I just had the extraordinary pleasure of seeing longtime friend and fellow-traveler Richard Doyle give a talk at Rice called “Just Say Yes to the Noosphere.” Rich is the author of On Beyond Living and Wetwares; we met at MIT; his advisor at Berkeley had been Evelyn Fox Keller who had moved to MIT. Rich is a rarity in academia: a kind of contemporary Bateson who insinuates himself into all kinds of interesting research projects; he’s just as willing to run a composition and rhetoric program as he is willing to be the American representative to the International Electrotechnical Commission’s Joint Standards Committee on Bio-Telemetrics. Rich’s talk was about the 20th century history of psychadelics research, and especially, research in unlikely places: like AMPEX, for instance (the inventor of magnetic video-tape), whose engineers experimented with LSD. It’s no secret how widespread the experimentation and research on psychadelics was from about the 1930s into the 1960s. After that, however, hysteria served to associate the research and on psychadelics with 1) drugs 2) bad graphics and 3) pseudo-science and new age mysticism.
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Tag Archives: Bibliomania
Rice U. Press: Scholarly monographs go digital
My own Rice University has re-launched its failed academic press as an “all-digital” publishing concern. It uses the Connexions system that I mentioned earlier and it will function as a regular peer-reviewed press. I think the details of licensing and price will be worked out as it develops, probably in response to what authors say they want. I do know that they intend to use Qoop.com to produce print-on-demand works– so it isn’t in fact “all-digital”–it’s just that it won’t use any conventional book-printing infrastructure.
This might be a good opportunity for anyone in search of a press–especially for dissertations or books that mightn’t have so mammoth an audience. Or, perhaps, for books that should be re-published, orphaned works or others that need a new hearing. Rex, here’s your chance to edit the complete works of Max Gluckman…
Chicago Exchange rises from the ashes (again)
The Chicago Anthropology Exchange was the unofficial journal of the anthropology department of the University of Chicago. If I remember correctly it was one of the many brainchildren of sol Tax. Like a lot of things that Tax got people enthused about, it wasn’t actually that successful and languished on and off for some time. I even did a brief stint doing layout for it during my time as a grad student. After that it collapsed again. But now it has risen from the ashes as “EXCHANGE”:http://newcloud.com/exchange/index.html with new CSS styling and interviews with “Marshall Sahlins”:http://newcloud.com/exchange/interviews/sahlins.html and “Slavoj Zizek”:http://newcloud.com/exchange/interviews/zizek.html. In my experience most departments have enough intellectual ferment to start a journal and now that the barriers for entry are so low technology-wise we should all start one. So I hope EXCHANGE will have a future full of good content (and an RSS feed and more metadata!).
New AnthroSource Titles
From OSU’s Anthropology Resources web site:
New AnthroSource content for 2006
The following four titles have now been added to AnthroSource.Culture and Agriculture
City and Society
Journal of Latin American Anthropology
Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of EuropeCoverage runs from the inaugural to the current issue.
Now, why can’t AnthroSource have its own blog to tell us things like this?
Low points in anthropology: THE AWAKENING
In a post a “little while ago”:/2006/05/05/so-true/ we noted the dearth of good anthropological theory readers, and more “recently”:/2006/05/22/anthro-classics-online-shakespeare-in-the-bush/ Kerim has tried to make the site more accessible to students by pointing out some key texts online.
This got me thinking: could you construct a ‘history of anthropological theory’ course using ONLY articles available on the most popular digital repositories, such as JSTOR? If so, it might be possible to come up with a reader in anthropological theory that was entirely digital and widely available to students who wanted to get a foot up?
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How to make downloading a PDF as easy as ripping an iTunes Song
We live in a wondrous era for electronic information. If you have a few thousand songs sitting on your hard drive there are all kinds of programs which will help you organize and catalog your information automatically. Software can identify the song and automatically add information about the song title, the artist, album, etc. There is even software that can automatically download the cover art for each album. When I take pictures with my digital camera it automatically saves extra information about the date I took the picture, what camera I used, and even the aperture and other settings. But there is one kind of information that remains in the dark ages: academic texts.
While songs and photos are rich in computer-readable metadata, most PDF files contain very little. You are lucky if you can even click inside the PDF file to copy and paste the article title. So, while there are many programs that will let you keep track of your PDF files in the same way that iTunes or iPhoto keeps track music and photos (my favorite is Bookends), one still has to open up the PDF, read the information, and then manually type it in to the database.
That you can open a PDF and read the data is a big difference between PDF files and other kinds of media. Not all songs have their title as the chorus. But precisely because of this, much less effort has gone into making it easy to automate the entering of such data into databases. Some academic websites will let you download citation data – but if the file is already sitting on your hard drive you can’t always figure out what database it came from. And this is another part of the problem with PDF metadata: the fact that there are so many different academic search engines, none of which is exhaustive.
So what is the solution?
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Neoliberalism: the awakening
I seem to remember that a few years back the big ‘thang’ at the AAA was ‘neoliberalism.’ This was, if I recall correctly, after the invasion of Iraq and just at the point when constant talk of ‘Empire’ in both the Hardt & Negri and ‘is America one?’ variants seemed to be running out of steam. Neoliberalism and neoliberal governance — which in the United States seemed to be closely aligned (confusingly enough) with neoconservatism.
I’ll leave others to sort out the labels — my point here is that the publication industry has caught up with the hype — Duke’s 2006 lineup includes not one but two books with ‘neoliberalism’ in the title: Aihwa Ong’s “Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty”:http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=3748-7 and James Ferguson’s “Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order”:http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=3717-7. I find myself very skeptical about both of these books, although I have to admit it is just because of my knee-jerk reaction against The New. My sense is that anthropological theory is more evanescent than ever, and people are constantly hopping around between issues and theorists as if the discipline were some sort of giant academic gallery walk — somehow it seems to me that Agamben (alluded to in the title of Ong’s book), while interesting, just won’t have the same effect on anthropology that Bakhtin, Foucault, etc. did.
In fact if anything, I get the sense that ‘liberalism’, sans prefix, is something people are talking about more and more — a good friend of mine finished the dissertation on the topic, and there are even “syllabi available”:http://healthhacker.org/satoroams/?p=588. The last shall come first, perhaps? At any rate while I’m tempted to pick up Ferguson’s book IMCT (“in my copious free time”), I feel more hesitant about Ong’s. Is anyone else interested in neoliberalism?
Target Audience
In my Anthropology of Alternative Economies course I assigned Bill Maurer’s book Mutual Life, Limited. I found it puzzling in ways that I find a lot of contemporary anthropological writing puzzling, which is why I am blogging about it here. Now, this probably reads as the set-up for a long rant about “postmodernism” that will end in my shaking my tatty black umbrella in the general direction of all perfidious young uns, set to an encomium of sympathetic yowls from the horde of cats circling my ankles. But that is not really what I intend here, and it’s none of your business how I spend my weekends anyway. Continue reading
Taylor and Francis: SARA TOC alerting
In the past year or so Kerim and I have published articles in Anthropology News about ‘next generation’ research online — using RSS feeds and so forth. In the next week or so I thought it might be interesting to try to undertake a broad review of what sort of tools are out there for anthropologists who do research. I actually am not qualified for this since I am not a librarian, and so this won’t be an enormous list of 500 URLs. Instead I just want to share some of the things that I think are useful as a researcher — the sorts of tricks and tips and locations that I find useful to know about.
For instance: how can you keep on top of what’s being published? Most journals have some sort of alerting service although it is typically in the form of ‘TOC (table of contents) alerting’ rather than an RSS feed — you give the journal your email, and when a new issue comes out you get a list of all the articles in your inbox. You don’t have to have a subscription to the journal or right to read it online in order to get alerted — it’s basically a fancy form of advertising.
Now there are various middleware services and sites that attempt to aggregate these sorts of services for you but on the whole I’ve found them to be spotty in coverage and they never provide the one-stop shopping oslution I want (if someone has other experiences let me know) so I’ve decided to just go direct to the source. Since each company has a different method of providing you TOC alerting, it makes sense to compare OTC alerting services by publisher rather than by journal.
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Product Endorsement
I’ve been reading Keith Hart’s Money in an Unequal World with the participants in my Alternative Economies class, and finding it hugely exhilirating. For quite some time I had been wondering when my next big intellectual crush was going to come along; I haven’t felt this swoony since I discovered the work of Joan Martinez-Alier and James O’Connor while writing my dissertation thesis.
Call me an old-fashioned girl, but even though I acknowledge that Bruno Latour has definitively skewered “the modern critique” I find it’s still what I like. “Network theory” doesn’t do it for me; I still want history (1) systematically accounted for and (2) demystified with a flourish. I can’t help it: in spite of agreeing with all the remonstrances about how I oughn’t to fall for it it remains my idea of a good time, every time.
AMNH Publications now open access
The American Museum of Natural History has recently launched a “new website”:http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/dspace/ which makes available for free its scientific publications. This includes its “Antrhopological Papers”:http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/dspace/handle/2246/6 as well as the older “memoir series”:http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/dspace/handle/2246/6 which contains more than a few classical anthropological pieces, like those of “Franz”:http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/dspace/handle/2246/8//items-by-author?author=Boas%2C+Franz “Boas”:http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/dspace/handle/2246/8//items-by-author?author=Boas%2C+Franz%2C+1858-1942 and “George Hunt”:http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/dspace/handle/2246/8//items-by-author?author=Hunt%2C+George, “Robert Lowie”:http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/dspace/simple-search?query=Lowie&submit=Search+&pubs=sci (particularly well represented) and “Alfred Kroeber”:http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/dspace/simple-search?query=kroeber&submit=Search+&pubs=sci. “Kwakiutl texts”:http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/dspace/handle/2246/23 anyone (warning: 4 megabyte PDF)? All we need is the Canadian Department of Mines to digitize their anthropological memoirs and Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture, A Study In Method will finally be at the world’s fingertips!
I could poke around all day in the AMNH’s collection. Much thanks to AMNH for making this trove of texts available using MIT’s “DSpace”:http://libraries.mit.edu/dspace-mit/ software.
Sticky?
How does it feel to be the University of Chicago professor who has co-authored a book containing the following paragraph?
“We have evolved with a tendency to link causality to things we can touch and feel, not to some distant or difficult phenomenon… We smirk now when we think of ancient cultures that embraced faulty causes — the warriors who believed, for instance, that it was their raping of a virgin that brought them victory on the battlefield. But we too embrace faulty causes, usually at the urging of an expert proclaiming a truth in which he has a vested interest.”
“Freakonomics”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/006073132X/ref=pd_kar/002-8783501-4320000?n=283155 pg. 140.
If despite the smirking and the urging you’ve got a free hand, there is something else you can do with that paragraph, and it relates to the book’s success. From its opening scene (a homeless black man with “expensive headphones”), to its closer (a black scholar who “beat the odds” and made it from underprivilege to a fellowship at Harvard), with a marquee story about the impact of legalized abortion along the way, the book constructs a slithery aperture into transformative transactions from which many of its presumably most enthusiastic readers have otherwise been shut out.
This is a book about feminism and racism written for people who feel either uncomfortable or unwelcome in the great conversation North American society has been having about feminism and racism since the 1960s. It presents an authoritative alternate language in which — not to participate in, but — to dominate that conversation. Dubner and Levitt assure their readers that “economics” is the value-free idiom with respect to which those other, value-laden, idioms can be shown to be misguided at best, stupid at worst, and almost always dead wrong.
That’s the point, so much so that most of the material which fluffs out the text (shoddy footnotes, sleight of hand interpretation of titillating evidence, a long final chapter that doesn’t even pretend to be anything but an extended chortle on what negro and po’ white mommas name their babies) hardly matters. Freakonomics is a pandering invitation to a certain societal segment of bombasticators to re-flate their bellows.
That’s all I’ll say for now, but to get back to the question with which I began: the obvious answer to my opening query is that it feels great to be that prof, and that not only does he sleep at night but that rolling in book-sales mega-bucks has given him a lovely and dew-like complexion. But I still wonder. Maybe it feels kinda sticky.
Chinese in the Pacific: a bibliography
Recently some people on the Anthropology of Oceania listserv that I subscribe to compiled a bibliography of work on the Chinese diaspora in the Pacific. It turns out that we had had this conversation before, but because our archives are so difficult to search we ended up having it again. Since I thought such a list might be interesting for SM readers I am including the bibliography here below the fold — there’s some interesting stuff in there!
Thanks to Rene van der Haar for compiling the bibliography and to everyone who contributed to it: John Barker, Niko Besnier, Neriko Doerr, Haidy Geismar, Alex Golub, Jamon Halvaksz, Paul Heikkila, Robin Hide, Stuart Kirsch, Larry Lake, Lamont Lindstrom, Jacob Love, Margaret Mackenzie, Moana Matthes, Nancy Pollock, Christine Stewart, Jaap Timmer, and Matori Yamamoto.
Some fancy formatting may have gotten lost through my cutting and pasting. Deal.
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Value, typos, editors
Over break I am trying to do some “remedial theory” reading to keep up with the Newest Latest in anthropological work. One of the books that I am slowly working through is David Graeber’s Toward an Anthropoogical Theory of Value. It’s difficult for me to get into because I’ve never been very interested in value. I worked with many of the same professors that David did — in fact, scarily, I think maybe all of the same people and even overlapped in the department by a few years. Does this make me The Graeber Mini-Me? Hard to say. At any rate for several of them (Munn, Turner) ‘value’ and what it was was a topic of concern, as David recounts. But somehow I never seemed to catch the bug. Which isn’t to say that it isn’t a perfectly good topic — it’s just not my topic.
The book is quite good, although I agree with Melissa Demian’s “review”:http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/pdf/10.1525/ae.2003.30.2.316 that his dismissal of Marilyn Strathern’s work is far too pat. But what really drives me nuts about the book are the large number of editing errors in it. Although I am only 55 pages into the book I’ve already spotted something on the order of a dozen confused names and non-existent citations — and these are just the ones that struck me as I read it for content, not with an intent to proofread.
On page 23, for instance, he refers to “Margaret Weiner” and her work on value when in fact he obviously is referring to Anette Weiner, whom he then discusses at length a few pages later. Is this a slip for ‘Margaret Wiener,’ who was (iirc) a student at Chicago at the same time as David and who appears in a footnote to a section of his text 250 pages later? Similarly, on page 295 Robert Herz is listed as Gilbert Herz (a slip for Gilbert Herdt?). C.B. Macpherson’s work on possessive individualism is cited in the text, but does not appear in the bibliography. Neither does Emerson 1844, Collier 1990, Bhaskar 1994a and 1994b (although there is an entry for 1990), Bloch 1991, or Josephides 1982. And like I said, I’m only 55 pages into the book.
I should be clear: I don’t think that these sorts of confusions are David’s fault, nor do they detract one bit from the validity or importance of David’s argument. What they are indicative of is the poor editing that Palgrave gave David’s manuscript. Of course all authors should theoretically produce a manuscript with no typos and an airtight bibliography and of course we always try our best. But ultimately our minds are on creating and expressing a new idea and a new argument. We need help when it comes to spit-and-polish issues such as these — and that is where great editors come in.
Of course people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and I am a notoriously poor speller and proofreader. I throw citations around constantly. So I am as guilty of this — and perhaps even more — than most people. Still, in the past six months since my dissertation defense I’ve dealt with something like five seperate editors for pieces that have appeared or are going to appear. The bad editors make you want to pull your hair out (actually, they make you want to pull their hair out.) But the good ones are an incredible support and improve your work inestimably simply by giving you room to work, nudging you in the right direction, and dealing with spit-and-polish issues. For instance, I have a piece coming out in The Contemporary Pacific and am doing revisions now. My editor — bless her scrupulously organized heart — has cross-checked every citation in my text with its entry in my bibliography. Having someone on my side working on these little details to make my article as professional as possible is a wonderfull, wonderfull thing. Although making corrections to the bibliography is a drag, having to cross-check it myself would be even more of a drag.
Books, despite the customary author’s assertion to the contrary in the preface, are the product of a team. Authors need good editors to produce good books. Despite this, it is hard these days to find academic editors who reallyfulfill that editorial role, much less pull it off with aplomb. I’m very fortunate to have worked with some good ones. Unfortunately, David doesn’t appear to have been so lucky.
Award-winningness
I am not a big believer in the true meaningfullness of awards. As a professor, I squirm everytime I have to take each of my student’s unique papers and shove their particularity into the confines of a letter grade. So I don’t believe that books that win awards are somehow necessarily much better than the runners-up (or a lot of other books that have been written). However, I do think there is something wonderful about obscure academic book awards. They give my brain the same tickle as occasional pieces by OHK Spate or Benjamin Franklin’s dialogue with his gout — ethnographically they are, as one of my profs in grad school used to put it, “delicious little somethings.”
I also like book awards becuase they serve as excellent filters on the world of content. In fact I imagine back in the good old days when Amazon.com wasn’t parsing out your preferences that awards were even more important as a filter to direct you to Premium Content. And of course the real book awards are sufficiently old-school that they don’t even have fer-trulies websites.
All of which is to say that in addition to my old-standbys the “Thomas Cook Award”:http://www.thomascookpublishing.com/travelbookawards.htm (an award the celebrates postcolonial imperialist knowledge of The Other in the name of an eponymous old-school imperialist) and the “Victor Turner Award”:http://www.smcm.edu/sha/turner01.htm (an old favorite of mine) I now add the “Edelstein Prize For The History of Technology”:http://shot.press.jhu.edu/Awards/edelstein.htm, which was “established in 1968 through the generosity of the late Sidney Edelstein, a noted expert on the history of dyes and dye processes, founder of the Dexter Chemical Corporation.”
The best part of this prize are the prize winners. Although I don’t do history of technology the books all sound scrumptious. Some — like Machines as the Measure of Men — are already well known to me. But Russell’s _ War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring_? Ingenious! And the most recent winner is The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933 by Emily Thompson. Another super-intriguing. No wonder she “won a Macarthur”:http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.1076861/apps/nl/content2.asp?content_id={86CDA030-FA8E-437D-918E-BE7479D7DF5F}¬oc=1.
Are there any other awards on people’s radars, anthropological or no?