All posts by Kerim

Kerim

P. Kerim Friedman is an associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University, in Taiwan, where he teaches linguistic and visual anthropology. He is co-director of the film Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!, winner of the 2011 Jean Rouch Award from the Society of Visual Anthropology. Follow Kerim on Twitter.

The first MOOC was a book

There is some interesting discussion happening right now about Massively Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. I think a lot of it conflates education with universities as an institution of learning. To better untangle some of this it is helpful to think about earlier changes in communications technology and how they changed learning. To that end, I’d like to discuss an article by my thesis advisor, F. Niyi Akinnaso (1992): “Schooling, Language, and Knowledge in Literate and Nonliterate Societies.”

Akinannso’s article questions the casual equation of formal learning with literacy. He shows how Yoruba traditions in Nigeria associated with Ifá divination have many of the same features we associate with formal learning, even though it is an entirely oral tradition. There are schools, exams, and, importantly for the present discussion, a process of socialization into the use of texts (whether those texts be written down or memorized). He compares the training of diviners to Peter Burke’s description of the training of Catholic priests in early modern Italy:

During the course of their training, these professionals develop special exegetical abilities and become speakers of the appropriate language of authority.These attributes and the specialized knowledge they have acquired become the chief source of their power in society.

The point being that these functions of the university (or seminary) as an institution can be fulfilled separately from the technology of literacy.

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5 Documentary Films from Taiwan

Someone asked me for a list of five documentary films for an online anthropology publication, but the piece never got published so I’m sharing it here. I decided to choose is a list of five films from Taiwan which I think would be particularly interesting for anthropologists. I’ve tried to select a variety of film styles: one fiction film by an indigenous Taiwanese filmmaker (Finding Sayon), two ethnographic films made by Taiwanese anthropologists (Returning Souls and Amis Hip-hop), a documentary by an indigenous activist (What’s Your Family Name, Please?), and an observational documentary (Yellow Box).

Yellow Box looks at the world of “Betel nut beauties” (scantily clad women who sell betel nuts to passing drivers) but manages to avoid being exploitative by pointing the camera so the gaze is primarily on the customers.

Finding Sayon is fictional account of a film crew visiting the village where a famous Japanese-era story, The Bell of Sayon (about an Aborigine girl who sacrificed her life for her Japanese teacher) took place. [Yes, I know this means it isn’t really a list of 5 documentaries – but this film is definitely of interest. We even had a review of it here on Savage Minds.]

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Reaction to AAA OA Announcement

When Leith Mullings announced that the AAA would be publishing a new Open Access journal we here at Savage Minds were all:

funny gifs

But when we saw this:

There will be a specific policy for Open Anthropology on “ungating” and perhaps “re-gating” content after a certain period of time.

we were all:

funny gifs

Seriously, does the AAA even know what “open access” means? Hint: “free access” is not the same thing as “open access”.

UPDATE: Seems that Ryan and I posted about this right around the same time. Make sure to go read his take as well.

Self Archive Already!

If you are an academic who has published in non-open access peer-review journals and haven’t yet taken any steps to make those articles available for free on the internet, you are doing it wrong. Doing so will ensure that more people read and cite your work. It will also make that work available to people who might otherwise not have access. And it is perfectly legal.*

There are a number of options for doing so. The best would be if your university or academic association has an official repository devoted to archiving such work. The AAA is currently working with SSRN to provide such a service, so you might try there. But you don’t need to be so official about it. You can simply host PDF files on your own website, or take advantage of any number of commercial services. I see a lot of people now using Academia.edu, Mendeley, or Zotero. Google Drive and Dropbox are also options, although you will want to have some kind of website where these links are advertised. Maybe Google Sites or WordPress? The list of options is endless, and it doesn’t really matter which you use – just get your stuff online!

In short, there is no excuse for not posting your own articles online, and if you see an academic who isn’t doing so you should take the time to let them know. A lot of scholars simply don’t know how to host their own website or use services like academia.edu — why not help them? Yes, in an ideal world journals would all be open access, but till that happens, there is no reason you can’t take steps to liberate your own work (and that of your colleagues).

  • While almost all academic journals allow some form of self-archiving, they do differ in the details. Some allow a copy of the final article as it appears on the journal website, while others only allow you to post an uncorrected pre-print. To see what is allowed for particular journals, make use of the excellent RoMEO database. And don’t worry if you are confused. I encourage people to err on the side of openness. If you accidentally make a mistake you probably won’t have FBI agents banging down your doors. You are more likely to simply get an email asking you to remove the PDF from your website.

Castes of Crime

With the appointment of Nicholas Dirks as the new chancellor of UC Berkeley, I thought it would be a good opportunity to talk about something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while, something that comes up whenever we show our film, Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!. During post-film discussions, people often ask about why it is that when the actors (the members of Budhan Theatre, who, along with their families, are the subjects of our film) introduce themselves they use “Chhara” as a surname: “Dakxin Chhara,” “Sandeep Chhara,” “Kalpana Chhara,” etc. We explain that this is not their real last name, but more of an affirmation of their formerly stigmatized identity. Having been labeled by the British as a “Criminal Tribe” in 1933, the members of Budhan Theatre now proudly declare that they are “born actors” not “born criminals.” But this naturally leads to the next question: are the Chharas are a “caste”? This is where Nick Dirks comes in, because to answer it requires understanding a little bit about the history of caste in India.

One of Dirks’ most important books is Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India in which he argues that India’s contemporary caste system was largely a colonial invention. This isn’t to say that there wasn’t something called caste before colonialism, just that caste in its present form was shaped by the colonial process. Nor was this shaping of caste purely a top-down matter, but something that happened through a process that heavily involved the Indian people themselves. Both the Brahmins who worked closely with the British to encode the caste system in the new bureaucracy, as well as the ordinary people, many of whom organized politically to ensure that their caste status was listed favorably in the census. While the “invented” nature of caste is still a matter of considerable academic debate, much of the debate is over how extensive and how formalized caste was in pre-colonial India. Most scholars accept Dirks’ argument that caste was profoundly altered as a result of the colonial encounter. (Well, OK, maybe some of his detractors wouldn’t use the word “profound”…)

Where this connects with the history of “Criminal Tribes” (now known as “Denotified and Nomadic Tribes” or DNTs) is with the following account from his book: Continue reading →

In Rousseau’s (and Polanyi’s) Footsteps (Thoughts on Debt)

After writing my last post on David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years I got a nice email from Keith Hart, which reminded me I still hadn’t read his long review of David’s book which I’d bookmarked back in July. I was waiting till I read the book myself as I like to read things with an open mind. But if you only read one review of Debt, this is the one you should read. Hart is himself one of the foremost economic anthropologists, and he has long been writing about some of the main issues discussed in Graeber’s book: money, the human economy, etc. His book on Money, The Memory Bank, is available online. (Keith is a long-time innovator in moving anthropology to the internet, and is also one of the main forces behind the Open Anthropology Cooperative.)

I’d really just like to leave this post here and make you all go read Keith’s piece, but it is long, and experience tells me few readers ever click on the links, so here are a few highlights for you [below the fold]:

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Desk Reject

Today I learned the term “desk reject.” I’ve never worked as an editor for an academic journal. It seems like a thankless job, and I have nothing but admiration for those who find the time and energy to do it well. But I have gotten to a stage in my career where I am frequently called upon to do anonymous peer review articles and I’ve come to the conclusion that a lot of journal editors are shirking their responsibilities by sending papers out for peer review that should never have gotten that far.

Rejecting a paper before peer review is called a “desk reject” and different journals differ in their policies. Some journals reject most papers before they get to peer review, while others send out almost everything. In some cases, it seems, this might be a ploy to boost rejection numbers so as to improve a journals’ ranking, although it isn’t clear that it actually makes a difference (for ranking) how you reject a paper.

From chatting with journal editors on Facebook it seems the most frequent cause for a desk rejection is that an article is obviously inappropriate for that journal. Editors told me of articles sent in the wrong language, or even the wrong academic discipline. Articles that are particularly poorly written might also be subject to a desk rejection.

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Moby Debt (Thoughts on Debt)

One of the things a good book does is to show you patterns which you start seeing everywhere. David Graeber’s Debt is one of those books. Right now I’m enjoying listing to the Moby Dick Big Read in which:

David Cameron, Tilda Swinton, Stephen Fry and Simon Callow jump aboard ambitious project to broadcast Herman Melville’s classic novel in its entirety – 135 chapters over 135 days

As I discussed in my last post, one of the central arguments in Debt is the constant tension between debt as a finite, calculable thing as defined by money (and backed by the authority of the state), and debt as an infinite moral obligation which can never be repaid. This tension is central to Moby Dick. Here, for instance, is a passage about captain Ahab from the end of Chapter 41:

They were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge.

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Graeber’s Marxism (Thoughts on Debt)

I recently finished reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years and I hope to start a series of posts inspired by this book. Not so much reviewing it, as in dialog with it. For my first post I wanted to highlight what I understand to be the Marxist underpinnings of Graeber’s methodology. To do so it is useful to look at a recent critical review of the book in Jacobin by Mike Beggs, one of the journal’s editors. It is useful because Beggs get things very wrong, but wrong in a particularly interesting way.

Beggs seems eager to prove is that Graeber creates a straw man out of economic theory, but in doing so he himself makes a straw man out of Graeber. He starts by conceding that some forms of economics are overly individualistic:

The most simplistic renditions of neoclassical economics may reduce all human interactions to self-interested exchange.

He then promptly points out that this critique is not new, and that the importance of social structure “could almost be seen as a constant in social theory since the classics.” Here is where it gets interesting:

But most of these other approaches to grand socio-history differ from Graeber’s in treating these levels as structures, and not simply as the practices that create them. They are made up of complex, evolving patterns of relationships that cannot be reduced to or derived from deliberate individual or interpersonal action. They emerge, as Marx put it, “behind the backs” of the very people who collectively create them. They become the social contexts that frame our actions, the circumstances not of our choosing within which we make history. They are collective human products, but not of ideological consensus – rather, they are the outcome of often competing, contradictory pressures.

Graeber, in contrast, stays mainly at the level of conscious practice and gives a basically ethical vision of history, where great changes are a result of shifting ideas about reality.

Whether or not you agree with Graeber’s overall argument about the history of debt, this is a laughable characterization of what Graeber is doing in this book Continue reading →

Political Ritual among the Nacirema

The Nacirema, till now most famous for their unusual body rituals, are also quite well known for their political rituals; especially the unusual way they choose their headman.* Whereas many traditional societies choose their headman based on his demonstrated ability at skills related to the survival of the community, the Nacirema have chosen instead to hold a public contest, called an etabed.

In order to understand the etabed, it is first necessary to understand the patron-client relations underlying Nacirema power relations. Patrons, all of whom live in a specially designated neighborhood outside the current headman’s domicile, form a special council which then meets in advance of the etabed to select both the contestants and the rules of the contest. These rules are specially designed, like Trobriand Cricket matches (in which the home team is always the winner), to give the appearance of a contest despite the ritual nature of the spectacle.

Which is not to say that the winners and losers are pre-determined. Quite the contrary. Despite the scripted nature of the contest, the two contestants must maintain a demeanor which projects their virility without seeming too aggressive. Any failure to achieve this delicate balance will result in a loss of face for the contestant. Too aggressive and they will be considered incapable of remaining calm under pressure. Even worse, they may also be considered “rude.” On the other hand, being too passive or polite will make them seem lacking in passion as well as displaying insufficient concern for the wellbeing of their patrons.

One of the strangest aspects of the whole contest is that the winner or loser is not determined simply by the performance of the two men, but by a special class of purohits who are beholden to the same patrons as the two contestants. Even though many watch the etabed itself, popular sentiment is still largely determined by these purohits, who compete amongst themselves to weave the most convincing narrative as to why the contestant supported by their patron was the true victor.

  • Till now, no woman has risen to this position. Although the rules don’t specifically prohibit participation by women, the nature of the contest makes it difficult for women to compete.

Amis Hebrew School (Learning an Endangered Language Part 8)

[This is the 6th 8th1 installment in an ongoing series.]

I'm officially a student again.

Above is a picture of my student ID from the “Hualien Tribal College.” Actually the official English name on their web page is “Hualien Indigenous Community College” which sounds better to my anthropological ears. Indigenous Community Colleges in Taiwan are not degree granting institutions. Courses tend to be short-term classes focused on indigenous culture, although they offer subjects like documentary filmmaking to help students learn to document their own culture. I’ve enrolled in an eight week course in the Amis language. (At the same time I’m continuing to audit indigenous language classes at my own university.)

While these classes have been great for my research, I still don’t feel I’ve made much progress with my language skills. Unlike DJ, who recently spent half a year living in a village with a large number of old people who still are able to speak Amis, I spend most of my time with young students who have very little competence. But more than that, I’ve come to realize that my research focus on official language revitalization efforts is actually something of a handicap when it comes to language learning. This is what I wanted to write about today.

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LOL Anthropology

Fadormeme

Recently I’ve been rethinking my attitude towards popular trends in anthropological theory. You know what I’m talking about… that sudden realization that a whole bunch of anthropologists seem to be engaged with a theoretical framework, scholar, or empirical subject matter that seems to have come out of the blue while you weren’t paying attention. Lacan, Agamben, affect, transnational flows… whatnot. In the past I used to share Marshall Sahlins sense that these were but passing fads and that long-established anthropological traditions had already said many of the same things if we just knew where to look for it. Now I’m not so sure.

Lately I’ve been thinking that there is something productive about playing with the latest lingo. The important word is “play.” Just like internet memes, trying to fit your research or ideas into a new meme gives one a chance to see the material afresh. Hell, it can simply make it fun again, like remixing Gangnam Style with Star Trek the Next Generation, or removing all the music and adding sound effects, or perhaps even just singing it as an acoustic set.

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Anthrosource is still #Fail

The “new” Anthrosource came out in January of 2009, and made Chris Kelty cry. In three and a half years it still hasn’t been fixed. Why not?

Do the following experiment. Pick a keyword and search for it on Anthrosource. Done? How many hits did you get? OK, now go to Wiley and search just one journal, let’s pick American Ethnologist. Search for the same keyword. How many hits did you get? Each time I do this I get several orders of magnitude more search results for AE alone than I do for a search engine that is supposed to search the entire contents of all the AAA journals.

For a paper I’m reviewing I wanted to see how anthropologists have been using Badiou. Anthrosource gives me a total of one result. AE gives me 35, which isn’t a lot, but is still a lot more than one. Even a more popular scholar like Foucault only gets 35 hits on Anthrosource but 592 in AE. (This is true even if you do an “advanced” search on Anthrosource searching “anywhere in the article.”) Considering that Anthrosource is supposed to be one of the main “benefits” we get as AAA members, this is shameful.

[PS: I’m still interested in knowing if any anthropologists have made particularly good or interesting use of Badiou in their work. If you know of anything, please share it in the comments. But, knowing our readers, I have to ask that you please refrain from using this as an opportunity to vent about Badiou or French philosophy in general.]

UPDATE: OK, I didn’t notice this before, but on the bottom of the “advanced search” page on Anthrosource it says “On this page you can search article authors, titles and abstracts. You can also use the links below to perform your search.” The link sends you to Wiley. As Hugh Jarvis explains, the reason I get more results there is that Wiley is actually doing a full text search, not just the titles and abstracts (which is what Anthrosource is doing). This is particularly confusing because the Anthrosource advanced search form says you will search “anywhere in the article” by default – but the text at the bottom contradicts this. Unfortunately, AFAIK there is no way to narrow one’s Wiley search to the list of Anthrosource journals, so you have to either search across all of Wiley’s content, or you have to search one journal at a time. I see from the comments that I am not the only one who was confused by this.

Seven Ways to Talk to a White Man

Chinese is a hard language to learn, and I’m the first to admit that I have a long way still to go. But for the past six years I’ve been teaching in Chinese and so I’ve achieved a certain degree of fluency even if nobody who spoke to me for more than five minutes on the phone would mistake me for a native speaker. In the United States there is a general assumption that everyone should and can learn to be a fluent English speaker, no matter where they are from. People are sometimes even fired for not speaking English at work [also see this]. But in Taiwan it is the opposite, there is an assumption that nobody who isn’t ethnically Chinese can learn to speak the language. For this reason, when someone sees a white person walk into a store or restaurant the first assumption is that there will be a problem communicating with you.

Of course, this happens in the US as well. I once read of a study where different groups of students were played the same audio lecture but with different photographs of the supposed speaker. When the photograph was of an Asian person the students performed worse on the test, actually retaining/understanding less of the lecture than when the photograph was of a white person. I don’t know if this study has been replicated, but I do think that expectations of communication problems are a self-fulfilling prophecy and result in reduced comprehension. This problem is compounded in a society like Taiwan which has relatively few non-Asian immigrants. But not everyone responds to a foreigner in the same way, and over the years I’ve compiled a mental inventory of the various ways in which people respond to the challenge of having to talk to a foreigner. What follows is a list of seven ways strangers react when they have to talk to me.

First, there’s “foreigner panic” which is often evidenced when dealing with service people who fear having to use English in order to do their job. I’ve seen salesgirls hide behind coworkers who speak better English. I’ve had people standing right next to me turn around as if looking for signs of intelligent life because the very idea that they might be able to talk directly to me never crossed their mind. And I’ve seen people practically bang their heads on the ground apologizing for not speaking better English. Fortunately, a few words in Chinese, no matter how badly pronounced, is usually enough to calm the panic and establish a more routine service encounter (when dealing with young women, this is usually only after some giggling and additional apologies). Continue reading →