This most recent failed walk repeats a path he took in the late 1980s, which he describes in his book The Proving Grounds. In it, he is flown into the upper reaches of the Sepik, crosses the central ranges, and then ends up on the shores of the Lagaip, and then returns to Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea. It’s hard to judge, but I reckon the total distance is about 50 kilometers as the crow flies. But that doesn’t really give you a sense of how onerous this walk is. On his website Allen claims that this walk was “the first recorded crossing of the Central Mountain Ranges of PNG”. This is incredibly tough terrain, and he should be congratulated for managing to do it. But he was not the first. Not by a longshot.

Ironically enough, Allen’s ill-fated trip to PNG happened in 2017, which is the 90th anniversary of the actual first white people who crossed Papua New Guinea: Ivan Champion and Charles Karius. Champion and Karius were patrol officers sent by the Australian administration of Papua to explore and map the island. Their epic patrol — which took over a year — involved dozens of people, including Papua New Guinean porters and police men who should be recognized (as Champion and Karius did) as key to the patrol’s success. Rather than getting dropped in the middle of the island as Allen was, Karius and Champion went up the Fly river, crossed the central ranges, located the headwaters of the Sepik river, and then went down it. It’s difficult to describe how difficult this patrol was, especially in 1927, before the advent of GPS or modern synthetic fabrics. Benedict Allen didn’t take a map because of some personal code of honor or something. Karius and Champion didn’t take one because there wasn’t one. And they went to make one. The patrol is described both in Champion’s book Across New Guinea from The Fly to The Sepik and in Champion’s biography of Champion, Last Frontiers”. 

There is also an example of people crossing in the direction that Allen came: From the northern side of the island. During World War II Catholic missionaries, priests, and nuns lived at mission stations up and down the Sepik. When the Japanese invaded, many of them moved upland, into the Sepik headwaters, in order to escape. Several of them, accompanied by the Australian patrol officer James Searson, ascended up into the central ranges, where they were met by the Australian gold miner and plantation owner Dan Leahy. After meeting in Maramuni, Leahy, Searson, and the Catholics ascended the central ranges and then walked down the high valleys in this area, rather than taking sailing down to the south coast. The journey was an incredible feat of endurance. The elderly nuns on that patrol did what Benedict Allen could not: cross the central range and then walk to a town. The walk had its price: Dan Leahy suffered hearing and vision loss for the rest of his life as a result of this trip. This walk is documented both in Fowke’s biography of Leahy, Kundi Dan, and in Theo Aerts’s The Martyrs of Papua New Guinea. Unfortunately, there’s no map of the patrol for me to show here. But trust me: It was a big walk.

Others, like Allen, started in the center and then worked their way out, but headed north. Jim Taylor, another government officer, undertook a massive patrol in 1938 and 1939 in which he walked from Mt. Hagen, in the center of the country, over the central ranges, and down the Sepik in canoes. This patrol was amazing for the stamina and endurance of both Taylor and his number two, John Black. Bill Gammage’s book The Sky Travellers  describes this patrol in meticulous detail, and includes the perspectives of the indigenous police and carriers who were on the patrol, as well as the viewpoints of the people who they met along the way. It’s probably my favorite book ever written on Papua New Guinea. Having read it, I can say with conviction the Benedict Allen is no Jim Taylor.

Benedict has also been bested by at least one other travel writer. Kira Salak’s Four Corners is an account of her recreation of Champion and Karius’s 1927-19 28 patrol. In this book she recounts her (successful) journey up the Fly and down the Sepik. She completed her trip in the period between Allen’s two attempts. To be fair, she did get a lift from Kiunga to Telefomin from OTML, the mining company active there. I prefer her book and her subsequent novel about PNG, White Mary, to Allen’s work.

Colonialism in Papua New Guinea can and should be criticized. But it was different in form and intensity than that in other areas of the world, especially before World War II. There was, as Edward Lipuma once put it, no Australian Pizarro in Papua New Guinea. These early patrols were exercises in natural history and cartography, and the explorers had strict orders not to shoot, which they did their best to obey. The patrols were chances for the Papua New Guineans they encountered to hold of things like salt and metal, which they needed. Police and carriers were central to the patrol’s success, and their lives and contribution to the nation were documented in works such as August Kituai’s My Gun My Brother . They helped strengthen the connections between Papua New Guineans and wider world, connections that have continued to grow in strength today.

Australian colonialism in Papua New Guinea was far from perfect, but by global standards it was not bad — although I recognize in saying that I’m setting the bar pretty low. My point here is simply this: Compared to the actual explorers who came before him, Benedict Allen’s walk is small beer. Even by his own, Boy’s Own Adventures standard, he pales in comparison to great patrol officers such as Hides, Taylor, Searson, Champion, and others.

It’s also striking to note just how little Allen learned about PNG when compared to anthropologists who have done fieldwork in this extremely remote location. Take a look at Proving Grounds and then look at Mark Dornstreich’s remarkable 1973 thesis on this same area. Here is a map that Dornstreich published in the thesis showing ethnic groups in the area:

I promise you: This was not easy fieldwork. Unlike Allen, he took his family to the field. His son remembers “Once, my father walked for three days to get to the nearest vehicle, so he could drive to get medicine for my mom’s malaria.”  Best of all Dornstreich went on to have a remarkable 30 year career as a farmer pioneering the local and organic food movement. Now that’s a story.

I could go on: About indigenous trade routes in Papua New Guinea, about the guides and hosts who so graciously offered their hospitality to Allen when he was lost and ill, and so forth. But I hope the point is made: Allen’s writings not only diminish the accomplishments of Papua New Guineans, they diminish the accomplishment of other white explorers! And this despite the fact that so many of those explorers accomplished so much more than he did. You don’t need to be some sort of rabid professor obsessed with political correctness to realize the limits of Benedict Allen’s brand of “exploration”.

Here is the standard speech I give students: There is no strong connection between your college major and occupation (at least for anthropology and most other majors). The purpose of an undergraduate degree is to give you general skills which will enable you to be a citizen of your country and the world. These same generalized capacities you need for citizenship are what you need for the job market. There is no point learning how to mechanically follow orders, since that just means you can be replaced by a robot. What’s key is the ability to learn quickly is key, since companies don’t really believe in training any more. You will be paid best if you can build or maintain the lives of the privileged. You will be paid poorly if you work for the poor or disadvantaged. The answer to the question “what can I do with this major” is not a fake list of job choices. It is ask “what do you want?” If you are waiting for your college professors to hand you a high-paid job, that’s not going to happen. And this is not our fault: it isn’t the educational sector that keeps blowing up the economy so the rich can get richer. College is not about choosing a major off a menu so that you can chose a job off a menu. College is about figuring out what you want to do and then seeing how possible that is in the world we live in today.

Now, the Hamilton Project doesn’t deal with the more philosophical liberal arts-end of my spiel to students. But it does underline one central point: There is no such thing as ‘anthropology job’ for anthropology majors. Take a look at this chart:

The most common jobs for anthropology majors are: law, management, teaching, and ‘postsecondary teachers’ which I think means ‘professors and adjuncts’. The body of the graph sorts these occupations by income, with the most lucrative on the left. But check out the bar on the left which measures how common each job is: 6.5% of majors are postsecondary teachers, 4.8% teach elementary and middle school, 4.1% are managers, and 3.8% are in law. In other words: even the most common job for anthropologists do not account for 93.5% of occupations for anthro majors. The top four occupations account for less than 20% of occupations. In other words: you can do anything with an anthropology major. But getting an anthropology major doesn’t give you skills for any job in particular. Except maybe being an anthropology professor.

The Hamilton Project uses the same ACS data data I’ve been using to advise students. When  I tell them the most likely thing that will happen is that they will be a high school teacher or a paralegal, they are often depressed. Partially this is because they have this idea that they’ll be issued a bullwhip and fedora along with their BA. But also this is because of the false and inaccurate statements made to them by the university. Universities today are increasingly telling their students that undergraduate degrees are vocational degrees. When asked to pick a major, students are given flyers listed ‘jobs you can do with an anthropology major’. These jobs are typically glamorous and involve a lot of international travel and helping people (aid work is popular). But there is no evidence — no evidence — that these job menu advertisements have anything to do with reality.

No one should tell an anthropology student that it is likely that they will go into a life of highly-paid, benevolent international travel if they get a BA in anthropology. Statements like this are 1) baseless 2) encourage students to imagine undergraduate education as vocational, not liberal 3) discourages imagination rather then encouraging it by giving students a list of possible futures rather than asking them to imagine their own futures 4) discourages students from studying what they care about (and thus cultivating a personal project that could get them an actual good job) and encourages them to study something which they believe (wrongly) has good job prospects.

Colleges and other groups — like the American Anthropological Association — do not concoct these job menu fantasies to help students. They do it to help themselves. They are the result of academic departments and associations trying to remain relevant as they compete with other disciplines for majors and enrollments. It is not too much to say that fantasy job menus constitute a sort of bait-and-switch by which future elementary school teachers are told they are going to work for the World Bank or Google.

The good news is that you can do whatever you want with an anthropology degree — but you have to know what you want, and then go out and get it. And the job may not be about making as much money as possible (although, to be honest, given the state of the world today that would probably be a good idea). Like most majors, anthropology is a welcoming discipline that will let you find your own way.

The bad news is that anthropology does not live to a life of adventure and excitement. In fact, most majors don’t. The world today is not a good place, and the prospects of well-paid, rewarding employment are not that great for most Americans. We owe it to our students to be honest with them about this fact, rather than subtly suggesting to them that declaring a major will somehow teleport them to an alternate economy of Endless Fulfillment. And if, on being told their future will be uncertain no matter what they chose, they get curious and start thinking about social stratification, politics, income and education, then… they might really be anthropology majors after all.

For many years, the standard theory textbook in anthropology was Lowie’s 1938 History of Ethnological Theory. It covered everyone — Boas, Durkheim, everyone. A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, the apostle of structure-functionalism, was one of the people he described. They had corresponded cordially in the past, but Lowie’s description of ‘R-B’ triggered the pretentious brit, and we wrote an eight page letter detailing  R-B’s charges against Lowie. The first sentence was: “The students of my seminar have asked me to explain how it is that you give such a distorted account of my views in your new book.” It’s all downhill after that — albeit in a very nitpicky, kinship-theory heavy way.

Lowie’s equally long response is a model of collegial, principled, methodical ruthlessness. You can read both letters on the History of Anthropology website. Radcliffe-Brown clearly wanted to have a Penis Size Contest in which each scholar carved our their own academic empire and then denounced each other as tyrants. You know, the way professors always do.

Lowie took the high road (sorta) by beginning his response insisting he didn’t hate R-B:

“Your letter of May 6th requires an extended reply, for it voices some regrettable misunderstandings. However, I must thank you for your candor, which I shall try to requite in kind. I hope you will disabuse “some persons” of the grotesque notion that my remarks are due to “personal spite or personal dislike.” Nothing in our past relations warrants this odd assumption. I have always recognized your work on social organization, and your appreciative note about my Crow book was all that I could wish. At least once I made efforts to lure you to our Summer School; and your willingness to take [W.Lloyd] Warner under your wing on my recommendation suggests some sense of common aims at the time. In short, I have no personal grievance whatsoever.

I have no disciples and want none. I am not a “leader” and I do not want my students to be led by the nose.

The letter ends with a series of humblebrags denigrating R-B’s egotism:

You have a gospel to proclaim; I make it clear to any students who seek inexpensive solutions for the riddles of the cultural universe that I do not hawk in such commodities. I do not conceive scientific work as an adolescent’s game for individual aggrandizement, but a cooperative effort that gives scope to many diverse talents and temperments. Neither in my book nor in this letter am I at all concerned about “scoring” against you: I am interested in separating dross from gold for a common exchequer. Having reread the pages devoted to you in my book, I suggest submitting them to some friendly layman remoted from the scene of anthropological feuds. Such a reader will not gather that you have “made an enemy” of me. Malice does not refer to its victim as doing some “exemplary” or “brilliant” work. The friendly layman will probably infer that you crave the servile adulation of henchmen, not the disciminating appreciation of peers, which to me is the only desirable form of recognition from fellow-workers.

The ironic thing about this letter is how the two of them have withstood the test of time. Radcliffe-Brown’s concisely, clearly written manifestos for structure-functionalism as still regularly assigned today, while Lowie’s longer works — in which he actually did what he said he would do — are pretty much forgotten. In my opinion, Lowie comes out on top in this correspondence, but in the long run his unwillingness to proclaim is gospel worked against him. On the other hand, Lowie trained a generation of students who went on to be instrumental in this discipline’s history, while R-B never had the influence that Malinowski did, institutionally speaking, in the UK. So perhaps although R-B is taught and remembered, Lowie’s legacy lives on, tacitly, in the discipline even as his work is less read.

As histories of antifascist action document, antifa is a fundamentally illiberal political movement which seeks to oppose fascism by any means necessary — including violence. For this reason, I can’t stress enough that I am opposed to antifa in the United States at the moment because I am opposed to violence, which is both against my values and tactically and strategically against our interests at this point in time given the mood of the country. But in different times and different places the threat of fascism was so dire that violent resistance was necessary. And in those moments, anthropologists acted bravely and with honor.

A good example of one such moment was the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s, which pitted Republicans (i.e. pro-democracy) against the dictator Franco. The conflict had its own internal politics, but many in the world saw it as a test of the power of democracy to withstand the power of fascism, which was spreading rapidly over Europe. Thousands of  Americans volunteered to ship over to Spain and formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight in the conflict — which the fascists eventually won. Two of the volunteers were Elman Service and John V. Murra.

Service grew up in the depression. He didn’t graduate from high school because his school closed for lack of funds during his senior year. After working part time to earn money he entered university, but dropped out to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. He fought and was wounded in battle, and then shipped back to the United States, where he continued to raise money for the Spanish Civil War. Then, after World War II broke out, he entered the military and returned to Europe to fight the Nazi threat. His country repaid his service with the G.I. Bill, which allowed him to get his Ph.D., and FBI surveillance to make sure he was not a communist. Apparently one reason he was never persecuted by our national security apparatus was because all of the guys in his unit told the FBI that he had their back.

Service is remembered today for his work on social evolution, and not remembered enough for classic articles like “Models for the Methodology of Mouthtalk”, which railed against the mindless use of jargon in anthropology. Service’s dislike of simple jargon and simplistic forms of explanation had deep roots in a depression-era childhood where inequality was not an abstract concept, and time on the battlefield where materialism was more than a theory. After a long and distinguished career he died at the age of 81.

John Murra’s life story is even more remarkable. A Jew from Eastern Europe, he was born Isaac Lipschitz, came to America to escape persecution, and attended college at the University of Chicago, where he studied anthropology under Robert Redfield. He finished his BA and then joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. “I did not graduate from the University of Chicago,” he later said, “I graduated from the Spanish Civil War.” He helped smuggle volunteers into Spain, and when the war was lost he was interned in a refugee camp. He returned to the US and volunteered three times to fight in WWII, but was denied because of the wounds suffered in his head and chest during the Spanish campaign. Instead, he worked with Ruth Benedict and John Dollard interviewing Spanish Civil War veterans, eventually producing the book Fear in Battle, a classic piece of WWII-era applied anthropology.

At the end of the war Murra was denied US citizenship, and had to sue the government in order to get it.  This was just one of the many indignities he faced as a radical living through the McCarthy period. I think his life experiences scarred him. He was a lifelong insomniac, and kept a foam mattress behind his office door so he could sleep on it when he needed. The acknowledgments section of his dissertation thanked his psychoanalysts, without whom “the writing of this dissertation could not have been completed”. His past as a communist haunted him and made getting grants, citizenship, and a visa very difficult. But despite these obstacles he became a world expert on the Andes and a professor at Cornell. He turned his passport difficulties into an advantage, writing a historical thesis and becoming a key player in the discipline of ethnohistory. He died in 2006 at the age of 90.

Murra and Service faced a fascist threat far more severe than what we face today. They lived through hardships that most anthropologists can only dream about. Today in the United States we must decide when the fascist threat is so great that we have no choice but to use violent resistance. I think we are very, very, very far away from that day. Very far away. Very. Far. Away. The turbulent years they lived through provides a valuable reality check about how serious the threat to our country is, even as their example demonstrates  what anthropologists have done when they saw a fight they could no longer ignore.

Damore’s memo exemplifies a now too-familiar trend: A bright person receive no real social science training in high school or college. They start thinking about human nature for the first time. They  use their intuitions to start generating hypotheses about the difference between men and women. And voila — Google memo!

There are lots of scientific conclusions out there in the world: The Pacific was settled from Asia, not North America. Gold has one more proton in its nucleus than platinum. The Battle of Hastings happened in 1066. Most Americans don’t wake up every morning and say “wait as second, does gold really have one more proton in its nucleus than platinum? That just doesn’t seem right to me.” And yet the James Damores of the world do wake up every morning and say “wait a second, do women really have what it takes to survive in a brutal work place environment? That just doesn’t seem right to me.” Why is the first finding accepted and the second is questioned?

The answer is: incorrect claims about the weight of gold have no cultural appeal. Incorrect claims about the incompetence of women, on the other hand, have tremendous cultural appeal for people like James Damore, because he has been socialized into a culture which has very strong feelings about the essential nature of men and women, and not very strong feelings about how heavy gold is.

Armed with the intuition that women can’t code, the James Damores of the world can then get on the Internet and find a large body of poor, discredited science which confirms exactly what they’ve suspected. They can also find existing, non-suck research and string it together in a way that doesn’t really make sense. Simple answers of precisely the sort you were hoping to hear — who doesn’t love that?!? The Internet is a massive graveyard of latent possibilities, waiting to be dusted off and employed by people who have been trained to optimize algorithms, but not to think critically as citizens about the world we are building together.

This is what anthropologists face: The self-perpetuating loop of the cultural appeal. Someone comes up with an idea for what they think is the first time. They find research that supports it. We knock it down. And then their idea is picked up by the next person in the loop. It’s like endless mode in a video game which features wave after wave of brilliant but undereducated white guys who spawn before you get a chance to heal or switch weapons.

How should we respond to Damore and others like him? On the whole, it feels like people have chosen not to engage with his ideas. Google fired him — which I imagine was in their best interests. Many on social media have argued that we should not dignify his arguments with a response. Others, especially women, have chosen not to engage, because wading into this discussion again probably feels to them like a slow, endless crucifixion. Even the abundant denunciations seem more like ad hominem attacks than genuine engagement with the merits of Damore’s claims.

We anthropologists — especially male anthropologists like myself, for whom the memo is not incredibly wounding — can never stop doing the work of concrete engagement with these issues. We must always address their substance and explain why they are wrong. And we must not trot out centuries-old Boasian nostrums and call it good. We need to keep up on current research and recognize how essentialist arguments have shifted over time. We must read generously and analyze critically. We need to be able to admit when our opponents have a point,  even when that makes us uncomfortable. It makes us credible, and stronger. Honestly, I don’t think it’ll happen too often.

This is the ‘profess’ in ‘professor’: To have these discussions, over and over again. To have the belief that you can win on the merits because your work is sound. The AAA or Sapiens should just create a fact-checking website where anthropologists do this full-time so that other people can just link to it and save themselves some time (for instance, here’s a good response). Someone needs to respond to the substance of these claims or else we really will become an ideological echo chamber. I feel both a sense of pride, sadness, and hope knowing that in the future, anthropologists will always be among the the people who engage with these issues. Again. And again. And again.

Anyone familiar with Guam’s history knows that it has had a tough go — centuries of punishing Spanish rule followed by a takeover by the United States in 1898, the same wave of expansion that added Hawai‘i and Puerto Rico to the US’s portfolio of territories. This was the beginning of the US’s militarization of the Pacific, which has been described in classic works like Cynthia Enloe’s Bananas, Beaches, and Bases as well as more recent publications like Militarized Currents. The Center for Pacific Island Studies at UH Mānoa even has a class-room ready textbook on militarization and nuclear testing in the Pacific which I’d highly recommend you read or teach.

In the case of Guam, there is a large literature on resistance to military buildup, the impact of the 2009 decision to increase military presence on the island(including the fencing off of parts of the island) and how the rhetoric of liberation legitimates the military presence on Guam. Just google “Guam militarization pacific studies” and you’ll find plenty to read.

As someone who shares an island with the command center for the U.S. Pacific Fleet, I have many vets in my classes, and know friends who have served in the military. As a result I’ve come to appreciate how our troops suffer when our civilian leaders make terrible decisions — as they have for as long as I’ve been alive. It’s a tragedy that members of our volunteer army are in harm’s way because we have a president who can’t tell nuclear war from defending the wall from white walkers.

But it’s even more of a tragedy that people born and raised in Micronesia may have their lives, land, culture, and history obliterated in an instant because they had the bad luck of being strategically positioned. A strike on Guam would be genocide, culturecide, landicide — the literal erasure of a way of life that has survived for thousands of years. Even the Guam diaspora, as strong as it is, could never recover from that. This simply can’t be allowed to happen. And screaming at North Korea will make it more likely to happen, not less.

I had a chance to visit Guam recently for the biannual meeting of the Pacific History Association. I was overwhelmed by the hospitality of the conference organizers. Undergraduate volunteers staffed the airport lobby twenty four hours a day to make sure conference goers got to their hotel after a long flight. When I say twenty four hours a day, I mean it. I got off my flight at 1:30 in the morning and was greeted by a smiling college student who game me a lei, a bottle of water, my conference package, and arranged travel to my hotel. It was an amazing show of aloha. Real aloha. That smiling young student had her whole life ahead of her. Next month she may be vaporized, along with everyone else at her university.

I personally still feel that Kim and Trump are not stupid enough to do more than make threats. I believe that both leaders recognize that actual war is not in their best interests. I hope that a nuclear strike on Guam is still a rhetorical threat, not a real one. But every time this tension is ratcheted up, we move closer to a future where we will all have to live in a world polluted with radiation. Except for Chamorro people, who will not be living at all.

All ethnographies, perhaps, contain some mystery: of how humans understand each other, or the way that words and glances, observations and encounters are turned into insights about what it means to be human at a given moment in history. But Sareeta Amrute’s Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin begins with a proper mystery, a person who has disappeared, and this literally missing body adroitly stages the subsequent exploration of IT workers’ missing bodies in scholarship on cognitive labor.

Global software and service is often thought of as “immaterial,” a traffic of ideas in which effort is a matter of the mind, rather than a muscled arm. Without collapsing cognitive and manual labor, Amrute argues that both are nonetheless embodied ––and formidably marked by social difference, in particular post-genomic notions of race, and class. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2002 and 2004 with Indian and German programmers in Berlin, and follow-up visits in 2006 (Germany) and 2010 (India), Amrute begins each chapter with an ethnographic anecdote in which this embodiment is individual, and at the same time evidence which speaks broadly to “life on the terrain of fluid capitalism” (p. 26). The stories of Meenakshi’s desperate job search and Adi’s mysterious start-up are “at once specific to the class of Indian technoelites with whom [she] worked and generalizable as a fundamental condition of life in times of uncertainty” (p. 26).

Even when theorists of cognitive labor are interested in embodiment, Amrute suggests, they tend to posit “a universal, unmarked subject of new economy work—a cognitariat who manipulates signs and symbols through a computer screen” (p. 56). As Part One, Encoding Race, shows in vivid ethnographic detail, however, the experiences of Indian tech workers in Germany are inescapably shaped by “folk theories of cultural difference” (p. 23). The liberal, tolerant notions of race espoused by German bosses and colleagues include particularly “Indian” traits that are assumed to underlie the success of the cast of characters we follow. And those same traits imprint the Indian body in ways that supposedly make them suited to the grunt labor of the IT industry. Their bodies, far from unmarked, are racialized within an office hierarchy that places skilled Germans in the front room from 9-5, and Indians in the backroom doing long hours of coding.

For Amrute, the decision to explore these imposed differences as “race,” rather than ethnicity or culture, follows from the embodied aspects of cognitive labor, since the experience of Germany’s tech guest workers is shaped by racialized perceptions of an Indian body and Indian culture in relation to technology. Race as a conceptual tool allows for an examination of the contradictory and overlapping nature of both race in Germany and the racialization of migrant laborers. That the elite Indian software engineers are also short contract, migrant laborers throws into high relief the ironies of post-Fordism, and the pertinence of their experiences for analyses of the global knowledge economy, neoliberal work more generally, and what is called the Indian New Middle Class (NMC). Amrute shifts in Part Two, Encoding Class, to the reimagining and realignments of technology, nation, and elite subjects currently underway by Germans and Indians alike.

In Germany, Indian engineers are “used as a way to figure, and figure out, what a new knowledge-based economy has in store” (p. 32). A history of fascination with an exoticized, spiritual or sensual India is joined to the possibility that Indian programmers may also have something to teach German subjects about a changed marketplace (p. 47). In an analysis of political cartoons, Amrute notes that there are images in which, “Unlike the Turkish Muslim man, the Indian programmer sometimes figures as a welcome and comforting ‘other’ that can uphold notions of tolerance and universalism. In others, the Indian IT worker threatens German job security by being a machinelike presence that is ultimately unknowable” (p. 32).

The “New Middle Class” Indian software engineers are, in turn, distinguished from previous generations of middle class (who relied on government service as a way up or to maintain prosperity) by their preference for the transnational techno-economy, and commoditized pleasures. The NMC is also known for “its influence across class as a model for being globally Indian” (p. 109), thus heightening the importance of its characteristics and preferences. Not only work, Amrute argues, but leisure practices and leisure spaces are crucial to understanding a middle class balance of work and pleasure in flux. While leisure activities are shaped by work, they also provide an opportunity to question and challenge the lived realities of precarious, cognitive labor.

In work itself, our protagonists must find multiple ways to reconcile their background and identity as skilled engineers with their status as cheap, replaceable, albeit white collar, guest workers. One of the more fascinating episodes, for example, explores how amidst a putative ethos of open source and open markets, they claim ownership of their labor. Re-asserting individual control comes in a number of ways, including “Spaghetti Code” which is an attempt to make themselves indispensable by producing code that is difficult for others to decipher, due to its lack of commentary and notation. This is an implicit bid to establish themselves as valuable in the long-term, made to the companies which have granted them temporary work status; and a push against the politics of free code which refuses them freedom of movement. Code can move past borders, even though they, dependent on restrictive visas, cannot. The choice to assume these risks displays what Lauren Berlant (2009) calls cruel optimism, an attachment to “the promise of self-fulfilling work and personal expression even when faced with… the impossibility of this vision”(p. 193).

Amrute approaches this “encoding” of class grounded in autonomist Marxist analyses of neoliberal capitalism. Bifo Berardo (2009), returning to Herbert Marcuse’s scholarship, argues that cognitive labor removes pleasure––what he refers to as eros ––  from the freedom found outside the office. While Amrute observes leisure being used to develop skills for the work place, she also sees it as an exploration of alternative lifestyles and identities. Workers getting together to jog before work despite long hours can be seen as a new necessity due to the lack of activity involved in cognitive labor, or as part a distinctively classed form of continual self-improvement: a performance to be recounted to colleagues, “vaulting them above other workers into the body-conscious class of its managers” (p. 146). But counter Berardi’s idea that work consumes eros in this scenario, Amrute argues that this is eros: these activities also constitute a politics of pleasure in the everyday (Chapter 5). Eros can be deployed by cognitive workers in opposition to the colonization of life by labor, and to form an “embodied middle-class imaginary” (p. 149). Drawing on the work of Kathi Weeks (2011), Amrute suggests that these are elements of a critical utopian project, which if limited and imperfect is nonetheless a vital alternative to the logic of capital.

The expressiveness of Amrute’s prose allows what are admittedly complex ideas to become engaging and accessible. This, combined with the strength of her description and the evident timeliness of her subject matter, make Encoding Race, Encoding Class a remarkably flexible text for teaching. It is an ethnography that will work as well in an undergraduate class as a graduate seminar, since it has the clarity and rigor for both. As well, there are a wealth of documentaries and films with which it can be paired (through our library we watched the excellent Coding Culture trio of short documentaries, by Gautam Sonti in collaboration with Carol Upodhya). Knowledge work, internet technologies, and global migration show every likelihood of remaining central to future economies, and this is a book that provides honed conceptual tools for examining how human life will be shaped by work, and leisure intertwined with labor. Topically, the book traverses domains explored by researchers of STS, media anthropology, migration, and South Asia, and, as this ensemble of academic areas suggests, it is precisely this willingness to draw from across fields to produce a compelling synthesis that may endear it to the non-academic. By the end of Encoding Race, Encoding Class, the immaterial labor of IT work has been materialized in the bodies of the migrant programmers, and it becomes clear that the person who disappeared at the beginning did so as part of a complex response to questions which the reader too will have begun to ask.

Works Cited

Berardi, Franco “Bifo.” The Soul of Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009.

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke: Duke University Press, 2009.

Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

The Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges (SACC) is pleased to announce the publication of Perspectives: An Open Invitation to Cultural Anthropology (ISBN 978–1-931303–55–2), an open access, peer-reviewed cultural anthropology textbook. The initiative to create this book took shape in 2012 when several SACC members identified a need in our community college classes for less expensive teaching materials. From our inception in the 1970s, SACC has supported lower income and first generation college learners and this book fits with that orientation and concern. We believe strongly, however, that this is a good introductory textbook and that it is suitable for first year classes in cultural anthropology at any post-secondary institution.

Book Production and Open Access

The production of this book is a big part of the Perspectives story. For five years, a number of SACC members participated in monthly video meetings to steer the project and many more expressed enthusiasm for the project at our annual business and board meetings. A small editorial board took charge of the work and twenty-five authors from colleges and universities in the United States and Canada wrote chapters for the book. They came from SACC and from the Teaching Anthropology Interest Group of the AAA’s General Anthropology Division. Some of the authors, like Robert Borofsky and Laura Nader, are well-known in our field. Other authors are newer writers who found this project a place to express their anthropological passions and to publish in a form that met their pedagogical goals. The list of peer reviewers includes twenty-two university and college instructors (see Preface) and each chapter was reviewed by at least two people to ensure the content was thorough and accurate as well as accessible to students.

In breaking away from the typical commercial textbook publishing model, SACC assumed responsibility for coordinating many publishing tasks including copyediting, typesetting, and design. Despite our initial naïve hopes and low cost assumptions, the book took several thousand dollars in SACC funding to produce. Thankfully, the board was always generous in response to our frequent requests for more money. We simply did not understand how much a free book would cost!

All told, we had the support of SACC and its board, a lot of unpaid labor, and a membership who saw this as an opportunity to call attention to the Society. Questions remain about website upkeep and who will do the work if and when new chapters are added or additional edits of existing chapters are required. There are limited ancillary materials. (We’d love to add more … and invite you to contact us if you are interested.) And our marketing is driven exclusively by social media and word of mouth.

Additional in-kind support came from Robert Borofsky who offered useful advice and resources from the Center for a Public Anthropology. We were encouraged by the American Anthropological Association too. We understand that the AAA is in a transitional period with its publishing program and we hope that this book, which we believe to be the first of its kind produced within the Association, will inspire other OA titles from the Association and its members.

Producing Perspectives gave us a new appreciation for the value in university presses and, particularly, to understand quite clearly the expertise they bring to producing books. It was Anne Brackenbury, from the University of Toronto Press and Teaching Culture, who reminded us at a SACC session at the AAA meeting in 2016 that a publishing environment where OA exists harmoniously with other kinds of publications may be the best of all worlds. Indeed, choosing Perspectives for our classes, and eliminating the substantial cost of commercial textbooks from our syllabi, may open opportunities for us to adopt other books written by our colleagues and produced by university presses.

Teaching with the Book

We wanted a book that students would enjoy using and reading and encouraged authors to highlight their stories as anthropologists. The chapters are written with general audiences in mind. The book is offered through a web portal in pdf and epub formats.  

The portal allows for the mixing and matching of nineteen chapters on a range of topics covered in many first year courses. There is no explicit order in which the chapters must be read or used. The opportunity for instructors to pair this book directly with their approach to teaching an introductory course is, perhaps, its real strength. Chapters can be used as primary or supplementary materials. And, the book is expandable and additional chapters will be added as people volunteer to write them.

The website also features some additional teaching resources. These include interviews with Philippe Bourgois, Fredrik Barth, and Carolyn Nordstrom and a copy of an address, “Can Anthropology Save the World?, by Nancy Scheper-Hughes. A series of short videos in which Robert Borofsky lectures on first year anthropological topics is also available.

The Cover

We put a lot of thought into the cover, in part because of the discussion on Savage Minds in 2016 about decolonizing anthropology textbook covers. We chose not to use a photograph of particular people or of an exotic ritual. Instead, we asked the designed to consider a colorful illustration of people in an urban setting. We believe the cover calls attention to unconventional anthropological topics but have been cautioned by some reviewers that it is overly generic (irony not intended!). We ask instructors to #TeachTheCover and to invite critiques of it from students as part of an effort to understand what anthropology is and what anthropologists do.

So far, responses to Perspectives from instructors have been positive. Most like the idea of open access teaching materials. We know of instructors who have adopted the text. Perspectives was used this spring by a SACC-affiliated instructor and the incarcerated students she teaches. A few friends and colleagues have suggested that we should do an open access for biological anthropology — and we are prepared to take that as a compliment while thinking seriously about the feasibility of such a project.

Perspectives reflects the shared conclusion of SACC, the authors, and editors that open access publishing is one way to engage a new generation of students and, particularly, the diverse students who attend community colleges. If nothing else, we are hopeful that Perspectives can bring anthropology to a broader audience of students and general readers outside of our classes.

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Overall, responses to our blog’s new name have been positive — and often enthusiastic. That said, we’ve had our fair share of objections: some people miss the old name (that’s sweet of you guys but it’s time to move on), while others are glad the old name is gone, but don’t like the new one. Along the way, Social Media has generated a good-sized list of ‘anthrodendum’ parody names, ranging from Latinate-racy (anthropudendum) to botanical (anthrodendron, invoking either coral or rhododendrons), or Trump-worthy (anthrodumdum). The one that seems to keep coming up the most, however, is the one I am most willing to own: anthroduodenum.

It’s sad that people think it is funny to lampoon our blog by calling it ‘anthroduodenum’. This stigmatizes the duodenum and disavows the hard work that the duodenum — including your very own duodenum, which is inside you right now at this very moment — does on a daily basis. The duodenum is an essential organ in your body. It absorbs more nutrients than your stomach. It turns the food you eat into the energy you need to live.

True, the duodenum lacks the glamor that a lot of contemporary anthropology craves. Many anthropologists see themselves as crusading moralists. They want to be our discipline’s heart, reminding us of right and wrong. Others walk around believing that everything that comes from their lips is the most philosophically important thing ever written. They want to be anthropology’s brain. The self-important impresarios who run our journals and funding agencies imagine themselves to be the bones and tendons of our scholarly body, holding it together.

No one ever imagines themselves to be the lymph nodes of anthropology, which help our discipline fight infection, or the pancreas, which regulates anthropology’s blood sugar levels. These less glamorous organs never make it into our analogies, despite the yeoman’s work they perform every day.

But I’m happy to own the name ‘anthroduodenum’. We do our work, every day. We raise issues of importance, like open access and net neutrality (my issues) to colonialism and racism (which I hope to hear more about from our new member Zoe Todd). It’s regular, unglamorous work. It’s not a good feeling to sit in front of a keyboard and say: “ok, I have to have something to say this week.” And these days, you know that pressing ‘publish’ will immediately result in criticism, since someone on social media will dislike (often intensely) what you have to say.  Instantly. Often without reading past the headline! That’s the acid and bile we neutralize on the site. Over the years, we’ve also had our fair share of ulcers, readers and commenters who seem to enjoy trying to puncture us. But we soldier on.

But we all still do this work, focusing on issues that deserve focus, recruiting guest bloggers who deserve exposure to a wide audience. It’s all part of the regular, often grinding act of digestion that we perform on the discipline.

To be fair, we’re an award winning blog and we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback, so I don’t want to sound ungrateful. I enjoy writing for the blog, and really appreciate the fact that visitors enjoy reading it. I’m just saying that when it comes to being called a duodenum, I wear that name as a badge of pride. Yes, that is what I am.

This weekend, when you are enjoying a nice meal with someone you care about, stop for a moment and thank your duodenum. It’s working hard, even if you don’t notice it. And, like Anthrodendum, it’s keeping track of all the important stuff in your (anthropology) diet so you don’t have to do it yourself. So keep taking fat bites off that thick, juicy Internet. We will keep breaking it down for you and keeping it real. ANTHRODUODENUM 4 EVAR!!!!!!!

More soon — but feel free to take a look at the links above!

Thanks — and here’s to a free and open Internet!

The list of groups working on the 12 July action is mind-bogglingly large and diverse. Major content companies like Amazon and Netflix are supporting the action, as are hubs for cultural creators like KickStarter and Etsy. There are non-profits like the ACLU and the American Library Association. There are progressive groups like the The Nation and  MoveOn.org. There are groups focused on social justice for racialized minorities, like Color of Change, Race Forward, and the National Hispanic Media Coalition. And then there are the usual technology  non-profits: Creative Commons, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Fight for the Future (where I get most of my news about this issue from). How massive is the coalition behind this day of action? It contains partners as different as Greenpeace and PornHub, that’s how huge it is.

Actions like this have worked before. On 18 January 2012 the largest Internet protest in history saw over 115,000 websites strike in protest of two Internet censorship bills, SOPA and PIPA. They were shelved indefinitely as a result. On 10 September 2014 Internet Slowdown Day mobilized thousands of sites to protest changes to Net Neutrality rules. It worked! We got strong net neutrality regulations from the Obama administration. Now that Trump’s new FCC Chairman is trying to roll back these changes, we have another opportunity to show that grassroots campaigns can stop threats to the Internet, the platform on which we all rely for free and unfettered access to information.

Anthropologists need to get onboard. We’ve long recognized that open access is a central value for all scholars. But it’s particularly important for anthropologist, who write about the lives of people living in the here and now, whose circumstances can be changed as a result of our research. If Net Neutrality is rolled back, we will lose the platform that open access runs on.

If you are an anthropologist who runs a website or has any sort of social media presence, you should sign up today to join the Battle for the Net. If you are an anthropologist who doesn’t live in the US, your participation is even more important: We need a strong showing of global sites to send the message that the world is watching. If you’ve watched developments in our country with alarm, now is your chance to do something about it! Stand up and be counted in the Battle for the Net. Show Americans that we’re not alone in thinking its crazy to regulate the Internet in this way. It’s an important and — let’s face it — easy way to show the world where you stand.

This won’t be the last post that you’ll see from me about net neutrality — so stay tuned — but please don’t make me blog ’til I’m blue in the face (or fingers?) to get you involved. Send me an email or message on twitter or Facebook if you want get involved. There is a lot of momentum here, so I hope you’ll join me!

For instance: Classics. Anthropologists have a long history of working with classicists, and imagining their discipline to be similar to the study of classical antiquity. At Oxford, it was the classicist R.R. Marett who helped anthropology gain a foothold. And really, until recently most of higher education just was the study of Greek and Latin texts.

Boas and other early American anthropologists imagined their work to be similar to philology. Boas’s method of interlinear translation of texts, for instance, was borrowed from the anglophone study of Hebrew texts. On this account, anthropology was like the other great Victorian orientalisms — but instead of Sanskrit, it studied Iroquois.

History has also been a common source for anthropology’s disciplinary imagination. I suspect it was like classics in the sense that everyone in the early twentieth century took it at some point. When Evans-Pritchards was casting around for a humanistic model for social anthropology, history was ready to hand. Anthropologists are attracted to it by its particularism. Indeed, a good portion of the 1980s was about the rise of ‘historical anthropology’. It was a potent combination of disciplines that produced some great ethnographies.

Anthropology emerged from geography — Boas had a degree in geography — but they have had their rapprochments over the years. Owen Lattimore was a favorite of Eric Wolf and others. In some sense geography is the spatialized study of particularity. Today, of course, geography is one of the disciplines that has been anthropologized, and you are as likely to find geographers doing fieldwork as anthropologists these days. Geography’s own theoretical turn produced authors like Neil Smith and David Harvey whose work has been influential in our discipline.

Finally, anthropology changed profoundly when we began imagining ourselves to be critics and interpreters of literary texts. Our sense of what it meant to ‘interpret’ developed at a time when criticism itself was developing rapidly and in many directions. The idea that an obscure Russian Dostoevsky critic living in Kazakhstan would become a central thinker in anthropology would have seemed absurd in the 1960s. But today Bakhtin is central to our discipline.

Over time, however, our discipline has shifted from imagining itself as one of the humanistic disciplines which studies human creativity. Increasingly, we identify ourselves more and more with disciplines that are about creating cultural forms, not studying them. The ‘crisis of representation’ (really, just a pointing out that there is such a thing as representation) invited anthropologists to think seriously about what it meant to be writers.

Of course, anthropologists have tried their hands at poetry and fiction for as long as the discipline has been around. And when they write ethnography they’ve always been aware of the rhetorical skill that is central to the writer’s craft. Malinowski didn’t invent fieldwork or ethnography, but he did manage to produce an ethnography which convincingly took credit for them. Sapir and Benedict wrote poetry, but they didn’t write poetry as ethnography. Ethnographic fiction and ambitiously styled ethnography have been around forever but (unfortunately) go in and out of favor. If anything,

Performing arts have had an even tougher time of it. Anthropology and dance — Katherine Dunham, Elizabeth Chin, Katerina Teaiwa — has been around for a long time but not really had the impact it should. I think this is because, scandalously, university students are not taught to dance. Theater has informed anthropologist’s imagination as spectators but few anthropologists really have imagined themselves as actors. There are exceptions. Victor Turner was Catholic — he knew what it was to do ritual. I sometimes feel that he did the anthropology just so he could do the theater, not the other way around.

I’m struck by how many anthropologists have turned to film making recently. Historically speaking, there’s always been a connection there. Modern media and ethnography came of age at the same time. But mostly, I think mobile phones are responsible. Anyone can make a film now, and everyone has. And… uh… yeah I’m not really sure how history is going to judge some of them. There’s also the growth of various forms of multimedia installation work — for instance at the AAA meetings. Increasingly, it seems like anthropologists are making the “Bowie turn” in theory, and imagining themselves as part of a restlessly conceptually mobile avant-garde.

There is more to say here — the rapprochement between game design and anthropology probably peaked with McKim Marriot’s ‘Samsara’ — but my point is just this: It’s not enough to say that anthropology is a ‘humanities’ and not a ‘science’. Things only really get interesting when you begin asking: ‘which humanities’? I think anthropology’s willingness to ask itself that question, over and over again, is one of the main things that separates it from ethnographic sociology. It’s a source of vitality and novelty for our discipline.