Month: June 2015

We like our stuff.   Stuff in fact is what makes the world’s capitalist markets go round. There are some well-thought out ways of describing the nature of stuff, including Karl Marx’s description of how and why “fetish commodity” is necessary to keep us consuming and buying. Then there was Torstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. But these are both boring reads—except for geeks like me who like classical social theory.…

Leon Neyfakh at Slate has written a review of the controversy surrounding Alice Goffman’s new ethnography On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City which is about the African’ American community of inner city Philadelphia, and their relationship with the  police.  The essay is called “The Ethics of Ethnograpy,” and discusses the role of Institutional Research Boards, the responsibility of social scientists for replicability, the nature of scientific generalization, and the nature of ethnography.  …

Yesterday’s New York Times featured an opinion piece on rudeness and incivility in the workplace and the high cost of mean bosses. It’s true, mean bosses suck. I’ve only had a couple, and most of my bosses during my low wage service years were pleasant overall or mostly absent, which is nice too. When I was a higher ed adjunct, my “boss” was the department chair. Technically they are not “the boss”, they are the people who have the responsibility to schedule classes and push some additional, administrative paper.…

We brought my mother-in-law to the Baltic Sea resort town of Ahlbeck which is near the Polish border for her 90^th birthday. My mother-in-law visited the resort in one of its former heydays of the 1930s. At the time she was ten years old, and very active as a swimmer—as 90 year olds will, they wanted to visit the memories of their childhood.

Ahlbeck is on the island of Usedom, which is mostly in Germany, though a tip of the eastern part is in Poland.  …

The Daily Beast in 2013 published a piece about “the New Mandarins” by Megan McArdle.  The New Mandarins are those people who test well, get good jobs, write the tests tor the next generation, and then give birth to the next generation that will do well, and so on.  The problem of course is that as in Ancient China, the Mandarins become more and more remote from the people who they rule, and the connection between the ruled and rulers becomes more tenuous.  …

Robert Harrington of the American Mathematical Society is trying t understand how young mathematician use their scholarly products.  As an an “experiment” he tried out qualitative interview methods to investigate his question.  Here is what he found out:

As a scientist, I have ideas about what scientific method is, and what evidence is. I now understand the value of the qualitative approach – hard for a scientist to say. Qualitative research opens a window to descriptive data and analysis.

Cultural Anthropology looks like they are making a good go of Open Access.  It is expanding the breadth and depth of their readership too–which makes cultural anthropology more accessible t the general public.  Read their editorial here.

Tony Waters

Tony Waters is czar and editor of Ethnography.com. He came to us from the Sociology department at California State University at Chico where he has been a professor since 1996.

Someone is doing some pretty good sociology on the New York Times–a Business Professor no less!  Like I wrote before, sociology is among the most widespread and successful of all disciplines in the academy, and it is not only found in Sociology Departments.  The article is callsed “Guess Who Doesn’t Fit in at Work” and it is about how discrimination in hiring practices.

Wanting to work with people like ourselves is not new.