Back in January, Matthew Stannard at the SF Chronicle, having come across my SM piece Anthropologists as Counter-Insurgents, contacted me about doing an interview for an upcoming profile on Montgomery McFate, the advocate for anthropology in the military whose work I was responding to. The piece is now online, entitled Montgomery McFate’s Mission: Can one anthropologist possibly steer the course in Iraq?. I’m not quite ready to revisit this topic—I’m up to my neck in grading and other work, with the semester’s end a week-and-a-half away, but I thought I’d mention it now while I put together some further thoughts on the matter. It’s a fairly good article, even though I’m only quoted once (Stannard apparently has not been taught the maxim that the more quotes of me a paper has, the better it is). Interestingly, though the interview ranged all over, I’m quoted more in my capacity as historian of anthropology than in my—I think more relevant—role as anthropological ethicist.
April 2007
Sun 29 Apr 2007
The Fate of McFate: Anthropology’s Relationship with the Military Revisited
Posted by oneman under Briefly Noted , History of Anthropology , In the Press , Military, violence, conflict , Public Anthropology[48] Comments
Sun 29 Apr 2007
The anthropological noosphere has been steadily expanding these past couple of years, and I just wanted to take this opportunity to drop the names of two recent blogs that have been on my radar recently—Culture Matters and A World Among Worlds.
Culture Matters is an ‘applied anthropology’ blog from Macquarie Uni in Australia—its one of the few blogs I can think of that are explicitly department based. In particular, its the home of Greg Downey, who has switched from Capoeira to capitalism. It has the whole applied anthro, consultancy, value-added thang going on.
A World Among Worlds is a blog set up undergraduate anthropology types at American University. I hesitate to say that it’s quite good “for undergraduates” not because its not good, but because by now I think they are sick of being reminded of the fact that they are undergraduates. So I’d encourage everyone to check them out as well.
Tue 24 Apr 2007
Michael Wesch Wins Rave Award
Posted by Kerim under Briefly Noted , In the Press , disseminationNo Comments
Congrats to Michael Wesch (whose Savage Minds posts you can read here) on winning a 2007 “Rave” award from Wired magazine! He deserves it.
How do you sum up the power and potential of Web 2.0 in a 271-second video? By moving really, really fast. When Michael Wesch, who teaches cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, made “Web 2.0… The Machine Is Us/ing Us,” he’d been working for months on an academic paper that would explain new Web tools. As he struggled to define concepts like hypertext, tagging, mashups, and wikis, he had an epiphany: He was working in the wrong medium. He needed to use the tools of Web 2.0 to explain Web 2.0. Anthropology — humans studying the experience of being human — is a recursive discipline, and Wesch’s is a recursive video, cutting quickly between screenshots that show him bookmarking Web sites with del.icio.us, creating a blog with Blogger, and posting pictures on Flickr. Wesch, whose video was viewed 1.8 million times on YouTube in six weeks, now has his digital-ethnography class conducting fieldwork about YouTube itself. “It’s just amazing to see all the humanity people put out there,” he says. “My students are hooked.”
Tue 24 Apr 2007
Ethnography. Anthropology is not ethnography—its not participant observation followed up by a ‘qualitative’ analysis of the ‘data’. Sure, this is the method that an overwhelming number of sociocultural anthropologists use (but not the only one—think of historical anthropology, for instance) but simply using this method does not produce work that is obviously anthropology.
This point was driven home to me lately when I read Rod Rhodes’s paper Everyday Life In A Ministry: Public Administration As Anthropology. I’ll be doing some fieldwork soon (hopefully!) on what I’m calling ‘policy elites’ and I’ve been reading around in all the disciplines which study them (critical accounting, public administration, sociology, geography and so forth). Rhodes is a very well-known “PA” in Canberra and one of my colleagues recommended the article to me. Its a very good—fascinating in fact. Rhodes managed to shadow British ministers, and his discussion of this research inside British ministries is written with an easy wit and keen insight.
But it is not anthropology. In fact, it is amazing how unanthropological it is. What about it is unanthropological? Its difficult to put your finger on—in fact it’s this nagging but unspecified sense that prompted me to write this. Its got something to do with the way that Rhodes handles his data. Although he engages a lot of classical anthropological dilemmas (“isn’t this just restating the obvious?”) and he has material to work with but somehow… it’s what he does with it that isn’t… anthropological…
This is not a criticism of Rhodes, whose work (like that of Mark Bevir) is one of my happier discoveries in the PA literature. But it did make me reflect on what is distinctive about our discipline—not the fact that we handle ethnographic data but the way we handle it.
Mon 23 Apr 2007
One of the email lists I am on recently publicized Internet Anthropologist= an online tutorial designed to teach people about how to research anthropology online. In general I’m very skeptical about these resources since the tools and sites that you use to do research online are always changing, and the people who put them together are not, in my humble opinion, very good at actually doing research. A (very) quick look at Internet Anthropologist, however, makes me think that it is a cut above the usual online tutorials. The Intute platform that it is based on looks interesting, and while the tutorial itself is really basic, some people need to be told “There is such a thing as the American Anthropological Association, and it has a website.”
Of course I was a bit miffed that Savage Minds didn’t make the cut of ‘popular blogs about anthropology’ but I’m sure they’ll come around eventually… 
Take a look and let me know what you think.
Wed 18 Apr 2007
SfAA Podcasts
Posted by Kerim under Briefly Noted , Open Access Open Source , Websites , dissemination[3] Comments
Jen Cardew has set up a website where you can download podcasts of sessions from this year’s SfAA meeting. Only a few are up so far, but more will be posted as they become available. Great work Jen!
It is worth noting that she did this using Wordpress.com’s free blog hosting – showing just how easy it is to set something like this up these days. There isn’t any need to wait for the AAA in order to set up a properly functioning website for your conference!
Wed 18 Apr 2007
A note on the Eskimo snow thing
Posted by Rex under Anthro Classics , Language , North America , Pedagogy[7] Comments
I did a satisfying little bibliography crawl recently to track down some references on the wrong-but-ubiquitous idea that ‘Eskimo have 100/354/1,000 words for snow’ which I thought I’d share here for people’s convenience. Most of the work done on this topic comes from Laura Martin’s ‘Eskimo Words for Snow’: A Case Study in the Growth and Decay of an Anthropological Example (aka American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 88, No. 2 (Jun., 1986), pp. 418-423). The more accessible and well-known publication is Geoffrey Pullum’s Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax (Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 7, 275-281). It’s been published in several other places (you can check out his publications list). The way that some universities are today, though, you may have an easier time getting a PDF off of Springer than tracking the eponymous paperback. Finally, there is also a brief comment on Snowing Canonical Texts by Stephen O. Murray (American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 89, No. 2 (Jun., 1987), pp. 443-444) which comments on Martin’s use of Boas’s original brief mention of snow. Anyway I thought it would be useful to have all this digested here.
The short version—for people who didn’t get the memo—is that the Eskimo do not have 100/354/1,000 words for snow.
Mon 16 Apr 2007
(Poking head in door…)
I am still ‘here’ dammit! (I quote Sandra Bernhard.) And I hope I am not the only one stuck in the thick of a spring semester. That’s the only excuse I can offer for not having posted more frequently recently, sorry! Random (no doubt unoriginal) thoughts associated with the ensuing guilt of not blogging enough:
1) What is the temporality of blog publics? Warner (Michael) suggests that publics always have a particular rhythm associated with the temporality of the reflexive textual form that constitutes them (e.g., a newspaper). What is the rhythm of the blog and its public? Is it even a rhythm? I think there is something to the constancy of the form, it’s 24/7-ness mixed with its instancy, that to me suggests something other than rhythm or even temporality. (I add that I think many blogs have a 9 to 5 daily work week rhythm that goes against what I have just written.) Mixed with this thought is…
2) Is the virtual-blog public like the eye of Sauron? Frodo and co. were not always seen, but that flaming eye was still always looking. My Imac’s strobing screen starts to take on Sauron-like qualities: always hailing me… always waiting. Connected to this is…
3) The problem of productivity, growth, and concealment. Melanesians not infrequently associate concealment with growth. As with the child in the womb, or the sweet potato in the garden, or the young woman before her debut, one way to achieve growth is to contrive its concealment. I was thinking about this in relation to the persistent ‘visibility’ of text-at-the-speed-of-thought, or blogging (in some forms). Anthropological ‘reveals’ once had very slow temporal rhythm, slower in fact than most other disciplines. This was or is importantly related to the time intensive nature of research projects themselves (ethnographic fieldwork).
Of course, in actual practice, the temporality of anthropology and its publics is multiple and complex. Books are still published. Students venture off for years of fieldwork (on Wall Street or in Thailand). Etc. I was just sort of free associating about whether or not the constant availability of the blog public could in some ways have detrimental effects in terms of the growth of thought. Are we hurrying?
And speaking of reveals, I promise more soon. Welcome Rena!!
Sat 14 Apr 2007
Kurt Vonnegut passes — have we lost an anthropologist?
Posted by Rex under Briefly Noted , In the Press[6] Comments
As we all know by now, Kurt Vonnegut passed away this past week. Like everyone I read Vonneugt in high school— I remember Sirens of Titan and Cat’s Cradle in particular—but some how I was never as turned on as other people. At any rate, as we’ve noted on the blog more than a couple of times, Vonnegut is someone who anthropologists sometimes claim as their own. Vonnegut famously flunked out of the anthropology program at the University of Chicago, and was only awarded an MA years afterwards when one of his novels was submitted in lieu of a thesis. Is our invocation of Vonnegut as ‘one of us’ a sign of the not-unusual desire of academics to capitalize on connections with famous alumns, or is there something in Vonnegut’s dour reflexivity that we can see as genuinely anthropological? Is his brief connection with our discipline an interesting piece of trivia, or can we find resonances of our worldview in his? Its an interesting question.
Fri 13 Apr 2007
We are happy to announce that Rena Lederman, whose guest posts on the IRB provoked some good discussion, has agreed to become a full-time member of Savage Minds. Welcome back Rena!
Mon 9 Apr 2007
Via the Linguistic Anthropology blog, I came across this excellent post by Lauren Squires, entitled “The social life of prescriptivism.” In it, Squires explains to the more positivisticly minded just what social science can contribute to understanding why bad linguistics happens. She brings together several related strains of linguistic anthropology/sociolinguistics research: language attitudes, language ideologies, linguistic awareness, linguistic capital (although she doesn’t call it that), etc.
For those of us trained in linguistic anthropology none of this is new, but I think we tend to forget just how little other people are aware of this research. The linguistics section of most bookstores is one of the smallest, and the anthropological sub-section is usually confined to one or two readers on language and gender. But what struck me about this post is that the same kind of thing could easily be written for any subject where scientists gripe about people not understanding their work, whether it is evolutionary theory or climate change, etc.
Take Richard Dawkins book, The God Delusion for instance. The rational argument against the existence of god has been around a long time, and it hasn’t made much headway for a reason. Those reasons are complex, to be sure, but there is a large literature in anthropology that can help us at least begin to understand the continuing appeal of a divine creator.
The trick is to assume that people say and believe the things they do not simply out of error or ignorance, but because within the world in which they live these beliefs make sense and are actually helpful to them. The very fact that church attendance is so much more a part of people’s lives in the US than in Europe should clue us in to the fact that there are important sociological factors going on here. While American’s may not fair as well in math and science as Europeans, I don’t think that math and science education alone can explain these differences.
UPDATE: I forgot to plug the prescriptivism page on my wiki!
Mon 9 Apr 2007
J.I. Staley Prize Winner Announced
Posted by Kerim under Books and Articles , Briefly Noted , Language , Medicine , South AmericaNo Comments
Charles L. Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs are the winners of this year’s J.I. Staley Prize, for their book Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling During a Medical Nightmare.
The book recounts the 1992-1993 cholera outbreak that killed some 500 people, mostly indigenous, in eastern Venezuela’s Orinoco River Delta. The disease had been absent from Latin American for nearly a century. Cholera can kill healthy adults in as little as 12 hours and can make a 15-year-old appear geriatric, Briggs and Mantini-Briggs note in the book, but is prevented easily by the provision of uncontaminated food and water and is easily treated.... The book draws from hundreds of interviews conducted from 1992-1999 with people from a cross-section of ages, occupations, social positions and degrees of bilingualism in the delta region, and the Venezuelan capital of Caracas. The authors recorded the stories of medical personnel, journalists, families of those killed by cholera, disease survivors, community leaders and government officials, traditional healers, missionaries, and others.
... In November 2006, [Charles] Briggs won the Edward Sapir Book Prize, the highest award in linguistic anthropology for co-authoring [with Richard Bauman], Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality...
Sat 7 Apr 2007
Libraries and Indigenous Knowledge
Posted by Kerim under Books and Articles , Briefly Noted , Intellectual property , Open Access Open SourceNo Comments
Since open access and indigenous knowledge are both topics which have been discussed extensively on Savage Minds, I’m happy to inform you of a new open access book entitled Libraries and Indigenous Knowledge: A National Forum for Libraries, Archives and Information Services:
This book is an outcome of the Libraries and Indigenous Knowledge Colloquium held at the State Library of New South Wales in December 2004. The editors have taken advantage of the opportunity provided by the substance and scope of the papers presented at the Colloquium, and the degree of professional interest in the issues associated with Indigenous Knowledge in libraries and archives, to put together an edited collection that is accessible to a wider audience. If it is possible to guide the way readers respond to this collection, then perhaps the first thing the authors would like readers to take away would be an appreciation and understanding of the complexities that professionals must engage with in meeting the needs of Indigenous people and the issues associated with managing Indigenous knowledge. From the Indigenous perspective, we can well understand the profession’s desire to have clear prescriptions for practice and practical assistance. However, the path to developing clear and high standards of practice in this area rests on building a strong foundation for understanding what informs the concerns of Indigenous people about the intersection of our knowledge and cultural materials with library and archival systems and practice. This requires a broad sweep across issues of knowledge, culture, history, heritage, law, and information technologies. It requires consideration of articulations between the local/global, the Indigenous/Western, and traditional/contemporary dualities. Most importantly, it requires professional understanding at a level deep enough to generate problem-solving and innovations to practice to overcome the manifold tensions that emerge across all these in a diverse range of situations.
Note: The official permanent URI does not work. I have instead linked to the UTS press URI which does, and filed a report to handle.net.
(via Material World)
Thu 5 Apr 2007
AAA Elections are upon us again (online ballot goes live at 9 AM in some unspecified time zone), and as usual most people will probably either ignore the election altogether, or simply vote for (or perhaps against) their friends and colleagues. I am so far outside AAA politics that I probably couldn’t identify half the names, and as far as I know nobody is required to submit a platform so there isn’t any information about the candidates available online (other than their faculty web pages). So this post is basically an open thread, in the hope of sparking some discussion or perhaps even inspiring some of the candidates to use this space to express their views.
Do the AAA elections matter to you? Tell us why!
UPDATE: I got this via an e-mail from the AAA, but the link doesn’t work for me:
Please note that information about each candidate and each ballot initiative is available through links on the online ballots. In addition, the aggregate of all the information about the candidates and the ballot initiatives is available as a single file at www.aaanet.org/eballot (note this is a large PDF file).
However, if you login you can read some information about each candidate online.
UPDATE: Link fixed. It doesn’t go to the PDF directly, but to a page where you can download it. The pdf is here.
UPDATE: Note: Voting Ends at 5:00 PM ET, May 15th, 2007. So there is still time for some discussion.
Wed 4 Apr 2007
History of anthropology, anthropological theory, and Just Plain Theory
Posted by Rex under History of Anthropology , Pedagogy[27] Comments
One of my jobs in my department is to create a new “theory course” for cultural anthropologists to supplement the core course that we currently have but that doesn’t cover the “hot theorists” that students want to read but which we can’t cram into the one semester of theory we currently offer. As a result I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to teach “anthropological theory”
Recently I’ve been thinking about theory for a different reason—I picked up a copy of the second volume of The Essential Edmund Leach which features a long final essay which is the closest that the mercurial Leach ever came to sketching out his ‘big picture’ of what anthropology is and ought to be. The essay was disappointing to me. It’s not surprising that a fox doesn’t do very good at playing the hedgehog, but what I didn’t like about the essay was the partial and even distorted way that it addressed the history of anthropological theory.
One thing that I’ve been thinking lately as I’ve thought about both Leach and my own attempts to create a ‘theory syllabus’ revolves around the difference between what I might call ‘history of anthropology’, ‘anthropological theory’, and ‘theory’ in a plain sense. (more…)
