Another Horror Story on IRBs, this one in the New York Times. It’s an uneventful article, I’m not sure what occasioned it, and unfortunately has little of the depth recently devoted to the subject in AE... but the fact that the Times saw fit to cover such a seemingly obscure topic must say something about the affective quality of IRB mission creep… did I mention that I was kicked off of the Rice IRB for making too much trouble? (Well, to be fair, I didn’t protest, I was happy to have one less administrative duty…)

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I’ve just returned from the Association for the Social Anthropology of Oceania meetings in Charlottesville, Virginia (more on which later). One of the sessions I sat in on at that meeting was the one on interpreting the discourse of intellectual property rights in the Pacific. Most of the participants at the session had a sense—to put it very roughly—that they did not like it when representations of indigenous people and knowledge about them slipped out of the control of indigenous communities. At the same time, many felt disatisfied with the solutions offered by the appurtenances of copyright, trademark, and patent. At the same time, given the power differentials that exist between indigenous people and enormous corporations (and other bad guys) it seems that Pacific islanders have to use something like the law to get the leverage necessary to level the playing field

Many of the papers in the sessions discussed alternatives to IP drawn from Pacific. Although not much of a practical solution (we won’t have IP laws based on Sepik cosmology coming to a Parliament Near You anytime soon) they did offer some ways to think out of the box about how to approach property etc.

But what other options were there? How do we find a language (other than IP) to speak about the ways to control the flow of information about you when it slips out of your graps and starts circulating in wider spheres. The solution, it seemed to me, came from my own (or perhaps just Strong’s) native theory of semiotics: branding.

(more…)

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Continuing themes raised in my previous post, I’d like to present another riddle of rationalization and reflect on its meaning and impact.

As part of the planning process for the building project in which I’m involved, I joined my colleagues in various fieldtrips to other institutions. In the course of those travels I saw and heard about many odd cases in which codes of various sorts, complicated by their local interpretation, had a significant role in shaping architectural decisions. The example that I wish to consider could have happened anywhere, so its precise location doesn’t matter. All you need to know is that the buildings in question are located at an American institution of higher education.

The institution built an addition that links two late 19th-century buildings. At the time of construction, local authorities said that only two of the four entrances on one side of the complex had to meet the accessibility standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Since the average distance between the entries is only slightly more than 50 feet, this seemed sensible. Adding two more large ramps would raise costs significantly and, more important, deface the historic buildings. (Although they are historic, they aren’t on the state or federal historic register, an issue I’ll get to in a second.)

A couple of years after the building was opened, though, the local code official, apparently under pressure from higher-ups elsewhere, reversed the earlier decision. Now all four doors either had to be made ADA-compliant or the two non-compliant ones had to be decommissioned as public entries.

The institution, like virtually all American colleges and universities, is committed to the letter and spirit of the ADA. But absent a budget for the addition of two substantial concrete ramps and a willingness to compromise the look of handsome old buildings, the institution removed exterior handles from the doors in question. (more…)

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As I desperately scramble to prepare my syllabi for the new semester (our winter break falls on the lunar new year), I run into the same problem I’ve dealt with every semester since I began teaching in Taiwan: hardly any ethnographies (or social science textbooks for that matter) are translated into Chinese.

This is not a problem unique to me, the only non-native speaker in the department; all the Taiwanese professors share the same frustration. Almost all of my colleagues are educated in the US or Europe and wrote their dissertations relying heavily on English language sources, almost none of which have been translated. They naturally want to teach using the materials that they are familiar with from their own studies. (At another time I plan to write more about the ways we and our students cope with this situation, such as when students resort to scanning entire chapters, or even books, and running them through machine translation software which spits out pure gibberish. But for now I want to focus on the issue of translation.)

Whether texts are old or new, famous or obscure doesn’t seem to matter. What is translated seems to largely be a matter of the personal whims of the translators. In some cases I’ve been told that the translations which do exist are so bad that student’s prefer to use the English (although I’ve yet to see a student read the English version when a translation is available). (more…)

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A provocation from the past:

I am the last to decry field work… But when I reflect on the broad generalizations that have emerged in the history of our science, I find that the most stimulating have come on the whole from armchair students, who saw no tribe though they studied European society: Van Gennep’s analysis of rites of passage, Lévy-Bruhl’s of pre-logical collective representations, Durkheim’s of division of labor, Hubert and Mauss’ of sacrifice and offering, and the many works of Tylor, Frazer, Marett, Engels, Freud, Pareto. When I consider the type of data with which they worked, I can only wish that they might be here again to use the data provided by modern field-research in even more fruitful hypotheses. This is not to deny that some modern field workers have produced as stimulating hypotheses: but, if we are to learn from our history, I hope that some of them will forsake the savage for the study.

(Max Gluckman, An analysis of the sociological theories of Bronislaw Malinowski, 1949; and see Manners & Kaplan, “Notes on Theory and Non-Theory in Anthropology,” 1968).

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I’m grateful for Strong’s post calling attention to David Graeber’s recent Malinowski Lecture on bureaucracy and power. These issues have been much on my mind in recent months.

Some personal background: One of the challenges (and very occasionally, pleasures) of working at a small college is that faculty members are often given administrative tasks that transcend the usual chairing of departments and programs. Where I teach, most of the top administrative officers are working academics, a situation that sets a tone for the rest of the faculty. Since 1998, I have been involved in a large building project that by 2012 will have encompassed the construction of three major buildings—two faculty office buildings and a new college library—and the remaking of a core part of the campus. I share chairing duties with the College Librarian, but in reality my co-chair and I have little latitude to make key decisions. Most of the time, we herd cats and serve as institutional memory for a multi-million dollar project that, when completed, will have taken nearly 15 years from initial conceptualization to the ritual cutting of the last ribbon.

For an anthropologist, architecture and site-planning are a real-world test of social analysis—it is, as they say, where the rubber meets the road. Architecture on college and university campuses is inevitably a form of social engineering, with all the possibilities (and delusions) that this entails. But even the most laudable goals—e.g, “creating a lively environment that facilitates teaching and learning”—must be weighed against such factors as cost, aesthetics, building codes, and unknown but presumably radical changes in IT in the coming decades. Fortunately, we’ve been working with a team of gifted architects with considerable experience in how buildings and people interact.

So where’s the anthropology in this? To design and construct buildings today is to wrestle with all the contradictions of modernity—in particular, what is often called the “irrationality of rationality” as manifested in risk-management, “accountability,” “due diligence,” and bureaucratic proceduralism. (more…)

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From David Graeber’s 2006 Malinowski Lecture at LSE, about the structural violence reproduced in and through modern bureacracies:

Police are, essentially, bureaucrats with weapons. At the same time, they have, significantly, over the last fifty years or so become the almost obsessive objects of imaginative identification in popular culture… [which] throws an odd wrinkle in Weber’s dire prophecies about the iron cage: as it turns out, faceless bureaucracies do seem inclined to throw up charismatic heroes of a sort, in the form of an endless assortment of mythic detectives, spies, and police officers—all, significantly, figures whose job is to operate precisely where the bureaucratic structures for ordering information encounter, and appeal to, genuine physical violence.

The lecture is a poignant and sarcastically funny take on the suffering created by bureaucratic stupidity.  I was thinking of Graeber’s emphasis on governmental imbecility a few weeks ago when I ran across Bob Somerby invoking anthropology to query the stupid.  (more…)

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A striking development that has come out of the last decade’s concern with indigenous IPR and, more broadly, with the world’s mad scramble for rules of cultural ownership is the rise of global initiatives to identify and protect anything defined as “heritage.” UNESCO is the single biggest player here, but UNESCO discussions have spawned new bureaucracies in many parts of the world.

Some experts close to the process see this as a good thing. Their argument is largely a pragmatic one: at least the world is talking about this stuff and finally taking measures to protect heritage from IP piracy. If you want to get the general flavor of this, click here to read about South Korea’s current efforts to define and preserve whatever it defines as its cultural heritage.

Although I’ve met many people involved with heritage protection and generally find them smart and motivated by the best of intentions, I’m a heritage protection skeptic, which puts me in good company. For a bracing critique full of tart humor, check out David Lowenthal’s article “Heritage Wars,” published in a UK online magazine last year. Other recent contributions to the skeptic’s position include Rob Albro’s 2005 essay “Making Cultural Policy and Confounding Cultural Diversity,” as well as a recent essay by Dorothy Noyes called “The Judgment of Solomon: Global Protections for Tradition and the Problem of Community Ownership,” accessible here. (more…)

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I’ve just come off of a week long visit with Bruno Latour. He came to Rice as the “NEH Distinguished Visiting Scholar” and gave a public lecture, three seminars, screened a video about his recent art exhibit and participated in three classes (two in anthropology, one in architecture), in addition to dinners, lunches, talks with undergraduates and graduate students, trips to the mall, and a tour of Houston. In short, we got our money’s worth. It reconfirmed for me my sense that Latour is a gentleman and a fantastic teacher; his curiosity is boundless, as is his ability to converse, in depth, with an astonishing range of people—from scientists to lawyers to evangelicals to architects to philosophers to American historians to undergraduates to the wine buyers at Specs (The World’s Largest Liquor Store, about which Bruno said of its immense and varied selection from all over the world “Now I understand relativism. You know, you aren’t supposed to be that open-minded”). The only people he seemed unable to connect with were the French, which is not entirely ironic. He is a fantastic teacher—better at clarfying his ideas in person than in print—and incredibly patient with questions and the inevitable attacks that come based on his reputation (one colleague asked if he felt responsible for the Holocaust—I think this was meant to be “provocative” rather than puerile). (more…)

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I just received the following email from Inside Higher Ed which I thought SM readers might be interested in (disclosure: I write occasionally for IHE). Happy Valentine’s day!

Tens of thousands of academic couples are searching for jobs in the same city. Now Inside Higher Ed introduces Dual Career Search
—a way for couples to conduct joint job searches.

To celebrate the launch of Dual Career Search, Inside Higher Ed is sponsoring the “Commuting for Love” contest. Readers are invited to submit stories of their challenging academic commutes—1,000 words or less. We’ll post the best stories on Inside Higher Ed, and pick one couple to win one round-trip airfare between any two U.S. cities (up to $500).

To show a little more love, Inside Higher Ed will send a box of chocolates to the first five academic couples who report that they found jobs in the same city using the Dual Career Search.

Send stories about your commutes (and news of jobs found) by March 14 to Kathlene Collins.

With hundreds of thousands of informed, diverse readers on Inside Higher Ed each month—many of them daily—Inside Higher Ed has become the top source for news of academe in just two years of publication. With 3,000 academic jobs at institutions all over the country, and with the new Dual Career Search, Inside Higher Ed is the place to find a job as a professor, dean, admissions official or president and to find a job for your partner. Inside Higher Ed’s readers may be on their own in finding love—but they are no longer on their own in finding jobs together.

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If you’re interested in how images move and morph in a digitally linked world, check out a recent essay in Harper’s about “Molotov Man,” who was born in a photograph taken by Susan Meiselas in revolutionary Nicaragua in 1979. (Work by Meiselas can be seen in the website of the photo agency Magnum.) It was subsequently appropriated for artistic and political purposes in Nicaragua and beyond.

Molotov man is the subject of the Harper’s article “On the Rights of Molotov Man:
Appropriation and the Art of Context,” by Susan Meiselas and Joy Garnett, published in the February issue. It also figures in the multimedia record of an NYU conference, Comedies of Fair U$e,” held in April 2006. The conference attracted such fair-use heavyweights as James Boyle, Lawrence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Jonathan Lethem.

Does anyone know of specific indigenous images that are this well-traveled?

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A curious development in the struggle to protect traditional knowledge (TK) from unwanted exploitation by outsiders is a strategy called “defensive publishing.” This largely applies to the realm of the patent, not copyright or trademark, because patents are supposed to be granted only for processes, substances, or devices that are truly novel. (There are other criteria as well, but they needn’t concern us here).

If you can prove that something isn’t novel, that it has been known and used for a long time, then it can’t be patented.

To defend traditional knowledge from exploitative patenting, then, there are two basic and fundamentally opposed choices under existing law: define it as a trade secret or protect it in plain view. The goal of the latter is to establish that patent applicants who make use of this information fail to meet the novelty standard.

Although the trade-secrets approach sounds promising, and some legal scholars argue that it’s the way to go for the protection of traditional IPR, it has certain problems. For one thing, a lot of TK isn’t especially secret. It is, almost by definition, in wide circulation within a society. Trade-secrets laws typically say that anyone who can duplicate trade secrets independently—say, through reverse engineering—is free to use them. Still, one can argue that the Aboriginal “keeping-places” emerging in Australia, repositories for TK that have strict rules of access, follow something like a trade-secrets approach. To a more limited extent, protocols for the use of Native American TK in American archives are moving in a similar direction.

The plain-view approach has been adopted in a few important cases—notably, that of Ayurveda, which is documented by the Indian government in the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library. (Site is publicly accessible but requires a simple registration.) The idea is to establish “prior art” and therefore refute claims of novelty.

Yet as the sociologist Sita Reddy has argued in a provocative essay, “Making Heritage Legible,” just published in the International Journal of Cultural Property, the conversion of Ayurvedic tradition into a database generates all manner of contradictions and conflicts. (more…)

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Following up on Oneman’s latest post, I thought I’d link to some other classics that are online for quick reference. They’re not hard to find but heh, I google so you don’t have to:
Dream and Gibes – the poetry of Edward Sapir

Language by Edward Sapir

Primitive Society by Robert Lowie

Mind of Primitive Man (thanks Oneman!)

Principles of Sociology Herbert Spencer

Myth, Ritual, and Religion Andrew Lang

Suicide by Durkheim (in French)

Head-Hunters Black, White, and Brown

These are just the ones with PDF downloads. Many more are available full-text. They even have copies of old issues of American Anthropologist on there (sssshh—Don’t tell the AnthroSource business model!)

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Google Books now makes it possible to download pdf\’s of public domain works, like this copy of our namesake Notes and Queries on Anthropology (1899). Alas, the text—which Google must have a plain-text version of in order to do keyword searching—seems not to be embedded in the pdf file. Here, to the best of my typing ability, is a little taste of \”Notes and Queries\” to whet your appetite:

It is almost impossible to make a savage in the lower stages of culture understand why the questions are asked, and from the limited range of his vocabulary or of ideas it is often nearly as difficult to put the question before him in such a way as he can comprehend it. The result often is that from timidity, or the desire to please, or from weariness of the questioning, he will give an answer that he thinks will satisfy the inquirer. If time serve, these difficulties can easily be overcome by friendly intercourse, and a careful checking of answers through different individuals (87 – 88).

Needless to say, this work is of historical interest more than practical interest. Still, it\’s good to see this history preserved and available; I also downloaded a copy of Franz Boas\’ The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), which is of rather more interest to me.

There is no \”master list\” of downloadable texts, or search flag that will return only results that have pdf\’s attached. The trick is to click the \”Full View Books\” radio button under the search form, and then hope. In \”Advanced Book Search\”, you can set a date range—I\’d think that limiting the publication date to years before 1925 would be a good idea, as current copyright law only covers back to 1926 or so. But, of course, there is public domain work published after 1926—anything published by the US government, for example—and there is still some material that was published earlier that may not be public domain (e.g. works in translation, where the rights are/were held by various parties and now nobody\’s quite sure who owns what).

Imagine if we had some sort of reasonable copyright laws—we could access much more recent scholarly work, most of which is locked up in the storerooms of university libraries where nobody will ever see it.

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Over at Terra Nova Jen Dornan is wondering whether mmogs are rituals. Like the question ‘are video games art’, posing the question this way has the drawback relying on the idea that ‘mmog’ and ‘video game’ are somehow moving targets in a way that ‘art’ and ‘ritual’ aren’t. However I do think that Jen’s question does allow us to think a little bit more fully about how moogs serve, as William James would put it, as a ‘genuine reality’ for their players.

To a certain extent the fate of ‘ritual’ as a topic was one of gradual decline. Attempts to describe exactly what ‘ritual’ was and how it differed from every day interaction foundered on the fact that practically everything seemed to be ritualistic—our everyday lives were, Goffman wrote, Interaction Rituals. Then we had Moore and Myerhoff’s book Secular Ritual. Today we see the classical work that ritual does—moving participants from one social role to another—as an aspect of all language use.

But the real question of how Worlds of Warcraft can count as ritual comes not from this take on ritual as a means of structuring social interaction but on an older sense of ritual as a form of embodied experience which appears, at first glance, to be distinct from the ‘disembodied’ experience of playing Worlds of Warcraft. How can you get the thrills and chills of real ritual when you are just sitting there staring at people do things on a screen? That our country’s anglo-protestant majority could make this sort of objection has always boggled me, since the vast majority of churches that I have been to involve, well, congregations that just sit there staring at people who do things on an altar.

(more…)

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