bq. Back when Malinowski was writing about the Trobrianders or Evans-Pritchard about the Nuer, their analyses spoke to and against prevailing opinions concerning the ways in which families, economies, politics and religion have to work. The evidence they offered was surprising, thus interesting.

Then, in a later message I wrote that Chris Kelty’s _Two Bits_ is timely and provocative ethnography. Here I’d like to elaborate a bit.

What Chris does in _Two Bits_ is to give us an inside look at a community that is very much on people’s minds these days. It sits on my shelves beside Yochai Benkler’s _The Wealth of Networks_ and Jonathan Zitran’s _The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It_. Another name that comes to mind is Lawrence Lessig. These authors are all lawyers deeply involved in discussing the challenges that the Internet and the Free Software and Open Source communities pose to established notions of intellectual property, the commons, and the notion that people must be either paid or coerced into participation in great, world-changing projects. Thus, I can say with confidence that Chris has done what Malinowski and E-P, and also Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead did in their day, bringing ethnography to bear on issues of concern that extend far beyond the parochial boundaries of anthropology itself.

Serendipitously, Ruth and I have got ourselves committed to giving a paper on city planning in Yokohama at the SEAA meeting in Taipei next month. So yesterday I started reading Setha Low and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga’s _the anthropology of space and place_. The collection begins with a collection of classic articles, Edward Hall “Proxemics,” Miles Richardson “Being in the Market Versus Being in the Plaza,” Nancy Munn “Excluded Spaces,” Alessandro Duranti “Indexical Speech across Samoan Communities.” I found myself reading with pleasure and remembering why anthropology had once been so exciting. Here is Hall, building on Sapir and Whorf, and demonstrating how to extract cultural rules of which informants themselves may be only dimly or obliquely aware. Here is Richardson, taking off from Heidegger (thought you’d like that) and exploring how being there in particular places works in Latin America. Nancy Munn writes about the way in which Walbiri avoidance of sacred/taboo spaces defines negative spaces with fluid and sometimes mobile boundaries. Duranti writes about the issues raised when Samoan words for “sit down” (which means to sit down on the floor with your legs crossed and your back straight, a sign of respect in Samoa) are spoken in LA, in spaces with chairs, sofas and TV sets. I note, as I read, that none of these articles stop with reporting what the anthropologist was told. All grapple with the issue of how to interpret behavior when what the anthropologist hears people say falls short of adequate explanation of what is going on. Mysteries are probed. The ideas sizzle. The issues are ones we all confront: How close is too close? How does this place (a church or classroom, for example) affect who we are? How does what we avoid define our world? How do we show respect when the rules are in flux?

I note, too, the absolute absence of the agonized moralizing that occupies such a prominent part in so much anthropological discourse these days. Might be worth thinking about.

Oh, yes, I know that they, too are human. But so are a 127 million Japanese, about whom I think I know less every day. Not to mention a billion-plus Chinese, the people I was trying to understand when I was starting out as an anthropologist. Where do I find the time, and why should I bother?

the exoticism thing strikes me as just as present as ever though… it’s just that anthros no longer have a monopoly on it. There are certainly some extreme forms of human behavior still out there for the delectation… but it seems more likely you will see them on Travel Planet or some reality TV show than in Cultural Anthropology. But I don’t think it was ever the exoticism that drove Malinowski or Evans-Pritchard precisely… that was just a means to an end… maybe we need to cultivate it once more in order to get heard in the global ecumene?

1. Back when Malinowski was writing about the Trobrianders or Evans-Pritchard about the Nuer, their analyses spoke to and against prevailing opinions concerning the ways in which families, economies, politics and religion have to work. The evidence they offered was surprising, thus interesting. Now the fact that people can behave in wildly different ways and believe the strangest things is pretty much taken for granted; dare we say a cliché. What Mary Douglas called the “not in Bongo-Bongo” argument has lost the zing it once had.

2. The grand narratives, “progress,” “the primitive,” “social science,” that once made any new ethnographic detail at least a contribution to something bigger than itself have been critiqued literally to death, and nothing has been found to replace them. “Scarification,” “spirit money,”susto,” pick whatever you like. Its on the same level as who was last in the American League in 1947 or which U.S. president was renowned as a great farter. Great for people who like to play trivia games or have an esoteric hobby. For the rest of us, nothing more than any other odd thing in the great intellectual midden than Google now makes instantly accessible.

3. The replacement of the grant narratives with the notion that anthropology is, after all, writing has the uncomfortable implication that it better be good writing or, yes, it is going to be ignored. The fact is that most writing is crap and most people who claim to be writers should look for another trade. There is nothing new about that; it is only the background noise produced by the endless sifting that separates classics from compost. Anthropologists are not, because they are anthropologists, exceptions to this rule.

focus people… focus. The introduction by GM is on the web site… maybe bored ethnography guy, or someone serious, could actually *read* something.

sheesh.