Category Archives: Invited post

Welcome occasional blogger, Zoë H. Wool

Zoë is a doctoral candidate in socio-cultural and linguistic anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation, Emergent Ordinaries at Walter Reed Army Medical Center: An ethnography of extra/ordinary encounter, focuses on the dialectic of the ordinary and extraordinary in the lives of soldiers marked by violence. She will be posting occasional posts on anthropology and the military, and related issues. Welcome Zoë!

Oscar Caliber: Soldiers in Avatar and The Hurt Locker

(This occasional contribution comes from the team of Ken MacLeish and Zoė H. Wool. Ken is a doctoral candidate in anthropology and the Program in Folklore, Public Culture and Cultural Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He conducted 12 months of intensive fieldwork with soldiers and military families at and around the U.S. Army’s Ft. Hood in Killeen, TX. His dissertation explores the impacts of war and military institutions in everyday life via the concepts of attachment, vulnerability and exchange. Zoe is a doctoral candidate in socio-cultural and linguistic anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation is titled Emergent Ordinaries at Walter Reed Army Medical Center: An ethnography of extra/ordinary encounter. It focuses on the dialectic of the ordinary and extraordinary in the lives of soldiers who are marked by violence. )

You might have noticed the strong militarized thread running through this year’s list of Oscar nominated films. A not necessarily exhaustive list includes: The Hurt Locker, Avatar, Inglourious Basterds, The Messenger, District 9, The Most Dangerous Man in America, Burma VJ, and Star Trek.

As a couple of anthropologists who study American soldiers, we’ve been struck by the much-ballyhoed showdown between Avatar and The Hurt Locker, particularly because there’s been relatively little said about the fact that the protagonists of both films are soldiers (Avatar’s Jake Sully is of course a marine of some fictitious and unspecified variety, but we’re going to take a leap and dispense with the service jargon).

After several years of largely unwatched and un-lauded contemporary American war films (Lions for Lambs, In The Valley of Ellah, Stop Loss, Dear John, Redacted, The Kingdom), it is worth taking a moment to ponder the significance of fictionalized American soldiers being at the center of such dramatically different films at a moment when actual American soldiers and Marines have, until just recently, largely vanished from the headlines. Soldiers are a key figure and symbol mediating public assumptions about, and relationships to, war violence. We wondered what the competing images in Avatar and The Hurt Locker suggest about those assumptions and relationships.

The two films are a study in contrasts on a number of levels. Avatar is a $400 million blockbuster that shattered director James Cameron’s own previous box office world record. The Hurt Locker had a budget of $16 million, and writer Mark Boals and director Katherine Bigelow self-produced it with funds from European backers because they were unsure if it would ever see a full theatrical release in the U.S.

Avatar was filmed mainly in front of green screens with its actors in motion-capture suits, a curious parallel to the film’s body-trading premise. Its incandescent alien flora and fauna serve as the backdrop for a moralizing tale drenched in liberal sentiment. The Hurt Locker was filmed on location in Amman, Jordan, less than 200 miles from the Iraqi border. Its palette is essentially sepia-tone, rounded out with blood and the black smoke of bomb detonations, and it’s an essentially plotless examination of war detached from political narrative.

James Cameron wrote the script for Avatar more than ten years ago, so its parallels with the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan—insurgent locals, resource exploitation driven by corporate interests, and well-meaning “anthropologists” trying to forestall bloodshed (can you say HTS?)—arguably say as much about the abiding features of counterinsurgency war in general as about the current wars in particular. Mark Boals’ Hurt Locker script is based on his time as an embedded reporter with a U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) team in Iraq, and yet the film is less ‘about’ the Iraq War than it is about the pleasures and pathologies of making and being exposed to violence.

Above all, the films depict radically different relationships between their protagonists, the violence they make and endure, and the greater logic of that violence. Avatar is a redemptive tale. In Jake Sully, the film gives us a curious blend of wronged veteran and cynical mercenary who transforms into pure-hearted revolutionary. The details of Jake’s tragic biography, his exceptional biometrics, and his mix of defeated nihilism and warrior’s code contextualize his decision first to do some things that are really bad (like helping to decimate a population and a planet to extract natural resources for profit) and then some that are really good (like coming to understand that this kind of exploitation should be stopped at all costs). The Hurt Locker, on the other hand, provides little context for its three EOD team protagonists beyond their dedication to, and enthusiasm for, their job. A few jumbled bits of background suggest that they are bound only tenuously to anyone or anything outside of the claustrophobic masculinity of military life. But this closed-off immediacy is a kind of ethical commentary in itself, as the film invites its audience to imagine the human-scale experience of a narratively overdetermined event—like war—that must be lived without the luxury of the kind of measured, meaningful and redemptive context that Avatar provides.

In Avatar, the combat violence is both the evidence and the means of evil deeds and the mechanism for righting wrongs. The humans fight to destroy and exploit, or even for the (clearly unwholesome) pleasure of killing. Cameron depicts the film’s mercenary grunts with an abundance of quasi-realistic contemporary detail—from their uniforms and hairstyles to their technical jargon and slang—but he also shows them as vulgar, sadistic, abelist, and racist, the dark side to Jake’s human vulnerability and empathy and his soldierly discipline and determination. For the Na’vi, on the other hand, violence against living things is imbued with righteousness and spiritual and existential significance. In both its thematic connotations and in its action, the film’s violence is utterly transparent. Good violence and bad violence are clearly meant to be distinguishable. And Sully’s perhaps accidental quotation of an Airborne slogan “death from above” to describe Na’vi aerial hunting suggests that good violence can safely blend militaristic and mystical attitudes. The bad guys strike first and leave destruction where there was peace and plenty. The ballet of arrows and rockets and soaring beasts and hovering aircraft that articulate and allegorize just and unjust violences is presented in excruciatingly elaborate technical detail, making it clear exactly how each act of destruction contributes to the morally freighted conflict. Violence always has a meaning and a message, its ramifications in the material world mapping point for point onto a moral one.

If Avatar is orderly and transparent, The Hurt Locker is unruly and opaque, both thematically and aesthetically, refusing the anchored of ethical certainty. The sense of devastation is generalized, and the temporality of before, during, and after doesn’t necessarily apply: violence happens and it’s happening now, arbitrarily bookended by the last days of these soldiers’ deployment. Even the seemingly orderly unfolding of the calendar—signposted throughout the film with periodic title cards showing number of days remaining—becomes disordered as the time of passing days is effaced by the racing seconds of a detonation device. Sergeant First Class James’ arrival in the unit at the beginning of the film finds an uncanny echo at its end when he arrives again. Time simultaneously loops back on itself and also counts down at the pace of a calendar and of a time bomb and of a rotation. The unfolding of time that can give violence a redemptive logic in Avatar is, in The Hurt Locker, shattered and fragmented.

It is this fragmentation, rather than any solid explanatory framework that characterizes the violence in The Hurt Locker. There are threats everywhere, but the only identifiable enemies are at a distance—seen through a scope from hundreds of meters away—or utterly absent—the bombmakers who leave their creations for the soldiers to find. When James and his fellow soldiers Sanborn and Eldridge return fire on a shooter they cannot see, the script, camerawork and editing keep the shooter obscured for several minutes—an eternity by action movie standards. When a bomb detonates on the ground next to an unsuspecting soldier, he literally disappears in a cloud of smoke. Just as scenes of violence are deliberately evacuated of all but a physical intelligibility, The Hurt Locker makes no direct reference to the larger political and strategic logic of the war. In contrast to Avatar’s sweeping scale and redemptive violence, The Hurt Locker’s visual and moral universe is one in which violence resolves little, but is its own dilemma and its own reward.

None of this even begins to touch on some of the other themes that cross these films: the gendering of violence; the place of capitalism and entrepreneurship; the competing modes of bodily discipline and decay; notions of “cultural difference”; or countless aspects of technical execution and visual style. Clearly the contrasts of these two films, and the soldiers in them are good to think with. Our thinking has left us with a few questions about these portrayals of soldiers and war violence and what they might mean.  We submit them here for your consideration:

  • Is there any way of squaring the fragmentary and contingent quality of violence in The Hurt Locker and the ethics of grand ideas displayed in Avatar? And in either case, what does this mean for how we think about soldiers who carry out violence?
  • What can we glean from both films’ portrayal of a deeply ambivalent relationship between the soldier and the military institution that he or she serves?
  • What is the relationship between the very bodily solder and other inanimate or semi-animate instruments of war? In what circumstances does the soldier’s bodilyness dispose him to be read as just a body, and in what circumstances does it round out his humanity and heroism by serving as a sign of his discipline and prowess?
  • Can soldiers ever also be seen as regular folks, and do they ever get to “be normal”? Or do they always have to choose between the chaos of war and a home that is (in one way or another) made strange?

UPDATE: Updated post to include Zoë H. Wool’s bio and byline.

Precarious Sociality

[The following is an occasional contribution from Anne Allison. Anne Allision is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University and, along with Charlie Piot, the next editor of Cultural Anthropology. Currently working on a book on poverty, precarity, and Japanese youth, her publications include Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (Chicago, 1994), Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (California 2000), and Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (2006).]

For a new project on the effects/affects of precarity on Japanese youth today, I have been contemplating the construct of “hope.” As in—who has it, what conditions generate it, and how is it linked to notions of both time (as in the future) and space (as in home). There is a pervasive sense of hopelessness and futurelessness in Japan today, and particularly amongst those stuck in irregular employment—the antithesis of the lifetime jobs of Japan, Inc.. Without the security of a stable job, a salary that is guaranteed to grow (or even last) over time, and a social identity, many youth say they feel stuck in both time and place. Not moving forward and seeing no horizon beyond the dreary here and now, people also complain of lacking a home itself. Though sometimes this is literal (the rate of homelessness is rising as is poverty), more often it is figurative. But what precisely is this—the sense one isn’t at, and doesn’t possess a, home? Certainly, not all Japanese feel this way. But the loss/longing/anxiety is widespread, captured by the claim made recently(by activists of poverty, Yuasa Makoto and Amamiya Karin) that not only is poverty spreading in the country and becoming a poverty as much of the imagination as of material conditions, but also Japan itself is becoming “refugee-d” (nanminka). The whole country is becoming exiled? From what? Itself? So, is this hope that has gotten lost or something else, like national(ist) identity? And why does my partner, who does his research in Togo, find quite a different national mood—one where people actively breath and breed hope—there today despite a degree of economic precarity far more severe than that in Japan? Is it because Togoloese are far less attached to the past than Japanese seem to be today, and far more eager, and willing, to place their hopes on a spatial or temporal outside—whether the end-times of Pentacostalism or the visa lottery everyone plays in the hopes of migrating to the United States? (Charlie Piot, Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa in the Post-Cold War, forthcoming, Chicago).

For the book I am writing on this subject, I delivered a paper on what I call “precarious sociality” recently at Cambridge University in the Department of Social Anthropology. The interest, and feedback, was remarkable, cluing me into how pressing this issue is for many of us. I share this here, and invite feedback on any of the issues—precarity, hope/hopelessness, sociality, youth, futurity, home/homelessness—raised here.

[Due to difficulties re-formatting Anne’s paper for the blog, I have opted to post the entire thing as an embedded PDF. It appears below the jump. – Kerim]

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Language and the Media in Fort Hood

Below is an occasional post by Zoë H. Wool. Zoe is a doctoral candidate in socio-cultural and linguistic anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation is titled Emergent Ordinaries at Walter Reed Army Medical Center: An ethnography of extra/ordinary encounter. It focuses on the dialectic of the ordinary and extraordinary in the lives of soldiers who are marked by violence.

There is much to be said, and felt, about the shootings at Ft Hood on November 5th.

As a socio-cultural and linguistic anthropologist whose dissertation fieldwork was on a military base (I worked mostly at Walter Reed with a brief stint at Ft Dix), and who writes about the dissonance that emerges when discourses of the ‘war on terror’ and soldiers’ experiences collide, I’ve been feeling the need to say a few things myself.

I think we need to be paying close attention to the ideologies of language that are emerging in media coverage and online chatter about the apparent shooter, Maj. Nadal Hasan. Those who have been following the coverage will be aware that people are obsessed with how to name (or nominate) Hasan.

Call him Crazy

One set of names at stake has to do with being crazy.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, commentators rushed to the figure of the PTSD suffering soldier, invoking exactly the stereotype of the ‘crazy vet’ that Ken MacLeish has written about here, reinforcing the myth that PTSD makes people (or perhaps just soldiers?) kill other people.

As it became clear that Hasan had not been deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan and had not been in an active war zone, this category morphed into another one that, as far as I know, was newly coined: that of “secondary-PTSD” caused by the assumption of his repeated exposure to the first hand accounts of soldiers’ combat trauma while Hasan was working as a psychiatrist at Walter Reed.

As the night of the shooting wore on, and more information about Hasan found its way to news outlets like the New York Times, the category of mental illness took on another shape: Hasan’s supervisors at Walter Reed and at a Masters’ program at Uniformed Services University of the Health Science had apparently been concerned that he might be psychotic in some more run of the mill, non-service connected way.

The ‘T’ Word

There is also the parallel, and more heated, discussion about whether or not to call Hasan a terrorist. The cover of the November 23rd issue of Time Magazine which features Hasan’s face with “Terrorist?” across his eyes (which are rendered in negative) is perhaps the most iconic iteration of this question.

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Sexual Revolution, Social Change, Political Reform in Iran – Complicated Intersections

(an occasional piece by Pardis Mahdavi)

Exactly one year ago this week, my first book, Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution was published. The book, based on fieldwork conducted between 2000 and 2007 with Tehrani youth, looked at ways in which the discourse on sexuality was changing and how these changes in sexuality were linked to a larger social movement as articulated by the Iranian youth themselves. When I began reading the reviews of my book (not recommended for the thin-skinned first time author), my stomach churned. “Is sexuality really political?” some reviewers asked, “do the sartorial changes in youth fashion or behavior have deeper reaching impact?” others wrote, “how deeply do these sexual behaviors penetrate Iranian society?”, “could sex unseat the Mullahs?”  while still others asked (on Savage Minds in fact) “is ‘pretty’ the new protest?”. When I talked about my research with my students, some of the same questions came up. At first, I was frustrated, angry even. What part of my clarifications and caveats had readers and students missed? Then I realized, my mistakes were twofold: 1) I had conflated the idea of a sexual revolution (think sexual revolution a-la 1960s Greenwich Village) with the social movement that was inspiring young people to lobby for social change, and 2) I was describing only a few appendages of a larger “body that was then searching for a head” (as Robin Wright has said) – which it found this past summer in presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mussavi. But let us start with the first problem.

The phrase “sexual revolution” or enqelab-i-jensi (in Persian) was one that came organically from my interlocutors, and was not one that was placed on them by me or any other academic or journalist. Young people and their parents would talk about a change in the discourse around sexuality and heterosexual and heterosocial relations. This was referred to as their sexual revolution. Thus, when talking about “Iran’s Sexual Revolution” the focus must remain on the phrase ‘sexual revolution’ without detaching the words to ask “is sex revolutionary?” Sex, in itself, is not leading to a revolution. Neither I, nor my interlocutors were trying to claim this, however, a “sexual revolution” refers to a revolution, or perhaps more accurately put, a change, in the way in which we think, act, or talk about sex. To that end, young people and many others in Tehran had achieved their goals in that sex was talked about and thought about in different ways than it had been in the decades before. What is important to note, however, is that this sexual revolution was just one part of a larger movement that my interviewees referred to as a sociocultural revolution or enqelab-i-farhangi. This social movement encompassed behaviors such as pushing the envelope on Islamic dress, sexual behaviors, heterosocializing, driving around in cars playing loud illegal music, partying, drinking, dancing, the list goes on to include basically, young people doing what they aren’t supposed to do under Islamic law. But, many people ask, don’t youth everywhere do these things? What sets youth in Iran apart from their counterparts say in Texas? The answer is this: 1) the stakes are much higher – in Iran, you could get arrested for engaging in these behaviors and the consequences could include long term imprisonment, lashings and other abuse, 2) engaging in these behaviors are often a step for many to becoming politically active. Everything in Iran is political and politicized. The regime in power has politicized Islamic dress, certain types of music, even certain websites. Those violating its rules are harassed, punished, sometimes forced to leave the country. Many young people in Iran have become inspired to engage in political activism through their involvement in these social movements.

This leads us to the second problem, the body looking for the head. During the time I conducted my fieldwork in Iran, a generational shift was taking place. The momentum was building for something, but none of us could quite put our finger on what. Young people seemed to be coming together, deploying 21st century tools around them such as the internet, facebok, Twitter, and seeking to organize through networks around the world. But no one knew exactly what they were organizing for, and what kind of social/political movement they were constructing. What we knew was this: the majority of Iran’s population – urban, educated youth – was disenchanted with the regime. Whether they came to this sentiment through their frustration at not being able to wear what they want, socialize with who they want, prey how they want, or engage in civic society the way they want, they had all come to the conclusion that the current regime was: 1) not representative of them, and 2) was not always acting in their interest. “Why don’t they work on solving this horrible unemployment problem instead of cracking down on what we wear?” asked one of my interlocutors, articulating a sentiment shared by many young Tehranis with whom I spoke. People were frustrated. Educated, restless, youth began turning to the tools they had around them, honing their skills, looking to communicate their sentiments to each other and the world around them through blogs, music, films and a presence in cyberspace. Those of us writing about this large body of Iranian youth focused on different appendages. Some wrote about Iranian bloggers and the blogosphere (Alavi 2005), some looked at music (Levine 2008), some, astutely, tried to look at larger social change amongst the youth (Molavi 2005, Khosravi 2007) For me, I wrote about the sexual revolution, just one part of a larger movement for social and political change.

This past summer, in June of 2009, the body of social change that had been searching for a head finally found one: the fraudulent election of Ahmadinejad, and the figurehead of Mir Hossein Moussavi. Young people (the same ones that spoke of sexual and social revolution a few years ago) began organizing, pouring into the streets in an organized fashion, using their bodies and strategically deploying technology such as camera phones, twitter and facebook to both organize and to speak to the Iranian regime and the rest of the world. Earlier today thousands of protesters marched the streets of Tehran, pumping their fists into the air and chanting “Coup! Government resignation”. Some wore green (to indicate their allegiance to Mir Hossein Moussavi) many did not. Up until now, much of the recent media depictions of the situation in Iran paint a picture of a stolen election, and a discontented public demanding a recount at least, and the installation of their preferred candidate. While the election has presented frustrated Iranians with a catalyst and a reason to protest, what we are witnessing in Iran is not a simple protest over election fraud. Rather, disenchantment with the regime, and the desire to mobilize a civil rights type movement in Iran has been building for many years, encompassing, but not limited to movements such as the sexual revolution, internet revolution and . This election, the overt nature of repression and fraudulent behavior has given many people the window they were looking for to mobilize a movement that goes beyond election politics. While some protesters are in fact expressing frustration at the election fallout, many are asking for an entire overhauling of the system. Would they be happy if Moussavi were installed? Perhaps. But many want more than this, they want to change the system of Islamic jurisprudence, and fundamentally, they want their rights back. While some might see the protests as “calming down” or “dying down”, the reality is that people have tasted the sweetness of voicing their discontent, and they have no plans of backing down easily. We need to listen to the calls made by the chanting protesters, “Coup! Government resignation”.

So, reflecting on the questions “is pretty the new protest?” or “could sex unseat the Mullahs?” some might say no, but a macro look at the situation reveals that this is all part of a process. It is unclear what the future will hold for Iran. What I do know is that these avenues of pushing for social change are roads that lead to networks pushing for political change. I don’t know what the outcome of this post-election aftermath will be, but what I do know is that I need to look more at the big picture, and I need to learn to ask bigger and better questions.

The Cultural Capital of New Creative Industries

Adam Fish of UCLA contributed this occasional piece on the relationship of journalism and anthropology. -ck

On May 11, 2009, Roxana Saberi, an Iranian-American journalist once charged with espionage and facing eight years of imprisonment in Iran was released. While anthropologists should celebrate her freedom and the upholding of the freedom of press we should also be deeply troubled that two reporters remain detained in North Korea facing trial for spying. One of them, Laura Ling, a Vanguard Journalist for Current TV, is an important informant for my anthropological research into new media journalism. Her difficult situation sheds light on the limited cultural capital of emergent creative industries in the digital age. As professionals who regularly analyze the power dynamics in the production of media, border issues, and state-to-state conflict, Ling’s case is important. Anthropologists and journalists share many of the same methods, goals, and dangers.

Current TV and North Korea

My research is with new media journalists, the creative industries built around them, and the practice and rhetoric of democracy that these journalists and industries reflect and glorify. As part of my fieldwork, I have worked as a video journalist for Current TV, the Al Gore backed user-generated television and internet creative industry. Current TV supported my work in several conflict zones: the Green Zone of Cyprus, Belfast, a disputed border between China and India, etc. It
was in the course of working with Current TV that I met Laura Ling and her camera-person Mitch Koss. On March 17, Ling, Koss, and Euna Lee were near the Yalu River on the border of China to interview North Korean defectors. Koss escaped and Lee and Ling were
detained by North
Korean border. They are awaiting trial for espionage. Continue reading →

Jared Diamond’s ‘Light Elephants’ and Dark Revenge In The New Yorker: The Problems of Amateur Anthropology

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p align=”center”>The Pig in a Garden: Jared Diamond and The New Yorker series:

StinkyJournalism.org and SavageMinds.org are simultaneously cross-publishing on both web sites, a series of essays on the controversy surrounding Jared Diamond’s New Yorker article, “Annals of Anthropology: Vengeance is Ours.” The essay series titled,The Pig in a Garden: Jared Diamond and The New Yorker, is written by ethics scholars in the fields of anthropology and communications, as well as journalists, environmental scientists, archaeologists, anthropologists and linguists et al., and edited by Rhonda Roland Shearer, Alan Bisbort and Sam Eifling. Each contributor’s mission was simple: To examine Jared Diamond’s article, and The New Yorker’s decision to publish it, through the lens of their own discipline. We think you will agree that these issues will not soon be put to rest. As Nancy Sullivan writes in her contribution, part of the reason for this series is to reclaim some of the ground among general readers lost to “experts” like Jared Diamond. With this series, StinkyJournalism.org and SavageMinds.org seek to capture that wider general audience for writings about anthropology.

This piece is by Nancy Sullivan, Director, Nancy Sullivan and Associates, Ltd. She does anthropological consulting, qualitative research, survey design, report writing, training and workshop design for a range of private and public entities. The field teams consist of DWU graduates from the Department of PNG Studies (former students of ethnographic research methods]. In 2009, she served as Team Leader, Karawari Cave Arts Expedition, The National Geographic Society Magazine, March 2-28, covering the cave art project National Sullivan & Associates have been conducting since 2007 with National Geographic and Guggenheim support.

I am an anthropologist who has lived in Papua New Guinea (PNG) for more than twenty years, most of these in the highlands. In 2002 I also taught a course in PNG war and peace, so the concept of Melanesian vengeance is not unfamiliar to me, either personally or academically. My understanding of Jared Diamond’s point in the piece “Vengeance is Ours” is that revenge is natural. It’s a Hobbesian message for the twenty-first century: humans are hardwired for revenge and require a social contract to prevent madness and mayhem. Savages are rational, because they also have rules to obey and urges to forfeit for the greater peace. But because tribes are such small units, Diamond seems to say, their rules lie closer to the human impulse.

Apparently the Melanesian social contract is somewhat thinner than the European one, superficially veiling the urge for revenge and permitting its satisfaction in controlled acts of  “payback.” People like Daniel Wemp, for example, live but a step away from the pre-Leviathan Eden, where all men were islands and under no social constraints. Diamond invites us to see the difference between Wemp’s smug vendetta and the lifelong frustrations of Diamond’s father-in-law, who could never experience revenge for his family’s murder during the Holocaust. The modern state fully thwarts our urge, whereas tribal edicts do not — presumably even tribal societies within the state of Papua New Guinea. In an interesting anti-sentimental twist, Diamond also tells us that tribal people are ultimately happy to submit to a state apparatus, if only to be freed at last from the cycle of violence and payback.

If indeed Papua New Guineans are so eager to throw off the shackles of tribalism and finally live in peace, Daniel Wemp can now thank Diamond and The New Yorker for alerting the state apparatus of his crimes.

No one will ever find ‘Daniel Wemp’

I want to make three points here. First, that Diamond has seriously endangered this subject, whom he identifies by real first and last name, by claiming his responsibility for a series of murders. Beyond the Nipa tribe and the Southern Highlands Province is a thoroughly modern state of Papua New Guinea for which these acts constitute murder.

The second point follows from the first. The field of anthropology has a code of ethics that includes “informed consent” — a not-incidental notion that if you use people for research purposes, they must know the risk involved, the nature of the project, how the data will be used, and how it will be publicized. In short, they should have the choice to remain anonymous. In a pinch, when these conditions cannot be met, you have to mask the subject’s identity.

But we know that Diamond’s piece does not actually come from the “annals of anthropology,” or at least not professional anthropology. That field has a distinct method, something called the ethnographic method, coined by Brownislaw Malinowski in New Guinea ninety years ago to prod the discipline out of the armchair and into the field for a minimally required period of time.

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Candy Goodwin on Teasing

Marjorie Harness “Candy” Goodwin, author of a recent ethnography of girls on a playground, joins our growing pool of Savage Minds “occasional contributors” with the following response to a recent NY Times Magazine article, “In Defense of Teasing.”

Dacher Keltner in his recent article on teasing in the New York Times magazine argues that “in seeking to protect our children from bullying and aggression, we risk depriving them of a most remarkable form of social exchange.” While ritual insult or trash talking among friends (as Labov told us long ago) can serve important functions by communicating complaints about someone in a playful and indirect way, there is often a murky line between ritual and personal insult. As Donna Eder (in her book School Talk) has alerted us, whereas the intent of the actor of a tease may be friendly, a recipient may interpret it as a hurtful insult, and not necessarily show the pain. Jaana Juvonen, my colleague in psychology at UCLA, who has done extensive research on bullying among elementary school and middle school children (see for example her book Peer Harassment in School: The Plight of the Vulnerable and Victimized edited by Juvonen and Sandra Graham, feels that (counter Keltner) there is not any easy way to distinguish teasing from bullying, which includes forms of social aggression.

In my own work among elementary school children (The Hidden Life of Girls) in California over a three-year period I also find that what begins as playful may very quickly become harmful. A working class girl who initiates playful ritual insult sequence (“When you grow up you gonna be working at Pick and Save”) might receive in return from girls in a mostly middle class clique hurtful personal insult, alluding to the target’s status as working class, not being able to afford braces, jobless in the future, rejected by everyone, including the gutters, and without friends. When multiple members of a clique ratify a particular version of reality of this sort that is hurtful we come face to face with forms of everyday micro-aggressions that often go unnoticed in “progressive” schools – schools where there are routine exercises is sorting out blue and brown eyed individuals in exercises that promote notions of fairness to all ethnic groups, but never attention to “the hidden injuries of social class.” The girls I studied routinely excluded a working class African American girl they called a “tag-along” and insulted her to her face so that by the end of sixth grade she was often eating alone on the playground during lunchtime. What may be thought to be teasing by some group members, may be experienced as hurtful by the target. The form of recipient response is critical to how we view an activity as either teasing or bullying.

Emily Martin on Anthropology Now!

Emily Martin has generously sent this brief history of how Anthropology Now started… Please be civil.

AnthroNow LogoI am pleased to see that there has been such quick and interested reaction to the launch of Anthropology Now. I wanted to write with a brief history of the long effort that has brought us here. I am speaking from my (spotty) memory here, and some details may be missing. We began as a committee of the AES in 1998 when I was president, Susan Harding was president elect, and Ida Susser was Councillor. The AES has kept us as an active committee ever since, which explains how we were included in the AAA program this year.

Our efforts to find a publisher stretched over 10 years. Ida Susser, Susan Harding and I organized approaches to (among others) Duke University Press, the University of California Press, the University of Chicago Press, Blackwells, Sage, and Palgrave. In each case we asked an anthropologist who had an existing (and positive) relationship with the press to make the pitch. All these presses turned us down except Palgrave. We got close with Palgrave only to be stymied by a change in administration and journal publication policies. We stayed in close touch with the AAA through successive presidents and the committee on scientific communication, but we never imagined that the AAA could fund this venture. They have consistently promised (and followed through on) in kind contributions and exchanges.

The very first year of our existence, Dean Birkenkamp, in a former professional capacity, found us and expressed his support and commitment. Thereafter he attended just about every annual meeting we had at the AAA meetings. He shared advice, kept up our morale, and pledged every possible effort to help us, for which we remain immensely grateful. It was only after he founded Paradigm Publishers and made it a commercial success that it became realistic for him to become our publisher. Given the depth and consistency of his interest and support, I do hope Paradigm makes some profit from Anthropology Now. Giving away 1000 copies (maybe more) of the first issue and mailing out countless full color brochures is an investment we hope the press will be able to recover. They are accepting the reality of years of losses on this venture, a move for which we are extremely grateful.

During the years before we had a publisher, our strategy was first to form an Editorial Board (much as you see it today) and second to post a “sample issue” on the web, which predates and only partially overlaps with what you see today. We owe the contributors to that sample issue and of course the additional contributors to the current issue a vote of thanks.

We also made efforts to raise grant support. When Leslie Aiello became president of Wenner-Gren, one of her mandates was to raise the public awareness of anthropology as a discipline: what is it that we do and what can we contribute to public debate and understanding? She agreed with our assessment of the need for a print magazine and a web presence. The financial support we have from Wenner-Gren will be crucial in the continued growth of the project.

We look forward to taking the web site to the next level and hope to continue to get good suggestions (and participation) from the readers of Savage Minds. For the moment, feel free to join us on the open Facebook group for Anthropology Now.

When Species Meet

Chewing on Haraway

(Inspired by Jonathon Sullivan, I decided to invite my dog, Juno, to write this occasional contribution. Here Juno writes a review of Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet. The review was solicited from Savage Minds by University of Minnesota Press. – K)

I was very happy when my owner decided that we should review this book. Mostly because when he reads a book we can sit together on the couch, which is much more fun than when he sits at his desk surfing the web. I get scratched behind my ear a lot more when we are reading a book.

I also like Haraway. She seems to engage ideas in the same way a dog might play with a dead animal: sniffing it, placing it our mouth, playing with it, rolling on it, barking at it, offering it to our master only to run away with it again. But I could tell my owner was as frustrated by this kind of play as he is when I do it. He likes to play boring, repetitive, games like fetch. He seems to prefer the easy popular style of Patricia McConnell to Haraway’s challenging prose.
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Ethnographic Methods and Virtual Worlds: Notes Towards a Typology

(a month or so ago I posted “a longish review”:/2008/06/13/more-on-coming-of-age-in-second-life/ of Tom Boellstorff’s book Coming of Age in Second Life. Tom has now whipped up this occasional contribution to expand some of his thoughts on the topic — enjoy! -R)

The Setup
1. I have been thinking about writing this essay for some time (in connection with an edited book project in its early planning stages), but was inspired to write it in this form in response to the interesting conversations that have appeared on this blog and elsewhere in regard to my book Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. This essay is an experiment in two ways. First, in it I discuss emerging genres of ethnographic research with regard to virtual worlds. Second, I use the blog format to post a draft, in the hope that the feedback I receive will help me in writing the final version of this essay. There have been several recent experiments using blog-based peer review to complement more traditional forms of peer review. The best example of this to my knowledge is the case of Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s forthcoming book Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. Part of the “experiment,” then, is to see how the comments I receive with regard to this essay help me revise it.

  1. Here is how I have set things up with these goals in mind. I have numbered the twenty paragraphs of this essay to facilitate commenting upon specific passages, and have kept the essay as succinct as possible. I see this essay as sharing genre features with the “conference talk,” a time-tested way to present work in progress. I have thus omitted endnotes, a bibliography, and most references to Coming of Age in Second Life, despite the fact that this essay extends arguments already present in that book. I encourage any and all comments on the essay, and would appreciate it if you could provide your name with your comment. If your comment inspires me in any way during the revision process, I will thank you in the acknowledgments section that will appear in the final version of the essay. I envision that final version being about twice the length of this draft, and of course as including endnotes and a bibliography.

The Background
3. Coming of Age in Second Life is an ethnographic study of the virtual world Second Life, as well as an analysis of the place of virtual worlds in human sociality more broadly. Since its unofficial release on April 21, 2008 and particularly since its official release on June 18, 2008, I have spoken in graduate seminars, been interviewed on radio stations, and appeared at a number of meet-the-author events (many of them taking place within Second Life itself). It is hardly a coincidence that in the same month as the official release of my book, the inaugural issue of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research was released. All this indicates that we are at a moment in which a new research community is coming into being, a community whose growth will only be stimulated by the continuing emergence of new virtual worlds, from Age of Conan to Google’s Lively. This research community includes a wide range of persons, from those who have researched virtual worlds for decades to students just beginning to think about new projects. It is an interdisciplinary research community, including persons from many academic disciplines, persons working in nonprofit and industry contexts, independent scholars, designers, journalists, and residents (these are, of course, not exclusive categories). Two key questions that emerge around this new research community (and in all likelihood, all new research communities) are: (1) what is the object of our study?, and (2) what do various methodologies bring to the table in researching this object of study?

  1. As with the case of my previous publications on Indonesia, it has been interesting to see what aspects of my analysis attract attention from different readerships. In both my Indonesia work and my Second Life work, discussions have emerged around questions of methodology and particularly the constitution of “the fieldsite.” I find this gratifying, because I have intentionally designed all my research projects to push on the boundaries of what we mean by “the fieldsite.” In Indonesia I have conducted research on gay Indonesians on three islands (Java, Bali, and Sulawesi), but in my books The Gay Archipelago and A Coincidence of Desires I discuss how, in a powerful sense, this research is not “multi-sited”: the fieldsite is “Indonesia” itself. This is because gay Indonesians have historically seen themselves as gay “Indonesians,” not gay Javanese, Balinese, and so on. There are many different kinds of spatial scales operative in human life, including local, national, regional, and global, and it is crucial not to equate culture with locality. Sometimes that equation is valid, sometimes not: it depends. Translocal cultural logics exist with regard to everything from religion to gender. In the case of gay Indonesians, while they may think of themselves in local terms with regard to some aspects of their lives, with regard to homosexuality they typically think of themselves as Indonesians. This makes sense given that the concept of gay subjectivity is associated with modernity, not learned from one’s parents or tradition, but the linkages to the nation turn out to be much more complex. I have suggested that one reason so little has been written on gay Indonesians is that these persons fall outside one’s analytical horizon if that horizon is founded in the spatial scale of locality. Researchers who equate culture with locality in Indonesia can miss the forest for the trees, so to speak: they will see all kinds of cultural logics that are local, but those that are translocal in some fashion will appear to be inauthentic impositions.

  2. My interest in challenging meanings of “the fieldsite” was strongly supported by my dissertation advisors at Stanford. One of these advisors, Akhil Gupta (now at UCLA) has co-written some key works about notions of the fieldsite with James Ferguson. James Ferguson was my colleague at Irvine for several years before moving to Stanford. I still have many colleagues at Irvine who support my interest in rethinking “the fieldsite,” including George Marcus, whose work on multi-sited ethnography is well known. When I began conducting research on virtual worlds, I thus came to the project with a prior interest in problematizing conceptions of the fieldsite. I soon realized that the conceptual tendencies with regard to virtual worlds were strikingly opposed to those I had encountered in Indonesia studies. Whereas in Indonesia studies, the presumption was in the direction of locality, in the study of virtual worlds the presumption has been in the direction of translocality. For instance, there were (and still are) persons claiming that all virtual-world research projects must include meeting persons in the actual world to be valid, or at least that such projects must always privilege the actual-world lives of virtual world residents.

    The “Four Confusions”

  3. As I discuss in Coming of Age in Second Life, both virtual worlds and the study of virtual worlds have histories to them. However, as noted above, the study of virtual worlds as a research community is in a formative stage, paralleling the recent growth in virtual worlds themselves. In such contexts of emergent inquiry, debates over definitions and terminologies are common, as a glance at the Table of Contents for the first issue of the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research indicates. A difficulty in moving these debates forward is the remarkably negative attitude toward virtual worlds found not just in some quarters of anthropology, but even in science and technology studies. In part this may be due to the simultaneously utopian and dystopian narratives that often co-occur with new technologies. It may also be relevant that to date, the most prevalent popular-culture reference to virtual worlds is The Matrix movies, in which a virtual world is used to enslave humanity.

  4. I define virtual worlds as places of human culture realized by computer programs through the Internet. Before turning to my typology of ethnographic methods with regard for virtual worlds, it will prove helpful to set out what I term the “four confusions” regarding contemporary discussions of virtual worlds. Most of these confusions originate in mistaking something that frequently co-occurs with virtual worlds for a necessary condition of their existence.

  5. Games. Virtual worlds are not games. Historically they have been and continue to be shaped by video games; they may contain games within them; they may even be largely structured in a game-like manner; but there is no way to equate virtual worlds with games without defining “game” so vaguely as to include all social life under its purview. The confusion originates to some extent in the English-language distinction between “game” and “play,” a distinction not found in all languages and cultures. Because it is incorrect to assume, by fiat, that all virtual worlds are games, it follows that the use of theories from game studies to virtual worlds must be contextual: in some cases such theories will be highly effective, in other cases less so.

  6. Visuality. Despite the fact that at present, phrases like “3D web” are frequently used as synonyms for “virtual world,” virtual worlds need not be graphical or even visual. This is seen most clearly in the fact that historically, virtual worlds were exclusively text-based (as in the case of “MUDs”). The fact that nearly all contemporary virtual worlds are built around three-dimensional graphics is fascinating and important to study, but this does not mean that such graphics are a definitional precondition for deeming something a virtual world. For instance, one could in theory have a virtual world composed entirely of soundscapes, in which persons who are blind in the actual world would be on equal footing with the seeing. One could imagine a purely haptic virtual world, in which an interface technology like a glove allowed participants to navigate and interact solely through touch. There is no indication such virtual worlds would involve more than comparatively small communities were they to come into existence. If anything, the trend toward visuality seems to be accelerating. However, it remains crucial that we avoid conflating virtual worlds and visuality. Since most contemporary virtual worlds are structured around visuality, theories from visual studies will be crucial to understanding them, but it would prove less effective to use such theories to make categorical claims about virtual worlds.

  7. Mass Media. Because virtual worlds are places, they are not mass media, though they may contain mass media within them (everything from magazines, books, and embedded websites to streaming audio and video media). Virtual worlds need not mediate two or more places, since they are places in their own right. If anything, it is more accurate to think of a virtual world as a “medium,” in the sense of a material in which one crafts things. This has consequences for the use of mass media theory for understanding virtual worlds: we cannot assume ahead of time how such theories will need to be reworked for virtual-world contexts.

  8. Anonymity and roleplaying. The vast majority of existing virtual worlds require that participants have accounts in which their identity differs from their actual-world identity. For instance, in Second Life I am known as “Tom Bukowski,” because while one is allowed to choose any first name one wishes, last names must be selected from a pre-defined list. However, it is not a definitional precondition of virtual worlds that they be built around anonymity. One could imagine a virtual world that encouraged or required participants to use their actual-world names inworld, along the lines of social networking websites like Facebook. As virtual worlds are used increasingly in contexts like education, nonprofit work, and the corporate sphere, virtual worlds disallowing anonymity, or at least not mandating anonymity, may become more common. Linked to this question of anonymity is that of roleplaying. Since many virtual worlds are structured partially or overwhelmingly as games, and given the historical linkages between virtual worlds and fantasy fiction like J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, it is unsurprising that forms of role play are crucial to many virtual worlds. Roleplay, however, is not a necessity for defining something as a virtual world.

  9. There are, of course, other possible confusions: this is to be expected given the degree to which the study of virtual worlds is an emerging field of inquiry. For instance, it is still unclear if virtual worlds must employ avatars. Text-based virtual worlds, for example, did not use avatars as typically understood: one could define the description of a resident as a textual avatar, but such descriptions seem more like a “profile” than an avatar. However, the four confusions described above seem to be the ones that most often sidetrack contemporary research agendas and discussions with regard to virtual worlds.

Research Questions and Ethnographic Design
13. With the preceding discussion in mind, I now turn to the issue of research design, setting out a three-part typology of methods for ethnographic research with regard to virtual worlds. I intend “typology” to be taken in a heuristic sense, not an exhaustive one. My undergraduate mentor in linguistics, the late Joseph Greenberg, talked about “splitters” and “clumpers” in linguistic typology: researchers who sought fine-grained categorizations versus those who worked to gather the world’s languages into the fewest possible groups. For the purposes of this essay I will be a clumper: I will heuristically group all ethnographic methods with regard to virtual worlds into only three categories. I could easily have set forth a typology with five or ten categories, but this more parsimonious typology has the benefit of brevity, and well as highlighting some key distinctions.

  1. It is crucial to foreground the relationship between “research question” and “method.” Any claim that a particular method is the best (or the only valid) method for researching virtual worlds misses how research always involves a coming-together of research question and methodology. How one conducts research is not determined by some essential property “out there;” it is shaped by the research questions one wishes to investigate. In my work as Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, I find that one of the most common reasons I end up rejecting a manuscript is that the research questions (while fascinating) and methodology (while rigorous) do not match up: the methods are not working to answer the questions the researcher has ostensibly chosen to examine. If I wish to study patterns of HIV infection in a certain social group, quantitative methods will prove invaluable. If I wish to understand how a certain population comes to think of itself as a “social group,” qualitative methods will in all likelihood be a better fit. Methodological partisanship is not helpful in moving these kinds of conversations forward: what ideally emerges is a research community, with researchers using different methods to answer differing research questions with regard to a shared field of interest. With this in mind, here is my “clumping,” preliminary typology of ethnographic methods with regard to virtual worlds:

  2. Virtual/Actual Interfaces. One class of ethnographic methods with regard to virtual worlds explores interfaces between virtual worlds and the actual world. An excellent example of this kind of research is T. L. Taylor’s Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture, which opens with the researcher attending a hotel convention for participants of Everquest. This class of methods builds off a history of examining such interfaces with regard to the Internet more generally. A well-known example of this is Daniel Miller and Don Slater’s The Internet: an Ethnographic Approach, which focuses upon how Trinidadians use the Internet to reconfigure Trinidadian identity and community. Since work in this genre tends to emphasize relationships between virtual-world and actual-world selfhood and sociality, a logical methodological outcome is that researchers strive to interview the same persons in the actual world as they encounter in a virtual world or worlds, and have as one research focus those instances where residents of a virtual world meet collectively in actual-world contexts.

  3. Virtual/Virtual Interfaces. Another class of ethnographic methods with regard to virtual worlds examines interfaces between two or more virtual worlds. In some cases, this can be a comparative research design in which residents of the virtual worlds in question do not (or mostly do not) move between the virtual worlds being studied. This is analogous to, say, Clifford Geertz’s book Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia, in which the Moroccans and Indonesians studied do not travel between Morocco and Indonesia and are, indeed, largely unaware of each other’s existence. In other cases, this can be a research design that tracks a community or communities moving between virtual worlds. An excellent example of this is Celia Pearce’s forthcoming book Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Online Games and Virtual Worlds. In this work, Pearce examines the “Uru diaspora,” a community formed when the virtual world Uru shut down and residents worked to rebuild their lost virtual home in other virtual contexts like Second Life and There.com. One frequent topic addressed by research in this genre is how notions of selfhood and community are sustained and destabilized across differing virtual contexts.

  4. Virtual Worlds In Their Own Terms. The third class of ethnographic methods making up my heuristic typology involves studying a single virtual world. This is the primary method I employ in my book Coming of Age in Second Life, where I refer to it as studying a virtual world “in its own terms.” If Geertz’s book Islam Observed can serve as an analogue for studying virtual/virtual interfaces, then several of his other books (for instance, his first ethnography, The Religion of Java), can serve a similar purpose in regard to studying a virtual world “in its own terms.” Geertz’s Religion of Java is primarily a study of Islam, and there are by how hundreds of insightful ethnographies of Islam, exploring Muslim life around the world. That such ethnographies usually focus on particular places and communities does not mean they ignore that Muslims are found worldwide, that many Muslims make the pilgrimage to Mecca, that persons migrate, and so on. Instead, it means that they examine how such translocal cultural logics and practices shape what is emicially understood to be a particular community or communities. It is absolutely crucial to recognize that an interest in intersectionality, translocality, and the co-constitution of cultural domains is typically common to all three classes of ethnographic methods I discuss in this essay. Some studies of virtual worlds “in their own terms” focus upon subcultures or specific topics (say, sexuality, or economics). Others strive for a more general portrait. In any case, researchers working in this genre are often interested in how shared practices and meanings emerge and are contested within a virtual world.

    Concluding Thoughts

  5. This rough typology of ethnographic methods with regard to studying virtual worlds is meant to underscore how different genres of research design allow for exploring varied sets of research questions. Most researchers end up working in all of these genres over time, but at any point in time the best research is based upon the difficult choice of focusing one’s methods in line with a particular avenue of investigation. Arriving at a workable and compelling design is perhaps the most challenging and important step in conducting research. It is not possible to do everything at once. In the emerging research community around virtual worlds, I have sometimes encountered a misreading of my colleague George Marcus’s work on multi-sited ethnography, wherein it seems to be assumed that the more “multi,” the better. In this misunderstanding, research on a single fieldsite is, a priori, suspect or outdated, while research on multiple fieldsites is, a priori, valorized as cutting-edge. In reality, both single-sited and multi-sited methods go back to the earliest decades of ethnographic research: indeed, nineteenth-century anthropology was dominated by evolutionary approaches that presumed multiple sites of research and comparison. This is why in 1896, Franz Boas, a founding figure in American anthropology, felt compelled to write his influential article “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology.”

  6. It should be clear that all three of the methodological approaches discussed above (or the many additional methods that I could have set forth with a more “splitter” typology) are valid approaches to researching virtual worlds. All have strengths, and all involve sacrifices in terms of honing a doable research plan. In what I find to be the best research in virtual worlds or the actual world, we are moving toward forms of what I have elsewhere termed “postreflexive” modes of ethnographic engagement, focusing upon how “the fieldsite” of any research project emerges through that ethnographic engagement, rather than being set in stone “out there.” It is by now well-acknowledged that the single fieldsite is, in this sense, an ethnographic fiction. The irony is that in virtual worlds research, what sometimes appears to be less well-acknowledged is that multiple fieldsites are also so constructed.

  7. What does the future hold? It appears that research on virtual worlds will continue to increase and diversify. A subset of that research will continue to be ethnographic in some sense, and this work bears every indication of representing an innovative set of contributions. Obviously, there is no need to choose between the various methods for ethnographic research with regard to virtual worlds that I have discussed above. All can be done well or badly, but none of them are by definition invalid. When properly keyed to appropriate research questions, each has something to offer. Each can contribute to building a body of ethnographic work that will help illuminate what virtual worlds are, as well as their changing place in human life. In some ways this body of work will be specific to virtual worlds, but it will continue to draw from a range of other fields as well. For instance, while (as noted above) virtual worlds are not necessarily visual and are not necessarily games, they do tend to be highly visual and often are games or emphasize play. As a result, theoretical perspectives from game studies and visual studies, among other disciplines, will continue to be crucial for understanding most virtual worlds. In turn, the growing body of research on virtual worlds, informed in part by various modes of ethnography, will have much to offer many other fields of inquiry. The conjunction of ethnography and virtual worlds will continue to stand as a vibrant field of research, contributing to central debates about human selfhood and sociality into the future.

—Tom Boellstorff is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, and Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist.

The Resistance is Dead! Long Live the Resistance!

For five decades, the People’s Republic of China has been proclaiming the death of the Tibetan resistance. In the 1950-60s, they discursively denied the existence of the Tibetan resistance army by referring to them as “high class separatists” and “rebel bandits.” Since then, they have attempted to curb any resistance by immediately putting down protests through arrests, beatings, imprisonments, disappearances (remember the 11th Panchen Lama?), and deaths. The PRC has done everything they can to give the impression that resistance in Tibet—armed or peaceful, coordinated or everyday—is a rare and unwise exception to their benevolent rule, is conducted only by monks or members of the “Dalai clique,” and is not representative of the majority of the Tibetan people who love the Chinese motherland.

Yesterday, therefore, marked a major departure from this stance, perhaps for the first time ever. On Thursday, March 20, 2008, the PRC government acknowledged that Tibetan protest is widespread. That is, it is not just confined to Lhasa or to monks, but is spread throughout Tibetan areas of China and is being committed by Tibetans from all backgrounds—by monks, laypeople, and students, and by men and women, young and old.

Why does this matter?
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Ventriloquists for Darwin

(Here is an occasional piece by Jon Marks at UNCC -R)

An international survey a couple of years ago found that only about half of Americans believe in evolution, placing us 33d in the world, on a list of the nations that believe in evolution the most. I find this troubling, but not because it is another demonstration that Americans are morons. That was known to H. L. Mencken in the 1920s, who referred to the American masses as the “booboisie,” and had even worse things to say about creationists. My problem with these data involves the idea of scientists being interested in what I believe.

I would be apprehensive at the State Department taking an interest in my beliefs, and I am just as apprehensive at the scientific community’s interest in them.

When did science come to be about your beliefs, anyway? I always thought it was about method.

If science is indeed about your beliefs, then I have a bone to pick with evolution. It just seems to attract the weirdest ideologues. Consider the post-Darwinian generations: in the 1890s there were the Social Darwinists. A couple of decades later there were the eugenicists. They were Darwinists too: Charles Darwin’s cousin (Francis Galton) was the movement’s founder, and his son Leonard led the British eugenics society after Galton. It’s hard to miss that connection!

In America, paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn and geneticist Charles Davenport led the movement – no conflict of molecules and morphology there! Davenport’s ideas fell into eclipse in America with the accession of the Nazis, and he died in 1944 – as the sitting President of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.
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Carole McGranahan on Tibet

By way of kicking off our “occasional contributors” project, Carole McGranahan has agreed to write something about Tibet for us, which she will shortly post. Carole McGranahan is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado. She received a Ph.D. in anthropology and history from the University of Michigan in 2001. Currently, she is revising her book manuscript Once and Future Truths: Tibet, the CIA, and Histories of a Forgotten War for Duke University Press.

I found a number of great articles she’s written about Tibet, which I’m sure she’d be willing to share with anyone who cannot access them.

On behalf of the elite Euro-American gatekeepers of Anthropology here at Savage Minds, I would like to thank Carole for agreeing to mix it up here on this subject.