Academic bloodsport has been on my mind this week since I have been reading the Charlot/Valeri debate that raged briefly in the pages of Pacific Studies in the late 1980s. It is without at doubt the Ultimate Fighting Championship of debates about Hawai’ian Sacrifice, partially because of the intensity with which it is fought (Valeri, in finest Francophone style, accuses of Charlot of managing to miss “not only the forest, but the trees as well”), partially because of its incredible erudition, and partially because it is, as far as I know, the only major academic debate about Hawai’ian sacrifice to date.

The Charlot/Valeri debate is totally unavailable electronically and so I have no link to it here. However, if you are interested in one academic cutting the work of another into very small pieces I hardily reccomend Edward Castronova’s smackdown of Carnagey’s work on video game violence, which features zingers like “the bugbear of statistical significance is loose among poorly-grounded fields, among which one must now, on the basis of their acceptance of this paper, sorrowfully include experimental social psychology.” (more…)

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You might have seen this article in yesterday’s Washington Post. Titled “For Wedding Photos, Chinese Couples Strike a Western Pose” the article focuses on the “Western” garb adorned in Chinese bridal photography:

With names such as Paris, Love in New York and Rome Style Life, the mostly Taiwanese owned studios that dominate one of Beijing’s busiest shopping districts have capitalized on a Chinese obsession with Western-style wedding pictures.

For the equivalent of $375 to $750, packages include at least five costume changes and a trip to pose in front of a nearby Roman Catholic church, even though most couples aren’t Christian. “It fits the Western style of the dress,” said Huang Ling, 23, director of the Miracle Love Marriage studio.

Before we go any further, I encourage everyone to look at some of the photographs online. I bookmarked these for my students when I was teaching Bonnie Adrian’s Framing the Bride: Globalizing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan’s Bridal Industry last year. (Bonnie informed me that she had wanted to include more in her book, but it would have made the cost prohibitive.)

There is no denying that there is something “Western” about these images, just as there is something “Eastern” about Yoga. But women in designer paisley outfits doing yoga at the local gym are as separated from the “Eastern” origins of Yoga as Chinese brides donning dress after dress at Taiwanese run salons. These photographs represent a Taiwanese notion of “glamor” and “romance” that is rooted in the global fashion industry, but takes a very particular East Asian form.

Most importantly, this particular kind of wedding photography is very much a Taiwanese product. Even Taiwanese I know in the United States go back to Taiwan to get their photographs done there because they feel that the Taiwanese industry is more up to date with the latest fashions than Taiwanese-run studios in the States.

It is a competitive industry as well. One of Bonnie’s biggest challenges was convincing her informants that she wasn’t planning on stealing their “secrets”:

Even with Xiao-lan to introduce me as an anthropologist, salon owners and photographers continued to assume that I intended to open a bridal salon of my own once I finished by doctoral degree. many anthropologists have been suspected of being CIA agents, development workers, or missionaries in disguise. That the bridal salon owner’s worst fear is industrial espionage by an American posing as an anthropologist is telling. It speaks to the self-confidence that some people in Taiwan can enjoy in globalizing processes, including the one that this book presents.

I find it unfortunate that Maureen Fan felt it necessary to spin this story as a Chinese obsession with the West, when it is the role of Taiwanese in shaping Chinese popular culture which strikes me as the real story here.

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MIT holds a “Media in Transition” conference every few years, the past conferences have been great. The have a call for papers posted that will probably appeal to some readers. I was at the inaugural event, which was based around Ithiel de Sola Pool’s book Technologies of Freedom, and had a weird and wonderful cast of characters.

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My own Rice University has re-launched its failed academic press as an “all-digital” publishing concern. It uses the Connexions system that I mentioned earlier and it will function as a regular peer-reviewed press. I think the details of licensing and price will be worked out as it develops, probably in response to what authors say they want. I do know that they intend to use Qoop.com to produce print-on-demand works—so it isn’t in fact “all-digital”—it’s just that it won’t use any conventional book-printing infrastructure.

This might be a good opportunity for anyone in search of a press—especially for dissertations or books that mightn’t have so mammoth an audience. Or, perhaps, for books that should be re-published, orphaned works or others that need a new hearing. Rex, here’s your chance to edit the complete works of Max Gluckman…

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Last night I was searching for some information about a new volume a friend of mine edited that was recently published by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, best known as the home of Indiana Jones or Robert Braidwood, depending on who you are. I not only found the volume, but discovered that the OI is providing it’s entire catalog open access. This is great news. Philology is a very small discipline and the dilemmas of scholarly publishing are nowhere as clearly articulated as when your sales rep is trying to pitch The Hittite Dictionary, Volume S, Fascicle 1, sa- to saptamenzu to librarians from small liberal arts colleges with rapidly-disappearing budgets.

For anthropologists who are detail junkies, these publications are all fantastic to page through. Many of the entries in the Hittite dictionary are incredibly Borgesian for someone who doesn’t study Hittite (“said of the thigh of a sheep in a quasi-recipe: ‘the client kisses the thigh of the sheep which has been cut open (and) stuffed (with pomegranite and chopped meat)’”). But a few of the pieces from the press articulate very well with the work of non-philological anthropologists including, most obviously, archaeologists and middle eastern types. Changing Social Identity with the Spread of Islam: Archaeological Perspectives looks good, for instance. And of course the whole point of writing this entry is really to plug my friend’s book, Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures, which is the proceedings of a conference which was unique for combining the work of anthropologists (mostly Chicagoans like Michael Silverstein, John Kelly, etc.) with that of philologists (Theo van den Hout, Peter Machinist, and Seth Sanders, the editor and my homie). It’s sort of Benedict Anderson in the ancient middle east—language and ethnic identity at the birth of alphabetic writing. Very cool and highly reccomended if go for those sorts of issues and are ready for the power of a fully armed and operation philological monograph.

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The web changes the way in which we do research and reading. It seems as if its always been this easy to get stuff, but its really only a few years since google and e journals combined became really effective. Its now possible to find almost everything ever written on a topic across disciplines and times, certainly that which was published in the journals now in JSTOR. And this makes new connections and chance discoveries possible, as well as the deliberate searching out of old thinkers. Last week I found a gem of an essay by Mary Douglas called The Hotel Kwilu. A Model of a Model and which had appeared in American Anthropologist in 1989. The essay is a commentary on the lack of connection between anthropology and the world, including the world of other social sciences. Mary Douglas likens this state of isolation to that of the Sheraton style hotel where she had stayed on a revisit to her fieldwork villages in what was then Zaire, a hotel which was perfectly fine but which was not connected to any national infrastructure. There were taps and a bathroom, but no running water. There were light fittings but no electricity. The hotel was in a state of anticipated and optimistic readiness for incorporation into a system from which it was excluded. I am sure all of us have stayed at similar places.

Anthropology has changed a bit since then. So have hotels in rural Africa. But not always in the ways anticipated back in the 1980’s. Connection to international media via satelite television and mobile phone networks is now quite common for even quite local hotels in Tanzania for example. Connection to water less usual. The direction of change is equally unpredictable in anthropology. Anthropology today is more likely to study transnational communities, interstitial social settings and social movements than in the 1980s. We are also looking at bigger issues. From our own singular perspectives. Perhaps where the Sheraton analogy still apt is in this replication of what makes this perspective institutionally possible across much of the world. Despite neoliberalism, cuts in public education and so on, globally, it seems to me that there have never been more anthropology departments in universities and never more anthropologists. What are the implications of this? Are university departments of anthropology part of a global chain? And how diverse are the different institutional products of different countries and regions?

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I was recently proofreading a paper for a Taiwanese colleague and since I don’t trust my own spelling I ran it through the spell checker. Word underlined every instance of “patrilineal” in red and helpfully suggested “matrilineal” ... Hey, at least its a kinship term. I’ve seen worse.

Still, it reminded me of a project I’ve been meaning to start for a while: I’d like to compile a list of common words used in the social sciences which aren’t in the default MS Word dictionary. Everyone could then download this list and add it as a custom dictionary. Many of you probably have your own existing custom dictionaries (I lost mine somewhere along the line), and you might be able to help us get started by uploading that to the new wiki page I’ve set up for this project: the Anthropology Word List.

Don’t feel a need to limit yourself to kinship terms, all the latest isms and post-structuralist jargon should be added to the list. If we are going to have to use words like “hybridities” at least we should spell them correctly!

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Anthropology.net and This blog sits at… are both making much out of how dismal anthropology looks when compared with other academic disciplines on Google Trends, which tracks search results for various terms on a nice graph. They compare anthropology with economics, philosophy, and chemistry. Sure, if you put in psychology or biology you’ll find the same thing. However, if you look at some more closely related disciplines, you’ll see something very different:

Sociology still comes out ahead, but anthropology is way ahead of linguistics, political science, and especially cognitive science.

Needless to say, Google Trends is a very limited tool. In part, it tracks the extent to which these terms have been incorporated into natural language. “The sociology of…” seems to be a much more common phrase than “the anthropology of …” on almost any topic I could think of (and even where anthropology won out, as with “the anthropology of magic” it was by a much smaller margin than cases where sociology was ahead). This may explain why many people still think I study bugs.

UPDATE: I realized that in my initial analysis I completely ignored the news reference section on the bottom. There you see political science comes out on top.

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After all the player-hating that happened the last time I focused on popular reporting on anthropology’s adjacent disciplines, I’m hesitant to mention the article that’s been brought up on Livejournal and antropologi.info about an article on Anglo-Saxon apartheid in early Englands and the racial genetics that underlie it.

There are things that I find curious about the article—the assumption that ‘marriage’ and ‘reproduction’ are the same thing and that ethnic identity is always corelated with a genetic marker for instance—but there doesn’t seem to be very much to be ‘racial’ to me. The fact that the word doesn’t appear in the article being the main reason. But even if you are suspicious of euphemisms such as ” ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Ethnic Group” there are more sophisticated critiques of this method than ask if it’s racist. The fact that the topic is a large migration of conquerors into a new land helps this article out of a lot of potential problems because it is in fact talking about a situation with a large migration of conquering people and the clear ethnic differences them and the locals on the receiving end. If the paper was about how the biogenetic substance of Anglo-Saxon conquerors somehow helped them in their conquest, or that they remain a separate ‘race’ today (rather than having pretty quickly blended in with everyone else, as the paper argues) then that would be something else again.

If you’re interested in learning more you can check out the webpage of The Center for Genetic Anthropology at University College London, which is also Ruth Mace land or, if you prefer Fiona Jordan land. The center also has some popular summaries of what it is up to, although I have a soft spot in my heart for Seth Sanders’s take on one study on race and religion in Africa one member of the center co-authored.

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I’ve been thinking about the Manchester school lately. My mantra for the fall is: Have We Really Thought Enough About Max Gluckman? (I am not the only person who thinks the answer is no)

In the course of thinking about this I ran across Berkeley’s anthropology emeritus lecture series, which has a ton of of great stuff available about prominent anthropologists. The entry on Elizabeth Colson is particularly good.

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BoingBoing’s Mark Frauenfelder writes about a disturbing mural which is on the wall of a federal building in Washington D.C. He quotes a Washington Post article about the 1937 painting:

Check out the big mural on the fifth floor, a friend told Myrna Mooney one day last August, shortly after Mooney and fellow employees of the Environmental Protection Agency moved into new headquarters in the Federal Triangle complex. A Native American from the Blackfeet Nation in Montana, Mooney was “flabbergasted” by what she saw:

Splashed across a 13-foot-wide canvas in the Ariel Rios Building was a graphic scene of Indians attacking and scalping white people. Called “Dangers of the Mail,” the 1930s-era painting included half a dozen naked white women being assaulted by Indians and an Indian stabbing a white man in the back.

“It portrays Indians as cowardly. It’s an insult,” said Mooney. “When you come from the reservation, these kinds of images make you physically ill.”

It looks like the painting is currently strategically hidden behind a bulletin board.

While I don’t think it is appropriate to have such racist images on the walls of government buildings, I also worry that simply removing such a painting will only sweep our racist past under the rug. A more creative solution might be to invite Native American artists to paint over the painting or submit other proposals for what to do with the space. Unfortunately, we do not seem to live in an era which encourages creative solutions to problems, so perhaps removing it entirely is more expedient.

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The concept of race as applied to humans has long been discredited by anthropologists. And yet it is not possible to discuss issues like the high rates of incarceration of black men, or the better medical treatment received by whites, purely in class terms. At the same time, immigration, DNA testing, intermarriage and other phenomenon have made the lived experience of racial categories more complex for many people. Changing attitudes have also made racial categories less useful as a basis for political action.

For anyone who is interested in how academics have attempted to deal with the dilemmas of theorizing race in the contemporary world, this recent Monthly Review article by David Roediger is must reading. In “The Retreat from Race and Class”, Roediger focuses on four works. Three from around 2000: Paul Gilroy’s book, Against Race, “Race Over” written by Orlando Patterson in The New Replubic (link for those with library access), and Bourdieu and Wacquant’s article, “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason”, as well as the more recent (2004) After Race by Darder and Torres. All of these works are very critical of contemporary racial discourse, and Roediger takes them each to task for failing to adequately address the problems of what he calls “white supremacy.”

Roediger’s review is too short to provide much insight into such a complex literature, but it does provide a great set of references for further exploration, such as in this passage where he responds to After Race:

Insofar as Fields, Darder, Torres, and others contend that inattention to class distorts inquiry into all inequalities in the United States, they are exactly right. However, the strategy of banking on the retreat from race to solve that problem is a highly dubious one. It leads to an extremely embattled tone and to ignoring the most exciting work building on materialist insights. From Cheryl Harris’s brilliant studies of whiteness as property, to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s research on racial systems, to somewhat older South African scholarship on racial capitalism, to Lisa Lowe’s important observations on race, universality, and labor at the start of Immigrant Acts, much work seeks to revive the class question by bringing racism and class together more systematically. But you would not know it from After Race.

While I’ve read some of the older stuff, such as Adam’s classic on South Africa, Modernizing Racial Domination, I’ve been negligent at keeping up with this literature, and am happy to have an informed guide to current debates. And while the idea of “teaching the controversy” might have been appropriated by ID advocates, I do find that such debates make for an excellent teaching tool.

I would also like to see more discussion about race in the liberal blogsphere, which is generally good on labor and gender issues, but strangely silent when it comes to race.

(via Political Theory Daily)

UPDATE: In looking for some of these citations online, I came across this excellent site on “Race, Racism and the Law” by Vernellia R. Randall.

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The New Republic posted a lovely little piece recently on The Food of the Iraq War which includes folk beliefs of soldiers like the fact that Country Captain Chicken can ‘make you gay’ and Charms candies bring disaster when consumed. So much for the Iron Cage of Rationality. At any rate it’s a great teaching piece to use in class and I like it because of the way it hearkens back to the anecdotal bits written by American anthropologists after WWII based on their experience serving in the military, such as Ralph Linton’s Totemism and the A.E.F. and George Homans’s The Small Warship Sort of like Baseball Magic but with guns.

Of course today the ethnography of the military is an enormous field, ranging from Homefront to Mastering Soldiers, but Country Captain Chicken making you gay really took me back.

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Since we are all reading Friction together, I thought I’d share one of those moments of recognition – when you have just been reading about something that happened a long time ago and it suddenly seems very immediate and present. Tsing, discussing the creation of “Nature” as a universal and the history of nature loving in the United States, brings up John Muir. On page 99 she writes:

Ranchers were Muir’s most explicit enemies; ranchers used the wilderness rather than experiencing or studying it. They were cut off from the universal; they destroyed it through inattention.

That passange had stuck in my mind, and so when I heard this NPR story about contemporary conflict between naturalists and ranchers it caught my attention. Here is the same story as written up in the Washington Post:

A conservationist group is asking a federal court to block new grazing regulations that it contends would give ranchers more water rights and control over public lands.

The Bureau of Land Management announced the final rules Wednesday, and they are to go into effect next month. First proposed in December 2003, the regulations would increase collaboration between the agency and ranchers whose livestock graze on 160 million acres of the nation’s public lands.

John Muir would roll over in his grave!

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A former acquaintance, Kiri Miller, is conducting a study at the University of Alberta on radio stations in Grand Theft Auto. If you’ve ever played GTA and listened to the radio, please spread the word about the survey and fill it out yourself!

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