation—that we find revealing orientations toward originality, attribution, and creative ownership.

The Evidence at Hand

This controversy centres around strikingly similar caramel slice and baklava recipes with identical measurements and matching instructions. In her blog post detailing the allegations, Maehashi writes:

While recipes can resemble one another, because there are only so many ways some recipes can be made, the precision and detail in the similarities in this case are, in my opinion, far too strong to be a co-incidence (sic).

My Caramel Slice recipe is special because it is made using caramel as the base (I mean, the name..!) rather than golden syrup which is the typical recipe (gives it a metallic flavour, I swear!). I can tell you the exact moment in my life that triggered the creation of this recipe – how and why it came to be, and what I tried before deciding that I had figured out The One.

Within 24 hours, Bellamy responded with an Instagram story where she writes:

In light of the recent allegations made against me by Recipetin Eats for plagiarising two of her recipes in my cookbook Bake With Brooki (caramel slice and baklava), I would like to provide the below statement.

I did not plagiarise any recipes in my book which consists of 100 recipes I have created over many years, since falling in love with baking as a child and growing up baking with my mum in our home kitchen.

In 2016, I opened my first bakery. I have been creating my recipes and selling them commercially since October 2016 - as shown in the next slide and as was communicated at the first point of contact I received.

On March 2020, Recipetin Eats published a recipe for caramel slice. It uses the same ingredients as my recipe, which I have been making and selling since four years prior.

I immediately offered to remove both recipes from future reprints to prevent further aggravation, which was communicated to Nagi swiftly through discussions.

I have great respect for Nagi and what she has done in recent years for cooks, content creators and cookbooks in Australia - especially as a fellow female entrepreneur.

Recipe development in today's world is enveloped in inspiration from other cooks, cookbook authors, food bloggers and content creators. This willingness to share recipes and build on what has come before is what I love so much about baking and sharing recipes - the community that surrounds it.

I stand by my love for baking, my recipes, and the joy this book has brought so many home bakers around the world eager to try recreating my recipes from inside their homes.

Bellamy's response to the allegations wasn't just defending her recipes – she was speaking the language of her community, where personal narrative often carries more weight than procedural documentation. Meanwhile, Maehashi's meticulous documentation of her recipe development process reflects the values of her community – where rigorous testing and explanation of the behind-the-scenes trial-and-error process form the foundation of credibility.

The question isn't simply "Did she copy?" but rather: "Are we even speaking the same cultural language when we talk about originality?"

Two Digital Cultures: Recipe Development vs Social Media Influence

At the heart of this dispute lies not just potentially copied recipes, but a collision between two distinct digital cultures with fundamentally different value systems, professional practices, and orientations toward content.

The Recipe Development Culture

Recipe developers like Nagi Maehashi operate within a community that places exceptional value on rigorous testing, meticulous documentation, and technical precision. This culture emerged from professional food writing but has expanded through blogs and recipe content across platforms. The development process typically involves:

• Multiple testing iterations to perfect measurements, cooking times and techniques

• Documented workflow from concept to final version

• Detailed explanatory text providing context and methodology

• Precise attribution when building upon another's work

• A focus on the functional reliability of the recipe

When Maehashi writes “I can tell you the exact moment in my life that triggered the creation of this recipe – how and why it came to be, and what I tried before deciding that I had figured out The One”, she's not merely telling a story – she's establishing her technical authority through a narrative of process and refinement.

For recipe developers, the lineage of a recipe – where it originated, how it was adapted – is part of its core value proposition. Attribution isn't just ethical practice; it's essential context that enriches the recipe's story.

The Foodie Influencer Culture

By contrast, social media influencers like Brooke Bellamy operate in a digital culture where personal narrative, aesthetic appeal, and lifestyle aspiration are the primary currencies. It's worth noting that Bellamy does operate three brick-and-mortar bakeries (Brooki Bakehouse) in Brisbane, but her primary identity in digital spaces aligns more with influencer culture. Her communication platforms prioritise visual impact and shareability over detailed long-form content.

• Visual presentation often takes precedence over technical precision

• Personal connection with audience drives engagement

• Content is oriented around personality and lifestyle

• Products emerge from personal narratives rather than technical processes

• Attribution practices are less codified and often more casual

Where recipe developers focus on the detailed history of recipe development, influencers often frame content through personal experience narratives. Bellamy's emphasis isn't on the technical development process but on the emotional journey: “falling in love with baking as a child and growing up baking with my mum in our home kitchen”.

The influencer economy rewards the appearance of effortless mastery over documented expertise. This isn't necessarily disingenuous – it's simply a different orientation toward content and audience relationship.

Digital Architecture and Its Influence

The platforms that host these communities further shape their distinct cultures. Recipe blogs incentivise detailed process documentation and search-optimised methodology. In contrast, visual platforms like Instagram and TikTok reward aesthetic consistency and personal narrative over technical detail.

This architectural difference shapes both how content is created and consumed. Recipe developers write with an assumption that readers are seeking detailed instruction. Influencers create with the understanding that their audience is there for a parasocial relationship facilitated through aspirational content.

Economics of Attribution

Perhaps most revealing are the economic models that underpin these cultures. Recipe developers typically monetise through:

• Advertising on detailed recipe posts

• Cookbook sales based on technical expertise

• Brand partnerships highlighting their testing expertise

Influencers monetise through:

• Sponsorships based on their personal brand

• Product lines leveraging their aesthetic

• Merchandise that embodies their lifestyle proposition

This last point deserves further examination. For both Bellamy and the wildly successful American cookie chain Crumbl, the primary currency isn't the detailed technical development process behind each recipe, but the visual and experiential qualities that make their products shareable.

Crumbl, like Brooki Bakehouse, has mastered the art of turning baked goods into social media phenomena through carefully curated aesthetics, rotating menus that create FOMO, and distinctive packaging designed to be photographed. Their pink boxes are as much a part of their brand identity as their oversized cookies. The aesthetic-forward approach has helped Crumbl grow to over 600 locations in just five years, demonstrating how the influencer ethos can successfully translate to brick-and-mortar retail sales.

Both Crumbl and Brooki Bakehouse create products primarily designed to be consumed digitally. Whether the cookies are "good" is almost secondary—they aren't selling baked goods for everyday consumption so much as marketing an aesthetic and offering entry into a trending experience first encountered online. Their websites function not as recipe repositories but as extensions of their social media presence – digital storefronts where customers purchase the lifestyle they've been aspiring to through carefully curated Instagram feeds. The pink boxes and bold branding aren't just packaging; they're essential props for the customer's own social media performance. This represents a fundamental inversion of the recipe developer model, where social media typically serves to direct traffic toward detailed recipe content rather than toward a checkout page.

These contrasting economic models directly shape approaches to attribution and originality. For recipe developers, detailed attribution enhances professional credibility and strengthens their position as experts – it's part of the value they offer. For influencers, the primary value proposition is their personal relationship with an audience and the aspirational lifestyle they embody, sometimes making technical attribution seem secondary to maintaining the personal narrative that drives sales. Neither culture has a monopoly on ethics or originality; they're simply different systems with different norms, languages, and understandings of what constitutes valuable content. When these worlds collide – as they did in the Bake with Brooki controversy – we witness not just potential copyright disputes, but a fundamental clash between different digital languages of attribution, originality, and ultimately, commerce.

The Rhetoric of Recipe Disputes

Examining the language deployed by both Bellamy and Maehashi provides a revealing window into how these different digital cultures communicate and conceptualize ownership and originality.

Brooke Bellamy's Rhetorical Strategy

When responding to plagiarism allegations, Bellamy's Instagram statement follows a rhetorical pattern common within influencer culture:

I did not plagiarise any recipes in my book which consists of 100 recipes I have created over many years, since falling in love with baking as a child and growing up baking with my mum in our home kitchen.

Several elements of this response are culturally significant:

1. Temporal anchoring in childhood: By situating her recipes within a childhood narrative, Bellamy employs a “biographical authority claim” – establishing legitimacy through personal history rather than documented process.

2. Emotional framing: The phrase “falling in love with baking” positions her relationship with cooking as emotional rather than technical, contrasting with the procedural orientation of recipe development culture.

3. Familial origins: Invoking her mother situates her knowledge within domestic rather than professional space, a rhetorical move that reinforces authenticity through intimacy rather than expertise through methodology.

When addressing the specific allegations, Bellamy states:

In 2016, I opened my first bakery. I have been creating my recipes and selling them commercially since October 2016 - as shown in the next slide and as was communicated at the first point of contact I received.

This statement shifts the attribution framework from documented recipe development to commercial prioritisation – a different system of establishing provenance. The “evidence” offered – a bakery display photo from 2016 with what appears to be caramel slice – provides no substantial proof of recipe ownership or development. It shows finished products without any documentation of process, ingredients, or testing.

This slide actually serves as a perfect encapsulation of the different evidentiary standards between these communities. The ephemeral nature of Instagram Stories, where users typically tap quickly through content, allows this tenuous evidence to appear substantial while evading deeper scrutiny.

A Reddit user (u/tehdang) also noted the conflation implicit in Bellamy’s bizarre evidence writing:

Is she trying to accuse Nagi of stealing her caramel slice? A picture of caramel slice with a red circle on it from 2016 doesn't prove that it's using the somehow miraculously identical recipe from RecipeTin Eats.

Bellamy’s concluding paragraph further illustrates the linguistic markers of influencer culture, she writes:

Recipe development in today's world is enveloped in inspiration from other cooks, cookbook authors, food bloggers and content creators. This willingness to share recipes and build on what has come before is what I love so much about baking and sharing recipes - the community that surrounds it.

This statement reframes the conversation from individual attribution to collective inspiration – a conceptual shift that aligns with influencer culture's emphasis on community and shared experience over individual technical ownership.

Nagi Maehashi's Rhetorical Approach

By contrast, Maehashi's language reflects the values of recipe development culture with its emphasis on technical precision and documented process:

My Caramel Slice recipe is special because it is made using caramel as the base (I mean, the name..!) rather than golden syrup which is the typical recipe (gives it a metallic flavour, I swear!). I can tell you the exact moment in my life that triggered the creation of this recipe – how and why it came to be, and what I tried before deciding that I had figured out The One.

This statement demonstrates several linguistic features characteristic of recipe development culture:

1. Technical differentiation: Maehashi immediately establishes what makes her recipe technically distinct from others.

2. Sensory precision: The parenthetical reference to “metallic flavour” signals detailed sensory observation typical of professional culinary discourse.

3. Process documentation: The phrase “I can tell you the exact moment” emphasises documented development rather than biographical authority.

4. Testing language: “What I tried before deciding that I had figured out The One” explicitly references the iterative testing process valued in recipe development culture.

When describing how she felt upon discovering the similarities, Maehashi writes:

I put a huge amount of effort into testing recipes, whether it's an original creation or one adapted from another source... To see them plagiarised (in my view) and used in a book for profit, without permission, and without credit, doesn't just feel unfair. It feels like a blatant exploitation of my work.

The emphasis on effort reflects recipe development culture's valuation of process as a primary marker of authority, while highlighting "profit without permission" invokes a specific understanding of content economics that differs from influencer culture's more fluid conception of inspiration.

Digital Communities as Accidental Anthropologists

The controversy between Maehashi and Bellamy didn't remain contained within their own communities. Instead, it catalysed a broader investigation conducted by digital communities who, in their collaborative analysis, began functioning accidentally as anthropologists – documenting, analysing, and interpreting evidence across digital cultural boundaries.

Within 24 hours of Maehashi's allegations going public, members of Reddit's r/Australia community began conducting their own comparative analyses. One user identified what they described as “identical ingredients, quantities, and preparation steps” between Bellamy's Persian Love Cake recipe and one published by Australian chef Kirsten Bacon on ABC news website in 2022.

When this user searched Google using specific ingredient measurements for the recipe, only one other result appeared – Kirsten Bacon's original recipe. This crowd-sourced investigation illustrates how digital communities now serve a function that would have been impossible in pre-internet publishing – distributed, collective verification that can rapidly identify patterns across vast amounts of content.

As one Reddit user (u/Shiny_Umbreon) wrote:

Probably smart to take it public, i dont think recipies (sic) are considered copyrightable, but the public opinion can still call it 'stealing',

This comment perfectly illustrates the translation problem between digital cultures. The user acknowledges the legal reality that recipes themselves are generally not protected by copyright while simultaneously recognising the court of public opinion operates by different standards.

Between Languages: The Problem of Translation

The challenge in cases like these isn't determining who is right or wrong, but rather in recognising that these communities operate with different linguistic systems for discussing attribution. The recipe development community speaks a language of precise documentation, iterative testing, and clear lineage. The influencer community speaks a language of inspiration, personal narrative, and shared experience.

This linguistic divide creates a translation problem – each party articulates their position using frameworks that make perfect sense within their own cultural context but may seem inadequate or evasive when evaluated by the standards of the other community.

The result is that the question: Did Bellamy plagiarise Maehashi's recipes? – cannot be answered with a simple yes or no. Instead, we must ask: Are these communities even speaking the same language when they talk about what constitutes originality and proper attribution?

Patterns Across Digital Creative Fields

The Maehashi-Bellamy controversy is not an isolated incident but part of a larger pattern of attribution conflicts emerging across digital creative spaces. The case of Mel Robbins and Cassie Phillips provides a compelling parallel drawn from a different creative domain.

In January 2025, poet and writer Sage Justice documented how motivational speaker Mel Robbins had built her bestselling book The Let Them Theory around concepts and language originally published by poet Cassie Phillips. Phillips had created and popularised the ‘Let Them’ mantra through her viral poem in 2022, which gained significant traction when she got the phrase tattooed on her arm. Robbins later published a book centered on the same concept without acknowledging Phillips as the originator.

The parallels between these cases are striking:

1. Both involve established figures (Robbins/Bellamy) adapting content from creators with smaller but dedicated followings (Phillips/Maehashi)

2. Both feature similar defenses centered on the idea that concepts cannot be owned

3. Both showcase different attribution standards between communities – traditional publishing versus digital creation

4. Both resulted in social media becoming the primary venue for accountability when formal channels proved inadequate

5. Both cases ignited discussions about the economics of digital attribution, with smaller creators feeling economically disadvantaged when their work is repurposed without credit

The similarities suggest that what we're witnessing is not merely isolated incidents of potential plagiarism but systemic friction between different digital cultures with incompatible understandings of attribution and originality.

Anthropology in the Digital Field

What makes the Maehashi-Bellamy controversy particularly fascinating from an anthropological perspective isn't the question of attribution, but how it reveals distinct cultural frameworks emerging from seemingly overlapping digital spaces. This has been explored by anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his 1973 text The Interpretation of Cultures. Geertz wrote that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun”. All communities spin their own intricate systems of meaning around concepts and their collective values.

These webs become temporarily visible when communities clash over how their values are represented. The recipe development and influencer communities inhabit overlapping digital territories yet have constructed entirely different standards for determining creative ownership, establishing authority, and defining ethical boundaries. Just as Geertz argued that understanding culture requires interpretive analysis rather than scientific law-seeking, understanding these digital attribution conflicts requires examining the interpretive frameworks each community employs rather than simply seeking universal standards of plagiarism.

Digital Spaces as Field Sites

The digital landscape, with its platform-specific architectures and affordances, creates natural boundaries between what might be considered different field sites in research anthropology. The Instagram Stories format Bellamy used for her response – ephemeral, visually focused, and resistant to external linking – perfectly embodies the values of influencer culture. Meanwhile, Maehashi's detailed blog post with its careful documentation, side-by-side comparisons, and preservation of evidence reflects the recipe development community's emphasis on verification and technical precision.

These digital spaces don't just host communication; they actively shape it. Instagram's architecture rewards personal narrative and visual impact, while blog formats with their search engine optimisation and permalink structures encourage detailed documentation and transparent attribution. When these communities attempt to engage across platform boundaries, they often find themselves speaking what amount to different languages despite using the same words – a classic problem of translation familiar to anthropologists studying intercultural communication.

Different Epistemologies of Attribution

What's particularly revealing is how each community has developed distinct ways of knowing what constitutes creative ownership. The recipe development community employs documented epistemology – knowledge claims about recipe development require verification through procedural documentation, testing notes, and clear lineage. This resembles academic citation practices, where authority stems from transparent documentation of influences.

In contrast, the influencer community operates through what we might term an embodied epistemology3 – knowledge claims about creative work are verified through personal narrative and temporal precedence rather than documented process. This parallels oral knowledge traditions, where authority often derives from personal experience and storytelling.

Neither system is inherently superior, but they operate with fundamentally different understandings of how creative authority is established. When Bellamy offers a bakery display photo from 2016 as evidence of recipe ownership, she's not merely providing weak evidence by recipe development standards; she's employing an entirely different system for establishing provenance – one that makes perfect sense within the cultural logic of influencer spaces.

Participant Observation in Digital Culture Clashes

As observers of this controversy, we find ourselves engaged in a form of digital participant observation – that core anthropological method where researchers immerse themselves in communities to understand their internal logic and cultural frameworks. What makes digital spaces unique is how they enable simultaneous participation across multiple communities.

Internet investigators examining recipe similarities aren't just gathering evidence; they're participating in an emerging cultural practice of digital verification that combines aspects of academic research, forensic investigation, and community moderation. Their collective efforts demonstrate how digital communities develop sophisticated internal mechanisms for establishing truth and navigating ethical boundaries even when formal systems prove inadequate.

These digital detectives are themselves performing a form of anthropology – documenting, analysing, and interpreting how different communities construct meaning around attribution. Their work reveals how the internet has created spaces where different cultural systems of value, evidence, and attribution interact, clash, and occasionally find translation.

Recipes for Recognition in a Digital Age

The Maehashi-Bellamy controversy offers more than just grist for the internet drama mill. It provides a compelling case study in accidental anthropology – how communities outside formal academic contexts naturally develop anthropological practices as they navigate complex (and sometimes foreign-to-them) cultural terrain. This case connects directly to themes I've explored in previous articles. In The Plague of Digital Forgetfulness, I examined how digital preservation often captures form without context; here, we witness this dynamic as screenshots of recipes retain their measurements whilst losing their development history4. Similarly, my exploration of classification systems in The Hidden Life of Books highlighted how categorisation reflects underlying values – just as the different attribution systems we've analysed here reflect the distinct values of recipe development versus influencer communities.

What makes these digital attribution conflicts particularly significant is how they reveal the evolving relationship between creativity, authentication, and platform architecture. The anthropological lens reveals something critical that legal frameworks often miss: these aren't merely disputes about who owns what, but fundamental collisions between different ways of understanding what creativity and attribution mean.

Perhaps most importantly, this analysis reminds us that digital ethics isn't simply a matter of establishing universal standards, but of developing cultural translation tools that help communities with different values communicate across increasingly fragmented digital landscapes.

In the end, the recipe for recognition in digital spaces may require ingredients from multiple cultural traditions – the procedural rigour of recipe development culture alongside the narrative depth of influencer communities – blended together through careful cultural translation. As accidental anthropologists navigating these digital territories, we're all participating in the creation of new ethical frameworks for a world where the boundaries between inspiration and appropriation are increasingly complex, contested, and consequential.

Just as the show-don't-tell edict transforms beyond creative writing, digital communities transform attribution practices beyond simple copying. The shadow narratives we construct – whether in public relations, social media posts, or recipe development – reveal more about our values than any explicit statement. And sometimes, as with those strikingly similar pink boxes with bold branding, the visual evidence speaks volumes without saying a word.

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The Taskscape of Cancer Care

Imagine you're lying on a hospital bed, arms stretched above your head in an uncomfortable position while a various radiotherapy technicians mark your body using a sharpie and a ruler. They advise that you shouldn’t attempt to intentionally scrub the marks off in the shower - they will use them as a starting point the next day1. And because radiation therapy takes weeks you end up wearing the evidence of the treatment long after it has finished. But the sharpie marks eventually fade and you forget the sting of the cold metal ruler on your flesh. While the marks may seem arbitrary to you, what they represent is the precise coordinates for treatment. The technicians position you meticulously, take x-rays using your ribs and collarbones as internal landmarks, to find congruence with their externally scribed markings. Then they leave the room and treatment begins. You feel nothing, were it not for the sounds of the machine you could easily imagine that nothing is occuring2 – yet this apparent absence of sensation belies the profound transformation occurring within your body.

This scene, drawn from my own experience with radiation therapy, exemplifies what anthropologist Tim Ingold terms a ‘taskscape’ – a landscape defined by activity rather than mere physical features. In traditional landscapes, natural features like hills and rivers create the terrain. In a taskscape, it is human activities that shape the environment. The body becomes a taskscape of medical care, filled with activities with the goal of transformation.

What's particularly striking about the taskscape of cancer care is how it renders patients simultaneously intensely present (as bodies requiring precise positioning) and strangely absent (in their lived, feeling dimension). Radiation therapy is an arduous process - my own treatment was over 24 consecutive days (excluding planning and post and mid treatment review appointments) - my presence was both ancillary and a barrier to the process. Oh, sure, my body needed to be there but I didn’t.

For my part there was very little agency involved - not to imply that I didn’t consent to the treatment - but rather that radiation therapy was not a typical doctor/patient dialogue where options are discussed and tests or treatments are theoretical. Showing up for radiation therapy is more like dropping your car off for a service. Sure, I make all the right gestures and sounds to indicate my understanding of what maintenance is required but that is artifice to conceal my ignorance and hope that the act is convincing enough to prevent getting ripped off3. I put on a similar performance when I asked a technician measuring and adjusting me prior to treatment to explain what was actually occurring. The technician gave me what they might have assumed was a simplified explanation of the different types of radiation as just described the state of my spark plugs4.

This paradox of being both simultaneously essential and ancillary to treatment echoes what Thompson (2007:341) describes as ‘living within a body that feels “well” a majority of the time’. I show up for each appointment, some stuff happens, I leave with only my sharpie marks as evidence anything occured5.

The Invisible Labour Beyond Clinical Encounters

The medical system privileges what Thompson calls ‘the serious stuff’ – surgery, chemotherapy, radiation – while overlooking the continuous work of living with and beyond illness. As Unruh and Pratt (2008:42) note, ‘the majority of cancer care happens in the spaces between clinical encounters’.

This invisible work takes multiple forms:

• Information management: During my treatment, I became an ‘information courier’, shuttling medical information between specialists who rarely communicated directly with each other. I would bounce between different doctors who required a full recounting of my medical history to date, effectively becoming the primary coordinator of my own care.

• Emotional labour: Managing others’ reactions to illness represents substantial hidden work. As Bell (2014:59) observes, patients often find themselves comforting the very people meant to be supporting them, creating what she calls ‘the burden of brightness’ – the expectation to maintain optimism despite personal struggles.

• Navigational work: Finding one's way through fragmented healthcare systems requires considerable effort, particularly when feeling unwell. This includes scheduling appointments, arranging transportation, managing paperwork, and advocating for appropriate care – often while experiencing treatment side effects or disease symptoms.

• Sense-making work: Perhaps most challenging is the cognitive burden of making medical decisions with incomplete information while simultaneously processing the emotional impact of diagnosis. As one participant in Unruh and Pratt's study noted, cancer patients become ‘business partner[s] in the most important business in my life, staying alive’ (2008:41).

The invisibility of this work reflects broader patterns in how medical care is structured. The dominant discourse around illness often focuses on discrete medical interventions while overlooking the continuous labour patients perform to maintain continuity of care. This oversight has practical consequences: when the work patients do remains invisible, it becomes harder to design systems and technologies to support it.

Anthropology at the Bedside: Changes in Medical Practice

Anthropological insights have gradually infiltrated medical practice, leading to meaningful changes in how care is delivered. Ethnographic approaches have been particularly valuable in illuminating the patient experience beyond biomedical frameworks.

Consider the evolution of cancer survivorship care. Early medical approaches assumed that once active treatment ended, patients could simply return to normal life6. However, anthropological research by researchers like Thompson revealed that cancer creates a kind of sustained trauma that is accentuated by experiences of suffering in connection to loss, extending well beyond the completion of medical protocols.

This understanding has led to the development of survivorship care plans, formalsed transitions from active treatment to follow-up care, and increased attention to the psychosocial dimensions of recovery. As Williams and Jeanetta (2016:638) note, patients need ‘support beyond post-treatment to help deal with ongoing fear, and the transition to a more normal life’.

Similarly, anthropological observations about the burden of navigating fragmented care systems have contributed to the emergence of patient navigation programs. These programs, first developed by Dr. Harold Freeman in Harlem Hospital, provide advocates who help patients traverse complex healthcare systems, particularly those from marginalised communities with limited resources.

Re-embodying Medical Care

Perhaps the most significant contribution of anthropological perspectives to medical practice has been the effort to re-embody care – to reinstate the person at the center of treatment. This reflects what Ingold might call biomedicine with the people in, echoing his description of anthropology as ‘“philosophy” with the people in’ (2014:393).

The growing emphasis on patient-reported outcomes in clinical trials, the inclusion of patient representatives on hospital committees, and the rise of narrative medicine all reflect this anthropologically-informed shift. These approaches acknowledge that technical precision alone cannot address the full complexity of illness.

My own experience with radiation therapy illustrates this tension. While the radiation oncologists meticulously mapped my body's surface, the deeper transformations – physical, emotional, social – required different kinds of attention and support. As Thompson notes, ‘two people with the same disease most certainly do not have the same illness experience’ (2007:342).

Correspondence in Medical Encounters

Returning to Ingold's theoretical framework, we might understand the ideal medical encounter through his concept of correspondence – an open-ended, dialogical process between patient and provider. Rather than treating patients as passive recipients of medical intervention, this perspective suggests the importance of knowing from the inside and understanding illness through lived experience.

This shift from translucence to correspondence – from seeing through to seeing with – offers particularly rich possibilities for reimagining medical care. It suggests that healing involves not just treating disease but engaging with the whole person and their changed relationship to the world.

When my surgeon marked incision sites during surgical planning, those lines were more than mere surgical guides; they became ‘demarcations between past and future selves’ (Thompson, 2007:340). Recognising this dual reality – the technical and the lived, the medical and the personal – is essential to humane care.

Looking Ahead

In my final post in this series, I'll explore how anthropological perspectives might inform not just medical practice but patient experience itself. How might concepts like correspondence, lines, and material anthropology help us navigate illness differently? What alternative richer metaphors might emerge beyond the dominant language of “battling” disease?

The challenge, as in all anthropological enquiry, is not to impose a ready-made framework but to follow the lines of becoming that emerge from lived experience. Or as Ingold (2016:3) reminds us, ‘life is lived along paths, not just in places’, and illness represents a significant redirection of those paths – one that deserves our fullest attention.

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References

Bell K (2014) ‘The breast-cancer-ization of cancer survivorship: Implications for experiences of the disease’, Social Science & Medicine, 110:56–63. https://doi.org.10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.03.031

Ingold T (2014) ‘That's enough about ethnography!’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4(1):383–395. https://doi.org.10.14318/hau4.1.021

Ingold T (2016) Lines: A Brief History, Taylor & Francis Group, London.

Thompson K (2007) ‘Liminality as a Descriptor for the Cancer Experience’, Illness, Crisis & Loss, 15(4):333–351. https://doi.org.10.2190/IL.15.4.d

Unruh KT and Pratt W (2008) ‘The Invisible Work of Being a Patient and Implications for Health Care’, Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings, 2008(1):40–50. https://doi.org.10.1111/j.1559-8918.2008.tb00093.x

Williams F and Jeanetta SC (2016) ‘Lived experiences of breast cancer survivors after diagnosis, treatment and beyond: qualitative study’, Health Expectations, 19(3):631–642. https://doi.org.10.1111/hex.12372

The Problem of Medical Vision

A cancer diagnosis transforms not just the body but one's entire way of knowing and being in the world. As a newly diagnosed cancer patient you are drowning in a miasma of technical knowledge and jargon that, until recently, was foreign to you. Clinicians spend years learning what they are then attempting to convey to you over a handful of appointments. This asymmetry in medical knowledge - between those who have spent years immersed in its language and those suddenly forced to learn it - reveals something fundamental about how medical understanding develops. In 1911 naturalist J. Arthur Thomson wrote:

When we work long at a thing and come to know it up and down, in and out, through and through, it becomes in a quite remarkable way translucent… so the human body becomes translucent to the skilled anatomist.

(Thomson cited in Ingold 2016:63)

Thomson's observation remains startlingly relevant over 100 years later. With any diagnosis - particularly cancer - a doctor sees through you, not just through modern medical imaging but through the lens of their own medical education and experience. This is by no means a criticism - good clinicians are ones who can turn down the volume to the superfluous. The experience and education they bring then opens pathways for diagnostic testing. But this same education and experience may also serve as blinders which obfuscate what lies beyond what they expect to see.

This medical translucence can have profound implications. At the age of 34, my breast cancer diagnosis placed me far from the typical breast cancer patient. Multiple clinicians initially dismissed my presentation of a visible lump as insignificant – not through negligence, but through such familiarity with how cancer typically presents. I existed outside their frame of reference, yet firmly within cancer's reality. This paradox illuminates a deeper truth about medical vision: what becomes translucent to the clinical gaze can sometimes obscure what lies outside expected parameters.

The challenge extends beyond diagnosis to the very way we understand illness. The problem of how to live and how to heal, and the felt chasm between knowing the world and being in it, seem as inscrutable as cancer itself. While viewing a cancer diagnosis as a rupture – a sharp demarcation between before and after – holds intuitive appeal, it proves inadequate when confronted with illness's intricate reality. As Anthropologist Tim Ingold (2020:90) suggests, experiences cut deep rather than becoming overlaid when he writes:

The past, then, is visible only by way of the translucence of the present. But the logic of the palimpsest teaches us otherwise. It tells us that with the passage of time, layers are not added but worn away, and that to mark them up means cutting deep.

This insight raises a crucial question: how can we reconcile these deep cuts to our lifeworld? In Genzaburo Yoshino's aptly titled novel How Do You Live? he suggests: ‘we must find a way to draw knowledge from all our suffering and sadness!’ The question then becomes not just whether we can identify these transformative moments, but how we might learn from them.

Most adults possess the cognitive and emotional skills to recognise and define traumatic incidents - an advantage over children, who, as Alisic et al. (2011) note, ‘might appraise threatening situations in a different way because their frame of reference is less clearly defined’. Yet merely identifying these ruptures isn't enough. The real challenge lies in finding ways to draw meaningful knowledge from experiences that fundamentally alter how we see ourselves and our world.

The Resistant Body

The paradox of visibility/invisibility in cancer diagnosis directly challenges medicine's presumed translucence. While Thomson's skilled anatomist sees through the body with practiced ease, the living body refuses such simple transparency. Medical imaging technologies attempt to render the body translucent - mammograms and MRIs searching for anomalies on what should be an unremarkable internal map. Even a chest x-ray reveals this tension: the lungs and heart become mere background, their living function secondary to the search for aberrations.

This attempted translucence meets its greatest resistance in radiation therapy. Here, my body became a site of measurement and marking – permanent tattoos and laser-guided measurements attempting to transform flesh into coordinates. Yet the marked surface of my body refused to become a passive canvas for medical inscription. Each breath shifted the landscape they attempted to map, every heartbeat altered terrain meant to remain static. My living body quietly rebelled against its reduction to geometric planes and measurement points.

The embodied tension was particularly evident during initial radiation planning. The radiation oncologists worked to transform curved, living tissue into flat geometric planes suitable for treatment. They took x-rays, using my ribs and collarbones as internal landmarks to supplement the external tattoos marking my skin. While the machinery whirred and rotated around me, I felt nothing – yet this apparent absence of sensation belied the profound transformation occurring. My body existed in two states simultaneously: as a technical object requiring precise positioning, and as a living, breathing entity that refused to be fully captured by medical vision.

Looking back, I realise this duality characterised much of my treatment experience: feeling physically present yet somehow removed from normal embodied experience. In this way, my body's resistance to medical inscription wasn't just physical – it was epistemological. It challenged the very way medicine claims to know and see through the body. Medical imaging creates new ways of seeing our bodies, treatment protocols establish new routines and rhythms, and our relationship with time itself shifts dramatically. These aren't simply changes imposed from outside but transformations in how we correspond with our world - the very dialogue between being and environment. The body's resistance reveals the limits of medical translucence, suggesting that truly effective treatment must learn to see with, rather than merely through, the patient.

When Doctors Become Patients

This tension between seeing ‘through’ and seeing ‘with’ becomes particularly evident when medical practitioners find themselves on the other side of the stethoscope. The gap between technical knowledge and lived experience creates its own form of translucence, as doctors who become patients often find themselves baffled that their medical knowledge is not protective in the way they assumed. In a post on r/ausjdocs2 post one doctor reflected on this after a lengthy hospital stay when he writes:

The hospital is boring as an inpatient. So boring. I understand why patients DAMA [discharge against medical advice] now. Especially when they’re getting daily bloods without explanation. I understand the rationale for daily bloods and even I was getting bloody tired of constant stabs.

(Reddit user: DefinitelyIVDU, 2025)

Despite – or perhaps because of – their medical knowledge, they found themselves navigating the same disorienting territory as their patients. This illustrates how the medical gaze, focused on gathering data points, can sometimes see through the person being treated.

Toward a New Understanding

The crisis of correspondence that begins with a cancer diagnosis - that rupture between our conscious and unconscious selves - never fully resolves. Instead, it opens into what anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes calls a “total social fact”: something that simultaneously transforms every dimension of human experience. Cancer reaches beyond cells and bodies to reshape relationships, routines, identities, and ways of understanding the world. It affects how we work, how we relate to others, how we think about time, and even how we understand ourselves.

This transformation becomes particularly evident when medical practitioners become patients themselves. As one doctor discovered during their own hospitalisation, technical knowledge provides no shield against the disorienting reality of illness. Their reflection - ‘I think this event has made me a better clinician... I get to compare my PICC and CVL scars with the cancer patients in ED. It's made some of them laugh’ - reveals something profound about how illness transforms ways of knowing. The doctor's scars become not just markers of medical procedures but points of connection, challenging the presumed translucence of the medical gaze.

These moments of accidental anthropology - whether through patients wrestling with medical inscription or practitioners discovering the limits of their technical knowledge - reveal how anthropological thinking naturally emerges when we try to make sense of illness. The body's resistance to becoming a mere set of coordinates, the inadequacy of traditional metaphors of battle or journey, the way medical knowledge transforms through lived experience - all these point to the need for new ways of understanding illness.

Rather than trying to resolve these tensions - between technical precision and lived experience, between seeing through and seeing with, between knowledge and being - anthropological thinking suggests we might work productively within them. Just as Ingold argues that experiences cut deep rather than becoming overlaid, perhaps we need to understand cancer as a process of continuous correspondence between different ways of knowing. The crisis that begins with diagnosis doesn't end in resolution but opens into new ways of corresponding with our bodies, our medical practitioners, and our transformed understanding of the world.

This perspective offers no easy answers but something potentially more valuable: a way of thinking that embraces both the precision of medical knowledge and the messy reality of lived experience. It suggests that healing involves not just medical intervention but finding new ways to correspond with our altered reality. The doctor comparing scars with patients isn't just sharing war stories - they're engaging in this correspondence, discovering how medical knowledge transforms when filtered through lived experience.

In the end, the anthropological lens reveals something crucial about illness: it is never just about bodies, or knowledge, or experience, but about how all these elements correspond and transform each other. The challenge isn't to resolve the tensions between different ways of knowing but to learn to move within them, finding new ways to correspond with our transformed reality. This might not heal the initial rupture of diagnosis, but it offers a way to make meaning from it, drawing knowledge from our suffering and sadness in ways that transform both medical practice and patient experience.

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References

Alisic E, Boeije HR, Jongmans MJ and Kleber RJ (2011) ‘Children’s Perspectives on Dealing With Traumatic Events’, Journal of Loss and Trauma, 16(6):477–496, doi:10.1080/15325024.2011.576979.

DefinitelyIVDU. (2024, February). ‘Perspectives from the other Side - some thoughts after a 3 week admission...’. Reddit, r/ausjdocs. https://www.reddit.com/r/ausjdocs/comments/1innttg/perspectives_from_the_other_side_some_thoughts/

Ingold, T (2016) Lines: A Brief History, Kindle Edition, Taylor & Francis Group, London, United Kingdom.

—— (2020) Correspondences, Kindle Edition, Polity Press, Newark, United Kingdom.

Thomas J (2007) ‘The trouble with material culture.’, Journal of Iberian Archaeology, 9(10):11–23.

Yoshino G (2021) How Do You Live?, B Navasky (tran), Random House.

Just as Macondo's inhabitants struggled with the meaning of their records and labels, patients in modern medical systems often find themselves navigating between different ways of knowing - between the technical precision of medical imaging and the lived reality of their bodies, between statistical prognoses and personal experience. These parallels aren't merely metaphorical; they reveal how anthropological insights emerge organically when people confront fundamental questions about knowledge, experience, and meaning.

When I began my academic career, I did not anticipate that it would lead me to writing about my own experience with breast cancer. Like many academics trained in the social sciences, I initially hesitated to incorporate personal narrative into scholarly analysis. However, anthropology has a rich tradition of reflexive practice - acknowledging how our own positions and experiences shape our understanding. As medical anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes argues, our personal experiences can serve not as limitations but as bridges to deeper understanding, provided we approach them with rigorous analysis and ethical awareness.

This series will examine how anthropological thinking appears naturally in medical contexts, particularly in cancer care. We'll explore how the essential features of anthropology - deep observation, sustained engagement with lived experiences, and attention to the contexts that shape human life - emerge in unexpected places. From the technical language of medical imaging to the invisible work of being a patient, we'll see how anthropological perspectives can illuminate the complex interplay between institutional knowledge and lived experience.

Unlike traditional medical narratives that often focus solely on treatment outcomes, or case studies that emphasise a singular experience, an anthropological approach reveals how illness transforms not just bodies but entire ways of knowing and being in the world. This transformation occurs across multiple scales - from individual patient experiences to institutional practices to broader social understanding.

In the coming weeks, this series will explore:

• How different forms of knowledge intersect in medical settings

• The invisible work that patients perform beyond formal medical encounters

• How cultural frameworks shape our understanding of illness and recovery

• The ways medical institutions simultaneously enable and constrain patient experiences.

Like the previous literary exploration, this journey will reveal how anthropological approaches can help us understand complex human experiences, not through abstract theorising but through careful attention to how people navigate profound transformations in their lives and understanding.

This investigation continues this newsletter's core mission: finding anthropology in unexpected places. Whether through the pages of literature or the corridors of hospitals, we discover that anthropological insights emerge wherever people grapple with fundamental questions about human experience and meaning-making.

Join me as we explore how anthropological thinking illuminates the complex intersections of medical knowledge, lived experience, and human understanding. Next week, we'll begin with a deeper examination of how theoretical frameworks can help us understand the transformative nature of illness experiences.

The Dispersed Discipline

On a recent afternoon, as I wandered the stacks of local used bookshops in search of Anne Carson's poetry and accounts of Papua New Guinea's history, I encountered a peculiar phenomenon. The anthropology sections, where they existed, presented a curiously incomplete picture of the discipline - populated primarily by introductory texts, their spines displaying titles that promised broad surveys of human culture. Yet the works that most vibrantly embody the discipline were dispersed throughout the shops, sitting among history, political analysis, and regional studies.

This dispersal of anthropological thinking presents an intriguing paradox. While the discipline prides itself on studying the interconnectedness of human experience, its insights are missing from its own category, instead they are scattered across categorical boundaries that obscure their methodological origins. A book about Papua New Guinea's Trobriand Islanders might be filed under Oceanic History, while a study of their kula exchange system could be found in Economics. Marcel Mauss's seminal work on gift-giving practices might be shelved with sociology texts - fitting, perhaps, as Mauss himself, like many influential thinkers of his era including Émile Durkheim and later Pierre Bourdieu, identified as a sociologist rather than an anthropologist. Yet these disciplinary self-identifications only underscore how artificial such categorical boundaries can be, as Mauss's work on gift-giving has profoundly influenced anthropological thinking.

The Performance of Knowledge

The dialectic between knowledge and its performance was presented in an inadvertent ethnographic moment. While I was comparing editions of Anna Karenina (searching for the most reader-friendly font size because that novel is BIG and is text getting smaller?), I overheard a conversation between a grandmother and her teenage granddaughter that crystallised another dimension of how we relate to books as cultural objects.

The scene unfolded around a display of clothbound classics - those beautifully designed editions that have become increasingly popular on social media. The granddaughter (dropping some birthday present related hints to her grandmother) demonstrated a fascinating linguistic dance: trying to articulate a desire for books while clearly prioritising their aesthetic value over their content. Her grandmother attempted to ascertain specific titles or authors, however in doing so encountered a kind of gentle resistance that revealed a generational shift in how books function as cultural artifacts. The granddaughter was noncommittal about authors and titles and even genres, rather, she was insistent that the books be pretty.

This interaction mirrors a broader transformation in our relationship with physical books. Just as Macondo's inhabitants found that labels could identify objects without preserving their meaning, these beautiful editions can signify literary culture without necessarily engaging with the texts themselves. The books themselves have ‘cultural capital’ - objects that communicate something about their owners regardless of whether their pages have ever been turned.

Classification and Identity

These parallel observations - the dispersed nature of anthropological knowledge and the performance of literary identity through aesthetic objects - speak to a larger question about how we organise and present knowledge in physical space. The used bookshop, with its carefully (if imperfectly) categorised shelves, attempts to impose order on the messy reality of human knowledge. Yet this very organisation reveals the arbitrary nature of our classification systems.

Consider how different the anthropology section appears to different viewers: To a first-year student, it might represent the foundational texts of a new discipline (at discount prices!). To a seasoned anthropologist, it might appear as a kind of phantom limb - present but incomplete, missing the vital connections that make the discipline whole. To the casual browser, it might suggest a field primarily concerned with theoretical abstractions rather than lived human experience, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

Similarly, the teenage girl's desire for beautiful editions of classic texts reveals how books function as both containers of knowledge and signals of identity. Her insistence to prioritise aesthetics over content suggests an awareness of how these objects are supposed to function (as texts to be read) versus how she intends to use them (as markers of cultural signification).

The Language of Spines

Long before Instagram-worthy clothbound editions, Penguin Books created their own visual language of knowledge through color-coded spines: green were generally for crime novels, cerise (or pink to some) was travel and adventure, dark blue was biographies, red for drama, purple for essays, and yellow was for miscellaneous titles that did not fit into any of the other categories. This colour-coding system became more than mere organisation. As Brian Morton noted in his reflection on Penguin's 80-year history these colors eventually became shorthand for intellectual identity, but not immediately. Initially, Morton writes, ‘it was feared that cheap books meant a net devaluation of writing itself’ and that ‘cheap books would mean fewer books sold’. But the opposite was true, Penguin paperback classics were embraced by the public and made literature affordable and accessible to the general public in much the same way Gutenberg's printing press democratised knowledge centuries earlier.

This historical precedent illuminates our contemporary relationship with books as both vessels of knowledge and markers of identity. Just as a row of colourful Penguin spines once signaled a literary mind, today's aesthetically curated bookshelves serve a similar function on social media. The difference lies not in the impulse to display knowledge - that has remained constant - but in how that display is mediated and consumed.

When Allen Lane founded Penguin, he aimed to make quality literature both affordable and attractive. The books needed to be, in Lane's words, “friendly” - accessible without sacrificing their cultural authority. Today's beautifully designed classics fulfill a similar dual function, though perhaps with the emphasis shifted more toward the aesthetic than Lane might have intended.

Beyond Categories

Perhaps what these observations reveal is the inherent limitation of any classification system - whether it's organising books in a shop or organising knowledge in our minds. Just as Macondo's inhabitants found that labels failed to preserve the living context of objects, our attempts to categorise knowledge often fail to capture its interconnected nature.

Yet there's something beautiful about how anthropological knowledge refuses to be confined to a single shelf. Its presence throughout the bookshop mirrors its presence throughout human experience - in our economic systems, our religious practices, our political structures, and our everyday interactions. The discipline's resistance to neat categorisation might be its greatest strength, reminding us that human knowledge, like human experience, defies simple classification.

Anthropology could truly be said to be an anti-discipline. For it will have no truck with the kind of intellectual colonialism that divides the world of knowledge into separate parcels for each discipline to rule.

Tim Ingold, 2018, Anthropology: Why It Matters

As for those beautiful clothbound classics? Perhaps they serve as a bridge between different ways of valuing books - as aesthetic objects and as vessels of knowledge. After all, many of us who now read voraciously began our relationship with books through some form of surface attraction, whether it was a beautiful cover, a film adaptation, or peer pressure. The challenge lies not in judging how others approach books, but in understanding what these approaches reveal about our changing relationship with knowledge and identity in an increasingly digital age.

References

Bourdieu, P., 2018. The forms of capital. In The sociology of economic life (pp. 78-92). Routledge.

Ingold T (2018) Anthropology: Why It Matters, Kindle Edition, Polity Press, Newark, United Kingdom.

Morton B (26 February 2015) ‘Spine tingling: 80 years of Penguin paperbacks’, BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3M67Kx1nm3wqSj7J7VwZRXv/spine-tingling-80-years-of-penguin-paperbacks.

When his father told him about his alarm at having forgotten even the most impressive happenings of his childhood, Aureliano explained his method to him, and José Arcadio Buendía put it into practice all through the house and later on imposed it on the whole village. With an inked brush he marked everything with its name: table, chair, clock, door, wall, bed, pan. He went to the corral and marked the animals and plants: cow, goat, pig, hen, cassava, caladium, banana. Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use. Then he was more explicit. The sign that he hung on the neck of the cow was an exemplary proof of the way in which the inhabitants of Macondo were prepared to fight against loss of memory: This is the cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk, and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk. Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters. (García Márquez, p. 48)

This parallel isn't merely literary. In both cases - whether it's a researcher's marginalia or Macondo's labels - we see the fundamental limitations of bare documentation. Just as knowing that a highlighted passage was once deemed important tells us little about why it mattered, labeling something as “cow” or “chair” captures nothing of its role in daily life, its cultural significance, or its web of relationships with other objects and practices.

This disconnect between labels and lived experience is captured in the image above, where a simple golden plaque stating ‘this is a cow’ tells us nothing about the complex daily routines and knowledge systems. These are represented by increasingly fragmented post-it notes that actually define animals context.

The Digital Echo

Today's digital preservation efforts face a strikingly similar challenge. We save websites to the Internet Archive, tag our photos with metadata, and organise our digital lives with labels and folders. Yet like Macondo's inhabitants, we often discover that preserving the form of something doesn't necessarily preserve its meaning. A saved historical webpage might retain its text and images, but lose the cultural context that made it significant. A carefully tagged photo collection might tell us who was present and when, but fail to capture why the moment mattered. Author Victor Hugo famously wrote: ‘What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.’

Consider this following scenario: a shared Google Doc filled with highlights and comments from many users. Over time, these digital traces become a kind of archaeological site - layers of feedback, questions, and responses accumulating like strata. Months later, a comment like “we should expand this” becomes as inscrutable as Macondo's labels. Who wrote it and to whom? Expand what, and why? The context that made the comment meaningful has evaporated. The technical capability to preserve every mark we make hasn't solved the fundamental challenge of preserving meaning. Hugo's “echo” becomes increasingly faint with each digital transformation, each migration from one platform to another, each attempt to capture lived experience in metadata.

Living Memory and Digital Preservation

This challenge extends beyond collaborative documents. Consider the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine - a vast repository of web history that preserves the form of historical websites but doesn’t the essence of their cultural significance. Currently, these digital artifacts remain legible because we still have living interpreters - people who remember why a particular GeoCities aesthetic was meaningful, or how a specific web forum shaped online culture. But it is that transition from living memory to purely documented history can fundamentally alter how we understand the past.

The space between preservation and living memory becomes particularly apparent when we examine how historical understanding shifts as direct witnesses pass away. World War II provides a stark example - as the generation that experienced it firsthand diminishes, we see how documented facts alone, without the context of lived experience, become abstractions that leave gaps where misunderstanding and revisionism can take root. The difference between knowing something happened and understanding its full human impact becomes painfully clear.

Winston Churchill warned us of this very eventuality: “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”. While Churchill was certainly a proponent of studying history - famously telling one colleague “Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft” - the doomed-to-repeat-it quote is actually a paraphrase of philosopher George Santayana's more nuanced observation: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. This misattribution itself demonstrates how meaning shifts over time. Even as we preserve the words, we lose their origins, their context, their full significance. In this case, the transformation of Santayana's philosophical reflection into a Churchill sound bite shows how preservation without context can subtly alter our understanding.

Digital Preservation's Double Bind

This brings us to a central paradox in digital preservation efforts: the more thoroughly we try to document everything, the more we risk drowning meaningful context in a sea of preserved minutiae. Like Macondo's inhabitants meticulously labeling every object, our digital archiving tools can capture vast amounts of information while still missing the essential meanings that make that information valuable.

The Internet Archive, for instance, has preserved billions of web pages, but browsing through its early captures of social media platforms reveals how much context is lost. A preserved MySpace page might retain its glittering graphics and auto-playing music, but without understanding the cultural moment that made such design choices meaningful, future viewers might see only dated aesthetics rather than expressions of digital identity and community. Future digital archaeologists might devote years of scholarly research to explain why everyone was friends with a guy named Tom. A detail that made perfect sense to users at the time2 but becomes cryptic without this context. This isn't the first time scholars have grappled with such interpretive challenges. In a fascinating parallel, 18th and 19th century antiquarians encountering mason's marks in medieval churches developed elaborate theories about their symbolic significance and attempted to trace individual craftsmen across Europe via their distinctive marks. As architectural historian Jennifer S. Alexander documents, it took years of research to discover these marks were primarily practical tools - tracking piecework payment and ensuring blocks were assembled in the correct order. The antiquarians' misinterpretation reminds us how easily we can overlay complex meaning onto what were, in their time, mundane technical solutions.

The challenges of digital preservation mirror those faced by previous generations of archivists and historians. When organisations attempt to preserve their institutional knowledge in vast databases and wikis, they often discover that documented procedures, no matter how detailed, fail to capture the tacit knowledge - the unofficial workflows, the unwritten rules, the accumulated wisdom - the map, as the saying goes, is not the territory. Yet while we can still decipher these mason's marks today (even if they were initially misinterpreted), our digital preservation efforts face an even greater challenge: the rapid obsolescence of both hardware and software threatens to make even perfectly preserved data incomprehensible.

This technical challenge is further complicated by the sheer volume of digital content being created every minute. Meta's recent introduction of AI-generated profiles and content adds another layer of complexity to future digital archaeology - creating volumes of artificial detritus in the digital archaeological record. Just as medieval church walls contain both mason's marks and casual graffiti, our digital spaces now contain a mix of human and AI-generated content. Organisations can effectively flood digital spaces with certain types of content while obscuring others, making the task of future digital archaeologists3 not just one of preservation and interpretation, but also of distinguishing between different types of digital deposits in these ever-deepening layers of virtual sediment.

Beyond Digital Stratigraphy: An Anthropological Reading

The challenge facing digital preservation isn't just technical - it's fundamentally anthropological. When medieval masons left their marks on cathedral stones, they weren't trying to communicate with future generations; they were participating in a living system of craft knowledge. Similarly, when we create digital content today, we're primarily engaged in present-day meaning-making rather than conscious preservation. Indeed, this newsletter itself demonstrates this principle - while these words may be preserved in various digital archives, their full meaning emerges from their participation in an ongoing conversation about anthropological thinking in unexpected places4.

This distinction matters because it highlights a central tension in digital preservation efforts. Like the antiquarians who misinterpreted mason's marks as mystical symbols rather than practical guides, we risk misunderstanding digital traces by focusing too much on their form rather than their function within living cultural systems.

Living Knowledge in Digital Spaces

Drawing from anthropologist Tim Ingold's distinction between studying about versus studying with (Ingold 2024), therefore begs the question: how do we preserve not just information, but ways of knowing? We saw this tension played out dramatically during the pandemic's shift to online learning. Some students discovered they thrived in digital spaces, freed from classroom social dynamics and physical distractions to engage more deeply with the material. Others found their learning severely compromised, discovering that their understanding emerged not just from the content itself, but from the shared physical experience of learning - the subtle cues of classmates' reactions, the informal discussions in classrooms, the embodied experience of being present in a learning space. Same content, same preservation methods, radically different ways of knowing. This divide revealed something profound about knowledge transmission: it isn't just about preserving and accessing information, but about understanding the diverse ways people engage with and make meaning from that information.

Yet our current preservation methods often fail to capture this dynamism. When the Internet Archive preserves a webpage, it captures a moment frozen in time - like pressing a flower between pages of a book. The form remains, but the living essence that made it meaningful is lost. This preservation paradox becomes particularly acute when we consider collaborative digital spaces. A shared Google Doc's comments and revision history might preserve who changed what and when, but they can't capture the informal conversations, the contextual knowledge, and the shared understanding that shaped those changes.

The Artificial Strata

Today's digital landscape presents an unprecedented challenge: the introduction of AI-generated content creates artificial strata in our digital archaeological record. Just as geologists must distinguish between layers of sedimentary material, future digital archaeologists will need to develop methods for differentiating between human-created content and AI-generated material. Meta's recent introduction of AI-generated profiles adds another layer of complexity - creating volumes of artificial detritus that may obscure or complicate our understanding of genuine human interaction.

This challenge echoes earlier anthropological debates about authenticity and mediation in cultural documentation. Just as early anthropologists grappled with questions about how photography and sound recording transformed their field practices, we must now consider how AI-mediated content affects our understanding of digital culture.

Implications for Contemporary Practice

These observations suggest we need new approaches to digital preservation - ones that draw from anthropological insights about how knowledge lives in communities rather than just in documentation. Some promising directions are emerging:

• The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is experimenting with preserving not just individual pages but entire webs of connected content, attempting to maintain some of the context that gives them meaning. This mirrors anthropological understanding that cultural practices can't be understood in isolation.

• Digital ethnographers are developing new methodologies that combine traditional participant observation with digital trace analysis, recognising that online communities exist across multiple platforms and timeframes.

• Projects like Mukurtu, developed with Indigenous communities, show how digital preservation can incorporate different cultural approaches to knowledge sharing and preservation. Their platform allows communities to maintain traditional protocols around knowledge access while using digital tools for preservation.

Looking Forward When Looking Back

As we create ever more sophisticated tools for digital preservation, we might do well to remember Macondo's inhabitants, who discovered that labelling something doesn't preserve understanding of its use. True preservation requires maintaining not just the form of knowledge but the living contexts that give it meaning.

Perhaps the future of digital preservation lies not in trying to capture everything perfectly, but in maintaining living connections between past and present knowledge systems. Just as traditional anthropological knowledge is preserved through both documentation and living practice, digital knowledge might best be preserved through systems that support ongoing engagement rather than mere storage.

This suggests an important role for developing digital ethnography and anthropology as a methodology - not just studying digital cultures, but helping to develop preservation approaches that maintain living connections to the stored knowledge. As we navigate these challenges, we might find that the most valuable insights come not from technical solutions alone, but from understanding how communities maintain and transmit knowledge across time.

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References

Alexander JS (2008) 'Masons' marks and the working practices of medieval stone masons', In P.S. Barnwell & Arnold Pacey (eds.), Who Built What? New Studies in Construction History, London: Spire Books, pp. 219-236.

García Márquez G (1967) One Hundred Years of Solitude, Harper & Row Publishers.

Hugo V (1866) Les Travailleurs de la mer [The Toilers of the Sea], London: Sampson Low, Son, & Marston.

Ingold T (2021) 'In Praise of Amateurs', Ethnos, 86(1):153–172, doi:10.1080/00141844.2020.1830824.

—— (2024) 'Anthropology is good', American Ethnologist, 51(1):37–39, doi:10.1111/amet.13245.

Thomas B (13 December 2024) 'Meta's New AI-Powered Chat Feature Is Like Getting Friend Requests From Bots', The Wrap, https://www.thewrap.com/facebook-ai-bots-new-social-media-friends/

In Gabriel García Márquez's novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, the inhabitants of Macondo face an unusual crisis: they begin to forget the names and purposes of everything around them. One character's solution is deceptively simple - he begins labeling everything:

With an inked brush he marked everything with its name: table, chair, clock, door, wall, bed, pan. He went to the corral and marked the animals and plants: cow, goat, pig, hen, cassava, caladium, banana. Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use. (One Hundred Years of Solitude, pg. 48)

This attempt to preserve knowledge through labeling - and its ultimate inadequacy - offers a remarkable lens for examining contemporary challenges of cultural preservation and digital memory. Before we explore these parallels, however, we should address an important methodological question: Can we treat fiction as ethnographic data?

On Reading Literature Ethnographically: The Historical Precedent

When anthropologists conduct ethnographic research, they create detailed descriptions of how people live, think, and make sense of their world. These descriptions aren't just documentation - they're windows into how humans navigate their social and cultural reality. While traditionally based on direct observation, ethnographic insights can emerge from various sources, including literature.

This approach has a rich history in anthropology. Ruth Benedict's landmark work The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), written during World War II when direct observation was impossible, drew significantly from literary sources, films, and personal accounts to understand Japanese cultural patterns. Similarly, Victor Turner's analysis of Ndembu ritual drew on both direct observation and local storytelling traditions, recognising that cultural understanding emerges through multiple channels. More recently, Veena Das's work on violence and everyday life in India has demonstrated how literary sources can illuminate aspects of social experience that might otherwise remain invisible to traditional ethnographic methods.

Beyond Traditional Participant Observation

Traditional participant observation, where anthropologists immerse themselves in a community for extended periods, remains foundational to anthropological research. However, this approach has limitations - it's bounded by time, place, and the anthropologist's direct experience. Literary sources, particularly rich ethnographic fiction like García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, can transcend these boundaries. They can capture long-term social transformations, internal psychological states, and complex cultural dynamics that might be difficult to observe directly. Just as Sacks's case studies revealed the lived experience of neurological conditions, literary accounts can illuminate aspects of human experience that resist traditional observation.

Digital Memory and Contemporary Preservation

The relationship between memory and documentation that García Márquez explores in the fictional village of Macondo finds striking parallels in contemporary digital preservation efforts. Consider these examples:

• The Mukurtu platform developed with Indigenous communities, which allows for customised access protocols that reflect traditional knowledge-sharing practices while using digital tools

• The Syrian Archive, documenting conflict through social media preservation, facing similar challenges of context and meaning that Macondo's inhabitants encountered

• The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which, like Macondo's labels, captures the form but struggles to preserve the living context of digital spaces.

Methodological Implications for Digital Ethnography

Studying digital culture presents unique challenges that echo Macondo's memory crisis. Just as Macondo's inhabitants discovered that labels couldn't preserve the lived understanding of objects' uses, digital anthropologists are finding that online interactions create new forms of cultural memory that resist traditional documentation methods. This has led to innovative approaches:

• Multi-sited digital ethnography that follows cultural practices across platforms

• Platform-specific methodologies that account for how different digital spaces shape memory and knowledge transmission

• Hybrid approaches combining digital trace data with traditional ethnographic observation.

The Parallel Lives of Labels: From Macondo to Metadata

Macondo's labeling system finds its contemporary echo in digital metadata - both represent attempts to create universal systems of reference that inevitably fall short of capturing lived experience. Consider:

• How social media tags, like Macondo's labels, attempt to create universal reference points but often lose context across communities

• Digital archives that, despite rich metadata, struggle to capture the embodied knowledge of cultural practices

• The way both systems reveal the gap between documentation and living memory.

This parallel extends to contemporary challenges, such as:

• Indigenous digital heritage projects that must balance preservation with traditional knowledge protocols

• Social movement archives trying to capture not just events but embodied experiences

• Community documentation efforts that struggle with the same fundamental question as Macondo: how to preserve not just information, but understanding.

Contemporary Anthropological Practice

Contemporary anthropologists increasingly recognise that in an interconnected world, cultural understanding can't rely solely on traditional participant observation. Jason De León's The Land of Open Graves (2015) combines archaeological analysis, ethnography, and literary sources to understand migration experiences. Similarly, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) weaves together scientific data, personal narratives, and literary sources to explore global supply chains and ecological precarity.

Looking ahead

Next week, I’ll explore how García Márquez's account of Macondo's memory crisis illuminates contemporary debates about collective memory, knowledge preservation, and the limits of documentary practices. His fictional community's struggle with memory loss resonates with very real challenges faced by communities grappling with cultural preservation in our digital age.

Finding anthropology in unexpected places sometimes means recognising how fiction can serve as a window into very real human experiences - a recognition that has shaped anthropological practice.

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While this newsletter isn't attempting to match the tone of an academic journal, it maintains the academic rigor you would expect in humanities discourse. Each article contains a reference list (some sources may be paywalled journal articles - let me know if you run into this issue 😉), but if you're looking for a specific book, interview, or article and can't remember where you read about it, the reading list is your go-to resource.

I'll update the list regularly but won't push it out via email every time, as that could quickly become annoying. It will always be available for free via the navigation bar or the link below. Links to paid media will direct you to either Goodreads or the author's website - never affiliate links.

¹Non-traditional in the sense that these sources are not, strictly speaking, works of anthropology or ethnography.

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Oliver Sacks, the distinguished neurologist, once wrote about a patient who mistook his wife for a hat. Years later, Temple Grandin would hand Sacks a hard hat to pass him off as a sanitation engineer when visiting a meat processing plant. In both cases, a hat revealed how readily we mistake - or can be misled about - who someone is. These two incidents provide a fitting metaphor for examining how Sacks himself wore different conceptual “hats” throughout his career, particularly how his neurologist's hat often concealed his remarkable work as an accidental anthropologist.

From About to With: An Anthropological Approach

Anthropologist Tim Ingold argues that while many disciplines study people, most treat what people know and do merely as beliefs and practices to be recorded and analysed. He writes: ‘But anthropology is different. For in anthropology, we don't just study people. We study with people’ (Ingold 2024, p.37). This distinction between studying “about” versus studying “with” lies at the heart of understanding Sacks' unique contribution to both medicine and our broader understanding of human experience.

Consider his work with Temple Grandin. Far from the clinical examination rooms of New York, Sacks found himself crawling through chutes designed for cattle, trying to see the world as both Grandin and the cattle saw it. He didn't just observe her work - he tried her squeeze machine to experience how deep pressure could calm anxiety. He participated in her professional world, even sharing in the deception of wearing a hard hat to access restricted areas. As Grandin guided him through the facility, she explained, “Keep the hard hat on. Keep it on the whole time. You're a sanitary engineer here” (Sacks 1995, p. 282). This wasn't just a doctor gathering clinical data - it was someone trying to understand another's way of being in the world by temporarily inhabiting it himself.

The Amateur Scholar

This approach exemplifies what Ingold calls amateur study, where “amateur” refers not to a lack of expertise but to work driven by genuine care and curiosity. The word amateur has roots in the Latin amare, which means: to love. Sacks could have fulfilled his professional obligations without ever leaving his office, without crawling through cattle chutes or traveling to small villages in Italy with his patients. His medical training required him to observe, diagnose, and treat neurological conditions. But it was his deep curiosity about human experience pushed him far beyond these boundaries.

Like many ethnographers, Sacks found that his understanding deepened through prolonged engagement with his subjects. With the autistic-savant artist Stephen Wiltshire, he didn't just observe him drawing in a clinical setting - he traveled with him, shared meals, met his family, and watched how he experienced and interpreted new environments. Likewise, when visiting the artist Franco Magnani, he didn't simply analyse his incredibly detailed memory paintings of his hometown Pontito - he traveled with Franco back to Italy to see how the artist engaged with the actual place that existed so vividly in his memory.

The Limits of Understanding

Yet even with such careful observation and participation, Sacks encountered moments that revealed the limits of understanding across neurological differences. In one striking incident with Stephen Wiltshire, they encountered a car with a license plate spelling AUTISM2:

“What does that say?” Sacks asked.
“A-U-T-I-S-M-2.”
“Yes, and that reads?”
“U...U...Utism.”
“Almost, not quite. Not utism–autism. What is autism?”
“It's what's on that license plate.”

To Sacks, this exchange represented Stephen's limited understanding of his own condition. But to many autistic people, Stephen's response makes perfect logical sense. Sacks asked “what is autism?” and Stephen answered with precise accuracy - it was, literally, what was on that license plate. This moment illustrates why we need multiple perspectives and ways of knowing to understand the gamut of human experience.

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Beyond Deficits: Seeing the Whole Person

This willingness to suspend judgment and learn from his subjects is perhaps most evident in his encounters with the surgeon Carl Bennett, who had Tourette's syndrome. Rather than viewing Bennett's condition purely as a disorder to be documented, Sacks observed how his seemingly disruptive tics transformed into precise, controlled movements during surgery. Through extended observation in both his home and the operating theater, Sacks came to understand how Bennett's condition wasn't simply a deficit but had become integrated into his identity and professional expertise in complex ways.

The title of his book An Anthropologist on Mars - a phrase Grandin used to describe how she felt studying “normal” people - could equally apply to Sacks himself. Like an anthropologist in an unfamiliar culture, he approached each patient's unique way of perceiving and being in the world with curiosity and openness. When Grandin told him that seeing cattle going calmly to their death made her feel happy because she had helped reduce their fear, Sacks didn't dismiss this seemingly paradoxical response as being the glib remarks often associated with autistic communication. Instead, he tried to understand the logic of her world, even when it challenged his own preconceptions about what constitutes empathy or ethical behavior.

Implications Beyond Medicine

The implications of Sacks' accidental anthropology extend far beyond his own practice. His work demonstrates how stepping outside conventional professional boundaries - removing our familiar “hats” and trying on new ones - can deepen our understanding across neurological and cultural differences. While medical training equips doctors with essential diagnostic and treatment skills, Sacks shows us that there's profound value in complementing this clinical knowledge with anthropological approaches.

This has particular relevance today as healthcare systems increasingly prioritize efficiency and standardisation over deep engagement with patients' lived experiences. A doctor can accurately diagnose autism or Tourette's syndrome without ever leaving their office, but understanding how these conditions are integrated into a person's life, work, and identity requires a different kind of engagement. It requires studying with rather than merely about.

The impact of this approach extends beyond medicine. In education, understanding how students actually learn and experience the classroom might require teachers to experience learning from their students' perspectives. In technological design, companies are recognising that true accessibility comes from designing with disabled users rather than just producing what they think might be useful. Even in scientific research, there's growing recognition that understanding complex systems requires getting down on the ground and seeing things from new angles.

Conclusion: Taking Off Our Professional Hats

When Sacks donned a hard hat to study Grandin's world, he was doing more than just participating in a simple deception. He was demonstrating how sometimes we need to temporarily set aside our professional identities - our familiar hats - to truly understand others' experiences. The fact that he never formally identified as an anthropologist makes his embodiment of anthropological methods all the more significant. It suggests that the deep, participatory understanding championed by anthropology isn't just a professional methodology but a fundamentally human approach to understanding others.

Perhaps most importantly, Sacks shows us that being an expert doesn't mean having all the answers. His encounters remind us that true understanding often comes not from our expertise but from our willingness to learn from others' ways of seeing and being in the world. In this sense, we are all potential anthropologists on Mars, trying to make sense of experiences and perspectives different from our own.

References

Cosslett RL (4 May 2017) ‘“This was my form of language”: the artist who draws cities from memory’, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/may/04/artist-draws-cities-memory-stephen-wiltshire

Ingold T (2021) ‘In Praise of Amateurs’, Ethnos, 86(1):153–172, doi:10.1080/00141844.2020.1830824.

—— (2024) ‘Anthropology is good’, American Ethnologist, 51(1):37–39, doi:10.1111/amet.13245.

Sacks O (1995) An Anthropologist On Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

—— (1998) The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales, Simon and Schuster.

The essential features of anthropology – deep observation, sustained engagement with people's lived experiences, and attention to the contexts that shape human life – turn up in surprising places. When Oliver Sacks documented his patients’ experiences of neurological conditions, he wasn't just practicing medicine; he was producing rich anthropological accounts that illuminated how people navigate radical alterations to their perception and cognition. His work demonstrates how anthropological methods can emerge organically when practitioners commit to understanding human experience in all its complexity.

This newsletter explores these instances of accidental anthropology, examining where and how anthropological approaches appear outside traditional academic discourse. By identifying anthropology's methods and insights in non-academic work, we can better understand both the versatility of anthropological approaches and their vital contribution to human understanding.

What makes and approach anthropological?

At its core, anthropology is distinguished by its commitment to understanding human experience through direct engagement and careful observation. While academic anthropology typically involves extended periods of fieldwork, the anthropological approach can emerge anywhere people take time to deeply understand how others experience and make meaning of their world.

Understanding others in this way requires more than just watching or interviewing. It demands what anthropologists call participant observation – a way of learning that comes from being present in people's lives, sharing their experiences, and paying attention to the details that shape their reality1. When done purposefully in academia, this involves fieldnotes, systematic observation, and theoretical analysis. But these same practices appear naturally when people commit to understanding others' experiences from the inside out.

Consider a journalist who spends time embedded in a community to understand a story, or a doctor who takes time to understand how illness affects every aspect of their patient's life. These practitioners might not use anthropological terminology, but their approach – careful observation combined with direct participation in people's lives – mirrors anthropological methods. They're not just collecting information; they're learning through engagement, allowing their understanding to emerge from real relationships and shared experiences2.

Participant observation is absolutely not a technique of data collection. Quite to the contrary, it is enshrined in an ontological commitment that renders the very idea of data collection unthinkable. This commitment, by no means confined to anthropology, lies in the recognition that we owe our very being to the world we seek to know.
(Tim Ingold, 20053)

Each week, this newsletter will examine instances of accidental anthropology across different domains – medicine, journalism, literature, film, and beyond. We'll analyse how these practitioners, while pursuing their own objectives, employ anthropological approaches that deepen our understanding of human experience.

The analysis will focus on specific works and projects, examining how they demonstrate anthropological methods and insights. Rather than merely identifying surface similarities, we'll explore how these examples push us to think differently about both anthropology and the fields in which they appear. From Oliver Sacks's detailed case studies of neurological patients to Joan Didion's deep explorations of American cultural life, we'll see how anthropological approaches enhance understanding across disciplines.

These examples demonstrate the enduring value of anthropological approaches, while suggesting new possibilities for how we might understand and document human life. Through exploring instances of accidental anthropology, we discover something important about both anthropology and human understanding. While anthropology emerged as an academic discipline with its own theories and methods, its core approaches – deep observation, sustained engagement, and attention to lived experience – appear whenever people truly commit to understanding human life. These unofficial anthropologists remind us that the tools of anthropology are available to anyone wanting to make sense of human experience.

Join me each week as we uncover these hidden instances of anthropological thinking and practice. Whether you're an anthropologist interested in seeing interdisciplinary applications of established approaches in unexpected places, or simply curious about different ways of understanding human experience, Accidental Anthropology offers fresh perspectives on how we observe, document, and make sense of human life.

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Ingold T (2005) ‘Anthropology and the Art of Inquiry’, Working Papers in Anthropology, 1(2).

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