Another advantage is that Evernote does OCR on the text in these photos so I can actually find them by search. It isn’t perfect, but its helpful.

Did you discover any great books at this year’s AAA? Or have any thoughts about some of the books I’ve listed above? Maybe you have your own book which just came out? Let us know in the comments!

Anthropologists traditionally deployed their authority as connoisseurs to shape and contextualize the context within which “we” learned about and encountered “other” cultures. Hell, we even had a role defining how people learned about and encountered anthropological knowledge. But now that carefully cultivated connoisseurship is becoming less and less important as Google algorithms and Web 2.0 recommendation engines become the primary gateways. Sure, to the extent that anthropologists are indexed in Google their authority is still important, but the first hit for a topic might be a corporate site who understand better how to game the system with search engine optimization (SEO).

Of course, it might not be a bad thing if a website run by an indigenous community can outrank anthropologists on google. There is something democratizing about the shift, which allows the producers of culture to outrank the connoisseurs. But, as Eric pointed out, there is something disturbing about the fact that these algorithms are a black box whose rules are determined by a corporate monopoly. How’s wikia search coming along?

Time-Life has teamed up with Google to archive their images online. Browsing around I found this gem, a picture of “Anthropologist Franz Boas” from the cover of Time in 1936 (When he was 78). The caption reads: “He translated the world’s gestures.”

UPDATE: Link to article text. (Thanks to raggedrobin!) Here’s a snippet (emphasis added):

Franz Boas got into anthropology 53 years ago. He has invaded almost every branch of this science: linguistics, primitive mentality, folklore, ethnology, growth and senility, the physical effects of environment. He reminds his colleagues of the oldtime family doctor who did everything from delivering babies to pulling teeth.

It isn’t exactly my itinerary for the conference, since a lot of events I’m interested in overlap, but it’s a useful way to list any, and every, event which catches my eye, and to then have those listed on my iPhone. Its also handy to figure out when might be a good time to meet up with old friends. Not to mention, it can serve as a useful record of the event after its done.

Looking around the anthro-blog-o-sphere, only Somatosphere had a post up about what they were planning on seeing at the AAA this year. How about you? Are there any must-see panels on your list? Are you presenting a paper this year? Let us know in the comments!

The Savage Mind 58

Moreover, the “ethnographer cannot interpret myths and rites correctly, even if the interpretation is a structural one … without an exact identification of the plants and animals which are referred to or of such of their remains as are directly used.” (p. 46)

My French isn’t very good, but I have an interest in this topic as part of the pre-history for British colonial ethnography in South Asia. If you know anything about this journal, or its founder, Alexandre Lacassagne, please share in the comments.

Despite the fact that a foreign policy organization chaired by Mr. McCain gave more than $850,000 to Khalidi’s Center for Palestine Research and Studies. Despite the fact that Khalidi is himself a semite, born in NY, with a “moral commitment to peace and justice in the Middle East.” Despite all this, the McCain campaign seems intent on pursuing this new McCarthyism.

For this reason I am endorsing supporting an idea I read about on Crooked Timber: that academics should show their support of Khalidi by buying his book, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. As Henry Farrell says:

It doesn’t take much in the way of prophetic insight to predict that we are going to be seeing a lot more of this kind of innuendo from disgusting slime-purveyors like Daniel Pipes if Obama wins – one of the lessons of the Clinton years is that when the nastier elements of the right are losing elections, they start trying to turn the culture war back up to 11. It would be nice to get a head start on the pushback.

Now if only I can get Mike Goldfarb to call me an anti-semite to sell my book! (Hmmm, I guess I need to write a book first …)

In many religions, for instance. The version of the Lord’s Prayer I memorized as a child included the line, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” In Aramaic, the language that Jesus himself spoke, the word for “debt” and the word for “sin” are the same. And although many people assume that “debts” in these contexts refer to spiritual debts or trespasses, debts are also considered sins. If you don’t pay back what’s owed, you cause harm to others.

One anthropologist/historian who has looked at the importance of the language of debt in religion is Vicente Rafael. His excellent book Contracting Colonialism looks at how Tagalog concepts of debt altered the meaning of Catholic religious traditions as they were translated into the local context.

Among the Spaniards, the contraction of obligations between two parties was always articulated with reference to a third term that stood outside the exchange yet determined its contours. Whther figured as God, the king, the state, or the law, this third term served as the central figure in all negotiations, acting as the origin, interpreter, and enforcer of the terms governing exchange …. By contract, the tripartite structure of the contract gives way to a different configuration in utang na loob ties. The contracting of debts …. is premised not on the sanction of a transcendent third term but precisely on its elision. ... The effect of this elision is to render the hierarchy found in utang na loob ties explicitly arbitrary. ... Token payments of debts are made not to memorialize authority (and thereby to consolodate hierarchy) but rather, as in the case of offerings profferd to the nono, simply to loosen the pressures from above (and so to deflect the full force of hierarchy). (p. 130-131)

Note: It seems Atwood started working on her well-timed new book over three years ago.

Those who read the stuff may be aware of the classic Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov. It is one of the few science fiction series that deals with social scientists—the “psychohistorians”, who use their understanding of the mathematics of society to save civilization as the Galactic Empire collapses. I loved Foundation, and in my early teens my secret fantasy was to become a psychohistorian. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing (yet). I was and am fascinated by history, but the craft of history is far better at the what and the when than the why, and I eventually wanted more. As for social sciences other than economics, I am interested in their subjects but cannot get excited about their methods—the power of economic models to show how plausible assumptions yield surprising conclusions, to distill clear insights from seemingly murky issues, has no counterpart yet in political science or sociology. Someday there will exist a unified social science of the kind that Asimov imagined, but for the time being economics is as close to psychohistory as you can get.

In his recent book, The Conscience of a Liberal; however, Krugman seems to have moved slightly away from this pessimistic view of the social sciences. In his book Krugman attempts to understand how America could have gone from relatively low levels of inequality in the 1950s to the outrageous levels of inequality we see today – levels not seen since the twenties. After going through various typical economic explanations, such as “skill-based technological change,” globalization, etc, he comes to the conclusion that it is “largely due to changes in institutions, such as the strength of labor unions, and norms, such as the once powerful but now weak belief that having the boss make vastly more than the workers is bad for morale” (p. 136). He then goes on to argue that these institutional and normative changes were closely tied to America’s changing political structure. In particular he focuses on the Republican party’s “Southern strategy” of appealing to disaffected Southern white men, which was first successfully adopted by Nixon and used with great effect by Regean and both Bush I and Bush II. He uses this to explain how it was that “advocates of a smaller welfare state and regressive tax policies [were] able to win elections, even as growing income inequality should have made the welfare state more popular” (p. 172).

I won’t go into the details of Krugman’s argument, or its merits, instead here I want to focus on the fact that even though Krugman arrived at the questions he asks via his economic models, his answers stray far outside the territory of traditional economic analysis. He hasn’t exactly taken up anthropology here — his arguments read like a combination of Talcott Parsons and Douglas Massey, both sociologists — but it’s a start.

More controversially, at least among my friends and colleagues, I’d also like to suggest that we anthropologists take more seriously “the power of economic models to show how plausible assumptions yield surprising conclusions.” I was shocked by the way in which many anthropologist friends reacted to the bailout bill recently before congress. There seemed to be widespread misunderstanding about the causes and magnitude of the crisis, as well as the importance of acting quickly (historical research on previous economic crises shows that timely intervention is one of the most important factors in averting disaster). Considering how much anthropologists write about globalization and other issues, it might behoove us to read some economists besides Michael Moore and Naomi Klein. Krugman might be a good place to start…

The following is the caption for this photo as it appears on the Defend America military blog:

A soldier from 1st Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) teaches tactical hand signals to Nigerian soldiers from the 322nd Parachute Regiment during exercise Flintlock 2007 in Maradi, Niger, April 4, 2007. The closed-fist signal means “stop.” U.S. Army photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Michael Larson.

Although I had not previously seen a picture of this gesture, I had come across it in my previous investigations into issues of cultural miscommunication and translation in the war in Iraq. It is an example which was often used in news stories about the confusion that could occur at checkpoints, since the Iraqi gesture for stop is with the had open, as in the U.S. Here is a blog post, from a soldier recounting a joke told during a briefing session:

The training opportunities thus far have been sparse, but comical. An Irish sergeant from the Brit Army briefed our unit on IEDs—still the number one killer of coalition troops in theater—as well as various checkpoint protocols:

“The insurgents, they’re sayin’ they blow themselves up fer seventy virgins, aye? Well we in the British Army have a policy to deal with this problem: We send them straight to Allah and keep the virgins for ourselves!”

“The British use this hand signal [closed fist] ‘Stop!’ to control traffic at checkpoints. The Iraqis, they use a similar one, [open hand] ‘Oogaf!’ And then there’s you Americans: [points weapon] ‘Freeze motherfucker!’”

But this is no joking manner. Although I believe the number of Iraqis killed at checkpoints has declined, especially (I suspect) as the US forces turn over such operations to Iraqi forces, many, many Iraqis have been killed at checkpoints over the course of the occupation. According to McClatchy from 2006 to 2007 there was an average of one incident (resulting in injury or death) per day. The headline reads: “US troops shot 429 Iraqi civilians at checkpoints.”

Here is what that article says about hand signals:

U.S. soldiers traditionally have used hand signals or signs to tell civilians to stop. If that doesn’t work, they fire warning shots. If the vehicles still are moving too close, they’re authorized to kill.

It doesn’t however, discuss the exact nature of the hand signals used.

If all this seems like an argument for the importance of employing anthropologists in the military – it isn’t. In fact, I was inspired to write this post by my friend Scott Sommers who recently spent some time reading up on McFate and found an article (PDF) she had written in Joint Forces Quarterly. What’s particularly interesting about this article (as pointed out by Scott) is that she seemingly gets the hand gesture story wrong. Here is what she says:

One Marine explained the American gesture for stop (arm straight, palm out) meant welcome in Iraq, while the American gesture for go actually meant stop to Iraqis (arm straight, palm down). As can be easily imagined, this misunderstanding resulted in deadly consequences at roadblocks.

As Scott found, this version of the story was repeated in an article about human terrain teams from the Boston Globe, complete with this picture (from a US Marine publication):

The US forces’ superficial understanding of local tribal customs and ancient ethnic and sectarian rivalries has hampered their efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. An outstretched arm, palm facing forward, for example, means “stop” in most Western cultures, but in Iraq it’s considered a sign of welcome. Confusion over the signal has had deadly consequences, leading US troops to open fire at Iraqi civilians who didn’t stop at checkpoints.

As far as I can tell the Boston Globe has this wrong, as does McFate. There is confusion over hand signals, to be sure, but it isn’t because the military are using an outstretched arm with the palm facing forward, but are using a unique military gesture which even most Americans would not understand.

In my post on “the myth of cultural miscommunication” I argued that many of these problems were “common sense” and didn’t require the intervention of cultural experts to intervene. In a comment on that post Carl Dyke wrote:

I’m inclined to agree with you, Kerim, but when you talk about common sense in an anthropological setting I get confused. Common to whom, under what circumstances, according to which rituals, restrictions and agendas?

I teach soldiers who have been or soon will be deployed. Like all of my students some of them tumble quickly to the value of taking the perspective of the other, while some are more rule or authority oriented. They seem to have different ‘common senses’ depending on how and where they were raised, where they are in their emotional-cognitive development, their sense of identity and purpose, their levels of stress, and so on.

Conflictual situations are notoriously poor ones for optimizing reciprocity of communication, as the post on the myth of Mars and Venus also shows. Short of a desirable but currently unlikely elimination of all conflict, what sorts of practical steps would in your view improve understanding under these difficult circumstances? Is there a specific way of understanding ‘common sense’ that gets us further there?

At the time I replied that I was “not talking about the common sense of individual soldiers, but of the military as an institution.” Since then I felt that Carl’s question deserved a better answer, and I’ve written this post partially as an effort to do just that.

If we take the McFate account at its word, then we really do have a cultural confusion which could be avoided with the help of cultural experts like McFate. But it doesn’t seem that this is the case. Scott also found this letter written to the Sandbox military blog in which a Company Commander finds that a new soldier does not understand the standard gesture for “stop”:

Now seeing this vehicle drive down the street I wanted to confirm that it was ready for combat. I held up my fist to communicate I wanted him to immediately stop. The Soldier however, interpreted my clenched fist more along the lines of the Mod Squad’s “solid” than as a command. The Soldier returned my “salute” with a wide smile on his face.

As you can see from this example, the strange and exotic culture that needs explanation is not that of the Iraqis, but the US military who have dealt with the problem of cultural miscommunication by creating a universal hand gesture which nobody understands.

In my previous post I used the term “common sense” but I think that oversimplified the matter. Deborah Cameron’s point is that men use miscommunication as a tactic to avoid doing what they want to do. The “Mars and Venus” books are aimed at helping women adjust to this fact by teaching women to better communicate their needs to men. Instead, Cameron argues, men shouldn’t be left off the hook so easily. The problem isn’t that miscommunication is a common-sensical problem – it isn’t. In fact there is a large body of linguistic anthropology literature on the subject, starting with John Gumperz’s excellent work on “crosstalk.” The problem is that this literature all too often overlooks the issue of power as it applies to such misunderstandings.

Similarly, we have a situation here where the US military uses an incomprehensible hand gesture and Iraqis are shot for failing to comprehend. The solution, we are told, is to teach our soldiers to better understand Iraqi culture, when it seems it might be our own military culture which needs to be able to adjust in order to adapt to local conditions.

But it is a “common sense” example in other ways, in that it seems the problem of hand gestures is well known – its just the details which are not. If McFate and company are wrong on the details, then they aren’t doing much good. The soldiers writing letters and blogs seem to understand the problem just fine (without expert advice) and the military needs to figure out how to listen to them. Or even better yet, leave it to the Iraqis to sort out for themselves.

On the other hand, I fully approve of using video games to teach the military about Iraqi hand gestures.

So, what to make of Blair’s course? The topics are interesting and are exactly those topics which concern many anthropologists: faith, globalization, identity, etc. (Blair recently “came out” as a Catholic.) Unfortunately, I can’t imagine any student staying awake in this class. Neither Volf nor Blair seems to have much to say about these topics except for vague platitudes. I thought that watching this would give me an opportunity to say something interesting and/or critical about Blair’s take on these topics from an anthropological point of view – but I honestly didn’t hear anything worth commenting on. He sees globalization as a force which “opens up” society and religious faith as capable of either aiding or hindering that opening up … depending (not quite sure on what).

I almost deleted this post, but then I thought it might be worth posting it to see if anyone has anything more insightful to say about it than I do. And who knows, maybe the course will get more interesting later on…

Also see: How Umberto Eco spends his time.

(Inspired by Jonathon Sullivan, I decided to invite my dog, Juno, to write this occasional contribution. Here Juno writes a review of Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet. The review was solicited from Savage Minds by University of Minnesota Press. – K)

I was very happy when my owner decided that we should review this book. Mostly because when he reads a book we can sit together on the couch, which is much more fun than when he sits at his desk surfing the web. I get scratched behind my ear a lot more when we are reading a book.

I also like Haraway. She seems to engage ideas in the same way a dog might play with a dead animal: sniffing it, placing it our mouth, playing with it, rolling on it, barking at it, offering it to our master only to run away with it again. But I could tell my owner was as frustrated by this kind of play as he is when I do it. He likes to play boring, repetitive, games like fetch. He seems to prefer the easy popular style of Patricia McConnell to Haraway’s challenging prose.

Even though its written like those “myths of mars and venus” books he has come to despise, McConnell taught my owner a lot about how to be a good companion species. Haraway, on the other hand, struck him as self-indulgent with its long digressions, reprinting of entire e-mail exchanges, and its stubborn refusal to make any coherent claims which are capable of being wrong. That’s why he asked me to write the review. I understand play.

Haraway like to play with her dog. She seems to be in much better shape than my owner and goes running with her dog everyday. They also compete together in the co-species sport known as agility. I wish my owner was half as fun. He mostly just likes to go for walks or throw a ball while I do the running. But he has read a lot of dog training books and we do some simple training exercises together which is fun, because I always get lots of treats when I’m studying. Haraway scolds Derrida because he didn’t seem particularly interested in playing with his cat. That upset her a lot. She wants us to understand the responsibilities provoked by our encounters with other species.

Here’s how she says it:

When Species Meet, strives to build to attachment sites and tie sticky knots to bind intra-acting critters, including people, together in the kinds of response and regard that change the subject – and the object. Encounterings do not produce harmonious wholes, and smoothly preconstituted identities do not ever meet in the first place. Such things cannot touch, much less attach; there is no first place; and species, either singular nor plural, demand another practice of reckoning. In the fashion of turtles (with their epibionts) on turtles all the way down, meetings make us who and what we are in the avid contact zones that are the world. Once “we” have met, we can never “the same” again. Propelled by the tasty but risky obligation of curiosity among companion species, once we know, we cannot not know. If we know well, searching with fingery eyes, we care. That is how responsibility grows. (p. 287)

She does this mostly by telling stories. And she’s a good story teller. Her best stories are about scientists who use animals for research purposes. She argues that the quality of the research depends on respecting the ethical obligation humans have to animals.

The animals make demands on the humans and their technologies to precisely the same degree that the humans make demands on the animals. Otherwise, the cameras fall off and other bad things happen to waste everybody’s time and resources. (P263)

In McConnell’s book she describes how she wasn’t allowed to give toys to the lab dogs when she was in university because the emphasis then was on keeping the lab “sterile.” (She snuck in toys anyway. I like McConnell.) But my owner says that it’s a mistake to conflate ethical positions like this with instrumental arguments about scientific outcomes because it isn’t necessarily true that scientifically valid outcomes are dependent on ethical behavior.

Haraway reserves her deepest scorn for the field of bioethics. She emphasizes the importance of social processes and the process of becoming – hence her use of stories to make her points. I like her stories, but my owner thinks that the stories allow her to avoid doing the philosophical dirty work of formulating a coherent argument.

I don’t know. I think he read this book hoping to learn something about dogs, when its really a book about humans. I learned a lot about humans from this book. The part about how activists are pressuring dog breeders to be more open about genetic data was really interesting. It’s a whole different world from the Taiwanese puppy farm where my first owner bought me. My current owner took me there once and seemed very upset when we left. I was just happy to see my mother, even though she barked at me.

I’d like to learn more about dogs and anthropologists. I hope my owner finds time to read Kohn’s article “How dogs dream” or Ghodsee’s Anthropology News piece “Basset Hounds in the Balkans.” Maybe you have some stories or references you’d like to share?

(You can see a webcast of a talk Haraway gave about her book at The Open University.)

In this screencast I search for recent articles in Google Scholar, import the results, and then add the full-text PDF from the associated AnthroSource URL.

(Hint: Expand the video to full screen mode.)

Sente ScreenCast from Kerim Friedman on Vimeo.

When Sente adds support for direct import from AnthroSource search results this will get even easier, but I actually prefer searching AnthroSource via Google Scholar. Other sites which are supported include ProQuest, WorldCat, and Google Books, among others.

(Sorry, Sente is currently only for Mac OS X. Non-mac users might wish to use the open source, cross-platform, Firefox plugin, Zotero which is also pretty neat, if not as pretty to look at.)