There is a short piece today in the Guardian about HTS, Minerva, global counterinsurgency, etc., tied to the Michael Bhatia story.  The story also reports on the recent conference hosted by the department of anthropology at the University of Chicago that Oneman attended.  While the story mentions a host of characters we have seen quoted in the press before on this issue, including Fosher, Sahlins, McFate, et al, it also quotes John Kelly, who I haven’t yet seen discussing this issue in the press.

The Bush administration is just trying to buy more time, says John Kelly, chair of the University of Chicago’s high-ranked anthropology department and joint organiser of a conference on anthropology and global counterinsurgency held there last month….  The conference also dissected the Counterinsurgency Manual, a military document that became a US bestseller. The manual implies “an endless future of counterinsurgency interventions,” Kelly notes. “It contains no section on withdrawal.”

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Via Danger Room, news that the Minerva Project (or Consortium) may not be quite the cash cow for social science research some might have imagined. There was a ‘blogger roundtable’ with Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning, Thomas Mahnken, on Wednesday. (Bloggers were from Kings of War, Blackfive.net, Mountainrunner, COMOPS Journal, and others I gather. So much for the ‘olive branch’: I wonder why weren’t we invited? Transcript of the roundtable here; it is well worth a look for those tracking this issue.) Mahnken fleshed out some numbers in relation to the money question:

And on funding, I mean, I think we’re—you know, we are talking millions of dollars. You know, we’re probably not talking tens of million dollars but, you know, one of the virtues of social science research as opposed to, you know, the physical science research is it’s relatively inexpensive… And certainly the—you know, the program I would anticipate growing over time, and I think it will be—you know, the funding will be driven by the—you know, the number of quality proposals we receive in—you know, in each area. This is—I mean, this is an area where, you know, 2 (million dollars) or $3 million actually goes a long way.

A few of the participants explicitly asked about ‘pushback’ from anthropologists. Mahnken responded by saying that AAA does not represent the entire community of anthropologists while also acknowledging the vexed history of anthropologist / military relations. I sensed in his response to these questions that DoD thinks that younger scholars (the “9/11 generation”) might not have the same qualms about the idea of Minerva (and related programs like HTS) as do those who hold offices within the various relevant professional societies. Some other information came out: Minerva will fund multi-year consortia and they seek to get this going by the end of 2008 (so, prior to the change in US administration). Also, Mahnken specifically refers to Hussein-era archival materials apparently in the hands of DoD as a possible resource for those working in Minerva connected consortia. I don’t know anything about this, but am wondering if the Pentagon is holding archival and historical materials related to Iraq, and who these are open to and under what conditions. This gets right into freedom of inquiry questions that Oneman was asking. There are also some comments about why the Defense Department is doing this when similar State Department or Department of Education programs may overlap.

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William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology:

The Cambridge University Department of Social Anthropology has great pleasure in announcing the election of Professor Henrietta Moore to the William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology. Professor Moore will take up her appointment on October 1st, 2008. She is currently Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Culture and Globalization Project, at the London School of Economics. For three years (2002-05) she was the Deputy Director at the LSE. Professor Moore’s very distinguished research career encompasses anthropology and psychoanalysis, anthropological theory and cultural analysis, culture and globalization, and gender, sexuality and social change. She has conducted research in East, Central and West Africa, Europe and India. The Department is greatly looking forward to welcoming her to Cambridge and to working closely with her in the years to come.

Professor Moore succeeds Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern, who was elected to the William Wyse Chair in 1993. In this her retirement year, the Department wishes to express its deep and abiding appreciation to Dame Marilyn for the unfailing dedication, collegiality and scholarly leadership she has provided over the last 15 years, and to pay tribute as well to the unique contribution she has made to anthropology both in the UK and worldwide.

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Below is an occasional piece by my friend and colleague Timo Kallinen. Timo has conducted years of research in Ghana and is presently completing a monograph that explores how traditional Akan ideas about power and authority affect the ways in which Ghanaians see contemporary political leaders.

“Penis-snatching epidemic hits the press?” by Timo Kallinen, Helsinki University

It has become more or less a commonplace notion that in Africa magic, witchcraft, sorcery, occult practices (or whatever term one wants to use) do not only belong to the traditional societies of rural villages, but that they are also found in urban settings and in modern sectors of society. During the 1990s, this observation brought witchcraft topics in anthropology from the field of classical ethnography to more current and broader discussions about the very idea of modernity itself. However, along with this discussion has come a strand of news journalism that produces coverage of African witchcraft that seems to mix traditional (exotic) with modern (familiar). According to press reports of this kind, the occult has now made its way to settings such as soccer clubs, university campuses, overseas immigrant communities, and high-tech surveillance, just to mention a few examples. The fascination of these stories seems to lay in the ways in which things that “we know do not exist” are viewed against a background where they seem to be particularly “out of place.” Hence the beliefs and practices of Africans appear even more “unbelievable” through surprising juxtapositions. Furthermore, these stories rarely pay attention to local categories and witchcraft is discussed as a phenomenon that the audience already knows from movies, fantasy novels, computer games, and other similar sources. The implication is that there are Africans who take such things seriously, who still believe in their concrete existence, while others have moved on. The disregard for local knowledge also blurs the differences between regions, countries, ethnic and linguistic groups and so on. As Terence Ranger has recently pointed out, the idea of Africa as a single “occult culture” is becoming dominant in the Western media. When considering the premises and aims of this kind of journalism, one question comes to mind: To what extent do we know that the phenomena in the media reports really exist?

Recurrent stories about “penis-snatching” in Africa are a case in point. A recent news report by Reuters, titled Penis theft panic hits city, describes how popular panic and attempted lynchings were triggered in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, by accusations of penis-theft. According to the report, rumors about sorcerers stealing or shrinking men’s genitalia with “black magic” had circulated in the city for at least a week and led to mob attacks on the suspected sorcerers. Finally, the police had detained the accused sorcerers and their alleged victims in order to avoid the escalation of violence. The same story mentions that the Congolese police did not want to see the sort of bloodshed that had occurred in Ghana roughly a decade ago, when several suspected penis-snatchers had been beaten to death by angry crowds. True enough, during my own fieldwork in Ghana in the late 1990s and 2000s I had heard numerous stories about chopped-off penises, mysterious cases of impotence and infertility, and the like. I had also seen the accounts in the local press about the mob violence. In fact, I can even remember reading similar stories about Ghana in Finnish newspapers sometime in the late 1980s. So, if we are to trust the media, we have an Africa-wide penis snatching problem on our hands that shows no signs of stopping. (more…)

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Those kernels of wisdom imparted to students leaving for the field. These are often conveyed in the hallway, or on the phone, or in office hours, from mentor to student; they seem most frequently to circulate after the formal presentation of a research proposal. And I think they often have much more impact than the sophisticated advice transmitted through ‘official’ channels. Sometimes they are very telling. Two off the top of my head:

‘Don’t eat unwashed lettuce.’ (Marilyn Strathern actually published a piece under this title in that symposium that Rena put together on IRB issues in Æ™.)

‘Never refuse an invitation.’ (This is attached to Chicago I believe {apparently, a few of our readers live, or have lived, there}.)

As concerns the relationship between anthropologist and informant, these two pieces of advice would seem to be diametrically opposed: one cautioning distance, the other refusing it. Anyway, recently a student here was presenting his final research proposal concerning Istanbul and modernity, and we staff were giving advice. Afterward, I realized that I had forgotten to tell him my new idea. The idea occurred to me, actually, in Bangalore International Airport: “Note the titles for sale in the business section of the airport bookstore.”

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OK, people. I know there are readers of this little blog all over the world. Let’s find out what’s going on. Let’s hear some buzz, some chit chat, what the talk of the town is, what’s bubbling under… I know we have regular visitors in Japan, Taiwan, Australia, Finland (natch), Egypt, India, Senegal, the UK, Hawaii, and…. Vegas. So what are people talking about where you are? What’s on the news? What’s playing on the radio? What are people wearing? What sex scandal is rocking the upper echelons of government? How often do you see hacked iPhones? Where are the cool kids hanging out? I’ll start:

In Helsinki, they hang out at a giant mall/bus-station complex called Kamppi. This suits me very well, since this is in fact my main hang out too. I feel like I spend most of my life buying groceries and waiting for the bus in this place. This means that I spend a lot of time watching the children and their get ups. Helsinki kids are fiercely devoted to over-the-top looks, in particular goth (this pic is from my favorite local website; the goth stuff, as here, sometimes shades into Harajukuism; Finns seem to love Japanese design cues, and vice versa actually: I understand that Moomin trolls are huge in Japan) and metal. Anyway, in the last several months I have noticed a distinct, and now overwhelming, shift toward a particular kind of costume, synthesizing Helsinki’s hard rock (&/or black metal) ethos with transnational 80s mania: Hair metal is huge. The kids at the mall are now completely decked out in Mötley Crüe gear, with ratted hair, eyeliner, the whole bit. So the mall, especially on Friday nights, is basically utterly mobbed by 14-year-old Nikki Sixx’s, many of them drunk. It’s good times.

Meanwhile, for several weeks the country was gripped by a sex scandal involving dirty text messages the Foreign Minister was obsessively sending to various women who really didn’t want to receive them. He eventually was replaced, but the scandal apparently continues because there is a court case involving the right to publish said messages in newspapers. One friend reported that on a radio discussion she heard, two interpretations were offered of the scandal: (a) a new moralism is taking over Finland or (b) Finland is finally becoming civilized. And then there is the issue of the invasion of beggars. Panhandling is virtually unknown here, so last summer when there were just a few on the streets, they seemed to dominate headlines. The country is bracing for the arrival of folks with the temerity to ask for money in public.

Plus, Luis Vuitton just opened a store. OK! So that’s some Helsinki buzz. Tell us something about where you are…

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Pure speculation. Does Montgomery McFate have the ear of Robert Gates, US Secretary of Defense? I was jumping around some sites related to the HTS discussion when I noticed the following quotes from a summary of a presentation that McFate gave {in May 2007} on ‘The Cultural Knowledge Gap and Its Consequences for National Security.’ Consider:

Why is Cultural Knowledge Not Available?

Despite the fact that a lack of cultural knowledge has hindered its operations across the globe, the U.S. military is still not filling that knowledge gap, according to McFate. She listed six impediments to the availability of this knowledge.

First, the military spends very little on the social sciences. From 2002 to 2004, the DOD spent less money on social sciences than any other agencies except the Smithsonian, whose budget is considerably smaller…

Conclusions and Recommendations

McFate recommended a four-step approach to closing the cultural knowledge gap. First, the federal government should develop a large-scale, systematic, social science research program. {Emphasis added} This program would sponsor highly directed research by social scientists to collect phase zero, open-source, baseline socio-cultural information.

Sounds an awful lot like the Minerva Consortium!

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In connection with this debate at SM, I noticed these observations at Open Anthropology:

I wonder if much of what we as anthropologists engaged in blogging are in fact engaging in is public anthropology, or simply anthropology in public. I will not be naming names, and take the charge that I am criticizing a “straw man”, to avoid any unnecessary skirmishes (I have enough battles on my hands already)–from what I have seen, most anthropology bloggers are in fact writing for an audience of anthropologists online, and the discussions, even when vibrant, retain a private quality. Sometimes the posts that are published fit in with narrow professional concerns that they could only be of very limited interest to a wider audience, apart from members of that audience who are curious to gain insights into academic professionalisms. We are not generally communicating anthropology to non-anthropologists, or drawing on non-anthropological blogs in our own conversations, or producing an anthropology that is less self-consciously anthropological because it is too immersed in the give and take of a public debate to pause and ask aloud: “I wonder what Ralph Linton would have said about this?” Some of us seem to be too busy trying to impress professional, even senior colleagues, as if blogging were a shortcut to professional prestige previously gained through print publications, knowing the “right people” and having the “right pedigree”, and lots of hand shaking at conferences. The tone of assessments can resemble that found in the comments of anonymous peer reviewers in print journals, that is, sometimes rather elitist and haughty: “overly simplistic”, “spurious argument”, “specious”, “outmoded dichotomy”, not a good way to invite dialogue. In other words, it’s as if “work” has followed me “home” when I read some of the blogs, when in my case I often seek a break, a refuge, and a space for doing something different, or something that goes against the norms of the workplace. Otherwise, the question I would be directing to myself is: what’s the point of blogging when there’s beer and television?

Well, as noted here, there may be no divide between beer and blogging. And blogs are the new TV: on demand, interactive! Yet, I wonder if any of us here at SM recognize ourselves in Maximillian’s description? Two responses. Yes!: This online world is so open, dynamic, multi-media-ed, polyvocal, synthetic, syncretic, hybrid, assembled, contemporary – in short, so very 2.0 – it seems like anything is possible, and anthropological discourse could work in this environment in inventive new ways and draw in whole new audiences. On the other hand, readers of Anna Tsing are people too, we are a public. Do we not count? Does all writing on the web have to be snappy and quick, tilted toward a general audience? Maximillian has captured something here, to be sure, but what I notice often elsewhere on many anthroblogs is simply collation of interesting articles about, say, hormones and risk taking, from the New York Times. Newsflash: we are all reading the New York Times online. We all saw that article. One thing I like about SM’s sometimes arcane discourse is precisely that it remains rooted in literatures that I find fascinating and that I frankly don’t really see discussed elsewhere on the web (could be my own fault though).

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Announcing the Minerva Consortium initiative, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates says:

The Human Terrain program… is still in its infancy and has attendant growing pains. But early results indicate that it is leading to alternative thinking – coming up with job-training programs for widows, or inviting local powerbrokers to bless a mosque restored with coalition funds. These kinds of actions are the key to long-term success, but they are not always intuitive in a military establishment that has long put a premium on firepower and technology.

This week, Newsweek reports on some of those growing pains:

{HTS} Recruitment appears to have been mishandled from the start, with administrators offering positions to even marginally qualified applicants. The pool of academics across the country who speak Arabic and focus on Iraq, or even more broadly on the Middle East, is not large to begin with. Some of the best potential candidates probably grew leery of the program when the American Anthropological Association declared participants would most likely be violating the ethics tenets of their profession if they signed up (because they would be contributing data that could be used in military operations). Several team members say they were accepted after brief phone interviews and that their language skills were never tested. As a result, instead of top regional experts, the anthropologists sent to Iraq include a Latin America specialist and an authority on Native Americans. One is writing his Ph.D. dissertation on America’s goth, punk and rave subcultures.

Following Oneman’s post on Minerva, this story sketches scenarios that call into question the freedom of inquiry that anthropologists working with HTS might be able to attain. Note in particular the story of Zenia Helbig. (See also.) Irony might be too soft a term for a situation in which the very expertise that is needed by the military (e.g., in local languages) is thought to reveal one’s suspect loyalties. I noticed several themes in the Newsweek story that were prefigured in our discussions of HTS at SM, notably the high salaries offered to the HTS anthropologists, the basic lack of local knowledge on the part of those hired, and so on. Steve Fondacaro is quoted:

But Fondacaro, whose program recently received an additional $120 million in funding {!!}, does not necessarily believe it was wrong to send over anthropologists with no background in the region. “Research methodologies are universal,” he says. Interpreters help fill in the gaps. That he clings to this concept raises concern among people who want the program to succeed, including Thomas Johnson, an Afghan expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. Johnson served in Afghanistan on a pilot Human Terrain team last year. A Pashto speaker, he spent much of his time there interviewing Afghans in their homes. “If you don’t have a good knowledge of the actual country and language, all the methodology can go for naught,” he says. Johnson was shocked to hear Human Terrain had received a huge funding increase while other military programs face cuts. He says it shows just how much faith Pentagon planners have in the idea that real experts can help America win the war in Iraq. If only someone would make the effort to find them.

AAA responds to Newsweek in rather convoluted and unclear fashion here.

UPDATE:  Good links at Antropologi.info.  And Wired’s Danger Room publishes a response to Newsweek from Montgomery McFate.

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American Ethnologist is becoming ‘AE’ and has yet another new cover and publication format commencing the new editorship of Donald Donham. Donham writes:

...we {Donham and former editor Virginia Dominguez} reflected on the title of the journal. Neither of us particularly liked Ethnologist. Its gesture toward comparison remains compelling, but it has, for all that a distinctly 19th-century ring… Changing the name of the journal was clearly out of the question, but these musings led me and the Board of the American Ethnological Society to redesign the cover. As readers of this issue see, American Ethnologist has become more boldy and simply AE. Visually, this reflects, I suspect, how readers usually refer to the journal…

Casting off a stodgy image through abbreviation (cf. ‘KFC’), this represents a further mutation, perhaps a natural evolution, in anthropology’s on-going rebranding. Thoughts? Personally, I like the new ‘ae’ logo, and think it would look pretty spiffy in rhinestones on the side of some faux fancy sunglasses (e.g.) – which everyone will of course really need in Long Beach at the SCA meeting.

Update:

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A blog at the BBC picked up this piece at Asia Times on Obama and called it “insightful, utterly wrong-headed, weird, incomprehensible all in one,” tagging it with the headline above. We already knew this, but we ought to be prepared, cause anthropology is going to figure prominently in the 2008 US election. I don’t think anthropology will always be lauded as a virtuous scientific or humanistic pursuit. Consider the scurrilous propoganda of the Asia Times article, as the author parrots anthropological critique:

America is not the embodiment of hope, but the abandonment of one kind of hope in return for another. America is the spirit of creative destruction, selecting immigrants willing to turn their back on the tragedy of their own failing culture in return for a new start. Its creative success is so enormous that its global influence hastens the decline of other cultures. For those on the destruction side of the trade, America is a monster. Between half and nine-tenths of the world’s 6,700 spoken languages will become extinct in the next century, and the anguish of dying peoples rises up in a global cry of despair. Some of those who listen to this cry become anthropologists, the curators of soon-to-be extinct cultures; anthropologists who really identify with their subjects marry them. Obama’s mother, the University of Hawaii anthropologist Ann Dunham, did so twice.

Obama profiles Americans the way anthropologists interact with primitive peoples.

That’s only the beginning. There is so much going on in the AT column that it is hard to know where to begin. Obama is slimed in a number of ways.

As a Third Worldist/communist revolutionary:

When Ann Dunham chose to follow Lolo Soetero to Indonesia in 1967, she brought the six-year-old Barack into the kitchen of anti-colonialist outrage…

Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother’s milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career.

As a whimp under the thumb of important women and therefore not a real man (...a meme also reproduced in the pages of the NYT fairly frequently by everyone’s favorite nutty columnist, Maureen Dowd):

...there is a real Barack Obama. No man – least of all one abandoned in infancy by his father – can conceal the imprint of an impassioned mother, or the influence of a brilliant wife…

...Never underestimate the influence of a wife who bitch-slaps her husband in public…

As a Muslim (the author reproduces suspicion while ostensibly rejecting it):

Barack Obama received at least some instruction in the Islamic faith of his father and went with him to the mosque, but the importance of this experience is vastly overstated by conservative commentators who seek to portray Obama as a Muslim of sorts… He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture…

As mentally ill:

...he is the political equivalent of a sociopath.

It is conceivable that Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the country. Hatred is a toxic diet even for someone with as strong a stomach as Obama.

In this one column are condensed many recent threads here at SM, from the question of anthropology’s putative Euro-American bias (ironically, Asia Times accuses anthropology of being an arbiter of anti-American values and a fomenter of revolution), to the policing of the family (“As he recalled in his 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, Obama idealized the Kenyan economist who had married and dumped his mother, and was saddened to learn that Barack Hussein Obama, Sr, was a sullen, drunken polygamist”) to the status of anthropological knowledge in contemporary political debates. This is coming from a publication called Asia Times, but the author is the anonymous Spengler, about whom not much is apparently known, including his nationality. Obama is an outsider in so many ways with regard to the typical profile of a presidential candidate, all of which this AT column indexes under the sign of ‘anthropology.’ “Anthropology” means: feminine or effeminate, non-white, leftist, elitist, dishonest, multi-personalitied, and so on. Sure, the AT piece is a rant in an obscure corner of the internet. But you can bet that should Obama receive the nomination, we will see much more bullshit like this. You can expect this kind of examination of Ann Dunham to leap into primetime on Fox News and MSNBC, if it hasn’t already. The question will be whether Obama’s brilliance and charisma can shine through. I certainly hope so.

Anyway, I don’t know. This thing leaves me nonplussed. What do we do with this?

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I am currently working with a group of scholars here in Helsinki on the discourse of global indigeneity or indigenism following the September 2007 adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by the UN General Assembly. We are reading through some contemporary anthropological and legal literature on the topic, and presenting case studies from our own research. Last week we discussed Cameroon, and in particular the Mbororo. This week we are moving to Indonesia and transformations in adat and tribal identity there. We will be discussing Sami as well. If our cases span the globe, this is because the construct ‘indigenous’ has become more and more persuasive in recent years precisely through linkages that are transnational in nature. How are these linkages sustained culturally and organizationally? What has drawn diverse people(s) together? As Ronald Niezen points out, indigenous activism is in a sense necessarily transnational because it seeks a politics that does not conform to the liberal logic of the nation-state. Reflexive ‘cross-nationality’ is thus a key component of successful indigenous organizing, drawing on national boundaries and cultures of nationality but cutting across them, putting them under erasure, so to speak.

This is one claim that Anna Tsing makes in an essay called ‘Indigenous Voice.’ (No, SM is not becoming an Anna Tsing fan site—I wanted to post this before Kerim’s recent posts, but Kerim’s prodigious blogging can hardly be matched.) Tsing argues that political identities must sustain a public to have effect, and they do this through a ‘voice’ that can be heard:

I track variations in the public articulation of indigeneity in different places. I follow not the ambivalence of ordinary people but the claims of those who set the terms of discussion—for example, activists, community leaders, and public intellectuals. Their claims become influential discursive frames to the extent they can gain both a following and an audience. These frames inform what one might call ‘indigenous voice.’ By voice, I am referring to the genre conventions with which public affirmations of identity are articulated. Because it is the genre convention, not the speaker him or herself, that has power, totally unknown people can speak with this kind of voice; but they must speak in a way that an audience can hear.

One might expect then to read an essay about kinds of speech, an analysis of rhetoric or register, a focus on discourse and text, as well as an essay about the conceptual (discursive, cultural) preconditions that precede and enable transnational recognition. However, Tsing follows this argument with a further thesis: “Cross-National Links Inform Transnational Fora.” What follows are lucid little synopses of different (national) cases and their (cross-national) linkages, each illustrating one axis around which indigenous political organizing gathers. Her first example is the connection between Canadian First Nations activism and New Zealand Maori activism in the 1970s—she boldly claims that this particular transnational axis is the most consequential source of contemporary rhetorics of sovereignty in indigenous movements (cf. Michael Brown in the same volume). Further examples concern ‘pluri-ethnic autonomy’ in the Americas, and environmental stewardship in the Amazon and elsewhere. At each of these sites, people secure political purchase by finding ‘allies’ in other national settings (sometimes the alliance is unreciprocated; some groups, unbeknownst to them, become models for others). This all makes a lot of sense and the essay is not merely celebratory, but points out problems (fissures or ‘friction’) generated along each of Tsing’s comparative poles.

Yet I was still left wondering. (more…)

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Box Turtle Bulletin, the blog that previously published a letter from Bill Maurer and Tom Boellstorff responding to a statement from Focus on the Family that there is anthropological consensus as to the definition of marriage, is currently hosting a debate about the matter. Patrick Chapman has posted a lengthy response to a ‘white paper’ by Focus on the Family’s Director of Family Formation Studies Greg Stanton. It’s a fascinating debate to me not necessarily because I am interested in definitions of marriage (though I am) but because of the way that anthropology is invoked by both sides as having authority on the subject. As Chapman writes: “What is particularly important with Stanton’s report is the recognition that anthropologists are the experts when it comes to understanding and defining marriage.” Anthropologists: Do not despair! Someone still cares what we have to say. Anthropologists are seen to have the last word on human nature and therefore as potentially having knowledge that could settle debate on the topic. The typical ‘pro’ gay marriage stance in relation to anthropology is to emphasize the diversity of world cultures and to emphasize that human nature exists in and as this diversity or adaptability. The typical ‘anti’ gay marriage stance emphasizes the fact that nothing quite like gay marriage has really been seen before in the ‘anthropological record.’ To me what’s interesting is how a moral question appears to be disguised in these debates as a ‘scientific’ one, and therefore the real nature of the conflict gets displaced. If in fact some tribe somewhere had/has a custom literally called ‘gay marriage,’ where two men or two women and their families celebrate their union through ritual and exchange, do we imagine that that would convince Focus on the Family of the validity of the institution? I actually think that these arguments are, at the core, about the moral legitimacy of modernity—and I think our very own Oneman has brilliantly guided discussion on this matter previously here at SM.

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Jay has already tagged this item, and Gretchen is positioning it as a political movement in the making (“Slow writing will be like slow food! ”) over at Facebook, so I thought it worth throwing this up here on the mainpage for discussion. Lindsay Waters has published an article at IHE advocating slowing our writing down. The article ranges over a number of issues of interest to us Minds (the politics of publishing being a big one), and returns to one major refrain: Zizek is a big fake, but one that typifies today’s celebrated (read: celebrity) scholar. Mostly, the piece seems to condemn the hyper-active, CPU/CGI-like aspect of academia today, where the ‘publish or perish’ refrain has been amped up to the nth degree. Academia seems more and more like Hollywood: too many channels, nothing on, the whole thing ruled by an inflationary ethos of fame. When young professors jones for Adderall just like their students, maybe it’s time for a chill pill. Part of me is agreeable to such a critique; the other part thinks it (like most resistance these days) is futile. The tidal wave of mediocrity that comprises so much scholarship, that fills library shelves (and online forums!) with a flood of words no one will care about in 15 minutes, much less 10 years, cannot be stopped. Waters advocates the humanistic essay as a reinvigorated genre for the future: full of lucid reflection and promise. Will the essay save us from ourselves?

{A confession: While reading the piece, I kept thinking of Tony Kushner’s stuttering angel and his/her refrain: ‘Stasis.’ This probably relates more to unconscious anxiety about market free-fall than to something as unimportant as needlessly accelerated academic publishing…}

The article is about the humanities. Anthropologists have special problems with time and with concision: a) our research methods are deliberately very very very slow (or used to be before the days of drive-through ethnography), b) one goal of our research is to record in great (often excruciating) detail whole sociocultural worlds. On the one hand, anthropologists have produced many really wonderful essays. I can think of examples from Douglas and Geertz. On the other, these essays seem always to be in a complementary relationship with much longer works (monographs). So, I think the argument about slowing down needs to be disarticulated from the argument about over-production of books.

Anyway, I am wondering what other folks think about this piece.

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Reed Magazine has published online a lovely account of the Warm Springs Project of David and Kay French. Robert E. Moore writes:

The Warm Springs Project was a multi-year collaborative program of anthropological and other field research organized by David French ’39 (1918–1994), who taught anthropology at Reed from 1947 to 1988, and his colleague and wife, Kathrine S. (Kay) French (1922–2006), also an anthropologist (both held Columbia Ph.D.s). Combining outside funding from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation with support from the college, the Frenches brought a series of Reed students to live and work on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Central Oregon (100 miles east of Portland on the Columbia plateau). The project was active between 1950 and 1956—mostly in summer, with shorter trips during the school year when possible.

Moore is the literary executor of the French papers, and his essay beautifully evokes the conviviality, intellectual vitality, and lasting influence of the project. With modest funding, the project “left—through the subsequent activities of its participants—a remarkable impact on anthropology, and on the arts and sciences more broadly.” For example, Dell Hymes was one illustrious participant (and the essay notes many more). Moore’s essay is accompanied by pieces on Hymes, and on other folks associated with the project, including Gary Snyder. I especially liked Stephanie Snyder’s article on the Frenchs’ basement study.

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