Savage Minds

A few years ago my wife Veronica (who is also a cultural anthropology graduate student) was doing her M.A. fieldwork in Yucatan, Mexico.  I was there with her.  We were staying in a decent sized pueblo, about three thousand people (although it seemed like much less for some reason).  We rented a room from a family for the summer–we found out later that two of the kids in the household were actually moved out of that room to make space for the two visiting anthropologists, but that’s another story of micro-politics for another time.  Lets just say that these two kids weren’t all that happy with the arrangement, and they made it pretty clear.  If only we had known!  Anyway, we worked out a deal.

Moving on.  While my wife was doing interviews, I ended up playing games and hanging out with a lot of the local kids.  Not a bad gig, eh?  Well, I was also the free research assistant, and I went along on many of the interviews, too.  In addition I did a stint of archaeological survey work for a few weeks–just to let you know that it wasn’t all just homeruns and striking out little kids for me that summer (kidding, of course, I let some of them get hits).  But I did play a lot of baseball with the kids when there was downtime.  We used to play tons of games in the solar (i.e. yard) of the house where we were staying.  These games included about 4-5 kids from the family we were renting from, and a whole slew of kids from around the pueblo.  Pretty fun.  Whenever I got back to the house all the kids wanted to play.  Often, they totally wore me out.   It became a pretty regular thing.  But then, I noticed something. read more…

Those of you following Savage Minds since the beginning will remember when this blog was the object of scorn and ridicule across the blogsphere as a result of our temerity in attacking Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. The debate was nicely summed up at the time by Inside Higher Ed’s Scott Jaschik:

And in the last week, a relatively new blog in anthropology — Savage Minds — has set off a huge debate over the book. Two of the eight people who lead Savage Minds posted their objections to the book, and things have taken off from there, with several prominent blogs in the social sciences picking up the debate, and adding to it. Hundreds of scholars are posting and cross-posting in an unusually intense and broad debate for a book that has been out for eight years.

A collection of links related to the discussion was posted here on Savage Minds as well. But the discussion did not end there. It is for that reason that I thought it might be a good time to highlight how the discussion continued after 2005. Although it got less attention, we subsequently had Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington as our very first guest bloggers (establishing a long running tradition on this blog). They drew from their book Yali’s Question to write a series of posts bringing significant expertise and nuance to the questions which had been raised about Diamond’s book. They were later interviewed for a NY Times piece about Diamond’s new book, Collapse. read more…

Yesterday important swaths of the Internet were blacked out to protest SOPA, PIPA, and the RWA. We would have blacked out our site as well but… uh… we sort of didn’t get around to it. One site that did, however, was Wikipedia. This lead to a certain amount of chortling and self-staisfied rubbing of hands from conservative academics as they enjoyed imagining what life is like for undergraduates without Wikipedia.

I’ve been rethinking the now-ancient war between Wikipedia and its paper forebearers myself, since I’ve just been asked to write my first encyclopedia article — a strange sensation as a wikipedia contributor! Given the recent outbursts of schadenfreude, I think its time to remember once again why Wikipedia is so utterly superior to physical encyclopedias.

To prepare for writing my encyclopedia entry I went to the library to see what actual encyclopedias look like. I must say I was pleasantly surprised. As a student I spurned encyclopedias as ‘secondary sources’ and plowed through texts. As a result, I have an invaluable knowledge that can’t be duplicated by reading secondary sources, and a keen awareness of how exhausting not using secondary sources is! Reading the high-quality, professionally edited entries in my library’s encyclopedias was an eye-opener and a guilty pleasure — you could learn so much with so little effort! And you don’t have to work as hard untangling the entries the way you do with Wikipedia!

But this is exactly the problem with closed, for-profit encyclopedias: they require no work. In fact, they require just the opposite: submission to authority. The writing guidelines for my encyclopedia entry insist that there be no quotations or citations — just a short list of additional readings. Encyclopedias give us no reason to believe their claims are true except the arbitrary authority of those who write them. They are the ultimate triumph of the authoritarian impulse in academics.

Compare this to Wikipedia, which has gotten so persnickety about insisting on citations and references that much of the charm of its early days has gone. Every wikipedia entry is an argument between its composers, spilling out of the discussion page and into the entry. Accuracy and verifiablity are there on the page to see. In other words, Wikipedia is the ultimate realization of academic ideals of argumentation, presentation of evidence, probing claims to logical coherence, and the deliberative use of reason. There is no better place for people to cut their teeth on the life of the mind, or to begin to learn the fundamental skill of close and critical reading of a text.

It is this refusal of arbitrary authority that really scares encyclopedia types, not worries about accuracy. Wikipedia is a place where you must learn to think for yourself, encyclopedias are places where you are told what to believe.

Of course, there is a lot to like about the arbitrary exercise of authority if you have faith in the authority in question: the gullible are not duped, the conspiracy theorists are silenced, and the trains run on time. The down side of intellectual debate is the possibility of intellectual chaos — and there’s certainly a lot of that on Wikipedia! If you are pessimistic about the capacities of your students to know and learn then feeding them the party line is, to you at least, the best way to protect them.

But we as educators can and must believe that our students — and everyone else! — is capable of more than this. Our fundamental principles and highest aspirations lead us ineluctably to the conclusion that attaining intellectual maturity requires immersion in the rough waters of public debate, which is exactly what Wikipedia is. The real danger of Wikipedia is its use by people made gullible by a system which promises them that someone, somewhere knows The Truth, exactly the belief that college teachers try to educate their students out of rather than into. We’d have less uncritical reading of Wikipedia if there were less people trained to be uncritical readers.

Oh and did I mention the massively larger coverage, the instant updating, the self correction, and the ease of consultation that Wikipedia possess? Or the sheer charm of Wikipedia: when was the last time you read an encyclopedia entry on death by elephant, Cardassia, or chicken sexing?

Wikipedia is flawed, human, complex, and ultimately deeply worthwhile. It is real life, not a child-proof playroom. What sort of educators are we if we believe the latter is better for our students than the former?

Over at his blog, Jason Jackson wonder whether that AAA supports HR 3699 or not. It’s a good question, but I think there is an even better one to ask: can the AAA support (or oppose) HR 3699? In other words, is there some sort of institutional structure and decision making system at work within the AAA that is actually capable deciding something in the name of the organization and then publishing it? Because frankly, even having the competence to decide to oppose HR 3699 in a timely fashion would be a step forward for the AAA.

The other side of the ‘can’ question is one of publicity: behind closed doors someone somewhere within the AAA may be giving the nod to whatever lobbiest we are allied with to oppose (or support) the AAA. Do they have the integrity to tell their membership what they are doing in our name? I am guessing that the answer is ‘no’, simply because any sort of public statement of this sort of back room dealing would immediately raise questions about proper procedure at AAA, which is exactly the topic these informal dealings are attempting  to avoid.

So: can the AAA successfully, publicly, and in a timely fashion announce a policy decision it has made or will we have to wait 8 months for the next AAA meetings and a DOA panel entitled something like ‘HR 3699:  An Important Topic Having To Do With $This_Year’s_Conference_Theme_Branding”?

I’m hopeful, but I’m not holding my breath.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s lawyer, Henri Leclerc:

At these parties, people were not necessarily dressed, and I defy you to tell the difference between a naked prostitute and any other naked woman.

Gayle Rubin, in her famous essay “The Traffic in Women”

Marx once asked: “What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is as good as the other. A Negro is a Negro. He only becomes a slave in certain relations. A cotton spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It becomes capital only in certain relations. Torn from these relationships it is no more capital than gold in itself is money or sugar is the price of sugar.” One might paraphrase: What is a domesticated woman? A female of the species. The one explanation is as good as the other. A woman is a woman. She only becomes a domestic, a wife, a chattel, a playboy bunny, a prostitute, or a human dictaphone in certain relations.

[h/t to Aaron Bady]

A bit ago Kerim talked about ‘reading fast’ and ‘reading slow’ (something I’ve called ‘pace layering‘ in the past). It was a post a lot of people found useful, although I have to admit I feel there is something not quite kosher about calling reading ‘devouring’ — somehow it makes it sound like ‘reading’ is an unusual way of feeding your mind, rather than the normal way we go about things (graduate students: guess how interested hiring committees are in your ability to demonstrate that you’ve bookmarked a lot of articles?). There was one thing that our two discussions has left out, however: thinking.

Thinking is one of the most important parts of the research process, second only to reading. (You must read. Read. Read. An article. A day. Read.) And yet I’m struck by the way that smart phones inhibit thinking by keeping us busy. When you are waiting for the bus checking Twitter, you are not only giving up the opportunity to read an article, you are giving up the opportunity for thought.

Thinking isn’t hard, at least not for me: most of my thinking occurs during my free time (walking is a fave) and just involves sitting there either silently ranting to myself (“We’ve given up thinking! Hey wait, I bet I could spin that out into a blog entry…”) or just sort of sitting there letting thoughts roll absently about in your head (“uh… interpellation…. hmm…”). Like sleep, the other major time your brain sorts itself out, moments of downtime spend stupidly pondering the universe can be remarkably productive because they allow your mind to shake the leaf bag that is your brain down until all your thoughts are nice and tightly nestled together.

Of course, thinking is second to reading because most thinking actually is the act of reading, which involves actively if silently responding to the author. But failing that, I really believe opening a beer, watching the sun set and going “uh… interpellation…” is a valid and important part of the academic process. So the next time you feel the urge to trawl the Internet for more things you’ll never read, take a second instead and turn off your smart phone and stare vacantly at the cars going by as you wait for your bus to come. Trust me — it’ll pay off in the long run.

Nicholas Negroponte famously insisted that the dotcom boomers, “Move bits, not atoms.” Ignorant of the atom heavy human bodies, neuron dense brains, and physical hardware needed to make and move those little bits, Negroponte’s ideal did become real in the industrial sectors dependent upon communication and economic transaction. In the communication sector, atomic newspapers have been replaced by bitly news stories. In the transactional sector, coins are a nuisance, few carry dollars, and I just paid for a haircut with a credit card adaptor on the scissor-wielder’s Droid phone.

The human consequences of the bitification of atoms go far beyond my bourgeois consumption. This shift, or what is could simply be called digitalization, when paired with their very material transportation systems or networked communication technologies, combines to form a powerful force that impacts local and global democracies and economies.

What are the local and political economics of granularity in the space shared between the fiduciary and the communicative? To understand the emergent political economy of the practices and discourses unifying around mobile media and digital money we need a shared language around the issue of granularity. read more…

Apologies for two posts in one night, but there’s a lot of news on the open access front.  First, the Quantum Pontiff asks whether Elsevier Could shut down arixiv.org:

They haven’t yet, but they are supporting SOPA, a bill that attempts to roll back Web 2.0 by making it easy to shut down entire sites like wikipedia and craigslist if they contain any user-submitted infringing material. (Here is a hypothetical airline-oriented version of SOPA, with only a little hyperbole about planes in the air.)

I think that appealing to Elsevier’s love of open scientific discourse is misguided. Individual employees there might be civic-minded, but ultimately they have $10 billion worth of reasons not to let the internet drive the costs of scientific publishing down to zero. Fortunately, their business model relies on the help of governments and academics. We can do our part to stop them by not publishing in, or refereeing for, their journals (the link describes other unethical Elsevier practices). Of course, this is easy to say in physics, harder in computer science, and a lot harder in fields like medicine.

That was via this post (thanks to Paul Manning on FB).  Michael E. Smith over at Publishing Archaeology is on it with news about related issues as well.  Now, some words from John Hawks about the NIH, public funded research, and open access: read more…

The sound: It was late afternoon.  I was in the middle of conducting an interview, recording the conversation with a small digital voice recorder.  Rain falling outside, in droves.  I could hear water rushing down the street.  The sound of water pouring from the roof.  Water dripping from here and there.  Clinking and clattering on the tin roof above.  Inside, one light in the corner of the room fought back the cold of the rain outside.  I was talking with a mother and her son amidst the incessant deluge.  The sound of the rainfall wasn’t exactly overwhelming, just constant.  In the moment, it all sounded pretty nice.

The fury: When I finally checked the recording later that night, the rain made it almost impossible to hear the conversation.  The voices of mother and son were swept up in an auditory wrecking ball that sounded more like a tornado than raindrops.  The interview was still salvageable, but it was hardly a masterpiece of ethnographic audio.  Frustrating. read more…

Just writing to send two quick thanks out to the anthropological blogosphere. First, on behalf of myself and all the other Minds here at SM I wanted to say thanks to all our readers for voting us their favorite anthropology blog for 2011. I understand that 75 votes may not be a totally representative sample of Teh Internetz, but it’s nice to receive the honor. We hope in future years we are totally blown out of the water by some of the other great anthropology blogs that have sprung up on line — it’s great to see the anthropological community grow.

Second, I wanted to thank Jason over at Anthropology Report for running the survey and for the bang-up job he’s been doing keeping us up to date with the goings-on of the blogosphere. No matter how many aggregators and algorithms you have, there is no substitute for a human filter, and anthropology has long needed a blogger who has made our online community his ‘beat’. Various people — us, Neuroanthropology, antropologi.info and so forth — have done this to some extent or another, but it’s never gotten the attention its deserved, so I’m very excited to see someone take this on. What I take to be Jason’s two beats — covering the blogosphere and connecting popular audiences to academic anthropology — are really valuable. He’s on my short list of feeds to read, so maybe he belongs on yours as well?

Once again, thanks everyone and here’s looking forward to a richly anthropological 2012.

A while back Rex wrote a comment on one of his posts that got me thinking.  About academia.  About publishing.  And about the current system that many of us are a part of.  Speaking about what he called the “awareness habitus of the general professorate,” he wrote:

…a lot of time when tenure committees speak half-heartedly of ‘publishing in major journals’ or citation statistics what they really mean is that they want junior faculty’s names to appear on the things that they read — to see them (although probably not read them!) ‘around’ in ‘important places’.

John Hawks followed with a great one liner posted just below, indicating that Rex had indeed hit the mark.  He’s onto something.  It’s the part about appearing in “important places” that really got my attention.  If getting tenure is all about being in these important places, here’s my question: Who defines what is and what is not an important place?  And, if this is one of the primary functions of our current publishing (and tenure) model, what does this say about the current state of affairs?

Just a few questions for today.  What I appreciate about Rex is that his posts and comments always keep me thinking–and asking questions.  Maybe too many questions sometimes.  As a graduate student who is still somewhat on the outside of things looking in, however, these kinds of questions matter.

In prepping for my new gender studies course this spring I’m rereading Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Mother Nature for the first time in about ten years. Well, aside from looking at the pictures and glancing over my underlines that is. So it came as somewhat of a surprise to find that Hrdy, twelve years out from publication, had something to say about now top-tier presidential candidate, Rick Santorum.

The story she’s referencing has already been trotted out by websites like Jezebel, about how late in Santorum’s wife’s fourth pregnancy something went catastrophically wrong, her body went into septic shock and doctors recommend an abortion. Because the procedure collided with “their” worldview (I’m assuming that her beliefs coincide with his) the mother risked her life despite the fact that doctors predicted her child would die regardless. In the end the mother survived but the baby died.

What really stands out to me in the passage is the great wit that Hrdy marshals in her description of Santorum on the senate floor, not easy to do given the circumstances, recontextualizing the abortion debate as something older than politics itself. It’s a testament to what a talented writer can do with words and how one anthropologist contributed to the discourse by deconstructing it.

Hrdy. 1999. Mother Nature. (pp.5-6)

The abortion issue is notorious for generating so much “heat” and so little “light.” On this particular occasion, one of the senators debating the issue (Rick Santorum, Republican from Pennsylvania) became “so emotional” that the blood vessels leading to his stomach constricted, while those leading to his heart and brain dilated. Responding to signals from the most ancient portions of his brain, his pounding heart caused the face of this deeply threatened mammal to flush “crimson” in preparation for a fight. His voice rose to such a pitch that colleagues had to intervene.

…

The abortion debate is ultimately about what it means to be a mother; and the senator, like many humans before him, had his own unusually clear notion of what mothers were for. The couple already had three young children, but this fourth birth was given clear priority over his wife’s well-being as well as that of her other children. Fortunately, the mother survived. But, as doctors predicted, the new baby died shortly after birth.

As the debate unfolded, the rush of blood and pounding heart beneath the senator’s coat and tie spoke volumes about motivations far deeper, far older, then members of Congress ordinarily consider. Like all humans, and indeed as is typical of the entire Primate order, the senator exhibited an intense, even obsessive, interest in the reproductive condition of other group members. Like other high-status male primates before him, he was intent on controlling when, where, and how females belonging to his group reproduced. One former member of the House of Representatives, however, sensed that there was more at stake than just the issues under debate. “It’s very interesting the issues they select,” observed Patricia Schroeder of Colorado. “They don’t want to intervene in the bodily functions of men.”

Schroeder’s quip goes to the heart of the matter. Passionate debates about abortion derive from motivations to control female reproduction that are far older than any particular system of government, older than patriarchy, older even than recorded history. Male fascination with the reproductive affairs of female group members predates our species.

I’m pretty sure I had a quote from Hrdy about Newt Gingrich too. If I find it again I’ll add it to the comments. Finally, the ‘90s are going retro! That’s good. I was getting sick of all this ‘80s crap: Ronald Regan, Don Henley. Bring back the culture wars and A Tribe Called Quest.

Many of you have probably used a road today, maybe even a highway. You didn’t think too much about it, the same way you didn’t worry about the electricity supply to your house, or the potability of your water. You pay taxes or utility bills, you get first world services — something we affluent first worlders are incredibly privileged to receive.

Now imagine one day you wake up, get in your car, and find a toll booth at the entrance to your local freeway or artery.

“What’s going on?” you ask.

“The government recently passed a law making it illegal for government agencies to allow you to use public works just because you’ve paid the taxes that create them,” says the attendant at the toll booth.

“That’s crazy,” you say.

“I guess they were worried that all of the contractors would go out of business if people just used roads funded by federal money.”

“Is it like a jobs thing, like they’re afraid all the construction guys are going to be out of a job if the government doesn’t step in? Like to protect the economy?”

“On the contrary,” the attendant says, “all of the construction workers are volunteers, from the guy operating the backhoe to the surveyors. It’s the accountants and CEOs in the back office who are earning salaries, and they’re raking in millions every year.”

read more…

A favorite topic on the blogosphere is whether or not Seediq Bale is an historically accurate take on the Wushe Incident. Some details, at least, are inaccurate, and people have some questions for the director Wei Te-sheng. For instance: Why is Mona Rudao at events in the early 1900s he didn’t attend (人止關 in 1902 and 姊妹原 in 1903)? Why does Mona Rudao shoot at Seediq women when there’s no historical evidence for it and when it goes against gaya - tribal tradition or teaching? Where does the child warrior Pawan Nawi come from? And so forth.

read more…

In academia the month of December is a crescendo of responsibilities, but our Twitter feed of links to anthroblogs, world news, and internet flotsam sailed on. This handy monthly report is a sample of what we were reading. If you’ve seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community, email me at MDTHOMPS @ ODU.EDU.

• The five stages of grading. #timewaster //MT
• RE: library costs – Ebooks are fine for pleasure reading but for serious study “We don’t read that way.” //MT
• Auction houses as a site for the social construction of value. //MT
• “Children of the Jungle” racist British colonial film about Bhils and Gonds (1939). #adivasi /KF
• Student Loan Fury in the Occupy Movement » Is anthropology a dead end? /KF
• Read this: Vincente Diaz shows us what indigenous anthro looks like in 8 open access pages /RM
• HAU is launched! Brand new, open access Journal of Ethnographic Theory /KF
• Yay! New RSAnimate, “The Divided Brain.” //MT
• Military Assc of Atheists & Freethinkers wants the military to provide chaplains for estimated 40,000 atheists //MT

read more…