Simpson is focused on institutional review more than ethical guidelines, but since one exists largely to facilitate the other, it is worth looking at the problems Simpson argues emerge within the review process:

At the outset, there is a serious disjunction between the way in which research is thought about in the context of ethical review and the way in which ethnographic research unfolds according to its own temporality and logic: that is, following the contours of social life as these are revealed by the persons with whom one engages in the field.

I find particularly compelling his argument that the anthropological subject does not easily fit the notion of a “human subject” presumed by medical ethics (whether medical subjects do or not is another question):

However, whilst anthropologists engage with subjects who are indeed human, they would not normally think of themselves as studying ‘human subjects’ in the medical sense, or as part of the legacy of experimentation described above. The vocabulary of subjectivation used by anthropologists is far richer and ranges through informants, interlocutors, consociates, collaborators, consultants. and friends. All of these suggest a relationship with a person for which the reduction to a corporeal ethics is likely to be at odds. Fundamentally, selfhood is seen as a situationally defined project, rather than one to be defined essentially. In this vein, Battaglia has argued for an ‘ethics of the open subject’ and, drawing on Haraway, takes a position which questions the ‘skin-bound individual as the natural boundary of the total person’ (1999: 135). In this approach, there is a profound acknowledgement of the relationality of the human subject. Furthermore, to talk of the ‘field’ is to talk of an entity which is itself relational and not merely spatial. The anthropologist, to a greater or lesser extent, becomes part of this field as a moral agent who is subject to evaluation by those engaged with when in the ‘field’. Subjects, by means of their own processes of counter-subjectivation, locate the researcher in terms of motive, intent, and the level of threat or danger that his or her presence brings, now and in the future (Carrithers 2005; Simpson 2005).

In conclusion he suggests that there are a series of three ethical moments that emerge throughout the research process. This section was a bit confusing for me at first, but then I realized that it was only in the current model that these three moments exist as distinct points in time. Simpson’s critique is actually to challenge the notion that the planning, fieldwork, and writing stages of ethnography lack clearly delineated ethical moments. With regard to ethical review at the start of the fieldwork process, Simpson emphasizes that ethical choices are an iterative process and that facing them requires a recognition of the “skill of the ethnographer as a moral being capable of reflexive awareness and an anticipation of the consequences of action and inaction.” Ethical dilemmas cannot be headed off at the outset by fiat.

With regard to the second moment, that of fieldwork, Simpson argues that “the possibilities for communication before, during, and after fieldwork are radically altering foundational tropes such as ‘field’, ‘immersion’, and ‘informant.’” As such, he sees ethics as something that should be the basis of continual dialog throughout the research process and advocates a process whereby ethnographers engage in an ongoing discussion of ethical issues with mentors rather than a one-time review.

The third moment is the writing process:

Confronted with this large and complex cloth, decisions must be made (alone or in consultation with informants) regarding what cuts to make: what goes into the text and what is to be left out; who gets named and who doesn’t; what it is legitimate to expose on ethical grounds and what must be concealed on ethical grounds. This is the moment at which an anthropologist’s judgements about just what is the appropriate relationship between informants, truths, and publics is laid open to challenge. Yet, just as fieldwork itself was once a ‘black box’, the ethics and politics of selection that underpin the writing of ethnography are rarely made explicit.

This last part is of particular interest to me, as I am currently writing a paper about how the process of collaborating on Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir! led to certain topics being left out of the film at the request of the community. In doing so, I argue that these ethical decisions can only be understood with the benefit of a historical and ethnographic analysis of the community (which I then proceed to provide in the paper). Thus an understanding of the ethical issues emerged as the result of the ethnographic process, not as something prior to it, although a commitment to a collaborative ethnographic process allowed for these issues to emerge in the first place.

Finally, to Simpsons argument that ethics are not something which can be followed programmatically, but a “skill of the ethnographer as a moral being” I would add that skill an ethnographer is also necessary. Creating a multivocal text (visual or written) is not easy and requires a degree of skill and training. A deep knowledge of the genre and the “tricks of the trade” is necessary to know how to handle ethical dilemmas in an elegant way rather than simply shying away from difficult topics. It is perhaps this, more than anything, which makes me wary of a formulaic review process, as I worry that they leave little room for creative solutions to ethical problems, preferring instead bureaucratic ones.

The time is gone when anthropologists could find solace in the claim that our main civic duty–and the justification for our public support–was the constant reaffirmation that the Bongobongo are “humans just like us.” Every single term of that phrase is now publicly contested terrain, caught between the politics of identity and the turbulence of global flows. Too many of the Bongobongo are now living next door, and a few of them may even be anthropologists presenting their own vision of their home societies, or studying their North Atlantic neighbors. The North Atlantic natives who reject them do so with a passion. Those who do accept them do not need anthropologists in the welcoming committee.
–Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations (2003:137)

Trouillot is then outlining a vision of anthropological duties and risks, include making native voices more full interlocutors, identifying the ultimate targets of anthropological discourse, and publicizing the stakes of anthropological exchange.

To what degree do Open Access efforts–specifically Hau–move us in that direction?

Allow me to first state that I am very encouraged by Hau and its potential. I also do not want to take away from the many interesting comments. However, from that discussion, I am left wondering:

1. As Rex identified in his initial post, “I don’t see a role for indigenous anthropology (i.e. by and for indigenous anthropologists) in this program at all.” David Graeber challenged this, but Rex challenged back–and so it seems the question is still on the table: To what degree might open access also be a place where indigenous anthropologists, native voices, and internal others have a chance to become more full interlocutors in anthropological conversations?

2. Are we “identifying clearly the ultimate listeners,” those Trouillot called “the Sepulvedas of our times” (2003:136)? Hau admirably aims to make “anthropology itself relevant again far beyond its own borders” (2011:viii) and is specifically launched against insularity and triviality. At the same time, the observation of “parochial irrelevance” is followed by lamenting that the Deleuzians, Speculative Realists, Lacanians, and Foucauldians are not taking classic anthropology into account, “a colossal failure of nerve” (2011:x). But are these the Sepulvedas of our times?

3. Trouillot was not talking about Open Access, but he did discuss accessibility: “Media claims notwithstanding, the influence of academic research that could be labeled politically ‘progressive’ has decreased–if only because these works are increasingly inaccessible to lay readers” (2003:137). And so I here wonder–even if every article in American Anthropologist were declared Open Access today–to what degree would it make a difference for the Bongobongo and the Sepulvedas of our times? I do not mean to be too harsh–Trouillot recognized the need for “a technical vocabulary to which research contributes and without which it cannot be sustained” (2003:137, and of course Trouillot’s Global Transformations is rather out-of-reach for many lay readers)–but it is worth thinking about how Open Acess and accessibility could and should interact.

This also seems related to Rex’s analogy to Academia as Music Industry. “Platinum hits” may be rarer, but the irrepentant Sepulvedas of our times keep churning out multi-nationally financed blockbusters.

But what happens when mp3 proliferate, multiple indie labels spring up, and the center falls out of genres like, for instance, hip hop, as they fragment into multiple different audiences and communities? Revenues drop, for one thing, and the publishing industry attempts to litigate or legislate away the new-found freedom that these communities have, attempting to make sharing illegal so that they can continue to profit from the scarcity they are architecting into what was formerly an open system.

For music listeners, rather than publishers, an issue of ‘importance’ arises — how can you tell that the assistant musician in your department is ‘important’ and deserves tenure in an era when platinum hits are getting rarer and rarer? What counts as importance is itself shifting. I can see a number of ways out of this dilemma but whatever route departments chose will require a choice. And standing up and deciding for yourself how to handle something as important as the professional credentialing of the professoriate is a big challenge which requires a lot of confidence in one’s own academic judgement. Which means, of course, that it is the sort of decision that the vast majority of us will hope is made by someone else! But at the end of the day, that is the sort of decision will have to be made.

A quick look at the bios of the contributors and editors to HAU will reveal that it is in many ways a Chicago-Oxbridge production, but with a continental twist. In many ways, HAU represents what people at some of the most prestigious institutions of anthropology have been thinking for some time, but the journal ‘opens up’ that thought to the public by making their work open access. The result is something unique: a journal with a strong, almost parochial character which is also transparent to a fault.

As someone in this network (but not really involved in the production of HAU) I recognize this take on ‘ethnographic theory’ as a species of what they call in France the ‘sciences humaines’: an approach to knowing the human that is rigorous, humanistic, and often places anthropology in conversation with philosophy rather than, say, evolutionary biology. At least this is how it seems to me.

What Ethnographic Theory Is, afaik

So what is ethnographic theory? According to da Col and Graeber “a conversion of stranger-concepts [that entails]… the destruction of any firm sense of place that can only be resolved by the imaginative forumulation of novel worldviews” (vii-viii).

The goal of anthropology on this account (afaik) is to take alien concepts, understand them, and then see the way they sort of make sense from our point of view, but don’t quite. Another kind of anthropology might try to slot alien concepts into a broader conceptual system, to say “this is a variety of exchange” or “this is a kind of taboo”. Ethnographic theory, on the other hand, wants to resist this easy assimilation. It wants to find the part of a concept which is untranslatable and use it as a jumping-off point for our own theoretical innovation. Instead of asking “how can we best translate this concept into our own system” it asks “how can we change our system so that it can understand this concept which resists classification”.

That’s why the journal is called HAU — Mauss’s analysis of the Maori concept of the ‘spirit of the gift’ is the paradigmatic example of this sort of ethnographic theory. And the reason that they called the ‘HAU’ instead of ‘SPIRIT OF THE GIFT’ is that the original Maori word includes meaning and resonances that the English translation doesn’t. And those resonances and meanings are what are productive, what produce innovation in us. Or better, what elicit it or pull it out of us by their foreigness.

It’s an interesting idea, no? To me the idea is very attractive, and as a Chicago-trained anthropologist I will now do the greatest honor I can to something I appreciate and enjoy: attempt to destroy it. Sorry Giovanni — it’s what they trained me to do!

Some Questions and Concerns

Part of what is appealing about the notion of ethnographic theory is the way that it cunningly reverses what many anthropologists think our discipline is supposed to do: make the strange familiar. Instead, the goal is to make the strange as strange as possible — to honor, welcome, embrace, and perhaps even emphasize its strangeness. In America, this smacks of ‘orientalism’ which we all automatically know is ‘bad’. But here, intriguingly, othering involves moral validation.

This stance is familiar to those of us who remember the bad old days of the Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate. That debate was basically about how best to honor indigenous people: Sahlins argued we should do it by emphasizing and validating their legitimate difference, while Obeyesekere argued this task was best accomplished by emphasizing our common humanity.

Both, in other words, represented the two moments of recognition that Charles Taylor talks about in his essay on “The Politics of Recognition”. Contrary to what you might expect from the subject positions of the two authors (Obeyesekere the third world elite, Sahlins the first world working-class intellectual) it is Sahlins who pursues a politics of difference and Obeyesekere who pursues a politics of universalism.

In many ways, this emphasis on recognizing otherness is akin to certain flavors of poststructural politics, such as a politics of performance a la Judith Butler, where the goal is to destablize hegemonic norms by revealing the excess which they must elide in order to make themselves taken for granted. It is for this reason that I — and probably I alone — see Butler and Sahlins as kindred spirits. But that is a topic for another day.

Many influences by Sahlins (such as Ira Bashkow and Rupert Stasch) have continued to pursue a way to recuperate a morally positive recognition of difference, and I see HAU as operating within this genealogy, even if it lacks the Yankee obsession with politics and relevance.

Looking ethnographic theory with Manoa eyes (eyes keenly focused on the politics of Pacific and Indigenous scholarship) I have my doubts as well. In an extremely obvious way, this is a project that engages indigenous ideas, not actual indigenous people (much less indigenous scholars). Some might object that the authors clearly state that they are “speaking of alien concepts, which are by no means limited to those drawn from strange and romantic places” (vii). But, to be frank, does anybody actually buy this?

I don’t see a role for indigenous anthropology (i.e. by and for indigenous anthropologists) in this program at all. Nor do I see — as one would expect if the program was committed to ethnography everywhere and not just ‘exotic’ spaces — any account of how one could do ethnography of their own first-world location. Here again HAU’s title is telling: cultural difference seems necessary, not incidental, to the program. When we see a piece on standard average european concepts made strange, maybe I will change my tune — if, that is, that piece doesn’t fall into the familiar trap of making the first-world working class ‘the other’. An essay on how the concept of ‘monster trucks’ expands our anthropological imagination will not cut it.

I feel clichéd saying this, but the concept of ethnographic theory also seems to ignore the real and enduring fact of colonialism, and the political economic processes that make the kinds of subjects like ‘ethnographers’ and ‘informants’ who in fact are commensurable with each other because of shared (colonial) world-historical experience. Just how alien are we from one another? And if the political effects of eliding the colonialism inside of white anthropologists are palatable, what do we think of an approach that, in some variations, decries Pacific islanders as inauthentic for not conforming to the lifeways described in books written a century ago?

The negative stereotype is this: ‘Ethnographic theory’ as a parlor game in which elite academic weave ever more obscurantist essays for each other inspired by their brush with ‘the exotic’ in the name of a project of getting intellectually high. I don’t think ethnographic theory does this all the time, or necessarily will do this (although frankly, sometimes at conferences I can’t help but get this feeling as people invoke white holes, quantum physics, and Papuan longhouses). Indeed, one of the best parts about HAU is that it might broaden the horizons of those who are used to doing ethnographic theory inside the ivory tower, thus opening it up not only to ‘us’ but opening ‘them’ up by exposure to ‘us’.

What Ethnographic Theory Doesn’t Do

The authors of HAU are not interested in many things that social scientists could do or aspire to do — indeed, some of their project was formulated specifically in reaction to these aspirations. For the sake of giving Michael E. Smith the opportunity to remind us once again that he has resigned from the AAA, I offer a list of some things Ethnographic theory can’t or doesn’t want to do:

Generalize in the Name of Science: This is not generalizing social science. It doesn’t seek to explain anything.

Intervene: Ethnographic theory does not aim to be ‘useful’ in either the lefty applied/emancipatory fight the power kind of way, or the right-wing Project Camelot/HTS kind of way. It doesn’t seem to be ‘good’ for anything except possibly expanding your consciousness, which some may claim has some sort of broad effect.

Be Public: Let’s face it, the style of much of this writing can be off-putting even for academics. This is not something intended for a general audience.

Collaborate: Fieldwork may involve a deep appreciation of local communities, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of cowriting with them.

Of course, few people want an anthropology that does all of these things, and there’s nothing wrong with not doing them. I include this list only to describe some of the desiderata that people might want in anthropology and how they are situated in relation to the project of ethnographic theory.

Further Reading

The foreward to HAU is very, very short and I chose it to publicize the journal as well as provide something that is a bite-sized chunk of this school of thought. Fuller treatments are abound, and many of them are open access. Tony Crook and Justin Schaffner’s article in HAU “Roy Wagner’s ‘Chess of Kinship’: An Opening Gambit” is a great overview of this school of thought (I thought about assigning it), especially if you know anything about Melanesia. Frankly, you will probably get more out of it than Roy’s article itself. Over at Tipití, another great open access journal, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation” is a great over view of VdC’s thought, which directly influenced the forward to HAU. Let’s face it — although open access anthropology can be hard to find if you don’t know where to look, some of the best and most cutting-edge stuff is out there, as HAU well demonstrates.

In Conclusion

In conclusion, I think the idea of ethnographic theory is exciting, coherent, and offers a way forward for anthropology — and when was the last time you said that about something published in American Ethnologist? But at the same time I feel a little ambivalent, and I’m not completely sold. I’d be interested in hearing your comments and feedback. I’ve tried to be critical but gracious, and I hope that I’ve been successful. So please do the same and keep the tone constructive — remember, the authors are listening, and even well-meaning criticism can come across the wrong way on Teh Internetz, so let’s try to encourage some collegiality here.

I’ll keep this post up until Wednesday, when I’ll make another reading suggestion based on how the conversation in the comments goes. Thanks for reading and thanks for discussing!

[I realize the irony of prominently citing American Anthropologist during the Open Access debates--I do end with a call to support Rex's proposal to read and talk about HAU]

–Andre Gingrich, Transitions: Notes on Sociocultural Anthropology’s Present and Its Transnational Potential, December 2010:555

–Karen Brodkin, Sandra Morgen and Janis Hutchinson, Anthropology as White Public Space?, December 2011:545

I am hoping in these guest posts to examine episodes of how anthropology gets taken–starting with a follow-up to Kerim’s archive on Jared Diamond, and then tackling the Anthropologie Store, the TV series Community, and other instances where anthropology either gives stuff away or gets hijacked. But I’d also like to write about taking anthropology back, in alliance with what Rex proposes around Hau or Matt suggests about the AAA.

As an introduction, I would like to use the two articles above, from the December 2010 and December 2011 issues of American Anthropologist, to assess anthropology’s current position, to evaluate resources and risks.

Andre Gingrich’s article hit the press just as the AAA science and mission statement issue really earned anthropology some great NY Times coverage. If anyone is working on a “careful and balanced history” of the autocritique, please let me know–in the wake of old wounds and new emotions about science, such accountings became nearly impossible. Bad feelings and suspicion persist, and for those in adjacent disciplines, anthropology can now always be dismissed with some lines about how it is “at war with itself” and “got rid of science.” This only exacerbated the way the autocritique had been misused, as Giovanni Da Col and David Graeber argue in the inaugural issue of HAU:

The anthropological auto-critique of the 1980s was made to serve a purpose for which it was never intended. In fact, anthropology has been since its inception a battle-ground between imperialists and anti-imperialists, just as it remains today. For outsiders, though, it provided a convenient set of simplified tag lines through which it was possible to simply dismiss all anthropological knowledge as inherently Eurocentric and racist, and therefore, as not real knowledge at all. (2011:xi)

This debate also proved how much the tag line postmodernism still serves as a convenient device to lump all opponents. Such lumping ignores how accusations of postmodernism tend to conceal more than they reveal about actual positions, and that there were legitimate critiques of normative science from Marxism and feminism long before–and that did not depend upon–this so-called postmodern critique.

Andre Gingrich could also have hardly known of all the other minor and major assaults in the works for anthropology in 2011, including the backlash from the “F— You Republicans” e-mail as a minor ambush and then the Florida Governor’s declaration of a no-anthropology-needed zone, which together with the heightened threats to educational funding and continued use of “economic crisis” to discipline and informalize academic labor, amounted to a major assault. However, Gingrich did have pertinent and rather prophetic words of advice for navigating these episodes:

Opponents will not remain inactive. In times of crisis, it is not difficult to predict that some forces will emerge that will argue either for an intensification of anthropology’s applied subordination and instrumentalization at the service of other needs and fields or for anthropology’s radical downsizing–or for both, as one step toward its dissolution. (2010:558-559)

Nevertheless, as of December 2011 there were good reasons to be hopeful. In contrast to the December 2010 science-in-anthropology incident, the AAA swiftly responded to Florida Governor Scott; anthropology bloggers like Daniel Lende and students like Charlotte Noble provided round-the-clock coverage and response, coalescing in what seemed to be anthropology’s first-ever rapid action team.

Meanwhile, the Occupy movement dramatically re-framed issues of plutocracy, wealth, and power, with anthropologist David Graeber playing a critical role. As a record number of attendees headed to the AAA annual meetings in Montreal, there were certainly reasons for optimism.

It is in this context that the December 2011 article “Anthropology as White Public Space?” was a particularly painful reminder of incongruities and what anthropology has been unable to accomplish. Anthropology as an academic discipline has generally been more willing to engage in autocritique and to take this further than other disciplines even begin to ponder. Anthropology also claims an anti-racist heritage and position. But though the authors found “some improvement” the overall tenor is that “many of the same exclusionary ideological and structural elements that the Committee on Minorities and Anthropology encountered [in 1973] are still prevalent in many anthropology departments” (2011:546).

This is a must-read article for anthropology. As the 2012 U.S. election season unfolds, vitriol and vicious denials of any kind of bias or structuring along lines of race, class, and gender will undoubtedly intensify. This is no time for anthropology to turn away from these issues.

Can a beleagured discipline simultaneously go through a transition to transnationalism and at the same time “take seriously the points of view of those who are internal others” (Brodkin et al. 2011:555)? I believe these issues can and must be linked and tackled together. But it requires awareness and political will.

Of most immediate relevance, and since I have the honor and privilege of blogging on the most distinguished of anthropology blogs, is how those of us who write and read anthropology blogs might contribute to this realignment. Anthropology blogs could potentially be a transnational hub and a place to embrace anthropologists of color, but I don’t think we are there yet.

Rex’s proposal to read and talk about HAU has real potential to address the kinds of “minimum consensus about transnational quality standards” Andre Gingrich discusses: “I would have great difficulties envisioning future postdocs in anthropology who have never done any fieldwork whatsoever, who speak no other language than their own, and who have never heard or read anything about Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, or Marcel Mauss” (2010:557). HAU precisely asks us to consider ethnographic insights, prominently includes translated works, and brings classic authors and basic texts to our attention.

At the same time, I want to highlight the insights from Karen Brodkin, Sandra Morgen, and Janis Hutchinson:

The heart of our conclusion is embarrassingly obvious. It is this: the defamiliarizing insights and analyses generated from vantage points developed by anthropologists of color are better tools for diversifying departmental organization and culture (among other things) than hegemonic ones, and anthropology departments should embrace them instead of marginalizing them. Alternatively put, anthropology has made its mark on understanding cultures by taking seriously the points of view of those it studies. We suggest it needs to take seriously the points of view of those who are internal others to better understand and diversify itself as well as enhance its theoretical robustness. (2011:555)

• Survey: Favorite #Anthropology Blogs announces a top dozen /KF
• For Pinker, the two world wars are “horrifically unlucky samples from a statistical distribution” /KF
• In Memoriam of #AAA President Elizabeth Brumfiel /KF
• C of William and Mary had slaves. They harvested crops to raise scholarship money, among other things. //MT
• Wikileaks revealed US espionage of Indigenous People in US, Canada, Peru & elsewhere. /KF
• Andaman Islands tribe threatened by lure of mass tourism—brace yourself before you read. /KF
• Police Demographics Unit Casts Shadows From Past /KF
• Wallerstein: “2011 was a good year for the world left” //MT
• American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year award goes to (drum roll) “Occupy” //MT
• Color photographs from the Great Depression. From rural America to industrial landscapes. //MT
• Paul Stoller: “One way to confront the spread of corporate culture on our campuses is to organize” /KF
• Orin Starn describes use of online message boards in ethnographic methodology for new book on race and sports. //MT
• American Behavioral Scientist Special Issue on the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. /RM
• Interview with anthropologist Catherine Lutz on the costs of war. /KF
• Does the AAA Support or Oppose the Res Works Act? /KF
• New Pew research: “Mormons in America”. //MT
• On Mitt Romney’s Mexican heritage: one Chicano author wrestles with definitions of identity. //MT
• The long, slow sexual revolution (part 1)— in which @GregDowney1 takes on Evolutionary Psych /KF
• MotherJones: Roundup of our favorite “Shit [insert race, gender, sexual orientation] Say” videos /KF
• Johannes Fabian—Cultural Anthropology and the Question of Knowledge, 2011 Huxley Memorial Lecture (audio) /KF
• Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” removed from classrooms under AZ ethnic-studies ban. /KF
• Academic publishers have become the enemies of science /KF
• Specimens from Darwin’s voyage on the HMS Beagle rediscovered. //MT
• Sydel Silverman and Her Quest to Preserve Anthropological Records – The Atlantic /KF
• Susan Blum on China’s (postponed) plans to educate Tibetans in Mandarin instead of Tibetan /KF
• Harry Walker on anarchist anthropology in the latest Anthropology Of This Century is worth a read. /RM
• All statistical biases are pretty much irrelevant. They are all dwarfed by publication bias. /KF
• Massive student loan debt is like taxing people for not living up to their potential. //MT
• New UC tuition idea: 5% tax on your income for 20 years. //MT
• The Australian, non-suck solution to student loan debt /RM
• Society for Cultural Anthropology officially opposes the Research Works Act! Huzzah! /RM
• Ancient Popcorn Found—Made 2,000 Years Earlier Than Thought in Peru /KF
• No, @cshirky, @zephoria is not the first ‘native anthropologist’. Otherwise a nice enough @nytimes piece. /KF
• The obscene profits of commercial scholarly publishers /KF
• OUP treats authors as “work for hire” whereby copyright is theirs from the start!? /KF
• In the context of SOPA/ PIPA: it almost came to be that taping TV with a VCR was copyright infringement. //MT
• Language Log tackles the venerable history of “just sayin”. //MT
• On the high fertility of Republican Presidential candidates. //MT
• Anthroworks likes to read dissertation abstracts. Here’s 40 that caught their eye in 2011. //MT
• On the popularity of American Indian stereotypes and playing Indian in South Korea. //MT
• “I have tried to mix and match ethnic and cultural traits in creating my imaginary fantasy peoples”—George RR Martin /KF
• On seeing a book on your dissertation topic . . . by someone else. /KF
• The Exploiting Africa Academy Award nominations /KF
• Sacheen Littlefeather representing Marlon Brando when he won (and rejected) the Oscar for The Godfather /KF
• Citizen philosophers: a 2008 law mandates philosophy courses for high school students. //MT
• Let’s make teaching skeletal anatomy to elementary schoolers fun! //MT
• Gillian Tett “Anthropology is like salt with food… it is a powerful dynamic to bring to the table.” /KF
• Zotero 3.0 is here! Now runs outside of Firefox and integrates with Chrome and Safari. /KF
• Say hello to ZotPad, the first iPad client for Zotero. /KF
• Time to dust off the #aaafail hashtag: @AmericanAnthro opposes federal open access in public comment to White House /RA
• Superman’s underwear advertized as cure for impotence, STD’s in Malaysia. //MT
• American Anthropological Association Takes Public Stand against Open Access #aaafail /KF
• The Digital Return: Digital Repatriation & Indigenous Knowledge /KF

As an up and coming academic, I’m willing to put my career on the line and promise to only publish in open access journals. Putting my career on the line is a very real threat, since many departments look for publications in key (generally not open access) journals such as American Anthropologist when hiring. However, I’m confident that the people who will be evaluating me will overlook those issues if they understand why I made this choice, and will evaluate my work on its own merits and not on the journal that publishes it.

I wish I could do the same, but unfortunately I can’t and I wish to share the reason why. The fact is that in much of the world (and in the US as well) there has been a move towards quantification in determining academic promotion and tenure. Taiwan, where I live and work, is has been particularly bad in this regard, as they struggle to raise the number of Taiwanese universities listed in international university rankings.

Taiwan does not have tenure, but one has a series of mandatory reviews as one proceeds from Assistant to Associate to Full Professor. The guidelines for these reviews are mandated in a very top-down way from the Ministry of Education (MoE) and there is little leeway in how these rules are interpreted at the university level. (One of the legacies of the martial law period in Taiwan is that the personnel office reports directly to the MoE, not the university president.) However, one way in which universities do vary with the official rules is in the informal requirement that professors have a minimum number of publications in SSCI listed journals (or SCI for the sciences). Universities thus compete to make the official rules stricter rather than more flexible.

On a side note, these requirements are interesting because SSCI journals are mostly in English, so Taiwan has created a separate Chinese-language TSSCI list, but they are counted less than the SSCI journals (even though they are often harder to get published in). Taiwan is somewhat unique in having the TSSCI list—universities in Hong Kong and Singapore focus more on SSCI. (Taiwanese academic Albert Tzeng has done some research on this.)

In any case, the problem I face is that I already struggle under the burden that my documentary filmmaking garners me zero points under this quantitative regime. Even book chapters count for very little here. And if the top journals in your field are not SSCI, tough luck. Moreover I don’t know of any SSCI listed Open Access journals in anthropology. I know there are some in other fields, but none that I know of in anthropology. My hope is that HAU will eventually earn this distinction, but that will take some time. Till then, I’m afraid I can’t follow Jeremey’s brave example. To keep my job I have to strive to publish a certain minimum of articles in SSCI publications, after which I will have the freedom to publish elsewhere if I please. I’m sharing this so that OA advocates can be more aware of some of the constraints scholars in other countries might face in submitting work to their journals.

Where is our discipline going? The good news is that because we can’t currently answer this question, we have a chance to try to do so in open and transparent forums.

In other words, we need to not just notice open access publications, and just resolve to cite them, we need to read them and talk about them: the key activity that comes between these two moments. The key to publicizing open access scholarship is to make it part of the conversation.

I’d like to get the ball rolling by trying an experiment. Every week for the foreseeable future I will (if all goes well) point to a piece of open access scholarship and suggest that everyone read it, say on Wednesday. On Friday I’ll post an entry saying what I think of it, and ask you all to comment. I’ll let the comments run until Wednesday, when I’ll post another piece. Sound easy enough, eh?

There’s no better place to start than HAU, which as come out of the gate so strongly. In particular, David Graeber and Giovanni Da Col’s introduction to the first volume is well worth reading for the vivid prose and possibly-groundbreaking paradigm of ‘ethnographic theory’. Best of all, the presentation is very brief, only three pages long. Are you telling me you can’t read three pages before Friday? So come on and grab an OA PDF of the introduction, read the first three pages (and of course as much of the rest as you want) and stop by the blog on Friday afternoon (Honolulu time) to tell me what you think. Who knows, it could be the start of a beautiful relationship.

People have suggested some concrete steps to take in the mean time, some positive and some negative. On the whole, I think the positive ones will be more successful (although boycotting peer review duties for AAA publications sounds like a good idea), even if the enormity of their task — reformatting the entire communication system for our discipline — is almost ridiculously daunting.

I’ve talked in the past about some of the things that need to be put into place — for instance, a ‘civil service’ of people to produce journals, a way to alert people when new articles are published. A lot more needs to take place, but today I want to focus on just two of them: open access needs to acquire some cultural capital, and it needs to demonstrate that its production values are as high as those provided by Wiley.

(that shouldn’t be too hard — once again, the latest issue of Cultural Anthropology is available on Wiley’s site, but not on AnthroSource. I pointed out this problem ten months ago and it’s still not fixed. So much for ‘access to content’.)

It’s for this reason that I think we need to revisit and pay close attention to the inaugural issue of HAU. Compared to other disciplines, anthropology has not had much trouble taking Open Access seriously. Many of the au courant theorists embrace the new and made their names with genre experimentation. I remember how gratified I was by Paul Rabinow’s attendance at an early open access gathering at AAAs, and I remain gratified by Michael Fischer’s continued interest in the movement. But crazy-ass postmodernists are one thing, HAU is another. This is a journal that includes pieces by Marshall Sahlins (who has supported copyright reform for ages) and Laura Nader. HAU is so important because it represents the way the opposite end of anthropology also embraces open access. Think about this for a second: when was the last time Marshall Sahlins and Michael Fischer agreed on anything? At this point I really think that it is safe to say that the only people who firmly oppose open access are not anthropologists, but the employees at the American Anthropological Association who are hanging on to an ever-more unsustainable business model which drives them into the arms of for-profit publishers.

HAU is not perfect — yes, I’ve found a few typos here and there — but there is no doubt that it has all of the polish and shine of a professional journal. And the occasional typos it does have just make us ask: how much do we really care about typos? Are we willing to ransom our discipline’s future to the need to make sure Wiley pays someone to copy edit our publications? Personally, I’m not. But that’s because I’m one of the worst spellers on the planet. So cracking the nut of copy editing is something to add to the to-do list. Or rather, HAU get’s to add to the to-do list, since they are the trailblazers in this respect.

Beyond the journal articles, HAU’s archival section is a third important aspect of the journal. Most of the time when we free up classic content we put it in a repository and then people hear about it…. how? By getting the rights to classic material and publishing it open access in a journal, HAU combines the best of repository building with the alerting and discovery functions of a serial. Instead of “we now have 10,000 articles in our repository” they can say “this month, why not read this classic article by Leach?” It’s a great way to bring stuff to people’s attention — read: shove it in their PDF libraries — even if they don’t have the time to read it right away.

HAU has been received great fanfare because it is the first “high-end” (as the editors put it) open access general journal of anthropology. Is it all it’s cracked up to be? The answer, as far as I can tell, is: yes. Of course, I can’t really say my endorsement is made with a great deal of objectivity. True, I’ve only been peripherally involved in the journal: I wrote a blurb for them (which makes me a member of the ‘editorial board’, apparently) and I’ve had lunch with one of the editors. But my connection lies deeper, because many of the authors involved are in my personal network.

So rather than take my word for it, why don’t you see for yourself and check out the journal today?

We’ve tried to explain why it is important.

We’ve written a lot about it.

But nothing seems to have changed.

What can we do to make anthropologists care about open access? To make them care what the AAA says about open access?

[This is an open thread for constructive suggestions about how mobilize for open access, not a place to rehash old debates about the merits of open access. Thanks!]

But, in case you don’t feel like scrolling right now, how about a couple of nice selections from the AAA response:

We write today to make the case that while we share the mutual objective of enhancing the public understanding of scientific enterprise and support the wide dissemination of materials that can reach those in the public who would benefit from such knowledge (consistent with our association’s mission), broad public access to information currently exists, and no federal government intervention is currently necessary.

Also:

We know of no research that demonstrates a problem with the existing system for making the content of scholarly journals available to those who might benefit from it.

Emphasis mine in both cases.  Take the time to check out the comments, which you can download as a PDF and share with your friends and colleagues (just an idea).  Comments?  Thoughts?

Update: Here is the direct link to the PDF of the AAA comment.

Update II: A few reactions from around the web:

Daniel Lende: American Anthropological Association Takes Public Stand Against Open Access

Dienekes Pontikos: The American Anthropological Association opposes open science

Michael E. Smith: American Anthropological Association joins the dark side of the force (with appropriate imagery)

Update III: For some background on what’s wrong with the RWA, check out this post by Barbara Fister

Update IV: Kristina Killgrove makes an excellent point about grad students who find themselves outside of the system, here.

Carr starts off the post by expressing his concern that academia is using practices like peer review as a way to segregate itself from wider audiences.  He argues that peer review is, at heart, not a bad thing, since it provides a way of vetting ideas in an important way.  But, he writes:

the practice of peer review in contemporary academia has turned really problematic. Most respected journals are more expensive than ever, making access to them the near-sole province of academics with access to libraries willing to purchase such journals. The pressure to publish increases all the time, both in rising demands on individual researchers (my requirements for tenure were much tougher than most requirements from a generation before) and in terms of an ever-expanding academic community.

One of the deeper issues, Carr argues, is that peer review can be riddled with politics that end up “slowing the flow of innovative ideas into academia” because those ideas may “run contrary to previously-accepted ideas upon which many reviewers might have done their work.”  Ultimately, Carr writes, these issues with peer review certainly don’t do much to help with the public image of academia (although he is speaking more specifically to geographers here, this applies to academics in general).

Here’s Carr’s solution, or, at least, his ideas for a way to start digging out of this trench:

So, a modest proposal: senior colleagues of mine in Geography – yes, those of you who are full professors at the top of the profession, who have nothing to lose from a change in the status quo at this point – who will get together and identify a couple of open-access, very low-cost journals and more or less pronounce them valid (probably in part by blessing them with a few of your own papers to start). Don’t pick the ones that want to charge $1500 in publishing fees – those are absurd. But pick something different . . .

Again, although he is speaking directly to other geographers here, I think this proposal applies to and should resonate with the anthropological crowd as well.  For Carr, such a move would be a critical step for opening up academic publishing to wider possibilities, conversations, and collaborations.  I agree, and I think he is right that certain established faculty members are in an important position for inciting and promoting change.  It’s a matter of interest and desire.

At the same time, coming from the position of a graduate student, I can’t help but wonder how those of us on the, well, lower rungs of the academic ladder, can do to actively foster these kinds of changes.  Since we are all encouraged to publish publish publish, maybe it would be a good idea to start thinking more strategically about how and why we are publishing, and more importantly WHO we decide to publish with.  If every graduate student and new professor is constantly upholding the current regime by basically giving up the fruits of their labor (and effectively providing certain publishers with a never-ending stream of valuable products), why WOULD anything change?  So, in the end, I think that Carr is definitely right, but that many of these changes are going to have to start taking place on multiple fronts as well.

On that note, check this out.

My ultimate goal for my WoW (as World of Warcraft is known) research is a book — now in its third draft. Along the way, however, I am ‘mining’ my research by producing several other publications. The two I want to discuss here are Being in the World (of Warcraft): Raiding, Realism, and Knowledge Production in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (full text is OA — the publisher forget to get me to sign a CTA so I can release the work as I like. They are OK with this). The second is a draft paper I recently gave at a theater studies conference entitled Feeling Powerful and Being Powerful: Virtuosity and Expressive Individualism in World of Warcraft.

If you read these papers, you can see that there are a lot of similarities between them. Both chronicle my work with my guild. Because WoW is way more exotic to Americans then Papua New Guinea (“Black people in a forest? Got it. People killing monsters online? What now?”) I spend a lot of time describing what goes on online. But there are important differences in them as well.

Each paper was written for a different occasion. “Being in WoW” was written for a special issue of Anthropological Quarterly dedicated to ‘knowledge production’. As a result, I felt like I had to shoehorn my piece into that category. “Feeling Powerful” was written for a panel on “Economies of Showing” and so it had to be fit into that category.  Ironically, the panel organizers just wanted to do something on ‘showing’ but the conference theme was ‘economics’ so they changed to title to make sure they’d be included.

I think this is a good example of a general phenomena in the life of the mind: you are always thinking, thinking thoughts that are very abstract and in flux. Then particular occasions arise and they act like molds that you pour your molten thoughts into.

The papers address their occasion, but they don’t pander to it. They both reach through their occasions to address wider points in the literature I’m addressing.

“Being in WoW” made two and half points: first, it argued against the idea that virtual worlds were compelling because they looked ‘real’. Rather, I argued that they were compelling because they were places where people could socialize. Second, I took issue with the idea that we ought study virtual worlds ‘on their own terms’ and do ‘the culture’ of ‘a world’. Rather, I argued that virtual ethnography should study communities of people and how those communities used multiple spaces, some real and some virtual, to create themselves. My half point was that Coming of Age in Second Life legitimated ‘the culture’ of ‘a world’ ethnography by comparing it to ethnography of the Pacific, and as a Pacifcist I pointed out that this was a lousy description of how Pacific Islanders and Pacificists actually thought of themselves and their cultures.

“Feeling Powerful” made a series of related, but different points: that success in WoW affirm’s player’s ego ideals, that a virtual space affects actual personalities, and that this is what we should expect given that American WoW players have a western culture of ‘expressive individualism’. One reason WoW is so popular is because it is a place where this dynamic is powerfully performed. Once we realize this, we can see it is more compelling a virtual world than Second Life: Second Life was built around Western presumptions that all human beings want to be creative artists, which I argue is not true — romantic creation is just one species of expressivity. For this reason we should expect to see SL fascinate Americans because it speaks to their culturally-laden perceptions about what people want out of life, but more Americans to actually play WoW, which actually gives it to them. And this is in fact exactly what we see.

Basically, both of these papers make the same broad claims, but they differ in the specific points they make, the audiences they address, and the concrete data they use. In the final book version a lot of this material will be incorporated. The ethnographic exposition will be all the better for having been written and revised mutliple times, and I’ll be better able to make my points better because I’ve already made them in ‘rough draft’ form in the published articles. Best of all, the length of the book will allow me to connect them together and to add a broader overview since details on these arguments can just be cited in the book, rather than made there.

There are some people who feel you should ‘never present the same paper twice’ and I think that this is true. There is also reason to be cynical of the culture of ‘minimally significant differences’ used by people who make minor tweaks to present the same basic paper at different conferences over and over again. However, taking the same project and turning it over and over again to fit the situation and as part of creating a larger and more integral work is good academic practice — as well as good for the CV — if you can take different bits of data from your fieldwork and slot it in to whatever intellectual preoccupation you have that fits the occasion.

I found out about this place by following a link from an io9 post to a website called Float Finder, which puts people in touch with their local sensory deprivation center and also seems to be a hub for a whole tank-subculture. The io9 piece is really worth a read too, especially the bit on sensory deprivation pioneer John C. Lilly, a man who took intramuscular LSD until he discovered he could speak to dolphins.

Or as io9 puts it–

Calling John C. Lilly eccentric would be akin to calling the Beatles a popular band – somehow “eccentric” just doesn’t do the man justice.

Perhaps it was the mystique of Lilly that inspired Altered States (1980), something of a cult flick among anthropologists, which stars William Hurt eating muscimol and floating in a tank until he manages to somehow de-evolve into a rampaging hominid. Personally I find the movie a bit of a dud (its been 12 years since I first saw it and haven’t really been tempted to revisit it) and I’m a fan of creature features and so-bad-its-good flicks.

The movie is best remembered for its funky, toxic freakouts:

Ok, so, you just saw the best part. But if you want to put it in your Netflix queue, you’ll be in good company among the consciousness studies crowd. Your enjoyment of the film may or may not be improved by being in an actual altered state.

I arrived at Float First early to watch an instructional video which emphasized safety, comfort, and not touching your eyes. “The only thing that can ruin a float is getting salt water in your eyes,” the attendant told me. While I sat through the orientation an older woman arrived for her second float and proceeded directly to her session. I, on the other hand, got the full tour. The attendant showed me the I-sopod and shower. I used the bathroom and rinsed off before climbing into the pod.

Because I had read the business’ website ahead of time I intentionally consumed less coffee than usual, but I did ingest 60mg of pseudoephedrine for my sinus congestion. I was not high, people. Just saying.

The room was a bit chilly when I stepped out of the shower. I climbed into the pod, which was lit with gentle colored lights and closed the bay door shut that was hinged like a hatchback trunk. Inside the water was warm and inviting, maybe less than a foot deep. Soon the air became moist and heavy. I pushed the button to kill the lights and began to experiment with getting comfortable.

Some soft New Age music played as I sloshed around. The density of the water was so high it was pushing my shoulders up while my head was tilting back and I found it slightly uncomfortable to keep my arms at my side. The attendant had recommended keeping one’s arms above the head. Eventually I found it worked best to support my head by lacing my fingers together and resting that way.

I thought back to the advice the attendant gave me, “Try not to let your thoughts race. Don’t think: ‘How long have I been in here? When will the cool stuff start?’ The best thing to do for your first floating experience is just try and take a little nap.”

I stretched out. In the darkness and silence I could hear my muscles move. A full body stretch sent my heart racing, a pleasant sensation. In the distance I could sense vibrations. Perhaps these distant sounds came from the pod’s plumbing or maybe from the restaurant next door but I don’t think I hallucinated them. In fact I don’t think I had any auditory hallucinations at all. I have, in the past, have purely auditory dreams with no visual component so I wondered if that would manifest itself somehow in the tank, but not this time.

Once the lights were out it didn’t stay dark for long. Specks of visual apparitions were present almost immediately. It wasn’t until later that they became really bright. I spent most of the time floating with my eyes open, but I tried closing them too. In general the visuals were more intense with my eyes open though it was pitch black either way.

One difficulty in my experience was in keeping still. Any gentle movement could disturb the float as the body slowly, softly touched into the side of the pod where it was bounced back and forth like a pin ball in slow motion. The more calm the body became the more calm the mind. I think the sensation of the mind leaving the body probably works best if you’re motionless, but I became fidgety and curious about exploring my surroundings. In addition to stretching my limbs I tried sitting up a few times too.

At their most intense the visual effects were quite remarkable. My mental state was a bit like being caught in that threshold right before you fall asleep, but somehow lucid. Quieting the mind was the primary benefit I was looking to gain but I found it was not easy to do. At first I found myself thinking about work, about my mother’s death, about family problems concerning the foster family of my adopted daughter’s siblings. By concentrating on my breathing (one of the only things you can hear inside the pod) I was able to calm my mind with limited success. It was in this state of calm that I experienced the most pronounced visual hallucinations.

There was one hallucination in particular that, like an old friend, I’ve known since childhood. Every now and then I experience it still just as I’m falling asleep. It’s a bright slowly moving flash of white light. If you can, picture the rotating lantern at the top of a lighthouse. From a stable vantage point it would seem dim as the lamp was turned away from you then slowly sweeping across your field of vision becoming brightest as it shown directly at you before diminishing when he lamp rotated away.

My old friend the lighthouse was particularly well defined in the tank, usually moving from right to left across my field of non-vision. The light blobs had an amoeba-like shape, getting thick and then thin as it moved or growing tails like fish. They were yellowish to white, but not blindingly bright (those are especially unwelcome while falling asleep as they startle me awake). Accompanying this was a crackling lightning, a sort of shimmering Northern Lights in electric purple. This hallucination moved much faster and its shape more vascular. Typically these two hallucinations coincided although they didn’t seem to have anything to do with one another – meaning they didn’t interact or interfere with each other.

The really intense light shows were relatively brief and seemed to coincide with letting my mind go, concentrating on breathing, and not trying to force myself to see things.

Something special was happening with my sense of touch and awareness of body. The water is heated to the temperature of your skin and the air inside the pod quickly comes to match it. With the high density of the water countering the effects of gravity and it being total darkness one does not have a sense of the body as being discretely bound in the ordinary sense. Over time you stop feeling the water and only have the sensation of being suspended – floating like a grape stuck in a Jello mold. Sometimes this would bring about a sensation like falling or flying. I found I could trigger this with a stretch prompting my heart give a little race as I squeezed the blood in my muscles. In that rush there was a feeling like coming down for a landing.

The sensation of flying, the visuals, and the mental state of calm weren’t all neatly packaged. It took a little effort, but one gets the feeling that with practice you could get better at it.

After an extended period of time of not being able to orient my body I found I could convince myself that I was standing up rather than lying prone. Then, as an experiment, I tried to convince myself that I was standing on my head. This was somewhat harder to do. In a third experiment I tried to image that I was actually floating face down instead of face up, but couldn’t quite pull it off. Around this time my arms began to feel very heavy and moving them took real effort. It was a bit like Han Solo must have felt trapped in carbonite, as I pushed against what seemed to be a solid surface but was only air.

Well into the session now, my thoughts began to change too. I was tumbling through memories from the recent past going backwards. I thought of my life here in Virginia, my wife and how fetching she was in college. I saw others of my friends from college and the places we would go. I saw my high school and people I knew then. I remembered family vacations as a little boy and thought of my mother.

With my hands I touched my belly and legs. The Epsom salts had made my skin soft and pleasantly slimey. I brought a finger to my mouth and the salt tasted terrible, it made me spit. My muscles loosened and I could hear my stomach gurgle to itself. A knot in my back unkinked itself and my spine gave a crack like a knuckle.

In the distance the New Age-y music crept back in. This was my cue that an hour had passed and the session was over, but I didn’t want to leave. I waited a minute longer and the music gently made itself more present (you never know, I might have hallucinated it so I wanted to be sure). I made my way over to the light switch and the dim purple light was like a bold sunrise. I squinted. It was time to wake up, it was day even if my pupils still thought it was night. I pushed open the pod bay door and cold air rushed in. I scampered wet feet to the shower and turned on the hot water and steam. The salt sloughed off; my cell phone rang. It was time to go back to “reality”.

I dressed and prepared to leave. The attendant at the front desk offered me a bottle of water and spoke to me briefly about the experience. I told him about the difficulty I had in fidgeting and quieting the mind, which he assured me were typical of first time users. He quickly excused himself to ready the room for the next customer.

The drive home was truly pleasant and then I enjoyed a short walk around my neighborhood, stopping for tea at a friend’s house. I felt so mellow and peaceful, like having just stepped out of a hot tub after receiving a full body massage and waking from a satisfying nap all combined. Colors seemed brighter and the real world a little more magical.

The floating experience was worthwhile. I can definitely see how like massage or acupuncture the effects of floating would be cumulative. It was a treasure to have such a peaceful respite from what had been a stressful week. Highly recommended.

Moving on.  While my wife was doing interviews, I ended up playing games and hanging out with a lot of the local kids.  Not a bad gig, eh?  Well, I was also the free research assistant, and I went along on many of the interviews, too.  In addition I did a stint of archaeological survey work for a few weeks–just to let you know that it wasn’t all just homeruns and striking out little kids for me that summer (kidding, of course, I let some of them get hits).  But I did play a lot of baseball with the kids when there was downtime.  We used to play tons of games in the solar (i.e. yard) of the house where we were staying.  These games included about 4-5 kids from the family we were renting from, and a whole slew of kids from around the pueblo.  Pretty fun.  Whenever I got back to the house all the kids wanted to play.  Often, they totally wore me out.   It became a pretty regular thing.  But then, I noticed something.

The kids who came over to play were only from certain households.  Other kids never came by, or were explicitly told to stay away by the kids in the household where we were renting.  I didn’t know this was happening at first…but I slowly started figuring things out.  Certain kids would approach me and ask about baseball when I wasn’t at our house, and I thought it was strange that they never actually came over…until the whole mystery started to make more sense.  I also remember some kids hanging out on the edge of the yard, leaning on the wall watching us play.  I’d ask them if they wanted to play, but they would politely refuse every time.  Why didn’t they every want to actually  play?

Well, it’s because those kids who didn’t come over, or who refused to play, knew more about the surrounding community politics than Veronica and I did at the time.  Sure, in some cases, this was a matter in which some kids just don’t like some other kids.  But in many other cases, there was more to it–some of the histories and politics of the adults in the community were filtering down through the kids, and this was showing up in something seemingly innocuous like these afternoon baseball games.  And these kids knew all about it.  In short, some of the kids in the pueblo were persona non grata at this house because of the bad relationships among all their parents.  Now, this isn’t really a shocking reality, but in the context of doing anthropological fieldwork, it was an important lesson.

Why?  Because we realized that where we were staying had its own small, but definitely important, politics effects.  Some members of the community felt comfortable coming by–and others did not.  This was a pretty important lesson, and both Veronica and I learned a lot from the whole experience.  The first thing we did was move the baseball games from a specific residence to a public place–we started playing in the plaza, next to the old stone church that’s hundreds of years old.  This worked out much better, and managed to help put the lid on some of the simmering kid politics (certain kids were less prone to little power plays once we were in public).  But what we also learned was that we have to pay close attention to the effects of the place where we actually end up living–and find ways to deal with issue that crop up.  Of course, there is probably no way to find a place that is completely apolitical or neutral in ANY community.  But it does help to recognize these kinds of things–whether they show up in kids games or elsewhere–and adjust accordingly.