Savage Minds

Honestly I don’t know why I’m on a journalism kick lately, but here I go again: Colin Marshall, host of a podcast and radio show called The Marketplace of Ideas recently posted an excellent list of interview techniques, including things like “have a conversation” and “reveal your ignorance”. Two things are interesting: 1) journalists, like anthropologists, frequently fall prey to an ideological sense of what makes a “scientific” or objective interview (a rote list of questions asked like the advancing front of a battle), and it often makes for bad journalism, by which I mean, journalism that doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know; and 2) everything Marshall lists might be understood as ways to get outside the “framing” of discourse. This latter point is essential to me: anthropologists are doing good work when they figure out how to de-frame discourse, i.e. how to work a conversation out of the frames that restrict people from thinking. The salience of “framing” is obvious to sociologists, linguists, political scientists and others today, and there is much quality research on framing… but very little research on resisting the framing of discourse and enabling the progress of thinking. I read these tips as clear strategies for doing just that.

In a recent anthropological lecture at UCLA an unnamed professor stated that colonialism is over, that somehow, somewhere all anti-colonial revolutions succeeded, or all colonials gave up because of cost or frustration. I was in the lecture hall and had already edited my antagonistic response. Here it is. Belfast is Still a Divided City is a documentary I shot and edited in 2008. It was broadcast on cable and satellite network Current TV in US, Ireland, UK, and Italy to 55 million viewers. No it is not observational or ethnographic but yes it is anthropological. Deal with it. Argue. It is surely slanted in favor of the Irish liberation movement. They were the ones who housed, fed, and gave me access. They became my friends. So access goes.

And so it also went in Palestine in 2009. The one’s who returned my rampant calls, emails, and door knocks were not the Israeli rabbis and politicians but the impoverished Palestinians. These shoots in Palestine and Northern Ireland are part of a documentary about divided cities around the world: Belfast, Jerusalem, Nicosia, Mostar, Berlin….LA. Usually the indigenous or minority population is more apt to take the gamble and work with uncredentialed mediamakers like me than the established powers who have mainstream print and TV media. These include the Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the Irish in Northern Ireland, and Latinos in LA. User generated content (UGC) nonfiction media is a weapon of the weak; economics, sanctions, barriers, primetime TV, state racism are the weapons of the strong.

On St. Patty’s Day, school yourself on the indigenous Irish sovereignty movement and the Protestant colonial activities by scoping my short doc.

Current’s blurb goes: “Ten years after the Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland maintains a relative calm. Despite a few isolated incidents, the fighting seems to have ended. But has this brought Protestant and Catholic groups closer together? In Belfast the two groups live in neighborhoods that are still physically separated by ‘peace walls.’”

Check it: Belfast is Still a Divided City: 90014381_belfast-is-still-a-city-divided.htm or http://current.com/items/90014381_belfast-is-still-a-city-divided.htm

In an unfortunately-forgotten bit of 70s academic bloodsport, Marvin Harris and Marshall Sahlins battled it out in the pages of the New York Review of Books over the origin Aztec cannibalism: was it, as Harris argued, something Aztecs were driven to as a result of a protein deficiency? No, Sahlins answered, but even if it was all of the symbolism and institutions surrounding it would still have to be explained as a result of culture, not nutrition. Sahlins’s argument was devastatingly convincing because it explained two phenomenon with a single maneuver: Aztec cannibalism was a result of culture, not nutritional needs, just as Harris’s belief in it was motivated not by facts, but by his own (American) cultural tendency to see human behavior as shaped by biological factors.

A disagreement with similar contours is afoot today. The latest skirmish in the Jared Diamond wars deals not only with issues of scholarly accuracy, but also the cultural/personal motivation of the protagonists as well as the social effects of their arguments. The main protagonists are the authors of Questioning Collapse, an edited volume in which expert scholars take issue with Jared Diamond’s reading of their specialty topics: the Rapa Nui (Easter Island) specialist discusses Diamond’s use of the Rapa Nui data, the Incan specialist discusses Diamond on Pizzaro and Atahualpa, and so forth. The book is critical of Diamond, who has responded with a review in Nature that is none too friendly itself.

The Usual Denunciations are already issuing from Stinky Journalism.org, which mostly focus on how unethical it was for Diamond to write a review of a book that criticized his book without explicitly telling readers the book he was criticizing criticized him. You can check it out if you want, but I think its much more interesting to see how the back and forth between Questioning Collapse and Diamond exemplified some of the issues that played out twenty years earlier in the Sahlins/Harris debate. How do we tack between the social effects of our work and its accuracy? How can we address the cultural underpinnings that motivate an author’s writing without falling back into ad hominem attacks? How well does Collapse stand up to scholarly scrutiny? And how good a job does Questioning Collapse do of reaching out to Diamond’s popular audience? These questions are worth asking — even if you are a little burned out on the Jared Diamond wars.
read more…

Two Facebook partners have to friend one another, and exchange “likes” and links incidentally; they behave as friends, and have a number of mutual duties and obligations, which vary with the distance between their real life homes and with their reciprocal status. An average user has a few friends nearby, as a rule his co-workers, or his family, and with these contacts he is on very friendly terms. The Facebook friendship is one of the special bonds which unite two people into one of the standing relations of mutual exchange of social reputation which is so characteristic of these digital natives. Again, the average person will have one or two celebrities in his network with whom they are “friends. In such a case they would be expected to serve them in various ways, such as becoming a “fan” and to share links to any new media these celebrities might post to their fan pages.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to the original text.

Anthropologist Roxanne Varzi came to our UCLA working group Culture, Power, and Social Change last week and spoke and showed a courageous and wise reflexive ethnographic film “Plastic Flowers Never Die” on the religio-statist support of martyrdom in Iran. I asked a question about how to theorize the role of digital ‘texts’ in the present era of ubiquitous self-publishing and social broadcasting. I was thinking about jihadi videos that are shot and distributed on online video portals as advertisement, recruitment tools, or celebrations of religio-military success. According to the IntelCenter, jihadi videos can be categorized as operational, hostage, statement, tribute, training, and instructional videos.

Essentially antagonistic with technoprogressive modernity while exploiting the simplicity, freedom, and access that comes with new media, these videos can be described as vanguard, counter, resistant, or subversive to capitalistic modernity while using the forefront of the sociotechnical tools of that capitalist technocracy. Our models of user-generated labor, from Shirkey and Benkler’s celebrations of social production to Terranova’s Marxist perspective on exploitative and ‘free’ labor, might not fit this un-capitalist media production practice. It is going to take a mix of something new to get it. But what?

I asked Varzi about jihadi videos: “These strike me as a rich source of information about a culture that is otherwise inaccessible to anthropologists: jihadi martyrs. How would you go about developing a critical anthropological methodology to reading these video texts?” Correctly but dangerously she stated she wouldn’t do it without an ethnographic component. I thought to myself: Let me get this right. I gotta hang out, like, deeply, with jihadi terrorists? As an anthropologist I cannot make a statement about jihadi video production practices without having first squeezed my way into their schedule and shared a few meetings over tea with my local jihadist? I’d love to, frankly, but I doubt I can network into their cliques. Are we going to let these remarkably reflexive, vocal “weapons of the weak” go unnoticed? If we can’t talk about these videos we are losing our disciplinary focus on subcultural expression and resistance and an opportunity to expand our methodological repertoire.

Jihadi video producers and new media firms, my focus, share little but extreme privacy. The similarities end there, but the problems for the ethnographer of either are identical: gaining access. My subjects are powerful. They have ideas that are worth millions in venture capital. Their lawyers are all about intellectual property. They live comfortable lives. They don’t need my cultural capital. They don’t need me around. Infrequently and for whatever reason, they invite me into their world. The Frontline documentary Behind Taliban Lines is a rare example that follows a single video journalist into the operations of the Taliban attempting to blow up a US convoy. This rarely happens in every context where a researcher wants access. Our own Rex thinks our focus should be on the subtle and not the savage, he’ll be happy to know that anthropologists usually are aren’t gutsy enough to pursue such inaccessible subjects.

What if I couldn’t meet these wealthy entrepreneurs in person? What if they were so private that participant observation was impossible? I would be forced to construct something anthropological through their public representations. Thankfully, my subjects produce a lot of media. They socially broadcast on Facebook and Twitter and have scheduled relations with the public at conferences. (Except for TED, which at $6000 a weekend excludes most.) But with or without ethnography, this project, like a hypothetical investigation of jihadi video producers, needs to happen. If we have to begin-and probably end-with texts, what will we do? We’ll need to first develop an anthropologically specific way of reading these video texts and other public media artifacts.

The time is now to revisit our present anthropological theories about the role of textual studies. Finding its most useful expression in reconstructive indigenous and postcolonial historiographies, texts have long been an essential part of our field. But have we fully fleshed out a spectrum of specific theories for each type of text? I am not interested in adjudicating the validity or truthfulness of this text versus that. Colonial documents, biographies, and census records need to be differentially theorized not as statements of fact or fiction but as culturally situated texts. What I am fishing for is a debate on whether the new digital documents can find a home in contemporary anthropological theory. What differentiates paper-based from Web 2.0 personal documents and text from video? Most importantly, how can we take a culturally distinct but necessarily distant visual text of war and conflict, consider its technical and productive online existence, not defer to speculation on auteur intentionality, be mindful of the artifacts that appear on screen, and extrapolate back to the producer’s culture?

More broadly, we need to ask ourselves how to do an anthropological study of ethnographically inaccessible objects: leadership of corporations, governments, terrorist cells, elite institutions. Anthropologist Jane Weddell’s recent book, The Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government and the Free Market” is a fine example. Ethical problems abound in all these projects. Just as Nancy Scheper-Hughes prospered, so will the anthropologist of video culture of martyrdom and other inaccessible objects.

Those who just recently joined the AAA might not know about the 2004 battle over whether or not the conference would be held in San Francisco. At issue was a strike by UNITE-HERE, a hotel workers union. In the end, the AAA chose not to cross the picket line and there was a change of venue. I played a small role then, having helped set up the AAA-UNITE blog and email list, although my involvement pretty much ended there. Robert O’Brien, however, went on to join the Labor Relations Commission (LRC) which was set up to help avoid having similar problems in the future.

Now O’Brien seems to have had enough. After a long silence, he has a new post up on the AAA-UNITE blog, where he writes that he is suffering from “commission-fatigue” —

the creeping death that sets in when you’ve been part of a successful organizing campaign that is co-opted and turned into a rubber stamp for the policies you’d been fighting.

At issue is this year’s conference in New Orleans. There is no strike in New Orleans, but the LRC members are angry that the conference is being held in a non-union hotel.

According to O’Brien, one of the things that happened after 2004 was a vote by the AAA Executive Board mandating that all AAA meetings be held in unionized venues. Now, you may disagree with this position, but it seems to have been arrived at as the result of a democratic process by the AAA leadership. For some reason, which O’Brien doesn’t explain, this policy was downgraded from being a “requirement” to being merely a “preference.” It isn’t clear if this is simply a difference of opinion, or if it was a change made by fiat by the AAA staff?

In either case, the choice of venue this year runs contrary to that preference/requirement, and the LRC is urging action. While O’Brien has personally decided to boycott the meeting, other members of the LRC are hoping to use the meetings to push forward for reforms. Specifically, they want to “change the conference organizing firm that AAA uses from the corporate-friendly Conference Direct to the labor-friendly INMEX.” They are urging individual sections to adopt proposals in favor of this change, and are planning to propose such a motion at the business meeting in New Orleans, as well as with the Executive Board. You can read the full letter over at the AAA-Unite post.

If you would like to sign on to the letter, please email Steve Striffler <striffler {at} hotmail(.)com> or Paul Durrenburger <pauldurren {at} verizon(.)net>.

For months — perhaps even years — John McCreery and MTBradley have been sounding off in the comments about how damn hard it is to learn textile format, the only way SM accepts to format comments. It turns out he wasn’t the only one. Textile — a beloved markup language I learned back in the days of the University of Blogaria — was bringing our site to its knees with its inefficient and moribund addon. Since I was the only one using it, the community didn’t like it, and it crippled the site, we’ve disabled it. Textile is dead, long live HTML — huzzah!

The downside of this is that since it took me like a month to make the change it will probably take even longer for me to go back and clean up the entries I’ve written that have textile markup in them. So for a while — indeed, let’s face it, possibly forever — these pieces will look weird. Sorry — its just hard to find time to do website maintenance while also applying for tenure. And any rate that stuff is old news, right?

This week, I was happy to find blogs that I hadn’t seen in the past (and no, I’m talking about the Economist online).  If I’m missing a blog (like your blog), email me, and I can include them in future weeks and put them on our blogroll.

So Over It: The Philosophers’ Magazine interviewed Alan Sokal, the physicist most remembered for publishing a fake deconstructionist article in Social Text and then announcing that it was a hoax.  In addition to lamenting that he will, in all likelihood, only be remembered for that incident, Sokal lamented the anti-philosophical ethos of the  younger generation of physicists.  Where could they have gotten that from?

If there’s an idea floating in different corners of the blogosphere, count on Daniel Lende at neuroanthopology to put it all together.  That’s just what he did for this post on 5 rules for anthropologists to reach broader audiences.

The Economist has a short piece on gendercide- the systematic abortion or infanticide of female children.  Almost more troubling that some areas of the world have a 120:100 male to female birthrate is the fact that neither poverty, education, rural/urban locality, or national policy alone can account for the rise of such cases.

Disciplined Struggle: Ryan Anderson of ethnografix posted on anthropology vs. economics–that intellectual cage match within the human sciences to explain social behavior.  Economics get more recognition, Anderson reasons, because its basic premises lends itself to models that are easy to pick up and apply to any number of situations.  But anthropologists’ attention ethnographic detail shouldn’t be a reason to fold our arms and say the world doesn’t understand us.  But, Anderson argues, anthropologists have arguments in their toolbox that can scale up too.

HTS To Go: Maximillian Forte at Zero Anthropology posted on the latest development in the anthropomilitary strategy–the continuation of Human Terrain principles in Afghanistan without Human Terrain Teams.  Forte shows that more and more of this knowledge production will be shifted to actual soldiers or military contractors.

A Nice Piece of History: Ethnocuba has a great piece about Edward Tylor’s little-known excursion to Cuba before he went to Mexico and collected information for his first book, Anahuac.

Biologists Get All Biosocial: Has the world turned right side up?  Nicolas Wade at the New York Times reports on new research that is getting biologists to recognize the role culture has played in recent human evolution.

We here at Savage Minds are happy to announce that Adam Fish has gone savage and become a full-member of the team. Originally brought on as a guest-blogger during a 2009 film fieldtrip to Palestine, Adam has been an enthusiastic contributor to the site and we look forward to more of his thought provoking contributions. He is a PhD student at UCLA investigating new media social entrepreneurs and other technolibertarians. He is also a documentary filmmaker. Find out more about his research and film projects here, see a list of his posts here.

Adam will initiate an untitled monthly interview project where he will talk each month with someone doing provocative ethnographic research. An example would be this fascinating interview Adam did for the Archaeology Channel with Mercedes Doretti, a forensic archaeologist who worked at every known location of genocide and mass murder in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Welcome Adam! If readers have any suggestions for potential interviewees please contact him directly at rawbird {at} gmail(.)com

It is not uncommon for us to refer to the corridors of academia as a kind of metaphor for the gossipy, informal, discourse which takes place outside of classrooms. Yet we rarely engage in ethnographic study of how academics actually use corridors. This is exactly what Rachel Hurdley has done. She wrote about her research in her paper “The Power of Corridors: connecting doors, mobilising materials, plotting openness.” I heard Rachel Hurdley talk about her research on my favorite BBC Podcast, Thinking Allowed.

Her paper is a response to efforts at moving academics towards more open, less walled-off spaces of the type which has become vogue in the business world.

the university is joining the latest movement in the public sphere towards open-plan, multi-functional, flexible, innovative structures which are constantly equated with ‘openness’, ‘innovation’ and ‘transparency’ by design experts and architects

Hurdley debunks the simplistic association of open spaces with the lack of hierarchy, pointing out the resemblance to feudal halls and much-despised modernist housing. She also highlights the creative and flexible ways in which people actually use corridors. Especially interesting is how she depicts corridors as resisting a single point of view, such as that embodied in Foucault’s panopticon:

These could be called processions of openings and closings between different knowledge domains or worlds: proffering left-overs, knowing not to eat them; talking by the printer, taking it away; putting her in the picture, writing his name in the gap. Similarly, static or one-way concepts of surveillance, spectacle and visibility are recast and mobilised. An ‘apex viewpoint’ at the turn by the director’s office is no more than a corner to a student; only the student can spot his supervisor’s office light.

In the interview she also discussed just how resistant faculty are to such changes. Some threaten to quit upon hearing of such proposed changes, while in places where they have already been implemented, many professors work at home.

Also mentioned during the interview was the fact that academics often use the corridor to “cancel e-mails.” That is, as they walk down the corridor they yell out through the open doors of their colleagues that they should ignore the e-mail they’d sent out earlier that day. She remarked that this seemed to fly in the face of our assumptions about the speed and ease-of-use of electronic communication, but I can totally understand this kind of behavior. Nobody wants to be the person who sends out a stream of e-mails correcting mistakes in previous e-mails, much better to yell it out as you walk down the corridor…

(This occasional contribution comes from the team of Ken MacLeish and Zoė H. Wool. Ken is a doctoral candidate in anthropology and the Program in Folklore, Public Culture and Cultural Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He conducted 12 months of intensive fieldwork with soldiers and military families at and around the U.S. Army’s Ft. Hood in Killeen, TX. His dissertation explores the impacts of war and military institutions in everyday life via the concepts of attachment, vulnerability and exchange. Zoe is a doctoral candidate in socio-cultural and linguistic anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation is titled Emergent Ordinaries at Walter Reed Army Medical Center: An ethnography of extra/ordinary encounter. It focuses on the dialectic of the ordinary and extraordinary in the lives of soldiers who are marked by violence. )

You might have noticed the strong militarized thread running through this year’s list of Oscar nominated films. A not necessarily exhaustive list includes: The Hurt Locker, Avatar, Inglourious Basterds, The Messenger, District 9, The Most Dangerous Man in America, Burma VJ, and Star Trek.

As a couple of anthropologists who study American soldiers, we’ve been struck by the much-ballyhoed showdown between Avatar and The Hurt Locker, particularly because there’s been relatively little said about the fact that the protagonists of both films are soldiers (Avatar’s Jake Sully is of course a marine of some fictitious and unspecified variety, but we’re going to take a leap and dispense with the service jargon).

After several years of largely unwatched and un-lauded contemporary American war films (Lions for Lambs, In The Valley of Ellah, Stop Loss, Dear John, Redacted, The Kingdom), it is worth taking a moment to ponder the significance of fictionalized American soldiers being at the center of such dramatically different films at a moment when actual American soldiers and Marines have, until just recently, largely vanished from the headlines. Soldiers are a key figure and symbol mediating public assumptions about, and relationships to, war violence. We wondered what the competing images in Avatar and The Hurt Locker suggest about those assumptions and relationships.

The two films are a study in contrasts on a number of levels. Avatar is a $400 million blockbuster that shattered director James Cameron’s own previous box office world record. The Hurt Locker had a budget of $16 million, and writer Mark Boals and director Katherine Bigelow self-produced it with funds from European backers because they were unsure if it would ever see a full theatrical release in the U.S.

Avatar was filmed mainly in front of green screens with its actors in motion-capture suits, a curious parallel to the film’s body-trading premise. Its incandescent alien flora and fauna serve as the backdrop for a moralizing tale drenched in liberal sentiment. The Hurt Locker was filmed on location in Amman, Jordan, less than 200 miles from the Iraqi border. Its palette is essentially sepia-tone, rounded out with blood and the black smoke of bomb detonations, and it’s an essentially plotless examination of war detached from political narrative.

James Cameron wrote the script for Avatar more than ten years ago, so its parallels with the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan—insurgent locals, resource exploitation driven by corporate interests, and well-meaning “anthropologists” trying to forestall bloodshed (can you say HTS?)—arguably say as much about the abiding features of counterinsurgency war in general as about the current wars in particular. Mark Boals’ Hurt Locker script is based on his time as an embedded reporter with a U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) team in Iraq, and yet the film is less ‘about’ the Iraq War than it is about the pleasures and pathologies of making and being exposed to violence.

Above all, the films depict radically different relationships between their protagonists, the violence they make and endure, and the greater logic of that violence. Avatar is a redemptive tale. In Jake Sully, the film gives us a curious blend of wronged veteran and cynical mercenary who transforms into pure-hearted revolutionary. The details of Jake’s tragic biography, his exceptional biometrics, and his mix of defeated nihilism and warrior’s code contextualize his decision first to do some things that are really bad (like helping to decimate a population and a planet to extract natural resources for profit) and then some that are really good (like coming to understand that this kind of exploitation should be stopped at all costs). The Hurt Locker, on the other hand, provides little context for its three EOD team protagonists beyond their dedication to, and enthusiasm for, their job. A few jumbled bits of background suggest that they are bound only tenuously to anyone or anything outside of the claustrophobic masculinity of military life. But this closed-off immediacy is a kind of ethical commentary in itself, as the film invites its audience to imagine the human-scale experience of a narratively overdetermined event—like war—that must be lived without the luxury of the kind of measured, meaningful and redemptive context that Avatar provides.

In Avatar, the combat violence is both the evidence and the means of evil deeds and the mechanism for righting wrongs. The humans fight to destroy and exploit, or even for the (clearly unwholesome) pleasure of killing. Cameron depicts the film’s mercenary grunts with an abundance of quasi-realistic contemporary detail—from their uniforms and hairstyles to their technical jargon and slang—but he also shows them as vulgar, sadistic, abelist, and racist, the dark side to Jake’s human vulnerability and empathy and his soldierly discipline and determination. For the Na’vi, on the other hand, violence against living things is imbued with righteousness and spiritual and existential significance. In both its thematic connotations and in its action, the film’s violence is utterly transparent. Good violence and bad violence are clearly meant to be distinguishable. And Sully’s perhaps accidental quotation of an Airborne slogan “death from above” to describe Na’vi aerial hunting suggests that good violence can safely blend militaristic and mystical attitudes. The bad guys strike first and leave destruction where there was peace and plenty. The ballet of arrows and rockets and soaring beasts and hovering aircraft that articulate and allegorize just and unjust violences is presented in excruciatingly elaborate technical detail, making it clear exactly how each act of destruction contributes to the morally freighted conflict. Violence always has a meaning and a message, its ramifications in the material world mapping point for point onto a moral one.

If Avatar is orderly and transparent, The Hurt Locker is unruly and opaque, both thematically and aesthetically, refusing the anchored of ethical certainty. The sense of devastation is generalized, and the temporality of before, during, and after doesn’t necessarily apply: violence happens and it’s happening now, arbitrarily bookended by the last days of these soldiers’ deployment. Even the seemingly orderly unfolding of the calendar—signposted throughout the film with periodic title cards showing number of days remaining—becomes disordered as the time of passing days is effaced by the racing seconds of a detonation device. Sergeant First Class James’ arrival in the unit at the beginning of the film finds an uncanny echo at its end when he arrives again. Time simultaneously loops back on itself and also counts down at the pace of a calendar and of a time bomb and of a rotation. The unfolding of time that can give violence a redemptive logic in Avatar is, in The Hurt Locker, shattered and fragmented.

It is this fragmentation, rather than any solid explanatory framework that characterizes the violence in The Hurt Locker. There are threats everywhere, but the only identifiable enemies are at a distance—seen through a scope from hundreds of meters away—or utterly absent—the bombmakers who leave their creations for the soldiers to find. When James and his fellow soldiers Sanborn and Eldridge return fire on a shooter they cannot see, the script, camerawork and editing keep the shooter obscured for several minutes—an eternity by action movie standards. When a bomb detonates on the ground next to an unsuspecting soldier, he literally disappears in a cloud of smoke. Just as scenes of violence are deliberately evacuated of all but a physical intelligibility, The Hurt Locker makes no direct reference to the larger political and strategic logic of the war. In contrast to Avatar’s sweeping scale and redemptive violence, The Hurt Locker’s visual and moral universe is one in which violence resolves little, but is its own dilemma and its own reward.

None of this even begins to touch on some of the other themes that cross these films: the gendering of violence; the place of capitalism and entrepreneurship; the competing modes of bodily discipline and decay; notions of “cultural difference”; or countless aspects of technical execution and visual style. Clearly the contrasts of these two films, and the soldiers in them are good to think with. Our thinking has left us with a few questions about these portrayals of soldiers and war violence and what they might mean.  We submit them here for your consideration:

• Is there any way of squaring the fragmentary and contingent quality of violence in The Hurt Locker and the ethics of grand ideas displayed in Avatar? And in either case, what does this mean for how we think about soldiers who carry out violence?
• What can we glean from both films’ portrayal of a deeply ambivalent relationship between the soldier and the military institution that he or she serves?
• What is the relationship between the very bodily solder and other inanimate or semi-animate instruments of war? In what circumstances does the soldier’s bodilyness dispose him to be read as just a body, and in what circumstances does it round out his humanity and heroism by serving as a sign of his discipline and prowess?
• Can soldiers ever also be seen as regular folks, and do they ever get to “be normal”? Or do they always have to choose between the chaos of war and a home that is (in one way or another) made strange?

UPDATE: Updated post to include Zoë H. Wool’s bio and byline.

I was thinking recently of how much I dislike the welter of food/travel channels on cable TV, and how this is related to my tendency to think about anthropology as a connoisseurship of life. These type shows — or better, they are part of a huge media system that trains its consumers — to want excitement, shock, the unexpected, the excessive. Let’s just call this an impulse to ’savagery’. So when people find out that we are anthropologists — assuming that they don’t think we study dinosaur bones — they want savagery from us: titillating bits of excessive and unexpected difference.Giving it to them is, I suppose, one way to get some publicity.

However, as Lévi-Strauss might have predicted, show where people go all over the world and eat/meet people run aground on the fact that most people are not all that different, since all foods/people are just combinations of each other. How many times can Tony Bourdain discover street vendors who sell sausage? Or the astounding fact that “this country also has flat bread/stew/a staple starch”? As a result I always feel these shows are constantly being ground down by the very hyperbolic nature which always requires them to push up against their edges.

I think an important part of being an anthropologist is that you are not deeply attracted to savagery, but rather something I’d call ’subtlety’: an appreciation for the little things in life. It comes from an awareness of them, all of them, which helps you put things in context: why that flat bread that way? How does metalworking in this place mean the dough gets put on top of one sort of thing rather than another? This for Boas this was a German ideographic impulse in which Lévi-Strauss, I reckon, saw a certain family resemblance with his own Frenchified impulses to connoisseurship. In America it has a populist tinge.

I think that one of the most important things anthropologists can do (and I’m thinking here of American anthropologists speaking to Americans since that is where I’m from) is to take people’s initial expectation that we are savagery experts and use it to help them see the subtlety of life. Doing so means helping them get inside ethnographic examples and minutiae.  Compare, for example, Andrew Zimmer eating Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches on camera to Dan Jurasfky’s awesome Language of Food blog. You don’t have to already be a total geek to watch in amazement as he traces fish and chips around the world from Persia to England — its a fascinating journey in and of itself.

I say this because I worry that anthropologists often think that the public wants to see them studying ’sexy’ topics like black market arms dealers, the global market in organs, transvestite hookers, and so on and so forth. I think these are all interesting topics but in lauding these topics as examples of something ‘the public will find interesting’ I feel us inexorably slipping into savagery mode rather than subtlety mode. So bring on the local staple starch and yet more cousin terminology — and a subtle approach to life that appreciates them!

For Your Consideration: The Harvard students’ newspaper interviewed anthropology professor Kimberly Theidon about the Academy Award nominated documentary “The Milk of Sorrow” that is inspired by Theidon’s 2004 book Entre Prójimos.  The twist?  Theidon did not know at first that her book on sexual violence against women in Peru was the inspiration for the film.

For Your Listening Pleasure: BBC Radio is streaming an audio report chronicling the story of Malinowski and the invention of field work.  Some things will make you raise your eyebrow, while other comments will make you roll your eyes.  Features interviews with Adam Kuper amongst others.

Anthropologists Do it Better: Tony Waters (a sociologist by training) from ethnography.com writes on why the International Studies Association (ISA) just doesn’t do it for him, and how AAA’s is where it’s at.  The best part of the story is when Waters is pulled into a meeting with a bunch of government bureaucrats on providing humanitarian aid to Nigeria.  He describes it this way:

The other NGO guy and I were the only ones there not in suit and tie.  We were also the only ones not dropping names of White House contacts, or mumbling about how we had such-and-such a security clearance from the US government but didn’t know what was happening in Nigeria.

Yeah, I’d stick to AAAs too.

‘Merck’y Transactions: On Somatosphere, guest contributor Ari Samsky posted a piece on the multinational pharamaceutical companies’ donations of medicine to the global south and the formulation of a ’scientific sovereignty’ that results.

Sound Off: Hendrik Hertzberg wrote a brief piece for the New Yorker online on Rush Limbaugh’s race-baiting insinuation that Barack Obama turns African American English on and off in order to appeal to different constituencies.  (Limbaugh went as far as accusing the president of reading ‘aks’ off the teleprompter.)  For a further analysis, see this piece on Language Log (and thanks to the Log for originally linking to the Henzberg piece).

Morning Cup of Evolutionary Psychology (Now with slightly less of that eugenic aftertaste):  You might disagree with the reasoning, results, and even the premise of this Time Article linking liberalism, atheism, and monogamy to a higher IQ in men.  But, at least some readers will also get a sense of self-satisfaction.

Want to share something with SM readers?  Post in comments below, or email.

I just want to point out to readers that there has been all kinds of discussion around Dominic Boyer’s post on Neosocialism which has been disrupted by a slow server and an overly aggressive spam filter. I apologize to everyone whose messages have been disappeared by our totalitarian spam control Stasi. Curious that this post should cause this problem so acutely…

In any case, take a second look at the discussion, if you have a chance.

Yesterday I attended a looong seminar by an acquisitions editor of a university press in which he went over everything from how to revise your dissertation to how the covers of books get designed. It was a rare opportunity to hear from acquisitions editors what they were thinking about and how their job worked (thanks to all who organized). The guy there mentioned a book which I’ve found very helpful in the past and which I thought deserved a nod on the blog for anyone thinking about turning their book into a dissertation. Namely,

Getting It Published by William Germano

Germano’s book does not actually have a series of easy-to-follow steps that will lead to being instantly published, but it does help give you context for what decisions are made in publishing and how they are made. It’s a valuable reality check for someone looking to publish. Like I say I’ve read it and found it really helpful.

There are a few other books that the editor didn’t mention but which I’ve also gotten some mileage out of that may be off the academic radar that I thought I’d mention as well. The first is

Making The Perfect Pitch: How To Catch A Literary Agent’s Eye, by Katharine Sands

Of the bintillion ‘how to get your first novel published’ books out there this is the one that I think is actually worthwhile. It’s quite ethnographic, actually — it contains numerous five-to-ten page reminiscences by authors and agents about how to write one-page pitch letters to attract a literary agent. It’s a frank, engaging book that features people finally laying down on the page all the complaining and advising they’ve been doing for years. There is no real overview or formula or big idea — just a chance to see some good (and bad!) examples and to climb into these people’s habituses. Habitoi? Habtiusi? Even though we academics don’t do agent-based publishing its still a great read.

Finally, in distant third is:

Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath

I have to admit that I am not a big fan of “books Lifehacker is breathlessly enthusiastic for this week”, and particularly not books like this which stray into social science territory. In this book the Heaths attempt to boil down into a simply formula the six things that supposedly are memorable ideas have. To a lot of people it will seem like a fluffy mix of cognitive psychology and folklore studies that could have been ten pages long. Bu I have to admit that ever since I’ve read this book I find myself unwillingly recognizing the utility of their framework. I’ll be explaining how ‘theoretical contribution’ is measured by the NSF and find myself saying “it’s like the ‘unexpectedness’ criteria from Made to Stick” or be talking about a dissertation proposal and say “it’s really got ’story’”. So maybe there is something to it after all. At any rate if you just go to the book’s website you can check out the six principles and if you give them your email address you can download a bunch of stuff and just skip the book entirely. So a guarded thumbs up for this one as well.

I know there are other books on publishing out there — I think ‘the art of abstracting’ is a strange a lovely hommage to the work of being a full-time absracter, for instance — and would be interested in hearing other people’s recommendations.