July 2016 – Ethnography.com

About the Spread of the English Language in India

Posted on July 25, 2016July 23, 2016 by Tony Waters

The Monster Anglopolis: The English Language in India

by Sunandan Roy Chowdhury

Published in Planet 216

Sunandan Roy Chowdhury decries the dominance of the English language over Indian culture, thought, identity and material development.

The waters of the Arabian Sea wash the walls of Mumbai’s National Centre for Performing Arts – India’s premier venue for theatre and performances, located in posh downtown Bombay, as Mumbai was known in the days of British Raj and in the early decades of independent India.…

Johnny Cash on the Importance of Listening to Your Mama about Open Carry of Guns

Posted on July 17, 2016July 16, 2016 by Tony Waters

In my Criminology class, I used to lecture about “ecological theories” of crime. For example, the “ecology of bars” lend themselves to violence. Basically, ecological theory says that if you put together young males, alcohol, and guns, someone is more likely to get hurt than if any one of the tree elements is removed. Remove any one of the three, and the danger goes down. Which is why the youngest males are not allowed in bars, there are hours after which alcohol is no longer served, and you are to leave your guns outside the bar. …

“Could be Worse!” Adventures in Maximum Security Prisons and Our Forthcoming Book

Posted on July 8, 2016July 7, 2016 by Tony Waters

This essay begins in February 2009, and picks up again in November 2011. And now it is going to pick up again in 2016, as I anxiously await the publication of our book “Prison Vocational Education and Policy in the United States: A Critical Perspective on Evidence-based Reform.” The book is authored by Andrew Dick, Bill Rich, and myself, and despite the title, is really quite a good read. …

Battle Ritual Among the Nacirema

Posted on July 7, 2016August 6, 2016 by Tony Waters

By Guest Writer Finn Johansson

Battle ritual among the Nacirema

In anthropological and ethnological research, scientists face new cultural specialties every day. Yet there are some rites, so deeply inherited by the practicing community, that ritual behavior might astonish even the most experienced researchers. Accessing those abnormalities from an empirical point of view in order to simplify cross-cultural communication is one of the main tasks of the rite-specified anthropologist. In order to do so, he often has to overcome his own fears and preserve his open-mindedness, even if every civilized muscle of his body wants to escape a situation so far away from what he is used to.…

Farmer Power: The Continuing Confrontation between Subsistence Farmers and Development Bureaucrats

Posted on July 3, 2016July 1, 2016 by Tony Waters

Day by day, the peasants make the economists sigh, the politicians sweat, and the strategists swear, defeating their plans and prophecies all over the world—Moscow and Washington, Peking and Delhi, Cuba and Algeria, the Congo and Vietnam (Shanin 1966:5)

Economists, politicians, and strategists since at least the end of World War II dream of the world’s rural farmers becoming a wealthy, healthy, and modern middle class. Implicit to this dream is peasants moving off the farms of China, India, Africa, and Latin America to staff factories in an ever-wealthier world. …