Update:  Via Bree in comments, you can follow the Twitter conversation here.

It’s another example of a military program that makes money for a contractor while greatly exaggerating its military utility. The program recruited the human flotsam and jetsam of the discipline and pretended it was recruiting the best. Treating taxpayer money as if it were water, it paid under-qualified 20-something anthropologists more than even Harvard professors. And it treated our ethics code as a nuisance to be ignored.

The article mentions many of the failings of the program, from allegations of sexual harassment and racial discrimination to padded time-sheets and wasted funds.  Noting the USA Today article, Zero Anthropology collates a series of documents related to investigations into HTS here.

The most visible effect of administration influence was pacification; Papuans could no longer use violence for settling scores and gaining political objectives.  Less immediately visible were changes in local economic and political relations that followed upon the introduction of steel, labor recruiting, and a growing dependency on the colonial economy. However, Papuans quickly discovered that there were other, expanded opportunities for pursuing their traditional goals (and developing new ones) under the new regime.  New sources of wealth became available, travel could be expanded, ceremonial exchange networks extended, and new directions explored for political and trade alliance. In many situations, the government presence even coincided quite satisfactorily with local Papuan desires, giving weakened groups relief from predation of their enemies, making rare trade goods locally plentiful, and putting nearby people at a trading advantage over their more distant neighbors.

Zero Dark Thirty begins with a statement that it is “Based on Firsthand Accounts of Actual Events.” And then the screen goes black; you hear voices from the World Trade Center only.  The theatre is pitch black for minutes.  There is no vision.

I went to see Zero Dark Thirty on Saturday. I’ve tried to avoid reading any of the controversy until having an opportunity to see the film (it opened later in Ireland than in the States), though it’s hard when my favorite critic of US power (Greenwald) has made what I am sure are compelling arguments against the film; and my favorite drama queen (Andrew Sullivan) has also been writing about it a lot; I have tried to avoid them both on ‘ZDT’, and so now I have to go back and read a month’s worth of material. Anyway, the film absolutely does position torture as effective in gaining intelligence that led to Osama Bin Laden, which is not a truthful claim despite the film’s opening sentence, and therefore it appears to carry forward the ideology of the ‘war on terror’ as promulgated by Cheney and Co.  So the central historical claim of the film appears to be false.  Still, according to Andrew O’Hehir at Salon, “Hina Shamsi, the director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, who does not think ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ is pro-torture, has made the especially apt observation that it’s a story about war crimes told from the perspective of the criminals.”

The question that hovers over the film is:  what does the ‘perspective’ of the war criminals look like?  What does it see?  Being a film, what does ZDT show about the war on terror as a ‘way of seeing’?  I don’t think the film is triumphalist or a representation of the heroic (pace Naomi Wolf’s over the top take down of the director). While not being an ideological condemnation of the prosecution of the ‘war on terror,’ it seems to me that it does portray the inhumanity, and figuratively the non-humanity, of those prosecuting it through the symbolism of affect (or its absence) it deploys.  The symbol is ultimately a kind of killer (affectless) insect.  This is what US ‘national security’ has become.

First in the torture and base sexual humiliation itself, which requires an absence of moral affect.  The most startling point in the film is when a man being tortured appeals to Maya, a CIA agent watching his torture, for help.  She states matter of factly:  “You can help yourself by being truthful” and walks away.  It’s the only thing she ever says to him.  Whether this masks some actual feeling on her part is unclear.  She doesn’t seem repulsed by torture in Bigelow’s characterization.  She merely seems tired.  Yet Maya is the protagonist of the film and the film makes a lot of hay out of the lack-of-progress daily updates she marked on the office window of her CIA ‘boss’ with a Sharpie.  Maya is in ZDT a person with a job.  She has a crummy Dell-like desktop and dusty keyboard.  And so the viewer, at least this viewer, couldn’t help but be sympathetic to her as someone with a job:  the viewer becomes complicit in this sense.  It’s a procedural.  If the film represents the perspective of war criminals, the experience of the viewer of the film implicates us in the (sorry for this) ‘banality’ of a non-legal regime:  Maya simply watches those interrogation scenes (torture) on DVDs, sifting through them like they are file folders.

The theme of a lack of moral affect continues in the assassination of Osama Bin Laden and the symbolism of how it’s filmed.  Those who carry it out are affectless and insectoid.  They literally have multiple-(pitch black inhuman reflective circular)-‘eyes’, in a metaphorical figure of the insect:  their night-vision goggles (worn at the darkest point of the night, ‘zero dark thirty’).  And again we, the viewers, see the assassination from this ‘insectoid’ perspective: the raid is filmed in ghostly/monochrome night-vision green.  There is occasional color photography interspersed with the night-vision perspective, and the color shots emphasize the screaming and fear of the children in the Osama Bin Laden compound, in effect their humanity; when talking to the children, the SEALS pull up the goggles, then they put them back down again, and kill.

The guns the SEALS use have green laser targeting, antenna-like.  And it’s the image of the multiple insect eyes of the night vision goggles, and what they see (a monochrome affectless world), that to my mind complements the symbolism of ‘national security’ in the prosecution of the drone war: drones are figuratively insect robots.  In fact, the film also includes a representation of drone strikes and of the black and white radar-like imagery we’ve come to associate too easily with ‘drone vision’. This is what US power is now: prosecuted by buzzing (they are known for this ‘droning’ sound) robots, connected to remote black sites (nests?).

Joseph Masco, an anthropologist of US militarism and national security, visited my University in January and gave a talk on digital surveillance under the US regime of the war on terror.  One of Masco’s points in his recent work has been that while logics of national security are shifting from deterrence to ‘preparedness’ and therefore pre-emption (and see also Andrew Lakoff on this subject), the apocalyptic affect of the Cold War continues to structure contemporary US militarism.  Emphasis on preparedness discursively establishes “synchronous stress on a global scale” he said in his talk:  operating on the very nervous system of the very bodies of individual subjects (think of airport scanners and the modes of shameful exposure requested).  This is the structure of historical movement from the War Department (wars are finite) to the Defense Department (‘defense’ is permanent), once again, squared.  The Department of Homeland Security represents a further conceptual shift:  as the project of national security now becomes part of everyday practices and affects (there were always survivalists in the US; the war on terror makes folks in the US all survivalists {‘terror alerts,’ remember the run on duct tape after 9/11?}.  And that word ‘homeland’ is significant; remember how weird it felt at first.  ‘Homeland’?

Masco structures The Nuclear Borderlands around the concept of the nuclear uncanny, the unhomely, the strange yet familiar presence of the nuclear secret in US society as institutionalized at Los Alamos.  As he concludes the book, he shows how though the logic of the war on terror has changed the way national security is ‘officially’ imagined through ‘pre-emption’, the affect of that war reproduces the apocalyptic imagination of the cold war (page 334):

Many Americans, for example, were gripped by an experience of the nuclear uncanny following the September 11 terrorist strikes, intuitively understanding the attacks on New York and Washington, DC, through a national notion of violence developed during the Cold War nuclear standoff.  One of the most powerful effects of the bomb, I believe, has been to nationalize a sense of apocalyptic violence in the United States, unifying the nation through images of its own end.  The cultural effects of the Cold War nuclear standoff–the decades of life situated within thirty-minute temporal frame of a nuclear war that may have always already started–has produced a new kind of psychic intimacy with mass violence.  The sheer number of times Americans have experienced the destruction of New York City in Hollywood films (e.g., in When Worlds Collide [1951], Fail Safe [1963] {and a series of others including} Independence Day [1996], Deep Impact [1998], Armageddon [1988]), in civil defense scenarios (from the 1950s, 1960s, 1980s, and 2000s), and in the US political discourse set the psychosocial stage for the attacks on the World Trade Center, blurring how citizens interpreted the event by making them so strangely familiar.  Amy Kaplan (2003) has argued that the scripting of the World Trade Center site in New York as ‘ground zero’ reveals a series of repressed discourses about US militarism and nuclear nationalism.  Tracing the etymology of ‘ground zero’ from its first appearance in 1946, as the site of a nuclear explosion, to its more general usage today as a place where things simply ‘start over, she asks why the ‘ground zero’ reference in New York is discursively tied not to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where civilians were also targeted, but to the Japanese military attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor…

Perhaps the luridly joyful response of many in the US public to the assassination of Osama Bin Laden (remember that President Obama had originally said there ‘was a fire fight’; for what it’s worth, ZDT corrects this misimpression; and remember the incredible emotional intensity of Hilary Clinton’s face in that most public photograph) was a kind of inversion of this apocalyptic affect.  But ZDT presents a contrast:  not the public world of a ‘perfectly paranoid system’ seeding insecurity (and indeed ‘terror’) everywhere and all the time, but a secret, dark, black (site) world whose apparent moral affectlessness (enforced nonresponse to the grotesque) is its only ‘affect,’ the putative principle of its effectiveness.  This is not the giddy absurdity of Doctor Strangelove.  The guy who kills Osama Bin Laden dispatches him with a couple ‘pops’ (they aren’t big loud Hollywood gun shots), and the script calls attention to the matter of factness of this act:  one of the others on the raid team notices it, saying something like, ‘Dude, do you know who you just killed?‘  The shooter basically ignores him.

If modes of US public imagination of its own apocalypse at the hands of the other have become more and more ‘alien’ (even simply cosmic, as shown in Masco’s list of films about the destruction of New York City), ZDT also shows the alien-ness of the US’s system prosecuting this war on ‘terror.‘  It replaces the procedural job of Maya with the nightvision of the Navy Seals.  And in ZDT, the long ‘hunt’ for Osama is reduced to a room with a handful of people, a cell.  This is a job, not an ideology.  The workings of affect here reminded me of the brilliant critique by Masco’s colleague William Mazzarella of the ‘posthuman’ (post-representational) aspect of the turn to affect in contemporary theory.  It further reminded me of the way Ruth Leys links the operative psychology underlying both contemporary torture (with its heavy focus on ‘shame’) and contemporary critiques of hegemonic ‘shame’ in relation to abjected identities.  Leys critiques the move away from intention and meaning in the contemporary understanding of affects.

Perhaps the film shows to an American public that associates the killing of Osama Bin Laden with triumph the fundamental immorality (or the putative amorality) of the acts that led to it.  Two images stayed with me from the film:  those multi-eyed cyborg/insect goggles, and the line Maya speaks with no affect.  Maybe Bigelow makes the stealth helicopters ‘sexy,’ military technology porn of a kind.  Or maybe this is a further symbol:  they hover, circling, with a silent putter, unseen, mosquito-like.

So one could argue that the film reflects a certain kind of ruthless (morally bankrupt) militarism of US culture back to itself.  However, and this is the part that is complex: to me the US is so militarized it doesn’t even notice how fundamentally strange this is anymore, at least not in ways that have any consequence it seems to me. For me, it was disturbing when on a Delta flight in the States in December, the flight attendants had the plane passengers give a round of applause for the US soldiers on board, who were flying in uniform. Here was a ritual of everyday (humdrum: a passenger flight, coach class) acquiescence to the (global) militarism of US society. I honestly thought: there may be doctors on this flight. Or high school teachers. Or NGO workers. Do they not also deserve applause?

Finally, I should admit to having a very strong emotional reaction to the (yes) assassination of Osama Bin Laden.  For me, it became the wrong kind of action (a CIA led assassination, again) once it was revealed that there really was no ‘fire fight’ as President Obama had dissembled in his press conference after the event.  Yet it was initially at the moment of that press conference that I was somehow proud of the President:  he did not use the phrase ‘war on terror,’ he said ‘war on Al Qaeda.’  This seemed to me at the time important in at least trying to move, in the most visible way possible, the nation away from the absurd “war on terror” construct (and whether Obama in practice is doing so is a very real question: see Guantanamo and much else; and notice that George W. Bush refused to join Obama at Ground Zero on the 10th anniversary of 9/11).

Still, there were political repercussions to this within the bizarro world of US right-left politics.  The fact that it was specifically the guy who himself had literally been painted by the paranoid fringes (if Fox News is fringe) as a terrorist-sympathiser was important in undermining the absurd war-and-fear-mongering of the neocons:  the neocons couldn’t in the end do what the liberal did.  A liberal can care about his country — he can be willing to kill for it, rightly or wrongly.  That disturbs the backwards and incredibly destructive neocon worldview.

At his second inauguration, Obama said we have to end perpetual war.  But we have a long way to go.  This perpetual war footing has actually been happening since 1945 (with the occasion of the only use of atomic weapons ever in war by the United States) — over a quarter of our history has been lived as a kind of perpetual war.  Read Joseph Masco’s brilliant ethnography of Los Alamos in the context of US culture, one of the most important works on US power today.

And yes, maybe we aren’t even moving away from perpetual war (but cf. Hagel).  I’ve been living on the edges of Europe now since 2006 (Finland, Ireland).  I’d like to think that living outside the US for nearly 7 years has rendered somewhat strange (and familiar, so uncanny) for me that place I love.  And it hits me at unexpected times.  Plane flights.  ‘Battleship: the Movie,’ total throw-away shlock, reimagines alien invasion in the mood of World War II (‘Greatest Generation’) military-craft:  not the drone here, but the destroyer and its cannon.  This was a kitsch advertisement for the US fighting the inscrutable other (an other that emerges out of Hawaii’s (where Obama was born) ocean waters, like the alien craft in Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds” come out of US soil (terrorist-cell like, not out of the sky).  Even Joss Whedon’s Avengers was a paean to the old-fashioned aircraft carrier.  For me, these boring films are much more disturbing in the end in the way they already nostalgically celebrate militarism as entertainment than is the complex symbolism of a lack of moral perspective in the prosecuting of the War on Terror that I think ZDT argues for.

…making connections is essential, and I think the project we’re engaged in here, at some level, is precisely to make some of those connections visible for emergent anthropologies elsewhere.  So let me offer one, in the form of a thought on description.  A Machine to Make a Future, my Celera Diagnostics book, is a kind of writing degree zero.  It is a modernist project where I wanted to be utterly saturated with things I know and to disappear from the text.  But in some ways that form of modernism is now traditional – it is hardly new. On the other hand, the project rejoins anthropology by demanding engagement with the unfamiliar. However, whereas no one would ever say to Marilyn Strathern, ‘The fact that you’re making us learn these terms from New Guinea is illegitimate,’ they will say that about SNP [single nucleotide polymorphism]. I don’t know what to do about that except persevere. Why is there such an investment in refusing to be open to the contemporary world?

–Paul Rabinow in conversation with George Marcus, Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, p 50

…connection and disconnection underpin the comparative maneuver that would contrast what seem(s) (the best way to describe) hegemonic Melanesian and Euro-American conceptions of relations. It is a Euro-American move, of course, to find unity in diversity (common brotherhood overcomes differences), but that is all right. There are many contexts in which that might be a good thing to do, and one I have made my own indeed involves constantly returning to Melanesian materials—not just for inspiration, though that is reward enough, but to keep the anthropological accounts of that region contemporary. What happens there (and what happened there) goes on mattering. They are “us” too.

–Marilyn Strathern, ‘What Politics?,’ Common Knowledge, 17:1 (2011), p 124

Around the beginning of this century Durkheim demonstrated the social factors controlling thought.  He demonstrated it for one portion of humanity only, those tribes whose members were united by mechanical solidarity.  Somehow he managed to be satisfied that his critique did not apply to modern industrial man or to the findings of science.  One may ask why his insights were never fully exploited in philosophical circles… If Durkheim did not push his thoughts on the social determination of knowledge to their full and radical conclusion, the barrier that inhibited him may well have been the same that has stopped others from carrying his programme through.  It seems that he cherished two unquestioned assumptions that blocked him.  One was that he really believed that primitives were utterly different from us.  A week’s fieldwork would have brought correction…[snip] His other assumption allowed him to reserve part of our knowledge from his own sociological theory. This was his belief in objective scientific truth, itself the product of our own kind of society, with its scope for individual diversity of thought. His concern to protect his own cognitive commitment from his own scrutiny prevented him from developing his sociology of knowledge… [snip]

For Durkheim, sacred and profane are the two poles of the religious life on which the relation between individual and society is worked out. The sacred is that which the individual recognises as having ultimate authority, as being other than himself and greater than himself. The dichotomy profane and sacred is not isomorphic with that between individual and society. It is not correct to interpret the indivudal as profane and society as sacred, for each individual recognises in himself something of the sacred. Sacredness inheres in the moral law erected by consensus to which each individual himself subscribes. The sacred is constructed by the efforts of individuals to live together in society and to bind themselves to their agreed rules.  It is characterised by dangers alleged to follow upon breach of rules.  Belief in these dangers acts as a deterrent… Because of the dangers attributed to breach of the rules, the sacred is treated as if it were contagious and can be recognised by the insulating behaviour of its devotees…

The first essential character by which the sacred is recognisable is its dangerousness… The second essential characer of the sacred is that its boundaries are inexplicable, since the reasons for any particular way of defining the sacred are embedded in the social consensus which it protects.  The ultimate explanation of the sacred is that this is how the universe is constituted; it is dangerous because this what reality is like.  The only person who holds nothing sacred is the one who has not internalised the norms of any community… The definition quickly identifies the sacred which in Durkheim’s universe is not to be profaned:  it is scientific truth… It is entirely understandable he should have internalised unquestioningly the categories of nineteenth-century scientific debate since he strove to have an honourable place in that very community from which the standards of conduct emanated.  His blind spot, for all the theoretical weakness it brought him, at least vindicates once and for all the value of his central theory of the sacred.  At that time science itself was unselfconscious about how its edicts were formulated and followed. But science has now diversified. It has moved from the primitive mythological state of a small isolated community to an international body of highly specialised individuals among whom consensus is hard to achieve.  According to his theory, such a new kind of scientific community would be hard put to identify anything we could have recognised as sacred fifty years ago.  So he is vindicated again by the passage of time which has made ‘correspondence-to-reality’ a fuzzier concept than it used to be…

[snip… Foucault… Quine… Hume… Wittgenstein… Bloor…]

When {Durkheim} entered the great debate {on social determinants of knowledge}, he muffed his cue. He could have have thrown upon the screen x-ray pictures just a disturbing as {Marx and Freud}. He could have been telling us that our colonisation of each other’s minds is the price we pay for thought.  He could have been warning us that our home is bugged; that though we try to build our Jerusalem, others must tear up our bridges and run roads through our temple, the paths we use will lead in directions we have not chosen. Woe! he should have cried, to those who never read the small print, who listen only to the spoken word and naively believe its promises. Bane to those who claim that their sacred mysteries are true and that other people’s sacred is false; bane to those who claim that it is within the nature of humans to be free of each other.  Begging us to turn round and listen urgently to ourselves, his speech would have disturbed the complacency of Europe as deeply as the other two.  But instead of showing us the social structuring of our minds, he showed us the minds of feathered Indians and painted aborigines. With unforgivable optimism he declared that his discoveries applied to them only. He taught that we have a more genial destiny. For this mistake our knowledge of ourselves has been delayed by half a century.  Time has passed.  Marx and Freud have been heard. Wittgenstein has had his say.  Surely now it is an anachronism to believe that our world is more securely founded in knowledge than one that is driven by pangolin power.

Below I append the 2008 results for ‘anthropology’ {Cambridge has two results, one for ‘social anthropology,’ the other for ‘biological anthropology’}:

Though I am personally deeply distrustful these sorts of rankings, feeling that that they utterly fail to capture the complex ways in which hierarchies of reputation (which I think are inseperable from putatively objective assessments of quality) are established, they are kind of amusing to talk about.  While the results displayed above roughly comport with my sense of the UK social anthropology scene, one result stood out:  the low ranking at Manchester.  I find it rather shocking that a department with a historical reputation such as Manchester’s should not end up in (even) the top half of the schools being ranked.  What’s up with that?  Meanwhile, this particular ranking of UK departments to me points up the fact that a similar recent assessment of US departments is nowhere to be found (to my knowledge).  The last results from the US National Research Council for anthropology were produced in, when?, 1995?  Anyone care to take a stab at a (purely subjective) Top 10 list of US departments?  What about a Worldwide Top 10?

The need for HTS as a capability was recognized in Phase 4 of Iraq and Afghanistan, when the military identified their lack of socio-cultural knowledge as an operational gap.  Building HTS during the war was expensive and difficult because we were reacting to a crisis rather than planning ‘left of boom’.  Had this capability been developed and implemented during a Phase 0 pre-conflict phase, policy decision-makers and planners in the Pentagon would have had a much richer and more granular baseline knowledge of the societies in which operations were to be conducted, which would have allowed them to develop more effective policies and strategies.  Even more important, these senior officials would have potentially had the opportunity to use this knowledge to deter conflict in the first place.

If HTS wisdom had been incorporated during the ‘Phase 0 pre-conflict phase,’ perhaps the conflicts could have been avoided.  Is McFate here saying that more ethnographic knowledge would have stopped the wars?

And yet, it seems that the diversity of cultures has rarely appeared to men for what it is:  a natural phenomenon, resulting from the direct or indirect relationships between societies.  They rather tended to see in it a sort of monstrosity or scandal…

This mode of thought by which the “savages” (or all those one chooses to qualify as such) are rejected outside mankind, is precisely the most marked and characteristic of these very savages themselves… Mankind stops at the frontiers of the tribe, of the linguistic group, and sometimes even of the village, to the extent that a great many of the peoples called primitive call themselves by a name which means “men” (or sometimes — shall we say with more discretion — the “good ones,” the “excellent ones,” the “complete ones,” thus implying that the other tribes, groups, and villages have no part in human virtues or even human nature, but are at the most made up of “bad people,” “nasty people,” “land monkeys,” or “lice eggs.”  One often goes so far as to deprive the stranger of this last shred of reality by making him a “ghost” or an “apparition.”  Thus curious situations are created in which two interlocutors proceed to cruel exchanges.  In the Greater Antilles, some years after the discovery of America, while the Spaniards sent out investigating commissions to ascertain whether or not the natives had a soul, the latter were engaged in the drowning of white prisoners in order to verify, through prolonged watching, whether or not their corpses were subject to putrefaction.

This anecdote, at once baroque and tragic, illustrates well the paradox of cultural relativism (which we will see elsewhere in other forms).  It is by the very manner in which one attempts to to establish a discrimination between cultures and customs that one identifies most thoroughly with those one tries to refute.  By refusing to see as human those members of humanity who appear as the most “savage” or “barbaric,” one only borrows from them one of their characteristic attitudes.  The barbarian is first of all the man who believes in barbarism.

–Race and History; see also (esp. pg. 475); cf.

In Culture in Practice, Marshall Sahlins proves himself to be one of the most profound and original anthropologists of our time. In the breadth of his perspective, his immense knowledge, his balanced sense of judgment and his refusal to bow to intellectual fashion, Sahlins is without doubt the wise man of contemporary anthropology.

Zone Books blurb

“Les amoureux fervents et les savants austères
Aiment également, dans leur mûre saison,
Les chats puissants et doux, orgueil de la maison,
Qui comme eux sont frileux et comme eux sédentaires.

Amis de la science et de la volupté
Ils cherchent le silence et l’horreur des ténèbres;
L’Erèbe les eût pris pour ses coursiers funèbres,
S’ils pouvaient au servage incliner leur fierté.

Ils prennent en songeant les nobles attitudes
Des grands sphinx allongés au fond des solitudes,
Qui semblent s’endormir dans un rêve sans fin;

Leurs reins féconds sont pleins d’étincelles magiques,
Et des parcelles d’or, ainsi qu’un sable fin,
Etoilent vaguement leurs prunelles mystiques.

— Charles Baudelaire”, see also

I arrived in the late evening so I had missed the news of the day.  I arrived during a downpour, and raced to the TV once at the motor lodge — cause I wanted to know just how large the victory was.  First channel:  Tyra.  Second channel:  Football.  Third Channel:  Football.  Fourth Channel:  Al Jazeera!  Al Jazeera calls the victory ‘convincing,’ and I see a blue Indiana, and a blue Virginia, and a blue Florida, and I think that Chris Matthew’s famous ‘chill up the leg,’ might have been a chill felt round the world, cause I get goosebumps.

People are talking of course, the bartender hands me a Tusker and wonders if Obama can deliver; in the Luo areas of Kenya things are quite ecstatic… Al Jazeera quickly shifts the discussion to what Obama will be able to deliver and who will govern under him (will, e.g., Robert Gates continue on as Secretary of Defense), and emphasizes that while Obama’s statements on Israel have hewed pretty closely to standard US policy, he is, by virtue of his unique background, capable of ‘talking to more people’ than, by implication, Bush was or just about any US politician would be.

I was still at the Starbucks in Dublin airport when Obama’s speech was broadcast live after the election was called.  There was Oprah crying, and Jesse Jackson.  An anthropologist friend and I exchange text messages.  I note the giant glass walls on the stage.  He txts with characteristic brilliance: ‘teardrop guards’.  Yes I’m tearing up, especially when — this truly thrilled me — especially when Obama talked to people ‘listening to radios’ in remote parts of the world.  I thought to myself, who but Obama on this occasion would bother to remember those folks and to speak to them?  This man can be a president of a different order altogether.  Perhaps the often jingoist phrase ‘leader of the free world’ might gain new meaning, might be resignified, for a new generation…

(UPDATE:  Radio says it is ‘Obama day’ but most people have actually decided to ignore it and go to work anyway.)

May an inconstant disciple dedicate this book which appears in 1958, the year of Émile Durkheim’s centenary, to the memory of the founder of Année Sociologique:  that famed workshop where modern anthropology fashioned part of its tools and which we have abandoned, not so much out of disloyalty as out of the sad conviction that the task would prove too much for us.

Epigraph, Structural Anthropology

All games are defined by a set of rules which in practice allow the playing of any number of matches.  Ritual, which is also ‘played,’ is on the other hand, like the favoured instance of a game, remembered from among the possible ones becuse it is the only one which results in a particular type of equilibrium between the two sides.  The transposition is readily seen in the case of the Gahuku-Gama of New Guinea who have learnt football but who will play, several days running, as many matches as are necessary for both sides to reach the same score (Read, p. 429).  This is treating a game as a ritual.

The Savage Mind, see also, cf.