The website for the University of Chicago’s “Anthropology and Global Counter-Insurgency” conference is now available at http://anthroandwar.uchicago.edu/. You can read abstracts for each of the three panels and for the individual presentations. Notice that I’ve somehow been given the last word…

Update (4/18): I’ve just heard from the conference organizers that Honorary Savage Mind-at-Large Marshall Sahlins will be chairing the last session (my session). He was an early invite, but it had looked like he wasn’t going to make it to the conference.

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In a recent speech before the Association of American Universities, Defense Secretary Robert Gates described his ideas for a new military-academic partnership. The “Minerva Consortium”, as he calls his vision, would offer funding and research assistance for researchers across academia, in order to build up the military’s understanding of the world the operate in and create a pool of experts the military can draw on.

At first blush, it seems Gates—a former university president—has learned some of the lessons of the past that led to the meltdown of the Cold War military-academic partnership in the Vietnam years. Most notably, he has come down against secret research, and claims to encourage critical responses to Department of Defense programs and practices.

“Let me be clear that the key principle of all components of the Minerva Consortia will be complete openness and rigid adherence to academic freedom and integrity. There will be no room for ’sensitive but unclassified,’ or other such restrictions in this project,” Gates said. “We are interested in furthering our knowledge of these issues and in soliciting diverse points of view — regardless of whether those views are critical of the department’s efforts. Too many mistakes have been made over the years because our government and military did not understand — or even seek to understand — the countries or cultures we were dealing with.”

University presidents are, of course, thrilled at the prospect, dreaming of university coffers flush with DoD funds once again. But academic researchers, particularly anthropologists, should be very nervous about Gates’ plans. This kind of direct involvement in the funding and direction of academic research, even without the veil of secrecy that military-academic partnerships have often had in the past, threatens to powerfully influence the shape of our discipline—even for people who reject military funding.

(more…)

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Everyone’s arguing lately about Savage Minds—it’s “civil society” or lack thereof, its institutional position in the field of anthropology, it’s Euro-Americano-centrism, and so on. What’s missing, I think, is that while Savage Minds is a “place”, a “publication” of sorts, with some cohesiveness, it’s also a somewhat random collection of individual anthropologists bound together by no shared theoretical orientation, area specialization, political stance, or academic genealogy. I think it’s clear that we don’t always agree—in fact, we’ve disagreed quite sharply at times. More to the point, we not only blog about different stuff but we blog for different reasons.

For me, Savage Minds has always been a place to “mess around”, anthropologically speaking. A place to try out new ideas and thin hypotheses, a wall to throw stuff onto in order to see what sticks. A place where I could try my hand at the kind of argument Yehudi Cohen makes in Disappearance of the Incest Taboo (that’s an AnthroSource link, for those with access) and string together some ideas about the end of marriage, or muse about the moral underpinnings of anthropology. A place to incubate arguments and positions—and to receive feedback from my peers both inside and outside of the field.

It’s been invaluable to have this kind of forum, away from the main channel of academic thought—the journals and academic presses that are our disciplinary mainstream, even if many of them have lower readerships than Savage Minds. So valuable, in fact, that I felt it absolutely necessary to include Savage Minds in my “Acknowledgements” when I published Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War. Here’s what I wrote:

Over the years, two online communities have proven invaluable as both a source of new ideas and a place to rehearse my own fevered anthropological imaginings. To the members of ANTHRO-L (especially Ron Kephart, John McCreery, Richard Senghas, Jacob Lee, Richard Wilsnack, Anj Petto, Ray Scupin, Robert Lawless, Wade Tarzia, Lynn Manners, Martin Cohen, Bruce Josephson, Richley Crapo, Tom Kavanagh, Scott MacEachern, Mike Pavlik, Thomas Riley, and Phil Young) and my fellow Savage Minds, (Alex Golub, Kerim Friedman, Chris Kelty, Nancy LeClerc, Kathleen Lowery, Tak Watanabe, and newbies Thomas Erikson, Maia Green, and Thomas Strong) I offer both my gratitude and respect.

In the end, I’m not sure I could have written Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War without having had this forum to develop those ideas. The other Minds and the many people who comment here not only helped me to refine my thoughts on anthropology and its role(s) in society, but to rethink myself as an anthropologist.

By way of gratitude, then, I asked my publishers if I could offer at least a little something back to this community which has offered me so much. They responded enthusiastically, providing me with a discount code to offer Savage Minds readers. So here’s the deal:

1. Order Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War from U Mich Press.
2. At checkout, enter the coupon code: WAX08UMP
3. Enjoy a 20% savings!

With the coupon code, the US price is $26.00 instead of the usual $32.50. As far as I know, this offer is not limited to US buyers, but I’m pretty sure the price of international shipping will eat up any savings over buying the book at full price locally. The coupon code expires on May 30, 2008.

For more information about the book, check out the review by Penny Howard at the Socialist Review. More reviews and information about the book will be posted at my personal site on the book page as it becomes available.

And if you’re not interested, for whatever reason (maybe your mother was cruel to you as a child?), that’s cool, too—I offer you as a member of the Savage Minds community my thanks.

But really, buy the book. Buy the book or I shall plug at you a second time! Tphptptptptp!

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I’ve been invited to speak at a conference hosted by the University of Chicago later this month on the topic of “Anthropology and Global Counter-Insurgency”. Other speakers will include David Price and Hugh Gusterson, who are doing yeoman’s work on the issue. Despite the fact that my introduction to Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War discusses issues related to counter-insurgency at some length, it is because of my work here at Savage Minds that I’ve been invited to speak. Take that, traditional publishing models!

Here’s the skinny on the conference, from the organizers: (more…)

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If you haven’t already, read these first:

Part I – In which I manage to get a publishing contract

Part Ia: Writing a Prospectus – In which I detail how I wrote my prospectus

You’d think that selling a publisher on your book idea would be the hard part.  Once you have a contract in hand, the rest should be easy, right? After all, in my case, the contributors had already presented their work, so they already had at least a draft to work from—all that’s left is for each person to clean up their draft, maybe expand a piece here and there, and tidy up their references.  Right?

Right?!

Wrong.  You’ve heard the expression “herding cats” before, right? Well, I decided that getting an edited volume put together was a lot like herding glaciers.

What I’m saying is, it goes a bit slowly.

Part of the problem is the academic schedule.  Most academics are bound to a semester-by-semester schedule that a] changes frequently, and b] puts us through periods of intense work interspersed with periods of intense inactivity. During the school session, for all our good intentions, non-teaching projects tend to fall by the wayside.  Some academics are lucky: they have tenure, 1- or 2- class per semester teaching loads, and committee work they’ve learned how to blow off.  Those are not the kind of academics one would expect to find contributing to an edited volume by an unknown grad student.

(more…)

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I was going to save this for Part II, but when I looked back at my prospectus I decided that a deeper exegesis of what I had done might be useful—I know I floundered quite a bit figuring out what a prospectus should look like, what its tone should be, and so on. So here’s a blow-by-blow look at the prospectus I sent to Pluto Books. I’m not saying this is the best proposal ever, or that I didn’t make mistakes, or that I wouldn’t do things differently today—just that this one worked, for whatever that’s worth.

I talked before about the need for a prospectus that really sells your book proposal. As academics, we’re used to writing proposals that highlight ideas, theories, methods—none of which is all that useful in a prospectus. Although an editor is (hopefully) going to be interested in what a book says, that interest has to be subsidiary to what kind of interest the book will generate and how many copies they can sell. Every publisher has a minimum number they need to sell to break even on a book—your prospectus has to convince them that they’ll sell more than whatever that number is.

Here’s the prospectus I sent to Pluto Books in 2005, modified somewhat to remove personal information.

(more…)

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A few people said they’d like to hear about the process of getting my forthcoming edited volume, Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War: The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism and the CIA published. The road has been a long one, almost exactly five years from inception to (planned) publication, so I decided to take a few posts and describe in as much detail as I can recall how I’ve managed this.

This is not intended to be “an expert’s guide to getting published”—in fact, it is presented more as a non-expert’s guide. I’ve had to learn most of this as I went along, and I’m hoping that knowing how I managed to get the project completed might help others like me—first-time academic authors—to navigate the system just a little bit more easily.

(more…)

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A report published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association and reported on by the NY Times adds weight to my “thin hypothesis” of well over a year ago: death rates for overweight people in 2004 were lower—100,000 lower—than for “normal” people.

Linking, for the first time, causes of death to specific weights, they report that overweight people have a lower death rate because they are much less likely to die from a grab bag of diseases that includes Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, infections and lung disease. And that lower risk is not counteracted by increased risks of dying from any other disease, including cancer, diabetes or heart disease.

As a consequence, the group from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute reports, there were more than 100,000 fewer deaths among the overweight in 2004, the most recent year for which data were available, than would have expected if those people had been of normal weight.

One expert, a Dr. JoAnn Manson from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, comments critically that “Health extends far beyond mortality rates… [The public needs to look at] the big picture in terms of health outcomes.” However, that’s what Health at Any Size advocates ave been advocating for year, rather than the simple-minded focus on BMI sorting people into “overweight” and “underweight” categories and automatically assuming these were “unhealthy”—and that the “normals” were “healthier”.

This new report gnaws at the seams of this construction, calling into question the meaning of normalcy and healthiness; although Dr. Manson and her “fat is bad” family are correct that some people experience quality of life issues (another huge construction), many don’t other than people—including doctors—pointing at them and yelling “fat bad, skinny good, you ugly and lazy and nasty”! Meanwhile, I think most people would rather not die this year, and would consider dying to be a sign of poor health (and something that also has some quality of life issues…).

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I didn’t see that anyone had posted this yet, and though people might be interested in the AAA Executive Board’s resolution against the involvement of anthropology in HTS. From the conclusion:

In the context of a war that is widely recognized as a denial of human rights and based on faulty intelligence and undemocratic principles, the Executive Board sees the HTS project as a problematic application of anthropological expertise, most specifically on ethical grounds. We have grave concerns about the involvement of anthropological knowledge and skill in the HTS project. The Executive Board views the HTS project as an unacceptable application of anthropological expertise.

The Executive Board affirms that anthropology can and in fact is obliged to help improve U.S. government policies through the widest possible circulation of anthropological understanding in the public sphere, so as to contribute to a transparent and informed development and implementation of U.S. policy by robustly democratic processes of fact-finding, debate, dialogue, and deliberation. It is in this way, the Executive Board affirms, that anthropology can legitimately and effectively help guide U.S. policy to serve the humane causes of global peace and social justice.

Update: This seems to be the official link.

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I’ve been somewhat absently following the story of U. of Michigan Press’ reconsideration of its relationship with UK-based Pluto Press, since my forthcoming book Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War is being released on Pluto Press and the loss of an American distributor would limit its availability in the country that it most directly deals with.  So it’s with some relief that I see that Michigan has decided to continue its relationship with Pluto Press. 

The issue was set off by

(more…)

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Apropos of the recent discussion of anthropology’s use in torture and other military action, I received notice this morning of an effort launched by several anthros (including David Price, Hugh Gusterson, and Catherine Lutz) to encourage the development of an ethical anthropology and to oppose anthro’s participation in counter-insurgency. Here’s the relevant part of the email:

The Department of Defense and allied agencies are mobilizing anthropologists for interventions in the Middle East and beyond. It is likely that larger, more permanent initiatives are in the works.

Over the last several weeks, we have created an ad hoc group, the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, with the objective of promoting an ethical anthropology. Working together, we have drafted a pledge of non-participation in counter-insurgency, which we have organized as a petition (see attachment). We invite you to become a part of this effort by taking the following steps:

1. Download and print the attached pledge (in .pdf format) [. Ask your colleagues to sign the pledge, and promptly send it to us via regular mail. Our address is Network of Concerned Anthropologists, c/o Dept. of Anthropology, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MS 3G5, Fairfax, VA 22030 (USA). If it is more convenient, email a .pdf copy of collected signatures and send it to us at concerned.anthropologists@gmail.com.


2. Forward this message to your colleagues, and encourage them to sign.


3. Join our network by emailing us at concerned.anthropologists@gmail.com. Be sure to include your name, title, and affiliation. We will add you to our email list.


4. Visit our web site at http://concerned.anthropologists.googlepages.com/home for more information and updates.

Email us at concerned.anthropologists@gmail.com if you would like more information or if you have questions.

Sincerely yours,
Network of Concerned Anthropologists

Catherine Besteman
Andrew Bickford
Greg Feldman
Roberto Gonzalez
Hugh Gusterson
Gustaaf Houtman
Kanhong Lin
Catherine Lutz
David Price
David Vine

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In the wake of Ward Churchill’s firing from Colorado University and his subsequent decision to sue for reinstatement, I’ve been thinking a lot about how (and, I admit, whether) to read Churchill’s work in the wake of revelations (or allegations, depending on your point of view) of academic dishonesty including plagiarism, fraudulent claims of Indian identity, and shoddy use of (or misuse of) historical sources. Some of the claims lodged against Churchill push to the edge of absurdity, including the use of articles ghostwritten by himself to support claims made in other articles.

For those who have been sleeping off a bender these past few years, here’s the story. (more…)

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This article in Inside Higher Education, which comments on a survey showing that more professors today feel their academic freedom is threatened than did during the McCarthyist era, is the kind of thing you’d expect me to have a lot to say about.

Gross surveyed social science professors last year about whether they had felt that their academic freedom was threatened, and found that about one-third did. In 1955, Paul Lazarsfeld, the late Columbia University professor, did a similar survey and found only one-fifth of professors feeling affected by attacks on their academic freedom.

However, I’m going out of town with my family in a little over an hour and won’t be back until the weekend, so I don’t have time to comment on it very fully. So here’s your assignment: imagine what you think I’d say about it, and then argue over what you’ve imagined in the comments.

Thanks—you’re a lifesaver!

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In a case of history repeating itself (this time as farce?), a Congolese zoo played host to a troop of “Pygmy” musicians (I’m assuming Mbuti). But it’s ok, it’s not discrimination. Really:

“It’s not a case of discrimination,” said Yvette Lebondzo, the director of arts and culture for the Republic of Congo. “We lodged them in the park near running water and a forest simply because that will remind them of their usual surroundings — which is the forest.”

I suppose they work just as hard to find culturally appropriate housing for other visiting world musicians—coke dens for American boy bands, teepees for American Indians, yurts for Himalayan techno groups, etc.

[Via BoingBoing]

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This is wrong on so many levels: Nevada has authorized the public university system—two of whose schools I teach in—to train professors and enlist them as “reserve police officers” to respond in case a VA Tech-style shooting breaks out here. Now, I’ve known a few police officers in my time—it’s a full-time discipline requiring an awful lot of on-the-ground experience to be able to make the kind of snap decisions that are demanded of real security work. Security expert Bruce Schneier has pointed out that the best security comes from trained experts that recognize and act on situations that feel “hinky”—not pulling aside every dark-skinned person in the airport, but pulling aside the handful of people who act slightly “off”. Developing this kind of sense, and then recognizing what it means and how to respond to it, takes experience and a certain mindset—which the Board of Regents apparently feels can be developed next to a 4-4 courseload, committee service, office hours, research, professional development, course development, and so on. They must be drinking the Horowitz Juice—that strange brew that convinces people that full-time profs (and adjuncts like me who carry a full-time, or more than full-time, courseload) are only working 15 hours a week and have plenty of time to devote to learning to be security experts on top of teaching.

It’s an insult to both professors and police officers, especially since we all know that the training Nevada’s “reserve police officers” receive isn’t going to be anything like what I’ve described above—neither time nor money are available for anything like that. Instead, I’ll lay odds that the “extensive training” will consist of an hour or two of basic firearm safety and police procedure (e.g. how to make an arrest and detain someone until the real police arrive) and a time requirement in a firing range. In effect, this policy will provide a ready source of guns on campus, under the protection of poorly-trained non-experts who are more at home with the intricacies of 17th century poetry or the esoterica of subatomic physics than with the demands of real security.

This is offered as an alternative, of course, to real policing, real governance, which would require either passing a new tax to increase police forces (which was voted down in referendums during the last couple elections; I should note that Nevada doesn’t have a state personal or corporate income tax) or increasing the gaming tax that casinos pay and which accounts for about a third of the state’s tax revenues (which of course the casinos that own Nevada would never stand still for). In other words, the state is offering up a classic example of what Schneier calls “security theater” in place of, you know, security.

And I’ll bet it’s coming soon to your state…

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