Here’s a short update about the two student debt surveys I started last week. Both surveys will be open for another week. After that I will compile the responses and share the results here as part of the Savage Minds/anthropologies series on student debt. The first survey has a total of 226 responses so far. The second survey, which looks at debt by country and institution, has 113 responses. Thanks everyone for taking the time to do the surveys! Please note: It would be great to get some more responses from biological/physical anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguistic anthropologists (and other sub-fields) for these surveys. Responses from socio-cultural anthropologists dominate both surveys (65% in the first survey, 56% in the second). Look for another update in one week when these surveys close!
On taking ontological turns
I didn’t make it to the AAA 2013 meetings. I heard the news though: ontology is the next big thing. I’m not sure what to make of this. I am all for getting your theory on, but so far I haven’t heard anything from this latest ontological craze that’s really hit home. Maybe I’m not paying enough attention. Maybe I’m not reading the right stuff. Or, perhaps after several years of being subjected to high doses of academic theory-talk, I have overdosed and now have some sort of weird allergy to anything that remotely resembles jargon. In that case I just need some Benadryl and everything should be in order shortly.
I did read a post over on Allegra by Isaac Morrison about this whole “ontological turn” thing that makes some good points. Here’s how it starts: Continue reading
The books about how to write for anthropologists (or anyone else)
I’ve received a lot of criticism in my life, but no one has ever accused me of having writer’s block. I do it all the time. On this blog, in my academic writing, in Amazon book reviews… I write write write. I wasn’t always a good writer or a fluent writer, and it took me years to get to the point where I could wake up every morning and feel that I could write five thousand words a day if I had to, and couldn’t sleep at night if I’d written less than a thousand. Many of my greatest teachers were role models, people who wrote comfortably and fluently and loved to do it. But I’ve also benefitted tremendously from good books on writing. Since we are doing the Savage Minds writing group this year, I thought I would share my favorite tips for books on writing. As an anthropologist, actually, when I say ‘books’ I really mean the conversations behind (and within) the books. And behind the the conversations I see the concrete networks of scholars. When it comes to books about how to write, there are two key figures who anchor two different (but related) literatures: Robert Boice and Joseph Williams.
How to ruin your students' weekend in three easy steps
I live just far enough north to catch some snow and ice a couple of times a year, but far enough south that people still panic when it happens. So when we got 2-3 inches this Wednesday my university administration shut the whole place down for two days. This is problematic for me because my class meets once a week for a 2’40” block, meaning my students just lost a week’s worth of content. And in the second week no less! I was going to cover evolution by natural selection in order to set up the next three weeks of study.
I have already got my semester totally planned and I don’t want to mess with it. How am I going to get at least a modicum of the lecture to my students remotely? In this blog post I’m going to share with you my work around strategy. Continue reading
Week 1: Savage Minds Writing Group Check-In
So…how did it go? How was the first week of writing? It’s time for our first weekly check-in. Please share your progress, accomplishments, and frustrations in the comment section below. If your first week was great, then fantastic and keep it up for week two. If your first week was somewhat rocky as (ahem) mine was, then work to find the energy and discipline to sink into a regular writing practice. Looking forward to hearing about everyone’s experience this week, and be sure to tune in on Monday for our first Writers’ Workshop guest author–Gina Athena Ulysse!
Undergraduate Ethnographers Infiltrate the AAA: Part 2
[Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Jane Eva Baxter]
Structuring a course experience or assignment to enable a particular type of learning is a challenging task, and never guarantees a specific set of results. In Part 1 of this post, I described the course context, learning goals, and assignment structure for sending 30 DePaul senior anthropology majors to the AAA Annual Meeting to participate, observe, and write about their experiences as brief ethnographies.
I did not ask students in advance what their expectations were for the AAA meeting (opportunity lost) but my sense, based on their reactions, is they imagined the meeting to be a rather serious, sober, and scholarly affair. They were overwhelmed by how social, dynamic, and fun the meetings were not just as first time attendees figuring out how it all worked, but also for all of you who were busily conferencing away as they were attentively observing you!
Several of the resulting essays were so good I wish I could share them with you in their entirety. Nearly all were thoughtful, competent, and reflective pieces of writing. The best were innovative, humorous, and insightful. It is impossible to convey effectively the results of 30 different research projects at the AAA. Instead, I’ve tried to summarize some of the students’ perceptions using the four broad categories assigned for their structured observations, and to offer some thoughts on what they learned by participating in the annual meeting as undergraduate ethnographers.
The Methods of Ethnology: SMOPS 9
“The methods of ethnology” is among the two most taught and anthologized essay by Franz Boas, the founder of American anthropology, and I include it here to give you a sense of who Boas was and what he thought. Boas is famous for doing ethnography, not talking about it. As a result it is extremely difficult to find explicit theoretical statements from him regarding what anthropology is or should be. There are three main texts that represent Boas at his most explicit: “the study of geography” is Boas’s earliest and most general statement, followed by “limitations” in the 1890s. “Methods” was written in 1920, and represents Boas’s views at the time that he had finally achieved institutional dominance in anthropology.
The Methods of Ethnology, by Franz Boas, edited and with an introduction by Alex Golub
Vale Stanley Tambiah
It was with a genuine sense of loss that I read over the weekend that Stanley Tambiah had passed away. Tambiah was a model anthropologist, a person whose personal life and work exemplified everything that our discipline can and should be. He was an area studies specialist whose monographs on life in rural Thailand expanded our ethnography of this area. He was a theorist who knit together British and American theories of symbolism and ritual at a key point in anthropological theory. And he also became a public intellectual who published substantive work on pressing issues of the day in books and articles about ethnic violence in India and Sri Lanka. Above all, he will be remembered by his colleagues as role model of the generous scholar and human being. His generosity, kindness, and humility seemed to combine the best of all the different cultures he lived in, from English gentleman to humble Buddhist to Sri Lankan Christian. His loss gives us a chance to reflect on the values he lived and that we, in turn, ought to continue to follow. Continue reading
Anthropologists: Ready, Set, Write!
Anthropologists have always been writers. But we have not always paid attention to writing as craft or as practice, rather than as vehicle for communicating knowledge. While historically some anthropologists wrote well or across genres—Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Cara Deloria, Laura Bohannan, and Clifford Geertz immediately come to mind—the 1980s literary turn in anthropology brought us new collective energy and interest in not just writing, but in writing well.
Writing takes time. Writing well takes time and practice. Continue reading
Anthropologies: Anthro student debt survey, round 2 (debt by country/institution)
This survey is part of the Anthropologies (#20) issue about student debt, here on Savage Minds.
As of about 7:30 PST on 1/20/14, the anthropologies/Savage Minds student debt survey has 191 responses. Thanks everyone for taking part in that first survey! The point of the survey was to get a general understand about debt as it relates to the broad community of people who identity themselves with anthropology. This includes people in the US, of course, but also beyond it. But one of the flaws in the survey is this openness. As readers here on SM and Facebook pointed out, I should have included a question about the country in which people studied anthropology to help parse out the numbers. Thanks for the input. That was a pretty big omission on my part! So, in an attempt to answer this question, I have written up a very short follow up survey that attempts to get a better understanding of debt by country/institution. Please note that you will be able to see everyone’s answers to the survey once you hit the “submit” button at the bottom of the page. Once I close both surveys I will compile everything and share the results here on Savage Minds.
Please click here to take the second survey.
Thank you for taking the time to take this follow up survey. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns please email me anytime: ethnografix@gmail.com
UPDATE 1/20/14 at 4:41 pm PST: We already have 47 responses for this survey! Thanks everyone. ONE IMPORTANT NOTE: If you have no student loan or credit card debt, please enter a ZERO instead of leaving answers blank!! Thanks!!
Anthropologies: Student Debt in anthropology (Survey)
In order to kick off the first Savage Minds/anthropologies issue about student debt, let’s start with a short survey. Following on the heels of Karen Kelsky’s recent survey about PhD debt, I want to see if we can get a little more information about student debt in the discipline of anthropology. This survey is open to anyone who has ever studied anthropology at the undergraduate or graduate level (past and present). It’s also anonymous. If you finished your degree yesterday, we want to hear from you. If you dropped out, fill it out and tell us why. If you finished back in 1980, we want to hear from you too. I am going to let the survey run for two weeks, which means it will close on Friday, January 31. Let me know if you have any questions: email me at ethnografix at gmail dot com. Thanks in advance for taking the time to fill this out! And please pass this along to your anthropology colleagues and friends!
Click here to take the survey!
UPDATE 1/17: As of about 8:45 pm PST, there are already 60 responses! Thanks!! When the survey closes I will compile everything and post the results here on Savage Minds. In the mean time you can see an overview of all responses after you click the submit button.
UPDATE II, 1/20/14: Based upon a few reader comments about the lack of a question about the institution/country in which people have studied anthropology I have created a short follow up survey: Student Debt in Anthropology Survey #2 (Debt by country/institution). Thanks for all of your help and input everyone!
Stoller and the 2014 challenge for social science
Paul Stoller has a new piece on HuffPo about saving the social sciences (and liberal arts). Here’s a good snippet:
The challenge for the social sciences — at least for me — is to simultaneously maintain rigorous standards while producing works that clearly and powerfully articulate important insights to broad audiences across a variety of media. In my discipline, anthropology, the challenge is to communicate critical insights about social life in such a way that moves audiences to think and to act.
Many of my colleagues devote considerable energy to debate the whys and wherefores of nature, culture, social change, globalization and ontological turns. These debates are usually articulated in specialized languages that may demonstrate brilliance but often limit the reach of insight. There is no reason that theoretically informed findings cannot be communicated to broad audiences.
See that last line? He’s right. Read the rest here and then go write something that would make Stoller proud.
Anthropologies on Savage Minds
After a couple years of running the anthropologies project and writing for Savage Minds, I have decided to combine my online energies. Anthropologies is moving to Savage Minds! The core idea of the project is going to stay the same, but the way it works is going to change a bit. Instead of publishing collections of essays all at once in journal-esque format, the new anthropologies here on Savage Minds will entail a series of themed, invited posts over a 1-2 month period. At the end of the series I will publish the collection in either E-pub or PDF format to make things nice and accessible. I think it’s going to work out very well.
All upcoming issues will be announced in advance to encourage as much participation as possible. If you have any comments or ideas, please feel free to email me at ethnografix at gmail dot com. Suggestions and ideas are always welcome.
The first Savage Minds/anthropologies issue will focus on the pressing, depressing, and ever-worsening subject of student debt. It’s an issue that affects far too many people, and it needs to be addressed sooner rather than later. I wrote about student debt here on Savage Minds a while back–at the end of the post I mentioned the idea of marshaling anthropology to start finding some answers. That’s what this issue is all about: bringing anthropology to bear on a subject that hits close to home for a lot of people trying to slog their way through grad school, recent graduation, adjunct-hood, and the horrible job market. Several contributors are already lined up, and the first installment of the series will be online soon! In anticipation of the student debt issue, check out this must read article on the Chronicle of Higher Ed by Audrey Williams June (published today), which mentions the PhD Debt Survey that Karen Kelsky started just a few days ago (it already has more than a thousand anonymous responses). Also check out Rebecca Schuman’s related piece on Slate. Those two articles will be a good prep for taking on–and hopefully pushing back against–the entrenched problem of student debt.
*Upcoming themes include: The politics of global warming and environmentalism; Aging; The uses and abuses of “culture”; An anthropology of the stuff we eat. And more! This series is open to suggestions, participation, and ideas, so please feel free to post your comments here or email me (ethnografix@gmail.com).
Undergraduate Ethnographers Infiltrate the AAA: Part 1
[Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger, JANE EVA BAXTER]
November’s AAA meetings are a distant memory after a season of holidays, finals, grading, and course preparation for round two of the academic year. Before they slip away completely, I wanted to share some thoughts about assigning 30 anthropology seniors the task of writing a brief ethnography based on time spent at the AAA annual meetings. That’s right- a small contingent of undergraduate ethnographers was among you. They may have handed you your conference program at registration, sat next to you in a session, or been at the next table at Kitty O’Shea’s or Starbucks. So think back, while you were busy conferencing you were being observed, perhaps were engaged in casual conversation, and certainly were studied thoughtfully by students in a senior capstone seminar trying to learn what it really means to be an anthropologist in 2013.
Teaching “The Anthropological Life” Using the AAA Meetings
The anthropology senior seminar at DePaul is titled, “The Anthropological Life” and is a course designed to help students simultaneously reflect on four years of education, and contemplate the transition from life in school to life without school. Each faculty member who teaches the course takes a different approach, but I’ve always embraced the seminar as an opportunity for students to connect with anthropologists working in a variety of vocational capacities. Usually, this means in a ten week quarter I invite four guest anthropologists from outside academe to come to campus, give a public lecture, have dinner with our seniors, and then have the seniors interview them for about 90 minutes where they can talk about their “anthropological life.”
My two main goals for the course are really quite simple. First, I want students to recognize that anthropology is not a particular vocation, but rather a way of engaging the world. I ask them: How do people with anthropological training see the world differently from those without such training? What are the core values of the discipline and how do those values become actualized in the daily practice of lived lives? Second, I want students to reflect actively on their own “anthropological lives” and consider how anthropology will shape their future regardless of their career or life path. In many forms we engage question such as: What does anthropology mean in the context of your life? How has anthropology shaped who you are as a person and how do you see anthropology shaping your future?
The AAA coming to town was a pretty remarkable opportunity in the context of this course. Where else could students gain so much exposure to contemporary anthropology so efficiently? And so, for the 2013 permutation of the course, it was decided to substitute a guest speaker with a somewhat structured encounter with the AAA meeting that would result in a very brief piece of ethnographic writing.
This copyright week, Let's make the AAA's monographs open access
I have a suggestion for Copyright Week: Let’s ask the AAA to release their books and monographs into the public domain. After all, one of the easiest, most important, and least risky things the American Anthropological Association has ever done is to put into the public domain all of its journal articles published prior to 1964. By doing so, the AAA took our heritage as anthropologists and made it available to the world — exactly as it should be. The decision making behind this move was a little complicated (I can tell you about it later), but the decision making behind our next one doesn’t have to be. Let’s do the same for all the books and monographs the AAA hold copyright for — regardless of when they were published.
Continue reading