Every student wants to know “How long should this paper be?” I think that’s a pretty reasonable question, but for some reason instructors sometimes treat this question like one of the deadly sins. Ironically, when your instructor is asked to present a paper, they are given the answer to that very question at the beginning! Conferences state how long the abstract should be, how long the sessions are, how many participants and often how long they personally have to speak.…
Month: January 2010
Undergrad Seminar: Why Incompletes Are So Dangerous
Here we are in the 2nd half of the academic year. If the 1st half got off to a rocky start, maybe this is a good time to talk about time management. Not the “The 7 habits of that smugly overambitious go-getter” variety. This is aimed more at the “How can I squeeze school into my hectic schedule of procrastination and binge drinking” style. In other words, for the rest of us.…
PhD, or not PhD
A column in The Chronicle of Higher Education, as pointed to by my friend Matt Bandy, has an interesting take on the essentialness (or lack thereof) of a Ph.D. The column is specific to the humanities, but is easily transferable to the social sciences, and I think most particularly, to Anthropology. Matt makes his points specific to archaeology, but I think that getting a PhD in any kind of anthropology these days is a particular kind of folly.…
I Hope That The Human Terrain Teams Read The Deceivers by John Masters: An Anthropological Novel
One of my favorite all-time historical novels is The Deceivers by John Masters. Published in 1952, the protagonist William Savage is an administrator in a remote district for the British East Indian Company. The book is set in 1825. Savage speaks four Indian languages, and has spent 19 years in the colonial service. As a colonial administrator, he is “the law” in his district. But to do this, he lives in an Indian village, embedded in Indian cultures and languages.…
Mark said we’re not blogging about HTS anymore
but I thought this was a good story, not specifically about HTS, but about one anthropologist’s work with the military, as a professor at the Marine Corps University at Quantico.
Not surprisingly, I agree with the points she makes about grey areas, and about how each anthropologist needs to “draw their own line.”
