Since we are talking about how stereotypes explain “more about the people making the statements than the people described in them” I thought it worthwhile to take some time in order to translate this map which has been floating around the Taiwanese internets.

I have no idea who the original author is, but I can promise you that my Taiwanese colleagues find this map to be both accurate and hilarious (“its funny because its so true”). It purports to show what anthropologists wish to study: how Taiwanese view the world.

I’ve been informed that some of my translations lack the local nuance which makes this map so funny. For instance, where I wrote “blonde babes” one friend implied that I should have written something more like “blonde hos” and the word I translated as Aborigine is far less polite, etc. In some cases I’ve included additional notes on the map which you will only be able to read at full resolution.

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I mentioned back in February that I was excited to be attending this year’s IUAES conference in Kunming, China. I even arranged a Savage Minds party for the event, which had 10 confirmed guests and 22 “maybes.” So I’m very sorry to hear that the Chinese government has decided that anthropologists pose a security threat during the summer Olympics (which are being held in Beijing, 1,200 miles away), and canceled the event for fear of protests.

China is on the lookout for protesters seeking to disrupt the Beijing Olympics in the name of Tibet, press freedom, or religious rights.

Now anthropologists and ethnologists, academics who study human development, appear to have been added to the list.

Without giving a specific explanation, Chinese organizers have pulled the plug on July’s world congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, the latest in a slew of events to be canceled or postponed ahead of the games in August.

“I’m not very happy with it,” Union Secretary-General Peter J.M. Nas said by telephone from his office at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. “And I hope still that they will listen to our arguments.”

Although distant from Beijing, Kunming is home to many minorities and, as the article says: “China is extremely sensitive to critiques of its policies toward minority ethnic groups and their languages, even more so since anti-government protests broke out in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa and spread to other Tibetan areas in March.”

UPDATE: A blog post from the Chronicle:

On Tuesday the association’s Chinese affiliate wrote to the group’s international executive committee, saying that it had “encountered complex difficulties hard to resolve in its preparation work recently, which makes it impossible for us to hold the congress at the time originally planned.”

The executive committee has rejected the idea of a postponement, but it has not yet received a reply from its Chinese colleagues. “We still have no concrete information about the results of our plea not to postpone the congress,” wrote the association’s president, Luis Alberto Vargas, a professor of physical anthropology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in an e-mail message to The Chronicle today.

Mr. Vargas and other members of the executive committee declined to comment further, citing the delicacy of the situation.

UPDATE: From an article in the Chronicle: “Ms. Harrison, who is a member of the association’s international executive board, said that the conference might be postponed for a full year.”

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Recently Kevin Kelly wrote a thought provoking post about how artists might function in the internet age.

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author – in other words, anyone producing works of art – needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

The problem I had with his post is the word “only.” Having relied heavily on internet fundraising to produce a documentary film I know how much work goes into getting just a few hundred donations. A recent Savage Minds poll, which involved nothing more than clicking a button, was only able to garner 400 clicks from our own true fans. Kevin Kelly later posted a letter from musician Robert Rich, making a similar point, saying that

In reality the life of a “microcelebrity” resembles more the fate of Sisyphus, whose boulder rolls back down the mountain every time he reaches the summit.

If it is that difficult for a musician or a filmmaker to secure the patronage of 1,000 true fans on the internet, what is the anthropologist to do? Is it possible to even talk about bypassing traditional research institutions and appealing directly to the internet to support our projects? I think so.

We may not be able to live off of it, but it seems to me that small scale research projects which have a strong element of public interest should be able to secure funding in this way. Just look at the success of DonorsChoose, a charity which funds projects proposed by elementary school teachers. Only projects which are able to reach their fundraising goals get funded. Otherwise you can reassign your money to another project.

Anastasia Hudgins, a lecturer and former classmate at Temple University’s department of anthropology is trying to do something similar for her summer research project. She and two undergraduate students are trying to raise $4,000 in the next two weeks to fund a research trip to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. She wants to followup on earlier research with Cambodian sex workers, to see how they have been impacted by recent laws outlawing prostitution. Like DonorsChoose, you only pay if enough people agree to fund the project before the May 15th deadline.

My personal experience tells me that this is a lot of money to raise in a short amount of time, but I’m curious to see if this works – and if it doesn’t I get to keep my $20. I can envision a DonorsChoose like site dedicated to anthropological research, where people can request small grants to replace a broken camera, buy a plane ticket, hire a translator, etc. After all, if we don’t want to depend on the military to fund our research, we need to find something better!

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These numbers should all be taken with a very large grain of salt, but with 400 people voting in our poll, it seems like there are a lot of anthropology graduate students, professors and undergrad majors out there:

The “other” category included librarians, editors, post-docs, medical professionals with anthropology training, and someone “living in sin with an anthropologist.”

And here is a map of our visitors over the past week. The top 10 cities were: Chicago, Helsinki, New York, London, Washington, Montreal, Bloomington, Portland, Arlington, and Sydney. The top 10 languages were: English, German, Traditional Chinese, French, Finnish, Italian, Norwegian, Dutch, Spanish and Japanese.

During that week we had 3,502 “unique visitors” the site, about half of whom were newcomers. Half of you are using Firefox, 35% are still using IE for some reason, and 12% are using Safari. About 70% of you connected via broadband (cable, T1, or DSL), with about 2% still using dial-up.

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Lately there has been some discussion here on Savage Minds about what an Anthropology magazine for a general audience might look like. There has also been some discussion about how the anthropological blogsphere seemingly perpetuates the hegemony of Euro-American academia. So I’m very happy to announce the first issue of AnthroVisions – a Chinese language magazine about contemporary Taiwanese anthropology, aimed at a broad audience.

In many ways it is the kind of magazine Rex imagines:

What we don’t have is a “it’s great to be an anthropologist! Here are the latest discoveries from anthropology! Learn more about how to do anthropology here!”

I’m a member of the editorial board, but the real work has mostly been done by Pei-yi Guo 郭佩宜 and Shao-hua Liu 劉紹華 at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, who deserve credit for all their hard work getting this thing off the ground. I also pleased that my Savage Minds post about the lack of ethnographies in Chinese was translated into Chinese and included [PDF] in this issue.

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Please indulge us by taking this informal reader poll. The poll will close in 7 days.

UPDATE: Sorry, I posted this when it was still supposed to be an internal draft. If you voted before the “undergrad” category was added, please vote again. And sorry about slighting independent scholars in the previous version!

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I don’t follow AAA or sub-section politics closely enough to have anything to say about the upcoming elections, but maybe our readers do? Or perhaps you are running for an elected position and would like to tell our readers why they should vote for you? Feel free to use the comments thread on this post to discuss anything related to the AAA elections. Ballots must be cast by the end of May.

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It seems that new productivity tools come out faster than we can keep up with them, but I’ve recently started using three new ones which I think are worth taking a moment of your time to investigate. All three have changed how I work:

• Jott is a service which works over the phone (sorry, US phone numbers only right now). You call the Jott phone number, record a short message, and then it is transcribed by both computers and humans before being emailed to you, one of your contacts, or various web services which interact with Jott. A recording of your original message is included, so you can figure out what went wrong when there’s a mistake. (It’s pretty accurate, but not pefect. “Ad hoc became “add a hawk” in my last Jott. They encourage you to spell out unusual names.) Even though I’m in Taiwan, my internet phone is registered in the US, so I use this all the time. Its great when I’m lying down reading a book and want to transcribe a short passage or make a note to myself.

• Evernote is a way to make sure your notes are with you wherever you are. It syncs your notes between your desktop computer (they have clients for Mac and Windows), the website, and even your mobile phone (via a Windows Mobile client, or an experimental IMAP interface for the iPhone). It also clips web pages and even recognizes handwriting, but I’m just happy to have my notes with me wherever I go. Oh, and you can send your Jotts to Evernote for note-taking bliss. (Evernote is currently in closed beta, but I have three invites left, and hopefully those three can share their invites once mine are gone.)

• Sente is a Mac OS X only application for keeping track of your references and PDF files. Nothing new there, EndNote and Bookends do the same thing just as well. In fact, Bookends was my favorite until recently, but Sente’s new “links” feature is amazingly useful so I’m giving it a try for the paper I’m writing. Download a citation from AnthroSource to Sente and it will see the link to the AnthroSource website, which it shows in the main panel. Click on the link to download the PDF file and its automatically downloaded, renamed, and attached to your reference! If there’s an ISBN number for a book you can see the Amazon and Google Books web pages for that book. And so on. Watch a short video showing this in action. (I should also mention Zotero, a free plugin for Firefox which can pull bibliographic metadata from numerous websites, organize PDFs and make bibliographies. Zotero can’t quite compete with stand-alone apps just yet, but its free and catching up quick.)
  

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In a weird followup to Spengler’s Asia Times Obama piece which Strong wrote about on Sunday, Maureen Dowd (who was mentioned in Strong’s piece) seems to have picked up the “Obama profiles Americans the way anthropologists interact with primitive peoples” meme in her latest NY Times column:

His mother got her Ph.D. in anthropology, studying the culture of Indonesia. And as Obama has courted white, blue-collar voters in “Deer Hunter” and “Rocky” country, he has often appeared to be observing the odd habits of the colorful locals, resisting as the natives try to fatten him up like a foie gras goose, sampling Pennsylvania beer in a sports bar with his tie tight, awkwardly accepting bowling shoes as a gift from Bob Casey, examining the cheese and salami at the Italian Market here as intriguing ethnic artifacts, purchasing Utz Cheese Balls at a ShopRite in East Norriton and quizzing the women working in a chocolate factory about whether they could possibly really like the sugary doodads.

Even though she acknowledges that Obama “did not grow up in cosseted circumstances,” Dowd seems to feel that Obama’s elite academic upbringing (anthropologist mom included) makes it difficult for him to connect with ordinary folks. This is strange because Obama’s success as a grassroots community activist was widely remarked upon as one of his defining features until this new meme started last week.

Personally, I’m inclined to agree with Bob Herbert, who thinks his inability to connect with rural voters in Pennsylvania is about something other than “elitism.” You know … like the fact that he’s black? But that’s what got me thinking. Maybe that’s why the anthropology meme is so powerful. It allows people like Spengler and Dowd to avoid openly addressing the racial undertones of their own commentary. It highlights his alienness without directly invoking race as a factor. If anything, it is his unusual multi-ethnic elitist upbringing. But definitely not the fact that he is black.

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Geographer Kris Olds has a great blog on Global Higher Education where, in a recent post, he points out that 50% of the US Federal Government’s R&D budget goes to Department of Defense’s research programs “dwarfing agencies like the National Science Foundation (which gets a mere 4%).”

But, as the New York Times notes, drawing upon Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments data, an increasing proportion of this is classified (hence the “black budget” moniker). Paglen’s research has delved into aspects of the research cultures associated with the highly secretive defense establishment via the use of graphic representations, especially patches (badges).

The patches analyzed in his new book titled I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagon’s Black World are worth examining, for they convey information about the practices associated with building research team cultures in a key segment of US federal government-sponsored R&D. They are also, if you watch the Colbert Report interview, seriously surreal. I must admit never having seen patches created by non-defense scientists.

The NY Times article also has a slideshow about the patches.

I’ll be sure to add patches to the budget of my next grant proposal! I’ve already picked out the patch for the Taiwan research team!

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I was actually thinking along very similar lines to CKelty [PDF] when I began looking at the literature on scale-making this week. In the world of the internet scale-making is all about scalability, about the ability to go from a website which can handle a few hundred users to one which can handle millions. Google recently launched a new service, App Engine, based around the promise that you’ll have Google behind you if your application takes off and needs to scale.

The reason I was thinking along these lines is that I recently finished Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody. Shirky argues that one of the defining features of the internet (once it has become a ubiquitous and prosaic part of our lives) is that it reduces the barriers to collaboration and collective action. But while the ridiculously easy group formation fostered by the internet makes it easy to form a group, the very fact of scale no longer serves as an index of group-strength. He gives this example from Howard Dean’s presidential campaign:

because Meetup makes it easier to gather the faithful, it confused people into thinking that they were seeing an increase in Dean support, rather than a decrease in the hassle of of organizing groups — the 2003 Dean Meetup simply brought out a much larger percentage of Dean supporters than would have shown up previously. We’ve seen this sort of effect before, as when written correspondence on letterhead stopped being a sign of a solvent company, thanks to the desktop-publishing revolution.

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Nicholas Kristof speaks to evolutionary psychologists and decides that misogyny doesn’t exist because there is no evolutionary motive for hatred, only a “desire to control them and impregnate them, so as to pass on one’s genes.”

The idea that something can’t exist because there is no convenient evolutionary just-so story for it is absurd. Kristof should read some Stephen Jay Gould:

Gould’s favorite example is the human chin, whose presence is an incidental consequence of the differential growth rate of two bones in the lower jaw. The dentary bone which carries the teeth elongates more slowly than the jawbone itself, so the chin juts out. In our ape-like ancestors the jawbone grows more slowly so no chin develops. Of course one can always try to invent a story about why having a chin confers more reproductive potential, but that is a parlor game, not science.

If humans can have chins, they can also have misogyny. Maybe even misogynists with chins.

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Thanks to everyone who responded to my last post. In response to my queries, I was able to track down some excellent overviews of the human geography literature where the keyword to search for is “politics of scale.” (See especially here and here.)

In that post I failed to link to Rex’s piece from last year, where he wrote:

In fact most of what we anthropologists talk about when we talk about ‘scale making’ is not an investigation of regional or global processes. We do not attempt to discern how many places we will have to travel to to examine these processes. Instead we talk about how people in the localities that we do our fieldwork ‘make scale’.

Having spent the better part of the last few days going over this material, I better understand the distinction Rex was making. Indeed, it seems that the way the term is used by human geographers often suffers from assuming that scale is an ontological category. Rex is more interested in looking at “the imputation of agency to collective subjects versus individual ones.” And I am more interested in the contested ideologies of scale which define the “local” in Taiwan in relation to the Austronesian linguistic sphere versus the Chinese one. Both of these projects relate to the making of scale through social action as opposed to the operation of individuals at pre-defined levels of scale.

However, having already spent some time going over the literature on scale within human geography, I think it would be a mistake to either abandon the term entirely (as Rex seems to suggest) or to ignore its genealogy outside of anthropology (as Tsing chooses to do). As Richard Howitt’s excellent review shows us, we have a lot to learn from the various debates over the use of the term within that discipline. For instance, too great an emphasis on process and human agency might blind us to the very real constraints on scale created by existing corporate, legal, and political institutions. In his sections on “the idea of scale” and “empirical studies of scale” Howitt shows how geographers have struggled with social-constructionist approaches to the concept of scale in ways which seem to anticipate some of the issues anthropologists have tackled in thinking about these issues.

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Two years ago Savage Minds, together with our readers, spent the summer reading Anna Tsing’s book Friction. Although I was somewhat underwhelmed by the book at the time, I have to admit that certain ideas have crawled in my ear and wrapped themselves around my cerebral cortex like a ceti eel. Specifically the notion of “scale making” discourses. At the time I criticized her use of the term for emphasizing vertical relationships over horizontal networks, but for various reasons I won’t go into now, the concept of scale is very useful for thinking about my current research with indigenous communities in India and Taiwan. For this reason I decided to investigate further.

Tsing is not particularly forthcoming about the genealogy of the term , but I’ve recently discovered that Google Scholar is an excellent way to identify the most widely cited source for a particular academic keyword. A search for ”’scale making’ globalization” yielded up two very useful essays. Both from 2000: The first is Sallie Marston’s “The social construction of scale” (Sage subscription or purchase required). And the second is an article by Tsing herself, entitled “The global situation” (Scribd iPaper link).

I’ll discuss Tsing first. I realize I must be one of the few idiots who hasn’t already read this piece – so I apologize to all our erudite readers for whom this reference is obviousness itself. But I want to say how much I loved this article. It is clear, insightful, and critical. It is especially critical of the triumphalist and “charismatic” discourses of globalization which so prevailed in 90s anthropology. It made me a Tsing fan in a way that Friction had not. But while the article elaborates her theory of “scale-making” it still doesn’t give us much of a sense of the genealogy of the term.

For that, I had to turn to Sallie Marston’s workmanlike piece. Marston, a human geographer, is well situated to give us this genealogy since it seems to have first caught on in English within that discipline. She traces it back to the work of Henri Lefebvre (a nice article on Lefebvre by Stanley Aronowitz can be downloaded here) and places special emphasis on the work of Neil Brenner (lots of downloads available there) and Peter Taylor (alas, no downloads). (Taylor is the only name from this article which appears in Tsing’s bibliography from the same year.)

In the last decade it seems that the term has really taken off – and has even begun to be criticized for its various inadequacies. I’m still exploring this literature and trying to figure out how to make use of it in my own work. I’m sure our readers will berate me for overlooking some obvious and important sources in my quest to trace the origins of this particular academic meme – and I look forward to it!

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Jen Cardew should be congratulated on putting together an incredible operation to podcast the 2008 conference of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA). The podcasts are not up yet, but they will be made available on their website over the next few months.

The AAA is also getting into the podcasting game, with their second podcast. The AAA is to be congratulated for embarking on this bold new venture, and for finding a way to translate the jam-packed excitement of an inter-office memo onto your iPod. This week’s podcast starts with the sound of a microphone being shuffled around and is followed with the following:

As a reminder to our listeners, these biweekly podcasts are intended to keep our members as well as the wider public informed about some of the recent developments within the AAA and the discipline of anthropology as a whole. In addition to highlighting contributions the association and its members have made to the public discourse these podcasts will also detail the latest issues…

I am eagerly awaiting the remixed version.

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