A discussion I have been having with other Pacific scholars about trends in the field sites of anthropologists has prompted me to survey SM’s savvy readership on sources of actual hard data about popular fieldsites today versus yesterday. Does anyone out there in cyberspace know of studies that collate or quantify the locations of today’s anthropological (sociocultural) research projects? Does anyone out there know if there are studies that compare contemporary trends to those from, say, the 1960s? I know that there are a couple of places that Ph.D. topics are listed, but I am wondering if there is a paper somewhere that has analyzed the data.

The background: There is a general perception amongst anthropologists (I think!) that fieldwork and research in so-called remote places or in traditionally exotic locales is diminishing, while ethnographic research in metropolitan centers and amongst highly mobile populations is increasing. Some of us are wondering if this perception is born out by the actual facts…

Any assistance from SM readers on this topic would be most appreciated.

Share This

AAA Executive Director, Bill Davis released a press release in which he made public how the AAA finances its publication costs:

The cost of publishing and distributing AAA’s 22 peer-reviewed print and online journals is anticipated to be over $2.1 million in 2007. ... Unlike some association publishers who subsidize other organization activities from journal publishing profits, within AAA the subsidy flows in the opposite direction. AAA and section member dues will subsidize our publishing program to the tune of more than $900,000 in 2007.

After rejecting an “author-pays” model Davis suggests some alternatives proposals:

substitute member dues for library subscription income … is would require an average increase in individual member dues of 71 percent, an average rise from $133 to $227. Alternatively, if dues were to remain the same, AAA would have to make up the loss of subscription income by cutting back or eliminating section support, anthropology department support, media outreach, advocacy for federal funding for anthropology, committee support and/or other benefits and services to members and the discipline.

Scary! Either we bankrupt members, or we eliminate member benefits. (The AAA does media outreach?) This reminds me of how the Republicans frame the Social Security debate by making it seem like an undesirable policy is necessary because the alternative would be an economic catastrophe. The heart of this argument is the claim that making our content available for free would result in a loss of revenue which would have to be made up for by members. But as Peter Suber makes clear, the study upon which Davis bases these claims is highly flawed. (Suber also highlights several other inaccuracies and misconceptions in the Davis article.) And as Rex has argued, the idea that a reader-pays model will solve these financial problems is largely a myth.

Tomorrow I will be putting forward a proposal at my college’s faculty meeting that we purchase an AnthroSource subscription for our university. For a university AnthroSource is a great deal, costing less than one tenth the price of some other leading social sciences databases. There is a lot to admire in what the AAA has done with AnthroSource, but it is time for them to stop opposing FRPAA, to stop spreading FUD about Open Access, and to start thinking seriously about alternatives to a business model based on restricting access to our work.

For more information visit the Open Access Anthropology website, blog, or discussion group.

(Thanks to Antropologi.info for the links!)

Share This

In my Copious Free Time I’ve been playing around with The SIMILE Project’s excellent open-source tool timeline—its very easy to use (although I haven’t used it much so far) and so I knocked up a flashy ‘web2.0’ time line of books written by anthropologists in the 1970s—you can see the very rough anthro theory timeline here. I think its incredibly cool and that we should fill in All Relevant Dates going back to League of the Iroquois. But then again that just might be me. So… how would you populate it?

Share This

Measuring skulls may seem oh so 19th century, but this particular skull is very 1980s! The tail bone is particularly interesting as well.

Share This

When Geertz passed away a while back, we linked to numerous obituaries and remembrances and (as I said in a previous entry), including Lionel Tiger’s harsh assessment of Geertz in The Wall Street Journal. Richard Shweder has recently prepared a rebuttal to Tiger’s piece to be published in Common Knowledge and has made a preprint available on his website. It’s an interesting piece that attempts to locate Geertz intellectually (a difficult if not impossible task, as Shweder admits) and to rebut Tiger’s piece about him (quite easy). Along the way we get some thoughts on tendencies in anthropological thought in recent decades and the Geertz almost (but of course not quite) fits into them. It’s a nice read.

Share This

I’ve just received an email stating that Mary Douglas has passed away. I’ll post more information as I learn it.

Update: Thanks to our commentors, we now have obituaries from The Times as well as the Guardian as well as a remembrance by Daniel Miller at Material World. Many others are linking to many of the other resources on the web about Douglas so I will include here just the highlights, such as this realtively thorough and up-to-date bibliography and another video interview with Alan MacFarlane.

Finally, it’s interesting to note that when I began googling around for confirmation of the email I received about Douglas, the first three blogs to cover her passing were all by biblical scholars.

Update: There is also an obituary from the New York Times and one from The Independent written by Adam Kuper

Update update: One more from the Telegraph

Share This

I’m teaching a course on the anthropology of education this semester. Ostensibly it is actually titled “Aboriginal Education” but because the classic educational ethnographies focus on class, race, and gender in the US and England the course ends up being much wider in scope than the title would suggest. Last year I tried using Willis’ Learning to Labor but the British context and colloquialisms were just too difficult for my students who are more familiar with American language and culture, so this semester I switched to Ain’t No Making It which has a lot of cursing, but is actually much easier to read.

In practice, the students here take turns reading the English materials, each group presenting and summarizing that weeks reading for the rest of the class before I lecture on it. It is a strategy that nearly all the teachers here use since less than one percent of all academic texts seem to exist in Chinese translations (anthropology even less) and the English level of most of the students is simply not up to doing the amount of reading one would expect of native speakers. It isn’t an ideal solution, but it works well enough for the higher level classes.

The language barrier is a problem, but with teaching undergraduates an even bigger issue for me is the lack of a shared set of cultural references. Even in the US (where I had once been described as “cool” in multiple student evaluations) I had started to fall behind in the age of video games, never having played WoW (Rex, on the other hand…). Here Manga are a big part of student life. I love classic American graphic novels, but I can’t keep up with the endless amounts of Manga which the students consume on a daily basis. All the restaurants near campus have walls lined with Manga for the students to read during their meals.

Fortunately, when students do their presentations well, they are able to make the connections I can’t make. In presenting MacLeod’s “Hallway Hangers” the students gave each member his own Manga-esqe avatar. I find particularly interesting the trouble the students had in portraying the one African-American member of the group, Booboo, as there are very few blacks in the Mangas they read. You can clearly see that he is drawn in a completely different style (perhaps by a different student? – I forgot to ask) than the rest of the gang. It is interesting because even when Manga characters are meant to be Asian, they are often drawn with Caucasian features, thus any attempt at depicting marked racial features requires deviating from the stylistic norms. Although this is not a problem for the best artists in the tradition, it clearly stumped my students. (UPDATE: I forgot to mention that the other avatar on the bottom left is meant to depict someone of mixed heritage.)

The whole exercise made me wonder if there wasn’t a market in re-writing classic ethnographies as manga? It would certainly do a tremendous amount to popularize anthropology. I’ve always been a big fan of the “Introducing …” and the ”... for Beginners” illustrated books, but with the emphasis on storytelling in many modern ethnographies perhaps some of them would be particularly well suited for manga editions?

Share This

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, anthropological theory has (for better or for worse) a genealogical orientation and I’ve been trying to figure out how this orientation operates because I will probably be teaching a course on ‘anthropological theory’ in the future. One of the ways I’ve been trying to figure out this history of anthropology has been to look years which seem like turning points—or at least pivots—in (US) anthropological theory. Since I am doing ‘contemporary’ theory I have focused less on the pre-WWII period and tried to focus on some moments that seek key to me. I have a big piece of paper where I’ve plotted important books on a timeline. Here are some years that stand out for me just in terms of publishing:

1957/58: The New Ethnography—componential analysis and cognitive linguistics
1966: The year structuralism hit. Savage Mind, etc. etc.
1972: Anthropology Today (Berreman) and Rethinking Anthropology (Dell Hymes)—politicization and relevance
1981/82: Post-Steward Columbians: Europe and the People Without History and Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities
1986: Objectivity? We don’t need no stinkin’ objectivity: Writing Culture, Anthropology as Cultural Critique
1997: Culture, Power, Place and Anthropological Locations.

One of my professors in grad school once remarked to me there is a bit of an academic rain shadow effect—your professors teach tend not to teach about their professor’s generation (because they are rebelling against it?), so you never learn about it in grad school. Then you learn about it, rebel against your professors, assign your students to read the generation of professors who taught your professors, then your students never read your professor’s work, they graduate… etc. etc…..So I am particularly interested in learning more from y’all about the ‘soft’ spot in my knowledge of the history of anthro between the period now firmly declared ‘classic’ (pre-Kroeber’s textbook Anthropology) and Ortner’s “Theory In Anthropology Since The Sixties” (1984) whose definitive construal of this period I have been struggling to get out from under for the past couple of years.

Any ideas?

Share This

You heard it here first folks:

In Defence of Kazakshilik: Kazakhstan’s War on Sacha Baron Cohen
Identities, Volume 14, Issue 3 May 2007 , pages 225 – 255

This article explores the controversy surrounding Borat Sagdiyev – the fictitious Kazakhstani reporter whose foibles mock Kazakhstan in particular and post-Soviet culture in general. With his appearances on Da Ali G Show, Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat persona long ago became the bête noire of the Kazakhstani government. However, when Borat was selected to host the MTV Europe Music Awards, the dispute over Borat’s authenticity as a Kazakhstani became an international incident. In response to his negative portrayal of Kazakshilik (Kazakhness) through the deterritorialized medium of MTV, the government of President Nazarbayev threatened Baron Cohen with legal action and brought down his web site borat.kz. Baron Cohen immediately responded in character via his new domain (.tv) and defended the actions of Kazakhstan, thus fuelling the controversy. The ongoing feud has prompted an interesting postmodern praxis – one in which a fictional persona and national government can carry on a mass-mediated dialogue. As I document the details of this ongoing conflict on the global and local levels, I seek to explain the changes in the international system which have enabled this intriguing paradox. In doing so, I attempt to draw some larger conclusions on the importance of protecting national identity in the postmodern era, especially from threats (both internal and external) which weaken a country’s global brand.

Share This

I just finished reading Ira Bashkow’s book The Meaning of Whitemen: Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World for a review article that I am writing. Ira is a good friend of mine, but even setting aside our obvious intellectual affinities I must say that his book is one of the best ethnographies that I have read in a very long time time, and I really do recommend it to anyone—including anyone who is looking for a good mid-level ethnography to teach to undergraduates.

The topic of the book is what people in Papua New Guinea think of white people and more particularly how modernity is a ‘raced’ concept in Orokaiva thought. Orokaiva have been dealing with white for four generations and are hardly people whose encounter with ‘the outside world’ is hardly new. Along the way it deals with many of the hottest topics in Melanesian studies today—we have material that touches of partible personhood, cargo cultism, alternate modernities, identity, and consumption.

But the book is really about how humans imagine the other in order to say something about themselves. As a result it is not just about Orokaiva, but the possibility and utility of ethnography as a way of knowing. As someone with a keen interest in the history of anthropology and a genuine and informed commitment to the Boasian program (the book is about race after all), Ira has produced a book that defends the feasibility of anthropology as a comparative project. The introduction and conclusion deftly sketch out a defense against criticisms which claim that representing the other must necessarily mean disempowering those who you speak to. (more…)

Share This

I’m really enjoying the “Identities” page on WorldCat. As you might remember, back in 2003 the library service opened up its records to the web (previously only those at subscribing libraries could see the results). I never noticed it before, but their Identities service pulls together lots of useful information about well known people, such as what the most popular works about them are, names of related people, etc.

I really like the “publication timeline” which shows how many works by and about the author were published in each year (also differentiating between works they published while living and posthumous publications). Here is the chart for Clifford Geertz:

And here is their tag-cloud for the top American anthropologists by number of holdings in libraries:

The service is still in beta, but as it grows I can see it being an excellent supplement to Google Books and Wikipedia, especially for getting a handle on a new author you might never have heard of.

For your reference, here are the pages for Lévi-Strauss and Franz Boas. (It would be nice to see a cleaner permalink structure for linking to individual entries.)

(Thanks to Ilya for letting me know about Identities. He also links to this blog entry by one of the developers.)

Share This

In my ethnography of the state class this semester we read both The Calligraphic State and Colonizing Egypt (guess which one I like better). In the course of our seminar we talked a little bit about Geertz and the shadow he casts (or not) over anthropology of the Middle East. Intrigued, I checked out Dale Eickelman’s brief essay “Clifford Geertz and Islam” in Clifford Geertz By His Colleagues and ended up reading the whole book. I was particularly struck by Geertz’s comment on Michael Fischer’s paper. Geertz writes (I’m editing heavily):

One of the advantages of living a long time is that you get to see, in the work of your younger colleagues something of what is to become of your work in the future. Now, when everything is coming up post, this can be a shaking experience. But it can also be, as with Micahel Fischer’s piece, a deeply reassuring one. I am warmed by the fact that one of the least tractable spirits in anthropology has found something to bounce off against in my work. Perhaps the the development that mosts interests me, and which I most regret not having done more with, is “science studies.” (p 114)

Fischer’s paper is, unfortunately, more or less unquotable due to the ‘emerging form’ of his prose. But tucked away in the monstrous paragraph-sentence on page 83 between references to Bruno Latour and Rayna Rapp Fischer mentions “the anthropologies of Chris Kelty” as an example of “the rapidly burgeoning field of science studies” that Geertz so warmly endorsed.

As our blog’s assemblage continues to proliferate, I was surprised but happy to see that we had enrolled Geertz in our network. Now if we could just get The Napster to write a similar endorsement for Oneman…

Share This

I love this oddly familiar map of the various online countries, from my favorite geek cartoonist, XKCD.

Next step: Argonauts of the Western Noob Sea.

Share This

A Harvard sophomore has written an article in the Crimson about the demise of the biological anthropology program, which seems to have been killed off by the creation of a new “human evolutionary biology” (HEB) program which “was identical to biological anthropology in every way except that it replaced social anthropology and archaeology requirements with pre-med classes.” The results were predictable, there are now only three biological anthropology majors left.

As someone who graduated from a four fields anthropology program, I’m glad that I had to take courses in biological anthropology, and many of my friends in that program were similarly happy to have taken their share of cultural, linguistic, and archaeology classes. Still, it was clear that the programs were moving further and further apart. The “linguistic turn” in Anthropology long ago moved cultural anthropology further towards the humanities, but more recently the increasing importance of genetic data have placed additional strains on biological anthropologists. My colleagues told me that the amount of specialized training required to handle genetic science placed tremendous demands on them, forcing them to take far more biology courses.

It remains to be seen if the remaining four-field programs will continue to hold together. Another source of pressure seems to come from the success of specialized programs in medical anthropology and science and technology studies. These programs seem to offer a truly interdisciplinary approach to combining science and cultural anthropology whereas traditional four-field programs are increasingly loosing their raison d’être.

Share This

A big congrats to anthro-blogger Antti Leppänen whose dissertation on South Korean shopkeepers is done and available online from the University of Helsinki’s electronic publications archive.

This is an ethnographic study of the lived worlds of the keepers of small shops in a residential neighborhood in Seoul, South Korea. It outlines, discusses, and analyses the categories and conceptualizations of South Korean capitalism at the level of households, neighborhoods, and Korean society. These cultural categories were investigated through the neighborhood shopkeepers’ practices of work and reciprocal interaction as well as through the shopkeepers’ articulations of their lived experience. In South Korea, the keepers of small businesses have continued to be a large occupational category despite of societal and economic changes, occupying approximately one fourth of the population in active work force. In spite of that, these people, their livelihoods and their cultural and social worlds have rarely been in the focus of social science inquiry.

(more at antropologi.info)

Share This