Please join me in welcoming our guest blogger: Thomas ‘Tad’ McIlwraith. Tad currently teaches anthropology at both the University College of the Fraser Valley and Capilano College in British Columbia. He is also self-employed as a cultural research consultant.

In his spare time (!), Tad blogs on Fieldnotes: Notes on the Anthropology of British Columbia. In fact, this is where I became familiar with Tad’s writing skills and interests! Although his blog is mainly geared toward his students to encourage them to discuss anthropological issues, anyone is welcome to read the blog and to leave comments. A thoughtful reply is practically guaranteed!

Tad’s professional interests include linguistic anthropology and environmental anthropology, particularly among Aboriginal communities in British Columbia, Canada. He is a PhD candidate at the University of New Mexico. His dissertation, entitled “But We Are Still Didene’: Living Lives as Hunters in a Northern Athapaskan Village,” deals with the value of hunting at Iskut British Columbia. In 1995, Tad completed a Master of Arts in Cultural Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. His thesis was entitled “Construction of Local and Pan-Indian Elements in Contemporary Stó:lō Identity.”

Tad has been the recipient of several grants and awards such as a research grant from the Melville Jacobs Fund and a graduate fellowship from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Less than one year after the completion of his Master’s, he published an article in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal entitled “The Problem of Imported Culture: The Construction of Contemporary Stó:lo Identity”. Since then, he has edited and co-authored a few creative works and reports and has presented several conference papers. One publication of special note, in my opinion, is ““’Kuji K’at Dahdahwhesdetch’ (Now I Told All of You): Stories Told at Iskut, British Columbia, by Iskut Tahltan Elders” which he co-authored with Istuk Village Elders and for which he received funding from the Endandered Languages Fund.

The overarching theme of Tad’s series of blogs on Savage Minds will be the character of Canadian anthropology. He will get us started with a piece on the relevance of “national anthropologies.”

Welcome Tad! I look forward to reading your work!

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There was some discussion, following Rex’s post on Wikipedia, as to whether or not people were ignorant or lazy in failing to edit Wikipedia articles. Since the examples Rex gave were of people who actually figured out enough of the technology to edit the “Talk” page, laziness seemed like the more likely option. However, I do think that learning a new user interface (and sub-culture) can be very intimidating. So I was very glad to see this excellent tutorial: How to contribute to Wikipedia.

I especially like this quote from Wikipedia’s own introduction:

Don’t be afraid to edit pages on Wikipedia—anyone can edit, and we encourage users to be bold…but don’t be reckless! Find something that can be improved, either in content, grammar or formatting, then fix it. Worried about breaking Wikipedia? Don’t be: it can always be fixed or improved later. So go ahead, edit an article and help make Wikipedia the best source of information on the Internet!

One criticism, however: I think that one of the major hurdles people have with using Wikipedia is that they don’t realize that there is a built-in “undo” function, or that you can even compare edits over time to see what has changed. A really good tutorial should explain how this works as well, since I think it would make people feel more comfortable contributing.

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I made some minor updates to the site which I believe everyone will welcome. Category archives should no longer produce an error message, and thanks to the elegant Filosofo Comments Preview plugin, you now have the option whether to submit your comments directly or preview it. Preview even works with Textile syntax!

Let me know if you see anything weird.

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Although their website has nothing about it so far, the University of Chicago Press is having a massive mail order catalog sale with tons of great books for very, very cheap. As usual, many have already been remaindered or have been in print long enough that this is not news for some books. However, huge swaths of them are unusually cheap—especially some of the cloth copies for art books, which retail for US$65 but are now going for US$14. There are some good finds in anthropology and related details.

Since the sale seems to be limited to people who have the actual mail-order catalog if you are interested you should call or request one, since the sale ends on 31 January so you have some time.

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[Asen Balikci in, Through These Eyes, by Charles Laird.]

In the December issue of American Anthropologist Jay Ruby reviews Charles Laird’s 2003 film: Through These Eyes, a film which interestingly seems to locate the origins of the current culture war in the Cold War era:

At the onset of the space race in the 1960s, the U.S. government feared its educational system was slipping behind the Soviet Union’s. A controversial science initiative grew out of its response, Man: A Course of Study [MACOS], a program with the ambitious goal of teaching American children what it was to be human. At the program’s core was a benchmark of visual anthropology, the Netsilik Film Series, capturing a year in the life of a small Inuit community on the cusp of contact.

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As an applicant, I group academic job announcements into two categories: big and small. The small applications just ask for a cover letter, the names of three referees, and your C.V. The big applications want all that and more. They also want: writing samples, teacher evaluations, syllabi, and actual letters from your referees – not just their names. That adds nearly a hundred pages to the application, if not more. Multiply that times three hundred applicants and they’ve got over thirty thousand extra pages of documentation on their desks!

Now, I’ve sat in on job searches from the other side. At Temple, the graduate students had (collectively) one vote in job hiring decisions. I know for a fact that almost all of that secondary paperwork was unimportant for making the initial short-list of the twenty or thirty candidates that would be looked at seriously.

It really seems like such a shame to waste all that paper. You’d think anthropology departments would have more concern for the environment.

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Somehow not a single linguistic anthropologist got included in the Forbes Magazine special report on communicating. When they wanted an article on “cross-cultural communication” they went to a zoologist!

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I have to admit, despite having studied Anthropology since I was a teenager (my High School offered anthropology), I never really had much in the way of methodology training. And, except for people in applied anthropology programs, I’m afraid that this is the norm rather than the exception. Even my graduate seminar on methodology ended up being a largely theoretical discussion. Perhaps that’s not a bad thing, but lately I’ve noticed that some of the jobs I’d like to apply for expect you to be able to teach a methods course. I thought of this as a good challenge and have been reading up on methodology and looking at examples of other syllabi (see here, here, here, and here) in order to develop my own course.

I often require students to engage in hands-on ethnographic work in my courses. In the visual anthropology course I taught at Haverford last term, students were expected to produce a visual ethnography. But a general methods course presents its own problems. Many of the books I’ve read on the matter just don’t seem to suit themselves to the structure of such a course. For instance, Habermas’ Knowledge and Human Interests would require a course of its own to teach. I had high hopes for Flyvberg, but was ultimately disappointed. Etc. I just can’t seem to find the books or articles that I’d really like to teach. (Perhaps I’ll eventually have to write one of my own…)

My first efforts are up on my wiki here. Please take a look and either offer feedback here, or edit the wiki directly. I’m not very attached to what I’ve done so far. I’ve put a lot of work into it, but it often takes me years and several times teaching a course before I’m happy with a syllabus. Because this is a first effort, I know it will need work. Please focus on the course outline (i.e. the reading list), I’m fairly happy with the general structure of the course.

Thanks for your help!

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First, let me say that Routledge is to be congratulated for devising such an ingeniously insouciant cover for their new ‘Routledge Classics’ edition of The Gift (for some reason I also find the cover of the Jung volume compelling in an inarticulate way). But I must say I’m pretty dismayed to see what happens when I try to ‘read more’ about the book. If you click on it you are taken to a ‘country of origin’ page where you must give them your physical location before they will show you anything about any of the books. Why? According to Routledge,

As a publisher we take copyright issues very seriously. Not all of our publications are available in all territories, and in addition we undertake to distribute other publishers [sic] product in some (but not all) territories. We use your location to ensure that we only display products which are available for purchase in your area.

The idea that copyright issues dictate you telling a website where you are from is just simply ridiculous. Copyright law is (newsflash) harmonized within the United States, so there is no need for me to tell Routledge where I’m from. Second, no one is violating any copyright law anywhere when they buy books in print abroad and have them shipped over to their house (although I admit, ianal, and there may be some weird ‘distribution’ thing going on. But I doubt it).

Routledge wants 1) metrics metrics metrics and 2) to get you to the right part of their ecommerce website. It is perfectly understandable that they should want both of these things. My point is not some Politech-like libertarian one about web privacy. My point is simply that Routledge is simply making information about their books 1 click farther away than it needs to be—in my case it was, as Richard Attenborough might put it, A Click Too Far. It’s also lamentable that copyright is the new liability when it comes to excuses that people turn to when they decide to do (or not do) something. Drives me up the wall I tell ya.

Ok, I’m done. Thanks for listening. I feel much better.

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I recently finished Michael Barber’s scrupulously researched biography of Alfred Schutz, The Participating Citizen. One of my favorite parts of the books involves Maurice Natanson’s correspondence with Schutz as he attempts to find a job shortly after finishing his dissertation. In the course of a two-year job search Natanson applied for five hundred positions before landing a position at the University of Houston in 1952. Natanson’s anecdotes of teaching ministers in training in Texas after years of immersion in emigre German philosophy in lower Manhattan demonstrates that the ‘liberal academy’ and ‘conservative Christian values’ have been in conflict for more than just the past couple of years:

I mentioned something in one of my classes about the problem of immortality and one of the students said, “Do you mean the fact of immortality?” When I suggested that philosophy does not begin by presupposing the dogmas of religion, a sudden chill spread over the class and people drew back as if I were going to lure them into a life of dishonor.

Natanson also notes that “When the head of the philosophy department mentioned the existence of higher criticism of the Bible, a minister in his class hurled his briefcase at the teacher, rushed to his desk, and screamed ‘You son of a bitch, I’m going to stomp you through the floor.’” and that when he mentioned Darwin in one of his classes “one student became hysterical and screamed again and again, ‘Prove the earth is that old! Prove it! Go ahead and prove it!’”.

I have never had experiences like this in my classes before, but Natanson’s reflection on the financial position of the adjunct is one with which I am all too familiar:

I have entered at long last a euphoric state: I no longer have any financial worries! My situation is by now so clearly disastrous that bills and financial demands make no impression on me at all. In fact, I have entered what might be termed the “aesthetic” of finance: my interest in bills and monetary letters is with respect to the quality of prining, the type of paper, the various systems of book-keeping, the different creditors used, etc. I am like the financier who has been wiped out on the market and then continues to watch the ticker tape machine, losti n fascination of the intricate machinery that announces disaster. As both Father Divine and William Saroyan used to say: “Peace, it’s wonderful.”

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It’s time now for another installation of “Wild Thoughts” (previously and unimaginatively entitled  Updates and Shorts ), in which I catch up on all the stories I’ve been saving for a “future post” which never seems to get written.  First, some updates:

• In Party Like it’s 1954 I described the loyalty oath requirement recently imposed on adjuncts in my school.  After a lightning-round of research on the Constitutionality and legality of the oath, and after communicating with a Faculty Senate member, I decided to sign the oath and pursue the fight once I’d secured my job.  I’ve learned of an unsuccessful legal challenge that was mounted by a full-time faculty member some time ago, and am hoping to get more information from him.
• The Meskwaki adoption case I described as “settled” in my earlier updates post has encountered new complications. The motehr in the original case, who after being disallowed by the tribal government to allow her newborn son to be adopted by a non-Indian couple outside of the community, has turned the child over to Human Services after being involved in a drug-related arrest and herself testing positive for marijuana and drug use.  
• Meanwhile, in the world of establishing ethnicity through DNA testing , the LA Times adds some context to the Wired piece mentioned by Kerim earlier.  What’s intriguing to me about the turn to DNA testing is that it essentially substitutes the uncertainty of competing sociocultural claims with the uncertainty of scientific claims—DNA testing has, so far, not come one whit closer to establishing ethnicity than the methods it replaces, but has become preferred for its air of scientificity.  What will be interesting is when the Pakistanis get wind of all this and start applying for tribal enrollment (Pakistanis often come up as “Native American” with current DNA testing methods).

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Some folks have been busy listing info-tech related panels planned for the 2005 AAA in DC on my wiki. Take a look here, and feel free to add your own. I’d be happy to let other topic-specific AAA conference pages emerge from that same starting page as well.

Anyone who wants to start their own wiki for a project might also wish to look at PB Wiki, which lets you start your own for free. (more…)

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My scarily erudite beloved is currently doing an Advanced Theory tutorial with one of her students, an art historian interested in architecture. Now they are doing structuralism and asking for suggestions. They have two sessions alotted to it, and want suggestions about ‘which Levi-Strauss to read.’ I suggested that for the first session they read “Animals are good to think and good to prohibit” by Stanley Tambiah and “The Kabyle house, or the world reversed” by Pierre Bourdieu. After that they can move to the first two chapters of our namesake, Savage Minds.

Does anyone have any other ideas? Classic structuralist writing useful to art historians with a focus on architecture? Please do not reccomend “Myth and Meaning” or anything by Roland Barthes.

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Via Lorenz, I see that the latest Anthropology News article by Brazilian anthropologist Gustavo Lins Ribeiro is freely available online. In it he seeks to offer an alternative vision of the knowledge economy which breaks down barriers between the various national anthropologies which have emerged over the past century. Although there is some flow from these various national anthropologies to the English speaking world, he would like to see more horizontal flows of knowledge:

We need to foster the visibility of non-metropolitan works of quality and enhance our modes of exchanging information. Translation of different anthropological materials into English is important to help diversify knowledge of the international production of anthropology. But unidirectional translation is not enough. If we want to avoid linguistic monotony, we also need to increase the quantity of heterodox exchanges and translations. German anthropologists should be translated into Japanese, Mexicans into German, Australians into Portuguese, Brazilians into Russian, and so on.

A noble goal, which I wholeheartedly endorse, but it is also necessary to consider just what a tall order this is. It costs the EU a billion dollars a year to translate all official documents into the various member languages. The entire US publishing industry only manages to translate about 330 books a year into English. Volunteer translations on the web can help, but I have yet to see any such site that produces a significant volume of output. For instance, there is a huge gulf between the various language versions of Wikipedia – the one place where we would expect the web to work best in this regard. And we all know just how far machine translation still has to go …

Which isn’t to say that it can’t be done. Government subsidies, better machine translation, and collaborative online software can all help. But for the time being I think we will still depend on individual scholars who have the skills to serve as a bridge across the linguistic divide. We should remind people just how valuable those skills are, and why it is worth the significant time and costs to train scholars in those skills. And not just scholars, but diplomats and our defense forces as well.

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Anthropologists of our discipline’s long history of engagement with social and political activism of varius forms often invoke anthropology’s status as the “reformer’s science.” The phrase floats around a lot. Not everyone who uses it knows the origin though—the closing chapter of Tylor’s ‘Primitive Culture.’ And even those who know the origin of the phrase often don’t know the original quote that it’s taken from:

To promotors of what is sound and reformers of what if faulty in modern culture, ethnography has double help to give. To impress men’s minds with a doctrine of development, will lead them in all honor to their ancestors to continue the progressive work of past ages, to continue it the more vigorously because light has increased in the world, and where barbaric hordes groped blindly, cultured men can often move onward with clear view. It is a harsher, and at times even painful, office of ethnography to expose the remains of crude old culture which have passed into harmful superstition, and to mark these out for destruction. Yet this work, if less genial, is not less urgently needful for the good of mankind. Thus, active at once in aiding progress and in removing hinderance, the science of culture is essentially a reformer’s science.

I think maybe some people who throw around the phrase “reformer’s science” don’t realize just what this phrase meant to Tylor—the elimination of old, outmoded bits of archaic culture in his society and their replacement by shiny new bits of Victorian culture. In fact, as Stocking points out, Tylor saw culture as a mass noun you could have more or less of, not something that came in plural form as distinct orders of meaningfullnes. As far as Tylor was concerned, people from the empire’s periphery weren’t from ‘different cultures’ they were ‘primitive’. I suspect Tylor’s sense of anthropology’s ability to ‘destroy’ cultural difference in the name of a universal civilizing mission is not what most anthropologists who speak of anthropology as a “reformer’s science” has in mind.

The lesson I take away from this is that strong moral certainty is like a large, prominently placed tatoo—it seems like a good idea at the time, but how will you feel about it in hindsight? If you are down for the long haul, then well and good. But maybe someday—perhaps within the course of just one career—this sort of zeal will no longer seem the bold gesture it originally was. This isn’t to say that I’m against moral certaintly or ethical commitment—I just got done with Yom Kippur, after all—but it is to say that a certain sort of Burkean existentialism may be the way to go in many situations. Aided, of course, with a good dose of historical awareness of the history and pedigree of some of the labels you throw about.

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