Lately I seem to keep bumping into anthropologists studying gossip. Even the San Francisco Chronicle is writing about the trend. But while the Chronicle article emphasizes the role gossip can play in policing community behavior, the gossip I’ve personally encountered in academia seems to often serve a different function. Namely, gossip is what allows the very different worlds of professors and graduate students to interact.

Not unlike the upstairs/downstairs world of British aristocrats and their servants, so well depicted in the movie Gosford Park, professors and graduate students inhabit the same space in very different ways. It is, for instance, quite difficult to put together a good thesis committee if you don’t know the intricate history of departmental politics from before you arrived in a program. It might be very relevant, for instance, that one faculty member crossed a picket line fifteen years back, while another was leading organizer of the faculty union. Similarly, the faculty are curious about the lives and interests of the students they will be working with. Classroom performance alone is not necessarily a good indicator of which students are ambitious enough to succeed in a competitive marketplace. Graduate students can also become important allies in departmental battles.

As a result, a knowledge economy develops in which professors and graduate students trade gossip. It also serves as a way to bridge the gap created by unequal power relations. Giving graduate students the inside scoop on other professors at least creates the illusion of treating them as equals. I was either not very good at such gossip, or I worked with professors who were more reticent, so I ended up depending on fellow graduate students who were better able to trade in gossip with their advisors. Or maybe I just say that because the gossip I didn’t know always sounded much more interesting than the gossip I did know?

Share This

A friend of a friend is doing a project anthropology and blogging in France and asked me to pass on a request—is there a French anthropology group blog that is functionally equivalent to Savage Minds? Or in general are there any French anthropology blogs that people can particularly reccomend? I know there are some EHESSians amongst our readers…

Share This

There seems to be a bit of penchant on Savage Minds for discussing the desire-as-lack that constitutes anthropology as a discipline, which manifests itself in the frequent gnashing of “intro to” syllabi and proposing of essential works. Far be it from me to avoid joining in the fun. In the irony-laden spirit of Found Magazine, my contribution to this comes not from my own vast and enviable experience, but from a not-so-silent partner, Thomas Chivens. Thom and I were undergrads at UCSC when Virginia Dominguez (current editor of American Ethnologist) taught there. For serendipitous and mysterious reasons that cannot be elaborated in the Internets (for reasons of space), Thom recently unearthed this gem of a handout.
What I love almost as much as this hand-scrawled clearly definitive (c. 1989, not clear exactly on the provenance of the Duke letterhead) list of must-read anthropologists, is what Thom has to say about it:

looking at it again this morning i can imagine virginia would have revised it over the years (i recall her passing it out amidst a barrage of caveats on its casually-thrown-together nature for her student heading to graduate school). i can see it moving into some sort of spreadsheet type format, endlessly expanding, etc.. but it’s the sense of completeness arising from apparent spontaneity that gives it a magical aura and suggests contesting or revising it is the wrong way to think about it. hopefully widespread reproduction won’t take that away. in this regard, it carries with it something of what giddens talks about as the formulaic truth of guardians, in contrast to the propositional knowledge of experts. and if we need guardians these days, which anthropology could use, i think virginia’s about as good as they come.

Something about the contrast this handout poses to the technological smorgasbord of information and research tools at our disposal captivates me. Part of it is, as Thom points out, the clear need for certain kind of guardian—not just in anthropology, but in any domain where apprenticeship is an essential component of progress in knowledge. Sometimes it’s better to have a hand-scratched, seat-of-the-pants expression of deep knowledge over a real-time, social software, scale-free, really simple, ajax-enhanced, web 2.0 instant access to scholarship. If you know what I mean. Part of it is the ”*Still alive, as far as I know” note, which is useful for the earnest anthropological grad student seeking out mentors and influences. Part of it is the emphatic national, tiered grid—I wish I had the guts, and the knowledge to organize my stories of scholarship with such gusto. In any case, I though our readers might enjoy a little bit of the old school, both in form and in content….

Share This

In the past year or so Kerim and I have published articles in Anthropology News about ‘next generation’ research online—using RSS feeds and so forth. In the next week or so I thought it might be interesting to try to undertake a broad review of what sort of tools are out there for anthropologists who do research. I actually am not qualified for this since I am not a librarian, and so this won’t be an enormous list of 500 URLs. Instead I just want to share some of the things that I think are useful as a researcher—the sorts of tricks and tips and locations that I find useful to know about.

For instance: how can you keep on top of what’s being published? Most journals have some sort of alerting service although it is typically in the form of ‘TOC (table of contents) alerting’ rather than an RSS feed—you give the journal your email, and when a new issue comes out you get a list of all the articles in your inbox. You don’t have to have a subscription to the journal or right to read it online in order to get alerted—it’s basically a fancy form of advertising.

Now there are various middleware services and sites that attempt to aggregate these sorts of services for you but on the whole I’ve found them to be spotty in coverage and they never provide the one-stop shopping oslution I want (if someone has other experiences let me know) so I’ve decided to just go direct to the source. Since each company has a different method of providing you TOC alerting, it makes sense to compare OTC alerting services by publisher rather than by journal. (more…)

Share This

PhDWeblogs.net is a non-profit initiative to bring together PhD students’ weblogs from all around the world. If you are preparing a PhD, and have a blog about your research interests, you can register it here. We also accept other research-related weblogs, even if they are not directly connected to a PhD.

(via Scott Sommers)

Share This

Botox injections, a personal trainer, and a fashion consultant can help make one more genetically fit!

Don’t believe me? Just read what Razib has to say!

I had better go get a nose job so that I’m not contributing to “random genetic drift”!

Share This

Last week, Baroness Lady Tonge of Kew brought up the bushmen of the Kalahari in the British House of Lords:

She suggested they were trying to “stay in the stone age”, described their technology as “primitive” and accused them of “holding the government of Botswana to ransom” by resisting eviction from their ancestral lands. How did she know? In 2002 she had spent half a day as part of a parliamentary delegation visiting one of the resettlement camps into which the bushmen have been forced. Her guides were officials in the Botswanan government.

Interestingly, the trip was funded by a company which owns “the rights to mine diamonds in the bushmen’s land in the Kalahari”!

The linked Guardian article by George Monbiot points out some other examples of people being called “stone-aged” when their land looked attractive.

John F Kennedy approved the annexation of West Papua by the Indonesian government with the words: “Those Papuans of yours are some seven hundred thousand and living in the stone age.” Stone-aged and primitive are what you call people when you want their land.

The animal theme comes up quite often too. “How can you have a stone-age creature continue to exist in the age of computers?” asked the man who is now Botswana’s president, Festus Mogae. “If the bushmen want to survive, they must change, otherwise, like the dodo, they will perish.” The minister for local government, Margaret Nasha, was more specific. “You know the issue of Basarwa [the bushmen]?” she asked in 2002. “Sometimes I equate it to the elephants. We once had the same problem when we wanted to cull the elephants and people said no.”

See earlier.

Share This

I’d like to congratulate Diane Nelson of Duke University for being one of the select one hundred and one professors singled out in David Horowitz’ new book: The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America!

She gets special mention because she is not only in women’s studies, but is also … gasp … a … cultural anthropologist!

Usually the fields end in “studies”: women’s studies, black studies, religious studies — one of the worst fields in the country — whiteness studies, queer studies, peace studies, global studies, cultural studies, all different forms of Marxism and various derivative radical doctrines.

They’ve destroyed the field of cultural anthropology (the study of other cultures). What they’ve turned it into is, well, Marxism again. You can go to Guatemala and hang out with terrorists and other quote “progressive” unquote groups, write up your experiences and publish them as a book, throw in a few Frenchified words like “imbrication” and invent some other nonwords like “fluidarity” — which is kind of solidarity but across borders — refer to yourself as a “gringa,” and you’ll become a tenured professor at Duke, like Diane Nelson, who is a director of undergraduate studies in the cultural anthropology department with a degree from Stanford.

Horowitz considers nearly all of contemporary social theory to be “some version of Marxism,” including “feminism, post-structuralism, post-modernism.” Presumably there was a pre-Marxist golden age of cultural anthropology before it was “destroyed” by such theories. Since he hates post-structuralism I suppose that the structuralists were OK. But many of the early Marxist anthropologists structuralists, so presumably even structuralism is tainted and we need to go back even earlier … I wish Horowitz would write another book telling us which social theories are acceptable so that we all know what to teach!

Share This

Yesterday, William Hipwell gave a talk at my department about “Research Ethics and Aboriginal Peoples.” I won’t go into the details, but the emphasis was on the importance of informed consent. I was reminded of our recent discussion on SM about “anthropology and the IRB” and, indeed, some of those issues came up in discussion. The point I raised, however, was slightly different and came from my recent work in India. The issue there is that while we have the full consent of those we are working directly with in the film, the concept of “community” and who has the power to provide consent on behalf of the community (as opposed to individuals) is one of the things at stake.

The group we are working with are reformers who are challenging the old system of community governance. One of the processes we filmed was the establishment of a new form of self-government that aims to more democratically represent the needs of the community. However, there are still several competing traditional councils, or panchayats, that have significant power in the community. The group we worked with was reluctant to go to those groups for permission because their activities were challenging the authority of the panchayat and some panchayat members were actively seeking to hinder those activities.

At the same time, discussions within the group of reformers revealed that there was some concern that failure to secure community-wide consent could result in blow-back. Already two members of the group have been arrested for violent crimes on the basis of false testimony provided by their opponents within the community, and everyone was nervous. (more…)

Share This

Dr. Griffin’s Anthro Lounge is a forum dedicated to anthropology. The membership seems to consist of a lot of Dr. Griffin’s students and ex-students, but is open to everyone. I’ve been thinking a lot lately (more than usual, even) about how the Internet can contribute to both the spread of anthropological ideas to non-anthropologsts and the development of new or improved idea within the discipline, both of which are explicit goals of Savage Minds but it would be folly to suggest that the way we’ve gone about it is the only or even the best way. Forums are notoriously hard to launch; Anthro Lounge has a nice long track record and an active membership already, and seems well-primed to become a great resource for anthropologists and the anthropologically-minded—what I think we all wish AnthroCommons would have become.

Share This

We have probably all heard news of the riots that have taken place in France recently—the largest youth and student protest since May ‘68. This included the occupation of parts of EHESS (the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), where some of France’s anthropology happens. A friend of mine recently passed along these photos of what the building looked like shortly after the police removed the protestors who had occupied it for three days. I’m not sure what story these pictures tell—of the devastation wrought by the ‘forces of order’ or the students who trashed the place when they moved in. I’m still trying to hear from my contacts inside the republic. Are there any readers who have a better idea what is happening in Paris?

UPDATE: This from the EHESS webpage:

Mercredi 22 mars, à 19h, le bâtiment de l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales du 105 boulevard Raspail occupé depuis le lundi 20 mars à 20h a dû être abandonné par la direction accompagnée d’une vingtaine d’enseignants-chercheurs, qui, pendant 48 heures, ont tenté de maintenir la légitimité de l’institution et le lien avec les occupants. Dès lundi soir, il a fallu prendre acte du fait que la réunion des étudiants qui s’était tenue dans les lieux avait été débordée par l’intrusion d’un groupe d’une trentaine de personnes, extérieures à l’établissement, déterminées et organisées. Craignant pour la sécurité des personnes et des matériels, la Présidente a demandé l’intervention de la force publique. En dépit de la gravité des dégradations constatées dès la première nuit et de la réitération insistante de cette requête, aucune intervention n’a eu lieu. Pour faire face à l’urgence, un nombre très important d’enseignants-chercheurs, de chercheurs et de personnels s’est mobilisé sur place jusqu’à mercredi en fin d’après-midi. Nulle intervention des forces de l’ordre n’ayant été autorisée jusqu’à ce moment et la seule proposition de la Préfecture de Police consistant en une « installation dans la durée » en organisant une permanence nocturne de quatre enseignants-chercheurs dans des conditions de sécurité devenues intenables, la Présidente a dû prendre la décision de quitter le site, en abandonnant celui-ci à la merci des occupants. Cette décision a été approuvée par l’ensemble des enseignants-chercheurs présents et suivie la mort dans l’âme. Les chercheurs, enseignants, personnels et étudiants de l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales se réservent de faire connaître largement l’analyse qu’ils font de cet épisode lamentable, et s’engagent par ailleurs à tout mettre en œuvre pour rétablir dans les meilleurs délais l’usage normal de leur outil de travail.

(sorry no time to translate this atm since I have to go teach—the long and the short of it is that the EHESS people are pissed off at the occupiers)

Share This

Just a short PSA to let you know that you can now receive updates of new Savage Minds posts via e-mail. Just fill out the form at the bottom of our sidebar on the right. You’ll only get one e-mail per day that there are new posts, no matter how many posts, and when there are no posts you’ll get nothing. Courtesy of FeedBlitz.

And for the RSS aware, I wanted to alert you to a great site which can give you RSS feeds for sites that don’t normally offer feeds. I set one up for Japan Focus and it is working great!

Share This

I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about Captain Cook, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about Immanuel Kant. But in fact they had a lot in common. They were born four years apart, published at roughly the same time, thought a great deal about how political communities were and ought to be organized, and spoke with George Forster about, among other things, race and human variation. Nevertheless, I’ve rarely thought about both of them together. At least not until I read Brian Richardson’s new book Longitude and Empire.

In Longitude and Empire Richardson traces the way that Cook’s novel cartographic and rhetorical techniques created new ways of knowing and recording human communities which helped reconfigure how Europeans thought about both themselves and others. Thus while Benedict Anderson claims that nationalism has its origins in South American colonies rather than Europe, Richardson adds that the idea of an externally-bounded, internally homogenous territory cum state cum ethnic group owes just as much to the South Pacific whose islands serves as paradigms of just this sort of model. His book manages to be exceedingly readable while simultanously addressing topics that are usually considered seperately—Pacific history and the works of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, for instance. Although I still have a few dozen pages to go before I reach the finish line, I can already whole-heartedly reccomend the book to all and sundry.

Even better, Brian’s website includes his dissertation, which the book is based on, and a smart-looking piece on books and their titles.

In this day and age it is hard to find new things to say about eighteenth-century voyages in the Pacific, and after the Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate we all suffer from Cook fatigue. But Brian’s book offers a fine example of humanistic social science which will interest many people whether they are Oceanists or not.

Share This

Thanks to the work of Brave Leader Richard Cameron and Uberprogrammer Peter Graif, AnthroSource now plays well with CiteULike after a period of recrimination and tears. Thanks so much to Richard and Peter for taking care of this and making this great tool work once more with AnthroSource!

Share This

While it is indeed possible (and at least fun to think) that trained otters in the service of Chinese explorers were the first to discover the Americas from the East, an article on Al-Jazeera’s website details the influence of Muslim scientists on the discovery of the New World from the West—and asserts the possibility that Andalusia Muslims may have gotten here well before Columbus. Whether the latter claim is true or not, certainly the importance of Muslim scholarship to Columbus’ voyage cannot be overestimated; Muslim navigation was the state-of-the-art in the 15th century and for centuries before, providing most of the navigation tools, such as the astrolabe, that Columbus and his crew relied on. By the 9th century, Muslims had proven that the Earth was a sphere, and had worked out its circumference to within 200 km (Columbus apparently knew about this work, but substituted lower figures to help make his case that the voyage he had proposed was at all feasible).

The impact of Muslim science and culture, and especially of the Al-Andalusian culture that dominated the Iberian peninsula between the 8th and 12th centuries, on the development of Western culture is little known and even less talked about. The treatment of Muslim Spain in Western Civ books tends to consist solely of the Song of Roland and, centuries later, the defeat of Granada and subsequent expulsion of Muslims (and Jews) from Spain. In between, a mighty civilization emerged, flourished, and ultimately declined—one that I am beginning to think contributed more to “Western culture” than the Romans ever did. Besides creating a stewpot of cultural and scholastic achievement in its own right, Muslim Spain served as a conduit for the teachings of the Muslim world at a time when Muslim learning was at its peak. For instance, the Catholic Church was utterly transformed by the study of Aristotle in Arabic translation; likewise, the introduction of double-entry bookkeeping by Fra Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli relied on the introduction of negative numbers by Muslims (who themselves had learned from Hindu mathematicians centuries earlier) and the al-jabr (“algebra”) of Al-Khwarizmi (from whose name we also get the word “algorithm”). The work of Ibn Rashid (Averroës)—who also gave us Aristotle—and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) form the foundation of Western medical knowledge; the poetry and dialogues of and about Muslim philosophers and warriors (and non-Muslims deeply embedded in Andalusian culture, such as El Cid, from the Arabic el Sayyid, “leader” or “chief”) laid the groundwork for the birth of the novel (in Spain, of course!); and the pointed arch essential to Gothic monumental architecture was adopted from Muslim architects. (more…)

Share This