It is already 2007 here in Taiwan, and what better way to start off the new year than with the announcement of a new anthropology blog!

Welcome to Linguistic Anthropology, a group blog from the members of the Linguistic Anthropology e-mail list (of which I myself am a member – although it is Leila Monaghan who deserves credit for getting this thing off the ground – I had nothing to do with it).

So far the blog sports two excellent posts: one by Chad Nilep on “technology isolation syndrome” (i.e. the medicalization of youth by the BBC), and the other one by Leila about how to teach an introductory course in “sign languages and Deaf culture.”

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It has been a very good year for Savage Minds. We are blessed with a vibrant community of readers and commentators.

Here is a roundup of some of 2006’s most noteworthy posts to take you into the new year:

• Anthropology of the Spirit: “everybody’s got a body, and it is surprising and interesting to learn about how the taken-for-grantedness of that body is historically/socially/culturally constructed. But not everybody has a spirit.”
• What is good anthropological writing?: “Which were the texts that made an indelible impression on you, and why? Any answer to this question has to be biographical.”
• The Invention of the World: Islam in the West: “the importance of Muslim scholarship to Columbus’ voyage cannot be overestimated”
• Found Mag meets Savage Minds: “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.”
• World Simulation: Part One: Constructing the World: “In my last post, I described my ‘anti-teaching’ philosophy that led me to experiment with different ways of teaching cultural anthropology in very large introductory classes. So far, the most radical and intensive experiment I have tried is the ‘World Simulation.’”
• Technology in the Classroom: PowerPoint Alternatives: “Power corrupts: PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”
• Reading circle: let’s do Friction: This page archives all of our posts from this summer’s discussion of Tsing’s popular experimental ethnography, Friction.
• The American Anthropological Association’s lobbying against open acess is so, so misguided: “In other words, in order for publishers to argue that it will become unprofitable for them to run a journal because of competition from open access repositories, they must argue that they provide very little value to a journal as a product.”
• 30 Days of Cinétrance: “Despite the fact that one of the prime motivations for producing reality TV is saving costs on writers and actors, it does seem to draw heavily from the social sciences.”
• In the Flesh in the Museum: “From the first European contact with the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere onward, Indians had been exhibited in royal courts, traveling shows, circuses, and world fairs and expositions.”
• Junking the Nature/Culture Divide: “Pharmaceutical projects and products redefine the horizons of possible human being.”
• Places and Frames: Reading Bruno Latour on Holiday: “Latour proposes that there is nothing intrinsically contextual about place, that place is simply a staging or framing for traces and associations, near and distant, past and present. Context as such does not exist as a factor which explains or accounts for a place.”
• Conspiracy Theory and Social Theory: “in many ways conspiracy theories are like social theory”
• Is motherhood natural?: “Many introductory kinship texts begin by pointing out that while fatherhood is frequently non-obvious, motherhood never is.”
• Book Review: The Politics of the Governed, Part 1: ”’Political society’ is the politics of subjects who wish to have the same rights as citizens, but are excluded (by dint of their very marginalization) from civil society.”
• You Only Link Twice: Spying 2.0: “an article about the US and defense intelligence agencies’ attempts to generate as much useful information as the blogosphere and wikipedia.”

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Apart from questions of prescription and description (or representation and practice) embedded in such questions as what counts as ‘cousin marriage’ here and there, and to what extent endogamous marriage strategies have property as the primary motivating interest, styles of reflexively-apprehended ‘kinship’ come to stand for whole sets of values and traditions, as noted below in Kerim’s post and responses.

As, for example, in places like the United States. The semiosphere (I really hate the term ‘blogosphere’) has lately been aflame with debates about gay parenting, prompted especially by Mary Cheney’s announcement that she and her partner are having a child. The symbolism is profound of course: here, at the very heart of one of the most consequentially anti-gay administrations in U.S. history (rivaled on anti-gay terms I think only by the Clinton administration), is a gay family. It’s rather uncanny how gays keep erupting on the putatively anti-gay Republican scene (Mark Foley, anyone?).

The properness of gay parenting was recently the subject of a controversial piece in Time magazine by James Dobson, who runs the conservative moralist group Focus on the Family (and who recently had his own uncanny encounter with the homo when his ‘friend’ Ted Haggard was forced out of the closet). The piece is controversial not only because it constitutes something of a personal attack on Mary Cheney and her decision to become a mother, but also because it misconstrues social research in order to argue that same-sex parental couples damage children. Carol Gilligan has released a letter calling on Dobson to cease citing her work in support of his argument that children can only properly be raised by their own biological father and mother. (To my mind, a rather odd gesture, since one of the hazards of publishing is that people are free to read and interpret your work as they like.) I actually think the best response to Dobson’s piece has been Saletan’s at Slate. (Saletan’s ‘Human Nature’ column is consistently fascinating.) Saletan points out that the real danger to children isn’t gay parents, it’s men.

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Juan Cole has recently argued that the Sunni-Shiite split in Iraq is actually a very recent phenomenon. Here is a quote taken from Crooked Timber (linking to this post):

I see a lot of pundits and politicians saying that Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq have been fighting for a millennium. We need better history than that. The Shiite tribes of the south probably only converted to Shiism in the past 200 years. And, Sunni-Shiite riots per se were rare in 20th century Iraq. Sunnis and Shiites cooperated in the 1920 rebellion against the British. If you read the newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s, you don’t see anything about Sunni-Shiite riots. There were peasant/landlord struggles or communists versus Baathists. The kind of sectarian fighting we’re seeing now in Iraq is new in its scale and ferocity, and it was the Americans who unleashed it.

It is tempting to see battles we can’t solve as intractable divisions rooted in tradition, despite their modernity, but doing so often obscures more than it clarifies.

However, I was intrigued by a very different culturalist argument about Iraq from today’s Christian Science Monitor, this one grounded in some very interesting data.

One central element of the Iraqi social fabric that most Americans know little about is its astonishing rate of cousin marriage. Indeed, half of all marriages in Iraq are between first or second cousins. Among countries with recorded figures, only Pakistan and Nigeria rate as high. For an eye-opening perspective about rates of consanguinity (roughly equivalent to cousin marriage) around the world, click on the “Global Prevalence” map at www.consang.net.

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Somehow, ‘the minor works of Rodney Needham’ is a phrase that has come to symbolize narrow-minded bibliophilia on this blog. Now with Needham having passed on the phrase bears a little more scrutiny.

Most people, I suspect, are not going to take this opportunity to re-evaluate Needham’s work. To be fair, there is much not to like about it—Needham’s scrupulously abstract studies of kinship are exactly the sort of thing that drove kinship studies into the ground (or at least into the arms of political economy). His work could be labeled Cartesian, indulgent, and hermetic. His tendency to dote on the obscure could baffle those who were not interested Hocart, van Cennep, and so forth. If you think The Minor Works Of Rodney Needham are obscure, check out the essays in The Lifegiving Myth

But in retrospect, these drawbacks are out-weighed by what Needham represents. Although his work was nothing if not distinctive, it has deep roots. Needham managed to crystallize a certain Franco-British sensibility that had been floating around his corner of scholarship for some time. Somewhere between Evans-Pritchard, Levi-Strauss, and the Annee Sociologique, Needham managed to create a personal style which, if inimitable, demonstrated the possibility and validity of an elegant and humanistic social science. Leach was ultimately better remembered for epitomizing much of this mood but Needham lacked Leach’s mercurial temperament. He was the hedgehog to Leach’s fox.

Needham also did much to give us our intellectual genealogy. Back in the days before The History of Anthropology, doing ‘theory’ was a much more playful affair. Needham was key in bringing to us the work of scholars like Hertz, Hocart, and van Gennep. And I mean this literally—he somehow managed to get volumes like Imagination and Proof and The Semi-Scholars in print, works that wouldn’t last a cocaine heart beat in today’s publishing environment. Perhaps there is a good reason for this—how widely does Hocart’s essay “On Rotation” need to be read?—but I do think that Needham’s championing of these works was important and wonderful. He gave us so much wonderful work of his own, and of others. Even if it remains ‘minor’ I still look forward to reading it.

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This is rich. The online open access jounal Public Library of Science (PLoS) has just launched PLoS One—an experiment in post-publication peer review. Rather than extensive peer review prior to publishing research, articles submitted to PLoS One will be reviewed by one editorial board member for primarily “technical rather than subjective” concerns (I think they mean technical rather than substantive… or maybe they don’t). Then the published articles are opened up for peer review by readers—through annotations, discussion and ratings systems. I think this is the future for scholarly peer review, especially in fields where competition is stiff and time to publication is important (i.e. less so for anthropology than for computer science, but still)—and so long as these articles are primarily annotated, discussed, and rated by people who actually have some knowledge of the given field or topic, it could become a system that moves people towards a kind of research publication spectrum (multiple, frequent reports on a research project) and away from the kind of secretive, report-it-all-in-one (or get rejected) Important Journal. The idea of “open access” is here not just about making research available, but also about staking out research territory in a public way, testing research questions in a public forum, and hopefully, raising the bar on the kind of research that is reviewed by the Important Journals.

What I love even more about this is that the first article I looked at is a fascinating replication of Stanley Milgram’s famous Obedience experiments from the 1960s, in which research subjects thought they were participating in an experiment about learning, but actually it was about obedience to authority. The replication takes place not with real people, but with virtual humans generated in an immersive environment and seeks to study emotional and physiological response to the administration of painful shocks to a character that the subjects know to be “virtual”—though they interact with it through vision and speach (and through text in the control). Apparently, people get a bit shaken up by torturing virtual humans. Not a surprise really, but a very clever experiment.

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More later, but here is the email I received:

Rodney Needham, who died on December 5 aged 83, was one of the most distinguished social anthropologists of the last 50 years; his idea of social anthropology as the great comparative study of the human imagination not only set him apart among English-speaking anthropologists, but gave his work a universal scope going far beyond the limits of a particular academic discipline.

Needham’s extraordinary diligence in getting the facts right, his rigour in analysing them and his powers of demolishing slovenly and inaccurate thinking were also qualities that were appreciated (or at least feared) by his professional colleagues, and were a model for his students.

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Michael F. Brown’s web site, Who Owns Native Culture, has been mentioned on Savage Minds on several occasions. Each time I visit the site I see his wonderful, blog-like list of “news stories, articles, and reports” about indigenous cultural/intellectual property issues and bang my head against the wall because there is no RSS feed for this valuable source of information. I know there are several sites to create RSS feeds for sites which don’t have them, but I’d never been able to make any of them work. Then I happened to stumble upon this excellent tutorial for Feed43.com. Within minutes I had a working feed set up. Here is a direct link to the XML feed (Note: This will look like gibberish in your web browser, as it needs a feed reader to parse the data. I highly recommend Google Reader).

Another possible use for this service would be to make an RSS feed to alert you whenever a scholar’s list of publications is updated on their homepage, giving you a direct link to the PDF. If you create any anthropology related RSS feeds please share them in the comments.

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Where the sun doesn’t rise until 10 AM, one might worry about mood, and disorders of a seasonally affective kind. You notice the absence of light in winter in places like Helsinki, Finland. Models and scripts are available for how to ‘deal’ with such atmospherics: there is the diagnostic (lack of light makes you depressed, tired) and the folkloric (time for hibernation, winter anticipates rebirth). However, there are advantages to a low sun: perpetual twilight casts beautiful shadows and renders the urban landscape cinematic, warm, golden.

My semester has ended, and so I look forward to future explorations in teaching and knowledge: January will bring new seminars, new lectures, new discussions, new arguments.

Helsinki has hosted some dynamite scholars in the past few months. Among them are: Riwanto Tirtosudarno, Alexander Edmonds, Eva Berglund, Michael F. Brown, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Among my responsibilities as a junior (read: green) lecturer has been to organize our annual colloquia. I have ‘branded’ our colloquial inquiries this year under the theme “Indigeneity on the Global Scene.” We have been involved in discussions as diverse as: the government of culture (formal [state/economic] recognition of systems of meaning as a mode and means of assuring proper respect and recompense for the marginalized), forms through which indigenous activism appears vis-a-vis the nation-state, the problem of culture loss in the midst of globalization, and the earth itself as the ground on which people create and re-create themselves (as the surface that provides traction, and see Rex here on SM on Tsing).

Dr. Tsing’s visit was dynamite. Among other things, she tracked diverse ways that ‘indigenous voice’ attains recognition on the global scene, as a traveling trope of authenticity, resistance, mobilization. But she also talked about her present work on matsutake mushrooms, transnational migrant communities, the forest. Who could have imagined that mushrooms and humans might have had a remarkably fecund relationship through the ages? SM itself has hosted important discussions of Tsing’s work, which in densely allegorical writing I think illuminates (through the hazy smoke of the global) what social worlds look like today. You might imagine twilight for the native, but you might also imagine a blistery-red ‘carbon sun.’
And Dr. Brown presented his scintillating work on the perils and promises of legal title to symbolic constructs (viz., culture). I hate to sound overly sanguine, but Brown’s work on cultural property I think represents the very best vision of what an anthropology of an already globalized world can and is doing.

Forward: we will be visited soon by Bruce Kapferer, Elizabeth Povinelli, and others. The recent decision regarding entitlement to the Kalahari I hope will provoke further discussion of the forms of recognition and power (cunning as they are) that the “indigenous” enables.

Meanwhile, hibernation (aka, laziness). I prepare syllabi, read papers, and explore new ethnographies.

Among these: Joseph Masco’s utterly transfixing The Nuclear Borderlands. Much like Emily Martin’s The Woman in the Body, Masco’s work crosses the institutional boundaries of science and culture in ways that I find completely inspiring. In part, the world of atomic science that Masco pictures is one that is everywhere (not at all unlike pregnancy) and yet is one that I am largely unfamiliar with. For that reason (and others), it appears as exotic and enticing as Anga insemination rites. Masco mobilizes sophisticated interpretive tools: from Freud’s uncanny to Benjamin’s concern with the anaestheticization of modern life. It is a pleasure to read.

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Via Kevin Drum, a press release about an article in the New Yorker. With a title like “Can Social Scientists Redefine the War on Terror?” it seems right up our alley. (See previous posts on the topic here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) In the New Yorker article George Packer talks to “a remarkable theorist named David Kilcullen, an Australian anthropologist who is also a lieutenant colonel in his country’s Army and the chief strategist in the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Coördinator [sic] for Counterterrorism.” There isn’t much saying what makes Kilcullen so “remarkable” except for his willingness to actively work for the military, but it seems he isn’t the only one:

Anthropologists and former military officers in the Pentagon are currently working on a new project called “Cultural Operations Research Human Terrain,” which is recruiting social scientists around the country to join five-person “human terrain” teams that would go to Iraq and Afghanistan with combat brigades and serve as cultural advisers on six-to-nine-month tours. Pilot teams are planning to leave next spring.

You can read some of Kilcullen’s papers here. I wonder if any of the anthropologists engaged with the military on these missions would be willing to blog about their experiences?

UPDATE: The full article is now available online.

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I haven’t seen Apocalypto yet, but there has been a lot of buzz on the blogosphere, so I thought I’d present some of the highlights.

Benjamin Zimmer at Language Log says:

Originally the buzz surrounding the film was mostly about Gibson’s choice to shoot the entire film in Mexico with local actors speaking Yucatec Maya. Now, of course, observers are more interested in speculating if the film will be dead-on-arrival at the box office thanks to Mel’s notorious anti-Semitic rant and DUI arrest last July. But linguistic issues are still getting some attention in the Apocalypto coverage, for instance in this Associated Press article describing the mixture of excitement and ambivalence among the Yucatec Maya community about a major Hollywood movie filmed in their indigenous language.

He then goes on to discuss the “foreboding Greek title,” after which he links to this post by John Lawler: (more…)

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The New York Times has a nice, short, editorial about the complex dynamic between culture and evolution. The piece emphasizes a point in Monday’s story about a recent article in Nature analyzing lactose intolerance in Africans.

A team of scientists has now discovered that an important human genetic trait — a tolerance in adults for the milk sugar called lactose — might have developed in several East African ethnic groups 2,700 to 6,800 years ago. That is astonishingly recent.

It may also be the first genetic example of what researchers call convergent evolution in humans. In other words, lactose tolerance among African raisers of livestock arose independently of the same adaptive trait in northern European pastoralists. But there is something still more surprising about this discovery. The genetic change came about because of cultural change. The shift to cattle raising some 9,000 years ago gave an immediate survival advantage to adults who could digest milk, an ability infants usually lost as they aged.

We are used to the idea that species evolve because of changes in their natural environment. But part of the natural environment of humans is culture itself, and it is striking to think that genetic adaptation in humans has been driven, at least in part, by how humans have chosen to live.

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I’m happy to report some good news regarding a post from over a year ago, when I noted that the Bushmen were being expelled from the Kalahari Game Reserve. This week the Botswana High Court ruled that they could go home. Unfortunately, the government is being very obstinate in its implementation of the ruling:

In a statement Thursday, however, Attorney General Athaliah Molokomme laid down conditions for the government’s implementation of the court order.

“The Central Kalahari Game Reserve remains state land,” Molokomme’s statement said. “It is owned by the state and subject to the laws of the republic.”

Only 189 people who filed the lawsuit would be given automatic right of return with their children, Molokomme said, far short of the 2,000 bushmen who say they want to go home. Anyone else would have to apply for permits.

Returning bushmen may take building materials into the reserve but only “for constructing non-permanent structures,” the statement said.

Those returning can use enough water for “subsistence needs,” Molokomme said. However, park authorities can restrict the amount of water to what is “reasonably required.”

This is likely to be a major obstacle to settlers because the government shut the main well in 2002, and water is scarce in the Kalahari.

Under the government’s rules the bushmen cannot bring domestic animals into the park. Anyone who wants to hunt—a central activity in hunter-gatherer societies—must apply for permits.

Looks like their struggle isn’t over. Via MetaFilter I discovered a site dedicated to their struggle. (Unfortunately it doesn’t yet work with Firefox.)

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One of the common complaints that came up in the comments of my last entry on Said was his tendency to essentialize the people he criticized. This is discussed more at length in Scott McLemlee’s interview with Robert Irwin over at IHE—which I think is worth reading. However, the reference that really jumped to my mind about stereotyping as analysis as political act came from Sartre and his attempt to trash the Marxists who were trying to snake his brand and destroy his value proposition:

Marxist voluntarism, which likes to speak of analysis, has reduced this operation to a simple ceremony. There is no longer any question of studying the facts within the general perspective of Marxism so as to enrich our understanding and clarify action. Analysis consists solely in getting rid of detail, in forcing the signification of particular events, in denaturing facts or even inventing a nature for them to discover it later underneath them, as their substance, as unchangeable, fetishized… The open concepts of Marxism have closed in. They are no longer keys, interpretive schema. They are posited for themselves as an already totalized knowledge.

Today’s Marxist[’s]... sole concern, at the moment of ‘analysis’ will be to ‘place’ entities these entities. The more he is convinced that they represent the truth a priori the less fussy he will be about proof. The totalizing investigation has given way to a Scholasticism of the totality. The heuristic principle… has become the terrorist practice of liquidating the particularity (Search For A Method, pp. 27-28).

This tendency to liquidate the particularity is not unique to post-colonial studies or cultural studies, of course. Those who denounce ‘cult studs’ or ‘the closing of the american mind’ or ‘radical professors’ are just as guilty of failing to take the complexity of their enemies seriously. It’s easy—and comforting—to do. But personally I try to resist it.

Personally I think liquidating the particularity is a very common tactic in anthropological discourse. Doesn’t our default politics consist in finding someone on the right, labelling them an ethnocentrist, and then denouncing them? I suspect that one of the reasons that anthropology has so much trouble being ‘public’ because the average reader doesn’t share our outrage when one or more of our disciplinary rules has been broken.

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Gary Kamiya’s article over at Salon entitled How Edward Said Took Intellectuals For A Ride has a nice write up of Robert Irwin’s new book Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism And Its Discontents. As is well known, Irwin’s book has been the focus of an enormous amount of attention after he was stung to death by a sting ray while filming his latest ‘Crocodile Hunter’ special. No just kidding that was Steve Irwin. Robert Irwin’s book caused a stir because it is—or so I’m told—a good book which criticizes Said.

Said, like Derrida and to a lesser extent Foucault, is one of these thinkers that has a lot of lousy critics who seem to be upset more by the way their work challenges their comfortable subject positions than by anything Said said. Irwin shares Said’s substantive politics but takes issue with his analysis. It sounds like an interesting book.

The idea that struck me in Salon was the idea that Said was a keystone of the ‘oppositional canon’. We all know that for every lousy critic of Said there is a uncritical admirer for whom Said is an exemplar of what a non-Haole, leftist, decolonizing academic can and should be. But I’ve never seen a syllabus entitled “The Oppositional Canon: Theoretical Genealogies”.

What else should be on there? What are the classics of the oppositional canon? What are the key articles that people focus on? Fanon? Spivak? Fabian? Do we read Mbembe or Cesaire or both? And which of them? I have a good sense of this for the Pacific (or at least Hawai’i) but not in general. I suppose this is because, subject-position wise, I’m the guy that people are opposing (I checked out Exemplars from the library to read over the winter break – MWoRN ftw!!!). But as someone who is going to be teaching an “Empire Strikes Backs” section of a grad-level theory course, what do you think I should be teaching?

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