UPDATE: Here’s a link to the original text.

Now O’Brien seems to have had enough. After a long silence, he has a new post up on the AAA-UNITE blog, where he writes that he is suffering from “commission-fatigue” —

the creeping death that sets in when you’ve been part of a successful organizing campaign that is co-opted and turned into a rubber stamp for the policies you’d been fighting.

At issue is this year’s conference in New Orleans. There is no strike in New Orleans, but the LRC members are angry that the conference is being held in a non-union hotel.

According to O’Brien, one of the things that happened after 2004 was a vote by the AAA Executive Board mandating that all AAA meetings be held in unionized venues. Now, you may disagree with this position, but it seems to have been arrived at as the result of a democratic process by the AAA leadership. For some reason, which O’Brien doesn’t explain, this policy was downgraded from being a “requirement” to being merely a “preference.” It isn’t clear if this is simply a difference of opinion, or if it was a change made by fiat by the AAA staff?

In either case, the choice of venue this year runs contrary to that preference/requirement, and the LRC is urging action. While O’Brien has personally decided to boycott the meeting, other members of the LRC are hoping to use the meetings to push forward for reforms. Specifically, they want to “change the conference organizing firm that AAA uses from the corporate-friendly Conference Direct to the labor-friendly INMEX.” They are urging individual sections to adopt proposals in favor of this change, and are planning to propose such a motion at the business meeting in New Orleans, as well as with the Executive Board. You can read the full letter over at the AAA-Unite post.

If you would like to sign on to the letter, please email Steve Striffler <striffler {at} hotmail(.)com> or Paul Durrenburger <pauldurren {at} verizon(.)net>.

Adam will initiate an untitled monthly interview project where he will talk each month with someone doing provocative ethnographic research. An example would be this fascinating interview Adam did for the Archaeology Channel with Mercedes Doretti, a forensic archaeologist who worked at every known location of genocide and mass murder in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Welcome Adam! If readers have any suggestions for potential interviewees please contact him directly at rawbird {at} gmail(.)com

Her paper is a response to efforts at moving academics towards more open, less walled-off spaces of the type which has become vogue in the business world.

the university is joining the latest movement in the public sphere towards open-plan, multi-functional, flexible, innovative structures which are constantly equated with ‘openness’, ‘innovation’ and ‘transparency’ by design experts and architects

Hurdley debunks the simplistic association of open spaces with the lack of hierarchy, pointing out the resemblance to feudal halls and much-despised modernist housing. She also highlights the creative and flexible ways in which people actually use corridors. Especially interesting is how she depicts corridors as resisting a single point of view, such as that embodied in Foucault’s panopticon:

These could be called processions of openings and closings between different knowledge domains or worlds: proffering left-overs, knowing not to eat them; talking by the printer, taking it away; putting her in the picture, writing his name in the gap. Similarly, static or one-way concepts of surveillance, spectacle and visibility are recast and mobilised. An ‘apex viewpoint’ at the turn by the director’s office is no more than a corner to a student; only the student can spot his supervisor’s office light.

In the interview she also discussed just how resistant faculty are to such changes. Some threaten to quit upon hearing of such proposed changes, while in places where they have already been implemented, many professors work at home.

Also mentioned during the interview was the fact that academics often use the corridor to “cancel e-mails.” That is, as they walk down the corridor they yell out through the open doors of their colleagues that they should ignore the e-mail they’d sent out earlier that day. She remarked that this seemed to fly in the face of our assumptions about the speed and ease-of-use of electronic communication, but I can totally understand this kind of behavior. Nobody wants to be the person who sends out a stream of e-mails correcting mistakes in previous e-mails, much better to yell it out as you walk down the corridor…

Brooks acknowledges that historical factors might be important, but quickly brushes them aside.

Why is Haiti so poor? Well, it has a history of oppression, slavery and colonialism. But so does Barbados, and Barbados is doing pretty well. Haiti has endured ruthless dictators, corruption and foreign invasions. But so has the Dominican Republic, and the D.R. is in much better shape. Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the same island and the same basic environment, yet the border between the two societies offers one of the starkest contrasts on earth — with trees and progress on one side, and deforestation and poverty and early death on the other.

OK, but not all histories of “ruthless dictators, corruption and foreign invasions” are equal. Lets look a little at Haiti’s actual history. A good place to start is Gina Ulysse’s 2005 interview with Sibylle Fischer, which highlights the specific racial dimension of Haiti’s history:

Yes, this association with Public Enemy and Fear of a Black Planet is absolutely right. The greatest fear of the white elites in the slaveholding areas was a repetition of Haiti—of another black state.

She argues that some of the most virulent racism was found right next door, in the Dominican Republic.

even today, anti-Haitian racism is endemic and the human rights situation of Haitian migrant workers on Dominican sugar plantations is appalling.

Or this recent article from the Times (UK), which highlights the tremendous debt burden Haiti faced for much of its history:

After a dramatic slave uprising that shook the western world, and 12 years of war, Haiti finally defeated Napoleon’s forces in 1804 and declared independence. But France demanded reparations: 150m francs, in gold… For Haiti, this debt did not signify the beginning of freedom, but the end of hope. Even after it was reduced to 60m francs in the 1830s, it was still far more than the war-ravaged country could afford. Haiti was the only country in which the ex-slaves themselves were expected to pay a foreign government for their liberty. By 1900, it was spending 80% of its national budget on repayments. … In 1947, Haiti finally paid off the original reparations, plus interest. Doing so left it destitute, corrupt, disastrously lacking in investment and politically volatile. Haiti was trapped in a downward spiral, from which it is still impossible to escape. It remains hopelessly in debt to this day.

What do you know, the Haitian’s did make a pact with the devil – France! I’m far from an expert on the region, but what little I do know leads me to think the combination of international racism towards the freed slaves and crushing foreign debt give Haiti a unique history that is not easily dismissed as identical to that of its neighbors.

But this isn’t the first time that Brooks has argued for a kind of civilizational view of culture as psychology which can explain economic differences between nations. He’s been making similar arguments about Asians for a long time. There is a good debunking of these by Language Log. That link will take you to a page full of earlier Language Log posts trashing Brooks’ often sloppy reading of the literature upon which he basis his claims. Please take some time to click on the links just so you can see how sloppy and misguided Brooks really is.

UPDATE: Anthropology Works has a nice roundup of recent scholarship on Haitian culture and social change.

UPDATE: Joshua Keating to Brooks: “Don’t ignore the politics.”

Brooks’ analysis also seems to assume that all dictators are created equal.

Also, Anthropologi.info is doing a great job of tracking the ongoing discussion about Haiti.

UPDATE: In my rush to post this article I totally skipped over another egregious comment by David Brooks:

There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile.

Fortunately, this has been taken up elsewhere: Razib at Gene Expression, Jim Sleeper at TPM Café, and Jason Pitzl-Waters at the Paganism blog The Wild Hunt. Some of the comments on the NY Times website are worth reading as well.

UPDATE: Sam Martinez has a post on Anthropology Works:

Nothing matches up in Brooks’ linkage of Harlem and Port-au-Prince — the comparison is a total clunker — nothing matches up, that is, other than a discourse of veiled white supremacy designed to blame Blacks for whatever ill God and man throws their way and to provide a white-dominated state with a standing excuse for doing too little, too late.

Speaking of which Paul Farmer’s organization, Partners in Health, recently launched a new website for Haiti, Stand with Haiti, for anyone who wants to support their relief efforts there.

(Via Rachel Maddow.)

UPDATE: From the New Yorker:

Paul Farmer stood nearby, listening, knowing that soon the tour would end and he would go back to work. He is forty-six and, thanks to the reputation for selflessness he has built up in the field, he is routinely referred to as a saint—and he has the physique to prove it. “I’m the skinny one,” Paul Farmer said to me, and added, gesturing to another, distinctly less skinny American, “Meet my brother.”

Most of the doctors and notables at the clinic wore name tags announcing their bureaucratic affiliations in the world of public health. Jeff Farmer’s read “Global Ass-Whuppin’ Initiative.” The penny dropped. Jeff Farmer, a professional wrestler, had been Lightning in the tag team of Thunder & Lightning. Jeff Farmer’s signature hold remains the Scorpion Death Lock.

What this means is that if you are on the anthropologists on twitter list and you tweet a link to a news story, you are essentially voting for that story to appear on the front page of the Twitter Tim.es page. Because the list is still small, it only takes a couple of votes, but hopefully as more anthropologists join Twitter it will become even more focused on anthropological topics.

*All are welcome to join the list, but I do ask that at least 1/3rd of your tweets be in English, and that you regularly tweet about matters concerning anthropology. If you’d like to be on the list, just send me a tweet @kerim.

And here is a picture of the view (on a more typically cloudy day) looking back, from the balcony near my office.

Most of the people who live on the East Coast of Taiwan reside in a narrow valley between the Coastal Mountain Range (top picture) and the larger Central Mountain Range (bottom picture). The valley starts in Hualien city, and continues down about about a hundred miles, to the next coastal city, Taitung. About thirty miles south is the village where I did my fieldwork. Apart from the great scenery and the chance to improve my Chinese, that is one of the main reasons I took this job. But it is now four years since I came here and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve made that thirty mile trip. That’s what I’d like to talk about in this post. I think the reasons give some insight into what life is like as an expat professor in Taiwan, what it means to teach near your field site, as well as some of the unique aspects of my current situation.

There are a number of reasons why I spend so little time at my old field site. One of them is that, as they say, “you can’t step in the same river twice.” It’s been a decade since I did my fieldwork, and the people I knew there have mostly moved on. I worked in an elementary school, and few people stay in the same place for more than four years. Some I’m still friends with. A teacher who teaches in the mountains south of Taipei, a baseball coach who is currently staying at my cousin’s house in Ohio has he studies for his Ph.D., and a few others I see now and then. But there are only a few people I know still living back in the village.

The other reason is that I’m busy. Taiwanese teachers typically have a 3-3 teaching load, as well as the usual advising and bureaucratic responsibilities. Since I arrived here I’ve developed over eleven new course syllabi – all of which I teach in Chinese. I mention this because it means I need to spend about four times as long preparing my courses as I would if I taught in English. The knowledge that almost all of my colleagues completed Ph.D.’s in Western Universities keeps me from making too much of my language situation. One get’s a lot more leeway teaching in a foreign language than one gets as a student, and I certainly couldn’t write a dissertation in Chinese, not to mention a term paper. Even now, for academic promotion, my colleagues are expected to publish and present papers in English whereas I can get by without having to write much Chinese at all.

The thing is, when I came they told me that I could teach in English because the government is trying to promote more English language classes. I tried it for a semester, but soon gave up. For one thing, less than a fifth of the students had sufficient English skills to follow me. Another reason is that we need at least ten students to get full credit for an undergraduate class. Although Taiwanese teachers get double credits for teaching in English – the same doesn’t apply to me as a foreigner, even though the problems I face are the same. But, over time, I’ve gotten better at it. The Ph.D. Cultural Theory course, which used to be the one class I did teach in English, I taught in Chinese (or Chinglish) this year. I still depend mostly on English language texts (giving my students translations when possible), but this semester was the first time I used a Chinese-only text in one of my classes, something I hope to slowly increase over time. [See this post I wrote some time back about the lack of texts in translation.]

But the biggest reason that I return to my field site so rarely has little to do with how busy I am teaching, and everything to do with how busy I am when I’m on break. Just at the time I got this job I was embarking on what turned out to be a four year project working on a documentary film in India. This has been one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done in my life, and I don’t regret it for an instant, but it does mean that when I do have a break I’m often jumping on board a plane to India (as, indeed, I’m doing again in about ten days time).

Despite everything I’ve said, I don’t mean to imply I haven’t been doing new research here in Taiwan. I have! About a year ago I started a series of posts on learning an endangered language and after that I interviewed some indigenous language teachers. While that work has been on hold over the past few months, I hope to take it up again as soon as we return from India. There is a paper I want to do on the subject and my New Year’s resolution is to get a first draft done by the end of the summer, and to turn it into a research proposal by the end of the year (when the National Science Council research deadline is).

Speaking of papers. Although it took me about three years to get into a schedule that works for me, I have lately also begun to figure out how to crank out those papers – something I need to do a lot more of if I’m going to pass the six year review required of all Taiwanese academics. Although there are the first inklings of a shift towards book-length manuscripts at some research institutions, here the focus is still on academic papers. A lot of credit is given for journals listed in the Social Science Citation Index which is annoying, since so many great anthropology journals aren’t listed there. My department has been supportive in giving me some credit for my online and multimedia work as well. I’m hopeful that the documentary film will be able to be included in my review.

One thing I’ve had to cut back on is conferences. It is just too costly and too time consuming to attend too many conferences from here. The school and the National Science Council do give faculty some support, but as much as I’d like to go to more conferences, I need to spend that precious time working on getting those papers out. I think, in general, this is true for junior faculty no matter where you are – but the distance (and jet lag) makes it even more true. To the extent possible, I have been trying to attend regional conferences, which can often be an exciting way to explore the region and (of course) network.

So, that’s why I don’t spend much time in my field site. But I’m learning a lot just by living and working here. For one thing, about half the students in our college are Taiwanese Aborigines, which is quite remarkable when you think that less than two percent of Taiwanese are Aborigines. Being a good teacher and advisor means learning from my students, which means being a good ethnographer. (Hopefully I can write some of that down in another blog post sometime.) Whether it is student term papers on indigenous issues, or problems advisees are facing at home, I’m picking up a lot about indigenous life by osmosis.

Below is video of a graduation day ceremony featuring cultural traditions from many of the different indigenous communities represented at our university:

In a way, I feel like I am now, a decade after I finished up my dissertation field work, finally ready to begin the task I started at that time. I feel that my first four years teaching here have given me a very special kind of training. And the learning process has made being a junior faculty member that much more exciting than it might have been otherwise. So even though I rarely go back to my old field site, it has still been a fantastic learning experience for me. Even though there may be limited opportunities for Ph.D.s to get academic appointments within the US, with the increasing globalization of higher education there are more and more opportunities abroad. I hope that this post might help others decide if doing so is right for them.

In 1960, 75 percent of college instructors were full-time tenured or tenure-track professors; today only 27 percent are. The rest are graduate students or adjunct and contingent faculty — instructors employed on a per-course or yearly contract basis, usually without benefits and earning a third or less of what their tenured colleagues make. The recession means their numbers are growing.

I recently had a chance to see the movie Avatar in glorious IMAX 3D, which is the only way I would recommend anyone see the film. It is certainly not a film one sees for the writing, or the characters, or the story telling. It is a spectacular display of visual pyrotechnics, and I should probably leave it at that. However, the film is like a giant anthropological piñata and after two days of sitting on my hands I can’t hold off any more.

[I don't think I mention anything in this post which you couldn't gleen from the trailer, but I've posted everything after the jump to help those particularly worried about accidentally encountering spoilers.]

First of all is the issue of race. I certainly am not in the mood to discuss whether the film is racist, yet I do think it is worth noting the way the film depicts the long-standing fantasy about ceasing to be white. I think the real problem with depictions of the other used in the film is that they are so clichéd that the Na’vi are boring and predictable. You are not really interested in learning more about them because you almost immediately feel as if you’ve met them a hundred times before, in other Hollywood films.

The second issue of interest is that of the Na’vi language. The SLA blog has a post about the work which went into creating this langauge. It is also worth repeating the observation that humans in American science fiction films almost always seem to be English speaking white-folk. At least in Firefly they cursed in Chinese.

The third issue of interest to anthropologists is that of virtual worlds. The film’s title comes from the fact that the humans interact with the Na’vi via virtual bodies, which seems primarily to be a plot device to allow most of the action to be computer generated without entering the uncanny valley. (When virtual humans mimic real humans too closely the small deviations from reality become more noticeable.) I can’t help but feel that they really missed an opportunity here. As I wrote about in my review of Tom Boellstorff’s book Coming of Age in Second Life, one of the most interesting things about virtual worlds is how complex the interaction between humans and their avatars can be. People can have multiple avatars, or “alts.” Different people can control the same avatar. And there are numerous problems raised when people are away from their keyboard but the avatar is still there. Of these, only the last one is even possible the film, due to the premise that each avatar has a unique genetic bond with a particular human. A little more complexity here could have made the film’s story line less predictable. [UPDATE: For more on how Avatar got Virtual Reality and networking wrong see Liz Losh's post, Avatarded.]

Finally, the film is interesting for being a cinematic representation of anthropology. Sigourney Weaver’s character, Dr. Grace Augustine, is officially referred to as a “xenobotanist” but the work she does with the Na’vi and the book she wrote about them seem very anthropological. (I couldn’t find an image of her book cover, shown briefly in the film, but it looks like an anthropology textbook.) It is not Grace, but the main character, Jake Sully who is offered a chance to learn the ways of the Na’vi and who goes “native.” The use of avatars to do ethnographic research is interesting enough, but what really makes this notable is the fact that he’s doing it for the military. In fact, his triple loyalties: to his military/corporate bosses, to the scientists, and to the Na’vi themselves, are a central source of tension in the film. As Bill Guinee noted on Twitter, it is hard not to see this as a commentary on HTS. [UPDATE: Just after I posted this, I came across the latest David Price Counterpunch article…on Avatar and HTS.]

But, like I said, the film’s script is so vapid, that it isn’t really much of a commentary on anything except the state of 3D visual effects, which are pretty damn impressive if you ask me. Especially when seen in IMAX…

For a new project on the effects/affects of precarity on Japanese youth today, I have been contemplating the construct of “hope.” As in—who has it, what conditions generate it, and how is it linked to notions of both time (as in the future) and space (as in home). There is a pervasive sense of hopelessness and futurelessness in Japan today, and particularly amongst those stuck in irregular employment—the antithesis of the lifetime jobs of Japan, Inc.. Without the security of a stable job, a salary that is guaranteed to grow (or even last) over time, and a social identity, many youth say they feel stuck in both time and place. Not moving forward and seeing no horizon beyond the dreary here and now, people also complain of lacking a home itself. Though sometimes this is literal (the rate of homelessness is rising as is poverty), more often it is figurative. But what precisely is this—the sense one isn’t at, and doesn’t possess a, home? Certainly, not all Japanese feel this way. But the loss/longing/anxiety is widespread, captured by the claim made recently(by activists of poverty, Yuasa Makoto and Amamiya Karin) that not only is poverty spreading in the country and becoming a poverty as much of the imagination as of material conditions, but also Japan itself is becoming “refugee-d” (nanminka). The whole country is becoming exiled? From what? Itself? So, is this hope that has gotten lost or something else, like national(ist) identity? And why does my partner, who does his research in Togo, find quite a different national mood—one where people actively breath and breed hope—there today despite a degree of economic precarity far more severe than that in Japan? Is it because Togoloese are far less attached to the past than Japanese seem to be today, and far more eager, and willing, to place their hopes on a spatial or temporal outside—whether the end-times of Pentacostalism or the visa lottery everyone plays in the hopes of migrating to the United States? (Charlie Piot, Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa in the Post-Cold War, forthcoming, Chicago).

For the book I am writing on this subject, I delivered a paper on what I call “precarious sociality” recently at Cambridge University in the Department of Social Anthropology. The interest, and feedback, was remarkable, cluing me into how pressing this issue is for many of us. I share this here, and invite feedback on any of the issues—precarity, hope/hopelessness, sociality, youth, futurity, home/homelessness—raised here.

[Due to difficulties re-formatting Anne's paper for the blog, I have opted to post the entire thing as an embedded PDF. It appears below the jump. - Kerim]

Precarious Sociality

See our website for more info.

The following comments were overheard in the hallways at the annual American Anthropological Association meeting, happening right now in a confusingly designed Marriott in downtown Philadelphia:

“Ugh. I would love to get that but I know that it’s highly competitive.”

“Once I get my career back on track I will always make more money than him.”

“I made so many contacts in the last hour it’s fantastic.”

“Have you heard about the porn musical?”

“I was like, hey, I’m a Yale grad student.”

“You can position yourself so you’ll benefit or at least not suffer.”

“Basically I just put a book proposal on his desk.”

“So they take all your clothes and you’re just standing there.”

“I do have health benefits because my wife has an excellent package.”

“I don’t think we’re going to have dinner. We’ve had our fill of each other.”

“I love her. She’s crazy. She should be Jewish.”

“I wouldn’t, you know, freak out, throw your hands up and run around in circles.”

“Wow, you really are a nerd.” —Thomas Bartlett