While I don’t necessarily see as extreme a reaction for books about labor migration and the effects of the nuclear program, I can easily see students assuming that these topics in of themselves representing a radical agenda by professors. I’d rather have students get an example of ethnography that won’t be immediately rejected as political. I’m not saying that ethnography isn’t political, only that we have to tailor the ethnographies we assign to our particular intro student audiences (within reason). This means we have to find ethnographies that both encompass contemporary cultural anthropology, have topics that most students won’t immediately reject and that aren’t boring.

(One of the few ethnographies that I have seen which meets all of these criteria is William F Lewis’s “Soul Rebels” about the Rastafari movement. While it was published in 1993, it is a multi-sited ethnography that is global in scope, it is seen as cool by many students and the writing is definitely not boring.)

I strongly agree with ckelty, in that everything I teach is inherently political. I teach in a small liberal arts college in North Carolina, with a religious affiliation (Prebyterian, PC-USA) – my students tend to be more interested in the sociopolitical implications of anthropology. For them, I think this makes anthropology seem relevant (of course, we all know that anthro is extremely relevant!). Of course, anthropology classes tend to attract the “save the world” social justice types (I don’t mean this in a disparaging sense), and typical undergraduate students have that youthful optimism about life that I so miss in my 40s, though my incoming college first-year teenager believes that my role in life is to stamp such nonsense out.

What I’m not sure about, though, is what ckelty means when he talks about “the well meaning liberal bias of reality.” I’m guessing he means the reality of academia, and not “the real world” (definitely not the MTV show).

and Grad Student Guy… might this be a case of the well meaning liberal bias of reality? In all honesty, I have no idea of the political leanings of either author, but when students issue blanket rejections like that under my tutelage, I usually use that as an occasion to challenge them to respond. When they cannot, there is no hope, when they can, there is dialogue. I teach in Texas, for the record. I also don’t teach anything that is not inherently political. Can you give me an example?

On the subject of the “Nuclear Borderlands,” one facet Masco himself placed some emphasis on (and which particularly interested me) was the notion of the layering of cultures on a specific environment. With each wave of newcomers, with the anti-war activists being the latest, we have a situation that becomes incredible complex, not only on the global scale (for example, in terms of geopolitics and culture), but at the home of the atomic bomb, where lives are even more directly affected.

I would emphasize, as I did earlier on SM about the book, that what makes it so great is the way that it crosses institutional orders and draws them together within an interpretive frame. So for example, there is a great deal of attention to popular culture and social relations of different kinds. This I think distinguishes Masco’s approach to ’security’ from your colleagues at the ARC, who seem to want to confine themselves to the rather grey discourse of experts. I think I understand the methodological reasons why ARC folks confine themselves to ‘experts’ (something to do with a technical notion of discourse as pertaining to serious speech acts, those subject to standards of intelligibility). But their discussions of ’security’ end up being, I think, too careful in a sense, too bureaucratic: they lack imagination precisely because they do not incorporate imagination (terror, affect, fantasy, the visual) into their analyses (from what I have read so far). By contast, Masco weaves an analysis of the sensibilities of physicists together with the zeitgeist of the nuclear uncanny. Reading against the grain of institutional division, Masco enables us to imagine something like ‘national culture’ (and compare his work to his colleague John Kelly at Chicago in this regard).

In other words, I think what makes this book good anthropology is precisely that it is informed by a background sense of ‘the cultural’ (or even ‘a culture’), a sensibility out of which ethnography as genre and method was born.