Last June, I published an article about the role of the CIA in the post-World War II world order. I rather liked it, but no one seems to read it! So here’s a link, so that anyone who follows Ethnography.com might check it out!
This post is mainly though to get myself re-engaged with Ethnography.com, and perhaps you too. We have had several excellent submissions posted since just 2020 from Tunisia, Madagascar, Dominica, Tanzania, and India. And then there is another post about displacement of COVID. More would be nice! I actually enjoy editing these offerings, and Christina Quigley is really good at layout. Which is why we encourage photographs..
As for my own blogging at Ethnography.com, I promise to start posting more. Some of it will be unique, and others will be cross-posts from newspapers, and other sources like the Small Wars Journal, which is where my article about the CIA “How America’s Consular Service Gets Smart: a review of the quiet good and ugly Americans.” There are perhaps too many obscure allusions to American Baby Boomer culture in this article; but we are a big group. I hope that others can take an interest, too. We Baby Boomers are nice people too! Besides the t.v. show “Get Smart” was really funny! Anyway, every time I drive past the massive American consulate being built here in Chiangmai, Thailand, I can’t help but imagine what Secret Agent 86, Maxwell Smart himself, will do in the “Cone of Silence” I imagine the US government is installing deep underground.
All this is a long way of saying, please send us more ethnographic reports! If you want to know what we like, please look at the blogs from Tunisia, Dominica, Madagascar, India, and Tanzania. Or like me just do a book review.
Tony Waters
Editor of Ethnography.com
And sometime resident of Chiangmai, Thailand; Lueneburg, Germany; and Chico, California!
Current email addresses: anthony.waters@leuphana.de; twaters@csuchico.edu; watersanthony777@gmail.com
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. In 2016 though he suddenly found himself with a new gig at Payap University in northern Thailand where he is on the faculty of the Peace Studies Department. He has also been a guest professor in Germany, and Tanzania. In the past, his main interests have been international development and refugees in Thailand, Tanzania, and California. This reflects a former career in the Peace Corps (Thailand), and refugee camps (Thailand and Tanzania). His books include: Crime and Immigrant Youth (1999), Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan (2001), The Persistence of Subsistence Agriculture: Life Beneath of the Marketplace (2007), When Killing is a Crime (2007), and Schooling, Bureaucracy, and Childhood: Bureaucratizing the Child (2012). His hobby is trying to learn strange languages–and the mistakes that that implies. Tony is a prolific academic, you can read more of his work at academia.edu.or purchase one (or more!) of his books from Amazon.com.