Wed 19 Mar 2008
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?
Comet Jo says:
Well, if you had a list in the sidebar of recent contributions by such “others” you could call it “The View from Afar.”
ckelty says:
not “The View from the Asidebar”?
I really like Associate Pansies, but I fear our associates wont. I’m changing my job title here to Assistant Pansy without Tenure.
Adam says:
Whatever the title (and ‘associated pansy’ sounds fine to me), the question is: how do you get the gig? Is it by invitation only, or will you have an online form to fill out? Smoke signal?
ckelty says:
Turing Test and a portfolio of Artwork? however we do it it will be opaque, unfair, and irrational. Failing that John McCreery will decide.
Jenny says:
Hows about….
distributed intelligence
alt.minds
alternative minds
other minds
mindful others
isochronals
isochronal minds (or pansies)
ganglia
rhizomes
transient light
transient pansies (dig the assonance)
1,000 points of light (did the sarcasm)
vox pop
singular savages
Some are ridiculous, yes, but could spark something useful nonetheless.
John McCreery says:
How about “Wild Chrysanthemums” or “Rampaging Kudzu”?
p.doc says:
Feral Minds?
Rex says:
Sadly, “Feral” just sounds like a Druid spec to me now. The pansy thing sounds good, however. I am particularly taken by “The View From Afar” or even the more pretentious option of just “Le Regard Eloigne” but I think that is a sign of weakness in me. Perhaps every occasional contributor should just be free to make up their own title? Or after they blog we can hold a referendum on what their title could be?
Dylan says:
While i do check this blog regularly and have done so since you first started i think the pat on your back that you give yourselves – “So far we have done a marvellous job of creating a civil society for anthropology” – is a little excessive.
Yes, plaudits should be given for the amount of links, ideas and comments you provide for the anthropology community. This is do not disagree with.
However, as an anthropologist working in the Caribbean and trying to fight against the hegemony of ideas coming from the Euro-American canon seeking to explain our condition, alongside a discipline wide research funding system that is seriously warped toward Euro-American worldview, and the reality that most of the best scholars from this region are forced to take up positions abroad due to the pull of money and facilities – im often disappointed with the slant and ideas many regular contributors take on savage minds.
‘You’ – those in university system in the Euro-American world, are the privileged.
You begin to believe after years of training your methods and ideas are appropriate to explaining other ways of life, when they are not. Ethnicity and race are but two concepts thrown around on Euro-American campuses that in their present form do not work in the Caribbean and Latin America. And we have had to bear this inaccuracy for decades – brainwashing the minds of our students to see the world as Euro-American do.
Most of the modern social theory underpinning Euro-American anthropology has that effect too, and if it were not for the advance of contemporary theory over the last 20 yrs we in areas of the world beyond Euro-America would still be mimic men not thinking for ourselves.
A reason im a big fan of authors like Eduardo Restrepo, Escobar, and Gustavo Ribiero are for their ideas like ‘World Anthropologies’ and ‘Other anthropologies’ which are designed to “fight the international hegemony of U.S. anthropology” and create an “anthropology that is more aware of the social, epistemological, and political conditions of its own production.” Important considerations.
Thus, my rant and feeling is that your ‘civil society’ for anthropology is firmly based on pushing some viewpoints and theory over others. It is not self-critical or reflective enough.
It is ‘civil’ in the sense that you become gatekeepers to a particular viewpoint within anthropology and we all listen (or rather read). And then many, perhaps those not with the years of a PhD under their belt, come to accept the viewpoint you provide as representative of the Anthropology community – hence the notion you can pat yourself on the back for the marvellous job you’ve done of creating a civil society for anthropology.
As anthros we know knowledge continually shifts and your blog does not reflect this notion enough. That for me would be a better definition of what constitutes ‘a marvellous job.’
All this said, and im sure there are many who will jump to the defence of “Savage Minds,’ as I might in another capacity – I do need to acknowledge the good too. Your idea for occasional contributors is most certainly a means to counter the inherent bias I take issue with and i applaud you for the foresight in regard to this matter..
Hopefully it won’t only be a bunch of US/Euro funded and taught minds telling us more of the same. Hopefully they will suggest there are other ways of seeing things, producing knowledge and understanding various spaces in the world.
kind regards
peanut says:
Dylan:
I too am a little stumped by what it means to think that SM has “created a civil society for anthropology.” Well, I guess it’s a start, and for that we should happy, I guess. The blog is great, and has some lively discussion sometimes, but I too am surprised how much I hear things I have already heard… poses and voices I recognize as not at all “2.0” (smirk). It’s good for all of us to be self critical in our thinking and our writing (and to combine the two, if possible). Of course, as many anthros might be quick to point out, it’s not the content so much as the stance and address that shape what becomes a focus of—and what is excluded from—a forum. A “civil society,” or “a public” if you want, draws its borders by who it addresses and how.
This self-congratulatory mode of address that you point out is (more than) a little clubby, a little “went to the right schools.” I wonder sometimes if this isn’t representative of one of the major problems of American anthropology, actually…the anthropological “we” excludes a lot of positions. By its very nature. Perhaps it is a result not of American culture per se, but, as you clearly point out, of American modes of funding both higher education and social scientific research (ahem, trust fund) such that, in a very real sense, an anthropology degree is mostly a luxury for the elite. And an American anthropology degree seems to have, somehow along the road, become the standard model of degree/pedigree/background/model in the discipline (as imagined from its centers somewhere in US metropolises). This is clearly a weakness in American anthropology, a self-hobbling delusion of grandeur. And with this narrow image of anthropology comes, as well, a narrow vision of what a proper career, and hence, a credible anthropologist, looks like.
If we talk about “slow writing” in anthropology, maybe we should take it a step further, and talk about humble writing. It would be good, I think, for things like collaboration, to say nothing of things like epistemological accuracy, to work to speak and write to each other (in blog posts and emails as well as in articles and monographs) in a way that accepts the partial-ness, the situated-ness of our knowledge as individual “minds.”
Carl Dyke says:
You anthropologists are so sweet to each other. As an outsider both to anthropology and this blog (and having just watched Barack elegantly reject the rhetoric of grievance) I’ll take a naive poke at this to set up the convenient straw man for the ‘other side’, since I notice a bid to recipro-otherfy here. If I play the bad guy well enough maybe we’ll give these kids a chance to redeem themselves by rushing to écraser l’infâme. Here goes:
Dude, of course they’re biased. That’s how culture works, man. And they’re biased toward their own culture. Wow. They know it better than the others, they’re more comfortable with it, they use it to see with, and when they have something to say that’s what they say it with. When they see other cultures they see them through the lenses of their own. When they learn other cultures they do so less authentically than the natives. So far I don’t see a point.
Are you expecting Euro-Americans to be different than everyone else that way? Why?
You’ve stereotyped Euro-American theory, tossed it all in the ‘imperial gaze’ bad-box, not bothered to find in it the critical resources that might be of value to you, assumed that your way of thinking is the only right and authentic one for your purposes. Cool! Fine! Good for you, rock on with that. You’ve got your favorites and they’ve got theirs. Right, that’s how it works.
In the Euro-American institutions that enjoy the most resources to do a luxurious life of the mind, Euro-American faces and perspectives dominate. Can we agree there’s nothing surprising or sinister about this staffing symmetry? The surprising thing is when they hire ‘others’ at all.
In contrast the plush economic resources for those institutions have to do with structural asymmetries in the global economy, as we know, which can be legitimately (although optionally) interpreted as oppression. There are loads of plush conceptual resources in Euro-American theory for criticizing structural asymmetries, for reflexive theory, as you say, so these guys should probably be doing that. Looks like they are, in fact they seem to be doing the little peepee dance of oppressor guilt quite nicely. I find that sort of tail-chasing tiresome pretty quickly, but tastes and appetites differ.
So many ways to be embarrassed when one is evil by nature. Let’s see if I can unsilence these poor discourse-hogs here in the ringing echoes of the trumpet of justice. Maybe we could skip the guilt trip where we use these guys’ willingness to listen and learn as a stick to beat them with. This is a conversation. No one has less voice here than me and look at me go. If Caribbean theory has something useful to add, awesome, then add it. Otherwise we’re stuck with one of these weird Foucauldian loud silences of ubiquitous shouting voicelessness, and we can all do with fewer of those.
Hope that’s good to think with. Cheers.
Rex says:
Well shit.
Kerim says:
From the abstract I submitted to the AAA, which you can read over at Remixing Anthropology:
From the very beginning we at Savage Minds have been aware of the problems and limitations raised by Dylan. But how to find good bloggers? Our efforts at recruiting non-bloggers have been mixed, to say the least. And even though one doesn’t have to go to the right school to sign-up for a free Wordpress.com blog, when we started out the anthro-blogsphere was infinitesimally small. It is bigger now, but (at least in English) not very diverse. I am actively promoting Savage Minds here in Taiwan in order to encourage Taiwanese bloggers to take up the practice – but I’m afraid if they do it will probably be in Chinese. Even among our full time regular bloggers, it just seems that some contributors drop off after a while – we don’t rightly understand why this is particularly true among our women bloggers. (We also lost our one Asian-American contributor.)
Recent changes should hopefully allow us to include a wider array of voices: “occasional” contributors lowers the barrier to participating and, the “around the web” feature allows us to draw attention to what is happening elsewhere in the anthro-blogsphere (although there too Jay is also limited by what is actually happening.)
Already there many more anthropologists blogging than there were three years ago and we do know our blog has a fairly international audience. If you are a non Euro-American, please start your own blog and let us know about it. We look for good writers and actively recruit new talent when we see it. We look for bloggers who have their own voice, and who are able to maintain a blog over an extended period of time. If you know of good blogs which haven’t come to our attention, please let us know about them.
Rex says:
I’m sorry. I still haven’t recovered from “the little peepee dance of oppressor guilt” yet.
John McCreery says:
One of the most attractive introductions to cultural studies that I have read is Cultural Studies by Fred Inglis (1993) , who writes in a thoughtful, humane and readable style that I associate with the best in British academic writing. His framing of the ground on which cultural studies is built is one this anthropologist is happy to share.
Shortly after this passage, Inglis addresses some of the issues being discussed here.
Hallelujah, I say.
Jacky says:
Kerim wrote: “Even among our full time regular bloggers, it just seems that some contributors drop off after a while – we don’t rightly understand why this is particularly true among our women bloggers.”
I can’t speak for “other” women bloggers (because when I blogged here as a “regular” blogger, I was still a woman), but it’s hard to keep up with the pace set by people who, I don’t know how, have the time to regularly produce blog posts that hold together. I have time to write informal stuff, but no time to write things that are fully academic and, after a few posts, I realised that the anthro blogging world often seems to require posts that are quasi-publishable. When I got on board, I was under the (seemingly) mistaken assumption that blogging was informal. That it was OK to post things that were still half-baked with the goal of provoking discussion.
All that to say that with full-time teaching and the 50+ hours per week that it entails, full-time single parenthood and volunteer activities involving Native and queer rights in Canada, I just couldn’t regularly produce quasi-publishable material that was typo-free and I couldn’t deal with the often harsh and cold comments from people that didn’t seem to agree with me about the “informal” nature of blogging and who would nit-pick on some tiny detail or resort to name-calling (not at me, ever, but at a much-respected colleague here).
Anyway, this is my long way of explaining why I dropped out of being a regular SM contributor but how the idea of being an occasional “associate pansy” appeals to me. I’ll let you know when I have an idea for a post (I’ll refer back to the running list I had). I will be doing my PhD as of next year so heavy-duty involvement in that might prompt some fresh material as well.
Jacky (the anthropologist and former SM contributor formerly known as Nancy)
Kerim says:
Nancy/Jacky Let us know when you’re ready!
Carl Dyke says:
Jacky, I for one am doing this as a blatant stall while the stack of introductory world history papers I have to read stares back at me like Nietzsche’s abyss. It’s much better than checking my fantasy basketball team for the nth time, because y’all are smart and stimulating and actually talk back sometimes.
I’m with you on the nature of blogs. To me they’re like a bar conversation, only with a lag time where you have to say several things in a row just to keep it going. But definitely shooting from the hip. I’m pretty impatient with people who think it’s all verruh verruh important. In a couple billion years the sun will go nova and ash this whole mess, in the meantime let’s see what we can figure out.
Looking forward to your pansifying.