Tag Archives: Public Anthropology

The journalist calls the anthropologist

[Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Laura Miller.]

Anthropologists are routinely exhorted to make our work accessible to non-academics, to do strident outreach, to engage with the public, and to otherwise not hole up in our academic enclaves. Part of our effort involves fielding inquiries from journalists. We should be happy that writers are interested in talking to us and wish to include our opinions, right? Over the years, journalists have frequently left me telephone messages or sent email along these lines:

Dear Professor,
I’m a writer for Massive News, and I’m currently doing a story on Something Interesting. As you are an expert on Something Interesting, I would greatly appreciate a comment from you. My number is xxx. Since I am on a tight deadline, however, please call me within two hours.
Thank you,
Journalist

I have found that often these journalists simply want to seed their articles with a few canned comments that will endorse their spin, and that they don’t actually care about my ideas. If you work in an academic environment in which you must constantly prove the relevance and worthiness of anthropology, as the majority of academic anthropologists at non-elite schools do, you might give in and provide what you hope will be an innocuous blurb. Continue reading →

Sunflowers vs. Bougainvillea

While some individual TED talks are interesting and even useful in the classroom (I especially love that many are subtitled in numerous languages), there I totally understand what Nathan Jurgenson is talking about when he says that “TED talks fuse sales-pitch slickness with evangelical intensity” in a way which “necessarily leaves out other groups and other ways of knowing and presenting ideas.” But where Jurgenson merely points out the problem, I thought Nathan Heller’s recent New Yorker piece on the TED conference did a great job of getting at the nub of the problem in a way which highlights some of the underlying issues involved in popularizing academic ideas. Unfortunately the piece is currently hidden behind a paywall, so I’ve taken the liberty of quoting the relevant passages at length:
Continue reading →

The Mark Regnerus Controversy & Social Science

This story first took off about a month ago, when UT Austin sociologist Mark Regnerus published the article “How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study.”  Regnerus also published a piece on Slate.com, in which he asks whether “it makes any difference if your parents are straight or gay.” The goal of the study was to challenge the idea that there are “no differences” between children who are raised by heterosexual parents versus those who are raised by same-sex parents.  Regnerus sums up his overall argument on Slate:

On 25 of 40 different outcomes evaluated, the children of women who’ve had same-sex relationships fare quite differently than those in stable, biologically-intact mom-and-pop families, displaying numbers more comparable to those from heterosexual stepfamilies and single parents. Even after including controls for age, race, gender, and things like being bullied as a youth, or the gay-friendliness of the state in which they live, such respondents were more apt to report being unemployed, less healthy, more depressed, more likely to have cheated on a spouse or partner, smoke more pot, had trouble with the law, report more male and female sex partners, more sexual victimization, and were more likely to reflect negatively on their childhood family life, among other things.

The basic conclusion of the study is that children who are raised by homosexual parents are “different,” and that they have more problems that kids who are raised in two parent same-sex households.  These conclusions have resulted in a storm of media controversy, a flurry of critical responses, and even an investigation into whether or not Regnerus committed ethical violations during this research. Continue reading →

There will come soft rains

A few thoughts about Ray Bradbury, writing, communication, and anthropology.

If there is one author that first sparked my interest in what we broadly call “the human condition,” it would definitely have to be the late Mr Ray Bradbury (William Golding gets a close second with The Lord of the Flies).  I first read some of Bradbury’s short stories way back in seventh grade, and his words have stayed with me ever since (I only wish I could find my seventh grade English teacher to let him know his efforts were not wasted).

Bradbury’s science fiction was always deeply human, and often full of poignant warnings about the potential future of the human race.  He was especially preoccupied with the machines we create, and how they can assert a certain amount of control over our lives.  Near the end of his life he was quoted saying this: “We have too many cellphones. We’ve got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.” Continue reading →

Another Occupy is Possible

A guest post by Levi Jacobs.

black marker, brown cardboard, red flags, blue jeans

sage, cigarettes, sweat mix with city smog and fried food:

in a circle we stand, breaths fogging, arms raised,

lie fragile under layers of tarp, blanket and winter night,

layers of poverty, police, and political scrutiny–

the sun sets fire to polluted streams, raises

factory stacks like charred fingers clutching sky:

powerlessness and power war in the returned Gaze of the cops,

antipathy, anger, appreciation in the honks of passing cars,

(never) doubting a small group of people can change the world.

Occupy is on our minds. With the May issue of American Ethnologist featuring articles on Occupy, and the New York Times noting recent social science interest in the movement, Occupy seems back on the anthropological radar—just as it is dropping off many screens outside academia. While this may just be a symptom of the speed with which our research and publishing tends to move, I’d argue there’s a better reason why anthropologists are researching and writing on Occupy. Early on, we maybe all felt we knew what it was about: economic inequality, the bailout of the rich, the newly-homeless foreclosed-on middle class and a permanent protest of all this, starting with Zucotti Park. As Occupy encampments sprung up nationally, then internationally, then started to get closed down, many of us became less and less certain of what Occupy is really about—homeless issues? Direct democracy? The banking system, or capitalism in general? Reform or revolution? It’s difficult to get a read on Occupy, not only because the interests of ‘the ninety-nine percent’ seem so broad, but also because there are multiple ninety-nine percents, with each Occupy locality made up of local people working autonomously on local issues, as well as translocal ones they might share with the larger Occupy movement. Is it even a movement? Towards what? Even locally, the diversity of concerns, goals and people involved in Occupy make this a hard question to answer. Continue reading →

A Khan Academy for Anthropology?

So I was down South where I met up with DJ Hatfield over breakfast and we got to talking… I’ve long been thinking about how the plethora of open academic courses and lectures online is making it so that teachers can act more like coaches—assisting students in self-paced exploration rather than acting as a funnel for all the information consumed in the classroom. DJ, in turn, has been thinking about how to break up his own lectures into smaller pre-recorded chunks so that he can act more like a discussion leader—interrogating his own lectures alongside students rather than simply regurgitating content down their beaks. Together we combined these ideas into a proposal for an online database of byte-sized anthropology lectures on various topics in anthropology—a Khan Academy for anthropology if you will.

Let’s say I’m going to give a lecture on the anthropology of money. I do this every year and I think I do a decent job of it, but I’d be a fool not to think that David Graeber, Richard Wilk, or Keith Hart couldn’t do it better. The problem is, even if I could find entire lectures by them online, I probably wouldn’t do so. I’ve never liked using class-length lectures by other scholars in my own classes, even something like Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey which I think is great. Class-length lectures from someone else’s syllabus don’t easily fit into my own syllabus unless I work the whole syllabus around those lectures. Nor do I think any of us are comfortable giving our entire class over to pre-recorded lectures. Not only is it boring for students to watch, it just feels lazy.

But imagine that Graeber recorded a five minute lecture on the economic myth of the origins of money, and Richard Wilk recorded a five minute lecture on Polanyi, and Keith Hart gave a five minute lecture on money in West Africa, etc. Each lecture could be used by teachers as the focus of class discussion, or the basis for a collaborative interrogation of those ideas. They could also be used entirely on their own for self-study by students. In any case, they would be a valuable resource for students and teachers alike.

So here’s my suggestion: someone (OAC?, HAU?, Living Anthropologically?) creates a site which allows people to post topics they’d like to see covered, has a searchable index and perhaps some kind of a rating system as well. The lectures themselves could be hosted on Archive.org under a CC license, so people could edit and remix the lectures as they see fit. All that shouldn’t be too hard – it’s just a database. The biggest problem would be getting anthropologists to actually make and submit content. Still, it might be fun to try if someone has the energy to do so. Maybe someone could even set up a room at the AAA to help record scholars who would like to participate but aren’t comfortable around a video camera… I’m just throwing this out there, I don’t have the time to follow through, but if anyone would like to get the ball rolling, feel free to use the comment thread to discuss how such a plan might actually work.

Dialogue with the Public: Adam Yauch and Academic Snobbery

Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Carole McGranahan.

Who is the audience for academic knowledge? When does that audience include not just fellow academics, but also the public? These questions are harder to answer than they should be. Our courses require enrollment and tuition. Our writings require effort to find and afford and read. Our conferences tend to be closed to outsiders and sometimes even to other scholars. As a profession, we simply do not have spaces where we regularly talk with an interested public about our research.

This is a story about academics silencing a public audience. It is about Ivory Tower condescension and how I once defended Adam Yauch’s right to ask a question. Here is what happened:

In April 2002, I participated in a conference on Tibet and the Cold War at Harvard University featuring distinguished scholars of China, India, and Tibet. The conference was a perfect fit with my research on Tibet and the CIA and was fantastic in many ways, until it wasn’t.  Continue reading →

Anthropology: Five Books

In the comments section to one of my recent posts about Jared Diamond, SM reader Michael asks:

Could anyone recommend some accessible anthropology literature? What would be 5 (or so) good books a generally educated person could read?

I think this is a great question.  I actually asked a similar question last August in this post, and while there were a few people who provided their 5 picks (here and here), I’d like to raise this question again to see what we come up with here.  If you had to pick 5 anthropology books that best represent the discipline, and that are also accessible to general readers, what would they be?  Just to get the ball rolling, here’s my new list:

  1. Debt, the First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
  2. Paradise in Ashes by Beatriz Manz
  3. Culture on Tour by Edward Bruner
  4. Righteous Dopefiend by Bourgois and Schonberg
  5. Behind the Gates by Setha Low

My list is by no means definitive, and it’s almost impossible to pick only five. My list also obviously has a socio-cultural anthropology slant.  So it would be great to see suggestions from linguistic anthropologists, biological anthropologists, archaeologists, medical anthropologists, etc.  What books would you pick?  Let’s hear it.

PS: Thanks, Michael, for bringing up this question.

Spike TV & National Geographic: Glorifying Looting

And now for some news on the archaeology and stupid-TV-show-ideas front.  Total #NationalGeographicFAIL and #SpikeTVFail at the same time.  A double whammy of bad ideas.  Several of my archaeology colleagues at the University of Kentucky have been talking about the recent news that Spike TV and National Geographic are planning two new shows that basically glorify outright looting.  Grad students are passing around the link to this online petition: “Stop Spike TV from looting our collective past!”  Archaeologists (and plenty of others) are rightly up in arms about this.  Michael E. Smith over at Publishing Archaeology has a new post that discusses some of the details:

SAA and other groups, such as SHA, have already prepared and sent strong letters condemning both of these programs to the production companies, networks, and others. Copies of the SAA letters can be found on the SAA website (http://bit.ly/w2MHJM, and http://bit.ly/wzT7IA). The letters provide details on why we are so concerned. Up to this point Spike TV has not responded to the public outcry. Leadership of National Geographic, however, has indicated that, while they are unable to stop the showing tomorrow on such short notice, they will place a disclaimer into the show that speaks to laws protecting archaeological and historic sites.

Read the rest of the post.  While I’m not really surprised that Spike TV is doing something like this, the fact that the folks at Nat Geo even considered this is ridiculous.  If you have updates about this, please share in the comments section.  Thanks to the U of Kentucky grad students, Michael, and everyone else for working to get the word out about this issue.  Definitely no time to be passive when it comes to archaeological, historical, and cultural heritage.

Mac McClelland (Mother Jones) on being a “Warehouse Wage Slave”

This is the kind of investigative journalism that I find extremely relevant.  Have you ever bought books or anything else from online distributors?  Ever stopped to really think about how that product you ordered actually makes it to your doorstep so rapidly, and at such a low price?  Journalist Mac McClelland has a new article over at Mother Jones where she does a little digging into the inner-workings and conditions of “Amalgamated Product Giant Shipping Worldwide Inc.” (not the real name of the company), which is a large-scale online distributor.  Her first hand descriptions and experiences remind me of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle–although the jungle she explores isn’t filled with the horrors of meatpacking, it’s congested with long hours, brutal time constraints, low wages, and, well, other strange things that people buy online and want shipped to them as soon as possible (read it to find out).  Here’s a poignant selection where McClelland critically questions the reasons behind these conditions:

As if Amalgamated couldn’t bear to lose a fraction of a percent of profits by employing a few more than the absolute minimum of bodies they have to, or by storing the merchandise at halfway ergonomic heights and angles. But that would cost space, and space costs money, and money is not a thing customers could possibly be expected to hand over for this service without huffily taking their business elsewhere. Charging for shipping does cause high abandonment rates of online orders, though it’s not clear whether people wouldn’t pay a few bucks for shipping, or a bit more for the products, if they were guaranteed that no low-income workers would be tortured or exploited in the handling of their purchases.

Is it anthropology?  Does that question even matter?  I think there is plenty of relevance here.  The article is worth a read.  But, in regards to anthropology, this article has me wondering whether or not there are anthropologists out there exploring similar issues.  If so, who?  If not, why not?  Another example of a pervasive, everyday issue that anthropologists are in a good position to thoroughly explore.  McClelland’s narrative and discussion is based upon a relatively short stint with the company, and I’d be interested to hear about similar projects, as well as others that are based upon longer-term experience.  Anyway, if any of you Savage Minds out there know of related work, let me know about it in the comments section.  Or, let me know what you think about McClelland’s investigation and article.

How to Get a Job as an Anthropologist

Stop being an anthropologist.

Some of my mentors, none of which are in anthropology departments, prefer to say “trained as an anthropologist, so and so, investigates…” as opposed to “so and so is an anthropologist.” If you are on the job market this may be hard to do as you are likely to have just become a PhD wielding anthropologist for the first time in your life and quite proud of the moniker and achievement but the shift in self-definition is important for you and your future academic home, I would argue.

I just went through the whole job-hunting process before signing a contract on Monday to become a Lecturer in media and cultural studies in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University. I was able to apply for a silly amount of jobs, get a bunch of interviews and campus visit requests, and have some choices and grounds on which to do some humble negotiating. I think my trick was post-disciplinary research and (a considerable amount of) cross-disciplinary publishing. I could apply to communications, media studies, anthropology, information studies, STS, sociology, television studies, American studies, and internet studies. If I were desperate I could apply for archaeology and film production positions. Postdoctoral positions, particularly those financed by the Mellon, are all about interdisciplinarity as are jobs looking for digital humanities scholars.

So I’d encourage my fellow freshly minted ABDs and PhDs to begin seeing their research and their teaching across at least 4-5 large disciplines. Be able to realistically apply to 4-5 departments. One can put this together variously by publishing in different journals, collaborating with colleagues from different fields, or simply working the boundaries of one’s discipline in necessarily interdisciplinary ways. (All I can say is that I hope this is not my internalization of the precarity of neoliberal governmentality in the education sector.)

And there is something said for responding (in non-trendy and timeless ways!) to emergent patterns in industry, politics, and social movements. The departments recognize that what is in the news is what the students want to study. In my case this amounted to a recursive loop from the hype surrounding new media –Arab Spring, Anonymous, Wikileaks, SOPA, PIPA, and Occupy– to departments requesting applicants with expertise in social media and political movements. Oddly enough, if the academic job thing doesn’t work out this type of preparation in the now prepares oneself better for a post-academic profession. In academia the joy of investigating emergent practices is that there is no syllabus. You get to design your own. And in the classroom you are not pulling teeth, the issues are on students’ minds. It is relevant.

I may sound heretical to some of you by suggesting that post-anthropological disciplinary affiliations are necessary. But one gains much less than one loses by fundamentally aligning oneself with the orthodoxy of a specific discipline. One one hand, the qualitative and critical social sciences are converging. Critical theory and ethnographic or textual methods run across all the disciplines above. On the other hand, replicating the discourses specific to a discipline is important for the survival of that discipline and I am glad some people are monogamously “physical anthropologists” or whatnot. But my argument is that this practice of disciplinary orthodoxy is dangerously myopic for a discipline and puts the job hunter in a situation with few options. I preferred to bring scholarship from other disciplines to anthropology, and though it proved difficult to buck anthropological tradition by studying contemporary technoculture in America, it provided me a wider repertoire of skills that apparently translate into numerous disciplines and a blessed job offer.

Good luck! Tell us how it goes for you.

 

Chron of Higher Ed: Charles Murray’s New Book

Peter Schmidt over at the Chronicle of Higher Ed has a new article that takes a long look at Charles Murray’s new book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.  Murray is one of the authors of the (in)famous book The Bell Curve, if you didn’t already know.  Schmidt writes:

Mr. Murray’s newest book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (Crown Forum), makes a pretense of making nice. It bills itself as an attempt to alleviate divisiveness in American society by calling attention to a growing cultural gap between the wealthy and the working class.

Focused on white people in order to set aside considerations of race and ethnicity, it discusses trends, like the growing geographic concentration of the rich and steadily declining churchgoing rates among the poor, that social scientists of all ideological leanings have documented for decades. It espouses the virtues of apple-pie values like commitment to work and family.

The thing about Murray, Schmidt argues, is that he is particularly prone to controversy, and this book is no exception.  Ironically, as Schmidt points out, one of Murray’s underlying themes is the social fabric of society has broken down–his book is in part a call for a return to the days of mutual trust and togetherness.  However, Schmidt writes, here is where the argument heads down a path that stirs up heated reactions and controversy:

In the midst of all of his talk about togetherness, he puts out there his belief that the economic problems of America’s working class are largely its own fault, stemming from factors like the presence of a lot of lazy men and morally loose women who have kids out of wedlock. Moreover, he argues, because of Americans’ growing tendency to pair up with the similarly educated, working-class children are increasingly genetically predisposed to be on the dim side.

Here is the link to Schmidt’s article again.  Check it out.  See what you think.  Murray sells a lot of books, and has a certain amount of influence in the policy world…and he also treads into social science territory.  His messages definitely get heard.  These are absolutely the kinds of conversations that we, as anthropologists, can and should find a way to address.

Shine on you crazy [Jared] Diamond

Ok, since everyone on here seems to be writing about Jared Diamond, including Jason, I am going to go ahead and jump on the bandwagon too.  I can’t resist.  What can I say?  I’m a complete opportunist.

A true story in which Jared Diamond plays a key role: During my undergrad I had two back-to-back anthropology classes. One was an archaeology/ethnohistory class about the European conquest of the Americas. The second was a course focused on pastoralism that took a cultural ecology/environmental anthropology approach. Both were excellent classes that I remember well to this day. Fantastic classes, actually.  One day, Diamond came up in class #1. My prof said: “Don’t waste your time with Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond’s arguments are terrible and full of environmental determinism.” In the next class, on the same day (no joke), my prof in class number two also brought up Guns and said, “It’s a GREAT book you have to read it.”  He was emphatic.  Considering the strong opinions: I read the book.* Continue reading →

Television for the 99% & Reverse Media Imperialism

It is no surprise that American television news networks that consistently cover the Occupy Movement in detail tend to be liberal or progressive in political persuasion. Current TV’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Free Speech TV’s Democracy Now!, Russia Today’s The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann, and Al Jazeera English all spend considerable amounts of their valuable time bringing the voices of Occupy to televisions in America. Similar funding strategies and political intentions unify these four networks. Each receives cultural, political, or economic support from various national governments. With this communication power, these networks proceed to critique American capitalism and imperialism through direct discursive confrontation or through emphasizing resistance movements such as Occupy. I run the risk of sounding a little conservative by posing it but my question is: what is the cultural meaning of the presence of state-based, anti-capitalism television and internet video? From the successes in Wisconsin, to Wikileaks, Anonymous, and Occupy Wall Street we are living in a golden era for progressive television and internet video.