Tag Archives: Websites

When you need another word for monolatrism

thesaurus.jpg
News that a beta version of an online ethnographic thesaurus has gone live arrived in my inbox this morning.  The editorial board of the Ethnographic Thesaurus seeks input on how to make it better:

Friends:

I’m happy to announce that after a three-year development project funded by the Mellon Foundation a draft of the Ethnographic Thesaurus is now available on the website of the American Folklore Society. We are well aware that this version is not perfect, and we need your help to make it better. Please visit the site, try it out, and send us your comments and/or suggestions for added terms. Below is the official announcement from the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and the American Folklore Society:

Ethnographic Thesaurus Goes Live!

The American Folklore Society is pleased to announce that the Ethnographic Thesaurus is now available in a dynamically-searchable draft version on the Society’s website at: http://et.afsnet.org.

The Ethnographic Thesaurus is a hierarchical listing of subject terms from folklore, ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, and related fields. The Thesaurus will improve access to cultural materials and scholarship by
affording researchers, archivists, indexers, librarians, and others a common language for description.

During the past three years, The American Folklore Society developed the Thesaurus in cooperation with the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, supported by a generous grant from the Scholarly Communications Program of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The editorial board of the Ethnographic Thesaurus requests your comments on existing thesaurus terms, as well as suggestions for terms to be added in the future.

Suzanne Flandreau (for the ET Editorial Board)

Pluto Press and U. of Michigan Retain Business Ties

I’ve been somewhat absently following the story of U. of Michigan Press’ reconsideration of its relationship with UK-based Pluto Press, since my forthcoming book Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War is being released on Pluto Press and the loss of an American distributor would limit its availability in the country that it most directly deals with.  So it’s with some relief that I see that Michigan has decided to continue its relationship with Pluto Press. 

The issue was set off by Continue reading →

RMAP has a posse (and so does NPS)

I am delighted to have just recently discovered that the Australian National University’s “Resource Management in the Asia Pacific”:http://rspas.anu.edu.au/rmap/ program has started a new “RMAP blog”:http://rspas.anu.edu.au/blogs/rmap. I have tremendous respect for the people at RMAP — and their research is absolutely central to my own project. Most particularly, their post on “social mapping and Human Terrain Systems”:http://rspas.anu.edu.au/blogs/rmap/2007/10/20/social-mapping-and-human-terrain-systems/ points out something I have long thought (and worried) about but have not said explicitly: that social mapping projects that grow up around mining projects are similar to the programs now being developed by the military in Afghanistan.

In both cases large bureaucratically organized institutions plant themselves in fluid contexts, which often results in a solidification of previous kinships practices. Thus, for instance, the “Culture and Conflict Studies”:http://www.nps.edu/Programs/CCS/index.html department at the “Naval Postgraduate School”:http://www.nps.edu/Home.aspx. And sure enough, the CCS has “tribal genealogies”:http://www.nps.edu/Programs/CCS/FamilyTrees.html that look remarkably similar to the genealogical reports that are often created in the wake of mining and hydrocarbon projects in Papua New Guinea.

We also have sites like “Iraqht”:http://iraqht.blogspot.com/ which posts links to “articles on tribal warfare”:http://www.smallwarsjournal.com/documents/coinandiwinatribalsociety.pdf (hosted by Small Wars Journal, the site on track to become the ‘Gene Expression’ of 2008!) which are similar in genre to the social mapping reports that deal with all the time in my research.

In my dissertation I focused on company-community relations. For the books I am expanding to a trichotomy of state, community, and company. Perhaps I should rebrand myself to include the military as well?

Depressed? It Might Be Anthropological

If all this talk of anthropologists either ‘collaborating with’ or ‘consulting for’ the military has got you down, you’re not alone. But there are places you can go, like these two websites:

livecrazy.jpgfeeltank.jpg

LiveCrazy.org is the website for the ‘Live Crazy Network,’ a nonprofit organization assembling the creative work of people who think about mood in contemporary social life. It was founded by anthropologist Emily Martin, whose new book is called Bipolar Expeditions. Martin conducted years of ethnographic work in the US on the growing science and industry of mood (and putative disorders thereof).

According to Wikipedia, Feel Tank Chicago is “a group composed of activists, artists, and academics that engages both in critical research and political activism.” The group stages happenings of various kinds that are tinged with feeling as well as with political critique, suggesting that affect could itself comprise such a critique. I connect the group in my own mental map of intellectual constellations with a set of interests that concern many scholars at the University of Chicago, in particular their interest in the way in which new publics emerge through and as forms of affect.

I think recent interest in mood or affect is not unconnected to other recent critiques of the platonic virtualism that sometimes characterizes cultural analysis in either a structuralist or a hermeneutic mode. For example, very powerful work has been attending to the materiality of meaningful practice (see especially the work of Webb Keane), building on the insight that meaning must take material form of some kind and so actually looking at that form lends greater precision and power to our understanding of how meaning happens. I think the turn toward affect performs a similar move as a kind of critique of pure semiology, insofar as it wishes to make visible the constitutive ’emotional’ or ‘irrational’ strands that are always a part of cultural worlds.

Anthropologists of the World, Unite!

Apropos of the recent discussion of anthropology’s use in torture and other military action, I received notice this morning of an effort launched by several anthros (including David Price, Hugh Gusterson, and Catherine Lutz) to encourage the development of an ethical anthropology and to oppose anthro’s participation in counter-insurgency. Here’s the relevant part of the email:

The Department of Defense and allied agencies are mobilizing anthropologists for interventions in the Middle East and beyond. It is likely that larger, more permanent initiatives are in the works.

Over the last several weeks, we have created an ad hoc group, the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, with the objective of promoting an ethical anthropology. Working together, we have drafted a pledge of non-participation in counter-insurgency, which we have organized as a petition (see attachment). We invite you to become a part of this effort by taking the following steps:

  1. Download and print the attached pledge (in .pdf format) [. Ask your colleagues to sign the pledge, and promptly send it to us via regular mail. Our address is Network of Concerned Anthropologists, c/o Dept. of Anthropology, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MS 3G5, Fairfax, VA 22030 (USA). If it is more convenient, email a .pdf copy of collected signatures and send it to us at concerned.anthropologists@gmail.com.
  2. Forward this message to your colleagues, and encourage them to sign.
  3. Join our network by emailing us at concerned.anthropologists@gmail.com. Be sure to include your name, title, and affiliation. We will add you to our email list.
  4. Visit our web site at http://concerned.anthropologists.googlepages.com/home for more information and updates.

Email us at concerned.anthropologists@gmail.com if you would like more information or if you have questions.

Sincerely yours,
Network of Concerned Anthropologists

Catherine Besteman
Andrew Bickford
Greg Feldman
Roberto Gonzalez
Hugh Gusterson
Gustaaf Houtman
Kanhong Lin
Catherine Lutz
David Price
David Vine

Digital Media and Learning Competition

The “virtual institution” HASTAC (the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, centered at UC Irvine and Duke) has announced a competition to win some of the Macarthur Foundation’s money ($2million of it) for projects in digital media and learning… It’s pretty clear this is for just about anyone, and probably just about any kind of project (though the HASTAC site is bizarrely specific in proposing that “For example, a team of teacher bloggers who already reach hundreds of thousands of readers may now seek to provide multimedia coverage and translation of MIT Professor Henry Jenkins’ recent white paper on media literacy.” Should we be doing that? Do we have to use Official Henry Jenkins White Papers?). In any case, surely there must be some anthropods out there with good ideas for goinig forth and learning the people with your digital media… now’s your chance!

Anthropology Conference Alerts RSS Feed

As far as I know there is no service which offers anthropology conference alerts via RSS. ConferenceAlerts.com offers updates via an e-mail newsletter, but not via RSS. So, following the method I used for the “Who Owns Native Culture” feed, I hacked one together for their “Anthropology, Cultural Studies, and related fields” category.

You can subscribe to the RSS feed here. Please in mind that this is a hack and could easily stop working if they update the code on their website just the slightest bit. I’ve tested it for a few days now and it seems to be working so far…

“Artpology” in Almaty

Forget what’s-his-name. For news on Kazakhstan, check out artpologist.net, the multilingual website of a group of scholars and artists studying the contemporary creative scene in Almaty. They write, “We will work with artists of three generations trying to show continuities and ruptures that have taken place in society since the break-up of the Soviet Union.” One of the members of the group is Stanford anthropology student Zhanara Nauruzbayeva. In an interview, Nauruzbayeva notes intersections between contemporary creativity and its rapidly changing urban context:

Initially we were fascinated with the artists’ studios, artists who live in Almaty, you know, what amazing and unique spaces those are. I just feel like there is so much in there and it would be really cool to show them. And this is something to be really proud of. But as we started here on the project we came across this subject of the transformation of the city, the construction and how it changes people’s daily lives and we just thought that we cannot ignore that subject anymore.

Kazakhstan and particularly bigger cities Almaty and Astana have changed a lot in the past 3-4 years maybe, but I feel like this year it’s particularly strong, it’s escalating. With construction, transformation of the city is affecting all areas, not only the older areas that are being demolished. And those spaces are being transformed into apartment buildings and commercial entertainment centers, malls, and also there’s a huge number of cars here, so lots of roads are being built to accommodate that quantity of cars. What else is the transformation, the construction affecting?

Wallpaper magazine has been tracking the urban scene in Kazakhstan recently, having featured the new capital Astana on the cover a few months ago. Presently, Wallpaper.com features something like ‘artpological’ photos of denizens of Astana. Check out Stefan Ruiz’s beautiful photographs here. Ruiz’s description of the city cracks me up: “North Korea meets Las Vegas.”

Professor Griffin Goes to Baghdad

Readers interested in ongoing discussion about anthropological knowledge and military operations should follow the blog of Dr. Marcus Griffin, professor of anthropology at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, VA. Griffin is being deployed to Baghdad under the US Army’s ‘Human Terrain System’ initiative (this .pdf explains the HTS). Griffin’s blog promises to report intermittently on the work he is doing with the Army. Given the heated discussion here at SM and elsewhere on the ethics of this sort of affiliation between the military and a professional anthropologist, I wrote to Professor Griffin asking him to clarify what set of ethical guidelines will govern his research and conduct in Iraq as I was unable to discern this from the HTS document that he links to. He has promised to write about these matters. At the moment, however, he is very much involved in preparations for Baghdad. Here, he describes ‘going native‘ within military culture:

Going “native” in anthropology is a fairly common strategy to gain a better understanding of the people with whom one is working. I am about a month away from deploying to Baghdad as part of the US Army’s new Human Terrain System and have almost gone completely native. How am I doing this?

First, I am working out regularly with Lt. Gato. He is showing me how to develop greater strength and endurance, pushing me to exert myself beyond my own motivation. When I complained about elbow tendonitis, he said, “Good, no pain no gain.” Thanks to him I am gaining greater strength and larger muscles. Second, I cut my hair in a high and tight style and look like a drill sergeant. I know because a woman at the gas station asked me if I was one and was perplexed when I said no but was satisfied when I said I was simply on my way to Iraq. Third, I shot very well with the M9 and M4 last week at the range. I previously paid careful attention to the training one of my team members gave me on his own time and our effort paid off handsomely. Shooting well is important if you are a soldier regardless of whether or not your job requires you to carry a weapon. Fourth, I am trying to learn military language with all the acronyms and idioms otherwise alien to university professor such as myself. I actually know what people are saying now half the time. By going native, I am better able to see social life from the viewpoint of the people I am working with.

Movies, Race, and Ethnicity

The last time I taught the course Indigenous Images it was a two hour class which meant that there was no time to show movies. This time around I got a four hour slot, so there will be plenty of time to show a film every week and still have some good discussion. But that means I need to pick films and find good readings to go with them, so I was really happy to find this excellent resource: The UC Berkeley Media Resources Center has put up an extensive set of bibliographies and videographies relating to Movies, Race, and Ethnicity. For my course, I’m particularly interested in the material on Native Americans (books, videos), which has already given me some great ideas for my course.

Architectures of Control

For anthropologists interested in the intersection of place and power, I highly recommend the blog Architectures of Control, by Dan Lockton. Take, for instance, this great post about how airport cafés ensured that customers wouldn’t sit for too long by removing the flight monitors: “This made people worry about missing their flights, which led to them looking for monitors that worked, thus leaving empty tables.” Or this post about anti-user seating in Oxford. (Examples from NY City at the anti-sit archive.) And this one on architecture and security about buildings designed to prevent threats which no longer concern those who use the buildings.

(via BoingBoing)

Savage Minds on Facebook

Since it seems all the cool academic blogs have their own Facebook group, I felt Savage Minds need one as well. If you have a Facebook account feel free to become a member and help make this work.

UPDATE: Wow. In less than 24 hours we have 38 members! Now what? Please post your ideas to the group’s discussion page!

Media Anthropology Network

Thanks to wiseguy I discovered a great resource for media anthropology:

Since 2004 the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Media Anthropology Network is discussing working papers about socio-cultural aspects of media technology uses within the scope of e-seminars via the Network’s mailing list.

… The website of the Network also provides annotated bibliographies, information about media anthropology events, and selected discussions from the mailing list as PDF documents.

They even have an RSS feed.

Send in the Blogs… The World’s Fair.

The World’s Fair is a newish blog that is one half Benjamin Cohen, an assistant Professor of STS at Virginia Tech (the other half is David Ng, a molecular biologist at UBC). One thing that has been immediately interesting is his interviews with young scholars: a really excellent intro to the history of Nanotechnology with Cyrus Mody (a new colleague of mine at Rice and Historian/Sociologist of Nanotech) and a recent one with Saul Halfon who has just published a book about demography, population control and “regime change in population policy.” The interviews are short but enlightening and I certainly hope he keeps it up…