Tag Archives: Books and Articles

They Studied Man

My vacation getaway bookstore has a glorious anthropology section. This is my favorite so far:

by Abram Kardiner and Edward Preblle

Kardiner was a sort of well-known psychoanalyst who wrote about anthropology and psychoanalysis. Preble was at the time “studying first law, and then philosophy and anthropology. During this same period he was also a high school science teacher and worked as a professional tennis player during the summers.” Who does that any more? Along with the passing of the golden age of anthropology (and I note the book refers to anthropology as a science throughout without batting an eye, thank you very much), I guess the golden age of part-time professional sports is over too. Sigh.

Ethan Zuckerman Blogs CK’s Berkman Center Talk

One of my favorite bloggers, Ethan Zuckerman, has a nice write-up of a book talk our own Chris Kelty gave over at the Berkman Center:

Framing the talk, he asks, “Why do geeks look alike?” We do, as it turns out – he offers two photos, of geek legends Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, who could have used each other’s driver’s licenses. He offers this as a special case of the idea that geeks seem to be able to find each other across national, language and cultural barriers. And he observes that a fascination with free software seems to link together geeks of all cultures.

Read the whole thing. Read CKelty’s post announcing his book.

Article title of the day

I haven’t read this paper, but I think the title easily wins the “cool article title of the day” award:

“Containing Modernity: The Social Life of Tupperware in a Mexican Indigenous Village”:http://eth.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/9/2/257?etoc

Get it? Containment?

The Presentation of Self in Virtual Life

While the title of Tom Boellstorff’s book draws analogies with Margaret Mead, I think the book would have been better titled The Presentation of Self in Virtual Life. Having expressed some of my concerns with the book in a previous post, I’d like to take a moment to talk more about what I liked most about the book: the way in which he presents the kinds of discourse and self-presentation strategies Goffman so famously analyzed in “everyday life.” By thinking about the differences/similarities between the two we can learn something important about what it means to function as a virtual human.

Take gender, for instance. As Boellstorff points out, the Second Life software doesn’t allow gender to be left undefined, although that could be a possibility if the developers chose to change it. As such it seems to recreate the sex/gender dichotomy which exists in real life. Even allowing for virtual gender play where male avatars dress in woman’s clothing. And while the gender of the real world player is unknown, Boellstorff points to one survey showing that only 10-15 percent of residents switch gender on a regular basis. Yet even this small amount is enough to cause problems for attempts to create an all-female space, since it would only be possible to limit the space to female avatars, the real-world gender of users being undetermined. Judith Butler tells us that sex is as culturally determined as gender, but in Second Life this seems to be true in a more fundamental way.

Another example is that of “alts” which are alternative avatars which express another side of the user’s personality, or serve to create anonymity. It is possible to wear a disguise in real life, but much easier to do so in a world where “nobody knows you are a dog.” The ease with which people might switch alts, and the choices they make about who to reveal these alts to gives them a degree of freedom over personhood not possible in real life.

But the part I found most interesting was the discussion of how people handle gaps caused by events which challenged the fiction of Second Life. These could be due to faults in the software (bugs or performance issues), or by real world interruptions (someone goes to the door while still logged in in second life). In the real world we have interruptions and distractions we have to deal with as well, such as when we answer a cell phone or need to pick our nose. But what is interesting about virtual reality is that we lack many of the cues and strategies we rely upon in the real world.

Decades of experience have developed some new strategies. For instance one could type “brb” to mean “be right back”, but if caused by a computer lag or a sudden interruption we may not have the time to do so. The result is an avatar who is “afk” or “away from keyboard” – still there, but not responding to what is happening in Second Life. It seems SL residents are not above playing the same kinds of practical jokes college students might play on a roommate who is passed out on the couch, such as drawing on the zombie avatar. Pranks aside, however, it seems that the strength of Boellstorff’s approach is his ability to describe such situations in a way that makes us better understand the nature of online personhood.

That virtual worlds allow us to experience life at a second remove from the habitus of our real world selves is also the joke in this clever Onion news story:

Ethnography of the Virtual

I just finished reading Tom Boellstorff’s ethnography, Coming of Age in Second Life, which I first learned about on Anthropologi.info last year. I have to admit coming to this book with a certain degree of antipathy towards its subject. It always seemed to me that playing Second Life was much more cumbersome, time consuming, and less entertaining than reading the real estate or personals sections on Craig’s List. Indeed, Boellstoroff’s book confirms my conviction that Second Life is mostly about real estate, with a little relationship stuff thrown in for good measure.

If Boellstoroff never really convinced me that I should care about Second Life, it is because he doesn’t even try. His argument is that whether we care about virtual worlds or not, they are here to stay, so we’d better try our best to understand them. And, what better way than ethnography? Indeed, Boellstoroff has given us a very competent, thoughtful, and well written, ethnography of one such virtual world. And this is perhaps the most interesting thing about the book – it is an ethnography of a virtual world.

Here’s Boellstoroff discussing his method:

It might seem controversial to claim one can conduct research entirely inside a virtual world, since persons in them spend most of their time in the actual world and because virtual worlds reference and respond to the actual world in many ways. However, as I discuss in chapter 3, studying virtual worlds “in their own terms” is not only feasible but crucial to developing research methods that keep up with the realities of technological change. Most virtual worlds now have tens of thousands of participants, if not more, and the vast majority interact only in the virtual world. The forms of social action and meaning-making that take place do so within the virtual world, and there is a dire need for methods and theories that take this into account.

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Be a Public Intellectual, Win a Book Contract

From Public Anthropology:

the University of California Press in association with the Center for a Public Anthropology will begin sponsoring in 2008 two annual competitions focused on drawing anthropologists to address major public problems and broad audiences. Both competitions will award book contracts at an early stage in the research/writing process in order to influence a manuscript’s subject and style. The hope is that authors, knowing they have a book contract in hand, will prove willing to speak about major public concerns in ways that non-academics find valuable.

One competition will focus on mid-career professionals. …. The second competition focuses on graduate students preparing to conduct fieldwork.

Follow the link for more information.

A Special Offer and a Note About Blogging

Everyone’s arguing lately about Savage Minds — it’s “civil society” or lack thereof, its institutional position in the field of anthropology, it’s Euro-Americano-centrism, and so on. What’s missing, I think, is that while Savage Minds is a “place”, a “publication” of sorts, with some cohesiveness, it’s also a somewhat random collection of individual anthropologists bound together by no shared theoretical orientation, area specialization, political stance, or academic genealogy. I think it’s clear that we don’t always agree — in fact, we’ve disagreed quite sharply at times. More to the point, we not only blog about different stuff but we blog for different reasons.

For me, Savage Minds has always been a place to “mess around”, anthropologically speaking. A place to try out new ideas and thin hypotheses, a wall to throw stuff onto in order to see what sticks. A place where I could try my hand at the kind of argument Yehudi Cohen makes in Disappearance of the Incest Taboo (that’s an AnthroSource link, for those with access) and string together some ideas about the end of marriage, or muse about the moral underpinnings of anthropology. A place to incubate arguments and positions — and to receive feedback from my peers both inside and outside of the field.

It’s been invaluable to have this kind of forum, away from the main channel of academic thought — the journals and academic presses that are our disciplinary mainstream, even if many of them have lower readerships than Savage Minds. So valuable, in fact, that I felt it absolutely necessary to include Savage Minds in my “Acknowledgements” when I published Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War. Here’s what I wrote:

Over the years, two online communities have proven invaluable as both a source of new ideas and a place to rehearse my own fevered anthropological imaginings. To the members of ANTHRO-L (especially Ron Kephart, John McCreery, Richard Senghas, Jacob Lee, Richard Wilsnack, Anj Petto, Ray Scupin, Robert Lawless, Wade Tarzia, Lynn Manners, Martin Cohen, Bruce Josephson, Richley Crapo, Tom Kavanagh, Scott MacEachern, Mike Pavlik, Thomas Riley, and Phil Young) and my fellow Savage Minds, (Alex Golub, Kerim Friedman, Chris Kelty, Nancy LeClerc, Kathleen Lowery, Tak Watanabe, and newbies Thomas Erikson, Maia Green, and Thomas Strong) I offer both my gratitude and respect.

In the end, I’m not sure I could have written Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War without having had this forum to develop those ideas. The other Minds and the many people who comment here not only helped me to refine my thoughts on anthropology and its role(s) in society, but to rethink myself as an anthropologist.

By way of gratitude, then, I asked my publishers if I could offer at least a little something back to this community which has offered me so much. They responded enthusiastically, providing me with a discount code to offer Savage Minds readers. So here’s the deal:

  1. Order Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War from U Mich Press.
  2. At checkout, enter the coupon code: WAX08UMP
  3. Enjoy a 20% savings!

With the coupon code, the US price is $26.00 instead of the usual $32.50. As far as I know, this offer is not limited to US buyers, but I’m pretty sure the price of international shipping will eat up any savings over buying the book at full price locally. The coupon code expires on May 30, 2008.

For more information about the book, check out the review by Penny Howard at the Socialist Review. More reviews and information about the book will be posted at my personal site on the book page as it becomes available.

And if you’re not interested, for whatever reason (maybe your mother was cruel to you as a child?), that’s cool, too — I offer you as a member of the Savage Minds community my thanks.

But really, buy the book. Buy the book or I shall plug at you a second time! Tphptptptptp!

More anthropologists in the news: Abu El-Haj in the New Yorker

Certainly more promising in its tone and affect than Strong’s recent case of anthropology villification is Jane Kramer’s New Yorker article about Nadia Abu El-Haj’s tenure case at Barnard (it’s not up on line yet, but I’ll post the link when it is). I think the article is well done, given the near impossible noise to signal ratio that develops around such issues, and especially in Morningside Heights. It gave me a sharper sense of just how powerful Edward Said’s legacy has become in the years since his death. It is, however, a bit light on explaining why her book, Facts on the Ground is innovative, or why it might be interesting to those who want to understand the situation in Israel and Palestine from a new perspective. Although it mentions the basic outlines (the something-more-than-ironic intertwining of Israeli archeology and Zionism), it doesn’t go very far towards contextualizing why anthropologists are doing this kind of work now, and why the reaction represents not only the ideological extremism of the people who deliberately misinterpret it, but also the failure of anthropology and anthropologists to get their messages out.

I think this is a shame, because the book really could be an authoritative one, and I don’t really understand why everyone (including Abu El Haj herself) just sort of wilts and defends, not the book, but the right for academics to decide tenure amongst themselves (which I completely agree with, of course, I have to). But this instead of coming out with a forceful statement of the content and substance of the book? I think there must be something interesting to say about the inability anthropology has of defending itself against the contemporary blog-mediated, 72-hour news cycle, personal-attack media ecology we live in. Note the total absence of the AAA in this article, save a mention of our president-elect, Virginia Dominguez, who was Abu El-Haj’s advisor. Why shouldn’t the AAA step in and fight this fight on behalf of Abu El-Haj? Is there as choice other than responding to idiotic, personlized, ideological attacks and sticking one’s head in the sand? Clearly institutions like Columbia are too economically and politically captured to do it for their faculty, should our professional society be helping?

Baker on Wikipedia: save our stubs!

Speaking of the NYRB, there is a totally “charming” article about Wikipedia by Nicholson Baker this month. Baker is exactly the kind of person I want to have speaking for Wikipedia, and his focus is not on reliability or legitimacy or the moral panics that so many seem to grasp at, but on the dangers of the “deletionists” and his one-man crusade to stop them from ruining what is in his estimation (and I agree) the true charm of Wikipedia, it’s ability to take the ephemeral, the obscure, the barely noticed and the everyday as seriously as the most revered data points of our collective experience. He asks for our help in preventing the deletionists from winning…

Ding 50 for CSSH

A big, big congratulations to “Comparative Studies in Society and History”:http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=CSS, who have just turned fifty. CSSH is a great journal with a great run that has produced so many worthwhile pieces. Their “latest, anniversary issue”:http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?jid=CSS&volumeId=50&issueId=01 is no exception and, best of all, access seems to be free for now. The stand-out article for me is Simon Harrison’s “Skulls and Scientific Collecting in the Victorian Military: Keeping the Enemy Dead in British Frontier Warfare”. Harrison’s book “Fractured Resemblances”:http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=HarrisonFracturing is a favorite of mine and I’m teaching it in my Political Anthropology class this semseter. After having done headhunting amongst the colonized his new project on skull-taking amongst the colonized sounds very interesting.

So again — congratulations to all the people out at CSSH!

Shameless endorsement of the week

Although only slightly germain to the topic of anthropology at war, readers may still be interested in this shameless endorsement of a book by a former teacher of mine: “Torture and Democracy”:http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8490.html by Darius Rejali. I have not read a single word of the book, but have a super high regard for Darius, and with blurbs on the back like “Monumental. Definitive. Devastating.” and endorsements from Philip Zimbardo and Kenneth Roth it is probably not going to suck. So if what you’ve been looking for is a definitive, 880 page genealogy of torture, look no further.

My AAA papers up at Mana’o

The papers I gave at AAA are now available on Mana’o, including:

“Being In The World (Of Warcraft): Raiding, Care, And Digital Subjectivity”:http://manao.manoa.hawaii.edu/94/
and
“Sustainable Development as Cargo Cult: Strange Tales of Scale Making from Melanesia and Beyond”:http://manao.manoa.hawaii.edu/92/

Would you like your papers easily shareable? Don’t want to go through the drag of uploading them to some hard-to-use server? Just email them to our librarians at submissions@manaoproject.org and we’ll take care it all and provide you an easy and human-readable URL for them!

/end public service message

anyhoo hope you enjoy my AAA papers — please be gentle w/them, as they are just AAA papers.

Improvisatory Sharpening: more on field vs armchair progress

On the subject of methodological sharpening raised by Rex a few days back, I’ve been meaning to hunt down a copy of this new book: Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork by Liisa Malkki and Allaine Cerwonka. I’m usually violently opposed to books that are collections of correspondence and proposals (i.e. unfinished and unpolished), but this turns out be the very reason why I think it will be interesting. If, as the flap copy suggests, it demonstrates how anthropologists deal with the fact that “ethnographic theorization is essentially improvisatory in nature, conducted in real time and in necessarily unpredictable social situations” then it could be very valuable. Rex’s conclusion that there is a difference between “armchair” sharpening of methodological tools and “field” sharpening is a nice place to start from (though a set up for an easy deconstruction) if one wants to think about where the field ends and concept work begins. I for one, teach my grad students that fieldwork continues well into the writing of a dissertation, article or book– just as we are happy to insist that we take theory into the field with us. If that be the case, then whatever it was we do/did in the field isn’t so different from what we do in the writing, unless one insists on adopting a radical break in state of mind, which is necessary for some students to get on with it (i.e. now I have my data, I just have to organize it into a text).
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