This site was the result of an undergraduate seminar at UC San Diego (UCSD) in which students read Mao: The Unknown Story and compared the sources with those from other books and articles on modern Chinese history – with rather devastating results. (What a great teaching project!)
Here is a page devoted to criticizing the statistical methods used in The Bell Curve. [I am completely unqualified to evaluate the math on this site, but it seemed worth including in the list.]
Anyone know of any other web sites devoted to debunking academic books? (Academic books only please.) It seems publishers are less and less interested in being editors or fact checkers, so such web sites will likely play an increasingly important role in keeping authors honest – or exposing sloppy scholarship. It also means that even careful scholars will likely have to have a web page defending themselves from such attacks.
One of my long term plans involves developing a course to teach here in Honolulu entitled “Kohen and Kahuna.” It would be an upper-level class for undergraduates that would compare taboo, myth, religion, and social organization in pre-contact Hawaii and ancient Israel. I might also extend it to Mormons, but I need to read more about Mormons before I commit to that.
Actually what I really need to read more about is ancient Israel, which is not my area of specialty. I was doing some research on anthropological accounts and in addition to the usual (Mary Douglas on the abominations of Leviticus, Edmund Leach on Genesis, bits of Peter Brown) I came across The Savage in Judaism by the wonderfully-named Howard Eilberg-Schwartz. Schwartz was just another innocent Rabbinical student until he read The Savage Mind and was almost thrown out of yeshiva for attempting an analysis of regulations about semen in Leviticus and Deutoronomy. Since then he’s gone on to produce other work.
The Savage in Judaism actually has two parts. The second half of the book is a very anthropological analysis of ancient Jewish practice (however one determines what that might have been) which looks to be quite good. The first half focuses on the situation of Judaism in European (i.e. Christian) approaches to studying other societies. Why wasn’t Judaism compared to other so-called ‘savage’ religions that Europeans discovered in their colonies? And where was it positioned vis-a-vis the study of the classics or ‘oriental’ texts? A big part of the answer, of course, is that even thought Judaism was one dispensation away from The Real Deal that Christianity represented, it remained a source of ‘Western Civilization’ different from the legacies of Greece and Rome. Very interesting.
I’m not very far in the book yet, however I also recently reccomended James Aho’s little book on double-entry bookkeeping without having read much of it and it ended up being just wonderful, so I won’t hesitate to reccomend this book as well.
A couple months ago, my then-girlfriend and I were surfing channels and happened to light upon Gene Simmons’ reality show. It was the end of the episode, and Simmons was lecturing a young band about something or other.
“He seems really smart,” my ex said, somewhat surprised.
“Of course he does,” I half-jokingly replied. “He’s Jewish.”
She was surprised to hear that The Tongued One was Jewish. Pressing my case, I continued: “Of course, most of your major rock stars are Jewish.” (more…)
A Google search for Ralph Linton (don’t ask) turned up this remarkably useful site from the AAA: Materials for Teaching the History of Anthropology which includes a bunch of free PDFs of obituaries of anthropological greats as well as other articles from the AAA. It’s a great collection of articles and free—and totally obscure. Has anyone else heard of this site? Well gratz to the AAA for putting it together even if they have (as far as I can tell) kept their lanthorn under the web’s bushel. These are great resources for Wikipedians.
In other news our site problems should be over soon. That’s also a long story.
Now that I teach in a department of “Indigenous Cultures” I have become increasingly concerned with how people come to be defined as “indigenous” and what that means. Most recently, I took a quick look at the question of whether or not people in Africa have effectively claimed the status of “First Peoples” as indigenous peoples elsewhere have done. After all, most Africans are indigenous to the continent, even if there have been internal migrations.
The web site of IPACC, the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Committee has this to say:
Today, groups claiming to be ‘indigenous’ in Africa are mostly those who have been living by hunting and gathering or by transhumant (migratory nomadic) pastoralism. These are different peoples who have followed particular trajectories of cultural and economic evolution in specific environmental conditions such as the equatorial rainforests, the Atlas, Hoggar and Tibesti mountain ranges, the Rift Valley and the deserts of the Sahara and the Kalahari.
Some Africans may be offended by the idea that one ethnic group should be called ‘indigenous’ and others not. IPACC recognises that all Africans should enjoy equal rights and respect. All of Africa’s diversity is to be valued. Particular communities, due to historical and environmental circumstances, have found themselves outside the state-system and underrepresented in governance. These ‘first-peoples’ or ‘autochthonous peoples’ have associated themselves with the United Nations’ standards on the rights of indigenous peoples. This is not to deny other Africans their status; it is to emphasise that affirmative recognition is necessary for hunter-gatherers and herding peoples to ensure their survival.
This is clearly a fairly defensive position for what must be a rather controversial topic, yet it seems intuitively obvious that the people who fall within this category do share certain characteristics with other indigenous communities around the world.
These articles were much more sanguine about the utility of indigenous identities in the African context. The first article, by Renée Sylvain, highlights one of the problem of place-based rights movements. Those San1 who continue to live in remote segregated homelands share many features with other indigenous communities, but those who have integrated into urban society face a very different set of issues. The author also expresses concern over the essentialized notions of culture that come with identification as an “indigenous” people. The second article, by Dorothy L. Hodgson, looks at hunter-gatherer and pastoralists who find themselves caught between the competing discourses of state sponsors and those of international indigenous rights activist groups, contradictions which were seen by activists as ultimately undermining their political effectiveness.
If anyone has direct experience working with these issues in the African context I’d love to know more.
1 I know, I know, some say that term is now out of favor – but as far as I can tell it is still being used in the South African literature.
A couple of months back I wrote a post which examined the tensions between AnthroSource and the sections of the American Anthropological Association. The sections restrict content in order to force subscription—the only way you get to read their sectional journal is to join the section. But now AnthroSource provides an electronic copy of all sectional journals online for anyone who is a member of the AAA (and AAA, of course, restricts content in order to force subscription—you don’t get access to AnthroSource unless you’re a member of the AAA. It’s all very meta). But note the principle that section members assume their members are acting on: given the choice between paying US$75 for a paper version and section membership versus paying just for AAA membership and a login to AAA, most people will take the cheaper digital texts. Given the fact that the sections believe (or fear!) that section members prefer cheap digital content to expensive analog content, we might want to ask the question:
Should the AAA actually be printing paper versions of its journals at all?
I imagine that most readers will consider this question shocking—the idea of the AAA disbanding its paper publications seem unthinkable. And yet is this because of a deep commitment to paper or simply because this idea is new and therefore a little unsettling? Just how convinced are you that paper journals ought to stick around in a world where digital texts make it redundant? Let me put it another way—if you are convinced that paper has got to stay, how much are willing to pay for it? US$75? US$45? US$10? In my experience, when people are initially confronted with the idea of giving up paper, they balk. But when asked how much they’re personally willing to pay to support it the picture changes quite a bit. Personally, I myself do want the AAA to keep printing paper journals—I like browsing through paper. But like most I place the value of a paper subscription much cheaper than what I’m currently paying to the AAA.
Asking this question about journals let’s us ask a wider, more important question: why do people join the AAA at all? I’ve often heard AAA muckitymucks speak as if the journals were the main reason that people join, but I’m not sure that’s the case. I suspect that people join for different reasons in the course of their career and depending on what sort of anthropologist they are. But my feeling is that the number one benefit of AAA membership is attending the AAA. We love it, we hate it, but the AAA meetings are where the social life of the discipline happen. If you want to give a paper, you give it at AAA. If you want to hire someone, you do it at AAA. If you want to get hired by someone you do it at the AAA.
I can imagine other reasons that people join the AAA other than the journals and attending the AAA. Some sections, such as Central States and AES have their own conferences that people enjoy attending. And of course many people join because it is the right thing to do. But overall my impression is that the biggest incentive to join the AAA is to become part of its social life at the AAAs. Whether you consider this to be a carrot or a stick depends, of course. I sometimes get the feeling at AAAs that many people are resulctant to put down the money for the AAA but that they had to in order to go to give a paper or participate in a job search. Of course its not surprising that anthropologists have a certain ambivalence to all this refelexivity and the fact that the meetings look like a bad remake of the inner sections of Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, but thinking about all this makes me, at least, think about ‘member benefits’ in a way that is larger than journals.
I don’t know. What do you think? Why do you join the AAA? And how much would you pay for paper?
In the final stage of my intro course my students and I read Jonathan Marks’sWhat It Means To Be 98% Chimpanzee. Marks has pretty much decided to be the post-genome Stephen J Gould (or perhaps Richard Lewontin) and produce the updated version of the anthropological critique of race. I like the book because it is easy to disagree with, but even when you disagree with it it is still an interesting and worthwhile read. At any rate the book sells itself as being about genetics but its really a sort of a crypto-introduction to science and technology studies.
In my last class I discussed the way that the media portrays science, and often presents complex and ambiguous findings as clear proof of ‘genetic determination’ of whatever traits its audience want or expect to be told are genetic. In order to keep the class current (and since this is constantly happening), I always get online before class, print up a couple of articles, and ask my students to imagine what Jonathan Marks would say about them. It’s a nice lesson in critical reading.
Well if you are like me and need a steady diet of overly-simplistic, prejudice-reinforcing reportage, look no further because yesterday I discovered livescience.com. The site’s section on human biology does a masterful job of producing article after article demonstrating how not to report on science.
Thus while Science publishes articles with titles like A ‘his’ or ‘hers’ brain structure? Livescience reports on similar studies with the headline Men and women really do think differently. And while the article in Science quotes scientists saying things like “No one knows quite what it all means, but the findings are food for thought.” you get no such consideration in the LiveScience article.
LiveScience also excels in running headlines which explain how something or other is genetically determined (or predicted) but then producing data to the contrary in their articles themselves (typically in the penultimate paragraph). Thus we get a headline which says Genetic basis for increased risk of impulsive violence about a study whose author says “By itself, this gene is likely to contribute only a small amount of risk in interaction with other genetic and psychosocial influences; it won’t make people violent” Similarly we get an article entitled Fingerlength predicts aggression in men in which the scientist interviewed says “Finger lengths explain about 5 percent of the variation in these personality measures, so research like this won’t allow you to draw conclusions about specific people. For example, you wouldn’t want to screen people for certain jobs based on their finger lengths.” I particularly liked this quote because in our readings for that day Marks quips that “behavioral genetics is the only science in the world where you can make headlines by leaving 95% of a phenomenon unexplained.”
Anthropologists are notorious for being overly-critical of anything that smacks of a biological explanation of human behavior, so I am sure that there are many readers out there who are ready to defend the research described above from the evil anthropologist who Wants To Hold Back Real Research because of a blind commitment to a politically correct cultural relativism. But my point here is about the way science is reported in the press, and to get my students thinking critically about reading popular sources. For that purpose I found LiveScience to be great. And of course LiveScience’s willingness to quote scientists to the effect that their results are merely suggestive of directions for further research does the website credit—in fact its what makes the website so literally edifying.
I just finished reading Michael French Smith’s Village on the Edge with one of my classes this semester and I must say that I highly recommend it to everyone who is looking for an introductory level ethnography which deals with Papua New Guinea.
Set in East Sepik province on the island of Kairuru, Smith’s ethnography is ostensibly one about ‘social change’—the book is organized around Smith’s two separate trips to Kairuru in 1975 and 1998. But the topic of the book is really much broader than this—Village on the Edge is really more a story of the changes that occurred in Smith’s life as well as the lives of the people on Kairuru that he met. In many ways, the book is about loosing the innocence of youth. The ‘social change’ that Kairuru experiences, after all, is Papua New Guinea’s fall from grace after independence and the effect that inflation, law and order problems, and crumbling government services have had on village life. Smith had his own fall from innocence as well—the book documents his own failure to find an academic position, his career in as a consultant, and his own quixotic relationship with a village he cannot really claim to ‘study’ as an academic anthropologist.
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Rex for some reason keeps his sideline writing op-eds for Inside Higher Ed a secret here on Savage Minds, but his latest piece has far too much anthropological content for me not to blow his cover. In it he talks about being Jewish in California, the Midwest, and now Hawaii. While the main point of the article (that being Jewish means very different things in each of these places) will not surprise our readers, Rex’s excellent writing and humor make the piece a pleasure to read.
I particularly enjoyed reading of one difference between Rex and myself which seems to go a long way towards explaining why he seems to take the whole Jewish thing a lot more seriously than I do:
As a Jewish professor from California, dealing with these stereotypes is even more difficult because I lack recourse to the solution favored by many colleagues: acting as if the complex negotiation of my identity can be accomplished simply by assuming that “Jewish” means “from New York” and leaving it at that.
Like the Hawaiian students Alex discusses, Taiwanese don’t really think of me as anything other than “American.” However, I’ve noticed that some particularly cosmopolitan Taiwanese take it as a matter of pride that they can identify my ethnicity. For them it is a sign that they’ve been to NY and know what a bagel is. Although sometimes they wrongly guess that I’m French…
This wacky Taiwanese computer ad features a Westerner with a tablet computer encountering Aborigines in Taiwan’s forest. My students pointed out that the Aborigines are wearing Tzou inspired outfits, dancing Amis dances, and living in Paiwan houses. But somehow they didn’t think it was strange that the Aborigines are living in the past, while the Westerner has a fancy computer. (And I’m not even getting into the strange sexual narrative.) In fact, my guess is that Taiwan’s Aborigines have more computers and cell phones than your average town in rural America.
Sage is one of the larger publishers in social sciences around, known (at least to me) for producing copious amounts of sociology with an indescribable but instantly recognizable vaguely modernist “academic-press” visual aesthetic. In this post I’ll focus just on Sage’s journals and the content alerting that they offer at their website, sagepub.com.
In terms of anthropology, Sage publishes just a few titles that are relevant to the discipline as a whole, but I have to admit that I have a soft spot in my heart for them—Anthropological Theory and Critique of Anthropology. However, Sage is also are particularly strong in cultural studies type of journals, including a lot of new media stuff, so if you are interested in Theory, Culture, and Society or Media, Culture, and Society, you have to go to Sage. If, like me, you are an amateur intellectual historian, you can also check out their old-school sociological theory titles like the “Journal of Classical Sociology” and “History of the Human Sciences.”
Sage makes it relatively easy to sign up for an account on their website. Indeed, it is impossible to miss—they’ve currently got a drawing for an iPod going and everyone who signs up is elligible! Moreover, it is very easy to change your account preferences because the ‘manage my accounts’ page hovers in the upper-left hand corner of your window when you visit the site. This page is also where you go to sign up for snailmail alerts and manage your physical address as well. This is very handy and well implemented. The problem is that the ‘manage my accounts’ page has very little to do with the majority of the services that Sage’s site provides.
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I think everyone agrees that Michael Wesch’s brief stint as a guest blogger here has been a great success. I want to thank Mike for explaining his unique and exciting approach to teaching, and maybe we can have him back here at some point to write about his equally interesting approach to multimedia. For now Mike is busy preparing to go back to Papua New Guinea and so we wish him the best of luck!
Sometimes I stumble upon a link that forces me to drop all of my work and shift my focus entirely. Such was the case when after lunch I learned of George Psalmanazar, “the first Formosan to visit Europe.”
In 1704, Psalmanazar published a book An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, an Island subject to the Emperor of Japan which revealed a number of strange habits. Formosa was a prosperous country of wealth with capital city called Xternetsa. Men walked naked except for a gold or silver plate to cover their privates. Their main food was a serpent that they hunt with branches. Formosans were polygamous and the husband had a right to eat their wives for infidelity. They executed murderers by hanging them upside down and shooting them full of arrows. Annually they sacrificed the hearts of 18,000 young boys to gods and priest ate the bodies. They also used horses and camels for mass transportation. The book also described the Formosan alphabet.
Mark Liberman at Language Log posted William Matthews’ “four subjects of poetry” which were read on NPR this past weekend.
I went out into the woods today, and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious.
We’re not getting any younger.
It sure is cold and lonely (a) without you, honey, or (b) with you, honey.
Sadness seems but the other side of the coin of happiness, and vice versa, and in any case the coin is too soon spent, and on what we know not what.
This then inspired Roger Shuy to write up the “four subjects of linguistic analysis,” and now this post picks up the meme for anthropological research:
These people are really, really, oppressed, but look! They have agency!
Identity is political and transcends national boundaries.
These people used to have a tradition, but they’ve adapted it to better fit with their current lifestyle and now it is a different tradition.
There are no signifieds, only an endless chain of signifiers representing the illusion of self resulting from desire-as-lack.
