Here’s a quick round-up from the road. As per last week’s comments thread, feel free to post other articles in comments.

Anthropology in Space: Hot Cup of Joe is hosting the Four Stone Hearth this month, and the result is stellar. The Pulp Sci-Fi Edition of Four Stone Hearth has a lot of great contributions, including an opportunity to pimp this guy’s grant proposal.

High Drama or Low Farce? Culture Matters reported on an opera being produced around Ted Strehlow, an Australian anthropologist who worked with the Aranda in 1930’s.

Ethnography of Oil: Responding to an editorial in Anthropology Today (need permission to access), Lorenz at antropologi.info pulled together articles on the impact of growing oil prices on everyday life around the world.

Lost Tribes of London: Photographer and stylist Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek (respectively) have mounted a show in London on “Tribalising Fashion.” True to their inspiration of 19th century salvage anthropology, the team consists of one who snaps the pictures and one who poses the ‘natives.’ [On a side note: the picture of a ‘bear’ in this article looks completely indistinguishable from a football-watching big dude. They might have tried to gay it up a little.]

Repatriation of Remains: Kim Christen at Long Road linked to this article in the Australian about several continuing cases of repatriating remains.

Personal Histories: Middle Savagery posted videos of a series of lectures at Cambridge from Meg Conkey, Ruth Tringham, Henrietta Moore, and Alison Wylie on Personal History and Archaeological Theory. Parts 2 and 3 are here.

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Wherever your sympathies lie, it seems important to understand how Western media coverage of the violence in Tibet is being perceived from within China. There have been a number of blog posts about this, and Ethan Zuckerman has already done a great job of rounding them up. I especially liked Rebecca MacKinnon’s piece. She used to work for CNN, one of the main targets of these critiques.

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Box Turtle Bulletin, the blog that previously published a letter from Bill Maurer and Tom Boellstorff responding to a statement from Focus on the Family that there is anthropological consensus as to the definition of marriage, is currently hosting a debate about the matter. Patrick Chapman has posted a lengthy response to a ‘white paper’ by Focus on the Family’s Director of Family Formation Studies Greg Stanton. It’s a fascinating debate to me not necessarily because I am interested in definitions of marriage (though I am) but because of the way that anthropology is invoked by both sides as having authority on the subject. As Chapman writes: “What is particularly important with Stanton’s report is the recognition that anthropologists are the experts when it comes to understanding and defining marriage.” Anthropologists: Do not despair! Someone still cares what we have to say. Anthropologists are seen to have the last word on human nature and therefore as potentially having knowledge that could settle debate on the topic. The typical ‘pro’ gay marriage stance in relation to anthropology is to emphasize the diversity of world cultures and to emphasize that human nature exists in and as this diversity or adaptability. The typical ‘anti’ gay marriage stance emphasizes the fact that nothing quite like gay marriage has really been seen before in the ‘anthropological record.’ To me what’s interesting is how a moral question appears to be disguised in these debates as a ‘scientific’ one, and therefore the real nature of the conflict gets displaced. If in fact some tribe somewhere had/has a custom literally called ‘gay marriage,’ where two men or two women and their families celebrate their union through ritual and exchange, do we imagine that that would convince Focus on the Family of the validity of the institution? I actually think that these arguments are, at the core, about the moral legitimacy of modernity—and I think our very own Oneman has brilliantly guided discussion on this matter previously here at SM.

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I have a really simply, totally stupid question here: what does the term ‘Euro-American’ mean? It surfaced recently in the comments on this blog and I have seen it elsewhere, but I honestly have no idea. Can someone tell me when/where this concept was first used, and what exactly it is supposed to do analytically and describe ethnographically?

I ask because my Ph.D. fieldwork was on gold mining in Papua New Guinea, and in particular about negotiations with Papua New Guinean land owners and Australian mine employees. The mine employees were mostly former colonial officers who have shifted from being ‘liasons’ between Australia’s imperial administration to mouthpieces for global capital. The topic, in other words, was highly ‘raced’—although what it meant to be ‘white’ and ‘black’ varied depending on when and who you asked, white and black were still/thus the central terms I found in my fieldsite. I continue to use them, unapologetically, in my work even though/because they are part of a global discourse with deep roots in colonialism. (For more on race in PNG I cannot recommend Ira Bashkow’s superb “The Meaning of Whitemen” strongly enough).

I am always a bit suspicious of the new terms since they often refer to more or less the same thing that the old term referred to, but obscure its genealogy. The distinction between The North and The South, for instance, has always driven me nuts because PNG is north of Australia and in OZ/PNG English when expats leave Australia they ‘go south’. So in my field work The South is to the north of The North, which is really a pain.

This leads me to the term ‘Euro-American’—is this just code for ‘white’? Because if so then it simultaneously denies and reinscribes the racial basis of the distinction it is making. Are white Australians and South Africans ‘Euro-American’? I ask because this term seems to obscure the global nature of white settler colonialism in favor of an emphasis on Europe and the New World. Are African-Americans ‘Euro-Americans’ because they are ‘American’ even if they are not ‘Euro’? How does the term compare with ‘Western’ or ‘WASP’?

Again, I ask because this term is not, as far as I know, one that is very widely used in the PNG/Australia context that I work on.

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I’ll be damned if we aren’t going to take our reader’s complaints seriously and start thinking criticially about things like the dominance of north american anthropology and our tendency to post inane shit. Like this blog. Which is the funniest and most incisive thing about Race I’ve read since Gloria Anzaldua.

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The Physics Delusion: The Economist reported on the “largest-ever scientific study of [religion]” (their words not mine). The story begins at CERN labs, where scientists are going to use the “Large Hadron Collinder” to find “The God Particle.” The plot meanders for a while, but then things pick up again when the scientists tells a group of undergrads about the ghost of a dead graduate student. [Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for finding this gem].

Photography without Weeping: The NY Times published this article on the rising trend of poverty tours in major third world cities. [In order to access NYT articles, you need a free account].

The (not so) Secret Lives of Faculty: Another NY Times article- this one on growing trend of faculty profiles on social networking websites. The article talks with faculty who have myspace and facebook profiles as well as some professors who have participated on “Professors Strike Back,” a MTV online forum for faculty to respond to student critiques from the now-infamous ratemyprofessor.com.

National Geographic reported that the world crunch for oil is starting to put more pressure on voluntarily isolated Amazonian indigenous groups.

Tenure, cont.: A couple weeks ago, I mentioned that there was going to be a Hollywood movie about tenure. Insidehighered.com did a feature piece on Tenure and the genre of the professor movie.

Oldies but Goods: Material World pointed readers to an article by David Wengrow (available here) on the “Prehistories of Commodity Branding.”

Speaking of Material Culture… Here is a cute article on Slate about the Death and Life of the Phonebook. The author casually mentions near the end of the first page that there is no scholarly monograph to date on the subject. Any takers?

Deep Play: Casey O’Donnell at Remixing Anthropology asks What would ethnography look like if it were a video game?

Classic Comedy: Who doesn’t love a kitchy t-shirt? Plus, I feel like it’s one of the tamer physical anthropology jokes.

[Update: Please do send suggestions for the weekly roundup to anthrohomo@gmail.com.  Suggestions certainly make writing a roundup easier.]

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For five decades, the People’s Republic of China has been proclaiming the death of the Tibetan resistance. In the 1950-60s, they discursively denied the existence of the Tibetan resistance army by referring to them as “high class separatists” and “rebel bandits.” Since then, they have attempted to curb any resistance by immediately putting down protests through arrests, beatings, imprisonments, disappearances (remember the 11th Panchen Lama?), and deaths. The PRC has done everything they can to give the impression that resistance in Tibet—armed or peaceful, coordinated or everyday—is a rare and unwise exception to their benevolent rule, is conducted only by monks or members of the “Dalai clique,” and is not representative of the majority of the Tibetan people who love the Chinese motherland.

Yesterday, therefore, marked a major departure from this stance, perhaps for the first time ever. On Thursday, March 20, 2008, the PRC government acknowledged that Tibetan protest is widespread. That is, it is not just confined to Lhasa or to monks, but is spread throughout Tibetan areas of China and is being committed by Tibetans from all backgrounds—by monks, laypeople, and students, and by men and women, young and old.

Why does this matter? (more…)

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(Here is an occasional piece by Jon Marks at UNCC -R)

An international survey a couple of years ago found that only about half of Americans believe in evolution, placing us 33d in the world, on a list of the nations that believe in evolution the most. I find this troubling, but not because it is another demonstration that Americans are morons. That was known to H. L. Mencken in the 1920s, who referred to the American masses as the “booboisie,” and had even worse things to say about creationists. My problem with these data involves the idea of scientists being interested in what I believe.

I would be apprehensive at the State Department taking an interest in my beliefs, and I am just as apprehensive at the scientific community’s interest in them.

When did science come to be about your beliefs, anyway? I always thought it was about method.

If science is indeed about your beliefs, then I have a bone to pick with evolution. It just seems to attract the weirdest ideologues. Consider the post-Darwinian generations: in the 1890s there were the Social Darwinists. A couple of decades later there were the eugenicists. They were Darwinists too: Charles Darwin’s cousin (Francis Galton) was the movement’s founder, and his son Leonard led the British eugenics society after Galton. It’s hard to miss that connection!

In America, paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn and geneticist Charles Davenport led the movement – no conflict of molecules and morphology there! Davenport’s ideas fell into eclipse in America with the accession of the Nazis, and he died in 1944 – as the sitting President of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. (more…)

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By way of kicking off our “occasional contributors” project, Carole McGranahan has agreed to write something about Tibet for us, which she will shortly post. Carole McGranahan is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado. She received a Ph.D. in anthropology and history from the University of Michigan in 2001. Currently, she is revising her book manuscript Once and Future Truths: Tibet, the CIA, and Histories of a Forgotten War for Duke University Press.

I found a number of great articles she’s written about Tibet, which I’m sure she’d be willing to share with anyone who cannot access them.

On behalf of the elite Euro-American gatekeepers of Anthropology here at Savage Minds, I would like to thank Carole for agreeing to mix it up here on this subject.

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The Guardian has two comments, one by Vaclav Havel and one by Timothy Garton Ash on the situation in Tibet. Havel’s, signed with others, is a strong indictment of inaction, and both essentially call for the same thing: allowing the media in, opening dialogue with the Dalai Lama, and otherwise moving towards a path of dialogue. Ash in particular points out (as commentors here did as well) that the issue is not “independence” but autonomy. Whether or not to boycott the Olympics also seems a bit undecided here, especially if things escalate further. The Olympic torch leaves Athens on Monday. It’s still scheduled to stop in Lhasa.

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We at Savage Minds have been thinking for some time about how to increase dialogue on the site. So far we have done a marvelous job of creating a civil society for anthropology, and have had some great guest bloggers and—of course—lively and informative commenters. However we’ve also been thinking about ways to blur these roles even further and promote more open-ended discussion. For this reason we are happy to announce a new feature at Savage Minds: Occasional contributors.

We’re not sure what we’re going to call them—One Time Minds? The Mindful? Associate Pansies? Whatever the name the idea is pretty straightforward: to get smart, relevant posts from smart, relevant people who want to make an intervention shorter than the traditional ‘guest blog’. We plan to kick off with a piece by Jonathan Marks (Jonathan, consider this your notice that you have been nominated to serve in this regard ) and, as Chris says, commentary by people who are working in Tibet.

Soon we’ll be making some changes to our sidebar, and the occasional blogging will begin. Until then, though, any idea what we should call ‘em?

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The recent violence in Tibet has been poorly covered by American media, and even more poorly analyzed, if at all. In fact, the only analysis I’ve seen so far is at Boing Boing, where they pay attention to things like this if it involves China blocking traffic to Boing Boing (which is actually probably a pretty good proxy measure of serious human rights abuses). I’ve been looking for anthropologists who have something to say on this, and with any luck, Vincanne Adams of UCSF, who is currently in China, will send us a short analysis on the subject. I and others (including Paul Rabinow, who suggested that we start a discussion here) would like to see this get more sustained, intelligent attention, given how completely dull the US media has been on the subject. I suppose it’s no surprise that the current administration has been silent. However, it’s also demoralizing that the current presidential candidates are, if not silent, weak and ill-informed on the subject (Obama seems to think the Tibetans are angry with the way Beijing is ruling Tibet, not that they are). Clinton, meanwhile, has said next to nothing on the subject.

This is another one of those instances where anthropologists should have something informed to say on this. If anyone has pointers to intelligent analysis, meaningful ways to show solidarity or other ideas, please share.

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I’d like to announce a new blog focused around a single session which I’m organizing (together with Michael Wesch and some of the other usual suspects) for this year’s AAA. It may be jumping the gun since we haven’t even finished submitting the panel on the AAA website, but we are really committed to making this a long term process whose life isn’t limited to the 10 min we each get to stand at the podium in November.

Please join us over at Remixing Anthropology and be a part of the process!

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Soon I’ll wrap up my series of posts on cultural studies and move on to another of anthropology’s interlocutors, Symbolic Interactionism and the ethnographic tradition in sociology. Before I do, however, I wanted to take one last stab at cultural studies and anthropology’s uneasy relationship to it. One of the things that bothers me about contemporary anthropology and cultural studies is the way that, for much of the work in these areas, there is no sense that it is hard to do ethnographic work, or that ethnographic details must be clear and precisely stated. The easy part, in other words, is what is going on. The hard part is how to draw out the theoretical implications.

There are probably many reasons that anthropology is currently in this state, but what about cultural studies? Recently I finished Constance Penley’s NASA/TREK, a delightful little volume made up of lots of different parts, some of which are better than others, and not all of which hang together so well. The book’s argument is basically that when it comes to space travel, Star Trek is the theory and NASA the practice, and that this NASA/TREK complex has become a central location for Americans to rethink issues of progress, science, and gender relations (race was obviously there, but never really focused on). I was struck by the beginning part of the book which worked, surprisingly convincingly, to convince the reader that NASA and Trek were basically the same thing. Penley does this mostly through detail—that the first shuttle was renamed ‘Enterprise’ after a write-in campaign, that Star Trek cast members were invited to the first launch, that they played the Star Trek theme song as the shuttle was moved out to the launch pad. Equally her discussion of the Challenger explosion and the folklore surrounding it was fascinating to read (and relied on the work of a folklorist—another discipline I should talk about at some point).

At the same time, the second half of the book that deals with slash fiction was much less convincing to me. It wasn’t that I disagreed with Penley’s claim (now, 15 years later, we all know about slash and female fans). But it seemed to rely more on assertion, based on experience, of what slash writers were like and less on the sort of evidence I saw in the first half of the book. The concluding section, on the other hand, which situated slash in the context of American utopian literature by women and interracial mateship (to use a Stralian term) novel was fascinating although, I admit, totally out of my depth.

The point of all of this is just to say that along the way it occurred to me that literary criticism has always (this is going to sound dumb) criticized literature. Its data are works which people have already read and/or are utterly impossible to do justice to in a short period of space. And yet clearly, literary criticism is (or used to be, alas), criticism of literature, not a description of it. A monograph which provided a close description of a novel is simply… a copy of the novel.

This probably sounds extremely naive to someone who knows more about this topic than I do, but I’d hypothesize that the particularities of the subject of the literary criticism (longish text artifacts) has resulted in a particular method of analyzing them, and that this method has carried over, or at least had an effect, in its inheritor disciplines. Make sense?

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Jay has already tagged this item, and Gretchen is positioning it as a political movement in the making (“Slow writing will be like slow food! ”) over at Facebook, so I thought it worth throwing this up here on the mainpage for discussion. Lindsay Waters has published an article at IHE advocating slowing our writing down. The article ranges over a number of issues of interest to us Minds (the politics of publishing being a big one), and returns to one major refrain: Zizek is a big fake, but one that typifies today’s celebrated (read: celebrity) scholar. Mostly, the piece seems to condemn the hyper-active, CPU/CGI-like aspect of academia today, where the ‘publish or perish’ refrain has been amped up to the nth degree. Academia seems more and more like Hollywood: too many channels, nothing on, the whole thing ruled by an inflationary ethos of fame. When young professors jones for Adderall just like their students, maybe it’s time for a chill pill. Part of me is agreeable to such a critique; the other part thinks it (like most resistance these days) is futile. The tidal wave of mediocrity that comprises so much scholarship, that fills library shelves (and online forums!) with a flood of words no one will care about in 15 minutes, much less 10 years, cannot be stopped. Waters advocates the humanistic essay as a reinvigorated genre for the future: full of lucid reflection and promise. Will the essay save us from ourselves?

{A confession: While reading the piece, I kept thinking of Tony Kushner’s stuttering angel and his/her refrain: ‘Stasis.’ This probably relates more to unconscious anxiety about market free-fall than to something as unimportant as needlessly accelerated academic publishing…}

The article is about the humanities. Anthropologists have special problems with time and with concision: a) our research methods are deliberately very very very slow (or used to be before the days of drive-through ethnography), b) one goal of our research is to record in great (often excruciating) detail whole sociocultural worlds. On the one hand, anthropologists have produced many really wonderful essays. I can think of examples from Douglas and Geertz. On the other, these essays seem always to be in a complementary relationship with much longer works (monographs). So, I think the argument about slowing down needs to be disarticulated from the argument about over-production of books.

Anyway, I am wondering what other folks think about this piece.

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