“Steven Farley, a State Department official working to build up the local government in the Baghdad enclave of Sadr City, knew he and his colleagues had taken a bold step, his son Brett recalled Tuesday.
Farley and other U.S. officials had learned that the Sadr City District Council’s acting chairman was loyal to the anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and had urged other members of the local advisory group to force the man to resign.
That was last week. On Tuesday, Farley, 57, and three other Americans were killed after a bomb exploded in the District Council building, just minutes before the selection of a new chairman was to begin.
Capitalizing on recent security gains in Iraq, U.S. soldiers and diplomats have waded deeply into Iraqi politics in an effort to build moderate and responsive government bodies that they hope will erode the appeal of extremists.”

I know next to nothing about Gang Leader for a Day and would be interested in hearing about it from someone who has read it. Your comments make me think about how social science’s estrangement from broader popular genres and audiences is relatively recent.

Jackson suggests that this movie could recruit a generation of ethnographers like Indiana Jones did for archaeologists. Of course, going to school with that generation right now, all of my arch friends think Indy is only good for a laugh. (On a side note, I hear no one making claims about other disciplines, like all the up-and-coming primatologists were inspired by “Gorillas in the Mist”). Maybe pop culture can seduce a generation of ethnographers so that the academy can trick them into becoming serious scholars. But then when that scholar publishes a book by Penguin that gets made into a movie, does it becomes pop culture again?

thx for pointing to info. on using google trends (via the Slate article)

http://www.terraplexic.org/review/2008/6/25/another-human-terrain-operator-killed.html

Mike Innes