The website for the University of Chicago’s “Anthropology and Global Counter-Insurgency” conference is now available at http://anthroandwar.uchicago.edu/. You can read abstracts for each of the three panels and for the individual presentations. Notice that I’ve somehow been given the last word…

Update (4/18): I’ve just heard from the conference organizers that Honorary Savage Mind-at-Large Marshall Sahlins will be chairing the last session (my session). He was an early invite, but it had looked like he wasn’t going to make it to the conference.

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In a recent speech before the Association of American Universities, Defense Secretary Robert Gates described his ideas for a new military-academic partnership. The “Minerva Consortium”, as he calls his vision, would offer funding and research assistance for researchers across academia, in order to build up the military’s understanding of the world the operate in and create a pool of experts the military can draw on.

At first blush, it seems Gates—a former university president—has learned some of the lessons of the past that led to the meltdown of the Cold War military-academic partnership in the Vietnam years. Most notably, he has come down against secret research, and claims to encourage critical responses to Department of Defense programs and practices.

“Let me be clear that the key principle of all components of the Minerva Consortia will be complete openness and rigid adherence to academic freedom and integrity. There will be no room for ’sensitive but unclassified,’ or other such restrictions in this project,” Gates said. “We are interested in furthering our knowledge of these issues and in soliciting diverse points of view — regardless of whether those views are critical of the department’s efforts. Too many mistakes have been made over the years because our government and military did not understand — or even seek to understand — the countries or cultures we were dealing with.”

University presidents are, of course, thrilled at the prospect, dreaming of university coffers flush with DoD funds once again. But academic researchers, particularly anthropologists, should be very nervous about Gates’ plans. This kind of direct involvement in the funding and direction of academic research, even without the veil of secrecy that military-academic partnerships have often had in the past, threatens to powerfully influence the shape of our discipline—even for people who reject military funding.

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Certainly more promising in its tone and affect than Strong’s recent case of anthropology villification is Jane Kramer’s New Yorker article about Nadia Abu El-Haj’s tenure case at Barnard (it’s not up on line yet, but I’ll post the link when it is). I think the article is well done, given the near impossible noise to signal ratio that develops around such issues, and especially in Morningside Heights. It gave me a sharper sense of just how powerful Edward Said’s legacy has become in the years since his death. It is, however, a bit light on explaining why her book, Facts on the Ground is innovative, or why it might be interesting to those who want to understand the situation in Israel and Palestine from a new perspective. Although it mentions the basic outlines (the something-more-than-ironic intertwining of Israeli archeology and Zionism), it doesn’t go very far towards contextualizing why anthropologists are doing this kind of work now, and why the reaction represents not only the ideological extremism of the people who deliberately misinterpret it, but also the failure of anthropology and anthropologists to get their messages out.

I think this is a shame, because the book really could be an authoritative one, and I don’t really understand why everyone (including Abu El Haj herself) just sort of wilts and defends, not the book, but the right for academics to decide tenure amongst themselves (which I completely agree with, of course, I have to). But this instead of coming out with a forceful statement of the content and substance of the book? I think there must be something interesting to say about the inability anthropology has of defending itself against the contemporary blog-mediated, 72-hour news cycle, personal-attack media ecology we live in. Note the total absence of the AAA in this article, save a mention of our president-elect, Virginia Dominguez, who was Abu El-Haj’s advisor. Why shouldn’t the AAA step in and fight this fight on behalf of Abu El-Haj? Is there as choice other than responding to idiotic, personlized, ideological attacks and sticking one’s head in the sand? Clearly institutions like Columbia are too economically and politically captured to do it for their faculty, should our professional society be helping?

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I’ve been invited to speak at a conference hosted by the University of Chicago later this month on the topic of “Anthropology and Global Counter-Insurgency”. Other speakers will include David Price and Hugh Gusterson, who are doing yeoman’s work on the issue. Despite the fact that my introduction to Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War discusses issues related to counter-insurgency at some length, it is because of my work here at Savage Minds that I’ve been invited to speak. Take that, traditional publishing models!

Here’s the skinny on the conference, from the organizers: (more…)

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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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On the subject of the diverse forms of Marriage and Reproduction, consider mathematicians. About 8 or 9 years ago the Mathematics Department of North Dakota State University started the “Mathematics Genealogy Project”—a database of every mathematician, living and dead and a list of their advisors and advisees. Mathematicians, and many other scientists, are famously obsessed with this kind of accounting of filiation. There’s even a mathematical concept, coined by the Kevin Bacon of Mathematics, Paul Erdös. The Erdös Number measures the co-authorship relation of two authors.

The Mathematics genealogy project has gotten a fair amount of attention, and it got me thinking that, Anthropology being the discipline most obsessed with genealogy as such, shouldn’t we have something similar, an Anthropology Genealogy project? Except better, and wackier with all those fantastic forms of kinship we know to exist? Not just students and advisors, but co-authors, membership in groups, crazy collaborations, informants who become anthropologists and anthropologists who become informants, concepts and diagrams and long-standing arguments about specific locales and research programs. Indeed, if we could figure out how to tie it in to major research traditions, conflicts and disagreements etc.—-even if schematic and simplistic—-then it might be a really good way to present the diversity of the discipline. Perhaps a Google Maps mashup of fieldsites, a la Susanne Calpestri’s for Berkeley? Or a recommendation engine…”People who studied this people, might also enjoy studying this people…” etc.

What does your genealogy of anthropology look like? Mine starts with Gary Gygax at the top

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From the Washington Post:

In the November 1944 edition of the Journal of Higher Education, Richard Stephen Uhrbrock discusses the attitudes of 60 graduates toward their colleges’ curricula in an article titled “College Courses in Retrospect.” Twenty-six schools are represented, including Cornell, Columbia and Princeton universities; Yale University had the most respondents, 11.

Here is what some graduates, all of whom were unnamed, said about courses they disliked:

Anthropology was “a complete waste of time. . . . I think it would have been a good course back in 1890. By the time 1935 came around it was a little old and out of date.”

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I want to point people to a couple of things related to the intersection of peer review and open access. The first is a recent round-table discussion held at the Center for Studies of Higher Education at UC Berkeley, which brought together a great group of people including Don Kennedy, the editor of Science and Mark Rose (author of Authors and Owners) among others. The minutes are available (link) and they include a number of interesting proposals and diagnoses of the main problems facing scholarly publishing today, including some sharp observations about the financial realities of publishing peer-reviewed work and creative ideas for publishing monographs.

The other, a bit late, but still ongoing is that Noah Wardrip-Fruin over at Grant Text Auto, is experimenting with blog-based, serialized, community peer review. Noah’s book, Expressive Processing (one of a increasingly large number of texts laying claim to the field of “software studies”), is serialized for commentary using comment press (hip hip hooray!) and is being conducted along side “standard” peer review with MIT Press. I think this is a great idea whose time has definitely come, for a couple of reasons. One is that I’m more and more fond of the idea that peer review is best done by communities of people who are not anonymous. Pseudonymy might be a good idea (i.e., I don’t care who “IreadBooks69” is at Amazon but I know that s/he writes great reviews). The other is that community is a just generally a good idea. If the people commenting on Noah’s book feel as though they are contributing, are part of something, and that they get credit for it, or perhaps even get an immediate response, then that beats the heck out of the anonymous, forgotten black hole I routinely send my reviews into. I only hope Noah writes some kind of white paper-ish thing highlighting what works and what doesn’t so that people can repeat the experience.

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Its probably been a long time coming, but I first noticed it in my corner of the anthropology universe back in 2004 when the UNITE-Here strike dislocated many AAA sub-sections. As a result, some sections experimented with smaller, independent meetings. Everyone enjoyed these much more than the AAA and many sections resolved to continue holding these smaller meetings. Some sections had already been doing this for a while, but it seems that since 2004 every section has its own mini-conference and a lot more energy goes into organizing those mini-conferences than the section events at the AAA.

In addition to all these section meetings, there are also numerous anthropology conferences held outside of the US which many of my colleagues enjoy more than the AAA. In July I’m going to IUAES in Kunming (China), which will be my first big non-AAA anthropology conference.

While its great that there are so many options, it also makes it hard to keep up. I can barely make it to one or two anthropology conferences a year. So I have a questions for everyone: What’s your favorite general anthropology conference? I am specifically asking about general-interest anthropology conferences that any cultural/social anthropologist would be interested in. I know there are great regional and subfield conferences, but I’m thinking more about AES/SANA, SCA, IUAES and other less specialized conferences. Or perhaps you still prefer the AAA?

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What does it say about contemporary social science that the following Call for Abstracts is currently circulating?

Call for Abstracts

Vital Signs: Researching Real Life
An international and interdisciplinary conference

Organised by Real Life Methods, part of the ESRC National Centre for
Research Methods

9-11 September 2008
University of Manchester, UK

Keynote speakers:
Prof Les Back (Sociology, Goldsmiths)
Prof Tim Ingold (Anthropology, Aberdeen)
Prof Carolyn Steedman (History, Warwick)

‘Real life’ is complex and complicated. How can we use research methodologies and methods to produce knowledge and understandings that are ‘vital’ and that resonate with everyday life? Abstracts are invited for papers, posters or symposia around the following themes:

• Methods for researching nature, culture, the material and the social
• Researching visual, auditory, tactile and other sensory realms
• Bridging different disciplines in understanding real life
• Mixing methods in real life research
• Accessing, measuring, and representing real life. What counts as ‘evidence’?
• Authenticity, rigour and rhetoric in real life research
• Researching intersubjectivity, memory, emotions, and humour
• Communicating and disseminating real life research
• Challenges in analysing real life data
• Real life research in policy and politics
• Participatory real life research
• Real life research ethics and moralities

• What is real life? Theorising real life

  The deadline for abstracts is Friday 7 March 2008.

  Full details and submission guidelines at:
  http://www.reallifemethods.ac.uk/events/vitalsigns/

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Here is a thought that is exactly one blog long:

Now that I am a few years into being a faculty member and I begin to compare it to the other small group work that I have done—acting, singing, raiding—the following thing strikes me:

Academics are very good at doing community. We all know we need it—feedback on our work, colleagues who work on shared areas of specialties, the cash bar at conferences. We extol virtues like collegiality, time donated for peer review and so forth.

At the same time, most academics (or maybe just those without labs) are not very familiar with teamwork. Working together, in a small group, over a prolonged period to solve a problem is not something we are used to. Like some sort of Durkheimian fantasy of aborigines, we wander amongst our classes and our students, coming together only for the occasional effervescent conference. But we rarely spend that much time in the same room with each other. And the one institution which does mandate problem solving together—the faculty meeting—is also notorious as the time when professors Behave Badly.

I don’t know if I’m right that professors are good at teamwork and bad at community, or if it would matter one way or the other, but it does seem to me that there is a noticeable difference between the work required to teach a class versus that required to, say, run a rehearsal.

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Having written a post that denigrates a strawman version of cultural studies I thought it time to write a post to infuriate members of my own discipline.

Let’s try this hypothesis: cultural studies is to now what anthropology was twenty or thirty years ago. (more…)

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In my neck of the woods ‘cultural studies’ is a term of abuse. In fact it functions a bit like the phrase ‘family values’ but in reverse. ‘Family Values’ is a completely amorphous concept, but being labeled with it means (in certain circles) that You Win, while managing to make the term ‘cultural studies’ stick to what someone else does is—regardless of what this term actually means—means They Loose. (more…)

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If you haven’t already, read these first:

Part I – In which I manage to get a publishing contract

Part Ia: Writing a Prospectus – In which I detail how I wrote my prospectus

You’d think that selling a publisher on your book idea would be the hard part.  Once you have a contract in hand, the rest should be easy, right? After all, in my case, the contributors had already presented their work, so they already had at least a draft to work from—all that’s left is for each person to clean up their draft, maybe expand a piece here and there, and tidy up their references.  Right?

Right?!

Wrong.  You’ve heard the expression “herding cats” before, right? Well, I decided that getting an edited volume put together was a lot like herding glaciers.

What I’m saying is, it goes a bit slowly.

Part of the problem is the academic schedule.  Most academics are bound to a semester-by-semester schedule that a] changes frequently, and b] puts us through periods of intense work interspersed with periods of intense inactivity. During the school session, for all our good intentions, non-teaching projects tend to fall by the wayside.  Some academics are lucky: they have tenure, 1- or 2- class per semester teaching loads, and committee work they’ve learned how to blow off.  Those are not the kind of academics one would expect to find contributing to an edited volume by an unknown grad student.

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(also at Open Access Anthro)

In response to a request from Jason Cross, anthropologist and lawyer in training at Duke University, I’ve been examining more carefully the available open access resources in and around anthropology. The aim is twofold. First I simply want to draw attention to how much action there has already been in making research open access, both old and new, primary (archival) and secondary. There isn’t a lot, actually, compared to a discipline like economics; but there is a growing array:

• Individuals are self-archiving.
• Workshops, conferences, and meetings are increasingly online.
• New research projects frequently coordinate openly via the Internet
• There are open access presses (Australian National University EPress)
• There are open access options in major providers (including Wiley)
• And slowly a move towards open accessing at least parts of the mainstream journals (like book reviews in American Ethnologist, and the Cultural Anthropology “Coke Complex” issue).
  


• There are also primary resources that cultural institutions are beginning to make freely available, like The anthropological papers of The American Museum of Natural History.


• The Mana’o project is already set to be THE place to archive research in anthropology, and I hope other ePrint servers follow suit so that not all of the work is on that project (though it would be nice if different future anthro ePrint servers federated their search tools).
• And as for journals, the DOAJ lists around 60 journals relevant to anthropology and ethnology. Not all of them are high quality of course, and some are pretty sketchy, but they are all open. A few good ones include After Culture, Anthropoetics: The Journal of Generative Anthropology, Anpere: journal of the study of anthropology of religion, Cultural Analysis, Culture Society and Praxis, Fast Capitalism, and my personal favorite title evah, Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness.
  

Perhaps most significantly, I would say about 80% of OA Journals are non-English (especially in Spanish) and non American/EU resources. It makes me dream of a world where the most accessible research in the world is done by people from the Universidad de Los Andes, The University of the Basque Country and The Anthropological Society of Nippon. Given how often the question of “indigenous” anthropology comes up amongst students and colleagues I talk to (i.e. “does it exist?”) I think they would be surprised to discover just how thoroughly it is kicking our cosmopolitan asses in the race to make its research available on the net. (more…)

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