Fri 16 May 2008
My ever-tenuous grasp of the line between fantasy and reality seems to be slipping away again…
Harrison Ford elected to the board of the Archaeological Institute of America
Discuss.
Alex Golub
Archived Posts by this Author
Mon 12 May 2008
Jay’s Around the Web column that featured the Missions for Dummies post about how Latin Americans ‘are touchy feely’ has been rolling around in my head for some time. Mostly this is because I have spent a lot of time reading cultural history of America as background for my new research project on World of Warcraft and have been thinking a lot about American theories of selfhood, markets and commodification, what constitutes human flourishing, and so forth.
I was struck by Irwin’s (the Missions for Dummies guy) insight that ‘Latins’ are ‘touchy feely’ since, in much of the United States, this is a stereotype that ‘white ethnics’ (Italian American, Irish American, Jewish, etc.) have of themselves—that they hug, kiss, and touch each other with a frequency and gusto that is a bit unseemly. The other stereotypes that I’ve heard from my friends in these communities is that ‘their people’ are 1) too loud and 2) prone to serve Too Much Food at family functions – or any functions really.
Now, an anthropologist you always want to ferret out the unexamined side of the contrast—the ‘what is taken for granted in my assumptions’ that goes unsaid. In this case I think what these stereotypes point to is not some distinctive way that white ethnics act, but an implicit contrast with the anglo-protestant norm, which appears to be that anglo-protestants prefer to sit together without touching, silent and hungry. Which is, actually, not a bad way of summing up a certain interactional style which I must admit I have witnessed in certain areas of rural Wisconsin and Minnesota during my time with local church parishioners there. (more…)
Sun 4 May 2008
Vengeance is his: Jared Diamond in the New Yorker
Posted by Rex under Eastern Europe , In the Press , Pacific[34] Comments
The April 21 number of the New Yorker features a long article by Jared Diamond entitled Vengeance Is Ours: What Can Tribal Societies Tell Us About Our Need To Get Even. Anthropologists have a tendency—increasingly shrill and kneejerk these days—to be very critical of Jared Diamond. Mostly I think this is because he does what they wish they did: write popular, widely read books. I’m not as affected by this sour grapes syndrome as some, and in the case of this article I’ve already had my druthers because I helped fact check it (this consisted in talking for ten minutes on the phone with a New Yorker employee). However there are still some kvetchable things in the article that deserve a going over.
The basic idea of the article is simple. In it, Diamond contrasts a tribal fight in Nembi distict, Southern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG), and the death of his father in-law’s mother (wife’s father’s mother, or WFM as we say in the kinship biz) in the holocaust. In PNG, Diamond’s friend Daniel undertook a long vendetta to avenge his uncle and was eventually successful. In the holocaust, the killer of Diamond’s WFM was arrested, detained for a year and then freed. Daniel was well-adjusted and emotionally reconciled to his uncle’s death—vengeance satisfied him. Diamond’s father in-law was haunted the rest of his life by the fact that justice was never delivered. The moral of the story, Diamond says, is that procedural justice under a state may not be as obviously superior to vengeance in tribal fighting as we might think. Its a typical anthropological technique: compare The West to The Rest, and open people’s minds by pointing out that They might know something We don’t, and that Our Ways may not be as hot as we imagined.
In its factual reporting, Diamond’s account of tribal fighting in PNG more or less rings true to me, and the things that don’t ring true are most likely simply variants between what is done in Nipa and what is done in west Enga, where I lived. I also appreciate Diamond’s spin on the topic—that tribal fighting is comprehensible and not mere barbarism, and that the people who do it are humans who live normal, albeit culturally distinct, lives.
That said, I do have some issued with what Diamond actually does with his data. (more…)
Tue 29 Apr 2008
American Ethnography, the AAA, and the Public Domain
Posted by Rex under AAA , Open Access Open Source , Websites[4] Comments
Recently Anthropologi.info blogged a new anthropology site, American Ethnography. American Ethnography is a very pretty site with monthly thematic collections of articles from AAA journals. My initial response was: “wow, how happy will the AAA be to see entire articles they are selling for money on AnthroSource being reproduced on the web for free?” So I was surprised—astonished would be a better word—when Martin, the proprietor of AE, pointed out a paragraph on the AAA website’s permissions page which states that:
AAA article content published before 1964 is in the public domain and may be used and copied without permission. The AAA asks only that you include a complete reference to the original publication and a link to AnthroSource.
I would actually prefer a little more specification of what “public domain” means exactly here, but its still an extremely positive step forward—well done AAA! And as for the rest of us, I we should take this opportunity to start making some of the foundational works in our discipline available as soon as possible. Not only will this enable everyone to learn about anthropology as a discipline, but it will also be interesting to see if subscriptions to AAA journals are affected. And if they are not, then perhaps we could convince AAA to make the moving wall on their content shorter than its current forty-four years…
Mon 28 Apr 2008
The April 14th edition of The New Yorker includes a long piece on the controversy surrounding Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropology professor whose tenure case became caught up in contemporary politics in the Middle East when the topic of her book, the politics of archaeology in Israel, became known to alumni of Barnard, where she teaches. It is a good article and—as far as I can tell from my vantage point far, far from Manhattan—balanced. The timing was fortuitous for me, since my class just finished reading her book Facts on the Ground. The response was, I’ll admit, not positive—the topic is pretty distant from local concerns in Hawai’i, and the academic writing and close detail can be off-putting for undergraduates. But I mention the New Yorker piece here since in the future if people are interested in ‘teaching the controversy’ as they teach the book it will be a good resource to them (its not online, unfortunately). I also mention it because I imagine (wrongly?) that all I have to do to get an active comment thread on this post is to say Abu El-Haj’s name out loud and people will have an opinion so… did anyone else read the article, and what did they think?
Tue 22 Apr 2008
Entertainment Weekly (yes, I subscribe to Entertainment Weekly, not Atlantic Monthly. Sorry.) is featuring another story on the new Indiana Jones flick (unfortunately, only 1 picture of CB’s bangs tho) and—more mind-bendingly—Archaeology Magazine has its own cover feature on The Truth Behind The Crystal Skull. Archaeology is the official journal of the Archaeological Institute of America, which is sort of the applied wing of the Indiana Jones mythos. I have a soft spot in my heart for the AIA because of its willingness to admit that being an archaeologist is cool. What would happen if cultural anthropologists produced a glossy journal documenting the glamorous exploits of cultural anthros? Its exactly the sort of ‘public’ anthropology that would probably get us some attention…
Sat 19 Apr 2008
Fri 18 Apr 2008
One of the areas that I have been trying to develop some expertise in since I finished my dissertation has been sociology, and particularly the qualitative, ethnographic sociology that is similar to anthropology. I’ve been delighted to discover all the great work done in that area, including the writings of gourmand-cum-symbolic-interactionist Gary Alan Fine. Fine is incredibly prolific, consistently good, and circles around many of the same sorts of questions that anthropologists ask. As a connoisseur of CVs I’ve been impressed by his and in particular the underlying patterns of reearch and publication that I see in his work. So, at the risk of stereotyping what has been a long and productive career, let me describe what I think of as How To Get Tenure The Gary Alan Fine Way:
1. Choose a fieldsite that is easily accessible and will not require tons of preparation – no language learning, for instance.
2. Do fieldwork there for a year or so—you might even be able to do it while still teaching.
3. While you are doing fieldwork, write a review article on an Enduring Issue in social science—the macro/micro distinction, the structure/agency dichotomy, the social construction of reality, etc. Coauthoring might help, as would teaching a course on it.
4. Towards the end of your fieldwork, write a journal article that summarizes your main ethnographic data.
5. Write a book about your fieldwork. Turn the review article into the first and last ‘theoretical framing’ chapters of your book, and expand the journal article into the middle ethnographic chapters—you probably had to cut stuff from the original article any ways.
6. Write clearly and well with a hint of humor, but not in such a literary style that the Hardcore Anthropology Is A Science Dammnit types get turned off.
7. Rinse and repeat. You should be able to cycle through these steps every three to five years.
Most of Fine’s stuff that I’ve read is set in the Midwest, but there is no reason this couldn’t be done in whatever fieldsite you’ve invested time in and you get back to pretty regularly. Ideally, the process should be iterative, with each fieldsite being connected or related to previous ones, and the theoretical issues framed by unfinished business left over from the last book.
Sun 13 Apr 2008
(Recently there was a discussion on one of my listservs about how to ‘keep up’ with anthropology if you lived in the Pacific and didn’t have access to a fancy research university. I thought this advice might be helpful so I’m reproducing it here. Hopefully over time I’ll add illustrations and/or further installments if people find it useful. Publishers and others should feel free to add additional resources in the comments. -R)
Let’s assume that, for some reason, you want to keep up to date with academic anthropology as it is done in large, ‘prestigious’ first world universities. For large, prestigious first world anthropologists like myself it is easy to keep up with the latest books and articles because you can simply stroll over to your lushly appointed library and browse the stacks. But what if you don’t have access to such a library? The guide will show you how to use commonly available and completely free tools on the Internet in order to keep up to date with the latest literature in anthropology. Since I study the Pacific, I will focus on the literature in that area. However this guide will be useful to anthropologists who study other areas, and since these methods can easily be applied to any academic discipline, the system described here will be of use to non-anthropologists as well.
What you need is ‘alerting’
The good news is that a tremendous amount of journals and books are available on the Internet. The bad news is that much of this information is available only for those who can afford to pay for it. This guide won’t tell you how to get access to password-protected material. Instead I want to focus here on ‘alerting.’ Alerting (or ‘discovery’) is the process of finding out about new books and articles. It is different from ‘filtering’ (where you decide whether you actually want to read any of the things you’ve discovered) or ‘acquisition’ (where you actually get hold of the articles you want to read). You know better than I do what you want to read, and you also probably have a better sense than I do of how to request articles via interlibrary loan or simply just beg borrow and steal PDFs from your large, prestigious friends.
Luckily, publishers want to make it as easy as possible for you to learn about and want to purchase the anthropology they are selling—they consider it a form of advertising. There are lots of complex and clever ways to keep up to date, but here we will keep it extremely simple and use the “Table of Contents Alerting” (TOC alerting) that journals use in order to get publishers to send you emails with a list of all of the articles in the current issue of their journal. There are also similar tools for book publishers that I will discuss.
The goal of this guide, then, is this: to get a steady stream of emails into your inbox that will let you know about the latest books and articles in anthropology. So let’s get started. (more…)
Thu 3 Apr 2008
Alas, our imminent merger with Wiley-Blackwell fell through at the last minute. However, if you are interested, the press release will still be stored here for all of perpetuity.
Mon 24 Mar 2008
I have a really simply, totally stupid question here: what does the term ‘Euro-American’ mean? It surfaced recently in the comments on this blog and I have seen it elsewhere, but I honestly have no idea. Can someone tell me when/where this concept was first used, and what exactly it is supposed to do analytically and describe ethnographically?
I ask because my Ph.D. fieldwork was on gold mining in Papua New Guinea, and in particular about negotiations with Papua New Guinean land owners and Australian mine employees. The mine employees were mostly former colonial officers who have shifted from being ‘liasons’ between Australia’s imperial administration to mouthpieces for global capital. The topic, in other words, was highly ‘raced’—although what it meant to be ‘white’ and ‘black’ varied depending on when and who you asked, white and black were still/thus the central terms I found in my fieldsite. I continue to use them, unapologetically, in my work even though/because they are part of a global discourse with deep roots in colonialism. (For more on race in PNG I cannot recommend Ira Bashkow’s superb “The Meaning of Whitemen” strongly enough).
I am always a bit suspicious of the new terms since they often refer to more or less the same thing that the old term referred to, but obscure its genealogy. The distinction between The North and The South, for instance, has always driven me nuts because PNG is north of Australia and in OZ/PNG English when expats leave Australia they ‘go south’. So in my field work The South is to the north of The North, which is really a pain.
This leads me to the term ‘Euro-American’—is this just code for ‘white’? Because if so then it simultaneously denies and reinscribes the racial basis of the distinction it is making. Are white Australians and South Africans ‘Euro-American’? I ask because this term seems to obscure the global nature of white settler colonialism in favor of an emphasis on Europe and the New World. Are African-Americans ‘Euro-Americans’ because they are ‘American’ even if they are not ‘Euro’? How does the term compare with ‘Western’ or ‘WASP’?
Again, I ask because this term is not, as far as I know, one that is very widely used in the PNG/Australia context that I work on.
Wed 19 Mar 2008
We at Savage Minds have been thinking for some time about how to increase dialogue on the site. So far we have done a marvelous job of creating a civil society for anthropology, and have had some great guest bloggers and—of course—lively and informative commenters. However we’ve also been thinking about ways to blur these roles even further and promote more open-ended discussion. For this reason we are happy to announce a new feature at Savage Minds: Occasional contributors.
We’re not sure what we’re going to call them—One Time Minds? The Mindful? Associate Pansies? Whatever the name the idea is pretty straightforward: to get smart, relevant posts from smart, relevant people who want to make an intervention shorter than the traditional ‘guest blog’. We plan to kick off with a piece by Jonathan Marks (Jonathan, consider this your notice that you have been nominated to serve in this regard 
) and, as Chris says, commentary by people who are working in Tibet.
Soon we’ll be making some changes to our sidebar, and the occasional blogging will begin. Until then, though, any idea what we should call ‘em?
Mon 17 Mar 2008
Soon I’ll wrap up my series of posts on cultural studies and move on to another of anthropology’s interlocutors, Symbolic Interactionism and the ethnographic tradition in sociology. Before I do, however, I wanted to take one last stab at cultural studies and anthropology’s uneasy relationship to it. One of the things that bothers me about contemporary anthropology and cultural studies is the way that, for much of the work in these areas, there is no sense that it is hard to do ethnographic work, or that ethnographic details must be clear and precisely stated. The easy part, in other words, is what is going on. The hard part is how to draw out the theoretical implications.
There are probably many reasons that anthropology is currently in this state, but what about cultural studies? Recently I finished Constance Penley’s NASA/TREK, a delightful little volume made up of lots of different parts, some of which are better than others, and not all of which hang together so well. The book’s argument is basically that when it comes to space travel, Star Trek is the theory and NASA the practice, and that this NASA/TREK complex has become a central location for Americans to rethink issues of progress, science, and gender relations (race was obviously there, but never really focused on). I was struck by the beginning part of the book which worked, surprisingly convincingly, to convince the reader that NASA and Trek were basically the same thing. Penley does this mostly through detail—that the first shuttle was renamed ‘Enterprise’ after a write-in campaign, that Star Trek cast members were invited to the first launch, that they played the Star Trek theme song as the shuttle was moved out to the launch pad. Equally her discussion of the Challenger explosion and the folklore surrounding it was fascinating to read (and relied on the work of a folklorist—another discipline I should talk about at some point).
At the same time, the second half of the book that deals with slash fiction was much less convincing to me. It wasn’t that I disagreed with Penley’s claim (now, 15 years later, we all know about slash and female fans). But it seemed to rely more on assertion, based on experience, of what slash writers were like and less on the sort of evidence I saw in the first half of the book. The concluding section, on the other hand, which situated slash in the context of American utopian literature by women and interracial mateship (to use a Stralian term) novel was fascinating although, I admit, totally out of my depth.
The point of all of this is just to say that along the way it occurred to me that literary criticism has always (this is going to sound dumb) criticized literature. Its data are works which people have already read and/or are utterly impossible to do justice to in a short period of space. And yet clearly, literary criticism is (or used to be, alas), criticism of literature, not a description of it. A monograph which provided a close description of a novel is simply… a copy of the novel.
This probably sounds extremely naive to someone who knows more about this topic than I do, but I’d hypothesize that the particularities of the subject of the literary criticism (longish text artifacts) has resulted in a particular method of analyzing them, and that this method has carried over, or at least had an effect, in its inheritor disciplines. Make sense?
Thu 13 Mar 2008
Inside Higher Ed is running a piece updating the latest news on attempts to revise the AAA’s ethics code to ban secret research such as that conducted by Human Terrain System employees. The article focuses on how they can word the code to allow contract archaeology and other ‘applied’ work while forbidding the sort of work that gives Hugh Gusterson the heebe jeebes. The debate over HTS temporarily stole away the ‘relevance’ meme from another never-ending debate in anthropology—that of ‘application’ and ‘jobs outside the academy’. Sounds like that issue is now re-emerging as people try to figure out how to produce formal language that will specify exactly which forms of ‘application’ are unethical.
Meanwhile, the ASA is doing a good job of continuing to blog about anthropologists at war over at the ASA globalog.
Wed 12 Mar 2008
Here is something I’ve wanted to blog about for some time now but never been able to find the time: anthropology in book stores.
If you go to Borders or even Barnes and Noble, you can visit the ‘Philosophy’ section and buy books of staggering degrees of specialization. Not just Nietzsche and Sartre, but Kripke and Quine as well. And Deleuze. What on earth are these book stores doing stocking such specialist items? Is it that the reading public has a weakness for continental philosophy? Is it that analytic philosophy is done in articles rather than monographs, so they keep only the continental in stock? Are these books merely decoration to entice self-styled ‘high brows’ into the store so that they can browse Kant but purchase Adorable Puppies Calendars? (more…)
