Welcome to the next installment of Around the Web. Thanks for all your comments last week. Keep them coming. Also, if you find something online you want to share, feel free to email me a link at anthrohomo@gmail.com.
Getting in: Julianne at Cosmic Variance wrote this interesting piece on admission to a PhD program from the perspective of the faculty.
Unholy Science: William and Mary anthopologist Barbara King preaches against finding God in Science. Plus, if you were in Sacramento this Sunday, hope you caught Darwin Day. (May need to create a free account to see this link). And an older post from missionfordummies on the difference between emic and etic perspectives.
You Say Potato, I say Cassava: The title of this podcast from Scientific American leaves little room for improvement. And, if you like great titles at Scientific American, try this one: When Incest is Best: Kissing Cousins Have More Kin.
Spies in the ranks: Ethnographers are used to be accused of being U.S. (or European?) spies. Considering endeavors like the Human Terrain Project, maybe some anthropologists already are. Now there is some chatter on the military spying on us. See Anthropologi.info‘s post for other relevant links.
In the future everyone will have 15 minutes of ethnography: Check out Michael Wesch’s posts on the DIY-Video Summit. (If you haven’t seen it, Wesch’s instant-classic video Web 2.0…The Machine is Us/ing Us features Savage Minds). Also, check out the DIY-Video Summit website.)
Of Statues and Scandals: NYT article on the scandal rocking the Greek archaeology bureau. (You may need a free account to access NYT articles online).
National Geographic Saves the Day: This video actually tells a pretty good story about how the government of Peru were able to repatriate artifacts from Machu Pichu. The heroes of this story? National Geographic, whose staff discovers the provenance of the objects, and anthropologist/former first lady of Peru, Elaine Karp. Who knew?
Cultural Studies/Natural Studies? Opinion piece from The Australian on the evolution of Cultural Studies.
More on Open Access: A lot of people are talking about Open Access in academia this week. danah at apophenia tells us to boycott locked-down academic journals. Also read Open Access News.
Small Ethnographers: Here is a short piece on how corporate ethnographers sometimes go into Ferret Mode, searching for an unknown problem in the business structure. Also a great lesson in product placement.
Barking up the wrong tree: It’s a diagram of Indo-European language families. Barking? Get it? But, no, do you get it? Just enjoy [via anthropology.net. For original image, see jonathan.beaton.name]
Danah’s post on apophenia presents the issue of open access as an either-or situation: either a journal is open or it is not. However a consultation with the SHEPA/RoMEO database would reveal that she could easily ask for permission to post a pre-print of her article in an institutional archive or her own website.
UPDATE: Danah does in fact offer an earlier essay version of her article, and mentions this at the beginning of the article, but the rest of the discussion leaves this third option behind.
i question the value of linking to a piece about corporate ethnography. the kinds of knowledge produced by corporate ethnography and the tropes of collaboration invoked by those who perform it are highly underexamined in academia, much less so than those who examine military collaboration, for example.
i see ethnographers working with large and small companies as a social fact that must be problematized just as much as anthropologists working with armies across the world.
So, Yoni, what about ethnographers working with Big Corporate Academia? Is that also “a social fact that must be problematized”?
You’ve made a great leap from the military to business anthropology. Yes, I suppose it would be best to be pure and high-minded and never ever study anything that offended us. But then, wouldn’t that cut off a whole range of things that human beings actually do?
This is the sort of thinking that continues to marginalize anthropology as the study of the exotic. Guess what, the exotic is us, too.
kate g,
thanks for being such a reductive dumbass. you’re strawmanning me by arguing that we can “never study anything that offended us.” that isn’t my point at all, and if you read the blog that referenced the corporate ethnography, you’ll see my point.
its about the knowledge we produce that then gets harnessed by corporations intent on using it to create/use consuming subjects. more precisely, subjects indexed to capitalism.
obviously you are working with corporations, which is why you snarled such a response, but i’d argue that ethnographic studies of corporations are much more in need, but those done in *collaboration* with marketers (see http://www.trendwatching.com/trends/virtual_anthropology.htm)
are highly harmful.
yoni, thanks for the link . I am your enemy, an anthropologist who has worked for over two decades as a copywriter, creative director, translator and consultant, in and around the Japanese advertising industry, also the author of a book on Japanese Consumer Behavior based on research conducted by an institute founded by a Japanese agency. I offer myself as an informant. Please ask some ethnographic questions.
John,
i don’t know if you are or aren’t being sarcastic, but i’d like to offer that i’m not as binary as i come off as being. i’m interested in these kinds of knowledges, and i may indeed ask you some questions. i think there are important issues that are unexamined within the discipline about corporate anthropology *while* so many other reflexive ways of using ethnographic knowledge, inquiry, etc are overexamined. does that make sense?
This exchange depresses me.
We need to examine everything, obviously. But questioning a _link_ because it is to a discussion of corporate anthropology? That’s not much of a examination; it’s seems to me to be a suggestion that anthropologists shouldn’t even *read* about uses of their abilities and knowledge outside of politically correct, AAA-approved anti-capitalist projects.
But what do I know? I must be a reductive dumbass.
Was I being sarcastic? A little, but in a good-humored sort of way. So if you have questions, please ask away. You might, before you begin, take a look at my first blog posting atTalentZoo
http://www.talentzoo.com/website/columns/columncontent.aspx?Id=20659.
The tone is light, the intent is serious, a taste of my world (written actually in 1995 for translation into German for a publication produced by the German Chamber of Commerce in Tokyo).
Damn, managed to truncate the link. Here, I’ll try again.
http://www.talentzoo.com/website/columns/ColumnContent.aspx?Id=2065&related=true
Yoni,
You’ve undercut your statement that you’re “not as binary as [you] come off as being.” You didn’t come off as binary, you WERE binary.
Interesting assumption that I’m “obviously … working with corporations.” What do you know about me? I’ve never worked for a corporation. But I am a proud member of NAPA (look it up), and we have to deal with snarky, divisive, marginalizing comments from other anthropologists all the time. Your response to a link is just part of the binari-ness of anthropology that practitioners face all the time.
To improve your knowledge of this, you might try reading the report of Practice Advisory Working Group in AAA. It does no good to marginalize the 51% (the majority!) of anthropologists who are applied anthropologists, often but not always, in business.
Practitioners are putting anthropological knowledge to work where we did our research; we are following through on the results of our research rather than washing our hands of the real world effects of our work and words. Why is it more pure to distance oneself from the world and ipso facto marginalize different views of how and where to do anthropology?
I work at a university. You want capitalism, consumerism, and market-driven policy and practice? Try a university.
Rock on, Kate G.
Kate
thanks for allowing to me to elaborate. i have read the working group report at the AAA and it doesn’t satisfy me like it appears to have you. I think your conflating working within capitalism, systems you don’t like, etc, and working directly to ensure their particular way of life and knowledge continues. the former is the university system, which as you point out is rife with exploitation, certain kinds of histories about the academy, etc. the latter imho is working for corporations, enjoying the kind of money they have, and sharing their goals and objectives — you are pretending as if an anthropologist doing fieldwork comes in with the same kind of need for output that corporations demand, and either this is a), again collapsing my argument in order to win yours or b), completely disingenous.
as usual, you give the “practitioners are putting anthropological knowledge to work where we did our research; we are following through on the results of our research rather than washing our hands of the real world effects of our work and words.” did i ever say that? did i ever in my comments assume the application of anthro knowledge generally is verboten, impure, diseased?
I question the value of questioning the value of linking to a piece about corporate ethnography.
As an anthropologist tight on the trail of cutting edge theory, I like to shift critiques (and ethnographic studies!) of capitalism from production to consumption. As such, I’d love to ask Yoni if s/he also CONSUMES NOTHING WHICH SUPPORTS whatever industrial/commercial/capitalist system s/he is so staunchly against (aka “the Man” perhaps?)
Because, while working for corporations might mean that one is “enjoying the kind of money they have.” I am not sure that it necessarily means “sharing their goals and objectives.” Does the sweatshop worker, while enjoying (some kind of) money, share in the goals and objectives of Tommy Hilfiger, for example? Do professors, graduate instructors, university janitors, and university administrators always share the same goals? Unclear.
Of course, we are all perfectly free to pick who we work for and under what conditions. Just as most of “our informants” are, in whatever part of the world they live, employed, unemployed, or living of some portion of the money their aunties make cranking out Hilfiger shirts in tax-free sweatshops. Everyone should be quickly judged by where they work and what they do to support themselves, because as we all know, people have a free choice. Under free market capitalism. Uh, hang on….
But quibbles about the necessary/possible complicity of labor in its own exploitation aside, I wonder about consumption. What about the products of corporate America and global corporateness and etc. (not to mention the military industrial complex) that we MUST consume as anthropologists? (Set aside the ones we consume as part of our private lives doing whatever we do in them, no matter how vegan.) I mean air travel, computers and digital cameras etc, anti-malerials and vaccines, (in some cases) anti-depressants and cigarettes, countless bottles of Coca-Cola that we are ritually obliged to purchase for informants who just don’t think it’s proper to do this or that ceremony with tap water instead? (Of course, that assumes the local tap water is even potable…note to self, must look into getting people to switch their ceremonial drinks from Coke to Odwalla, shit who owns Odwalla now? Ack.)
Who is more complicit in the corporate game, the producer or the consumer? And NATURALLY we would never point to ANYONE’S CLOTHES, or their FUNDING PACKAGE (should they have/have had one in grad school), especially not one funded by the US Govt and paid for out of cold war military industrial fear………
We would never do those things because we moved past STRAIGHT EDGE delusions of purity some time before becoming professional anthropologists, and we’ve learned that the world is a complicated place, and that there is more to be gained than lost from learning about it, reading about it, and linking to it.