Three recent articles about blogging or otherwise posting personal thoughts online caught my interest. The first, which I commented on at my personal website is the Chronicle piece by "Ivan Tribble", "Bloggers Need Not Apply". Tribble, recently released from search committee duties at his school, rails against academics who blog, under the guise of "helpful advice" to job-seekers.

We all have quirks. In a traditional interview process, we try our best to stifle them, or keep them below the threshold of annoyance and distraction. The search committee is composed of humans, who know that the applicants are humans, too, who have those things to hide. It’s in your interest, as an applicant, for them to stay hidden, not laid out in exquisite detail for all the world to read. If you stick your foot in your mouth during an interview, no one will interrupt to prevent you from doing further damage. So why risk doing it many times over by blabbing away in a blog?

The second article is a NYTimes "Style Desk" piece entitled "The New Nanny Diaries Are Online" (this piece may have fallen behind the Times’ paywall; read the Village Voice’s take on the subject here or Bitch PhD’s take here). The author, one Helaine Olen, describes her growing discomfort with her nanny after reading about her private life on her blog (the nanny has since abandoned the blog, but not before writing a fairly extensive and humiliating rejoinder to Olen’s piece).

Yet within two months of my starting to read her entries our entire relationship unraveled. Not only were there things I didn’t want to know about the person who was watching my children, it turned out her online revelations brought feelings of mine to the surface I’d just as soon not have to face as well.
...
My husband thought her writing precociously talented but wanted to fire her nonetheless. "This is inappropriate," he said. "We don’t need to know that Jennifer Ehle makes her hot."

And, finally, a Boston University journalism professor was fired for making this comment about a student on an online sports board:

"Of my six students, one (the smartest, wouldn’t you know it?) is incredibly hot. ... It was all I could do to remember the other five students."

I don’t want to defend or castigate any of the actors in any of these situations—I’ve said my piece about Tribble at One Man’s Opinion and am working up something more specific on the Boston University case (stay tuned, folks!); Olen’s case has been suitably discussed by both her nanny personally and a bevy of Internet commentators. Instead, I’m concerned here with how each of these pieces illustrates conceptions about the division of public and private life in American (North American? Western?) conceptions of the self, especially where work is involved. In each of the cases, the blogger/poster has committed a transgression, revealing his/her private life in a public forum (the Internet).

Modern American culture is structured around the hard division between public and private spaces, personaes, and expression. This division defines and bounds our behavior among every dimension—religion, gender, sexuality, class, economics (consider how improper it is to ask someone’s annual income!), politics, and so on. Each of us does a pretty remarkable job of adapting to the varying definitions of proper and improper behavior in each context we move through in the course of our daily lives. At the same time, these boundaries can become contested—consider the furor over the Supreme Court’s decision striking down Texas’ sodomy ban (in Lawrence et al. v. Texas). The advent of the Internet has posed one of the greatest challenges to these "hard" boundaries in recent years, confouding efforts to adequately define public and private spaces and often shifting behaviors that were once considered "private" into the "public" eye, and vice versa. It is telling that Tribble contrasts the public exposure gained from blogging with the "privacy" of face-to-face interactions in such public venues as cocktail parties and classrooms:

We’ve all done it—expressed that way-out-there opinion in a lecture we’re giving, in cocktail party conversation, or in an e-mail message to a friend. There is a slight risk that the opinion might find its way to the wrong person’s attention and embarrass us. Words said and e-mail messages sent cannot be retracted, but usually have a limited range. When placed on prominent display in a blog, however, all bets are off.

What seems to bother Tribble here is not so much the comments themselves (after all, one would think an academic would have a bit more worry about inane comments made in the classroom!), but their iterability —their capacity to be repeated and, in being repeated, to escape the control of their author. The appropriate public venue for academic speech is publication, after passing through layers of vetting and peer review to minimize the consequences of iterability. While off-hand comments made in person are, in the Derridean sense, iterable, their lack of a permanent material form somewhat limits their impact. By writing on a weblog, though, the author grants his/her comments the permancence of publication without the benefit of academic screening. (An argument that might seem surprising to anyone with any depth of experience on the web—pages come and go with a surprising suddenness! For example, in the post on "iterability" I just cited, a link is broken, and the post is less than a year old. Tribble answers this argument bypointing to mechanisms like Google’s cache: "Even if you take your blog offline while job applications are active, Google and other search engines store cached data of their prior contents. So that cranky rant might still turn up.")

Iterability seems to lay at the heart of Michael Gee’s case as well. Consider, for example, Robert MacMillan’s commentary at the Washington Post:

But just because his words are gone doesn’t mean they haven’t been preserved elsewhere… like right here in this column, and over at Boston Sports Media, where blogger David Scott posted them on July 15 so the rest of us could wonder at them…

A fellow BU prof, Michael Feldman (writing as "the Dowbrigade"), adds these comments in his own response:

As regular readers will note, the Dowbrigade also works at a Major Boston University, and over the years we have had our share of "hot" students, but we would never dream of saying so in a public posting.

Gee could not have been fired for having "hot" students—professors cannot very well have a policy forbidding attractive women from enrolling. He also could not have been fired for noticing the "hotness" of his student—unless a professor is blind, s/he is going to have students that s/he thinks are physically attractive, whether in relation to their own standards of physical beauty or to those of society at large. Where Gee transgressed was in letting it be known that he found a student attractive (Feldman highlights the "sloe-eyed Sabra" part of the comment as a racial slur, but I don’t think this is the primary reason for Gee’s dismissal)—that is, in exposing the always-present but always-suppressed private reactions of a professor to his/her students (on whatever grounds) to the public eye. We professors are supposed to be neutral with regard to our students, to judge each of them solely on their ability to master the material presented in the class, not on their physical attractiveness, political beliefs, personality quirks, financial status, or any other individual quality (except, maybe, inasmuch as it contributes to their greater or lesser mastery of the course material). By making his private reaction public, he made the illusion of professorial neutrality more difficult to perform not only for himself, but for academics in general.

Gee’s offense lies not so much in his private reaction as in the his public puncturing of his (and his professorial colleagues’) professional image—which is also the offense committed by Olen’s nanny Tessy. Time and again, Olen notes that there are "things I didn’t want to know" about her nanny, things that, eventually, so punctured Olen’s image of what a nanny is supposed to be that she ended up firing Tessy. Now, nannies already blur the line between public and private—they are employees who are paid to take care of their employer’s children and household, but they are also "part of the family", often living with "their" family and certainly privy to many of the most intimate details of the family’s life. For many women—especially, perhaps, of the New York liberal career-woman type—the illusion of "nanny as family member" is crucial to what is, after all, a rather exploitive work relationship. As long as Tessy could be viewed as "one of the family", Olen was comfortable with the arrangement; but when she started reading posts that described Tessy’s nannying as "work" and her employers as just that, "employers", Olen’s comfortable illusion was shattered:

Most parents don’t like to think the person watching their children is there for a salary. We often build up a mythology of friendship with our nannies, pretending the nanny admires us and loves our children so much that she would continue to visit even without pay.

Without that "mythology", Olen literally grew disillusioned with Tessy’s performance.

Each of these cases presents an act of discipline, in which a person is punished for their transgressions against the supposedly hard and fast boundaries between public and private expression—which Tribble and Olen, in their decision to "go public" and write about these punished transgressions, have made to act as a warning to the rest of us (Tribble’s weak objection that no candidate was passed over solely for blogging notwithstanding—the intent of his piece is clearly to warn would-be academic bloggers to keep their mouths shut). But what does this say about the nature of employment in today’s American society? With Tribble’s and Olen’s cases, the real discomfort came not so much in their employees’ (or prospective employees’) lack of qualification for the job at hand, but in their suspicion of an active life outside of work. Although Gee’s transgression touches more directly on his ability to do his job, it must be noted that there is little in his comments to suggest that Gee would be impartial in his grading practices or as a teacher—if anything, his post seems like the effort of a new professor (he had worked as a reporter the prior 17 years) to deal with the realities of his situation. How do you deal with a student whose physical presence is distracting?

In each of these cases, it seems to be the fact of merely having an "unauthorized"—that is, non-work-related—private life that is being punished, reflecting an effort to extend the discipline of the workplace—of public life—into the worker’s private life. The epitome of this attitude can be found in Henry Ford’s Dearborn, a model community where news, church, even appropriate recreation was provided by Ford’s agents—and where workers’ home lives were monitored as well. While ostensibly protecting the boundary between public and private, the employers in the cases mentioned above are all in effect defining what their workers’ appropriate private life should be.

In this respect, the act of blogging/posting becomes problematic not so much for the inability of the author to control the reception of his/her words, but for the inability of his/her employer to control the private life of the author. The act of posting becomes evidence of a deeper transgression than just misrecognizing or refusing to recognize the boundaries of appropriate public behavior; it shows the failure of the employer to adequately discipline his/her worker, or the failure of the worker to adequately conform to the expectations of his/her employer. In the end, though, both transgressions amount to the same thing—in the face of an employment regime determined to draw ever-smaller boundaries around the private, rejecting those boundaries is in itself evidence of an "unauthorized" private life. Which is why, I would venture, blogging has caught on in such a big way; in the face of greater and greater incursions on our private life—not just by employers, but by government, social advocates across the political spectrum, religious organizations, black-hat hackers and identity thieves, and ever-tightening security in retail facilities—blogging has provided a way to "push back", to assert a private life that nobody owns, ironically enough by making it public.

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I recently received this e-mail from the Institute of International Education:

Following please find an announcement concerning new fellowships for threatened scholars. Scholars from any country and any field may qualify. We invite you to nominate suitable candidates, and ask for your help in forwarding the announcement to any academic colleagues who may be interested. We are especially eager to identify candidates still facing threats in their home country/region, who may not be aware of the program. At the same time, we invite participation from universities and colleges that might be willing to host fellowship recipients. We are especially eager to identify universities and colleges outside of the US, especially French, Spanish and Russian language institutions.

Visit the web site for more information.

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While Easter Island and Its Mysteries might not be as great a book as it was deemed to be by Dr. Étienne Loppé, Chief Curator of the Lafaille Museum in La Rochelle (France), who wrote a gushing preface, it certainly provides interesting insights into ethnography in the mid 1930s.

A translation of this 1930s French ethnography is freely available online, as “a gift from [Dr. Ann Altman] to the academic community and to everyone else who is interested in Easter Island.” It includes copious footnotes by the translator.

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Daniel M.T. Fessler, Assoc. Professor of Anthropology at UCLA, is requesting data on children’s interactions with fire in small-scale societies. If you are able to, please respond to his survey, copied in full below the fold. Send your response directly to Dan (dmtfessler “at” gmail.com) – do not post in the comments or he might not get them. (more…)

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The posts that Ozma and I wrote about Guns, Germs and Steel seem to have struck a nerve, and already there is a fair amount of discussion in the blogsphere. In addition to Brad DeLong’s dismissive pot-shots, there is a very good discussion developing in the comments section of this Crooked Timber post. From there I learned that the Science article mentioned by Ozma (and also by Majikthise and Louis Proyect) has been posted online by Louis. I recommend everyone take the time to read it in full. Also, Nomadic Thoughts is collecting links about the debate, and I will try to mirror some of those here, as well as whatever else I come across as I discover them. And stay tuned – our resident New Guinea expert, Rex, is on vacation, but I’m sure he’ll have something to say when he gets back!

UPDATE: For those who want a quick overview of the debate so-far, go take a look at an excellent write-up by Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed.

UPDATE: This is getting very long, so I’m moving everything below the fold. (more…)

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Lisa Rofel’s Other Moderities has been mentioned a few times in comments on recent posts, so, as it is one of my favorite recent ethnographies, I thought I would post the text of a classroom presentation I gave on the book some years ago. Since this was originally written for a seminar in which my colleagues were assumed to have also read the same material, there may be some gaps where I could count on the rest of the class to understand—for example, there’s some heavy borrowing from Appadurai, which we had read immediately prior to Rofel, but I do not mention him by name here. However, I do not trust myself to make edits all these years later, when the book is not fresh in my mind anymore.

In Lisa Rofel’s words, Other Modernities “addresses the cultural politics of modernity in the late twentieth century. It suggests how modernity is imagined, pursued, and experienced… in those places marked by a deferred relationship to modernity” (3). She offers us an at least introductory definition of modernity the following: ”...an imaginary and continuously shifting site of global/local claims, commitments, and knowledge, forged within uneven dialogues about the place of those who move in and out of categories of otherness” (3). As the central project of the book, Rofel presents us with a conception of modernity which is local and particularistic while placing those local forms of meaning in increasingly larger spheres of class, ideology, nation, and global capital, in ways which are, frequently, frustrating in their complexity. In addressing this complexity, I’ve found it useful to adopt a distinction suggested by [a colleague] between Rofel’s presentation of modernity as an academic or theoretical construct, mainly calling on Foucault and Althusser and addressing the modern human condition in the context of global and transnational forces, and modernity as the object of desire for the people whose lives make the subject of Rofel’s ethnographic work. Although this division is wholly artificial — which is part of Rofel’s point — it does have a precedent in the structure of her own (challenging) introduction, in which she moves back and forth from 1st-person descriptions of Hangzhou and its inhabitants to 3rd-person academic inquiry. Artificial as it is, I think that this approach helps to compensate for Rofel’s introduction which, for me at least, was highly confusing in its multiple use of multiple concepts of modernity invoked to account for each other. This is not all Rofel’s fault — the lack of specificity in academic concepts of modernity, which Rofel challenges, has produced a somewhat limited vocabulary.

So for the moment we sidestep the question of modernity as a theoretical position and look at the lives described by Rofel. On this level, modernity becomes the desires of the state and of its subjects, a local imaginary grounded in local conditions even as it looks elsewhere for its inspiration. But Rofel shows that this desire and its inspirations have neither remained constant nor been mobilized in constant fashions over time. Furthermore, the vision of modernity strived for by both Zhenfu workers and the Chinese party/state is necessarily and irrevocably intertwined with constructions of labour, gender, age, social networks, and geographical location. Rather than forming separate and separable parts of local identities, these factors are each constituted in and through the others. For example, Rofel is challenged by the oldest cohort of women workers’ unflinching adherence to the doctrine of their own liberation. How can they remain so convinced of their liberation, she asks, while they recognize the bitterness of their lives, both with regard to their work in the factories as silk workers and their work in their homes as mothers and wives (aside: which is, unfortunately, largely ignored, even rejected as important, by Rofel, who is almost ecstatic about women’s reports of their lack of affection for their children….)? However, as Rofel discovers, for the elder women of the Revolutionary era, the criteria by which Rofel and her fellow Western feminists judge “liberation” were not applicable — unsuited to the particular history of pre-Revolution Chinese industrialization and capitalization, they fail to adequately account for the specific projects of modernization and subject-formation undertaken in the establishment of the Chinese socialist state from the late ‘40’s. Although Rofel does not give a lot of background information about pre-socialist China, she does hint at the collapse of traditional sources of income (e.g. the difficulties faced by Yu Shifu following her father’s death and her early entry into the silk factory [64-70]) and the pressure this put on women, especially young and unmarried women, to enter the workforce where, as sexualized (feminized) bodies inhabiting an “outside” space (not contained within the social network of ostensibly responsible parents and relatives) they were subject to disrespect and humiliation. By stressing labour as a foundational element, rather than gender, the Revolution liberated women from the imposed boundaries of “inside” and “outside” work. (Incidentally, note that this concept, used either ethnographically or theoretically, never ignores the presence of “work” in the home, the way Western concepts of “private” and “public” spheres do — partially explaining the lack of affection and the importance of raising children out of “maternal” desire which Rofel so blatantly admires later on, as the invention of “maternality” mystifies the “work” aspect of Western women’s household activities.)

Modernity in the desires of these women, then, is immediately tangible, even as it turns to imagined futures in its attempted realization — that is, it deals with the particular hardships or “bitterness”-es experienced by particular people at particular times and places. Although State policies may slavishly admire and imitate Western or Soviet models of modernity, Rofel shows that in the implementation of these policies by individual subjects there exists a space of interpretation and misrecognition (on which, more momentarily) which alters and can even challenge the conceptions of the State. For the cohort of women closely identified with the Cultural Revolution, the elaboration of this space became a primary concern, even as they became disillusioned with the promises and practices of that time — consider, for example, Xiao Bao, the shift leader who protested her lack of promotion to an office job by setting up her own office on the shop floor. Given authority over the women of her shop, Xiao Bao exercises that authority by not exercising it, subverting the very power which she exercises. Although it is unclear for how long she can continue to non-exercise her authority, in the meantime, she has constructed around herself (or rather, around her desk) a space of non-participation in the imagined modernity of the state, instead enacting her own contradictory desires in that space.

Rofel’s analysis of this act of subversion owes a lot to her understanding of an undertheorized (in fact, virtually ignored) aspect of Althusser’s concept of “interpellation”. Rofel mentions Althusser earlier in her discussion of the construction of Liberation-era female subjectivities and, for those unfamiliar with the concept, I’ll rehearse the main points of Althusser’s theory. In his article “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, Althusser is concerned with the way a State (in his conception, Western States, despite the fact that he describes Stalinist Communism almost to the letter…) creates appropriate subjects. On the one hand, he notes, there are Repressive State Apparatuses, such as the military, the police, mental institutions, and so on, which serve to impose certain behaviours and exclude others. The use of such apparatuses is costly, however, both in resources and in the potential threat of resistance. Ideally, then, domination is achieved through the creation of self-regulated subjects, accomplished though the Ideological Apparatuses of education, vocation, religion, and so on. The goal is the production of subjects who “recognize” themselves in terms of the state ideology. Althusser uses the metaphorical illustration of a police officer hailing a man in the street—yelling out “You, there!” into the crowd of pedestrians. The man who turns — who recognizes the hail as meant for him — immediately admits his guilt and takes on himself the identity of the criminal (note that it is not necessary for the police officer to know anything about the hailed man’s guilt — it is the act of recognition which makes him guilty, rather than any previous knowledge on the part of the officer). In this sense he becomes subject to the domination of the legal apparatus. But, as well, in his recognition, he acts — he turns. In becoming subjected (relative to domination), he also becomes a subject (relative to agency). Rofel discusses the agency of the Liberation-era cohort in terms of their recognition of and identification with the ideology of the early Socialist State, from which their agency as women and as labour is derived. But Althusser hints at something else: in a one-phrase, parenthetical aside, he mentions “misrecognition”, a mention which is never followed up, leaving it entirely open to interpretation (ironic, that). Misrecognition would imply the construction of subjectivity at odds with the structure within which it resides. In their various challenges and subversions of State policy, the workers Rofel describe enact such a subjectivity — not necessarily consciously resisting State domination (although there is an element of that at times, too) but in subjecting the official significations to personal and positional interpretations which produce other modernities than originally intended.

The history related by Rofel is one of unfinished State projects of modernity. Each of the cohorts described corresponds to an incomplete modernization project: the original optimism of Socialist progress, cut short apparently by the disasters of the Great Leap Forward (which Rofel leaves perturbingly unclear) and the breaking off of relations with the Soviet Union, the hoped-for but unrealized perpetual revolution of the Cultural Revolution, cut short by the death of Mao Zedong and the overthrow of the Gang of Four, and the present (re-)introduction of Free Market Capitalism, as unfinished in China as elsewhere. In the wake of each of these projects was left a body of subjects formed and informed by the future modernity imagined and imaged by the State in each period, and by the local interpretations of those modernities. Rather than an undifferentiated Modern toward which the Chinese people as a whole are converging, Rofel shows the multiplication of modernities at every turn, with their concomitant genderizations, class-ifications, and localizations.

This divergence is already suggested by Rofel’s simultaneous use of and criticism of Foucault’s analysis of modernity and it’s investment in “biopower”. Rofel pretty consistently uses a Foucauldian definition of modernity which has at it’s core the penetration of State power into the lives of its subjects or, to be more precise, the entanglement of subjects at every level with the apparatuses of the State. For Foucault, one of the primary manifestations of this involvement is in State surveillance of its subjects — the panopticon of state control, constructed through normative discourses of medicine, psychiatry, criminology, sexuality, biology, and so on. Rofel shows in detail the refinements of these methods and their implementations in post-Revolution China, adding to the mix an understanding of the role of labour ideology and the ways that the work of the individual (for lack of a better term) has been used to integrate them into the workings of State power. With each shift in State conceptions of modernity, the forms and uses of bio-power have shifted, culminating in the radical individuation and re-gendering of bodies illustrated by Rofel’s description of the contemporary “family planning” office at Zhenfu. But in her particularistic analysis of the deployment of such power, Rofel challenges Foucault for both his Eurocentrism and his failure to understand the shifting meanings such power could hold at the local level. In effect, she says, Foucault assumes the homogenizing nature of modernity — an assumption which is not upheld by the reality of local situations, but is rather informed by ethnocentric assumptions about the efficacy of European civilization and the converse weakness of non-Western others. As Rofel points out, the heightened awareness of sexuality and the personal pleasure promised in its name — as well as the technology of statistics and display through which sexuality is monitored by the State — have not in fact produced a more efficient work force. Instead, the re-feminized female workers at Zhenfu are well-known as the worst labourers — increased absences, off-hours partying, “uncontrolled” or “inappropriate” pregnancies, and a refusal to construct their subjectivities through labour make the newest cohort of silk workers highly unlikely candidates for carrying China to an approximation of Western wealth. Rofel’s analysis thus widens and supplements Foucault’s, calling for a consideration of the modernities constructed in local subjectivities, rather than one which encompasses and supplants those local configurations.

The one thing that nags at me is Rofel’s’ discussion of hyper-masculinity. Although it all sounds OK to me, she never really gets into a discussion of masculinity per se — although she does note the presence of male workers in the silk factory, and not always in exclusively male spaces. Why this bothers me is this: the hyper-masculinity she refers to seems explicitly oriented towards local conceptions of Western business practices, as well as local conceptions of femininity since the introduction of economic reform. As such, fine. But it fails to account for the more everyday forms of masculinity, as illustrated by local interpretations of weft-threading as women’s work, while warp-threading is exclusively men’s work—or why men in the weaving shop hang their scissors from their ear while women tuck them into the pocket of their apron. These little considerations — the ways in which virtually identical tasks are differentiated — form an underexplored territory of gender in Rofel’s book. While the hyper-masculinity of market trade may represent a desired modernity of the men in the shop, it is not a realized desire, and the opposition of feminine and hyper-masculine leaves out the everyday gendered lives of the real men involved.

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I finally watched episode one of the Guns, Germs, and Steel TV show last night. Its all on TiVo, but I’m finding it hard to sit and watch – it is a rather painfully made show. So many shots of Jared Diamond looking scholarly: peering out windows, looking at maps, walking back and forth, etc. Ugh! And do they really need to work the title of his book into every other sentence? I mean, in the first episode they don’t even get up to the invention of guns…

The show is framed by the motif of “Yali’s Question.” Yali is portrayed as some local guy (he looks like a worker) whom JD bumps into on the beach one day and asks him:

Why you white man have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little?

But Yali isn’t just some guy on the beach. He’s a politician. This isn’t JD’s fault. Here is what he says in the book:

I had already heard about a remarkable local politician named Yali, who was touring the district then.

But I can’t completely absolve JD for this portrayal. I believe there is something fundamentally wrong about the very question he is asking.

The modern U.S. is the richest, most powerful state on earth. It’s crammed with more cargo than most New Guineans could ever imagine. But why? That’s what Yali wanted to know. How did our worlds ever come so different?

By framing the question in this way, the show is forced to portray New Guniea as a land of poor people, and the US as a land of wealth. Although we are told that there are intelligent people from New Guniea, they are portrayed as hunter gatherers, or poor farmers. While the show does show the hubub of urban New Guinea at the end, one would hardly know that there is internet access in the country.

This gets to the fundamental problem I have with JD’s question. While it is interesting and important to ask why technologies developed in some countries as opposed to others, I think it overlooks a fundamental issue: the inequality within countries as well as between them. I assure you that logging industry executives in New Guinea live better than you or I do! Both New Guinea and the United States are far more unequal (by some measures) than is India. Moreover, inequality throughout the world is increasing more rapidly now than every before.

Although it is a contentious argument, economist Amartya Sen argues that inequality within countries can be more important than inequality between countries. I’ve collected a bunch of writings about this question on my wiki, and there was some lively discussion about it in response to this earlier Savage Minds post. But the main point Sen makes is that people in societies that are objectively poorer, but less unequal live longer than people who are objectively wealthier, but at the bottom rungs of a more unequal society. It doesn’t help to have more cargo if you can’t afford the dental work necessary to meet new standards of beauty. (Read this post about a US woman who couldn’t get promoted because of her teeth.)

Yes, it is interesting to know the environmental constraints societies have struggled against over the course of history, but it is a mistake to see this as an explanation of contemporary inequality.

To take a recent example, Nigeria (environmentally blessed with some of the largest oil reserves outside of the Middle East) used to be one of the richest countries in the world. Corruption, aided by Western banks who provided the means of funneling the majority of the nation’s GDP into private bank accounts, and deep cultural divisions between North and South, destroyed that wealth. Yet there are still many, many, millionaires and billionaires in Nigeria, and their collective wealth would be enough to give them plenty of “cargo” ...

So, no offense to Yali, but his question should be:

Why is cargo distributed so unequally both within and between our societies?

Once you frame the question that way, environmental factors seem rather incidental.

UPDATE: Brad DeLong, points out that I overstated my case with the Nigeria example. However, I still think my overall argument still stands. The comparative wealth of Nigeria is less important for my point than the inequitable distribution of that wealth within Nigeria.

I would also add that the poor farming conditions DeLong speaks of are partially a result of the oil economy:

During the oil boom, Nigeria’s small family farms became marginalized. Women and children largely ran the farms as men sought work in the cities’ industrial-development schemes, which were heavily subsidized by petroleum wealth.

UPDATE: My discussion with Professor DeLong continues in the comments section of this post – which also has links to discussion on other sites.

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Kerim suggested Savage Minds mount a response to the recent PBS special (link courtesy of Kerim) on the theories of self-described polylingual polymath Jared Diamond (scroll down to “about the author”). Rex, our Melanesianist and thus an obvious choice to take up the task, was unfortunately departing for China just at that time. None of the rest of us leapt at the job, though we all conceded it was a worthy idea. Our collective reluctance points, I think, to anthropology’s Guns, Germs, and Steel problem.

Has this ever happened to you? You are at a party, or perhaps a family gathering, or maybe even just standing in line at the DMV when the person next to you strikes up a conversation. If they don’t start talking to you about Indiana Jones at the mention of anthropology, there is a fair chance they’ll bring up GG&S – expecting that you just love the book. Now you’re in a pickle. Diamond showily positions GG&S as the definitive anti-racist take on human history. If you say you don’t really care for it, your interlocutor is likely to get a slightly baffled look on her face. What could you possibly mean, you don’t like Diamond’s noble tome? Are you… a racist? To explain why you don’t like the book would take more time than most people making friendly small talk want to spend, and – worse yet – your explanation will necessarily impugn the motives of people who do like it, a group that you now know includes the person with whom you are speaking. My own usual reaction in such encounters is to say that unfortunately I have not read the book but that boy, it sure does sound interesting. (more…)

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According to Anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani, author of the book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, Americans are trapped in “Culture Talk,” a way of framing the problem of terrorism which assumes that culture was made

only at the beginning of creation, as some extraordinary, prophetic act. After that, it seems Muslims just conformed to culture. According to some, our culture seems to have no history, no politics, and no debates, so that all Muslims are just plain bad. According to others, there is a history, a politics, even debates, and there are good Muslims and bad Muslims. In both versions, history seems to have petrified into a lifeless custom of an antique people who inhabit antique lands. Or could it be that culture here stands for habit, for some kind of instinctive activity with rules that are inscribed in early founding texts, usually religious, and mummified in early artifacts?

There are two versions of Culture Talk: the crude view that Islam as the enemy civilization, and a more subtle view of Islam as divided within itself (although this division is seen as unchanging over the course of Muslim history since the middle ages). Mamdani ascribes the first view to Samuel Huntington, whose 1993 article, “The Clash of Civilizations,” is widely cited by proponents of this view. However, Mamdani argues that Huntington’s article was little more than a caricature of Bernard Lewis’s 1990 “The Roots of Muslim Rage.” This earlier article forms the basis of the more nuanced version of Culture Talk.

Lewis both gestures towards history and acknowledges a clash within civilizations. ... But Lewis writes of Islamic civilization as if it were a veneer with its essence an unchanging doctrine in which Muslims are said to take refuge in times of crisis.

Lewis ignores the important political and historical contexts of fourteen hundred years of history when he writes:

The struggle between these rival systems has now lasted for some fourteen centuries. It began with the advent of Islam, in the seventh century, and has continued virtually to the present day. It has consisted of a long series of attacks and counterattacks, jihads and crusades, conquests and reconquests.

(more…)

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Since a lot of you have confessed to deep-seated (if anxious) relationships with Indiana Jones, I thought I would let you know about IndyGear, a site about Indiana’s gear with tips and links to help you recreate your own Indiana Jnes look. I fully expect to see some fedoraed, bomber-jacket-wearing, whip-toting anthropologists roaming the AAA meeting halls this year.

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Pharyngula has dirty pitchers. check it out

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A few days ago I came across Long Sunday, a group blog whose contributors write, for the most part, on continental theory writ large. Reading the posts there have taken a while because the comments are often magisterial in length (not unlike some of the posts here at SM!)

Quite frankly I am jaw-drop amazed at the high level of discussion there and I am glad I came across this wonderful site. I have been on-and-off following the individual blogs of some of the contributors (such as Fort Kant, Charlotte Street), but having one place to go to get my RSS feed fix will be convenient.

One particular post, begun by Jodi Dean, caught my attention. She has launched a learned discussion about the ways in which neoliberal capitalism produces a fantasy of Capital as the Real. Taking cue from Slavoj Zizek’s concept of the imaginary real, she suggests that this neoliberalist fantasy is so sublime (and subliminal) that when disguised in the language of the Symbolic (economic laws, for example) it tends to obfuscate the institutional violence of state power at both the national and international levels.

Here’s a long quote from this post, which neatly summarizes a paper she has made available online titled “Enjoying Neoliberalism”:

Zizek argues that Capital is Real in several senses: it is the ‘positive condition of hegemonic struggle’ (Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 319), it ‘sets a limit to resignification,’ and it determines “the structure of the material social processes themselves’ (Ticklish Subject, 276). But, to assert that Capital is Real is to embrace neoliberal ideology, to accept its premises without a struggle, without inquiry into how neoliberal faith in the market has come to produce a sense of its own inevitability. What is necessary, then, is an account of the neoliberal imaginary allied with the Real.

One might want to claim that Zizek’s elaboration of the Real in terms of an imaginary Real, a symbolic Real, and a real Real and his specification of capital as a symbolic Real (one that operates in terms of basic formulae or persists as an underlying structure) contributes to thinking about capitalism insofar as it points to a logic determining and distorting, that is, forming, the basic matrix of contemporary socio-political life. I disagree. The specification of capital as formulae invests economics with a scientific status, with the ability to formulate laws or truths about the world that tell us how the world functions. Such an investment occludes and naturalizes the roles of governments, both as national states and as international organizations, in creating property rights, establishing corporations, producing a functioning tax system, and sustaining and militarily defending the very infrastructure necessary for business.

As I understand her argument, neoliberal capitalism produces a fantasy around the very notions that guarantee it, such as free trade, private property rights, the right for governments to tax and enforce regulation, etc. These elements of neoliberal capitalism, however, are backed by the state’s fundamental power to mete out punishment. In her short essay she explores this idea through a sharp analysis of the shopaholic and the criminal as two prominent subject positions in neoliberal capitalism.

In her discussion she takes Zizek to task for downplaying the role of disciplinary power in neoliberal capitalism while overemphasizing the truimph of unfettered exchange-value. She asks:

How is that we have been taken in by capital? That we find ourselves so entrenched in it that escape seems impossible, a step into oblivion?

To answer this question, Alphonse van Worden, another blogger at the site, delves into the history of the Atlantic slave trade. If Dean argues that neoliberal capitalism produces a sublime fantasy around the institutions of state power, for Alphonse this resonates specifically with the genealogy of emancipatory politics (she brings up the transatlantic slave trade) as integral to understanding the legacy of private property rights.

She makes sure to explain the process of inversion whereby the initial calls for liberating slaves, which were initially a response to the traumatic encounter with the horrors of industrial capitalism, had been usurped by Capital itself in the form of liberal economic thought. For this inversion to be convincing, however, required not only “the revival of antique narratives and the fanstastic and the fabulous” but also the twisting of the political mythology from an image of freedom to that of bondage. This is why she says:

Its a head-exploding irony that the modern concept of ‘freedom’ upon which the idea of ‘free trade’ is built and which is the fairy in its shell was first embodied in sugar industry slaves, who were physically the ‘freedom’ of their proprietors.

Reading this exchange I immediately thought of a parallel discussion about the theory of labor power in Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, which was mentioned in the commentary (Alphonse also mentions Robert Brenner’s Merchants and Revolution, which I did not know of but sounds fascinating from a comparativist perspective.)

I am quite enthralled by this bringing together of Zizekian musings on neoliberal capitalism and what seems to me as a more “British Cultural Marxist” look at the history of industrial capitalism. Although I am not fully convinced of Dean’s critique of Zizek (but then she’s read much more Zizek than I have, so who am I to say this), this move to ground a critique of neoliberalism in a nuanced historical materialist sort of analysis is promising. If anything, it blasts through the comforting mythology of neoliberal capitalism that we (or I should really say “I” to be less presumptuous) often wrap ourselves in by tuning into the emancipatory potential of one’s encouters with the acute economic and political inequalities that exist today. This engagement with the Real is for me at the heart of the ethnographic encounter—and perhaps is part of my answer to oneman’s discussion about the disciplinary “moral core” of anthropology.

This discussion also brings back some of the key theoretical issues in the anthropology of political economy (the work of Sidney Mintz immediately comes to mind). It also touches on the anthropology of law, which in rent years has been energized through a double-whammy of Giorgio Agamben’s reappraisal of Foucault’s theory of biopolitics and the critique of neoliberalism from what I see as a more Anglo-American take on the politics of recognition.

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Most people who read Savage Minds do so through our RSS feed, so it seems silly to have a tutorial about how to read RSS feeds. (Currently over 200 people are subscribed to our feed.) However, I figure that some people still haven’t figured it all out, so I thought I’d make it easier.

This will be short:

• First, read this article. It explains what RSS feeds are.
• Second, visit the new Bloglines public account I’ve set up for Savage Minds.

That’s it.

In time you may wish to set up your own Bloglines account. Then you can read this tutorial, which will guide you through the process.

Over time we will add more feeds to the Bloglines aggregator. And when it goes public I might even switch us over to Feedlounge which looks like it will be very cool!

Personally, I don’t use Bloglines, preferring NetNewsWire on my Mac. (Which can actually sync with Bloglines, although I haven’t tried that.)

For more information on RSS feeds, see all the posts in the “feeds” category on my blog.

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Perhaps it is because most of my physical anthropologist friends spend their time looking at DNA rather than old bones, I’m never too enthusiastic about bone studies. Sure, they are important, especially when entirely new species are discovered, or people are discovered in a location they weren’t expected at a particular time, but the problem is that there are so few bones out there that it is hard to make much of a few isolated data points.

So I enjoyed this great post by John Hawks, debunking all hype surrounding the recent victory of scientists in the Kennewick Man case. As he points out, scientists are unlikely to learn much new after examining the 9,000-year-old skeleton. Why? Because scientists have already analyzed the skeleton!

Yes, it’s true. The plaintiffs in the case have assembled at last to study the remains, and are putting on a public show of it. But almost all of what they are going to do has already been done. And most of the new analyses they intend could be accomplished with data that are already published.

The National Park Service maintains a website related to the Kennewick case. Included on the site are detailed reports of the analyses that were carried out on the specimen during the preparation for the court proceedings.

Interesting … as part of the preparation for a court proceeding over whether or not scientists would have the right to conduct scientific investigations on the skeleton, scientists conducted investigations on the skeleton. No wonder Native American’s don’t trust the government!

The National Park Service website is truly an interesting find. It includes, for instance, this report by Eugene S. Hunn, a student of Berlin and Kay, on the “linguistic evidence that Sahaptin-speakers were intimately familiar with the flora and fauna characteristic of the central Columbia Plateau habitat surrounding the Kennewick Man site.”

Here is some more background on the controversy. And here is a post explaining what is involved in analyzing the remains.

(John Hawks post found via Pharyngula.)

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During my exploration of del.icio.us bookmarks tagged “anthropology,” I came upon a site with the correspondence between student Margaret Mead and teacher Franz Boas during Mead’s research in Samoa (1925-6). This site, which was created to showcase more exchanges between the two anthropologists and complements the letters already published in the appendix of Derek Freeman’s book The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead.

Because I am unfamiliar with the details of the Mead-Freeman controversy (started by Freeman’s Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth), I was unable to truly appreciate the letters in terms of proving or disproving the validity of Mead’s findings. (For more on the Mead-Freeman controversy, see here and here, among others.)

Instead I read these letters as an exchange between a student and an advisor. In some of her missives Mead is quite honest in expressing her doubts about her fieldwork situation. The way she asks Boas for advice, I thought, was revealing of their close bond. In reading this exchange between a student and her teacher, I sensed some transference between the two, which might be a familiar feeling for those who has undergone the rigors of ethnographic fieldwork as a graduate student.

When I read this following passage in a letter Mead wrote to Boas (January 16, 1926), I thought to myself, “Hey, I’ve been there too!”:

But through it all, I have no idea whether I’m doing the right thing or not, or how valuable my results will be. It all weighs rather heavily on my mind. Is it worth the expenditure of so much money? Will you be directly disappointed in me?

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