Neither grading exams, drafting Powerpoint slides, nor job applications will keep Around the Web down for long. We’re back with links about anthropology, culture, and the Black Eyed Peas.
Information and war
- I wouldn’t be surprised if anthropology was implicated in this manipulation of folklore by the U.S. military against Communists in the Philippines in the 1950s
- How would you like it if all electronic communication was susceptible to U.S. government eavesdropping? For some reason I feel like taking up letter writing. I hear the Post Office could use the revenue.
The meaning of airport security
- Our own Kerim Friedman blogged about a bloke in South Yorkshire who was made to pay a hefty fine in penalty for joking about blowing up an airport on Twitter. Its a parsimonious meditation on the nature of meaning and joking behavior. Maybe this guy should have just shown up in black combat gear and wielding an assault rifle, which apparently is okay in San Jose and doesn’t result in security calling 911 or anything.
Capitalism: Betting against the Wammies
- Remember that game show Press Your Luck? Well Maxine Udall (girl economist) has been taking stock of everything in her life she’s gained by luck noting that to do so is to cut against the grain of American meritocracy. She was inspired to these metaphors and more by a recent scholarly economics publication, Roland Benabou and Jean Tirole’s, “Belief in a Just World and Redistributive Politics.” Wonder if she’s read Roger Caillois?
Aluminum gets heavy
- A few weeks back, Around the Web alerted you to the struggles of the the people of the east Indian state of Orissa and sympathetic street protests in London against the mining company Vedanta who wants to gut their land for bauxite. Material World offers high praise in this book review for Out of this Earth by Felix Padel and Samarendra Das which explores the subject in ethnographic detail.
Roma in perspective
- As the expulsion of Roma continues in France, anthropologist Sam Beck offers some historical notes on the recent history of Roma people that broadens the scope to all of Europe. “Since the 1990s, the people who are being displaced and resettled are the ones who are poor. These are not the migratory Roma. Much like low-income migrants from all over the world, Roma are looking to gain a better life for themselves and their children.”
On Matt’s wish list
- This book, Between Art and Anthropology, looks awesome. Birthday’s coming up, hint hint.
Higher Ed jobs: Gone the way of journalism?
- Adjuncts and other contingent faculty may want to take this survey investigating our working conditions. I completed it in less than 30 minutes.
- Any young adult feeling insecure about the future of teaching anthropology as a viable way to make a living from the present until retirement may want to read this blog post by Dean Dad. Will our jobs still be here 30 years from now? Here’s his response in a nutshell: (1) the elite schools will continue to be able to do whatever they want, (2) as tuition rises the low-cost, high quality community colleges and 4-years will become even more attractive, (3) the for-profit universities will continue to grow, (4) the less prestigious but still expensive private schools will fade away. Here’s a quote from the Dadster:
A cliche of economic history is that the early railroads failed because they thought they were in the railroad industry, but they were actually in the transportation industry. Trucks ate their lunch. The educators who will thrive in the future will be those who understand that they aren’t in the Tenured Professor business; they’re educators. That may mean online delivery, or mediated delivery, or modular approaches, or structured group tutoring, or mentoring, or I don’t know what. But outside of the elites, the one strategy I can almost guarantee will lose is digging in your heels and trying to stop history. If you don’t believe me, ask your local newspaper editor.
Public libraries fall to neoliberalism
- If you’re skeptical about for-profit higher education how about for-profit public libraries? The company LSSI runs 14 library systems in 63 locations making it the fifth largest library system in the United States. No wonder there’s so much public acrimony. Retired people love libraries and they’ve got a lot of time on their hands for organizing.
Podcast covers cargo cult
- The monthly podcasts at Memory Palace have turned their attention to the Vanuatu version of the cargo cult. Its a compelling story, I agree, and more than a little bizarre which gives it the power to unsettle. I’ve tried to use it as an example before in Cultural Anthropology classes, but I’ve always struggled to get students over the “Hey, this is really weird” part. And in this version of the tale the tone is kind of melancholy. Are we supposed to feel sad for the natives for believing in cargo cults? Nice production but I’m still ambivalent.
- Also interesting to me was this comment at Boing Boing, which linked me to the podcast. “If you compare post industrial economic reasoning with the SouthWest Pacific cargo cults, the parallels are scary.” Now, that is something to think about.
Anthropology illuminates the internet age
- NYU’s Gabriella Coleman on the culture of hackers.
- Genevieve Bell, resident anthropologist for Intel, is director of interaction and experience research. From the attached video, Why Intel hired an anthropologist: “You can see the wonderful mess that makes up all of our lives.” That’s a pretty good disciplinary summary actually.
Forgetting Margaret Mead
- Over at Zero Anthropology, Max Forte is rummaging through the detritus of popular culture looking for references to Margaret Mead. Here’s my two cents. If ethnographies had sexier book covers we’d sell a lot more copies. This one could have come off the desk of the Mad Men themselves. (Purchased at a used bookstore and coffee shop in Tivoli, New York, a bedroom community for Bard College, for a mere twenty-five cents back in ’99. A souvenir of a summer well spent.)
- So perhaps Mead hasn’t aged well. But you know who has? Jane Goodall. Whereas Mead’s culture and personality work has become passe (I don’t recall even reading her in grad school, Benedict yes, but not Mead), Goodall’s discovery of tool use among chimps in Gombe contributed to a rethinking of the culture concept in the 1970s and her conservation efforts have only grown more important. Kudos Jane on 50 years of hard work!
Timewaster:
- According to the WSJ the Black Eyed Peas are the most corporate band in America. “From Coors to Levi’s, Honda to Apple, Verizon to Pepsi, brands have padded the group’s video budgets, underwritten its tours and billboarded band members in prominent places… If will.i.am wasn’t in music, ‘He’d be the best ad executive on Madison Avenue,” says Randy Phillips, president and CEO of the concert promoter AEG Live. “I’ve never seen anyone more astute at dealing with sponsors’ and companies’ needs and understanding their brands.'” Is it still called selling out if that was your goal all along?
Seen something around the web you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Email me at mdthomps AT odu.edu
Thank you Matt, and I enjoy these roundups as usual, slowly becoming one of my favourite things to read on anthropology blogs.
Reading about “Press my luck” I found myself thinking, What if I believed in a fundamentally just world under attack by malevolent others? Would I belong to the Tea Party or go back to being the Trotskyite I flirted with being at a much younger age? Who would I see as a bigger threat, corporate CEOs whose lifestyles embody my dreams or illegal immigrants whose color, customs and languages are different from my own?
Though some would have you believe that every time you go to a natural history museum Herbert Spencer kills a kitten, her former place of employment isn’t a bad place to rummage.
I know the first thing that comes to mind for a lot of people when they see a title from 1929 like The Sexual Life of Savages is, “Wow, what a racist.” The first thing that comes to my mind is, “Wow, what an entrepreneur.”
Mead was also something that not many can claim – read.
I was half listening/watching The Cove last night and they had a pretty nice Mead quote so perhaps she lives on in other ways.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if anthropology was implicated in this manipulation of folklore by the U.S. military against Communists in the Philippines in the 1950s”
From what I understand that was the British who did that, but then I’ve heard a few different versions of the story. It’s like an urban legend that gets passed down in some circles of the military. I personally doubt the US military has never done anything like that. If you study the history of what was called psywar at the time, there was just no one doing anything like that at a strategic level. You can do that here: http://www.psywarrior.com/
If anything like that did happen, it would have been the illegal actions of a single commander. It should also be noted that the author of that article is a famous “UFOologist,” and “cryptozoologist.”
Re Mead and Goodall: the comparison is a bit skewed: when Mead was at the same point in her life as Jane Goodall is now, she was still a force. Mead died in 1978; you’re comparing her reputation in 2010 to that of a woman who is still on the lecture circuit. Not fair.
I wonder if the problem of visibility is more complex. Mead was a prominent part of a movement to separate biology and culture in the 1920s and 30s, and to the extent that we take that separation for granted in cultural anthropology her impact continues. We simply erase the traces of history in such taken-for-granted concepts. And don’t tell Duke that psychological anthropology is dead – Mead’s work has evolved into a rich set of subfields, including cultural psychology and many aspects of cognitive anthropology.
Your mention of Benedict is telling, though many readers will take it as non sequitur. Our habit of prestige citation leads us to ignore older work by anthropologists who seem out of date, but who often made the same point we now reference through a more cutting-edge anthropologist (or political scientist).
I didn’t read Margaret Mead in graduate school, but I didn’t read Jane Goodall either. But 30 years later I also realize that what I did read was a highly selected thin slice of anthropology designed to promote a form of anthropology that was hot at the time. Many of the people we did not read turned out to be interesting and important.
With the psyops vampire story in the Philippines, I thought it was interesting that the Americans who were trying to leverage some strategic advantage from this folktale of the Asuang did up their sacrificial victim in the way that they did. Sure European vampires drain blood through two bite marks in the neck, but is that how the Asuang attacks its prey? Maybe vampires in different cultures do different things. But somebody translated Asuang as vampire to the Americans and they thought, “Oh yeah, I know what a vampire is,” and so proceed based on their understanding of their myths.
Maybe the Huks fled in fear because they thought the Americans would puncture their necks and take their blood too. It seems like it has the potential to be a Lacanian “successful miscommunication”. We hear this all the time through governmental spokespeople that we are “sending a message” to whatever ally or foe. It’s even in domestic politics, the voters are “sending a message” to the party in power, the political parties are “sending a message” to their base or “independents’ and so on. What does that mean? And when results are achieved, how can we know that they are for the reasons we believe?
On the subject of female anthropologists of note I had a idea. What if we did an archaeology of the citation of women authors in graduate syllabi and charted it up like a battleship graph? I think it would be neat to see the surface areas of authors growing and shrinking over time with new names emerging as others dissipate.
If Barbara wasn’t reading Mead in grad school thirty years ago, then when did that practice die out? I did read Goodall in grad school nine years ago but does that make me an outlier among young graduates or is more common to site her now than in the past? I just would be curious to see that done.
When you refer to reading someone in graduate school, I assume you mean in core courses rather than in one’s more specialized or independent coursework. We did not read Margaret Mead in Systems at Chicago, but then again the course covered classics — Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, et al — and then leaped forward to the now-and-the-wow. Only so much could be squeezed into 2 quarters, so Mead, along with scores of perfectly interesting and influential people, was edged out.
Why female anthropologists? The same ebbing and flowing of names of male anthropologists certainly takes place over time.
But 30 years later I also realize that what I did read was a highly selected thin slice of anthropology designed to promote a form of anthropology that was hot at the time. Many of the people we did not read turned out to be interesting and important.
I’ll second that.
“With the psyops vampire story in the Philippines, I thought it was interesting that the Americans who were trying to leverage some strategic advantage from this folktale..”
Like I said before, if this did actually happen, and that’s a big if, it wouldn’t have been done by anyone in psychological operations. A similar event happened a few years ago in Afghanistan when some Al Qaeda fighters were killed, and their buddies were hiding caves nearby. The closest village refused to take the bodies for burial, because more Afghans really don’t like Arab fighters. After a few days, the bodies had to be either buried or burned. The US soldiers decided to burn the bodies. Unfortunately, there was a psyop team there, who though it would be a good idea to taunt their buddies by calling them cowards and lady boys who wouldn’t fight them or honor their comrades, while the bodies burned. An Australian reporter recorded it and put it on the news. With just that, all psychological operations were shut down in Afghanistan for two months and a full investigation was done. The story was reported in a way that assumed that they bodies were burned by the psyopers for that purpose, which wasn’t true.
I was a psychological operator when I was in the army, and these stories were a part of our folklore. This story and many others were told and retold in order to teach young psyopers what not to do. Another, much more famous example, are the “Death Cards” used by the cavalry in Vietnam. These cards were meaningless to the Vietcong, and something we in the community would call, “psyop by good idea.” That is, psyop or a message that is developed not from a very careful analysis of one’s target audience, and the use of culturally relevant and credible themes and symbols, but made up by some officer somewhere who thinks something would be cool. I think you are referring to this kind of psyop, which usually isn’t successful even by accident. You get something similar in advertising agencies with “creatives” who design ad campaigns that win awards for creativity, but still get canceled, because they don’t have any affect on sales.
On a side note, my experience as a tactical psyop team chief, gave me some insight into some of the issues and complaints about the HTS, and practicing anthropologists in general. Psyop teams are just 3 men, and typically support about 800 soldiers. They are independent special ops soldiers who don’t fall into a clear chain of command (their command is usually a few hundred miles away and they just report in by radio or email). They are also not given any actually power, even though they report almost directly to the Pentagon and can pretty much go anywhere, and do anything they want personally. That means they have to persuade the very people they are working for into even listening to them, or allowing them to even operate in an area. Whether a commander is persuaded to do something, or not, psyopers have zero command authority. That means, if a commander wants to do something like that, this psyop team can’t stop him. Like HTS teams, however, we would report to that commander’s boss’s boss. A couple of years ago a special forces A team was turned in by a psyop team for abusing civilians.
My point is that one of the first things a psyoper learns is that the first, and most important thing they do when they get somewhere, is to “psyop the supported unit first.” That is build rapport with them, and gain their trust. Get them to like you and respect your team. You learn what kind of commander runs things by chatting up his staff before ever meeting him and changing your appearance to match his expectations (do I look like an infantry soldier, or grow a beard and look like a special operations soldier). If you don’t do these things then nothing you want done will get done. I don’t think HTS teams are taught this, and the team leaders (former special forces officers), never had to learn. This is probably why they end up pissed off, because they aren’t being taken seriously and spending their time in the mess hall.
The same can be said for anthropologists working outside the academy in general. Too often an anthropologist naively thinks that a company or government agency should stop what it’s doing and listen to everything they have to say. They don’t realize that their job is to conduct at least a cursory ethnographic study of their employers as much as the people their employers what them to study.
For your next Around the Web, you might consider taking a look at the current issue of Science magazine–specifically the special package on NAGPRA, (of which I was one of the contributors). It is available to all readers free (with online registration):
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/10/returning-tribal-remains.html
My post on it is here: http://www.collide-a-scape.com/2010/10/08/a-lawful-reckoning/
Given Adam Fish’s background, I’d be curious to hear his response. Even better, perhaps the upcoming 20th anniversary of NAGPRA will occasion a post from him on it.