Learning from TED, SFAA and BarCamp

The 2009 SEAA conference was held in Taipei this year and it was a real treat to see so many anthropologists visiting the country I currently call home. I thought the Jurassic Restaurant was a great place for our final dinner! But as much as I enjoyed it, I am always left somewhat disappointed by anthropology conferences, so I thought I’d write a blog post to try to put some of the reasons for that disappointment into words, trying to think aloud about how we might do better.

The first thing I would do, if I had the power to do so, would be to ban the reading of papers. It seems to me that there is often an inverse relationship between how famous an anthropologist is and how boring their presentations are. All too often they simply read aloud seven to nine pages of dense double spaced text extracted from their most recent publication. Thanks, but no thanks. I’d rather read the paper at my own pace, thank you. How about trying to learn from the wonderful TED talks? Although the TED curators seem to be a bit too fond of neoliberal and technocratic solutions to the world’s problems, there is no doubt that the talks one finds on that site are rarely boring.

Secondly, putting all the TED talks up as online video might have something to do with the quality of the talks. Surely this keeps presenters on their toes? The SFAA podcast site is a great example of what anthropologists can do in this regard. This should be standard practice at all anthropology conferences, and included in the conference budget. All too often there are a million talks scheduled at the same time, so it would be great to be able to hear the ones you missed later on. It is a great way to “open access” our conferences.

Third, I’d like to see a little more time devoted to discussion. Lets be honest, fifteen minutes is not enough time to present all your data. It seems to me that anything less than forty minutes is going to be little more than an advertisement for your work, encouraging people to read more if they are interested. So why not keep the papers short, maybe under ten minutes, and open up more time to some real discussion. Make the papers available online for those who want to read them.

Finally, I’ve never been to BarCamp, but it seems to be one of many participant-driven “unconferences” like the citizen journalism one I attended at Wikimania 2007. The entire agenda was determined on the spot, with the second round of topics picking up from where we left off at the end of the first round. I loved how dynamic this approach was, compared with what I’m used to at academic conferences. It would be great to open up the format of anthropology conferences to experiment with these other forms. This could even be extended to after the conference is over. Perhaps there could be some kind of built-in mechanism by which each year’s conference builds on questions raised the previous year?

Savage Minds Around the Web

Whatever the Future Brings: Check out Wired’s post on Michael Wesch‘s presentation at the Personal Democracy Forum (a social networking media conference). According to the oracles of all things electronic, Wesch’s talk on how to get people’s attention in an age of mass distraction got a standing ovation at the conference.

The Forest Has Eyes (and Possibly Land Claims): Rory Carrol at the Guardian wrote a provocative article at the Guardian UK about the Peruvian government’s claims that there are no ‘uncontacted’ tribes in their section of the Amazon, the indigenous groups and activists who are claiming that there are, and the anthropologists who are hedging their bets.

A Reductionist’s Guide To Life Choices: For those of you who don’t listen to the NPR podcast called “Planet Money,” here’s some advice. Do listen. The hosts often have non-traditional perspectives on the U.S. economy, society and the current fiscal crisis. This Friday was an amusing exception. The podcast invited Tim Harford, an economist who offered humorous rational choice models to help his blog readers figure out if their spouse is cheating or whether a couple should enter an open relationship. All in all a comical point of entry into how economists think. But if you’re thinking about following his advice, don’t.

In Memoriam: I ran across two very well-done obituaries this week. The first was an article in the Boston Globe recalling the career Helen Codere, an ethnographer of the U.S. Pacific Northwest who elaborated on the potlach and edited a selection of Boas’s work called simply Kwakiutl Ethnography. On her experience as a female ethnographer in the 1940s-1960s, the Boston Globe wrote:

Dr. Codere, who never married, pointed out that in the field, “Single women lack some of the freedom and mobility of single men; they are objects of even greater curiosity and scrutiny in a world in which going two by two is projected.’’

The Guardian UK wrote also wrote an obituary of medical anthropologist Cecil Helman.  A brief exerpt:

Cecil’s work with traditional healers, especially in Brazil and South Africa, allied to 27 years’ experience as a GP in the NHS and a period as a ship’s doctor, helped him to develop an original and illuminating approach to the complexities of healthcare provision in multicultural populations.

The New Persistence of Memory: The Language and Popular Culture in Africa Archive

Some readers here may have seen my review of Johannes Fabian’s recent books, which are linked to a site he co-created with Vincent de Rooij called The Language and Popular Culture in Africa Archive. It’s a great small collection of original texts, translations and commentaries, curated with scholarly care, and representing hard to find and valuable resources. What’s more, even though it is a small-scale project, it was one of the first open access publications in anthropology, and could continue in this fashion if there were interested people.

Fabian wrote to me recently concerned about the future of this archive, highlighting several issues that I think we will all face in the near future:

As you may have noticed in my email signature below the address of our LPCA archive has changed (because of some reorganization at the University of Amsterdam). The old address that appeared in publications so far will get you there for a while but probably not forever. One of the vagaries of presence on the net. Also I say “our” archive because it has been a truly collaborative effort with Vincent de Rooij, a former student and a linguist-cum-anthropologists whose dissertation was about Katanga Swahili. He designed, maintained, and edited the website meticulously. And he did this for almost 10 years without any institutional funding or even academic credit, on his own time. This has become untenable for me but, more importantly, he has turned to other subjects and interests, which is of course entirely legitimate. So the sad news is that LPCA, though it can run, as it were, on autopilot for years as long as it keeps its space on the server, is, if not dead, in suspended animation.

I think such projects are the very lifeblood of anthropology today–far more so than the increasingly sterile walled gardens of the academic journals run by the Publishing Borg and its scholarly society minions. So what should we do to keep them alive:

  1. Volunteers? Is there anyone out there with an interest in and focus on popular culture in Africa, african linguistics or swahili who wants to help? This could be an editorial opportunity as well, since there is both the archive and a Journal associated with the project.
  2. How can we improve it, or make it more 2.0-y and social interneterrific without sacrificing what is already there? What’s the right back-end? The journal (Journal of Language and Popular Culture in Africa) could obviously be ported to Open Journal Systems, if someone wanted to do that, whereas the archive materials might be appropriate for Omeka.
  3. How can we make it more “official”– perhaps by assigning DOI numbers (what would a suitable registration agency be?) and so forth to make it findable as a library resource?
  4. Can we leverage the new “open anthropology cooperative” to find people who are interested and committed?
  5. Other suggestions for Johannes and Vincent as to how to make this project survive and grow?

Facebook and Google: Parochialize your Intarnet!

There’s a very nice little article in Wired this month about Facebook’s plans to rule the world. It’s got lots of details about things like Facebook Connect and about the hubris-filled and cocksure Mark Zuckerberg. What got me thinking most, however, was this chestnut:

For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google’s algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg’s vision, users will query this “social graph” to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search.

It’s one of those nice journalistic object lessons which seems to sum it all up at the exact moment that all of its assumptions leak out of the edges: that the Web must be one thing, that one must gain knowledge either from machines or people, that our circle of friends is “our” primary source of information, that we use facebook to get information or that its CEO’s vision maps onto its practices; and so forth.

But there is something crystalline about this. There is a change at work here, a kind of parochialization in process. The metrics of trust embodied by Google are a set of ideals grounded in the idea of a vast library, a global brain, “the world’s information” and the Internet as a vast sea of computable texts and actions; those of Facebook are ideals of human contact, facefulness, recognition, mimicry, identity management, constant contact, powerful control over one’s identity, social network and reputation, self-actualization. Google is dominated by an ethic of information openness in which more is better, because it makes it easier to comb through collect, sort and analyze data. The more open data is, the better your analysis of it will be. Facebook is dominated by something like an ethic of “revealed preferences”–the only information that matters is information tied to a autocthonous system that gives it meaning. Parochialize your Internet; re-embody your avatar. On Facebook, everyone knows you’re a beautiful and well-bred dog. On the capitalist side, this all comes down to how your information will be commodified: facelessly and anonymously, but with possible benefit for a general public (though that public is a geo-politically fraught one with fault lines called China and Saudi Arabia) or facefully and behaviorally targeted commodification, with maximum benefit for the social graph you make and belong to. If we want to talk about intentional communities today, let’s start here: with the automatic co-creation of consumer profiles. The war to make our own demography starts here.

Celebrity Journalists and North Korean Prisoners

If you hadn’t heard of Laura Ling, the journalist sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for illegally entering North Korea, at the time of my first upload to Savage Minds about her plight you probably have now. On the eve of her sentencing, June 3, Lisa Ling, sister to Laura and multi-network television journalist, after two months of US State Department recommended silence, was on almost every major American television network advocating for her sister’s release. In my first post, I wrote about the dangers of working as a journalist for Current TV, a small cable news network with a very limited amount of institutional cultural capital it could muster in case of an emergency. On June 14th, New York Times writer Brian Stelter furthered this idea and wrote about how new media journalism is exceedingly dangerous because small start-ups don’t have the sway of large ones. His point is oddly near to my own and if SM indeed has a reader at the NYT than I am haplisa-at-vigil1py to oblige Stelter’s creativity and I’ll accept the flattery with the imitation. Today, I will continue the analysis of this crisis in the direction of looking at the relationship between individual and institutional cultural capital.

I was at the first LA vigil on May 21 before Lisa Ling’s public involvement. There were seven people on a dog path along Venice beach. One person looked like Jason Schartzman. He wasn’t. He along with all others whorshipped at Laura’s church. At the second LA vigil at a swanky restaurant in Santa Monica I had to elbow through the valet, concerned beautiful people, television personalities, and cable news reporters to get my professionally premade “Save Laura” sign. After months of silence, when these media insiders wanted the attention it was instantaneous. I won’t say that this is an instance of media producer nepotism. It is a good story for ratings; a real news issue. We should campaign for the pardon of these two unfortunate journalists. However, the media blitzkreig explains much about the cultural capital and complicity of cultures of media production.

I want to think about individual cultural capital, namely Lisa Ling’s, and her use of that capital to advocate for the release of her sister, and how it relates to institutional cultural capital, namely the advocacy powers of American television networks. The play between institutional and individual cultural capital can be understood through the structure-agency dualism within the anthropological tool of practice theory. However, practice theory usually works within calculations of oppositionality and tensions. In the classic view, individuals, particularly activists, are in an antagonistic relationship with media institutions. The case of Lisa Ling and American news networks, on the contrary, consists of individual agency and institutional structuration overlapping. In the process, entertainment and activism synchronize. Let me explain.

There was a key moment, an event, that exposes the presence and strategic deployment of cultural capital in this case. Lisa Ling is a correspondent for CNN, National Geographic Channel, and ABC’s The View. Mitch Koss, who was with Ling and Lee in North Korea, is widely known to have been the mentor of Lisa and Laura Ling, as well as Anderson Cooper. These media insiders waited months to thumb threw their address books to get the numbers of Larry King, Anderson Cooper, and Matt Lauer (Today Show). With all due compassion to Laura and Lisa, it is important to note that in a world of increasingly edutainment-geared television news programming this is a “good” story complete with evil despots, nuclear weapons, and teary-eyed family members. Even without this engaging nonfiction narrative, I would argue, Lisa Ling would be able to get on every show, and have celebrity-dense, simultaneous vigils in several American cities coordinated with her television appearances.

What if Lisa wasn’t Laura’s sister? What is Al Gore hadn’t founded Current TV and weren’t involved? Would this issue had gotten on all major networks at primetime hours had Lisa not had these contacts and been so camera-ready and photogenic? These concerns could be somewhat tempered if we consider the class and cultural capital of the people who gain full-time employment in the creative industries. It isn’t Lisa’s ease and practice on camera which makes it possible or her connections, but a mix of these issues and more that constitutes her powerful cultural capital. While Current has branded their business as entrepreneurially democratizing media production and distribution to the masses, the people who are under the benefit packages and full-time salaries of these companies are unusually well-connected through family, elite schools, or other insider and backdoor operations.

With practice theory, we often conclude that agency is structured and the higher the agent gets within spirals of power the more structuration occurs. Activism, usually associated with individual agency, quickly is structured to death and transformed into spectacle. Strangely enough in the Ling situation, the individual and institutional cultural capital synchronize. This coordination usually happens only to elites. However, usually even to them, their political intentions are stripped in the pursuit of entertainment. This is not so in this case. Through personal favors, shared political concerns, and co-benefits in the economics of spectacle, the Ling family and major news networks coordinated to publicize the reprehensible situation of these journalists.

Also at the vigil for the first time were employees of Current TV, in my next blog I am going to investigate the political and capitalistic drive behind the censorship and denial by Current TV of this issue and the failed promise of the democratization of citizen journalism and participatory culture.

Savage Minds Around the Web

Profoundly Meaningless (Yes Yes Yes):  Mother Jones blog reports on the closing of the last keffiyeh factory in Palestine.  According to Mama J, hipsters have underwritten the boom of cheaper keffiyeh production in China.  [Thanks to hawgblawg for finding this story].

Zombeconomics:  Worried about the shrinking global economy and the over population of over qualified professionals?  Overthinkingit.com has the solution.  One major outbreak of zombie attacks would both thin out the world population, and, once controlled with biotechnology, become a cheap source of labor.  Makes sense to me.

The Public Anthropology Public: Daniel Lende wrote two posts on neuroanthropology this week on public anthropology.  The first purports to be a review of Rob Borofosky’s explanation of Public Anthropology, but it is much more.  The post assembles various perspectives and multimedia interviews and examples of public anthropology.  In the second post, Lende compiles a list of further resources for people interested in deeper exploration.

Hey, Hey, Hey, I’ve Got It (World Cup Fever): Well, actually, I was gay-vaccinated against the fever before first going to Brazil in 2002.  (They won that year, and I hid from the hours of fireworks).  But others have the fever.  Material World posted on Lynn Jarvis’s Homeless World Cup, and Language Log explores the reported origins of the vuvuzela, a South African horn played at soccer matches.  (yes, i said it, soccer).

Sugar and Spice: Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily posted a very just critique of a recent article from the Archives of Sexual Behavior, claiming that infant girls were more attracted to pictures of dolls while infant boys were drawn to pictures of toy trucks.  Perhaps the post should have been titled, ‘babies socialized into gender roles really f’in early.’

Ok, I promised myself that this week would be MJ free, but this post at Language Log reached down and tapped my inner-child-ethnomusicologist.  Benjamin Zimmer tells a compelling tale about the Cameroonian origins of Jackson’s line ‘ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa,’ and in the process the globalization and transnational consumption of popular music.  Wanna be startin’ somethin’ indeed.

Anthropology 2.0: For Real?

In Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody he says that “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.” The problem for those of us who are early adopters of new communications tools is that we get caught up in the excitement of new possibilities and lack the patience it requires to wait for the potential to be realized. I remember hooking up my Mac+ to a New York City node of France’s Minitel network via a 300 baud modem sometime in the late 1980s. I could see the possibility, but as late as the mid nineties I still faced angry looks from students when I told them they needed to sign up for an e-mail account if they took my class. Sometimes we forget how unnecessarily complicated all this seems to most people. Especially anthropologists. I have been blogging for nearly eight years now, but it seems like it is only in the past year that I suddenly stopped being able to keep track of every new anthropology blog out there. E-mail is now boring, as are blogging and the social web. And that’s exciting, because it means things are just getting started!

The evidence? If you haven’t already, take a look at the Open Anthropology Cooperative. Back in May I wrote yet-another-post complaining about how the AAA relied upon poorly made user surveys instead of proper qualitative research, or genuine bottom-up democratic decision making. That sparked an interesting discussion on Twitter about what a more open, global, and democratic alternative to the AAA might look like. The discussion soon outgrew the 140 character limit, and so moved over to Kieth Hart’s forum. The discussion there progressed for a while until, at the end of May, Maximilian Forte suggested using Ning, and Kieth Hart set up the Open Anthropology Cooperative.

Continue reading →

A Media Anthropologist in a Commune

My girlfriend lives on a commune, or, to be more PC and less 1960s, an “intentional community” in Southern California. The social glue that links the residents are a non-denominational spirituality, inexpensive/free living, shared work, collective food production and sharing, and “community.” From what I can gather, residents share a desire to link individual with universal consciousness, connect to nature through devotional work, and uphold an emotional honesty. The more humanistic or less numinous amongst the residents say “community” is the reason they live here. For these individuals, this commune’s attractions are the shared responsibilities and personal relationships. I am here now enjoying a kale and fig salad and handpicked/squeezed orange juice from the orchard (she is the reigning queen of the organic farm here) and entertaining research ideas.

In the 1990s there were a few anthropologists working on the American commune. These studies focused on history. Examples include Don Pitzer’s cross-cultural utopianism and developmental communalism and Susan Love Brown’s ethnography of a yogic community and her accurate description of the importance of generations for the growth of New Age religiosity. Honestly, the history of the American commune doesn’t interest me as much as the future of small-scale socialism. As a media anthropologist, I want to see how this bricks-and-mortar intentional community relates to the taste and affinity cultures online. How to create analogies that move between this commune and digital socialism?

Skeptics of social media like Andrew Keen and Neil Postman agree that there is a fundamental and substantive difference between real and virtual communities. Something profoundly human is lost in the virtualization of relationships. Personally, I tend to see social media as augmenting my strong friendships, extending my informal friendships, and providing opportunities for new friendships. Regular use of social media affirms or complicates preexisting relationships, provide opportunities for the creation of new networks, while creating something perhaps unprecedented: virtual communities. These virtual communities could be seen as historical extensions of communes, political groups, audiences, fan bases, and other communities unified by analogue media. However, in some ways they might also provide for the invention of new sociality. Clay Shirkey, Henry Jenkins, and danah boyd expand on this generative thesis.

As distinct as they are materially and physically, it is difficult to textually code in a single word the differences between “real” and “virtual” communities. Cultural relativists like anthropologists are rightfully wary of “reality” and how “real” creates “unreal” communities. So “real” won’t work. What about “embodied?” Engagement with social media at a laptop isn’t the most active of corporeal engagements but it is nonetheless embodied. Will “symbolic” community work for the “virtual?” In-person engagements are mediated by fashion, language, body movements, and other symbolic forms of communication. So “embodied communities” won’t work for the “real.” The terms “mediated” or “symbolic” won’t work for the “virtual” which we know isn’t just virtual but also physical. Recourse to archaeology won’t work because virtual communities produce many tangible artifacts and a substantial infrastructure. I will use in-person to describe those person-to-person interactions in shared tangible space and online communities to describe the digital relationships knowing that this definition is leaky.

So here’s the pitch. A comparison between this commune and a virtual community could provide evidence for what are the differences between in-person and online communities. It will be necessary to locate and work with a vibrant virtual community that is networked via social media and who share a set of ideological beliefs or a division of labor. A Facebook group that interacts around political or religious ideas would work. The primary data will come from an identical questionnaire that will be filled-out by both the residents at the commune and the participants in the virtual community. The correct drafting of this instrument will be necessary to elicit evidence about what differentiates and unifies the in-person and online communities.

The most important point that unifies this intentional community and social media communities is “intentionality.” Both populations elect to be a player in the chosen community. They are not born into it by their gender or generation nor are they forced into it by circumstance and history. Intentionality is enshrined in the very title given by members of this “intentional community.” Communes, despite having ideological ideas about nature, consciousness, and social work going back to the 17th century, reflect one of the emergent qualities for the creation of new online communities. Doubters could see intentionality as the social fabric for community development as but an extension of the consumeristic mentality that prioritizes individualism and a shopping mentality taken towards social formation. Regardless of the connections between intentional community development and capitalistic interpellation, intentionality as a force for community growth is a frame through which we can observe and critique the formation of numerous cultures of affinity, competency, and taste both in-person and online.

What would be a good online community for comparison? Are there any precedents for this research?

Ethnic Studies Under Attack in Arizona High Schools

November 21: Mayflower.

Image via Wikipedia

Legislation that will end ethnic studies programs in Arizona high schools looks set to be signed into law by the state’s governor. Promoted by the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Horne, the law will deprive public schools that do not eliminate ethnic studies courses of 10% of their state funding.

The target of the bill appears to be Tucson Unified School District, whose Raza Studies program serves some 1,200 Latino students. Interestingly, students involved in this program show a marked improvement over the state average on the state’s standardized testing (which goes well with other evidence that students involved in bilingual education, as well as students given access to electives like art, photography, and creative writing perform better on standardized tests – they tend to be more focused on and more engaged with school overall than students who are deprived of these “optional” courses). Continue reading →

Savage Minds on the Internets

Faubion, Marcus on Fieldwork: InsideHigherEd interviewed James Faubion and George Marcus about Fieldwork is Not What it Used to Be, the recent edited volume about which Chris posted last month.  In the interview, Faubion and Marcus discuss their first fieldwork experiences, the proliferation  anthropologists of the U.S., and their thoughts on the future.  

Justice is Blind, But Still has Fashion Sense:  Feminist Law Professor Collin Miller blogged on this week’s Michigan Supreme Court Amendment to all state courts’ operating procedures that Judges can enforce certain dress codes to verify witnesses’ identity or to assess their demeanor.  This basically upholds the decision of a lower court judge who threw out a case brought by Muslim who refused to remove her niquab, or face covering, during proceedings.  In good lawyerly fashion, Miller gives a comparison of other legal conflicts between the guys in robes and the ones in ethnically marked garb.  

Friends with Class:  Emily Bazelon at Slate.com wrote a provocative piece on how the flagging economy’s is transforming social networks of friendship in the U.S.  From exposing irreconcilable differences of consumption patterns between friends to breaking up office social circles, the recession is ruining our personal lives.  

Online?  How About Some Anthropology?  Daniel Lende at neuroanthropology.net complied a list of social networking and other sites bringing anthropologists together to converse and share information.

AnthroIT: The Kuala Lampur English language paper, the Star, published an interest piece on corporate anthropologist Genevieve Ball, her experience as a PhD student, and her transition to work in the world of IT.  

Want something included?  Just reply in the comments section or send an email for future posts.

Who isn’t on Twitter?

When the American Anthropology Association is on Twitter, that must mean everyone is. But, I ask: is there a Twigital Divide? Should I be writing a grant proposal to study those left behind, tweetless and downtwodden? Clearly the time has come for me to stop not thinking about facebook and start not thinking about Twitter!

Welcome roving blogger Adam Fish

Adam Fish, a PhD student at UCLA is going to be doing a bit of guest blogging here at SM this summer. Adam describes himself as a new media producer and anthropologist of the creative industries. He’s worked as a documentary maker at CurrentTV on issues such as Iraqi and Bhutanese refugees, Native American tourism, Buddhist/Hindu religious land disputes, and the split cities of Belfast and Nicosia, Cyprus. He has promised to give us some insight into that place where economics and activism meet in citizen journalism and participatory culture. He’s travelling and will be in Cyprus, Israel, and Burning Man… blog on, Adam.

“Pretty” is the protest?

Jezebel has an interesting post, entitled “In Iran, “Pretty” Is Sometimes The Protest.” She writes:

So, when you see this woman with red fingernails, she’s not just risking arrest for holding that sign, she’s risking it for the shade of her nail polish.

It relates to a Juan Cole piece, “Class v. Culture Wars in Iranian Elections” in which he pointed out that “the Iranian women who voted in droves for Khatami haven’t gone anywhere…”

I don’t know enough about class and gender politics in Iran to say much about this. The fact that the women in these pictures often conform to Western notions of glamor, including fair skin, had struck me in the media coverage about the elections, but I hadn’t thought about it beyond that until I read Jezebel and Juan Cole’s posts. What do you think?

UPDATE: Thanks to Gregory Starrett for mentioning Pardis Mahdavi’s new book, Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution. Here is an interview with her:

Savage Minds Around the Web

Is there an Anthropologist in the House? Daniel Goldberg at Medical Humanities Blog, posted his plea for more medical anthropologists in clinical settings. Self-professedly a fan but not practitioner of anthropology, Goldberg suggests that medical anthropologists would be a valuable addition (if not replacement?) for clinical medical ethicists. He writes:

I have often wondered how different my local world would be if it were anthropologists in charge of designing, implementing, and teaching cultural humility, instead of the relatively thin but conventionally dominant and poorly named “cultural competence.

Reform at a Distance: In A recent New York Times Op-Ed , contributor Nassrine Azimi on suggests that Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is an oldie-but-goodie model for people to think holistically about demographic and educational challenges currently facing Japan.

You Can’t Say That in Science! Language Log has a plea for action regarding a libel lawsuit against British science journalist Simon Singh. Singh is currently fighting a lawsuit brought from the the British Chiropractic Association, claiming that Singh’s challenges to the validity of certain claims of chiropractics lack demonstrable evidence constitute intent to defame the Association. Perhaps more interesting than the case itself has been the response from various public interest groups claiming that free speech is necessary to scholarly practices of critique. The comments to this post also raise some interesting views.

Biopower at the Limits: Thanks to Somatosphere for linking to a new blog post by Paul Rabinow discussing his research collective’s conceptual work on synthetic anthropos–an emergent constellation of effects and propositions borne out over the struggle between the figures of biopower and human dignity. Or something to that effect. Eugene Raikhel’s somatosphere post has some interesting views on this as well.

In Memoriam [Updated 6/16/09]: Stephen Christomalis at Glossographia has a great tribute to Willard Walker, recently deceased linguistic anthropologist and expert in (the admittedly specific field of) Cherokee numerals indigenous literacy in the Americas, most specifically the Cherokee syllabary.  In all cases, a really interesting description of one scholar’s life’s work.

As always, feel free to write in or post any other news.

Savage Minds Around the Web

Counterinsurgency…A Growth Industry: Maximilian Forte brings us this great post on the Canadian military’s recruitment of social scientists for work in Afganistan, including recently published anonymous interviews of scholars who have worked with the Canadian military.

Want to Talk with Common People, like you: Mark Dawson from ethnography.com has a new project. It’s part visual ethnography, part Studs Terkel, part road trip movie. And the first installment is really good. The ‘Ordinary People Project’ has Dawson driving around Northwest Canada and Alaska documenting the everyday stories of people who live there. The first installment is already up.

Losing Ground: Journalist Mark Dowie writes in the UK Guardian about his new book on the struggles between environmental conservation movements and the indigenous people displaced by declared wilderness areas.

Native American Construction: Material World posted an essay by Joana Alario discussing the cultural politics of building Native American casinos and museums in the Northeast U.S.

Caught in the Middle: Jean Jackson published a report on the AAA Human Rights website about the precarious situation for rural indigenous groups in Colombia still stuck between the politics of the FARC and the Uribe government. The report comes after a massacre of at least 8 Awa people, who the FARC accused of being military informants.

Traveling Exhibit: Valeri Russ at The Philadelphia Daily News writes a review of the AAA’s ‘Understanding Race’ exhibition which will run this summer at the Franklin Institute in Philly this summer. Russ’s article mixes a discussion of the exhibit with local Philadelphians experiences of race.

Ethnographers’ Personae: Lorenz at anthropologi.info reviews the new online edition of Anthropology Matters, with 11 articles by students on the identities one is forced to take on during fieldwork.

Want something else included?  Post in the comments or email me.