Paper short abstract:

Part of a larger project examining data practices and infrastructures as unexamined sites of power when it comes to environmental justice, this paper explores data violence and data allyship, and suggests anthropology needs to reformulate what it understands as data in order to engage with both.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is part of a larger project which maps out the social and political implications of the emerging digital territories of environmental governance. Although those working in environmental justice rightly focus on how land has been polluted, natural resources exhausted, and people dispossessed in ways that re-inscribe colonial racist logics, relatively little attention has been paid to environmental data itself as a key site of power. Within this, in this paper I will be addressing the questions of data violence and data allyship. Social anthropologists often treat quantification as something reductive and violent, but then stop short when it comes to engaging in more depth ethnographically with the technical aspects of this. There are three problematic implications - the complex machinery of data violence can be assumed rather than opened up, even as this demands that we reformulate what we understand data to be; anthropologists are often unable to to effectively support strategies of data sovereignty, data resistance and data politics; and our reflections on the violence of our own data is often limited to the discursive and textual. To argue these points, I first look to history and information studies to flesh out what I mean by the technical machinery of data violence. I then draw on indigenous data sovereignty movements to point towards what data allyship might be. Finally, I draw on my own experiences working with indigenous environmental agents in the Brazilian Amazon to point to the violences of my own informational practices.