Well, the first official Savage Minds retraction: the story about the student visited by Homeland Security after requesting Mao’s Quotations via interlibrary loan was a hoax. The student began elaborating on the story to the professors mentioned before, and eventually tripped the profs’ BS meters. Dr. Williams visited the student’s home to question his parents, who figured strongly in the story, and discovered they knew nothing about any of it. Confronted with the growing implausibility of his story, the student finally broke down and admitted making the whole thing up—we still don’t know why.

The article makes a pretty good point about why this story moved from a local story to an international one, citing the “perfect storm” of revelations last week regarding government surveillance of citizen actions—the NSA wiretaps, the FBI watchlist of anti-war and other leftish groups, the Pentagon’s domestic monitoring—which made the student’s claim not only plausible but downright likely. With Horowitz’ campaingn against academics, and a general distrust of critical thinking made sharper since 9/11, professors have been waiting for something like this for a long time. Add to that the concern since the PATRIOT Act’s inception over library monitoring—a provision which the government has claimed it has never used but which is desperately needed—and you’ve got a great zeitgeist for just this kind of story, like the organ harvesting tales of South America or vampire rumours of Africa.

Expect to get this thrown in your face by right-wingers desperate to put a presentable face on the allegations of illegal surveillance that actually is going on in the US. Inasmuch as I played a part in the circulation of this story, I feel partially responsible—though I doubt my SM piece was really key to the international attention this story has received. Still, it’s not part of our plan to mislead readers, and if my story has caused any inconvenience or consternation or embarassment to anyone, I am deeply sorry.

“Correct mistakes if you have committed them and guard against them if you have not.” So sayeth Chairman Mao.

[Thanks to Boing Boing for the Mao quote, and Tom Tomorrow for the heads up on the hoax.]

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You know the phrase “informal economy?” That was Keith Hart’s idea. Hart exemplifies the Oxbridge lefty populist 60s development social anthropologist—you know the type. Throughout his career Hart has always had a personality and imagination that is a little too big for anthropology to hold. Luckily that is what the internet is for—his book The Memory Bank is now supplemented by a website which is literally his memory bank. I can’t think of another professor who received their Ph.D. four decades ago who have been so enthusiastic about embracing the Internet. Not only is his book available online in more or less complete form, so are his papers, both published and unpublished, his stories and poems and even links to IMDB move reviews he’s writtten.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the site is his blog. It isn’t actively maintained now, but even in its current form it’s sort of fascinating—some entries literally consist of “here’s what I wrote last night to replace the intro of chapter 2 of that new book I’m writing.” I started reading The Memory Bank when it first came out then managed to leave it on a plane. I remember it being intriguing and definitely a couple of standard deviations away from the run of the mill in a fascinating way. Although it was clear that Hart’s grasp of the Internet was different from that of someone who grew up with it, Hart’s take on it, like the rest of his career, cannot help but peak your interest.

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I am always on the lookout for ways to become a better teacher, and in my undergraduate teaching so far I’ve been very focused on developing courses in which in-class discussion and expository writing skills can be linked together through syllabi which encourage students to see learning as a the process of entering into a discussion with authors they encounter and the scholarly tradition out of which those authors emerge (note to potential employers: I am also deeply committed to publication and research. Plus I also love committee work and professional service. Much more than those pesky other applicants).

My background to this comes from The University of Chicago Writing Center. Now that I am located in Honolulu, though, I keep searching for other inspiration as I continue to work on my classroom teaching. I recently stumbled across the web site for The New Humanities Reader and I must say I am really blown away by their approach. I didn’t even know there were new humanities and here they’ve already got a reader! If I was ever teaching a composition class—rather than teaching an intro anthro class with a composition component—I would seriously adopt this as my textbook. I mean this is the first time I’ve ever been tempted to adopt any textbook. In fact I am tempted to see whether I can’t make it fit into my anthro course. The authors, bless their souls, have included lots of great content from their program on the website, including a set of links to authors for their students to explore. But what I find most impressive is the teacher’s manual. This material is fantastic, and I certainly plan to use it more in my teaching.

Coming as I did from a liberal arts background, I have a strong sense of how a ‘discussion’ or ‘seminar’ style class ought to be run, but of course no idea of how my students managed to implant this ideal in me. From what I’ve seen so far, the New Humanities Reader looks like a great way to explicitly explain how ideals like ‘socratic dialogue’ or ‘problem-based discussion’ can actually be achieved in class.

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With new developments in the Pennsylvania Intelligent Design trial I thought SM readers might want to rise above the hue and cry of contemporary debate to a more lofty, philosophical plane. Martin Roth, a philosophy professor at Knox College, has recently taught a course on Intelligent Design which is remarkably well-balanced and thorough. Of course I may be biased because I went to high school with Martin, but I think this syllabus will be of interest to any academic who is interested in the Intelligent Design debate. Savage Minds has the syllabus available for free download. Check it out.

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Inside Higher Ed is running a brief interview with John Willinsky, the authror of The Access Principle. Like many scholars interested in copyright reform and open access scholarship, I preordered this book some time ago and I’m looking forward to reading it. It certainly seems poised to summarize what so much of us have been arguing for a long time now, and on all accounts it is a lucid and thorough treatment of the subject. I highly reccomend it, and will blog more after I get my hands on a copy just to make sure that my positive views are actually justified!

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While we are working on the film, we have been having our meals at Roxy Gagdekar’s house in Chharanagar, and we have had many long talks. He is a tremendous source of information about the Chhara community, denotified tribes, and the politics of Gujarat. A reporter at one of Gujarat’s leading newspapers, Roxy is also an excellent writer. So I am very happy that he has decided to start his own blog. He plans to use it to write about Chharangar, the activities of the Budhan Theatre, and even some short fiction he has written.

In one of my first posts on Savage Minds, I argued that there would be a resurgence of “armchair anthropology” as a result of the internet. Central to this argument are what Hossein Derakhshan calls “bridge bloggers.” Such bloggers are able to bridge the same linguistic and cultural barriers that anthropologists seek to overcome. In some cases they may even do it better. I believe that Roxy Gagdekar is one such person.

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So, as many of you have probably heard, Evo Morales has won the election for the presidency of Bolivia. Upsetting all predictions, he won by a simple majority—more than 50% of the vote. This is an amazing feat in a Bolivian presidential election. There were EIGHT candidates for president, and his nearest rival trailed him by twenty percentage points. This kind of slam-dunk never happens.

It means that a very controversial candidate has a real mandate for governance; that, in fact, he has the strongest mandate that any newly elected president has had in Bolivia since its “return to democracy” in the early 80s (following the dictatorships of the 70s).

So what is controversial about “Evo”? He’s indigenous, a socialist, and emerged as a political leader in coca-growing unions. He’s promised to fully legalize the cultivation of coca in Bolivia. Traditionally, coca leaves are chewed or made into tea; a limited level of cultivation for these purposes is already legal in Bolivia. All cultivation over this level is presumably destined to be elaborated into cocaine (in fact, some of the “excess” coca also goes to traditional domestic use—but, ahem, not most of it). Evo has promised to develop profitable alternative (ie, non-cocaine) uses for this “excess” coca. It’s not as totally implausible as it might sound—at the coca-growing peasant end of things, cultivation isn’t that profitable—it’s just more profitable than any of the currently-available alternatives. So it wouldn’t (hypothetically) be impossible to divert “excess” coca to another kind of weakly profitable (at the peasant end) market if one existed. However, it must be said that although it is hypothetically possible there is no realisitic precedent for the plan.

But that’s not really the most important part of Evo’s agenda, though it will receive a huge amount of hyperventilated attention in the U.S. press. Earlier this week, on Fox “News”, a reporter gamely explained that while a one pound of coca leaves costs about $2 on the street in Bolivia, one pound of cocaine is worth about $15,000 on the street in the United States—so “you can see the mark-up”. It was shamelessly misleading, as a pound of coca leaves would in fact yield an amount of cocaine invisible to the naked eye, but whatever.

The coca part of Evo’s campaign really is small potatoes (as is cocaine’s part in the contemporary—as opposed to the 1970s/80s—Bolivian economy). What is a huge deal in Bolivia today is the nationalization of its natural gas resources. This is what is going to receive real (as opposed to scandal-baiting) international governmental and private-sector attention. It is also what is going to be Evo’s central administrative challenge. Evo came in first in the provinces of the more populous Andean west. Support for nationalization of natural gas resources is high is in the Andean west. Evo did not come in first in any of the provinces of the lowland east. The natural gas reserves are in the lowland east, and these lowland eastern provinces have long been rumbling about regional “autonomy” which can for some purposes can be translated as “keeping the profits of natural gas production in the lowland east and not sharing them with the Andean west”.

Surprisingly, Evo did come in second in Santa Cruz—the province that leads the lowland autonomy movement. This was unexpected, and is encouraging because it indicates there may be a basis for rapprochement between the two regions. Evo is witty, charismatic, and courted the east throughout his campaign, evidently with real success. If he can reconcile eastern and western interests over the nationalization and exploitation of Bolivia’s gas reserves, he will succeed where his 3 predecessors have failed in rapid succession.

If he fails, Bolivia is in real trouble, but in that case don’t expect to hear much about him in the U.S. press. But if he does succeed: whoo-eee. Expect to hear that he personally encourages red-blooded American schoolchildren to freebase cocaine daily and twice on Sundays.

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Susanne Osthoff, the German archaeologist and relief worker kidnapped in Iraq three weeks ago, has been freed and is reportedly in sound health, according to German authorities. Her driver is also expected to be freed shortly. Details are still sketchy—I imagine more will be forthcoming as Osthoff makes her way home to begin her recovery—but for now it’s simply a relief to know she is ok.

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A while ago, Rex posted on Human Events’ list of the “most dangerous books of the 19th & 20th century”. While ideologically frightening, we can be thankful that Human Events doesn’t (yet?) have any sort of enforcement power behind their list-making.

Or do they? A student in Massachusetts was visited by Homeland Security officers after requesting a translation of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book (#3 on Human Events’ list) through interlibrary loan. The student, who was taking a class on fascism and totalitarianism, requested the book as source material for a term paper on Communism; after filling out the form, he was visited at his parent’s home by two DHS agents, who told him the book was on a “watch list”. The content of their visit is, so far, unreported—but whatever was said, the fact of the visit itself is intimidating enough, and the effect on a developing student’s willingness to grapple with complex issues clear enough to imagine.

Just as worrying, though, is the “chilling effect” this visit is already having. (more…)

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Last night, sitting in Roxy Gagdekar’s house in Chharanagar, I asked him a question that I have been asked at nearly every screening of Acting Like a Thief: namely, how are people able to identify Chharas?

Beyond the historic injustices Denotified Tribes (DNTs) faced during the British Colonial period, Chharas (and other DNTs) continue to suffer from ethnic discrimination. Stigmatized as thieves, it is difficult for them to get legitimate jobs in mainstream society. As a last resort, they turn to criminal activity. It is a vicious circle from which only a few are able to escape.

But how do people know they are Chhara? They don’t look noticeably different from the rest of the population, and even if they did, they could easily be from a neighboring state. They speak their own language (Bhantu), but they can speak Gujarati as well as anyone else. (more…)

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Recently some people on the Anthropology of Oceania listserv that I subscribe to compiled a bibliography of work on the Chinese diaspora in the Pacific. It turns out that we had had this conversation before, but because our archives are so difficult to search we ended up having it again. Since I thought such a list might be interesting for SM readers I am including the bibliography here below the fold—there’s some interesting stuff in there!

Thanks to Rene van der Haar for compiling the bibliography and to everyone who contributed to it: John Barker, Niko Besnier, Neriko Doerr, Haidy Geismar, Alex Golub, Jamon Halvaksz, Paul Heikkila, Robin Hide, Stuart Kirsch, Larry Lake, Lamont Lindstrom, Jacob Love, Margaret Mackenzie, Moana Matthes, Nancy Pollock, Christine Stewart, Jaap Timmer, and Matori Yamamoto.

Some fancy formatting may have gotten lost through my cutting and pasting. Deal. (more…)

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Over break I am trying to do some “remedial theory” reading to keep up with the Newest Latest in anthropological work. One of the books that I am slowly working through is David Graeber’s Toward an Anthropoogical Theory of Value. It’s difficult for me to get into because I’ve never been very interested in value. I worked with many of the same professors that David did—in fact, scarily, I think maybe all of the same people and even overlapped in the department by a few years. Does this make me The Graeber Mini-Me? Hard to say. At any rate for several of them (Munn, Turner) ‘value’ and what it was was a topic of concern, as David recounts. But somehow I never seemed to catch the bug. Which isn’t to say that it isn’t a perfectly good topic—it’s just not my topic.

The book is quite good, although I agree with Melissa Demian’s review that his dismissal of Marilyn Strathern’s work is far too pat. But what really drives me nuts about the book are the large number of editing errors in it. Although I am only 55 pages into the book I’ve already spotted something on the order of a dozen confused names and non-existent citations—and these are just the ones that struck me as I read it for content, not with an intent to proofread.

On page 23, for instance, he refers to “Margaret Weiner” and her work on value when in fact he obviously is referring to Anette Weiner, whom he then discusses at length a few pages later. Is this a slip for ‘Margaret Wiener,’ who was (iirc) a student at Chicago at the same time as David and who appears in a footnote to a section of his text 250 pages later? Similarly, on page 295 Robert Herz is listed as Gilbert Herz (a slip for Gilbert Herdt?). C.B. Macpherson’s work on possessive individualism is cited in the text, but does not appear in the bibliography. Neither does Emerson 1844, Collier 1990, Bhaskar 1994a and 1994b (although there is an entry for 1990), Bloch 1991, or Josephides 1982. And like I said, I’m only 55 pages into the book.

I should be clear: I don’t think that these sorts of confusions are David’s fault, nor do they detract one bit from the validity or importance of David’s argument. What they are indicative of is the poor editing that Palgrave gave David’s manuscript. Of course all authors should theoretically produce a manuscript with no typos and an airtight bibliography and of course we always try our best. But ultimately our minds are on creating and expressing a new idea and a new argument. We need help when it comes to spit-and-polish issues such as these—and that is where great editors come in.

Of course people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and I am a notoriously poor speller and proofreader. I throw citations around constantly. So I am as guilty of this—and perhaps even more—than most people. Still, in the past six months since my dissertation defense I’ve dealt with something like five seperate editors for pieces that have appeared or are going to appear. The bad editors make you want to pull your hair out (actually, they make you want to pull their hair out.) But the good ones are an incredible support and improve your work inestimably simply by giving you room to work, nudging you in the right direction, and dealing with spit-and-polish issues. For instance, I have a piece coming out in The Contemporary Pacific and am doing revisions now. My editor—bless her scrupulously organized heart—has cross-checked every citation in my text with its entry in my bibliography. Having someone on my side working on these little details to make my article as professional as possible is a wonderfull, wonderfull thing. Although making corrections to the bibliography is a drag, having to cross-check it myself would be even more of a drag.

Books, despite the customary author’s assertion to the contrary in the preface, are the product of a team. Authors need good editors to produce good books. Despite this, it is hard these days to find academic editors who reallyfulfill that editorial role, much less pull it off with aplomb. I’m very fortunate to have worked with some good ones. Unfortunately, David doesn’t appear to have been so lucky.

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The connection between eating and having sex is a fairly obvious one. Many of the words we use to describe sexual desire (hunger, voracious appetite) and sex acts themselves (eating out, munching), and even various body parts (my favorite: “the split knish”) refer to food—an obvious parallel given the importance of the mouth to both eating and sex. The connection is deeper than just slang, though—Edmund Leach noted in 1964 that the way we categorize the animals we eat and the way we categorize potential sex partners are parallel as well (at least in mid-century Britain): women and animals that live in the home (sisters, dogs) are off-limits for eating and/or sex; animals and women that live outside the domestic sphere (cattle and other animals that roam more or less freely, neighbors) are potential sex and marriage partners; and the truly exotic, those living entirely outside of the familiar world altogether (emu, Africans—from a British perspective) are neither food nor sex partners. Among the Arapesh and Adelam peoples studied by Margaret Mead (1935), a man could eat neither one’s own yams and pigs nor one’s own mother and sister, while:

Other people’s mothers
Other people’s sisters
Other people’s pigs
Other people’s yams which they have piled up
You may eat (Mead: 78).

With such a thin line between eating and “eating”, it seems unsurprising that some people would seek to combine the two more explicitly. Enter the cann-fetish (some explicit langauge, probably not worksafe)—cannibal fetishism (or cannibalism fetish). While many of us are familiar with the case of Armin Meiwes, the German man convicted recently of killing and eating a partner he met and coordinated the killing with over the Internet, Meiwes represents an extreme distortion of what is becoming a significant, if small, fetish community. For the most part, cann-fetishists stop short of actually eating or hurting anyone, rather endulging in a rather elaborate pretend-feast involving trussing the “meal” (generally a willing female, who is bound and whose various orifices will be poked, prodded, and filled with various trimmings and cooking implements), coating her (or, apparently far more rarely, him) with oil, butter, honey, and other basting substances, and “cooking” her in a make-believe oven.

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I was poking around the internet today looking for a course on underground things that I might reccomend to Anru. After some truly inspired Googling I finally managed to find the school I was looking for: the London Consortium. Like the European Graduate School it appears to be a theory-heavey interdisciplinary MA-granting sort of thingamajig. However, while EGS has always seemed a little too outre to me I must say that I am very impressed with the London Consortium’s program, which seem both interdisciplinary and open-ended, but also rigorous and imaginative (here’s a link on the consortium’s early years.)

I am particularly impressed by their classes—I want to take them all! Lest anyone think my long quotations of Robert Lowie and Weber in this blog indicate a sort of stiff-necked obsession with orthodoxy—what Ozma calls the “minor works of Rodney Needhan” approach to scholarship—rest assured I like interdisciplinarity as much as the next person, as long as it is done well. And done well the courses are too—they have a PDF brochure with more course listings (including readings and a rough schedule) and there is additional information and readings in short pieces in Critical Quarterly 42(2)—a description of the logic behind the classes and a list (both require authentication—sorry).

The two most interesting courses I found were both by Paul Hirst before his untimely passing and just look awesome. The one on “what lies beneath the ground” covers monsters undeground (i.e. “the minotaur and crocs in the New York sewer”), “Caverns, Graves, and Wells”, mines, sewers, air raid shelters, and of course The Underground itself. Texts to be read include Murakami’s Hard Boiled Wonderland, Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, and the sixth book of the Aeneid. Hirst’s other seminar—entitled “Shit and Civilization: Our Ambivalent Relationship to Ordure in the City, Culture, and the Psyche” starts with favelas, moves through Mary Douglas, and ends with a week on “shit and art.” Awesome.

Even though Hirst is not around the other classes that they are teaching all seem equally good. I encourage you to check out the catalog.

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Kerim Friedman invited me to guest blog on Savage Minds. I thought about throwing out for discussion some questions that I encountered while doing research on the subway systems in Taiwan.

My current research focuses on the subway systems in the two largest cities in Taiwan: Taipei, the capital and economic-cultural center of Taiwan, whose first subway line was completed in 1996; and Kaohsiung, the country’s hub of heavy industries and one of the world’s largest container ports, whose subway system is now under construction. I use the subway systems as a focal point to understand the regional, national, and global processes that are unfolding in Taiwan. Given that many Asian countries are investing heavily on infrastructure including highways and subways (to boost the country’s global economic competitiveness), my research is not just about Taiwan but carries comparative angles.

In the course of my research—as well as on occasions when I presented my work at professional conferences—I repeatedly faced the question: How do you do research on the subway system in a big city? Indeed, metropolitan Taipei has a population of 6 million, whereas Kaohsiung is a city of 1.5 million people. Over time, I sort of worked out an answer. My involvement with Taipei’s subways was as both a passenger and an ethnographer. That is, the subways constituted the nearly exclusive means of transportation during my stay in Taipei, except for the times when I took a taxi or was driven by friends or families (Research in Kaohsiung is a different story, as the subways are sill under construction). To acquire a broader understanding of the system, I also rode the different routes of Taipei’s subways at different hours of the day as well as on different days of the week, to observe who rode from where, and how and when. The subways also entered in literally every conversation I had with people, both native Taiwanese and foreign-born residents and visitors, in Taipei and elsewhere in Taiwan (and frequently in North America). This fieldwork was blessed with the fact that the subways were, and continue to be, a novelty in the social life of Taiwan; almost everybody had something to say about their personal experience with, or perception and knowledge about, the subways. By extension, with few exceptions, my subway project seemed to generate genuine interests among the people I met, who were often eager to talk to me about the subways. In addition to participant observation, I also had formal interviews with (past and present) government officials who were in charge of the subway construction and of the making and implementation of Taipei City transportation policy prior to the subways, and with civil engineers and urban planners involved in the planning and building of Taiwan’s subway systems (in Taipei and Kaohsiung). In addition, I read intensively literature, popular reports, newspaper and magazine articles on the subways.

But again, at what point can I claim that I have a full understanding of the subway system in Taipei—or Kaohsiung? How many people do I have to interview or talk to in order to say that I have had enough? Or, to put it generally, when can one call it an end when one’s research site is a city with a few million people?

[Anru Lee is an assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the City University of New York. She is the author of In the Name of Harmony and Prosperity: Labor and Gender Politics in Taiwan’s Economic Restructuring (2004) and a co-editor of Women in the New Taiwan: Gender Roles and Gender Consciousness in a Changing Society (2004).]

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