‘Tis the season for academic rites of passage and for many of us to say goodbye to the students who have been our intellectual companions for the past four years. Here are some of the (mostly) lighthearted thoughts I shared with my graduating anthropology majors and minors at our department reception this week. *Please note that this was an outline and I elaborated each point with ad-libbed examples from the classes we had shared and with local community examples that would make no sense to outsiders.…
Month: June 2017
Karl Marx’s View on Agency and What the Individual Can Do to Effect Social Change
Last Friday, I went to an Education conference to talk about my book Schooling, Bureaucracy, and Childhood: Bureaucratizing the Child. It is a book which emphasizes that questions whether schools can change as fast as school reformers have often wish. The point is to explain that as bureaucracies, schools are embedded in persistent habitus, which resists changes, even of the most articulate and passionate reformers.
Somehow, this degenerated into a discussion of what social scientists call agency.…
Does the Chinese Government Fund PhD Dissertation in Christian Theology???
I have been staying in Germany the last few weeks, hanging around academic types. Two that I came across were Chinese PhD students are studying at German Schools of Theology. Christian theology. One is trying to figure out the nature of Eschatology in a Chinese context. Eschatology is about the what happens to people after death, judgment, and final destiny (it is true—I just checked the dictionary). The other dissertation is a historical thesis about the nature of tolerance and intolerance in Augsburg, Germany in 1520-1530.…
Batman and George Orwell Philosophize, or is it best to be a wimp and a fool, or just a fool?
Colonial Burma has a strange hold on the colonial British imagination—it is a remote and exotic place where the British were not very successful in holding sway. And the place it emerges occasionally is in the inability of the west to “understand” the east. Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce Wayne’s butler in the film Batman Returns (2008) had some experience in colonial Burma which sheds some light on how the British might have thought about their imperial adventure there.…
Asking How Many Children Your Mother Has is a Complicated Survey Question!
I am teaching a Population class here in Chico, California, this semester. Sometime during the class, I generally ask students about how many children there are in their families, and what their own fertility intentions are. To avoid the complications of the modern family, divorce, remarriage, and so forth, I break it into three questions, which are:
1) How many children does your mother have?
2) How many children does your mother’s mother have?…
The Connection between Crime and Immigration: A Complicated but not Conflicted Issue
This blog was originally posted in 2010. However, the issues raised I think are timeless. “Debates” about crime and immigration reappear it the presses around the world periodically, usually without much context. Rather a person who happens to be an immigrant is caught doing a crime, and then inferences is made to all members of a group. The fact of the matter though is that immigrants tend to be ore law-abiding than native born populations. …