This is the first in a hopefully ongoing series of Savage Minds posts about music I and my fellow SM’ers care about. The subject is, loosely speaking, “world music”, with all the ambiguities and troubling exoticisms that phrase implies. My hope is merely that, given the wide range of music that we as anthropologists are likely to come across (and, perhaps, be somewhat more receptive to than the average listener), we can expose some of our readers to music they might not otherwise have heard of.

My first entry comes from the “unlikely bedfellows” category: Matisyahu, the Hasidic Jew with the mighty dub reggae sound. Born in 1979 to a secular Jewish family in Pennsylvania and migratory throughout his childhood, Matisyahu joined the Chabad Lubavitchers at age 19 following a trip to Israel and a couple years of soul-searching. A Phish and Grateful Dead follower in his teen years, Matisyahu brought a jam-band sensibility to his religious expression, finding in dub reggae—with its already-existing religious imagery (Zion, Babylon, lost tribes, etc.) and message of peace—a way to be Jewish.

Today Matisyahu lives in Crown Heights, a crossroads of traditions and aesthetics in the heart of Brooklyn. His music represents the other side of the anxieties that fueled the riots in 1991, cutting across musical and spiritual traditions with an ease which has won him fans across the racial spectrum—and on both sides of the Atlantic. The image of this mensch, in his black suit, full beard, and fedora (sans sidelocks—which are not shared by all Hasidim, especially those of Russian descent) , belting out rhymes can be jarring, at first (this video clip includes excerpts from his live performances)—most of us think of Hasidim as a kind of urban Amish, not as beatboxing jammers. But the spiritual exhortations of Matisyahu follow easily from the mysticism and joyful prayer of the Hasidic tradition, and music has ever been part of the celebration of life that is central to the Jewish tradition.

For a taste of Matisyahu’s music, you can download the following MP3s from JDub Records, Matisyahu’s label:

Warrior (Laswell Dub)
King Without a Crown (live)
Heights (live)

Or listen to the whole album Matisyahu Live at Stubbs at the album’s homepage.

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It’s official: the Savage Minds party will be in my hotel on Saturday night at AAAs. Don’t know my room # yet, but this information will be circulating at the meetings. If you come to the AnthroSource event on Thursday evening I will tell you about it for sure, otherwise just get it from the grapevine. Feel free to drop by with a little beer, wine, or soda (or, as they say at the University of Chicago, ‘pop’) and meet the staff and our friends and colleagues.

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Want an article fast? It turns out that Google is indexing AnthroSource.

Try this trick.

In Google search for:

site:.anthrosource.net [YOUR SEARCH]

Where [YOUR SEARCH] is anything you want. For instance, to find articles about Taiwan’s Aborigines you could do this search:

site:.anthrosource.net Taiwan Aborigines

That gives you 53 results, with each result being a direct link to a PDF file. If you have already logged in to AnthroSource it will bring you right to the file. (more…)

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David Price reports in “Counterpunch” on a 1943 OSS (the precursor to the CIA) document he discovered entitled “Preliminary Report on Japanese Anthropology” , a compilation of anthropological research into racial and/or cultural characteristics of the Japanese that could be “weaponized”. The report verges on the genocidal in its cold, detached consideration of means of destroying the Japanese:

The report considered a series of Japanese physical and cultural characteristics to determine if weapons could be designed to exploit any identifiable unique “racial” features. The study examined Japanese anatomical and structural features, Japanese physiological traits, Japanese susceptibility to diseases, and possible weaknesses in Japanese constitution or “nutritional weaknesses.” The OSS instructed the anthropologists and other advisors to try to conceive ways that any detectable differences could be used in the development of weapons, but they were cautioned to consider this issue “in a-moral and non-ethical terms,” with an understanding that, “if any of the suggestions contained herein are considered for action, all moral and ethical implications will be carefully studied.”

Although Ralph Linton and Harry Shapiro objected to these instructions, others—including Clyde Kluckhohn and Ernest Hooten—embraced the project, examining cultural traits like food production as well as “racial” traits like “inner ears morphologies, taste bud densities, laryngeal musculatures, intestinal lengths, and arterial systems”. In the end, little of use was turned up—a slight proclivity for respiratory infections led the anthropologists involved to recommend using anthrax as a weapon, the importance of rice in the Japanese diet and the short viability of stored rice led to recommendations aimed at the destruction of the agricultural system—and the project seems to have been abandoned. But, Price asks, “what recommendations would have been made if significant characteristics had been isolated”? And more to the point, for me: can anthropologists afford to defer the moral and ethical implications of their (our) work, trusting that such implications will be “carefully studied” by others down the line?

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Or, Anthropology for Old People.

So, with the AAAs in the air and most young anthropologists’ thoughts turning to interviews and how to sum up their thesis research in a boffo mini-paragraph, this might not be the most apropos time to discuss What Lies Beyond. But we here at SM shrink from no grim task.

A question likely to echo down the hotel hallways next week, and certain to rustle among the leaves of the groves of academe during next spring’s campus interviews, is what today’s tesista (this word should exist in English but unfortunately “thesist” sounds religious, “thesiser” sounds like a made-up title for a minor nobleman in a fantasy fiction novel, and “writer-upper” is plainly hopeless) plans to do as her Next Project.

One option that comes up often enough to perhaps warrant being considered a pattern is the young anthro—returned from a doctoral project carried out at a field site accessible only by ice ax, dugout canoe, or 20 mule team equipped with propeller hats—who suddenly evinces a serious interest in the same themes as those of the original research—say, exchange rituals—but in a rather more comfortable setting—say, upscale organic grocery stores located in periurban North America. Sometimes in a tone of mild moral umbrage about giving exoticism a poke in the eye.

I for one always felt certain I’d have none of that. No, I’d stay in the South American heartland, polishing my hard-won though still pretty pathetic Guarani language skills and ultimately dying, slowly, of Chagas’ disease as befits any Chaco dweller worth his salt. Neither bug bites nor saddle sores nor sulfurous ground water would stand in my way.

But that was me talking the talk. This fall, walking the Next Project walk (with a visit to my old field site along the way), I’ve discovered the Paraguayan Chaco (my previous work was in the Bolivian Chaco). A good portion of the Paraguayan Chaco has been settled by Mennonites and is, astonishingly, a Chaco with grocery stores, a Chaco with air conditioning, a Chaco with swimming pools (well, one anyway). My anti-colonialist spirit tells me it is wrong wrong wrong for me to want to take a swimsuit next time, while my sensualist flesh says it is oh so RIGHT.

So, I’m wondering (in a self-exculpatory sort of way)—am I just succumbing to the inevitable? Apart from all the condemnations of exoticist exploitation that are heaped upon old-fashioned, out-in-the-impoverished-Otherish-boonies fieldwork, how much of a role does the fact that anthropology is no longer a young upstart discipline, but one with lots of comfy established practitioners, play in the shift of what kind of ethnography “counts” for our collective purposes?

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Here’s a real Thanksgiving tale to warm your cockles: Thanksgiving Coffee, a California-based distributor of organic and fair trade coffees, is offering Mirembe Kawomera coffee, produced by a Ugandan cooperative composed of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian coffee growers.

The story of Mirembe Kamowere—which means “delicious peace”—is amazing. In 1999, as world coffee prices plummeted due to a glut of Brazilian and Vietnamese coffees, Jewish Ugandan J.J. Keki went door-to-door through his community encouraging his fellow farmers—mostly Muslim and Christian—to band together in an effort to create a stronger bargaining position. The effort was successful, allowing alliance-members to clear 20 to 40 cents a pound more than for conventionally-traded coffee, meaning Ugandan coffee growers can earn a dependable living somewhat buffered from the vagaries of the world market system.

(more…)

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Faculty Democracy is a broad-based association of NYU faculty dedicated to bringing transparency and accountability to decision making at the university.

One of their first acts has been to come out in support of the striking graduate students. In this statement in support of GSOC, they emphasize the importance of graduate student’s right to express their opinions:

Regardless of our individual opinion about unionization for graduate assistants, we (the undersigned NYU faculty members), believe that in order to protect academic freedom and to maintain an open and collegial atmosphere at the university, graduate students should be free to express and follow their beliefs about unionization without any fear of reprisals. At a time when this institution is under heightened public scrutiny, it is all the more important to preserve this enviable tradition of freedom at NYU.

I counted fourteen anthropology professors among the over two hundred signatures.

Faculty Democracy have also posted this letter to NYU’s undergraduates responding to comments by the school president: (more…)

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Bryan Pfaffenberger has started an STS Wiki. I don’t yet know how I feel about this, but I want to feel good, and I want to be loved. Most of all I want it to be a useful resource and clearinghouse. If you feel the same way, and consider yourself part of STS (which in this case means Science, Technology and Society, or Science and Technology Studies, but not Super Turbo Sedan), then maybe you’d like to participate too! Bryan is also a member of CASTAC (Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology and Computing of the American Anthropological Association), which, by the by, is currently considering the question of whether it still needs to exist, or whether its purpose has been served, viz. to make STS safe for anthropology (or was it “to make anthropology safe for STS”? I forget who I am With and who I am Against these days). Anyways…

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The oldest cliché in the book, guaranteed to be found in any newspaper article or TV show about indigenous peoples, is the moniker “ancient people” (sometimes “ancient tribe” or “ancient tribal people”, etc.)

What is an “ancient people”?

The idea, I suppose, is that their current practices, social structure, and way of life has remained unchanged for centuries. It is a nice fantasy, but it is almost never true. Further investigation invariably reveals a history of constant change. These include changes that come from the dynamics of so-called “traditional” ways of life, including warfare with neighboring groups, the constant invention of new traditions, changes in food supply, and migration to new ecological environs. It also includes exogenous factors, such as invading armies, trade with other groups, colonialism, and incorporation into the global economy. Often these changes (including incorporation into the global economy) happened a century ago. So long ago that the younger generations have never known any other way of life.

In some extreme cases, the group itself might be a product of colonialism. As Mamdani documents in Citizen and Subject, many so-called “tribes” were invented by European’s in order to simplify colonial administration of rural areas. Fluid and even democratic indigenous practices were replaced with the creation of a tribal “chief” answerable only to colonial authorities – a despot. (more…)

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Back in the day young anthropologistswent off to the field packing a copy of the Notes and Queries in Anthropology—a checklist of topics About Their People that they had to be sure to cover. The idea was that there were people back in the metropole were creating generalizing theories of society and needed comparative data to do it. You might be studying ritual and myth amongst the Pukapukaese, but someone out there was trying to plot the distribution of outrigger canoes, and they wanted to make sure you added your two bits. Thus the notes and queries included standard questions to ask, and diagrams of bows and so forth with the English names for bits of the bow so that you could describe in English what people were telling you Pukapukian. I can testify that having the Notes and Queries in the field is useful—in a fit of retropique I took one with me to the field, and it did in fact help me keep my eyes open in ways I wouldn’t have otherwise: how people carried babies, how often crops came up and so forth—the kind of thing I might otherwise have not thought about.

Today the Notes and Queries is out of print, but would like to keep it’s tradition alive in another modality—I want to create a Notes and Queries for virtual worlds, and I want to ask you what you think ought to be in it?

Like the Oxford dons who gathered their ethnographic data through correspondence with railroad clerks and bank tellers living in outstations in rural Australia, anthropology professors today who are interested in massively multiplayer video games have a pool of indigenous experts to draw on: their students. Profs all over the place have encountered students whose reflective awareness of the game’s they’ve mastered means that they have in some sense become avocational anthropologists themselves. In my anthropology of virtual worlds class this semester my students will be producing a series of ethnographic papers about the virtual worlds that they have been studying, and several of them are interested in publishing them on the web. What, then, are the categories and comparisons that you think they should highlight in their paper?

Some might object that when ‘the field’ is only a click away, profs are not completely out of the loop. While I don’t have 7 level 60s on three different WOW servers, I play often enough that I understand the differences in the economy and sociology of, say, Guild Wars and Diablo II that is wrought by their differing use of instancing. And in fact my familiarity is part of the problem—so many of the researchers who study virtual worlds sort of ‘already know’ about how these worlds are structured that we often end up assuming that ‘merely’ descriptive pieces are uninteresting. We assume that we already know all about these games because we play them all the time. But what about people who—like the typical anthropological audience—want to know all about these places, but aren’t ever going to end up going there themselves? And surely sometimes we as natives of these spaces need someone to write down what is going on in them—that is why we have historians and journalists and so forth in real life.

So: We need to begin developing a corpus of richly ehtnographic writing about virtual worlds, and we need to structure it in such a way that we can compare the cases with each other. What are the categories we are interest in? What form should they take? What sorts of notes and queries should be made? What is on your radar? The way the architecture of the game mandates cooperation? The way the virtual worlds are becoming ‘third places’ for students? Let me know what you would want out of a comparative study.

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I know that many of you are in a pre-AAA frenzy but I wanted to drop a quick note for anyone interested in the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) meetings in May 2006 but who is not on their mailing list. The call for papers has been extended to December 1. The theme of the meeting is “Human Nature/Human Identity: Anthropological Revisionings” which is right up my alley. No big surprise there considering that the conference is being organised by and held at Concordia University, my alma mater. I’ve already submitted a paper proposal (I did so before the first deadline back in October) and am anxiously awaiting news. I have also agreed to organise a round table session on the public nature of cégep anthropology (a post on this topic will follow shortly) so I’m very excited about this whole thing. Nothing like having an anthro conference in one’s own town to get the anthro juices flowing!

If you’re not a CASCA member, don’t worry. You can become a member at the same time as you register. Also, you don’t need to be Canadian to come to a CASCA conference! If you know you will have to miss the conference, don’t worry either. I will surely review some of the sessions I’ll have attended here on SM after the conference in over.

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What makes for an effective job interview at the AAAs? This is a difficult question that many people need advice on, particularly at this time of year. Luckily, I have mastered the art of the job interview, and offer these tips for beginners:

1. Remember, job interviews are serious and formal occasions. Do not use slang or informal language. Do use proper english—for instance, avoid using words like ‘I’ or ‘me.’ Ettiquette at the AAAs demands the more formal ‘one’ or ‘we.’ Thus: “One is prepared to teach at your university” or “we have a copy of our CV should you require it.”

2. The most important part of a formal presentation is formal attire. A dark suit is increasingly becoming acceptable, but you can never go wrong with a tuxedo. If the interview occurs after dinner, white tie is appropriate. When the AAAs are held in warm climates, a white tuxedo may be worn before dinner, but never after.

3. Most full professors—i.e. those who will be interviewing you—take their status as senior professors very seriously. Be sure never to look them in the eye while they are speaking to you—they consider this a sign of disrespct. If this makes you feel uncomfortable, I suggest bringing something small to hold in your hand that you can use to focus your attention. This trick worked very well for Chris Kelty when he had his interview for Rice: he brought a small plastic lighter and stared fixidly into the flame as he turned it on and off. If you still feel nervous when trying this trick, try murmuring the words ‘fire’ over and over again during the difficult parts of the interview until you feel calm.

3. Remember, faculty are only interested in hires who are on the cutting edge of anthropological theory. Make sure every single answer you give begins with the words “science and technology studies.” For instance, if someone asks “What sort of teaching techniques do you find most useful?” The proper answer would be: “Science and technology studies. I like to use small-group work, science and technology studies.”

4. Hotel room interviews somehow manage to be both physically cramped and socially distanced. Try to establish a sense of rapport and collegiality with your interviewers by attempting to sit in their laps!

I hope this helps all potential job-seekers out there—good luck!

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Via The Office Weblog comes news that Basecamp is offering free Basic accounts for teachers. Basecamp is an online project management tool that offers users the ability to create todo lists, file sharing, and collaborative editing and has great potential for educational use—say, allowing students to collaborate on group projects. The Basic account lets you manage up to 15 projects at once and to upload files (while their trial-level Free account only allows 1 project and no file sharing) and should be more than adequate for those whose classes aren’t 300-student lecture-hall types. They say “drop us a line” if your interested; the only email address I’ve come across is support@basecamphq.com, which I’ve sent an email to; I’ll post an update if this turns out not to be the best way to contact them.

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Few people know that before they made King Kong in 1933, Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack were documentary filmmakers. Their first film was Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life, made in 1925, made just a few years after Nanook. The film documents the harrowing migration of the Bakhtiari in Western Iran.

I regret not having had a chance to see this film. Fortunately, in honor of Peter Jackson’s forthcoming King Kong remake it will be screened on Turner Classic Movies next Tuesday. Here is their description of the film: (more…)

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The main reason I am attending the AAA this year, besides than the Savage Minds party, is for job interviews. Other than the obvious (researching the place you might be working), what advice do Savage Mind readers have for a job interview?

A while back we had a discussion about the “What is your greatest weakness?” question. What other standard questions might one be expected to be asked? What questions do you wish you had been better prepared for at your last interview? What questions do you ask when they ask if you have any questions to ask them?

How about proper attire? It seems to me that people dress much more formally at the AAA now than they did a few years ago. Is it enough to dress as if I was going to give a talk (sweater or jacket, but no tie), or does one need an extra level of formality (i.e. a tie) for an interview?

UPDATE: I found a useful list of questions one can anticipate here. And some questions you might wish to ask of the interviewers here. More advice here, here, and here.

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