WANTED! John Curran emailed me with a photograph of this poster.
Curran wrote:
My friends didn’t really know who Montgomery McFate is, or about her involvement with HTS/Minerva; they took one of the posters with them because they thought it was interesting.
I caught up with them at a concert last night (at Fort Reno Park). So the publicity war has literally been taken to the streets. My friend, Amanda (the one who took the poster down) is a reporter for Washington City Paper, and is “thinking of writing something about this on [their] website.”
Here is the article Curran’s friend wrote for the Washington City Paper’s Blog.
Not breaking news, but John Postill at Media Anthropology posted a pdf of extracts from Tim Ingold’s 2007 Radcliffe-Brown lecture.
Talking about Social Science: Jovan at Culture Matters posted a link to Socialtalks, a new bulletin board designed to increase online conversation among students in the social sciences.
Institutional Bureaucracy: Zachary M. Schrag, who maintains the Institutional Review Blog, wrote an in-depth review of Charle’s Bosk’s article “The New Bureaucracies of Virtue or When Form Fails to Follow Function,” from the November 2007 issue of PoLAR. This will be part of an ongoing commentary on the articles on the IRB published in the same edition.
Revenge of the Theoreticians: Tony at Ethnography.com has had enough! He’s sick of applied social scientists talking trash about scholars in the academy. So, beware, academy-haters, because Tony has this acerbic response.
Also: over at 3 Quarks Daily Justin EH Smith has just released ‘Imaginary Tribes #5’ – another in his ongoing series of alternative anthropologies. #5 is a take on Structuralism. Reading these makes me think of those bad dreams I used to have before Anthropology exams in which all the facts, figures and dates reassembled themselves into a peculiarly refracted universe, uncannily resembling our own, though somehow not quite right.
http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2008/08/imaginary-tribe.html
I just looked around the web for more on the Montgomery McFate warning poster and noticed that others had the same gut reaction I do: I don’t quite buy it, especially given that these are showing up in her own neighborhood. Given McFate’s personality, I’d wager that she made the posters herself so that she can cry and claim she’s apolitical victim. But who knows, it might be real and a natural result of being exposed as a spy. People don’t like being lied to and spied on.