I’ve blurbed about the long-handled Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS to its friends) and their extremely prolific Aboriginal Studies Press in the past. One thing well worth checking out on their site is a cool interactive map of aboriginal ethnic groups.

Most of my research is about how problematic maps which divide aboriginal identities and territorial claims into externally-bounded, internally homogenous “billiard ball” type units a la Eric Wolf can be. But I’m not an aboriginal expert, so what do I know about Australia? Plus also the map is really cool.

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In Karen Nakamura’s recent blog post: “Careers: Visual anthropology as a field of study?” she republishes a letter she sent a student asking about graduate study in visual anthropology.

1. Visual anthropology is on the margins of the discipline. Few programs offer degrees in it and there are even fewer jobs.
2. It is my own belief that photography or film work that isn’t backed by participant-observation research is weaker than that that is. If your goal is to fly in, take photos, and fly out, then you might want to pursue a degree in journalism.
3. There are dwindling grants for visual social science research. You would most likely apply to standard anthropology grants—which means that your work should speak to the discipline of anthropology in some way.

Like Karen, when students approach me about pursuing a career in visual anthropology, I usually attempt to dissuade them. The reason being that if they are interested in producing visual documents, they are unlikely to be able to do so in a Ph.D. program in anthropology. Only rarely are visual documents accepted in lieu of written ones at the graduate level. While some may complement their written thesis with “supplementary materials,” they will most likely remain just that.

Of course, if someone is interested in media studies and would like to do an ethnography of visual media production, then I think they’ll do OK. (more…)

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Perhaps one of the most widely read anthropological essays, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” by Clifford Geertz is available online in standard HTML format, as well as a PDF file. The continued popularity of this piece is due in no small part to Geertz’s fluid prose, sharp observation, and self-depreciating humor. (Self-mockery seems to be an essential ingredient for making an anthropological classic.) But I think the real appeal of this article is the way the reader is drawn into the process of anthropological discovery.

The article starts with a heart-pounding chase. Cockfights are illegal and the sudden appearance of the police during one of the first fights Geertz and his wife witnessed sent everyone scurrying home:

On the established anthropological principle, When in Rome, my wife and I decided, only slightly less instantaneously than everyone else, that the thing to do was run too. We ran down the main village street, northward, away from where we were living, for we were on that side of the ring. About half-way down another fugitive ducked suddenly into a compound-his own, it turned out-and we, seeing nothing ahead of us but rice fields, open country, and a very high volcano, followed him. As the three of us came tumbling into the courtyard, his wife, who had apparently been through this sort of thing before, whipped out a table, a tablecloth, three chairs, and three cups of tea, and we all, without any explicit communication whatsoever, sat down, commenced to sip tea, and sought to compose ourselves.

This story serves two purposes: The first is to draw the audience into the society along with the anthropologist. Just as this event led to Geertz making the transition from “outsider” to “participant,” so too does it make the audience feel as if they are active participants in the drama. The other purpose is to establish the subjective authority of Geertz’s account. Geertz can tell us what this ritual “really means” because he was there. Not only was he there, but he was embraced by the members of the society who loved his clumsy ways.

Does Geertz’s effective prose lull us into a false sense of interpretive complacency? (more…)

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I wouldn’t normally stoop to peddling anything but myself on SM, but I thought I should mention that Vilsoni Hereniko’s award-winning film The Land Has Eyes is now available for schools and libraries on a DVD. I’ve mentioned the movie before and encourage everyone to see it if they are interested not just in Pacific films, but in good films regardless of where they come from. It is an especially good teaching aid because free teaching guides which incudes many free articles about Rotuma. Hereniko also has an truly excellent essay entitled Indigenous Knowledge and Academic Imperialism which is available for free download as well. I really like this article and I teach it all the time. Of course I live in the Pacific and share a university with Hereniko, but I think the article is useful for people outside of the Pacific—it is insightful in a lot of ways, and there are also lots of things for students to disagree with in the paper. Yet it’s written in such a way that the disagreements are remarkably fruitful, and in general I find it to have a sort of depth in discussion that just reading it doesn’t necessarily reveal. At any rate if you are looking for a film about Pacific islanders that is not Once We Were Warriors or Whale Rider then I’d encourage you to check out The Land Has Eyes.

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People had a lot of great ideas about what to read over the summer, and in the end it looked to me like we had three top favorites: E.T. Cultures, Ferguson’s new Africa Book, and Friction. I personally want to dip into E.T. Cultures, and of course by now on the blog there is some demand to take a serious look at the Ferguson. However, Friction is a nice size and ‘award-winning’ which makes it enticing as well. Why don’t we start there and see if we can’t move through the other books, or see what other forms of ‘scholarly communication’ the reading circle can morph into?

So, Friction by Anna Tsing it is. I’ll post my comments on pages 1-50 on 5 June, and we can be off. I’m looking forward to it!

UPDATE: Below is are links to all the posts in this series:

• Towards a cultural tribology: Anna Tsing’s Friction (I)
• Summer reading circle: Friction (II)
• Summer Reading Epicircle: A Frictiony overview (II.1rc2)
• Summer reading circle: Friction III
• Summer reading circle: Friction IV
• Summer reading circle: Friction V
• Summer Reading Circle VI: Friction
• Ranchers and John Muir’s Universal

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Neil Gaiman, who has given some thought to the nature of heroes and myth in his time, takes on “The Myth of Superman” with Adam Rogers in Wired this month. Unlike other comic book superheroes (or, in Cory Doctorow’s preferred usage, “underwear perverts”), they write, who have remained purely the creatures of their writers, Superman transcends his depiction in comic books, TV shows, radio shows, movies, and Atari games, and “…has evolved into a folk hero, a fable, and the public feels like it has a stake in who Superman ‘really’ is.”

Gaiman and Rogers track the appeal of Superman, the mythic quality, to the “internal war between Superman’s moral obligation to do good and his longing to be an average Joe” – a tug-of-war between doing the right thing and playing along, embodied respectively in Superman and his nebbishy alter ego, Clark Kent.

Other heroes are really only pretending: Peter Parker plays Spider-Man; Bruce Wayne plays Batman. For Superman, it’s mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent that’s the disguise – the thing he aspires to, the thing he can never be. He really is that hero, and he’ll never be one of us. But we love him for trying. We love him for wanting to protect us from everything, including his own transcendence. He plays the bumbling, lovelorn Kent so that we regular folks can feel, just for a moment, super.

I disagree, though. (more…)

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I once read, though I forget where, that being Jewish consists mainly in asking what being Jewish means. As the somewhat frequent displays of Jewish anxiety here at Savage Minds might suggest, this isn’t too far off the mark. Many contemporary Jews face an identity crisis, or rather several identity crises, as they grapple with the meaning of a label that encompasses both Paul Wolfowitz and Jerry Seinfeld, Superman and Benny Goodman, Albert Einstein and Harvey Weinstein, Matisyahu and Ariel Sharon, muscle-bound Israeli soldiers and hide-bound New York accountants, rock stars and astrophysicists, atheists and mysticists and regular synagogue-goers and High Holiday Jews and hannukah bushes and $50,000 bar mitzvahs and poetry slams and klezmer and…

Tiffany Shlain’s short film The Tribe, now available on the TriBeCa Film Festival’s website, explores the sense of membership in, exclusion from, and indifference to that shape modern notions of Judaism, particularly in the US. Shlain takes as her central focus the figure of Barbie, the Grand Poobah of shiksas conceived by American Jewess Ruth Handler and named after her equally Jewish daughter Barbara (do I need to mention her son’s name was Ken?)

Of course, Barbie is not Jewish. Not even remotely Jewish. She is, like Marilyn Monroe (who actually was Jewish), the antithesis of Jewishness—the negation of Jewishness, even. For the Jewish student of popular culture, then, the question is: why did a Jewish women design a doll that is so un-Jewish? If Barbie stands as a role model for young girls, why set the Ideal so very far from the way Jewish women look? Blonde where Jewish women are dark-haired; straight-haired where Jewish women are curly-haired; button-nosed where Jewish women… aren’t; svelte where Jewish women are zaftig. To create an America where Barbie was the norm would require the literal erasure of Jewishness. (more…)

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In a post a little while ago we noted the dearth of good anthropological theory readers, and more recently Kerim has tried to make the site more accessible to students by pointing out some key texts online.
This got me thinking: could you construct a ‘history of anthropological theory’ course using ONLY articles available on the most popular digital repositories, such as JSTOR? If so, it might be possible to come up with a reader in anthropological theory that was entirely digital and widely available to students who wanted to get a foot up? (more…)

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When I asked for suggestions for how this blog should move forward, one issue that was raised was the lack of discussion targeted at anthropological novices. For this reason I am starting a new series linking to classical works in anthropology which are available online. The idea is to both encourage newbies to read some classical anthropological texts as well as allow those with Ph.D.s in the discipline to debate the contemporary value of these works.

Today’s entry is Laura Bohannon’s essay “Shakespeare in the Bush.” First published in 1971, reading this essay in high school really turned me on to anthropology. It explores how difficult it is to translate Shakespeare’s Hamlet into the cultural idiom of the Tiv in West Africa (the Tiv are mostly located in Nigeria). While the article takes on a straw-man argument (the idea that there is something universal about Shakespeare’s plays overlooks just how hard it is for even American school kids to learn to appreciate Hamlet), it is a well written article which I believe holds up to the test of time. With Bohannon playing the fool, we follow along as she struggles to explain European notions of kinship, ghosts, and justice to her Tiv audience. It works so well because it is Bohannon who is the butt of the joke, not the Tiv (although the self-assurance of the Tiv elders that they know better than Shakespeare how this story should be told is part of the story’s charm). Despite its whimsical tone, I think we actually learn quite a bit about Tiv culture and society in this short article.

Reading this article again just now I was struck by the fact that her audience consists of respected elders. My guess is that she would have found the audience much more receptive to Shakespeare’s narrative if they had been lower status members of society, such as children. In other words, I don’t think it is simply a case of the Tiv failing to understand Hamlet. Rather, I suspect that these elders perceive Bohannon’s narrative as a threat and are eager to “correct” her in order to neutralize that threat, whereas children or other members of the society less threatened by narratives suggesting alternative social structures would have had considerably less trouble understanding Bohannon’s retelling of Hamlet. This suspicion comes out of my own understanding of ideology as what Zizek calls the “active refusal to know.” According to such an interpretation of Bohannon’s article, there is nothing specific about Tiv society which prevents them from understanding Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but her storytelling is frustrated by the “will to ignorance” of the elders. Sure, even Tiv children would have been confused by many aspects of the story, just as American children are, but I’m simply suggesting that they might not have rejected the very premise of the story in the way that the elders did. Of course, we would probably have learned much less from such an exchange.

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There’s two days left, so if you have ideas for a book you’d like to discuss on Savage Minds over the summer, please let us know!

So far we have the following reccomendations:

Worker in the Cane, Sydney Mintz
Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World, James Ferguson
Kupilikula, Harry West
E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outserspaces, Deborah Battaglia
The Network Inside Out, Annelise Riles
Mutual Life, Limited, Bill Maurer
Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back, Besteman and Gusterman
Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Anna Tsing
Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner
The Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor

Feel free to weigh in on these or to mention additional ones.

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We live in a wondrous era for electronic information. If you have a few thousand songs sitting on your hard drive there are all kinds of programs which will help you organize and catalog your information automatically. Software can identify the song and automatically add information about the song title, the artist, album, etc. There is even software that can automatically download the cover art for each album. When I take pictures with my digital camera it automatically saves extra information about the date I took the picture, what camera I used, and even the aperture and other settings. But there is one kind of information that remains in the dark ages: academic texts.

While songs and photos are rich in computer-readable metadata, most PDF files contain very little. You are lucky if you can even click inside the PDF file to copy and paste the article title. So, while there are many programs that will let you keep track of your PDF files in the same way that iTunes or iPhoto keeps track music and photos (my favorite is Bookends), one still has to open up the PDF, read the information, and then manually type it in to the database.

That you can open a PDF and read the data is a big difference between PDF files and other kinds of media. Not all songs have their title as the chorus. But precisely because of this, much less effort has gone into making it easy to automate the entering of such data into databases. Some academic websites will let you download citation data – but if the file is already sitting on your hard drive you can’t always figure out what database it came from. And this is another part of the problem with PDF metadata: the fact that there are so many different academic search engines, none of which is exhaustive.

So what is the solution? (more…)

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A recent story from the BBC ends with the words: “the romance between a teenage tribal girl and a British scholar was clearly doomed.” The British scholar in question was Verrier Elwin, one of the first anthropologists to work closely with India’s Adivasis. At the age of 37 he married a 13 year old Gond girl against the wishes of her parents. He divorced her ten years later. She is now old and destitute. Certainly not one of the high points in the history of Anthropology …

Despite his obvious ethical failings, as Shashwati says, “Verrier Elwin was one of the first anthropologists to write with great sympathy and understanding about India’s tribal communities.” For that reason one of my goals for this summer was to read his autobiography, as well as a more recent biography, and then maybe even have a go at writing the as-yet-nonexistant Wikipedia entry on him. I have to say, however, that the whole project suddenly seems somewhat less enticing.

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I’ve been reading more about this bill (and the bill itself S. 2802), and it appears that the Bill as it stands does not explicitly exclude funding for social, behavioral or economic sciences. It does however, set priorities for funding in physical sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics. Two things are significant about this: the first is that this list also excludes biological sciences (although a later sentence lists “physical and natural” sciences—but the NSF doesn’t currently organize itself that way). Given that the funding breakdown at NSF is usually that Phyiscal science gets twice as much as Bio and Computer sciences, and usually about 10 times as much as SBE, it would seem that these priorities are already being met. I cannot imagine that such a bill would survive without being amended either to avoid micro-managing priorities, or at the very least, to include the biosciences and (maybe? at least?) economics as priorities as well.

The other significant thing is that the realities of funding at the NSF are never easily restricted by the actions of congress. Anyone who has applied for a large NSF grant in the social sciences in the last 4 years has encountered the “Human and Social Dynamics Program”—which is the NSF’s largest social science initiative ever, and explicitly promotes interdisciplinary work between scientists, engineers and social scientists. What this means to me is that a bill like S. 2802 probably provides the NSF with yet more incentive to create more programs like this, and to fund less “basic” research, especially in SBE, but probably across the board. This is, increasingly, what the NSF is expected to do: encourage scientists and engineers to move their science in the directions indicated by the taxpayers and their representatives. If there is no call, from any quarter of society besides that of the researchers, for continued research on neo-liberalism: THE AWAKENING, or on primate behavior under conditions of extreme scarcity of funding, or on anomalous Igbo fricatives, then the NSF has absolutely no mandate to fund it (I would note, however, that this is not what the NSF was originally designed to do, which was in fact to fund basic science and let corporate america sort it out later in “development”—but times have changed…). So, half empty glass = yes, NSF funding of anthropology is imperiled (has it ever not been?); meanwhile half full glass = those of you anthropologists willing to do interesting research on things that are prioritized by the NSF (like, for instance, “Dynamics of Coupled Natural and Human Systems” or “Human and Social Dynamics”) may well still find plenty of funding there.

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(this from the AAA—this has also been making the rounds on other lists)
URGENT ACTION REQUIRED

Dear AAA Member:

Please consider this request for immediate action. This is likely one of the most important requests for action you will ever receive from the AAA as it involves a legislative threat to National Science Foundation research funding for the social and behavioral sciences. At a meeting of the Senate Commerce Committee TODAY, an authorizing bill – S. 2802 – focusing on American competitiveness will be marked up (i.e. negotiated). It is imperative that legislators hear from the social and behavioral science community before this bill is finalized. Please review the following and make a call:

ACTION NEEDED: If your Senator is listed below, please call or email your senator this morning regarding a proposed amendment by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) that would instruct the National Science Foundation (NSF) to direct its resources primarily to the physical sciences. It is likely that the Hutchison amendment would significantly reduce or eliminate NSF funding for the social sciences. Congress should not be micromanaging the NSF, which supports fundamental research in all science disciplines, including anthropology.

MESSAGE: Please contact your senator, identify yourself as a constituent, and communicate the following simple messages:

OPPOSE the Hutchison amendment to S. 2802 (the “American Innovation and Competitiveness Act of 2006”) which excludes the behavioral and social sciences from consideration in the awarding of NSF research grants, and undercuts their role in advancing national innovation and competitiveness.

SUPPORT the amendment to S. 2802 sponsored by Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) which would eliminate the section of S. 2802 that prescribes research priorities to the NSF.

BACKGROUND: Since last fall’s release of the National Academy of Sciences report, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” – a congressionally requested report offering a set of recommendations aimed at restoring U.S. advantages in the marketplace, specifically in scientific and technology – significant congressional and executive branch attention has been focused on U.S. innovation and competitiveness. A range of legislative initiatives have been introduced to promote innovation and competitiveness in various ways. S. 2802 – authorizing legislation that frames spending parameters but does not appropriate funds – is the latest of these initiatives. Although S. 2802 is only authorizing legislation, it should be noted that many of the senators who will be voting on it also serve on the Senate Appropriations Committee which has spending authority for the NSF.

Members of the Senate Commerce Committee who need to be contacted ASAP:

Ted Stevens (R-AK)
TEL: 202.224.3004
http://stevens.senate.gov/contact.cfm

John McCain (R-AZ)
TEL: 202.224.2235
http://mccain.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.Home

Conrad Burns (R-MT)
TEL: 202.224.2644
http://burns.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=ContactInfo.EmailMe

Trent Lott (R-MS)
TEL: 202.224.6253
http://lott.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.Email

Olympia Snowe (R-ME)
TEL: 202.224.5344
http://snowe.senate.gov/Webform.htm

Gordon Smith (R-OR)
TEL: 202.224.3753
http://gsmith.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.Home

John Ensign (R-NV)
TEL: 202.224.6244
http://ensign.senate.gov/forms/email_form.cfm

John Sununu (R-NH)
TEL: 202.224.2841
http://www.sununu.senate.gov/webform.html

Jim DeMint (R-SC)
TEL: 202.224.6121
http://demint.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Contact.Home

Daniel Inouye (D-HI)
TEL: 202.224.3934
Senator_Inouye@inouye.senate.gov

John Rockefeller (D-WVA)
TEL: 202.224.6472
http://rockefeller.senate.gov/services/email.cfm

John Kerry (D-MA)
TEL: 202.224.2742
http://kerry.senate.gov/v3/contact/email.html

Byron Dorgan (D-ND)
TEL: 202.224.2551
senator@dorgan.senate.gov

Barbara Boxer (D-CA)
TEL: 202.224.3553
http://boxer.senate.gov/contact/email/policy.cfm

Bill Nelson (D-FL)
TEL: 202.224.5274
http://billnelson.senate.gov/contact/email.cfm

Maria Cantwell (D-WA)
TEL: 202.224.3441
http://cantwell.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm

Ben Nelson (D-NE)
TEL: 202.224.6551
http://bennelson.senate.gov/contact/email.cfm

Mark Pryor (D-AR)
TEL: 202.224.2353
http://pryor.senate.gov/contact/

David Vitter (R-LA)

TEL: 202.224.4623
http://vitter.senate.gov/?module=webformiqv1

George Allen (R-VA)

TEL: 202.224.4024
http://allen.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=AboutGeorgeAllen.SendAnEmail&EmailContactForm=Type+your+e-mail&x=14&y=15

Any questions, please call Paul Nuti at the AAA office – contacts below.

Paul J. Nuti

Director of External, International & Government Relations

American Anthropological Association

2200 Wilson Boulevard, Suite 600

Arlington, VA 22201

TEL: 703/528-1902 x3008

FAX: 703/528-3546

e-mail: pnuti@aaanet.org

WEB: www.aaanet.org

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To celebrate Savagemind’s one year anniversary I’d like to try to implement an idea that we’ve thrown around on the site for some time—a reading group. I’m hoping this will really take off since it is now summer and perhaps we have free time?

Unless any of the other Minds object or have some other ideas, I’d like to propose we proceed as following: I’ll keep checking this post for a week—in the comments please provide lists of books you’d like to read with us. So far the two books that have been suggested have been

Worker in the Cane, Sydney Mintz
Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World, James Ferguson

Please leave other suggestions. After 27 March May I’ll make a decision about which of the books we should read based on the discussion we’ll have in the comments here. I’ll then give people a week or two to get the book. After that we can read one chapter a week. At the beginning of the week I’ll post some thoughts and then we can discuss in the comments. I’ve tried this sort of arrangement in real life and I find one chapter a week to be pretty doable. At this speed we can get through it in time to get ready for the fall.

So—what books would you all suggest or vote for?

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