Lev Michael has long been an excellent contributor to discussions here on Savage Minds, but I hadn’t noticed that he recently started his own blog. Although for the past few weeks he’s been linking to it in his comments, I hadn’t noticed until I read this post recommending his blog on Language Hat.

Lev is a Ph.D. candidate in the excellent linguistic anthropology program at UT Austin, where he studies “the strategic use of grammatical resources in interaction, language documentation and revitalization, and language politics” in the Peruvian Amazon.

His blog, Greater Blogazonia, already has a bunch of great posts, including thoughts on Unwrapping the Sacred Bundle and this great post about “the unintentionally hilarious situation of white people referring to this indigenous Amazonian group as the ‘white people’.”

I’m really glad to see so many high quality new anthropology blogs popping up. If you’ve started a new one recently, please let us know! And don’t forget to add it to the Academic Blog Wiki. Someday we’ll update our blogroll…

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As the spring semester approaches my fellow hemisphere mates and I, I am putting the final touches on my ‘theory’ syllabus. I’ll share it with SM soon (the initial draft is not very appetizing), but I thought it would be interesting here to blog about something I will not be teaching—the long historical essay. As I’ve mentioned in past posts, anthropologists have come, for some reason, to ‘do theory’ in the form of the disciplinary history. This includes monograph-length studies, of course, but one particular genre that seems particularly anthropological is the long essay in which anthropologists describe ‘their theory’ or a more general ‘world view’ by constructing a genealogy whose telos they are. So in honor of Christmas—which involves its own teleological understanding of my own tradition—I thought I’d try to make a list here of classic ‘long essays’ in anthropological theory. Let me know if you can think of any more:

Blurred Genres, Clifford Geertz
Theory in Anthropology Since The 60s, Sherry Ortner
“As People Express Their Lives, So They Are…” in the Symbolic Anthropology Reader
Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems, Michael Fischer
Anthropos, Edmund Leach
The Use of Anthropology: Critical, Personal, Politics, Dell Hymes

The genre is pretty fuzzy, but I hope this gives readers of these works some sense of what I’m talking about.

I’m not actually assigning any of these essays to my students (they can read them on their own if they want). They are very tricky. Often presentist and self-serving they require very sensitive antenna to read through to get some actual sense of the literature they cover. At the same time working through the motivations of their orchestration of the literature is in itself a good way to get some sense of the scene when the author was writing. But at any rate I think given the limitations of class time it is better to get students to actually read the material rather than read about it. What do you think?

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Long-time readers of this blog will no doubt remember the Guns Germs and Steel kerfuffle , in which it was widely concluded that Anthropologists as a whole hate Jared Diamond because they are jealous of his success as a popular writer.

Today’s New York Times has picked up the story, and while they don’t mention Savage Minds, they do interview previous SM guest blogers, Frederick K. Errington and Deborah B. Gewertz. (You can see all their posts here.)

Times reporter George Johnson attended the “Choices and Fates of Human Societies” seminar at the Amerind Foundation and presents the contest in a somewhat more generous light than some of our readers and critics on the web, seeing it as a battle between “big picture” theories and the focus on the particular:

By the time I left Amerind, I realized that what I had witnessed was a clash of world views. Central to the “cosmology” of Dr. Diamond’s tribe is a principle celebrated throughout the physical and biological sciences — to understand is to simplify and seek patterns.

... For the anthropologists, the exceptions were more important than the rules. Instead of seeking overarching laws, the call was to “contextualize,” “complexify,” “relativize,” “particularize” and even “problematize,” a word that in their dialect was given an oddly positive spin.

Its a formula I’m not entirely happy with (I happen to like grand narratives…), but if the alternative is being a bunch of jealous backbiters, I’ll take the accusation of particularism any day.

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Via Far Outliers, this lengthy and fascinating interview with Jeffrey Summit, “a rabbi and professor of ethnomusicology and Judaic studies at Tufts University,” about the Abayudaya, or the “Jewish people of Uganda”:

The once vibrant Sephardic and Mizrahi of Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Egypt, were established in North Africa approximately two millennia ago, but since 1948, the vast majority of North African Jews emigrated, settling in France, Israel, and the United States.

Now, in contrast to these communities, the Abayudaya, which means “Jewish people of Uganda,” proudly reference their conversion to Judaism in the 1920s, stating that they were drawn to Jewish practice by the truth of the Torah, the five books of Moses. Their founder, Semei Kakungulu, was a powerful Ganda leader, and he considered Christianity and Islam, and then according to community elders, said, “Why should I follow the shoots when I could have the root.”

Read the whole thing.

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The subtitle of Mike Dash’s best selling book Thug, “the true story of India’s murderous cult,” has a sad irony to it, considering that it takes as its main source the documents and testimony collected by William Sleeman and the Thuggee and Dacoity Department of the East India Company. [See update below.] To get a sense about the reliability of these documents it is worthwhile taking a look at how they were collected.

Parama Roy does just that in the chapter on thuggees in her book Indian Traffic:

The lack of independent witnesses, the unavailability in many cases of both bodies and booty—the sheer paucity of positivist evidence, in other words—could only be resolved in one way. The most important criminal conspiracy of the century (of all time, some of the authors claimed) could be adequately engaged only by a new conception of law. ... Since the law as currently defined made the complicity of individuals in particular crimes almost impossible to establish, specific criminal acts were no longer punishable as such. Instead, it was … enough to be a thug, without actually being convicted of a specific act of thuggee, to be liable to the exorbitant measures of the Thuggee and Dacoity Department. ... It permitted the arrest of entire families, including women and children, as legitimate means of entrapping active (male) thugs; since thuggee was supposed to be a family affair anyway, transmitted in the genes and passed on from father to son, wives and children were also fit targets for the colonial state’s punitive and corrective measures. The act admitted the testimony of approvers [convicts who confessed in exchange for a pardon] in lieu of the testimony of independent witnesses (which had been disallowed under Islamic law), a move which created a remarkable mechanics of truth production and conviction.

... All those identified as thugs by approvers’ testimony were automatically guilty, even if no specific crimes could be proved against them and even if there was no (other) evidence of their ever having associated with other thugs.

Of course, the British where themselves a little worried about the quality of such evidence: (more…)

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Our friends at Culture Matters have spawned. Leave them alone and you never know what they’ll get up to. In this case, a new blog on “neuroanthropology.” This is the kind of think I really like to see, for a couple of reasons. One is that it is precisely the kind of place where there is room to move anthropology and biology forward together. As Greg puts it, it allows us to “think much more seriously about how culture might shape development, allowing us to think seriously about a kind of deep enculturation of the brain, senses, endocrine system, and the like. Researchers in fields that specialize in these topics are increasingly aware of the degree to which developmental variables affect developmental outcomes, creating opportunities for anthropological research to influence a host of other fields.” There is room for a new kind of medical and bio-cultural anthropology for people willing to connect—- though it does depend on finding the brain scientists willing to meet the cultural scientists halfway, which is no mean feat.

The other thing i like about it is that it is a specialized scholarly blog; that’s something i’d really like to see more of because it gives me hope for the future of the field to see people openly and enthusiastically sharing ideas, research, new finds and new theories, rather than squirreling them away in the hopes of being first, and honor that seems increasingly less important.

Joy.
http://neuroanthropology.wordpress.com/

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Lakota Sioux Indian representatives declared sovereign nation status today [12/19] in Washington D.C. following Monday’s withdrawal from all previously signed treaties with the United States Government.

... Property ownership in the five state area of Lakota now takes center stage. Parts of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana have been illegally homesteaded for years despite knowledge of Lakota as predecessor sovereign [historic owner]. Lakota representatives say if the United States does not enter into immediate diplomatic negotiations, liens will be filed on real estate transactions in the five state region, clouding title over literally thousands of square miles of land and property.

Young added, “The actions of Lakota are not intended to embarrass the United States but to simply save the lives of our people”.

Following Monday’s withdrawal at the State Department, the four Lakota Itacan representatives have been meeting with foreign embassy officials in order to hasten their official return to the Family of Nations.

... The Lakota reservations are among the most impoverished areas in North America, a shameful legacy of broken treaties and apartheid policies. Lakota has the highest death rate in the United States and Lakota men have the lowest life expectancy of any nation on earth, excluding AIDS, at approximately 44 years. Lakota infant mortality rate is five times the United States average and teen suicide rates 150% more than national average . 97% of Lakota people live below the poverty line and unemployment hovers near 85%.

More info on the official webpage of the sovereign nation of Lakota.

UPDATE: More thorough coverage over at Culture Matters.

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The current issue of the journal Games and Culture is running an article I’ve written with the scarily erudite Kate Lingley. The topic is fear of video game addiction and mental illness in China, and it appears in a special themed issue on gaming in East Asia. If you want to read the other articles in the journal and your library doesn’t subscribe to Games and Culture, you will have to ILL them or pay US$15 to download a PDF. If you want to read my article, however, you can download it for free or even check out the preprint on Mana’o. Let me take this as a case study in open access…

When Lingley and I started working on the article, I began looking at open access possibilities. The first thing I asked was: what are this journal’s policies on open access? I found the answer to this question at RoMEO—Romeo is a service run by the open access project Sherpa in the UK. Its incredibly easy to use—all you do is type in the name of the journal you are publishing in, and they tell you what its policies are. They parse all the legal forms and keep their database up to date so you don’t have to wade through the legalese. They are a great, responsible, and very professional service.

So Romeo told me that Games and Culture would allow me post my pre-print (i.e. my page proofs) but that I had to wait 1 year before I could archive my post-print. Now for most people this is fine, since page proofs are pretty much finished projects. But because I am an open access nut I wanted to do more—I wanted to make sure the final version of our article was available to everyone. (more…)

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Orientalist critique can sometimes seem like an intellectual game of “gotcha,” but for India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs), orientalist colonial policies, and the regimes of knowledge upon which they were built, are a very real burden which informs nearly every aspect of their daily life. The stigma of criminality that prevents, for example, someone with a masters degree in English literature from finding a job as a schoolteacher, or makes it imperative for a professional photographer to carry his camera receipts with him so he can prove he bought his own camera, or makes DNTs afraid to talk in their own language when traveling by train, are a direct result of colonial practices.

When doing research last summer in the British colonial archives I read numerous colonial ethnographies of the so-called “Criminal Tribes” (as DNTs were then known). Many were written by policemen, and the information in them was written for the express purpose of identifying such criminals. Gunthorpe’s 1882. Notes on Criminal Tribes Residing in, or Frequenting the Bombay Presidency, Berar and the Central Provinces, Lemarchand’s 1915, A Guide to Criminal Tribes, and, also from 1915, Naidu’s The History of Railway Thieves : With Illustrations & Hints on Detection are all in many ways the same book with slight variations. They freely stole from each other and the style was essentially the same. Numerous other such guides were circulated among the various colonial agencies.

They are like bird watching guides, identifying common habits and markings which will help you spot a criminal among the crowds. From Lemarchand:

(more…)

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It its never-ending bid to own every inch of your brain, Google has just announced the beginning of its competitor project to Wikipedia. You knew this was coming. You did really, because every time you search for something, you get a Wikipedia page, right? You thought Google wouldn’t notice… There have been some short posts by Esther and Henry at Crooked Timber, and all of us want to hear what Siva will say, since he’s made it his new project to worry about precisely this.

For my part, I find it to be an interesting confirmation that something has changed with respect to innovation on the internet. While it is comforting to suggest that innovation takes place democratically on the Internet because any little guy with an innovation can suddenly become huge and all of a sudden capture billions of eyeballs, or whatever, its pretty clear that Google is turning out to be to the Internet what IBM was to mainframes and Microsoft was to PCs. Which is to say, a monopolist. Only it’s in a totally unregulated environment, where the de facto ideology is that we live in a world of unconstrained free competition; we fool ourselves that this isn’t a monopoly because their tag line is “don’t be evil.”

But in reality, Google didn’t innovate here. There are a bunch of projects that have done what google is proposing to do with “knols” but they don’t have the massive resources and direct access to the most valuable data available that Google has (for instance, my own Rice Universities Connexions project has addressed exactly the issues Google claims that no one else has addressed). But for most net observers, anyone who says “we did that before google did” is just sour grapes… and in an era and an environment in which the intellectual property system is so drastically and so completely broken, it’s impossible to use IP rights to adjudicate who might actually deserve recognition for an idea. The best you can do is assume that if they are 1) bought by Google or 2) bought by Microsoft, they must have had a good idea, and some good lawyers. So I’m not sure how I feel about the new frontier; on the one hand, I, for one, welcome our new knowledge-ecology overlords, on the other hand, it feels to me like we’re on a primrose path towards the Wal-Martization of the Internet, with candy rainbow-colored everything. Or maybe I should just take the blue pill, and stay here, forever.

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Cultural Anthropology is currently hosting a forum and a collection of articles on Pakistan, offered by Veena Das and Naveeda Khan. It contains a number of short pieces, an article from CA by Khan and a forum and blog on the CA website (registration required). It looks like they’ve had no discussion so far, so for those of you with Pakistanimania, head on over…

link…

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(also at Open Access Anthro)

In response to a request from Jason Cross, anthropologist and lawyer in training at Duke University, I’ve been examining more carefully the available open access resources in and around anthropology. The aim is twofold. First I simply want to draw attention to how much action there has already been in making research open access, both old and new, primary (archival) and secondary. There isn’t a lot, actually, compared to a discipline like economics; but there is a growing array:

• Individuals are self-archiving.
• Workshops, conferences, and meetings are increasingly online.
• New research projects frequently coordinate openly via the Internet
• There are open access presses (Australian National University EPress)
• There are open access options in major providers (including Wiley)
• And slowly a move towards open accessing at least parts of the mainstream journals (like book reviews in American Ethnologist, and the Cultural Anthropology “Coke Complex” issue).
  


• There are also primary resources that cultural institutions are beginning to make freely available, like The anthropological papers of The American Museum of Natural History.


• The Mana’o project is already set to be THE place to archive research in anthropology, and I hope other ePrint servers follow suit so that not all of the work is on that project (though it would be nice if different future anthro ePrint servers federated their search tools).
• And as for journals, the DOAJ lists around 60 journals relevant to anthropology and ethnology. Not all of them are high quality of course, and some are pretty sketchy, but they are all open. A few good ones include After Culture, Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology, Anpere: journal of the study of anthropology of religion, Cultural Analysis, Culture Society and Praxis, Fast Capitalism, and my personal favorite title evah, Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness.
  

Perhaps most significantly, I would say about 80% of OA Journals are non-English (especially in Spanish) and non American/EU resources. It makes me dream of a world where the most accessible research in the world is done by people from the Universidad de Los Andes, The University of the Basque Country and The Anthropological Society of Nippon. Given how often the question of “indigenous” anthropology comes up amongst students and colleagues I talk to (i.e. “does it exist?”) I think they would be surprised to discover just how thoroughly it is kicking our cosmopolitan asses in the race to make its research available on the net. (more…)

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Although only slightly germain to the topic of anthropology at war, readers may still be interested in this shameless endorsement of a book by a former teacher of mine: Torture and Democracy by Darius Rejali. I have not read a single word of the book, but have a super high regard for Darius, and with blurbs on the back like “Monumental. Definitive. Devastating.” and endorsements from Philip Zimbardo and Kenneth Roth it is probably not going to suck. So if what you’ve been looking for is a definitive, 880 page genealogy of torture, look no further.

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Richard Nisbett has the most thorough trashing of research claiming a link between race and IQ I’ve seen yet.

For the poor, a group that includes a substantial proportion of minorities, heritability of I.Q. is very low …

Even when a trait is highly heritable (think of the height of corn plants), modifiability can also be great (think of the difference growing conditions can make).

... Tested in later childhood, the German children of the white fathers were found to have an average I.Q. of 97, and those of the black fathers had an average of 96.5, a trivial difference.

... when a group of investigators sought out the very brightest black children in the Chicago school system and asked them about the race of their parents and grandparents, these children were found to have no greater degree of European ancestry than blacks in the population at large.

... A superior adoption study — and one not discussed by the hereditarians — was carried out at Arizona State University by the psychologist Elsie Moore, who looked at black and mixed-race children adopted by middle-class families, either black or white, and found no difference in I.Q. between the black and mixed-race children. Most telling is Dr. Moore’s finding that children adopted by white families had I.Q.’s 13 points higher than those of children adopted by black families.

...Within each race, prior knowledge predicted learning and reasoning, but between the races it was prior knowledge only that differed.

... That environment can markedly influence I.Q. is demonstrated by the so-called Flynn Effect. ... in the Western world as a whole, I.Q. increased markedly from 1947 to 2002. In the United States alone, it went up by 18 points. Our genes could not have changed enough over such a brief period to account for the shift; it must have been the result of powerful social factors.

... In fact, we know that the I.Q. difference between black and white 12-year-olds has dropped to 9.5 points from 15 points in the last 30 years — a period that was more favorable for blacks in many ways than the preceding era.

... Most important, we know that interventions at every age from infancy to college can reduce racial gaps in both I.Q. and academic achievement, sometimes by substantial amounts in surprisingly little time. This mutability is further evidence that the I.Q. difference has environmental, not genetic, causes. And it should encourage us, as a society, to see that all children receive ample opportunity to develop their minds.

UPDATE: The New Yorker has an article about a new book by James “Flynn Effect” Flynn. (via Amardeep)

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The New York Times has an article about how philosophers are suddenly going out and doing empirical research.

It’s part of a recent movement known as “experimental philosophy,” which has rudely challenged the way professional philosophers like to think of themselves. Not only are philosophers unaccustomed to gathering data; many have also come to define themselves by their disinclination to do so.

When I was picking a major in college I spoke to my sociology professor and my philosophy professor asking them why I should major in their discipline. I was won over by my sociology professor, who convinced me that the major philosophical questions of our time are really sociological questions, and arguably have been since the birth of the social sciences. While I think there is an important place for arguments from first principles, I still find this argument compelling. And reading the Times, it seems philosophers do as well.

Unfortunately, their methodology seems lacking, restricted mostly to conducting surveys. I hereby invite our fellow philosophers to join us at the next AAA where they can learn a thing or two about philosophical research methods.

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