Reflections

Summary: Conversational artificial intelligence is often a form of storytelling, and underlying some of AI’s stories is an artificial ethos that could be insidious. 

I am a cultural anthropologist and I’ve been ruminating on the cultural impact of artificial intelligence. I recognize AI’s potential for increasing knowledge, productivity, and generating medical breakthroughs. There is no question in my mind that AI will be a collaborative, indefatigable partner for humanity. I am so galvanized by it that this fall I will incorporate AI into the curriculum of my Columbia Business School course, Market Intelligence: The Art and the Science. At the same time, I am acutely aware of AI’s threats, among them job displacement, data breaches, and the annihilation of humanity (a 50-50 chance according to BCA Research). 

I am not writing here about the list Google Bard furnished when I asked it to outline AI’s impact on culture: Democratizing media, improving our quality of life, changing how we work, and challenging our concept of identity. All are worth considering. However, my focus centers on a topic that has long fascinated anthropologists: storytelling and the role of stories as behavioral models and meaning makers. AI’s impact there could be more insidious than the topics it provided. AI’s well documented racism is one concern, but my purview is broader.

For eons, only human beings crafted stories. Anthropologists have observed that stories express the ethos of a culture, epitomizing shared ideas and values, codifying social rules, and encompassing a world view. This essay is a musing – and a provocation – based on the notion that knowledge produced by the conversational AI many of us are now accessing is often a form of storytelling. If we look hard enough, we can discern a kind of artificial ethos underlying some of AI’s stories. 

At its most basic, a story imparts information. Sometimes it is difficult to know when a story is real or imagined, and AI is not aware of the difference. Historical fiction blends fact and fiction by design. If you subscribe to multiverse theory, all stories can be true everywhere all at once. The reliability of stories as information has been fraught and fought over for years. Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories contained tales on the origins of animals’ physical characteristics that aimed to amuse children. Decades later, geneticist Lewis I. Held Jr. was moved to publish a scientific account of animal evolution. In the film, Rashomon, different people witness a horrific event and provide conflicting accounts of what occurred. One interpretation of Rashomon is that facts are subjective and depend on one’s perspective. Science fiction author Ted Chiang writes about the truth in contrast to the feeling of a story, contemplating the merits of what is correct historically versus what is valuable for a community in the present.  Several years ago, comedian Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” to denote the sense that something feels true even if it is false. “Fake news” gained currency as a political cudgel in the past decade but dates back to the late nineteenth century. The variability of truth telling was cringingly demonstrated by political consultant Kellyanne Conway when she referenced “alternate facts” regarding the crowd size at Donald Trump’s Presidential inauguration. Need more be said regarding George Santos’ fabrications about his family, ethnic heritage, education, employment, finances, residences, health, and charity work?

What are we to make of stories crafted by a non-human? How can we untangle fact from fiction when we ask AI for accuracy, are provided with fantasy, and the author’s judgement is absent? That is what occurs when AI “hallucinates.” I asked ChatGPT: How can I be sure the information it provides is true? Here is part of its response:  It is important to note that ChatGPT is not infallible and can make errors or provide incomplete or inaccurate information…while ChatGPT can provide useful insights and information, it’s always a good idea to exercise critical thinking and verify information through multiple sources.

Good advice. The problem is that many of us won’t heed it. We’re too busy, too lazy, or too trusting. While AI promises efficiency for knowledge generation, its errors of fact and interpretation can be problematic. My apprehension is elevated when I think about AI’s subtle, unfettered impact on our culture-based ideas, sentiments, and behavior. AI is not yet imparting an ethos consciously but latent meanings and biases can be discerned in much of its content. If AI becomes sentient, will a purposeful ethos follow? Will enough of us decode the ethos embedded in its stories? What impact might an AI ethos have on its human users? How might it alter the character of our cultures? Are we prepared for the possibility that the stories AI concocts and the artificial ethos they convey implicitly could have profound and pervasive effects on who we are as human beings? These questions, which go beyond falsehoods per se, are not only for anthropologists to ask; they are questions for every one of us.

Our reliance on AI’s stories will proliferate the more we tap its breadth and depth of knowledge and relish its speed in providing it. Even if purveyors of AI pause its technological advances to mitigate its risks there is little doubt that AI will permeate our lives. Much of that will enable humanity to live smarter and better. This is a moment when we should reflect on AI’s storytelling facility, be cognizant of the artificial ethos conveyed in some of its stories, and take seriously their cultural implications. Before we buy into AI’s stories, we should recall the ancient Roman who, after being told a compelling but false tale by a market vendor, probably thought, caveat emptor.

Introduction

In 1980 I wrote a piece called “Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Control of Women.” In it I posited that control over women in the West and East was accomplished by pointing the finger at the Other. See, say the Egyptian pundits, “the West controls women by taking away the family name in preference to the name of the male spouse.” And the pundits in the West say, “see, Middle Easterners control women by having more than one spouse.” To which Easterners say that in the West prostitution is legal. Or Westerners say their women still wear veils—not a sign of modern development. Such is the power of comparison and when used by key people, it satisfies the status quo.

The paper was reviewed by two male anthropologists, who suggested that I separate East from West and turn the piece into two articles—one focusing on the state of Western women, the other on the state of Eastern women. The article was not published as I wished in the United States, but rather ended up being accepted for publication by Cultural Dynamics in Belgium. It was then translated into French and later found its way into French Canada before being republished elsewhere. The power of comparison was in this case too much for some American anthropologists, who did not distinguish lay comparisons from those used by academics.

At the time of writing “Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Control of Women,” my purpose was to indicate how images of women in other societies can be prejudicial to women in one’s own society. And while male dogma is prevalent in all contemporary nation states, patterns vary; it is this variation which is crucial to the maintenance of different patriarchal systems. Positional superiority draws attention from the processes that control women worldwide, as in the Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade. Thus, there is a need for anthropological comparison in our investigations at the global level. In the United States, the unprecedented overturning of Roe v. Wade after fifty years has been followed by the introduction of possible criminal charges for practicing abortion in predominantly Republican states. There were mid-term elections in 2022 and much talk of women’s reproductive rights. In response, California, Michigan, and Vermont wrote women’s reproductive rights into their state constitutions. 

In many states, there is a loss of abortion rights even for women who are the victims of rape or incest. The contemporary status of American women takes us back to the nineteenth century, with women having to leave their states to find abortion care elsewhere, while also fearing criminal charges for those doctors who might help them, as well as for themselves—as mentioned, even in the case when they are a victim of rape or incest, which are crimes. Even in Texas there are now attempts to criminalize those who sell abortion pills. 

There have been very few comparisons being made with countries outside of the United States, even among those outspoken in favor of women’s reproductive rights. There was, however, much talk about the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, which was perceived as unprecedented and, some argue, unconstitutional in a country where all are supposed to be equal.

Meanwhile, out of curiosity about women’s reproductive rights globally, I sat down with a friend who had a smartphone and started to collect data. “What country in the Middle East has reproductive choice for women?” My guess was wrong—not Lebanon. When my mother was in Lebanon the belief was that “It’s not their business [referring to the state],” as she said empathetically at the age of 96. Rather it was the business of the woman, her family, and their religion. Today only one Arab country has pro-choice law—Tunisia. 

We continued with the help of the smartphone, which also provides references for its assertions. “What about the European Union countries?” I asked. What about the United Kingdom? Pro-choice, as is Ireland, which is predominantly Catholic. What about Russia? Pro-choice. What about China and India? Both pro-choice. In Latin America, only Argentina and, more recently, Mexico are pro-choice. Canada, which provides complete medical care for all through government policies, is of course pro-choice.

So what major industrial country does not give pro-choice reproductive rights to women? The United States! And what do such comparisons tell us about the status of women in the United States? It seems that we have regressed to the nineteenth century. American women today do not have control over their own bodies. How could this have happened, and could it be turned around? We could point to former President Trump’s reactionary appointments to the Supreme Court. But how, in the face of massive public support for Roe v. Wade, could the Supreme Court go against the grain despite poll after poll indicating loss of public support for the court? Suggestions have been made to deal with this public loss of support. Some suggest court term limits or increasing the numbers on the court for some abortion rights groups. This is the United States, supposedly a democratic society. Yet the Supreme Court is dictating a ruling that has little support, even among many Catholics and among other religious groups. Despite public opinion, some members of this court are threatening to dictate further on gender issues, this time on cross-gender questions.

In this supposed example of what is happening to women’s reproductive rights, comparison is indeed powerful in revealing a global context. American women in the United States have been demoted in status in the global context. No longer can we brag, as in earlier periods, as I mentioned in “Orientalism, Occidentalism and Control of Women.” No longer can we point the finger.

Extending Comparisons to Other Realms of Culture

Reproductive choice is but one example of how non-anthropological comparison can be used to call attention to something that matters. Another is single-payer social policies (or their equivalents). After all, Canada has had single-payer for decades, as have many European countries. Or maternity leave. But even with Roe v. Wade and a women’s right to choose, if an American woman wants to have a child and work outside the home, paid leave for maternity is not federally mandated. In fact, paid leave for maternity is the norm—except for in the United States (New York Times, 10/6/07). One hundred and seventy countries offer some paid maternity leave; 98 of them offer 14 weeks off with pay. A National Geographic map published in 2007 revealed that the United States is only one of four that does not—the others being Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland.

Why is this so? This is not so easy to answer, especially since Americans often brag about the status of women in the United States. Working women may want greater government involvement but many businesses reject the idea of giving paid leave because of the financial cost, even though the idea of the single-income household is now outdated.

California has had a paid family leave policy since 2004, and workers contribute a small percentage of their paycheck to pay for it. I myself had three children while teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, with no maternity leave. My husband, in contrast, could take paternity leave as a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab. Indeed, suggestions at the federal level that money is a problem is ridiculous given that 170 countries now provide paid leave. 

A second step is public anthropology—reaching out to the American public, much as earlier anthropologists, such as Ruth Benedict, or Margaret Mead, or Clyde Kluckhohn, did. In my own experience, I have delivered hundreds of talks to non-anthropological audiences. Anthropology matters now more than ever, given how powerful modern technologies of disinformation are. We have comparative methods; we do participant observation as ethnographers. There is much to gain from ethnographies—a knowledge of what our country really is today.

Final Comments

In researching this article, I learned a few things about my country that I had not known before—how exceptional the United States is in areas where we are not supposed to be exceptional, that is, how unusual the absence of women’s reproductive rights is globally, how unusual the absence of maternity leave is when viewed comparatively, and how rare student debt—and also medical debt—is in the wealthiest of nations. Viewed competitively, our use of juries in the criminal justice system is honorable, but the United States has more people in prison than any major world power. Comparison is indeed a powerful way to reveal what is really going on in our country—aspects of it that for the most part go unnoticed. Why? Really? Some people say the smartphone obscured what anthropological ethnographies have revealed about the world outside the United States. Smartphones are not so smart.

Americans are taught from an early age that their country is exceptional; to think otherwise, given the number of wars we have been involved in, would not be patriotic. Michael Moore produced a documentary film called Where to Invade Next in 2015 saying that other countries did better. The film was well received but won no awards. We teach that war is patriotic, not a weakness. And, as I learned working on the Carnegie Council of Children for many years, it is not acceptable to say that kids in France are treated better than here. Really? “No Children Left Behind”? Yes, beware of the power of comparison: You might learn something you didn’t know before. 

But the global picture is not always as positive as this article suggests. Pro-choice legislative changes in Ireland and Northern Ireland are very recent. Malta—an EU country—still has a total ban on abortion. Poland has, over recent years, introduced legislation to restrict abortion to only very limited and exceptional circumstances. A focus on legislation also overlooks the many ways in which abortions can be legal but inaccessible (for example, due to “conscientious objection” on the part of healthcare providers). Indeed, much more could be made of comparison of the rollback in reproductive rights that we have witnessed across the world in recent years, and the important role of the anthropologist in documenting, understanding, and fighting against this.

Bibliography

Benedict, Ruth (1940) Race: Science and Politics. NX Modera Age INC.

Case, M. A. (2019) Trans Formations in the Vatican’s War on “Gender Ideology”. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 44 (3): 639–664. 

Gilby, Lynda, Koivusalo, Meri, and Atkins, Salla (2021) Global Health without Sexual Reproductive Health and Rights? Analysis of United Nations Documents and Country Statements, 2014–2019. BMJ Global Health DOI: 10.1136/bmjgh-2020-00465

Graff, Kapur, and Walters (2019) Introduction: Gender and Rise of the Global Right. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 44 (3): 541–560.

Grzebalska, W., and Peto, A. (2018) The Gendered Modus Operandi of the Illiberal Transformation in Hungary and Poland. Women’s Studies International Forum 68: 164–172.

Hanafin, Patrick (2022) An Uncertain Secularisation: Reproductive Rights in Contemporary Italy. Polemos(Rome) 2922, 16 (1): 75–96.

Kluckhohn, Cylde (1949) Mirror for Man: The Relation of Anthropology to Modern Life. N.Y. Mc Grace Hill. 

Mead, Margaret (1930) Growing Up in New Guinea: A Comparative Study of Primitive Education. New York Morrow. 

Mishtahl, Joanna (2019) Reproductive Governances and the (Re)definition of Human Rights in Poland. Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness, 38: 201.

Moore, Michael (2015) Where to Invade Next, documentary film.

Nader, Laura (1989) Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Control of Women. Cultural Dynamics.

On Unsustainable Refugee Livelihoods and the Politics of Time in Humanitarian Governance.

Estella Carpi with Amina al-Halabi^[1]

In this short article, in an attempt to question the politics of time that humanitarian governance implicitly rests upon when managing refugee lives, we question the contradiction residing in imposing long waits on refugees who are selected for resettlement. Amina’s account will highlight the paradox of a humanitarian system that asks people, implicitly, to count on means they do not own, while the lack of those means is often the primary reason for applying for resettlement.

Amina is a Syrian woman who has been living in an informal tented settlement (ITS) in a hamlet of northern Lebanon since April 2011, after governmental shelling began to target opposition areas across Syria. Along with her husband and her three children, she is now waiting for resettlement in France. After 12 years in the same ITS, the French humanitarian corridors invited her for a series of face-to-face interviews, and she was eventually selected for resettlement.

Through corridors, refugees can legally enter Europe by being granted humanitarian visas and are given the possibility to apply for asylum afterwards. Normally, once relocated, the selected refugees – mostly women with their children, entire families or (more rarely) single men – reside in facilities or apartments paid by the organisations in charge. While waiting for asylum, refugees can take language classes and navigate future job opportunities, while children can register in schools.

In the history of human displacement, humanitarian corridors have been organised and negotiated by the United Nations or by other NGOs that, at a later stage, require approval from foreign governments. Corridors have also been used during displacement from Syria. In addition to France, Italy has been a common destination for Syrian refugees who aspire to relocate overseas through the corridors. Generally, such relocations happen through complex bureaucratic arrangements in relatively long timeframes. Amina and her family will only be able to leave Lebanon for France after nine months of waiting. The wait is due to facilitators trying to guarantee accommodation and other related arrangements in the country of resettlement.

What livelihoods can Amina and her family rely on while waiting for the long-awaited departure? And, more broadly, what are people supposed to rely on in this timeframe, if the dire living conditions that impede their sustainability – and even their survival – are the ones they need to live in until departure?

Such ways of operating have long taken these ‘impossible waits’ for granted. Corridors are only one example where the impossible wait is presumed. When I was researching livelihood programs in northern Lebanon throughout 2016 and 2017, my interviews with practitioners from the International Rescue Committee pointed to cash for work programmes,through which refugees, especially men, are employed for a period of time (typically six months) – after which they become ineligible for any new temporary job in the following six months. This policy was meant to enable a larger number of low-income refugees to access the same, albeit temporary, job opportunities. In this framework, NGOs act as temp agencies. Local practitioners working through cash for work programmes often voiced their perplexity concerning this policy. Some of them stressed how providing people with precarious sources of livelihoods can, paradoxically, unsettle the ways in which a household has developed their tactics of survival. Over the years, many NGO practitioners have questioned the effectiveness of such policies and practices, with most refugee households being unable to develop alternative means of economic sustainability after completing their period of employment offered through humanitarian programs.

Lebanon is officially a country of transit, having never signed the 1951 Convention for Refugees. Nonetheless, it has ended up hosting nearly one million refugees from Syria and thousands more from Iraq, Sudan and Palestine, to mention only a few. Amina emphasises how everything has become unaffordable. ‘The diesel (mazut) to warm up the house, food, medications for chronic diseases, the cost of rent and of schooling material for the children… The United Nations only help you with some of these expenses, such as food; but, most of the time, you are the one that needs to find strategies to overcome such hardships. Over the last few years, NGOs in Lebanon have been providing less and less aid, and discontinuously’. Economic collapse in Lebanon, aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the massive destruction ensuing from the August 2020 port explosion in Beirut, triggered a large-scale downturn in the country. Humanitarian providers, in this context, sought to tailor their aid and support to a rapidly worsening economic context, but their attempts at readjusting programmes to a severe economic crisis did not go very far.

In this context, the refugees who are selected by humanitarian corridors are viewed as ‘the luckiest’ in a historical moment in which there is no alternative to day-by-day survival. However, the politics of temporality of such resettlement programmes rests on the tacit assumption that people are capable of surviving while waiting for their opportunity to rebuild their lives elsewhere. Refugees in countries where legal resettlement is not possible (like Lebanon) often lack temporal perspectives and struggle to establish their right to permanence. As scholar Cathrine Brun incisively wrote years ago, ‘this emptying of the future [of refugees] – or the rendering of an abstract future – shows that the emergency imagery decontextualizes and ‘de-situates’ the lives of people experiencing a crisis’. Moreover, it is not merely displacement per se that unsettles people’s ‘ownership’ of any temporal perspective; it is the specific way that displacement is managed: blurring the future and even, as mentioned, the immediate present. Often embedded between economic unsustainability in the receiving countries and the unfeasible return to the countries of origin, refugees tend to be deprived of the right to temporality, tout court. 

While their means of everyday survival are at an all-time low in today’s Lebanon, Amina and her family still have nine months ahead before their departure to France. Other refugees do not even have a departure date, until which they are asked to survive by relying on their own means. For all of them, tomorrow cannot be a certainty.

---

^[1] A pseudonym has been used on personal request.  

Introduction

November 2022, somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. I am sipping evening tea with Dario, an electrician from Ukraine, one of the 25 seafarers working on board a the liquified natural gas (LNG) carrier I have been living and conducting ethnographic fieldwork on for almost a month. During this time, I have been following and observing the daily life and work routines of Dario and the rest of the crew members as well as having conversations with all of them. This evening Dario and I are talking about LNG. I am asking if and how it is different for him to work with this type of cargo than with other liquid bulks like oil, which he has worked with earlier. Dario is eager to answer my question, and he starts talking generally about his role in the transport of LNG. Enabling the transport of LNG over long distances gives him indeed a sense of pride. First, Dario is proud of his own expertise in working with LNG carriers which are different and more technically advanced than other bulk carriers. He did not gain this expertise in maritime school, but through work experience within the developing sector of gas transport in the shipping industry. Secondly, since LNG is difficult to control because it can shift from liquid to vapor and gas and back to liquid,^[1] those in charge of its transport must be very good at monitoring and controlling these changes. However, what is making Dario most proud is that through his work, he argues, he is helping make Europe energy independent on Russia and so he is contributing to democracy. 

We live in a time of energy crisis

The last words of Dario stuck in my head. They did make a lot of sense. In fact, we live in a time of energy crisis. Energy markets have been shrinking already since 2021 due to higher competition, overconsumption, production cuts, insufficient storage capacity, and poor redistribution systems.^[2] The crisis also means that the price of natural gas has reached a record high pushing for inflation and overall impoverishment of citizens and a forced re-definition and re-dimension of common people’s basic needs. This situation is worsening due to the dragging conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the weaponization of energy infrastructures by Russia, the redistribution of international resources to support Ukraine’s military, and the tightness of regulations around using hydrocarbon revenues for the greater good. In the years to come, energy prices and inflation will keep growing, governments will adopt drastic rationing measures, many smaller industries will have to close, thus giving more power to larger producers that will influence legislation to their interests. The situation will exacerbate power imbalance and social inequality across countries.

In the Western world, Europe is particularly vulnerable. The European Commission’s strategy to decarbonize Europe and its vision for a climate-neutral economy by 2050,^[3] fully supported by governments and policy makers is creating serious obstacles to negotiate long-terms contracts with large energy suppliers around the world. Since Europe is unwilling to open new gas extraction sites at home,^[4] it is highly dependent on foreign supplies and vulnerable to market fluctuations. This is why a key objective of the EU is to ensure stable access to liquid gas markets for energy independence and security.^[5] In this context, LNG is seen not only as a solution to enhance the diversity of gas supply and improve energy security, but also to ensure a smoother transition to a greener economy and to the full use of renewable forms of energy (Lindstad et alii 2020).^[6]

LNG, a controversial energy resource.

LNG is indeed a strategic key source of energy. Considering Europe’s current decarbonization strategy, people are made to believe that LNG is the best transitional form of energy, a “greener” non-renewable alternative form of energy. Indeed, LNG is very efficient – in comparison with coal and oil^[7] – and can be used in most of the existing infrastructures running on fossil fuel, in contrast to renewable energies which need ad hoc infrastructural apparatus. However, the destructive practices by which most of the natural gas is extracted, like hydraulic fracturing (fracking), are often left out of the picture.^[8]

Nevertheless, LNG is indeed an appealing and valuable energy resource as it can to a certain degree enable a “smoother” shift into renewable forms of energy using existing infrastructure and, in addition, can make Europe more energy secure and independent. LNG is a controversial energy resource used in practices of “green politics”. Bruno Latour talks about “green politics” in vision of the new climate regime and the many strategies materialized in legislations, fiscal regulations, and infrastructural projects many countries in Europe are adopting to make energy transition possible. What makes politics “green”, according to Latour, is the pervading, repetitive, almost formulaic statements about green shift, green technology, and green energy in the broader discourse of climate change and energy transition.^[9]

In fact, whether LNG is really green, a little green or not at all green, everybody is crazy about it right now, competing for its access and making the energy market implode. Since Russia’s historical export to Europe has been heavily sanctioned and the gas flowing into Europe via pipelines has been drastically reduced,^[10] the only way to get gas into Europe is through shipping of LNG in tanker ships from other-than-Russia^[11] exporting countries around the world.

Automated shifts in the maritime: LNG carriers, LNG technology, and its carers.

Tanker ships that transport liquified natural gas are called LNG carriers. The number of these ships has boomed in the last 10 years. Major and middle size shipping companies specialized in the transport of hydrocarbons and other liquid bulks are now investing in LNG carriers. They are constructing new ships with safer, more efficient technology. As part of my postdoctoral project,^[12] which investigates how the fast automation and digitalization of systems on board LNG tankers change perceptions of work, identity of the seafarers, and create at the same time possibilities but also challenges in many aspects of everyday labor and life on board ships, I had the privilege to conduct ethnographic fieldwork on board two LNG carriers in 2022. The 300-meter ships were sailing across the Atlantic Ocean from regassification plants in Europe to Storage facilities in the USA.^[13]

LNG is different from other cargoes as it is “invisible”. Locked into tanks that are never opened unless every 5 to 7 years at dry dock, LNG is unequivocally present and pervasive. In relation to the world of freight and container shipping, other scholars have conceptualized shipping containers as “material objects whose embedded properties change not only depending on the cargo they are carrying, but also through encounters with different climatic conditions” (Leivestad, 2022: 206). The constantly fluctuating properties of LNG under the uncontrollable forces of nature, like sea, weather, and temperature, create a special engagement between the crewmembers and this form of energy.

Since LNG is shifting properties all the time – from liquid to vapor to gas to liquid -, it comes with instruments that monitor these changes on its tanker ships. These are innovative machines, like for instance the reliquification plant, which is a large system of machines able to reliquefy vapor from boil off (BOG) of LNG in cargo tanks. LNG carriers also come with kilometers of piping system, thousands of sensors, and several hybrid engines, which can use different types of fuels and can be powered by electrical batteries. These hybrid ships are considered and labeled “greener” in the maritime world. Even though LNG technology is exciting, is sensitive and vulnerable to unpredictable factors, like weather conditions or updates installed to computer systems. The seafarers working with LNG machines are aware of all these problems. In fact, the special engagement, care, and responsibility they have for LNG extends to the instruments they use to monitor, transport, discharge, and load LNG. Under the pressure to complete operations more efficiently and in the shortest time possible, seafarers must also obey the new environmental regulations – like those under SOLAS –^[14] and satisfy cargo owners who require cost-efficient fuel usage. 

Most LNG ships today are classified by IMO according to MASS (Maritime Autonomous Surface Ship) definition, as level 1 (out of 4) autonomous, which means that while some systems and processes are automated, seafarers are still needed on board to operate, control, and maintain them. Nevertheless, fast automation of systems is calling for a drastic reduction of personnel on board ships. For instance, on most ships today you find the Electronic Chart Display and Information System, called ECDIS which has almost totally replaced the use of paper charts and has made many navigation functions automatic. Sensors and alarm and software systems make cargo operations, loading and unloading, fuel usage, berthing, emergency systems, air, and water supplies systems self-regulating and automated to a degree. This automation shift in the maritime industry has drastically reduced the number of seafarers on board ships to 17-30 today compared with the 1950s where you could find cargo ships with up to 80 crewmembers (Stepien 2023).

Still, a ship is not a very complicated or advanced machine besides all the sensors monitoring performances and algorithms rendering operations semi-automated. The basic mechanical principles of marine propulsion have remained the same for 200 years and so do the basic machines that run and keep a ship floating. What has really changed over the years is the type of fuel which a ship uses and the rate at which the ship, or better put, the ship’s crew, carry on operations, like loading and discharging cargo. In the face of accelerated capitalistic needs (Eriksen and Schober 2018), the quantity of cargo per ship has also grown enormously, creating unsustainable monsters (Latour 1996; 2021) like the Ever Given, 400-meter long and 22000 TEU, one of the largest ship containers in the world which was stuck in the Suez Canal for 6 days in 2021. 

Even though technology has developed enormously enabling huge volumes of LNG to be shipped across continents, marine officers, machinists, and engineers remain the main carers for LNG machines. Their responsibilities are structured in such a way that the vast number of machines and systems on board the ship – and the responsibility for them – are redistributed among single individuals by rank, expertise, and level of experience. This organization constitutes partly but fundamentally the hierarchy on board ships. Nevertheless, due to the “novelty” of working with carrying LNG,^[15] no matter how individuals are expert or ranked, it is often through teamwork and mutual help that problems are solved. LNG and its machines are indeed catalysts for the establishment of new social relations which involve collaboration, support, and mutual help.

In fact, for seafarers, relating to human experiences is easier than relating to manuals and standardized procedures on how to conduct “optimal” reparations. Crewmembers working both on deck or in the machine department would agree on the fact that both LNG and its machinery are unpredictable and that there is still not yet enough knowledge about the behavior or this mutable form of energy and the consequences it has on the technology and machines it uses. In fact, they experience fluctuations every day. Sensors and automated functions monitoring the cargo often do not give a reason why LNG is expanding, contracting, boiling off, or behaving the way it does. Therefore, learning happens by means of human communication and the exchanging of experiences. Sharing past experiences on similar or different LNG carriers with same or different machines helps broaden the spectrum of possible solutions to problems which might not be recorded in the user manuals, for instance. 

Conclusion: Conducting ethnographic fieldwork on board LNG carriers

Ships are contained, isolated, self-sufficient, highly hierarchical, and very organized villages. This containment makes them into attractive sites for ethnographic observations. Since the shipping world is difficult to access and relatively little known, there are many understudied yet revealing ways in which seafarers relate to the cargo they monitor, care for, transfer and transport it around the world. These relationships between crew members, ship and cargo open an investigation of unexpected social dynamics that can be at the same time conflictual, generative, and contradictory. Borrowing from Latour, ships can be conceived as “cultural objects” (1996) because they break down the object-subject, nature-culture dichotomies. In fact, ships are both technologically advanced material things which are highly dependent on humans but also unpredictable and respondent to often unforeseeable and sometimes invisible factors. They have in a way their own defuse agency and they are often object of anthropomorphizing practices that give them strong individuality and agency. 

In addition to being by nature unpredictable, a ship carrying LNG is even more unruly because of the constantly changing nature of the cargo that triggers unexpectedly all infrastructural systems -mechanical and digital – around it. LNG is an “alive cargo”, the captain of one of the ships told me, this is why Dario was particularly proud of being able through his work to control and contain the behaviors of LNG. In practical terms, the complex relationship between all the crewmembers and LNG is manifested in the way the seafarers monitor the cargo, maintain and repair the machines, the way they plan time and space around the navigation routes, the way they perform safety procedures, and the way they incessantly record and log performances and parameters of the behavior or the LNG. How seafarers talk about and perceive the energy cargo they are responsible for constructs a picture around their lives so entangled with LNG and gives another powerful narrative around LNG. In addition, seafarers play a fundamental yet invisible role in the global and politically loaded LNG discourse today. 

LNG as world demanded, market inflated contested resource, obtained by destructive extraction practices, and used in transitional semi- green energy narratives, fits very well in highly political and contradictory discourses. The controversial impacts of LNG are not only ecological (increasing of hydraulic fracking for the extraction of gas) and not only political (making LNG poor countries more dependent to LNG exporting countries, like the US, and thus more vulnerable and politically controllable).^[16] On a micro level, on a level of social relations, LNG can also have controversial impacts on the nature of work on board LNG carriers where innovative technology draws more attention than humans, expectations and workloads are becoming strenuous, and traditional hierarchies are reshuffled making conflicts arise. So far, one of the greatest paradoxes of LNG is reflected in the role seafarers working on LNG carriers play. In face of the global importance of LNG, when so much depends on them right now, they yet remain uncredited, unspoken of and invisible. 

References

Blanchard, R. L. (1978, January). An LNG cargo system simulator for crew training. In Gastech 78 LNG-LPG Conf. Pap.;(Monaco) (Vol. 2).

Latour, B. (1996). Aramis, or the Love of Technology. Harvard University Press.

Blanchard, R. L. (1976). An LNG Cargo System Simulator for Ship Crew Training. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Ship Operation Automation Symposium, Washington, DC, August 30-September 2, 1976. Proceedings expected to be available about December 1976. (Vol. 5, No. Proceeding).

Eriksen, T. H., & Schober, E. (2018). Economies of growth or ecologies of survival?. Ethnos, 83(3), 415-422.

Klein, N. (2020). On fire: The (burning) case for a green new deal. Simon & Schuster.

Latour, B. (1996). Aramis, or the Love of Technology. Harvard University Press.

Latour, B. (2007). To modernize or to ecologize? That is the question. Technoscience: The Politics of Interventions, 249-72.

Latour, B. (2011). Love your monsters. Breakthrough Journal, 2(11), 21-28.

Leivestad, H. H. (2022). The shipping container. History and Anthropology, 33(2), 202-207.

Lindstad, E., Eskeland, G. S., Rialland, A., & Valland, A. (2020). Decarbonizing maritime transport: The importance of engine technology and regulations for LNG to serve as a transition fuel. Sustainability, 12(21), 8793.

Stępień, B. (2023). Can a ship be its own captain? Safe manning of autonomous and uncrewed vessels. Marine Policy, 148, 105451.

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^[1] LNG is natural gas, predominantly methane, converted to liquid form for ease of storage or transport. The liquefaction process happens at around -162 °C. As a liquid, LNG takes up around 600 times less volume than gas at standard atmospheric pressure, which facilitates its transportation over long distances without the need of pipelines, generally in specially designed ships or road tankers.

^[2] Aksjekaffe podcast Episode 94  Øystein Kalleklev «Flex LNG» 18.01.2022.

^[3] In line with the European Green Deal and the EU’s 2030 energy and climate targets. https://climate.ec.europa.eu/eu-action/climate-strategies-targets/2050-long-term-strategy_en

^[4] Except for Norway who is one of the largest gas exporter countries in the world and the most important source of pipeline gas imports to Europe right now.

^[5] Energy union (europa.eu); https://www.lr.org/en/insights/articles/lng-uptake-demands-energy-security/

^[6] In fact, countries that have access to LNG import terminals and liquid gas markets are far more resilient to possible supply interruptions than those that are dependent on a single gas supplier, cargoes of LNG are available from many different supplier countries worldwide and finally, the global LNG market is undergoing dynamic developments.

^[7] Produces 40% less CO2 than coal and 30% less than oil. Methane burns also more efficiently than coal. 

^[8] For some of the many examples of destructive outcomes of gas extraction see: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/fracking-boom-tied-to-methane-spike-in-earths-atmosphere; https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/14/fracking-causing-rise-in-methane-emissions-study-finds; https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2019/08/study-fracking-prompts-global-spike-atmospheric-methane

^[9] Opposition and critique, in turn, use the term green washing (Latour 2007; Klein 2020). 

^[10] Around 40% of all pipeline imports to the EU have been controlled by Russia in the past years.

^[11] USA, Qatar, Australia and Nigeria to name a few most important exporting countries. 

^[12] My postdoc project is part of a larger collaborative project with title “Automation shift in the maritime sector of the oil and gas industry: assessing risk and safety, protecting labor” ASMOG. https://www.uib.no/en/asmog

^[13] Each segment of the journey from destination to destination, including time for loading and discharging, takes about two weeks.

^[14] Safety of life at sea (SOLAS) is an international treaty that regulates all aspects of commercial ships with focus on safety for all ship operations  https://www.imo.org/en/About/Conventions/Pages/International-Convention-for-the-Safety-of-Life-at-Sea-(SOLAS),-1974.aspx

^[15] Even though studies on simulation training on board LNG have existed since the late 1970s (Blanchard 1976 and 1978), there is surprisingly still a lack of training on LNG shipping machines and simulations at maritime schools (https://safety4sea.com/cm-addressing-training-requirements-on-lng-fueled-ships/. 

^[16] The role of the United States is increasingly important in the EU gas supply. Imports from the US are increasing enormously. As part of the Russia-Ukraine war and the related weaponisation of energy supply, the Russian share of pipeline imports has fallen dramatically. Between January and September 2022, the largest LNG exporters to the EU were the United States (44%), Russia (17%) and Qatar (13%).