The Dumbarton Circle: What’s in a Name
It was late. The dessert had been eaten. The wine bottle made another round. We’d been at it for hours: trying to come up with a name for our new…whatever it was. Club? Group? Collective? We’d started with a Manifesto, a declaration of discontentment with the current state of Silicon Valley. We were all from different backgrounds — design, anthropology, the humanities — and wanted to increase communication between them. And we all lived in and around the Bay. But beyond that, we had little to go on. Each person had a different sense of what the group might accomplish, and it felt like trying to name a band: each name suggested a new genre of music that we might try. The Bay Area Multidisciplinary Collective (or BAM-C) stuck for a while. Then someone said, motioning to the ring we all made around the dinner table, “Circles are nice. Maybe we should be a circle.”
Eventually we found it: The Dumbarton Circle. It seemed fitting. The Dumbarton Bridge is a central artery that connects the two halves of the Bay, a mundane piece of infrastructure that lies beneath the glitz and glamour of Silicon Valley start-ups. On one side is the Facebook campus, a multicolored tech jungle with a huge thumbs-up “like” sign, always swarmed with photo-taking tourists, that greets you as you sit in traffic and begin to inch onto the bridge. On the other side is Fremont, a diverse and growing city, more affordable than other parts of the Bay, yet beginning to feel the effects of a rapidly increasing housing crisis that is pushing out long-term residents and blue-collar workers in favor of tech-industry commuters and high-profile companies like Tesla. The Dumbarton Bridge gives you a view of both San Francisco at the north end of the Bay and San José at the south end, along with power lines, a burnt-out train bridge that now stands idle across the water, and bicyclists in stretchy neon outfits making their way past bumper-to-bumper traffic. To drive over the Dumbarton is to be aware of contrasts: that between an unsung concrete-and-metal reality and the world of virtual futurism that it makes possible, and that between the manual labor it took to build such a bridge and the six-figure salaries awaiting the 20-something entrepreneurs who now commute across it. It would be hard to find a more local symbol of the Bay’s infrastructure, its history, its future, and its growing-pained present. And the local, after all — a shared care, concern, and interest for this place we now called home — was our group’s greatest commonality.
A circle, too, speaks to older forms of intellectual engagement that acted as models for our endeavor. Mutual Improvement Societies, for example — neighborhood reading and discussion groups that were very common in the nineteenth century — were based on circular models of expertise. People would take turns writing papers, leading discussions, or teaching a skill based on their own knowledge and research, and each person would have a chance to be the expert in a given meeting. The structure of such groups also encouraged a plasticity of format: from evening to evening, the agenda vary to include debates on current issues, book club discussions, recitations of favorite pieces of literature, social gatherings, readings of original papers, and so on, always with different members participating and taking the lead. With the model of rotating expertise, there was freedom to cover a wide range of intellectual subjects while never losing the connections provided by community and location.
We might think of ourselves as a modern Mutual Improvement Society. We are each an expert in a different field, but we want to talk with friends not from our home disciplines. We want the freedom to float between disparate topics of conversation and to choose different formats for our work while still maintaining a common identity as The Dumbarton Circle. And we always want to be able to sit around a dinner table and share community, food, and discussion.
To this end, we imagine several possibilities in our future. We might begin a series of Dumbarton Seminars, in which we take turns suggesting readings and leading discussions. We might interview each other about our experiences living in the Bay Area. And, most immediately, we plan to host two events at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San José this November. The first is a series of walking tours meant to provide conference participants with a local lens into other sides to Silicon Valley, besides the shiny tech narrative. The second is an interdisciplinary roundtable which brings together scholars from anthropology, design, and literature to discuss the utopias they encounter in their research and build coalitions around imagined egalitarian futures. Stay tuned for more details!
A final naming note: our blog title, “Three Quarters of an Elephant,” also debated at length at that eventful dinner party, harkens back to the folktale in which several people, encountering an elephant in the dark, assume that it is something else. One feels the tail and thinks that an elephant is just a rope. One feels the trunk and thinks it a snake, and so on. From the limitations of each individual perspective, none can imagine the entire elephant as a whole. For us, the perspectives are our educational and career backgrounds and the elephant is Silicon Valley. With the lenses provided by specialized, field-specific training, none of us will ever be able to understand the challenges and opportunities of Silicon Valley in full. If we talk to each other, and seek out communities and communications beyond our own, we might arrive at a larger picture: three quarters of an elephant might begin to come into view. But that last piece will always remain fuzzy, encouraging us to seek new perspectives. This seems a good place to begin the conversation, with a story from the past that might guide our way through the present.
