Simpson is focused on institutional review more than ethical guidelines, but since one exists largely to facilitate the other, it is worth looking at the problems Simpson argues emerge within the review process:

At the outset, there is a serious disjunction between the way in which research is thought about in the context of ethical review and the way in which ethnographic research unfolds according to its own temporality and logic: that is, following the contours of social life as these are revealed by the persons with whom one engages in the field.

I find particularly compelling his argument that the anthropological subject does not easily fit the notion of a “human subject” presumed by medical ethics (whether medical subjects do or not is another question):

However, whilst anthropologists engage with subjects who are indeed human, they would not normally think of themselves as studying ‘human subjects’ in the medical sense, or as part of the legacy of experimentation described above. The vocabulary of subjectivation used by anthropologists is far richer and ranges through informants, interlocutors, consociates, collaborators, consultants. and friends. All of these suggest a relationship with a person for which the reduction to a corporeal ethics is likely to be at odds. Fundamentally, selfhood is seen as a situationally defined project, rather than one to be defined essentially. In this vein, Battaglia has argued for an ‘ethics of the open subject’ and, drawing on Haraway, takes a position which questions the ‘skin-bound individual as the natural boundary of the total person’ (1999: 135). In this approach, there is a profound acknowledgement of the relationality of the human subject. Furthermore, to talk of the ‘field’ is to talk of an entity which is itself relational and not merely spatial. The anthropologist, to a greater or lesser extent, becomes part of this field as a moral agent who is subject to evaluation by those engaged with when in the ‘field’. Subjects, by means of their own processes of counter-subjectivation, locate the researcher in terms of motive, intent, and the level of threat or danger that his or her presence brings, now and in the future (Carrithers 2005; Simpson 2005).

In conclusion he suggests that there are a series of three ethical moments that emerge throughout the research process. This section was a bit confusing for me at first, but then I realized that it was only in the current model that these three moments exist as distinct points in time. Simpson’s critique is actually to challenge the notion that the planning, fieldwork, and writing stages of ethnography have clearly delineated ethical moments. With regard to ethical review at the start of the fieldwork process, Simpson emphasizes that ethical choices are an iterative process and that facing them requires a recognition of the “skill of the ethnographer as a moral being capable of reflexive awareness and an anticipation of the consequences of action and inaction.” Ethical dilemmas cannot be headed off at the outset by fiat.

With regard to the second moment, that of fieldwork, Simpson argues that “the possibilities for communication before, during, and after fieldwork are radically altering foundational tropes such as ‘field’, ‘immersion’, and ‘informant.’” As such, he sees ethics as something that should be the basis of continual dialog throughout the research process and advocates a process whereby ethnographers engage in an ongoing discussion of ethical issues with mentors rather than a one-time review.

The third moment is the writing process:

Confronted with this large and complex cloth, decisions must be made (alone or in consultation with informants) regarding what cuts to make: what goes into the text and what is to be left out; who gets named and who doesn’t; what it is legitimate to expose on ethical grounds and what must be concealed on ethical grounds. This is the moment at which an anthropologist’s judgements about just what is the appropriate relationship between informants, truths, and publics is laid open to challenge. Yet, just as fieldwork itself was once a ‘black box’, the ethics and politics of selection that underpin the writing of ethnography are rarely made explicit.

This last part is of particular interest to me, as I am currently writing a paper about how the process of collaborating on Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir! led to certain topics being left out of the film at the request of the community. In doing so, I argue that these ethical decisions can only be understood with the benefit of a historical and ethnographic analysis of the community (which I then proceed to provide in the paper). Thus an understanding of the ethical issues emerged as the result of the ethnographic process, not as something prior to it, although a commitment to a collaborative ethnographic process allowed for these issues to emerge in the first place.

Finally, to Simpsons argument that ethics are not something which can be followed programmatically, but a “skill of the ethnographer as a moral being” I would add that skill an ethnographer is also necessary. Creating a multivocal text (visual or written) is not easy and requires a degree of skill and training. A deep knowledge of the genre and the “tricks of the trade” is necessary to know how to handle ethical dilemmas in an elegant way rather than simply shying away from difficult topics. It is perhaps this, more than anything, which makes me wary of a formulaic review process, as I worry that they leave little room for creative solutions to ethical problems, preferring instead bureaucratic ones.

UPDATE: Edited for clarity.

As an up and coming academic, I’m willing to put my career on the line and promise to only publish in open access journals. Putting my career on the line is a very real threat, since many departments look for publications in key (generally not open access) journals such as American Anthropologist when hiring. However, I’m confident that the people who will be evaluating me will overlook those issues if they understand why I made this choice, and will evaluate my work on its own merits and not on the journal that publishes it.

I wish I could do the same, but unfortunately I can’t and I wish to share the reason why. The fact is that in much of the world (and in the US as well) there has been a move towards quantification in determining academic promotion and tenure. Taiwan, where I live and work, is has been particularly bad in this regard, as they struggle to raise the number of Taiwanese universities listed in international university rankings.

Taiwan does not have tenure, but one has a series of mandatory reviews as one proceeds from Assistant to Associate to Full Professor. The guidelines for these reviews are mandated in a very top-down way from the Ministry of Education (MoE) and there is little leeway in how these rules are interpreted at the university level. (One of the legacies of the martial law period in Taiwan is that the personnel office reports directly to the MoE, not the university president.) However, one way in which universities do vary with the official rules is in the informal requirement that professors have a minimum number of publications in SSCI listed journals (or SCI for the sciences). Universities thus compete to make the official rules stricter rather than more flexible.

On a side note, these requirements are interesting because SSCI journals are mostly in English, so Taiwan has created a separate Chinese-language TSSCI list, but they are counted less than the SSCI journals (even though they are often harder to get published in). Taiwan is somewhat unique in having the TSSCI list—universities in Hong Kong and Singapore focus more on SSCI. (Taiwanese academic Albert Tzeng has done some research on this.)

In any case, the problem I face is that I already struggle under the burden that my documentary filmmaking garners me zero points under this quantitative regime. Even book chapters count for very little here. And if the top journals in your field are not SSCI, tough luck. Moreover I don’t know of any SSCI listed Open Access journals in anthropology. I know there are some in other fields, but none that I know of in anthropology. My hope is that HAU will eventually earn this distinction, but that will take some time. Till then, I’m afraid I can’t follow Jeremey’s brave example. To keep my job I have to strive to publish a certain minimum of articles in SSCI publications, after which I will have the freedom to publish elsewhere if I please. I’m sharing this so that OA advocates can be more aware of some of the constraints scholars in other countries might face in submitting work to their journals.

We’ve tried to explain why it is important.

We’ve written a lot about it.

But nothing seems to have changed.

What can we do to make anthropologists care about open access? To make them care what the AAA says about open access?

[This is an open thread for constructive suggestions about how mobilize for open access, not a place to rehash old debates about the merits of open access. Thanks!]

And in the last week, a relatively new blog in anthropology — Savage Minds — has set off a huge debate over the book. Two of the eight people who lead Savage Minds posted their objections to the book, and things have taken off from there, with several prominent blogs in the social sciences picking up the debate, and adding to it. Hundreds of scholars are posting and cross-posting in an unusually intense and broad debate for a book that has been out for eight years.

A collection of links related to the discussion was posted here on Savage Minds as well. But the discussion did not end there. It is for that reason that I thought it might be a good time to highlight how the discussion continued after 2005. Although it got less attention, we subsequently had Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington as our very first guest bloggers (establishing a long running tradition on this blog). They drew from their book Yali’s Question to write a series of posts bringing significant expertise and nuance to the questions which had been raised about Diamond’s book. They were later interviewed for a NY Times piece about Diamond’s new book, Collapse.In 2006 we had a few posts on Collapse, but not anything significant. My own posts on Collapse largely consisted of relaying emails others had sent me, while Rex linked to this review article. In 2010, however, Rex returned to Collapse with an in-depth blog post about the edited volume Questioning Collapse.

Diamond’s 2008 New Yorker piece, “Vengeance Is Ours: What Can Tribal Societies Tell Us About Our Need To Get Even” led to a number of Savage Minds posts. It started off with this post by Rex:

At root, the problem — and it is not a fatal flaw, just a problem — with Diamond’s article is that it teaches us that Other Ways Of Life Have Something To Offer Us, but the only way it can do so is by making Papua New Guineans appear more Other to us than they really are.

[Apologies for the awful formatting on some of these older posts, we used to use a Markdown syntax plugin on our site, but we removed it when it became apparent it was slowing down the site. As a result, many of Rex's older posts are now unformatted.]

Then came Rhonda Shearer’s piece “Jared Diamond’s Factual Collapse:
New Yorker Mag’s Papua New Guinea Revenge Tale Untrue, Tribal Members Angry, Want Justice” which Rex wrote about here, and a letter from Mako John Kuwimb, one of the people named in the lawsuit. Rex later complained that the problem with Diamond was that “his piece ran under the banner ‘annals of anthropology’” thus sending an “off-brand message to our audience.” Then, in conjunction with Stinky Journalism (now iMedia Ethics), a series of posts were published on Diamond’s “vengeance” article and the Daniel Wemp affair: Nancy Sullivan, Rex, Andrew Mack, Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Rex again, and yet again. The last post links to this article which Rex says is “the lengthiest, most competent, and most incisive account of the short-comings of Diamond’s article.”

In looking back on all of this, I feel that the NY Times article on Collapse got to the heart of the problem anthropologists have talking to those outside of the discipline:

For the anthropologists, the exceptions were more important than the rules. Instead of seeking overarching laws, the call was to “contextualize,” “complexify,” “relativize,” “particularize” and even “problematize,” a word that in their dialect was given an oddly positive spin.

So it is interesting that the very last blogger on Savage Minds to discuss Jared Diamond was David Graeber, who asked “Can We Still Write Big Question Sorts of Books?” Unfortunately, he then became a media darling for having done just that, and never had time to follow up on his initial post.

So there you have it. If nothing else, Jared Diamond has given us all a lot to talk about.

At these parties, people were not necessarily dressed, and I defy you to tell the difference between a naked prostitute and any other naked woman.

Gayle Rubin, in her famous essay “The Traffic in Women”

Marx once asked: “What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is as good as the other. A Negro is a Negro. He only becomes a slave in certain relations. A cotton spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It becomes capital only in certain relations. Torn from these relationships it is no more capital than gold in itself is money or sugar is the price of sugar.” One might paraphrase: What is a domesticated woman? A female of the species. The one explanation is as good as the other. A woman is a woman. She only becomes a domestic, a wife, a chattel, a playboy bunny, a prostitute, or a human dictaphone in certain relations.

[h/t to Aaron Bady]

Before you do anything else, you should answer the following question: why are you are going to graduate school in anthropology?

If the answer is that you want an academic career in anthropology, you might think twice about graduate school. I don’t have any statistics to back this up, but I think the percentage of current anthropology Ph.D.s who are likely to find tenure track jobs in an anthropology department isn’t much better than the percentage of people in college rock bands who go on to sign deals with major record labels. If rock ‘n roll is in your veins, nobody is going to dissuade you from trying to make a career of it, and if you feel the same way about anthropology I say “Go for it!” Otherwise, I’d suggest something else.

Of course, even within academia there are a range of choices. If signing a tenure track contract at Chicago is the pinnacle of the academic job market there are lots of decent options further down the slope: including teaching in another field or an interdisciplinary department (I’m in a program on “ethnic relations and culture”), teaching at a community college, or teaching outside of the U.S., etc. But even if you do get a job, know that academia almost everywhere is under attack from a range of neoliberal policies and budgetary cutbacks, so be ready for a rough ride.

Some of you might be interested in applied careers. Here I think there are a lot more options and I would be much more encouraging. There is a real demand for people with anthropology degrees in a variety of careers. The AAA has a page listing some of them, and I like this list from the counseling centre at the University of Manitoba, but I think the real list is nearly infinite. Basically anything you can do without an anthropology degree can be done better with an anthropology degree. Or at least I think so, and so (it seems) do many employers.

Knowing the answer to the first question will affect what you do next. I won’t spell out all the possible permutations, but suffice to say that if you want a job at one of the top anthropology programs in the US, you would be best off attending such a program. Sure, someone from a third tier university still has a shot at getting a job a the top programs, but know that the odds are stacked against you. Partially because the top universities are more likely to give you the funding, support, and training necessary to do top-quality work and partially because of the sometimes incestuous nature of the discipline. Still, there are many good reasons you might not simply choose a university based on its ranking. For instance, there might be supporting programs which you might wish to make use of at another university, such as a good film school, or medical school, or linguistics program, etc. This could be especially useful for those going into more applied programs.

One thing I tell international students looking to go to the US is that they are best off applying for a Ph.D. program. Many countries more clearly demarcate the M.A. and Ph.D. and so it is good to know that these programs are likely to be combined in the U.S. Rather than writing an M.A. thesis, you will be required to take the same courses as M.A. students and will receive your M.A. upon completion of your qualifying examinations (and/or submission of your dissertation research proposal). As such, it doesn’t really make sense to apply for an M.A. and doing so will often disqualify you from funding opportunities.

Now we get to the hard part. How to pick the program which is right for you? My response to this question is that if you don’t already know the answer you should give yourself six months to a year to do research on graduate programs. I know it sounds like a long time, but the truth is that it is a very difficult question and researching the answer requires doing a lot of reading. That’s because I think you are best off researching professors, not programs [but see note #1 below]. You need to find people who are doing work that you like, that excites you, that makes you want to give up seven to nine years of your life doing something similar. And the time will be well spent because knowing the answer to this question will not only help you pick good a graduate school, it will also help you prepare your application, making it more likely that you will be accepted to the program of your choice.

Of course, knowing you like the work of a particular professor doesn’t necessarily answer the question of which graduate program you should attend. Because the current job market is such a mess someone who does great work might be unemployed or might be teaching somewhere other than in a graduate program in anthropology. But you can write to that person and ask for advice. Perhaps you could study with their teacher, or one of their classmates, who are at a university better suited to your needs. It also sometimes happens that great programs get split up and the professors scatter to a number of other universities. To sort all this out you need to become a scholar of the recent history of academic anthropology. You should also attend AAA meetings and try to talk your way into some of the various parties being held by the graduate programs you are interested in (often in their hotel rooms after the meetings are over), or perhaps just visit the school and try to talk with some of the graduate students. The point is that if you aren’t simply choosing programs based on the name of the university, it is a difficult choice and requires some careful research. Take the time and do it right.

Finally, everyone should have a “Plan B” (and even “C”). It is sometimes possible to transfer to your first choice program after spending a year or two somewhere else. It is also possible that your second choice turns out to be better than you thought. But also be ready to do something else if a career in anthropology doesn’t turn out the way you wanted. A number of my friends dropped out of academia and while fellow academics treated this as a kind of death, they themselves seem much happier as a result. Sure, they miss it sometimes, but then they come to their senses.

NOTES:

1. Since I recommended choosing a gradate program based on how much you like the work being done by individual professors, I should add a word of warning: professors can get sick, they can loose their jobs, and they can move to other universities. While finding an individual professor is a good way to start the job hunt, be wary of picking a program because of just one faculty member. Best if there are a couple of professors you would be willing to work with at the same university. You are going to have to take courses with the rest of the faculty anyway, so you’d better like them.

Scanning

I spend too much time doing this. The dopamine hit one gets from finding something new is immediate and gratifying. I have my email, Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. each of which is sending me a steady stream of new links. (Follow our SavageMinds Twitter feed or Facebook account for the results of this time-wasting activity.) I check all of them throughout the day. Especially Twitter.

One of my favorite ways to browse all this in one place (excluding Google+ for now, but I’m sure that will change) is Flipboard for iOS. Google tried to buy Flipboard and when they failed made their own app called Currents. Currently Flipboard is still way ahead of the Google, as well as other competitors like Pulse, Zite, etc. (Here is a post from Lifehacker reviewing several of the options.)

To make the best use of Flipboard, you want to group your favorite Twitter sources into “lists” so that each list can have it’s own magazine on Flipboard. I haven’t been doing a great job of updating my various lists, but you can see mine here (or post your own in the comments.) You can do the same thing with Google Reader folders and Facebook “Friends Lists.”

But if you are in scanning mode, what do you do when you find something interesting to read? There are now a number of “read later” services, but my favorite is still Instapaper which gives you a nicely formatted offline reading experience on your smart phone or Kindle. Flipboard and many other apps have Instapaper support built-in. But this doesn’t work for everything. What if someone links to a book? Or a movie? Or an article which doesn’t work in Instapaper? Or perhaps it is just a website you want to save for later?

In that case, my favorite option is the social bookmarking service Pinboard.in. Pinboard can be set to archive your Twitter account and even automatically bookmark every link in your Twitter feed. But I prefer more selective control. For that there is an option to only bookmark “starred” tweets. This means that as I read Twitter I can “favorite” something and know it will be bookmarked in Pinboard. I can then return later and process the links accordingly. I will usually add books to my Amazon wishlist, movies to my RottenTomatoes “want to see” list, and articles to my Zotero list.

Browsing

Browsing is a more engaged and purposeful type of scanning. This is what I do when I’m doing research. There are really a couple of different activities I might be engaged in when I’m browsing. I might be actively searching online, in which case I’ll add finds to my Amazon wish list or Zotero, or perhaps save a website to Evernote (Pinboard can also archive websites offline, but I prefer Evernote because I can also save PDFs, and I can select which part of a webpage I wish to archive – it also works well on iOS.) I also get various TOC and Google Scholar Search alerts via email. But here I want to focus on another type of browsing which is the process of going through actual texts and figuring out what you want to do with them.

I used to use Sente for this, but increasingly I find it easier to simply save PDFs in a folder in my Dropbox account which seamlessly syncs with my favorite PDF reading application: GoodReader. It is much easier to sit on the couch with my iPad and quickly scan these PDFs than it is to do at my desktop. The articles I must read go in a “must read” folder. For books, I download sample book chapters to Kindle, and use the Kindle iPad app in the same way. The books I decide to read I then buy from Amazon. If the book isn’t available on Amazon (or anywhere else), I will scan the book in Google Books if I can, or sometimes the publisher has a sample chapter.

Increasingly many books are available online in PDF even if the publisher doesn’t officially make them available as texts. This happened with the music industry earlier, and I think academic publishers would do well to learn from the past by making their books available via legitimate services like Amazon and Apple. One interesting new option is 1dollarscan which will scan your books at a rate of $1 for 100 pages. The downside is that (for copyright reasons) they will then pulp the book after scanning it for you. For a cheap PDF of a book not currently available, one could purchase a cheap used copy online and send it to 1dollarscan. I haven’t tried this, but you might even be able to have the book sent to them directly.

Devouring

So you’ve finally got your articles in Instapaper, Kindle, and/or GoodReader and want to sit down with a cup of tea and engage in some more careful reading. Things still aren’t that simple. What if you want to take notes? While printed texts can all be dealt with in the same way: a highlighter and/or a pencil, electronic texts have different restrictions depending on the software and publisher. Instapaper lets you save articles you like directly to Evernote. GoodReader lets you highlight text and then email a summary of your highlights, which you can send to Evernote via your private Evernote email address. A more complicated scenario is when you have a PDF that doesn’t have text which can be selected. Then you either need to run it through OCR software on your computer, or use GoodReader’s other annotation tools which let you draw over the PDF. (I usually use the “box” tool and simply draw a box around the text I am interested in.) The annotated PDF can then be sent to Evernote, which will do it’s own OCR, allowing you to search the full-text of the PDF (assuming you have a “pro” account).

Kindle is more difficult. Kindle lets you make highlights (read this tutorial), but then you need to go to the webpage and copy those annotations back to your computer. There is no way to simply copy or email these annotations from the Kindle app. Because some publishers restrict how many annotations you are allowed to make on a single book, you might need to backup and delete some of your annotations before you can make additional highlights. For the tech savvy, there are also ways to crack the Kindle DRM and save the book you’ve bought as a PDF in GoodReader, where you will be free of such restrictions.

As I mentioned above, it is very easy to find oneself spending far too much time “scanning” and “browsing” and not nearly enough time actually “devouring” the books and articles that we have already decided to read. It is too easy to be distracted by the constant stream of incoming distractions. Research shows we are far worse at getting back to concentrating on the task at hand than we think we are. My solution for this has been to adopt the Pomodoro approach. This means you set a timer for 20 to 25 minutes during which you don’t do anything except read. When I started doing this I found myself itching to check Twitter after about ten minutes. Slowly, using this approach, I’ve re-trained myself to go for longer without seeking distractions. You then “reward” yourself with 5-10 min of scanning before doing another “Pomodoro.” I personally found Pomodoropro to be the best Pomodoro app for iOS. They don’t yet have an iPad version, but the iPhone version works just fine on the iPad.

That’s it for now. A year ago I wrote a similar post about “going paperless” but a lot has changed in a year. I imagine next year this will all look hopelessly out of date. If you have your own suggestions, or a more Android friendly version of some of the iOS apps I listed above, feel free to share them in the comments.

The first lesson is that it takes a certain amount of repetition for a point to sink in. This is normal in spoken discourse, but it is useful in writing as well. It isn’t just repetition: successful academic writers often seem to be able to spin endless variations on the same theme. This not only helps bolster their argument, it also makes their point clearer by presenting it in a variety of different ways.

Secondly, and I think more importantly, many junior scholars undervalue their own insights. They tentatively make a theoretical point, find lots and lots of citations to bolster that argument, and then rush on to discuss the data. They feel safe with data, and are eager to establish the validity of their theoretical insights. An established scholar, on the other hand, sees the theoretical point as a rich vein to be mined for all it’s worth. While the initial case study may need exhaustive documentation, additional iterations of the main point can be made with less evidence, and in some cases can be purely speculative. This also helps attract other scholars to cite the work, providing them as it does with potential avenues for new research.

These two styles of writing might be thought of as “mining” vs. “harvesting.” Where the established scholar doesn’t let go of an idea till every last bit of ore has been extracted from it, the junior scholar is busy harvesting citations to bolster a single insight. I think this explains why experienced scholars seem to cite much less frequently. If you are making the same point over and over again, you don’t really need to provide additional citations for each new iteration of the central theme. The junior scholar, on the other hand, lacks the confidence to push too hard on any given idea, worried perhaps that it might fail to hold up under too much scrutiny. Instead, they hide it under a pile of citations, hope to deflect, rather than draw attention to their own ideas.

When I examine my own motivations for avoiding repetition and using lots of citations, I don’t see the kinds of motivations I’ve just attributed to other junior scholars. I tell myself that I just like to “show my work” by highlighting the scholarship upon which my own ideas are built. My frustration with established scholars is that they so often feel no need to do so. Similarly, as a very careful reader, I often find myself skimming over work which is overly repetitive, and I don’t wish to bore my readers in the same way. This is how I used to think about it. Now, however, I’m less certain. I think there are some good reasons to do more mining and less harvesting. They say you should “dress like the job you want to have.” Since most established anthropologists dress so badly I’m not sure that is good advice. But maybe writing like an established scholar is not such a bad idea…

Within a few weeks #occupyharvard and #occupyberkeley made the news. Especially notable was the use of violence against peaceful protesters at Berkeley. Among them was former poet laureate of the United States, Robert Hass, who wrote:

“Whose university?” the students had chanted. Well, it is theirs, and it ought to be everyone else’s in California. It also belongs to the future, and to the dead who paid taxes to build one of the greatest systems of public education in the world.

That question, “Whose university?” came to the fore again at #Occupy UC Davis, where,

Without any provocation whatsoever, other than the bodies of these students sitting where they were on the ground, with their arms linked, police pepper-sprayed students. Students remained on the ground, now writhing in pain, with their arms linked.

That’s from this courageous open letter from an untenured assistant English professor to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi. Nathan Brown’s letter is worth reading in full, so I won’t excerpt it here. Also worth watching in full, is the video of the students getting pepper sprayed and then chasing the police off campus, as well as a silent protest the following night.

There was even solidarity for the #occupy movement at the AAA, where there was an”Occupy AAA General Assembly” as well as an “Accessible Anthropological Assembly”. Not having been there, I look forward to full reports from those who were.

I imagine that the #occupy movement will grow even larger in response to the brutal attempts to suppress it. Feel free to treat the comments here as a second open thread on the occupy movement in academia. I’d be particularly interested in hearing from campuses which haven’t gotten as much news, and from anthropology students who have been involved with these movements.

Let’s start with two of the more famous songs which have been given misheard Chinese lyrics. The first is “Golimar” from the Telugu movie “Donga“:

To give you a sense of how this goes, the word “golimar” is translated as “幹你媽“ which is pronounced “gan ni ma” and literally means “fuck your mother.” The rest isn’t much more sophisticated than that.

Just to show how popular this song is in Taiwan, remember our guest post by Futuru Tsai about traditional Amis song and dance? Well, here’s footage I took of Futuru and his adopted Amis age set performing Golimar during last year’s Amis Harvest Festival:

(I highly recommend Futuru’s film “Amis Hip Hop” about the role of contemporary song and dance in the festival.)

A second, equally popular video for misheard lyrics is Daler Mehndi’s Tunak Tunak Tun, which is a popular internet meme in it’s own right.

OK. Enough context. Here’s the music video I wanted to talk about. I’ll let you watch it first:

What I like about this video is that it is buffalaxing in reverse. The song was written, in part, with the kind of fake lyrics one would come to expect from a buffalaxed movie, except those are actually the original lyrics of the song. Although, as a mainstream song the lyrics are not dirty, they are often just nonsensical (represented in the subtitles with the use of simplified and gibberish characters). Even better, the video comes with Hindi subtitles which I’ve been told look as if the original song lyrics were run through Google Translate.

Finally, a word about Bollywood movies in Taiwan. Unlike Indonesians or Russians, Taiwanese don’t watch Bollywood. Most of my students here would only have seen Bollywood movie songs as buffalaxed YouTube videos. However, there is one notable exception. Everyone I know in Taiwan and, as far as I can tell, the rest of East Asia as well, seems to have seen the comedy “3 Idiots.” I think the criticism of the education system in that film is felt even more strongly in East Asia than it is in India.

• Why We Protest
• David Graeber: anthropologist, anarchist, financial analyst*
• Anthropology and Occupy Wall Street
• “Similar to the Third World debt crisis” – David Graeber on ‘Occupy Wall Street’

As many of these posts make a lot of David Graeber’s contribution, I also recommend reading Aaron Bady’s post “Intellectual Roots of Wall St. Protest Lie in Academe” where Graeber responds to the attempts by the Chronicle of Higher Education to paint him as a “leader” of a leaderless movement.

Anyway, reading all this I was thinking back to how important universities were to the protest movements of the 60s, and the few “teach ins” I attended as an observer during the buildup to the US invasion of Afghanistan, and I was wondering if there weren’t more stories to be told here? What’s happening on college campuses in the US? Are there teach ins about economic inequality? Is #OWS affecting class discussion? Research topics? Campus politics? Consider this an open thread on the links between #OWS and academia.

UPDATES:

• David Graeber: On Playing By The Rules – The Strange Success Of #OccupyWallStreet
• Anthropology, Moral Optimism, and Capitalism: A Four-Field Manifesto
• Preamble to an Ethnography of the People’s Mic

What attention it has gotten has largely been positive, such as this glowing review in CounterPunch, or this blog post by Louis Proyect. A review in VAR was slightly more critical, but not by much. Still, the following comment from Stephen Broomer’s review gets to the heart of the matter:

Padilha’s contribution to this debate is confined within the limits of documentary form. Secrets of the Tribe is a narrative-driven documentary, and as such it privileges dramatic contrast over the reinforcement of facts or proof.

Indeed, I would go much further. The film struck me as little more than tabloid journalism, reveling in salacious scandals, academic cat fights, and conspiracy theories in the name of discussing research ethics and scientific methodology. It reminded me of one of those local news stories where a reporter exclaims how shocked he is to discover that there is prostitution in his city while the camera indulges in digitally blurred closeups of exposed female flesh.

In comparing this film to tabloid journalism I don’t mean to impute Padilha’s motives. Padilha is clearly someone who cares deeply about Brazil’s indigenous population. He also deserves credit for actually interviewing Yanomami for the film. But Padilha is not an anthropologist. As one review put it: “A student of math and physics, Padilha turned to filmmaking after a brief, unsatisfying career in banking.” (He is most famous for “Bus 174″ about a hijacked bus in Rio.) For this reason he seems unable to meaningfully engage with contemporary debates about fieldwork practices or the nature of anthropological research.

I don’t really know which bothered me more: the lumping together of pedophilia accusations against Jacques Lizot and Kenneth Good with Patrick Tierney’s accusations against James Neel and Napoleon Chagnon, the fact that the film completely ignored Tim Asch even as it relies extensively on his footage, or the way it presented anthropological epistemology as a simplistic choice between the hard-science of sociobiology on the one hand and mushy-headed cultural relativism on the other.

What really upsets me is that these are serious issues, which warrant serious discussion. By simplifying the scientific debates and lumping them together with pedophilia accusations, the film missed a unique opportunity to make an important contribution to the popular understanding of anthropology. Too bad.

When talking to students about their future I always suggest they make a 5 year plan. Not because of any nostalgia for Soviet-era policy making (although I do like their posters), but because it seems to me to be about the farthest ahead one can reasonably make long-term plans. Sort of like how weather reports stop being useful once they go beyond the next three days. Life is just too random to think about what we’ll be doing ten years from now. But I think five years is reasonable.

I suggest to students that they start with where they want to be in five years and work backwards. This is useful because it adds and element of long-term planning beyond the question of what they want to do next. For instance, taking a year off to travel might be a great idea after college, but if they want to be completing an MA in five years time, it would be good to be researching MA programs while they are on that year off, maybe even sending off an application or two. And for Ph.D. students, it helps them think about all the things they might need to do before they finish their Ph.D. If they want to be writing up in 5 years, then they need to take their qualifying exams, write their proposal, do their fieldwork, etc.

Five years just seems to put these things in perspective. It may not be so important if you are a tenured professor and all that matters is getting the next book, film, journal article out year-by-year, but I think it is a great tool for those who are planning to embark on a new stage in life. If you’ve just had kids in about five years you’ll be thinking about schools: where do you want to live? If you just finished graduate school, you’ll probably only be able to work as an adjunct for so long: do really want to stick it out on the academic job market beyond that point? And if you are a junior professor thinking of tenure: will you have a book done in time?

It can be stressful thinking of these questions, which is why we mostly avoid them. One of the main benefits of a five year plan is forcing yourself to think through the tough questions that need to be asked about your future. As to whether or not you end up sticking to your plan, for me that’s much less important. In a couple of years you can make a new plan…

There are a couple of issues dominating the discussion. The first is whether the protesters who supported Hazare are dupes of right-wing parties — a claim which echoes similar debates about the Tea Party Movement in the US? The second is whether the bill being proposed by Hazare will make India more democratic by cutting down on corruption, or less democratic by creating a government body with too much power over elected representatives of the people? And the third issue is whether or not ridding the nation of corruption will make for a more just society, or whether corruption offers the disenfranchised important wiggle-room in dealing with state power, wiggle-room usually preserved for the elite?

I don’t have much insight into the first two questions, although I’ll admit that my sympathies usually lie with writers like Arundhati Roy who has been very critical of Hazare and his supporters. I do, however, have some small insight into the issue of corruption in India, having recently completed a documentary film in which corruption was one of the central themes. My wife, Shashwati Talukdar, and I have spent the past five years making frequent trips to an urban ghetto in Ahmedabad, in Western India, where we filmed a troupe of young actors who use street theater to protest against police brutality and corruption. I have also published two academic articles about the history and ethnography of the community.

The Chhara are one of 198 communities throughout India, an estimated 60 million people in India today, who were labeled “born criminals” by the British under the “Criminal Tribes Act,” first passed in 1871. Even though the act was abolished, the stigma of criminality still remains, and it is difficult for the Chhara to find legitimate work. As a result, many turn to brewing liquor, which is illegal in the dry state of Gujarat. It is this home-brewed liquor that is the focus of much of the day-to-day corruption which pervades the community. The police turn a blind eye to the strong-smelling alcohol stills bubbling away in nearly two thirds of the homes, while simultaneously taking a cut of the profits in the form of bribes. Costumers come to Chharanagar from all over the city to get a drink.

While this seems like a win-win situation, one which might support the claim by some of the Kafila bloggers that corruption is empowering for the poor, the truth is both darker and more complicated. In fact, both the police and the Chhara are trapped in a vicious circle with no way of getting out. The police refused to be interviewed for the film, so we didn’t get tell their story as fully as we would have liked, but we’ve been able to piece together bits and pieces over the years.

In short, applicants to the police force have to pay bribes to get into the police academy, but they can’t afford the bribes, so they have to borrow the money at exorbitant rates from money-lenders. To pay off the interest on the loans they then need to collect bribes, and because the Chhara community generates a fair amount of illegal revenue, they all wish to be assigned to the local police station which oversees the Chhara community, but getting assigned there requires another hefty bribe… Because the Police depend on the illegal activities of the Chhara for their livelihood they will even resort to force to keep Chhara from “going straight.” They also administer beatings and torture to ensure that the bribes are paid in a regular and timely manner.

Nor did bribery seem to significantly protect the Chhara from arbitrary detention and torture. Instead, what worked for the community was the ability to organize around street theater. While problems persist, the existence of Budhan Theatre (the name of the street theater movement) has helped temper the worst excesses of police violence. On the other hand, in Bhavnagar, a coastal town with a Chhara community that also brews liquor, the situation was much worse. We also saw significant class differences in both communities. It is often the most vulnerable (i.e. poor widows) who were subject to the worst violence.

Having said all that, if corruption were magically eliminated, I’m not sure it would be a good thing for the Chhara – at least not in the short term. While there are new opportunities emerging for the more educated sections of the community, a significant number of Chhara still depend on illegal activities for their income.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta argues that corruption offers wiggle-room to those who fail to easily fit within the four corners of the law:

For the vast majorities who face the glare of documents, the demand for transparency, the imperative to come clean and be visible – corruption offers an occasional patch of friendly shade. Corruption, at least as a certain looseness with the law and with the regulatory power of the legal apparatus, is what keeps this society humane at its deeper, darker recesses.

I’m sympathetic to this argument. Certainly corruption helps the less fortunate Chhara make ends meet when they can’t find more legitimate employment; but the corruption we observed in Chharangar cannot be described as “humane” by any stretch of the imagination. Corruption keeps the Chhara (as well as the police) trapped in a cycle of violence, and the only way out has been the grassroots political organizing of Budhan Theatre. Gramsci said that “between coercion and consent lies corruption and fraud” which I think aptly describes the situation in Chharangar, where “common sense” is very much determined by the logic of corruption which pervades daily life. I worry about those who would romanticize petty corruption as liberating, even as I acknowledge that the absence of corruption may very well be worse…

The title of this post comes from a 1930 article in Man which discusses the superiority of such tops over various other ways to measure skin color, such as Broca’s skin color charts. While I knew anthropologists had used Broca’s charts, I don’t recall reading about the use of color tops, which was apparently quite common. The tops used were actually by Milton Bradley, but as best I can tell they were quite similar to the Bauhaus design pictured above. [Can anyone find a picture of the actual Milton Bradely tops?]

The colour top is a device made by the Milton Bradley Company, of Spring- field, Mass., U.S.A., a firm which manufactures kindergarten supplies. It is, primarily intended for teaching children the principles of colour blending. The first investigator to use it for recording skin-colour was Davenport, who employed it in his study of the heredity of skin-colour in Negro-White crosses in Jamaica (1913). The principle is one with which we were all familiar in our childhood. The apparatus consists of a small top, of the disc variety, spun by means of a wooden spindle kept in place by a nut. On this basal disc, which is of cardboard, are placed paper discs of various colours. When the top is spun the colours blend… The proportion of each colour which goes to the make-up of this composite surface can be varied at will, by merely moving the discs round upon the spindle… By suitable adjustment of these four discs, the spinning surface can be made to reproduce,with a considerable degree of exactitude, the colour of human skin of all shades and gradations that may be met with.

Be warned, however,

The judgment must always be made while the top is rotating at full speed. Even slight slackening of speed renders matching difficult and the records unreliable.

I learned of the use of these tops from an interview with Michael Keevak, author of Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking. It sounds like another interesting book from the man who wrote The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax, which I blogged about back in 2006.