Oh yes, you heard me right: The bio-cultural imperialism of Sid Meier’s Civilization.

Say it louder: The bio-cultural imperialism of Sid Meier. It had to be written. Somewhere out there in the collective conscience there was an anthropological analysis of Civ and now I have found it. And I rejoice in this knowledge.

Better yet, Kacpar Poblocki’s piece is a lovely cultural-studiesy rant about the Deleuze ‘body without organs’ piece of wet-ware that our bodies become when we exist in the state of “becoming-state”—that is to say, when we play too much Civ. Simply critiquing Civ’s obviously crude teleology would be too simple. No, as Poblocki insists, what we have here is “no blunt propoganda but instead Althusserian unconsciou manifestations of cultura lclaims, of which Meier may well not be aware”. The result is a game in which

Civilization offers an opportunity, literally and in the absolutist sense, to become the state… the state that we become at the same time comes to itself by means of a not always precisely formulated yet salient Hegelian dialectic waltz of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, very much a la Fred Astaire, i.e. up a stairway: e.g. mysticism and the code of laws lead to a more advanced monarchy

There have been other pieces on Civ (including one by David Myers, who has made his work available for all) but none manage to combine withering post-modern critique with hours and hours of game play like this wonderful little out-of-the-way piece.

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I’ve been relatively silent on SM recently partially because I’ve been hard at work on another project that involves far more intimate knowledge of WordPress than any mortal and fully employed academic should ever have, namely The ARC: The Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory. Some may recall previous mentions (1,2) on SM. ARC was started about two years ago by Paul Rabinow, Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff as an experiment on collaborative “concept work” in anthropology. This latest transformation represents not only significant progress in the work of the people involved, but a transformation of the infrastructure of collaboration and discussion, which will hopefully allow for a much wider array of people to participate.

Among the things that have been occurring in ARC are an ongoing discussion on “concept work” and the ideas of conceptual labor and a “laboratory” in the human science. George Marcus, James Faubion, and Rebecca Lemov have all contributed to this discussion as it has unfolded. In addition, the projects within the orbit of ARC have settled into a few different areas: a project on “Vital Systems Secuirty” looking at the genealogy of contemporary approaches to critical infrastructure protection, homeland security, syndromic surveillance and other such developments; a project comparing developments in synthetic biology and nanotechnology, primarily around ethics and ontology; and an ongoing discussion on biopower, biopolitics and their continued transformations in anthropology and elsewhere; and an experimental lab/seminar at UC Berkeley focused on concept work and graduate pedagogy. (more…)

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That is a small burn at the bottom of the cover of my copy of Discourses. No doubt from a flying ember sparked in the firepit of my fieldhouse. Since I was welcomed to the field by all kinds of spooky stuff (rumors of witchcraft and ghostly goings on), perhaps my mind turned to the Ivy text because of its thematics of ‘haunting.’ Yes, I read the book by lamplight. I had first encountered Discourses in Vincanne Adams’ “Transnational Culture and Power” seminar at Princeton way back in Spring 1995. I re-read it in the field in 2000. But it wasn’t exactly ‘phantasm’ that drew me back to a text that had initially struck me (and apparently Kelly & Kaplan) as difficult and unclear. It was specifically the idea of ‘vanishing.’ For in my fieldsite, men kept making a rather startling claim: they were [bodily] shrinking (see especially the work of Jeffrey Clark, among others).

I went to the field with just a few texts, all of them Melanesian ethnographies, and no novels. I remembered one colleague telling me that he only brought a ‘linguistics handbook’ or something like that to the field with him, noting that anthropologists in the field too often spend time reading and not enough time interacting. Once in the field, the notion struck me as absurd: I desperately wanted something to release me from interaction. So I wrote home to ask for some books. Among them, two complementary texts: Haruki Murakami’s Wind Up Bird Chronicle, and the Ivy monograph.

I got to thinking about Ivy as I contemplated the persistent claim amongst many of my informants that their ‘culture’ is ‘dying’ (a notion that was sometimes expressed in English: as in the sentence, “Our culture is dying”). I had been trained to be critical of such claims and to note that while my informants observed that their lives were fundamentally transformed, even ruptured, I could see that their culture was still being reproduced (see Robbins & Wardlow). The crux of my present work lies at the impasse presented by the juxtaposition of claims to cultural demise and anthropological faith in the integrity of culture. This is not at all a new problem for anthropologists. I like ‘modernity’ because it helps me to think about it. (more…)

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I allude to the ‘long nineteenth century.’ I tend to be uninterested in epochal pronouncement; it usually seems to me to be a rather egomaniacal gesture (as when intellectual X declares period Y over and done with; see below on fashions in theoretical prefixes.) Nevertheless, a hypothetical conversation I have been having in my head has got me thinking about how we will reflect upon and classify the 20th century in contemporary and future discussions. If the long nineteenth century referred to the period between the French revolution and World War I—a period of reconfigured sovereignty and unbridled Empire—perhaps a similar reconfiguration of the socio-political will be said to characterize the 20th. Could we periodize the ‘short’ 20th century (I depart here from other formulations) as beginning at or towards the end of World War II (perhaps with the creation of the United Nations or at Bretton Woods) and ending in 1989, with the fall of the wall? (I deliberately resist September 11, 2001, as an epochal marker, believing that to invoke 9/11 these days participates in certain ideological framings [as for example, the very idea of the ‘GWOT’] that I reject—and besides, the significance of 9/11 in many ways I think was prefigured by the dissolving of the ‘bi-polar’ world of ‘the Cold War’ represented by certain momentous events in Berlin.)

The hypothetical conversation is between John Kelly & Martha Kaplan and Marilyn Ivy on the question of modernity. An odd juxtaposition? Consider: they are centrally concerned with the transnational politics and history of the Pacific; they are critical interpreters of the ‘national-cultural’; and they all take World War II and its aftermath as the foundational moment for the emergence of contemporary ‘glocal’ social orders. But while Ivy I think performs captivating hermeneutical theatrics with the concept of ‘modernity,’ Kelly & Kaplan assiduously criticize the ways in which the construct ‘modernity’ operates to cover over the specific character of the exercise of power on the world stage today (an exercise of power that assumes an especially American face).

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Human geography—and particularly Marxist human geographers such as the work of Harvey, Smith, and LeFevre—have developed the notion of ‘scale’ that have found their way into anthropological theory. Thus we have notions of scale making and scale jumping percolating into the works of Tsing, West, and so forth. These concepts have always seemed naggingly imprecise to me although it is difficult exactly to say why. I want to take a stab at explaining why here, even though I’m hardly an expert on this literature.

Scale, technically, is the representative fraction that indicates the relationship of a unit of distance on a map to a distance on earth—one inch to a mile, and so forth. ‘Issues’ of scale arise when geographers enter the realm of (as Neokantians might put it) problems selection and focus—what ‘scale’ is appropiate for a particular research topic? That of the country, the region, the city? Since geography is (almost by definition) catrographically inclined, issues of research focus and design are expressed in spatial terms.

This is all well and good, but when anthropology begins adopting these terms this spatial metaphor for problem selection—appropriate for cartographic endeavors—gets stretched to the point where it becomes a hinderance rather than a help. This is particularly true, I feel, in the case of the literature on globalization. (more…)

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If you keep up to date with “what’s happening” on the Intarweb then you probably read Boing-Boing, and if you read Boing-Boing recently (or the open anthro blog or anthropology.net) then you probably saw their link to a recent article by Nature entitled PR ‘Pitbull’ To Take On Open Access. The plot of the story will be familiar to those who follow intellectual property issues, but what might not be so familiar to you is the American Anthropological Association’s relation to this particular ‘Pitbull.’

The plot is straightforward: there are companies out there that make money selling content to people. It may be movies, it may be music, or it may be academic articles. Although what exactly they sell may vary from company to company, all of them have one thing in common—they themselves do not produce the content that they sell. The actual movies, music, or articles are made by artists (or anthropologists, or biologists) who license their creative work to Big Content. These companies then acts as a middle man, taking a cut of the profits earned from the sale of the content. Sometimes they take more of a cut than the creative individuals who made the profits in the first place. Let’s call these businesses Big Content.

In the past, these publishers have justified their role by pointing out all the value that they add to the content created by artists. After all, they bankroll movies, hook musicians up with producers, and provide copy editing for journals. And of course there is distribution—no singer-song writer or professor of Semitic philology has the know-how to print CDs or academic journals and distribute them across the country. These are—or were—very good points.

The problem, of course, is that Big Content’s business model faces a strategic challenge in the digital age. Suddenly we can distribute our creative work across the Internet and make it available to everyone, solving many of the problems associated with distribution. Similarly, computer technology and in particular free/open source software give us tools that challenge Big Content’s claim that it adds value to our creative work. Suddenly the middlemanship of Big Content goes from seeming slightly unsavory to appearing downright superfluous. Or, at best,

In a land of plenty, what does an industry premised on scarcity do? Enforce scarcity on a world that has never known it. And just as in the recording industry, Big Content has begun using scare tactics to convince academics that the free dissemination of ideas—the central ideal of our profession—is unethical. (more…)

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The excellent (but poorly advertised, on the Internet anyway) Boston Review is currently running a review by Lawrence Rosen of Robert Irwin’s book on Said. I’ve discussed the Said-Irwin thang before as something that pretty much all anthropologists should keep up on, given the way that Said has become so central to the canon. Lawrence Rosen—a student of Geertz from the Morocco phase—has had a distinguished career (although not very similar to his contemporary Paul Rabinow) worrying out the interpretive end of law and anthropology and the Middle East.

The thing that I like about Rosen’s review is that it charts a middle course between Said and Irwin. It is tempting to diss and dismiss both of thee authors since there seems to be so little middle ground between not only their arguments, but their more general sensibilities. I like Rosen’s willingness to point out the way that Said’s shortcomings can be understood as part of a larger ‘unfinished’ project rather than as errors that doom the enterprise from the start. Above all, it ends by shifting the discussion away from the narcissistic examination of the careers of Western scholars and back to the issue at hand—what must be done for Standard Average European scholars to understand the Standard Average Muslim?

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Some time ago, I asked how we could help our students make up for the widely-lamented lack of studying skills—and just plain living-as-a-student skills—they bring to college with them. Since then, I’ve been thinking more and more about this problem, as I’ve grappled with some of the deficiencies and ineptnesses that seem to be breeding like rabbits among my students. Over the break, I decided that I needed to commit myself to bringing some of the studying and learning skills that those of us who have achieved higher degrees have picked up along the way, making explicit things like how to write a research paper but also how to organize one’s time or how to learn leadership.

One result of this is a new site I put together during the intersession, entitled Being Better Students. The basic idea is to collect (and, occasionally, author) good, solid, and doable tips for students—things that they can read and immediately go and do to help them wrap their heads around what should be very high demands on their time and energies. Now that I’ve started to accumulate a decent amount of material, I’d like to invite Savage Minds readers (and writers) to have a look and let me know what you think—and especially let me know what works for you or your students. I’d be happy to accept guest posts, or to repost information sent privately, or whatever, so long as it’s practical and useful.

Hopefully, the site will help encourage professors to take on some of their own students’ short-comings—I’ve gotten a little tired of colleagues telling me that I had to work around these problems instead of helping my students face them down. Hopefully, too, there will be information from time to time that’s new to some of us “students-for-life”—it’s never too late in your academic career to become a better student!

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For those of you who are eager for a ‘first contact’ fix (or a ‘criticize essentialized representations of first contact’ fix) but are burned out on the Korowai, may I suggest the Smithsonian’s excellent website on Matthew Stirling’s 1926 film By Airplane To Pygmyland. Done in collaboration with SIL (who I think have the footage that forms the core of this ‘digital curation’), the website has both the original footage of the expedition as well as photos and interpretive essays. The site is too big and I am—alas—too busy to give it a thorough going-over. One thing that I love about the title is that the ‘aeroplane’ part probably sounded as sexy and mysterious to its 1926 audience as the ‘pygmyland’ bit. Serious though—this is a great and deep on-line resource for teaching culture contact and the representation of the colonized.

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Physicists hate it when Anthropologists misuse Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to give added weight to the commonplace observation that the ethnographic observer has an impact on the subjects and activities being observed. Not only is it unnecessary to evoke physics, it is bad physics:

Another common misconception is that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is equivalent to the statement, “You can’t measure a system without changing it.” In fact, it applies to unmeasured states and does not really take account of the effect of measurement.

Nonetheless, it has become anthropological shorthand to refer to our academic concerns that we (the observer) might be unduly influencing what we observe. The same concern affects documentary filmmakers, as it is not uncommon for the presence of the camera to have a strong influence on the events being recorded.

This fact struck home yesterday as we were interviewing a key subject. His kids came tearing across the frame: an older sister chasing her younger brother. As she ran, the sister yelled: “They should film our fight!” As shooting anything else had become impossible, we complied.

PS: I’m happy to say that DER has made our short film (which the current project is building upon), Acting Like a Thief, freely available from Google Video in its entirety. If your university library doesn’t yet have a copy of the film, please request that they purchase one. Doing so will help us demonstrate the wisdom of such an Open Access model, as well as supporting our current production!

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Hello folks. Sorry for the last couple of days when SM was offline. We switched servers from one machine to another and trying to coordinate the old machine (in California) with the new machine (in Illinois) with the guy who had the DNS (in India) and the guy moving the data (in Hawai’i) proved to be a little tricky. But we are now up and running, and while there may be a few small hiccups now and again I think we are back in business.

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Following previous discussions of semiosilversteinianism and Rex’s suggestion regarding ‘great diagrams,’ I looked up this wild diagram, from perhaps anthropology’s most accomplished sketch artist: Alfred Gell.

From Gell’s essay, “The Language of the Forest,” which relates phonological iconism to the ‘auditory culture’ and sylvan mode of being of Umeda people in New Guinea. I quote at length:

Phonological iconism [...] depends on tracing connections between the sound-substance of individual words and morphemes and their meanings. As a culturally elaborated expressive mode it is probably quite rare, if only because the regular processes of sound-shift which all languages undergo would ensure, other things being equal, that phonologically iconic forms evolved into non-iconic ones after a lapse of time. Only where things are not equal, that is, where there are specific cultural vectors tending to preserve, generalize and intensify expressivity against the countervailing forces of morphological change, should one expect to encounter elaborate phonological iconism as opposed to sporadic onomatopoeia.

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For most of us, the spring semester is now firmly underway, and this means that we are all being held to the vague and airy promises of ‘preparing class materials’ that we made over break now that there are actually students in our classrooms. As a result I thought it might be nice to start what may become a tradition here at SM—sharing the syllabi of the regular bloggers at this site to let you know what we are up to. And so, without further ado, I give unto you:

The Relevance of Anthropology for Contemporary Problems (Rex)

Ethnography of the State (Rex)

Contemporary Anthropological Theory (Strong)

People and Culture of the World (Oneman)

Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (Oneman)

Gender, Race, and Class (Oneman)

Public Spheres and Public Cultures (Kelty)

Adivasi Studies (Kerim)

Multimedia Ethnography (Kerim)

Language and Society (Kerim)

I like these classes not only because they all look so interesting but also because they give you a sense of where we as a blog are coming from—we have two large state universities, a private school, and two universities outside the US (in Finland and Taiwan). There are also a range of classes here—everything from Anthropology 101 to advanced graduate seminars. Some of us are using wikis and blogs to teach, while others rely only on chairs, tables, and a good book. If you’ve just started teaching, maybe you could send us links to your syllabi in the comments of this post so that our readers could have a wider sense of what is being read in the discipline.

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The first issue of Cultural Anthropology under the editorship of Kim and Mike Fortun is out, and I am a willing participant in the media blitz. The first issue has a few articles that look great (although, as we already know, you need to be a AAA member to access them). One is an article on memory in Sierra Leone—articulating nicely with an article in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine on child soldiers—I’d love to see her reading of the use of memory in that autobiography. An article by Ilana Feldman on Human Rights in Palestine and an article by Michael M.J. Fischer revisiting culture.

As I am on the editorial board of CA, I’ve been privy to some of the discussions about what Kim and Mike want to do with CA. (more…)

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‘Pop Quiz’: Occasional series in geeky anthropological fun. The Boym quote below (and Rex’s comment) inspired me to look up the following. Any guesses as to its author?

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