Today I tried out a new search engine that lets you list up to 25 sites and then search just those sites using Yahoo! search. It is called Rollyo.com, and you can search a whole bunch of anthropology related web sites by going to this link.

I really like the idea. The site, however, has some limitations. For instance, you can’t only search a specific portion of a site, you have to search the entire domain. That means if someone has a blog hosted on their university web servers, you have to include the entire university in your search. Still, I think we will soon see more of this kind of thing. Some sites already let you search your blogroll, but those tend to only search the most recent posts – sites like this let you search everything that has been indexed in a large search engine over the years. I can also imagine setting up custom searches that just look at sites related to your research topic, or a class you are teaching. It is important to remember that not everyone has the same skills when it comes to finding information on the web, and this will enable the more sophisticated web-researchers help those who are less adept.

While I’m at it, I should also mention that Savage Minds is at the top of the Technorati list of anthropology related blogs! We are also near the top when using Google’s new blogsearch engine to look for “anthropology.”

PS: The sites I added to the current Rollyo search are just for testing, as the site improves I will try to create more focused lists – perhaps for each subfield. Or you could do that yourself and post the link to the comments!

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I recently ran across the article Remnants of Romanticism: Max Weber in Oklahoma and Indian Territory which is a nice little piece of scholarship on two things that I usually don’t think of together—Max Weber and Native North America. Let he who has ears hear.

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It’s difficult to talk about ‘open source’ as if it were a unitary phenomenon. It’s telling, for instance, that one way of referring to it these days is F/LOSS (for ‘free/libre open source software’) an orally hygenic acronym which captures the ‘free as in speech’ meaning of ‘free’ by glossing it into its less ambiguous generic romance-language equivalent (biella is really the expert on this sort of thing). The term is meant to knit together an ‘open source’ approach (think Eric Raymond and Bruce Pehrens) with a ‘free software’ approach (think Richard Stallman) which diverge on several key issues. But open source’s cup runneth over and has spilled out into our culture more generally. Academics, for instance, have developed the concept of ‘open access’ publications, while Lawrence Lessig has been just one of the many voices who have argued for ‘free culture’ as a model of and for the natural history of pretty much any kind of creative activity.

Both internal diversity and external diffusion, then, make nailing down open source’s ‘brand’ difficult. In recent comments Judd Antin argued argued that the heart of what it means to ‘open source’ is to engage in a collaborative ‘process’ of scholarly research, and that simply releasing a finished ‘product’ such as an article that can be freely circulated is secondary this more central meaning of ‘open source.’ John McCreery argues argues that Linux coders have “a shared project” and are “opposed to the notion that knowledge is private property”—a position which encourage cooperation while Anthropologists undertake “a jumble of private projects” under the influence of “an insistence on personal ownership of intellectual property” which discourage cooperation. Both contrast with my position about the role of ‘open source’ in anthropology not because we disagree about the importance of ‘open source’ as a cultural idea or movement, but because of our fundamentally different approaches to intellectual and creative production.

(more…)

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Reading through Fontana Labs twelve tips for surviving graduate school (via Crooked Timber), I felt compelled to suggest a few of my own.

• Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. I consider myself lucky that my advisor has survived major spinal surgery, car accidents, and illnesses to still write letters of recommendation for me, but I know of many people who were not so lucky. I’ve heard horror stories about suddenly having to switch course half way through writing up a dissertation because someone’s advisor died. Backing up your hard drive isn’t enough, you need to have a backup advisor as well.
• Teach. Even if you can make more money working as a web designer, or you have enough grant money to pay for the rent, if you want a career in academics you need teaching experience. Moreover, teaching will let you know very quickly if you really want an academic career. If you don’t love teaching, you better rethink your career plans.
• Blog. I know some people are saying not to, but I think it is a great way to “have some kind of outlet outside of your academic life” as Fontana suggests – one that can work around your busy schedule. It is also a great way to test ideas, to be involved in topics outside of your narrow research area, and to have the kinds of discussions you wish you could have with your classmates if they weren’t all so distracted with their own work.
• Graduate. Like many people told me: The most important thing about your dissertation is that it get finished. Nine years is the average for anthropology (fieldwork and language learning taking up a few of those years), but some people seem to go on forever. Your dissertation isn’t the end of your career – it is just the beginning.

For more advice see the comments on this earlier Savage Minds post.

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Several of our sister websites have been commenting on a recent article in Anthropology News which seemingly sounds some gloomy news for open access scholarship in anthropology. Indeed, Judd Antin goes so far as to ask whether there something fundamental about anthropology that makes the discipline averse to an open model. The short answer is: no. The long answer is: yes, if by ‘open source’ you mean ‘AnthroCommons’.

What did this article actually find? The authors wanted to understand how people use digital genres to organize scholarly meetings. They concluded that people used email and face-to-face interaction. No surprise there. Although many people liked the idea of posting conference papers on the internet, in practice very few were willing to do so themselves, and most people thought it would be better to make abstracts easily available online.

So: people like to use email to send papers to each other. Why? Because it’s private, they already know how to use it, they use email as a file system to store, index, and retrieve attachments, they’re not actively interested in adopting new technology for its own sake (if it’s not broken, don’t fix it), and new genres are not obviously sufficiently better than existing onces to induce a switch. In other words, we use email because it is a good tool for the job we want to do.

Why would people be averse to publishing their papers online before the AAA meetings? Two things occur to me here. Come on, folks: we write our papers the night before we give them. Let’s just come clean about that, ok? Our aversion to choosing a Creative Commons license has less to do with concerns about intellectual property, and more to do with the fact that we don’t want to admit to our session organizer that we haven’t finished our paper. Second (and more importantly), conference papers are some of the worst work we produce—they are poorly edited, the citations are often incomplete or wrong, and the arguments we make in them may change over time. There is nothing wrong with this—it is just another way of saying that conference papers are the first step to a final polished document that we do want to make available to the world. David Weinberger once glorified the Internet as a form the raised the first draft to the level of art, and I don’t have any problem posting my informal work on the internet (hence this blog)—but why in the world would we as scholars want these hesitant, initial steps of our thoughts to appear at the top of a Google search for our name?

Much of the article’s discussion of open source and anthropology came in the context of evaluating AnthroCommons, a ‘virtual community’ (i.e. bulletin board) for anthropologists. They found that people didn’t like AnthroCommons. But just because people don’t like AnthroCommons doesn’t mean that they don’t like open source. It means they didn’t like AnthroCommons. Duh.

And people really don’t like AnthroCommons—only five of the 619 people surveyed said they’d actually posted anything. Now admittedly, I’ve not read the full report—while the news article states that “the full report is available through the AAA website” there is no clue on the website as to where it is. There isn’t even a link to the report in the article! This is an egregious flaw for which the gods of useability (or any webdesign 101 teacher) ought strike them down. Regardless, five out of 619 does not bode well.

It’s easy to see why people don’t like AnthroCommons. First, the site is graphics heavy (the text in the ‘about’ page is actually an image of text, not CSS styled text). Second, it is hard to use (if you want to get at the content of the website, you must click the ‘browse’ link, not the ‘content’ link). Third—what is the point? To repeat, email is easier to use than AnthroCommons. There is no real reason to make conference papers public, much less open source their contents. And believe it or not, despite my own enthusiasm for open source models, I would argue that there is no point in releasing your forum comments under an open source model. I mean, thank god: finally, someone can mix, rip, and burn such earth shaking creative works as “what time is the conference again?” Let the revolution begin!

People clearly want AnthroCommons to be a place where they can quickly and easily browse through session abstracts and—after the session—make papers available to fellow participants and selected others (but not everyone). We desperately need this because those little catalogs we all have to carry around are a pain, and I can think of ways of adding value to these catalogs when we digitalize them. What if you could login (easily) and search (easily) for sessions (and topics, and people), and then save the ones you were interested in on a personalized schedule page? You could even rate them so you could figure out which ones to skip once Conference Fatigue set in. And then you could print up a little schedule, map, and room guide and carry it around with you. If the site was well designed and standards compliant, you could even browse it on your cellphone as you were walking around the hotel trying to decide what to do next. And none of this, of course, has anything to do with open source.

Open source is a superb way for us to share the information with the world that we want to share—the polished scholarly work on which we stake our reputations and careers. But it is not a magic sugar shaker which can be sprinkled over any project with the word ‘community’ in it in order to make it even better. Similarly, technologies are not necessarily better because they are newer. Poorly designed technology designed to do something users have no interest in is not going to be successful. This does not mean that anthropologists hate open source, it means that we need it to be applied where it counts—in the distribution of our journals, magazines, and other scholarly products, not in forum postings or incomplete rough drafts. Is it really a surprise that anthropologists are averse to the use of open source when it is done poorly? No. Can we imagine a way to do it well that anthropologists might love? Yes. Does such a thing exist now? No. Should we create one in the future? Obviously.

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Unlike the Spice Girls, I do not often ask my audience what they want, what they really really want. I think of myself as my students’ personal trainer, except I help them develop minds—rather than buns—of steel. I have many colleagues in Hawai’i and abroad who worry that education is becoming ‘commodified’ and that people increasingly think of paying for an education as being similar to buying a new Camaro. While they worry about students demanding ‘customer satisfaction’ the largest issue in education I’ve run across today is an emphasis on credentialing rather than educating. Students that I encounter at universities across the US are less worried about achieving a state of satisfaction than earning an A, and approach classes more worried about the cultivation of their transcript than their sensibilities. Obviously, trying to get a great grade in a course is not exactly orthogonal to learning anything, but the shift in emphasis does sometimes make my job harder.

This is why I like the image of the personal trainer—it helps people understand what they are getting for their money: an opportunity to undergo a personal transformation which they may or may not take advantage of. It also helps underline another aspect of the teacher-student relationship which I believe quite strongly in despite the prevailing egalitarianism of our times: students do not know what they want or need out of an education—that is why they need us to guide them through it. Like Dante or Luke Skywalker, they need old guys in robes to guide them and unleash their potential.

That’s why I was struck by 37 Signals’s recent blog entry. As designers of websites and other things, they note that

Nobody knows what they really want before they get it. Not consumers, not conference goers, not programmers, and certainly not clients. Delivering greatness requires you to let go of the safety in mediocrity where you just do as you’re told.

For people working in the private sector, this is quite an insight. But my general feeling is: duh. I am reminded of the shift that has occurred in restaurant menus over the past couple of decades. Today menus are elaborate paeons to the food diners are about to consume. But traditionally the menus at America’s great restaurants had menus that read ‘five courses of fish in different sauces.’ They didn’t elaborate, because the chef was clearly more capable of deciding what you ought to eat then you were. The client, after all, waits on the souffle—not the other way around.

The wonderful thing about 37 Signals’s entry is that it helps to remind educators fearful of creeping consumerism that people who Get It—and 37 Signals is an outstanding company that does Get It—come to understand what they do as similar to education. This is, of course, the exact opposite of the trend that educators fear. Contrary to Hannah Arendt’s disparaging remarks about academics’ fear of anything not inherently mediocre (which are, unfortunately, not entirely off the mark), this is a case where people who excel at what they do have come to an understanding that is in line with, not opposed to, the ideals of the academy.

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The arrival of the Internet is not the first occasion on which academics and dilletantes have sparred over the value and importance of official accreditation—William James’s short essay on the Ph.D. Octopus is always fun to help us rethink just how deep our cherished academic traditions may or may not stretch.

Although, to be fair, it’s not as interesting as him taking nitrous and reading Hegel.

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Via a newly-discovered blog at Anthropology.net, a newly discovered Roman ruin which was found using Google Earth.

From the Nature.com article:

Using satellite images from Google Maps and Google Earth, an Italian computer programmer has stumbled upon the remains of an ancient villa. Luca Mori was studying maps of the region around his town of Sorbolo, near Parma, when he noticed a prominent, oval, shaded form more than 500 metres long. It was the meander of an ancient river, visible because former watercourses absorb different amounts of moisture from the air than their surroundings do.

His eye was caught by unusual ‘rectangular shadows’ nearby. Curious, he analysed the image further, and concluded that the lines must represent a buried structure of human origin. Eventually, he traced out what looked like the inner courtyards of a villa.

Mori, who describes the finding on his blog, Quellí Della Bassa, contacted archaeologists, including experts at the National Archaeological Museum of Parma. They confirmed the find. At first it was thought to be a Bronze Age village, but an inspection of the site turned up ceramic pieces that indicated it was a Roman villa.

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BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow recently discovered the Library of Congress’ extensive collection of Edward Curtis photographs. Since this means that thousands of people will now be looking at those images, I think it is important to discuss how they were made.

The anthropological term the ethnographic present refers to the artificial construction of a time before contact with European culture, and is best illustrated by this Far Side cartoon:

Curtis worked very hard to construct such an ethnographic present in his photographs. (more…)

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The Micronesian Journal of History and Social Science is a scholarly journal focusing on (you guessed it) Micronesia and social scientific approaches to it. It is entirely digital, and the full contents are downloadable off the net. So if you are looking for material on Micronesia (which can be difficult to find if you don’t live in Honolulu, the unofficial capital of Micronesia) then look no further. While I am not a Micronesianist, I do see a couple of names I recognize in the tables of contents, so I’d say this journal is worth a look. The thrashing of Bravo For The Marshallese is interesting, for instance, since I’ve heard very good things about this book from other sources.

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Via BoingBoing comes Paul Saffo’s article on “The Ghost Dances” of the modern world. Using the historical Ghost Dance as a template, Saffo explores the myriad movements rising on all sides of the political and technological spectrum attempting to wrest control of people’s lives and communities from forces that have grown out of local control.

[It’s] dark history has made the Ghost Dance an anthropological shorthand for any millennial movement preaching a rejection of alien novelties and a return to traditional ways. The Ghost Dance is very much alive today. The global rise of religious fundamentalism is pure Ghost Dance, be it Islamic fundamentalists pining for a return to the Caliphate, Jewish fundamentalists battling moderate secularism, or Christian fundamentalists preaching an imminent Second Coming. The current opposition to evolutionary theory is an indelible example of the Ghost Dancing phenomenon. From this opposition has arisen “creation science,” a deeply contradictory belief system that attempts to use scientific method to discredit scientific theory to prove the literal truth of the Biblical version of creation.

Although I might question the device of an “anthropological shorthand” that generalizes and dehistoricizes a very specific complex of ideas—especially when anthropologists already have a general name for such movements (“revitalization movements”)—I think there is something useful in Saffo’s comparison, notably his recognition that such movements are never about a pure “return to the past” but are, rather, an attempt to “rescue” the past and re-deploy it to create a more satisfying present and future.

The Ghost Dance and it’s political-spiritual cousins are distinctly modern phenomena, in both their goals and their methodologies. As Saffo writes, “Embracing coveted portions of what one opposes in the service of returning an old order is a signature of the Ghost Dance.” Thus we have nuclear technology, the Internet, and the modern transportation system drafted into service in the interest of restoring the social order—even when the desired social order is Muhammad in Medina, the Jerusalem of the Second Temple, pre-contact North America, or even the New Primitivists’ pre-agricultural nomadism. Rather than rejecting modernity outright, these movements often accept the best aspects of modernity (though the definition of which aspects are “best” can vary widely) while rejecting the aspects that minimize individual human dignity (itself a very “modern” idea) or threaten the possibility of community/communion/communitas. That advancing the interests of the individual while protecting the sense of collective identity are often contradictory is only one of many contradictions that not only shape but motivate the modern Ghost Dancer.

The downside of Saffo’s comparison is that it tends to limit our responses. The original Ghost Dance was a response to very real pressures faced by American Indians at the end of the 19th century—yet the implications of the movement were threatening enough to the social order of the day that the Dance was banned and ultimately the movement destroyed, with much new suffering and bloodshed in the process. The labelling of modern reviatalization movements suggests only two avenues of response: either we destroy them, as we did in the late 1800s, or we watch them fade away. Today’s Ghost Dancers have vastly more leverage than the Native Americans of the American frontier—a handful of men with box cutters can embroil the entire world in conflict. The idea that we can destroy every instance of resistance to a growing techno-political world order is foolish—especially when more and more of us are finding ourselves on the other side of the techno-political divide. Without addressing the concerns underlying these movements, it seems unlikely that they will fade away, either—new movements will pop up as other movements run out of steam, because the alternative for most people is simply too grisly to endure for long. So far, the threat posed by the most extreme and most heavily armed of the modern Ghost Dancers has made any consideration of the issues they are responding to seem impossible, even treasonous, making it likely that these movements will continue to exist.

In a Durkheimian sense, though, perhaps the existence of Ghost Dancers is a necessary part of modernity itself, acting as a check on the worst excesses of the modern regime. For the average person in today’s world, these movements form the boundaries of human expression, lighthouses and buoys marking out the rocky coasts and allowing the rest of us to tack a more or less safe route through dangerous waters. Like Durkheim’s suicides, it may be that society produces its own discontents—that they are, indeed, the most modern among us.

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Anthropologists and software is a big problem. N6 and SPSS are more program than we need. Hobbyist genealogy programs don’t handle polygamy well and have never heard of matrilineal descent. In my experience, anthropology’s general ghettoness when it comes to quantitative rigor tend to be reflected in hacked-together databases (sometimes even using suck programs like FileMaker), interviews recorded on iPods and dumped into iTunes, and so forth. When will someone develop a decent piece of software that will just let us do a decent census of our village?

Enter Community Express 2.0, written by my friend and colleague John Burton and available for free download for non-profit individual use. John is an academic/consultant type who works on land and social impact issues in Papua New Guinea and the Torres Straits. Ever since I started reading his work while I was in the field I have been blown away by how consistently insightful he has been about just about everything he’s written—his paper C’est qui, le patron? is for some reason one of my favorite pieces of PNG ethnography ever although it is only 11 pages long and you will find it totally unremarkable. He is also one of the few people I trust to conduct rigorous and accurate social mapping in PNG (a land of poor censuses and weirdo consultancy reports). John has spent years trying to develop a piece of software that will do what many anthropologists want to do—get their village into a computer and munge up the data.

The program known more about demographics than I do (the intricacies of birth spacing, for instance) and, most critically for me, the program understands the distinction between residence and descent, so you can do genealogical work that integrates with a regular household census. Perfect those pesky societies – which is to say every society—where people move around and live in different places.

Now let’s be up front here: Community Express suffers from several problems, some serious. It was, for instance, written by John, who is remarkable for his curmudgeon contrariness. He has made the interface more intuitive than in pervious versions, but at some level it is designed by him for him and by god you will just have to learn how to use it. Additionally, the software is designed to integrate tightly with Microsoft Word (boo! hiss!) so if you want to print up the nifty automagic pivot chart of your data you’d better have excel installed and Community Express had better know where to find it. At least in this edition of the software you can print to a paper size other than A4—the previous one was Commonwealth-centric.

I haven’t tried this latest version, but it shows great promise, and I encourage you all to try it out and give John feedback. In a perfect world he’s open source the project or at least let others tinker with the code (for instance, to port the program to something other than Windows). So please give it a shot and maybe we can evolve the perfect village census program.

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I saw Terry Gilliam’s fairy-tale fantasy The Brothers Grimm over the weekend. As a big fan of Gilliam’s movies, I liked it, but while I plan to reference the film here, this is not going to be a straight-forward review. Rather, the film got me thinking about the historical Grimms and their relation to anthropology, and it is this I plan to write about, mediated by Gilliam’s vision and my own spotty memory of the Grimms’ work and lives. That said, if you haven’t seen the movie and plan to, you may want to skip this post for awhile (though it’s hard to imagine what I could give away about a movie you should already know begins “once upon a time” and ends “and they lived happily ever after”).

The Brothers Grimm is a highly fantasized story inspired loosely by, rather than based on, the lives of folklorists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Set at the end of the 18th century, in French-occupied Germany, Gilliam’s Brothers Grimm are a pair of hucksters who use their scholarly knowledge of Germanic folktales to fleece superstitious peasants by combating the witches, trolls, and other bogeymen that haunt their villages. Captured by the French for their fraudulent activities, they are condemned to die—unless they can solve the real mystery of young girls (including Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel’s sister Gretel) disappearing from a Bavarian village under their captor’s command. Order is wanted, and the Brothers Grimm are assigned to establish it.

The real Brothers Grimm were not, so far as we know, hucksters. Neither were they collectors of children’s literature, despite the status of their work today. Rather, the Grimms were linguists and scholars attempting to document and construct a Germanic national literature, and through it, a German national consciousness—what Boas would later call their Volksgeist. Remember that, before 1871, Germany had no existence as a unified nation-state; to the contrary, it was a loose collection of kingdoms, duchies, baronies, and papal electorates, almost coincidentally geographically co-terminous and only theoretically unified by a shared language.

(more…)

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Please join me in thanking Deborah Gewertz and Fred Errington for a very successful stint as guest bloggers. I appreciate their willingness not only to prduce great posts, but to engage so deeply in dialogue with the greater SM community. Thanks to them, for this past fortnight SM was a little less not-suck than it might otherwise have been. Thanks again folks!

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I have a soft spot for non-human primates, especially gorillas, as they got me interested in primatology and physical anthropology back in high school. This eventually got me to take a college-level anthro course and led me to adopting cultural anthropology as a career. So I’m pleased to see that 20 governments are getting together to try to save the great apes from extinction.

I’d be curious to know if there are actual primatologists on board with the Great Apes Survival Project, the organism that organised the conference during which the declaration to save the great apes was signed. I would think that they do but I was unable to find the information on GRASP’s website.

Of course, non-human primates co-exist with human primates and GRASP seems to have grasped (I couldn’t resist) the idea that the activities of local populations need to be taken into account. As is indicated in the BBC news article, the agreement proposes that:

The agencies should ‘make it a priority to develop and implement policies which promote ecologically sustainable livelihoods for local and indigenous communities’

I think that this reflects an acknowledgement that government agreement or no government agreement, ultimately it is essential to obtain the cooperation of people who live in areas near our non-human cousins. This cooperation requires that the people in question have the resources that they need to live without having to resort to poaching. I’m hoping that they have at least consulted cultural anthropologists in that area to assess effective ways of carrying out this project while taking local realities into account.

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