Author: Donna

Call for papers: Society for Applied Anthropology Meetings, Seattle, WA, March 29-April 2, 2011

Roundtable discussion
Anthropology in a Box:  Extending the Reach of Anthropology in Institutional Settings

Libraries, hospitals, schools, businesses, and the military; these are all institutions that can inspire and require novel anthropological approaches, both theoretical and methodological. These kinds of spaces leave ambiguous the lines between clients, colleagues, and research participants. Anthropologists working within and adjacent to institutions often find themselves with multiple roles, each enmeshed in different relations of power within the organization.…

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.…

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.”

Donna

Well, not really.  Not on the cover, anyway.  And not in Rolling Stone.  But I love that song!

But hey hey, anyone see this? HTS makes it into Newsweek, and I’m intrigued all over again. Seems it’s not being as valuable a program as it could be, at least in part because the social scientists who would be most equipped to help the military in Iraq—think: those who speak relevant languages and/or have spent significant time in the Middle East, or (gasp!)…

So it’s midterm time, and also time for me to do my self-check (stolen from my colleague and best pal, Cindy herself):  have the students write down the most interesting, most confusing, and most important things they have learned so far in the class.

Thus far, we’ve been reading Margaret Mead’s Growing Up in New Guinea.  So a  lot of the confusion involved cross-cousins, tabu, and the intricacies of so-called primitive life in 1920s New Guinea. …

The Arrival Scene is a trope of classic anthropological literature. In invoking the beginning of the anthropologist’s journey among a specific people, a specific landscape is invariably described. Doing so is more than an attempt to hook the reader—writing these scenes also hooks the anthropologist back into the field experience. That moment, conjured in narrative, when the anthropologist is confronted with the people and place they have decided to make familiar, is also when the anthropologist begins their attempt to feel at home in an unfamiliar place.…

I am intrigued by what seems to be a persistent pattern among my peers, one that seems to render them unlikely (not to say incapable) of thinking anthropologically about their own lives, and careers.  I am frustrated by the number of times I’ve had the, “go ahead and submit that article you are sitting on, what are you waiting for,” conversation with my fellow women in anthropology.  Did they not  remember that article submission (among other things in our profession) can still be highly gendered, and that men tend to send stuff off because “it’s great,” and women tend to send the same quality of stuff off much less often, because it “needs some more work”—and then gets lost in the shuffle, and never gets sent out at all. …

So now that Halloween is over, and a good time was had by my family, I can muse aloud (or ablog) about the slow creep of Halloween from a good time for kids, to a mandatory RAGING PARTY for the adults, and how that plays out in Homeowner Associations, and other community organizations.

This is the first time in my life I’ve ever lived within the influence of an HOA, and I have to say, it’s quite a learning experience.…

Well the historic First Dinner of (some of the) ethnography.com bloggers has come and gone, and a good time was indeed had.  Much of the conversation was about (surprise!) anthropology and anthropologists, and during that evening I was reminded of a theory of subfields and personality that I formed early in my graduate career.

It came to me pretty quickly that there were startling contrasts between the anthropologists I hung out with as an undergraduate (gregarious, lots of parties, good people, so nice I married one of them) with the ones I was encountering as a graduate student. …

I keep turning over in my head some of the issues that are troubling the AAA these days, in particular the Human Terrain Systems project, and the question of AAA’s (and the anthropologists within the organization’s) stance on it. (and there is more in the current Anthropology News)

I get, I really do, the suspicion with which Roberto Gonzales and others view the government, the military, and their projects (especially the war) in Iraq.…

So, anyone else see this on Slate?

A quote:

“This trade is almost inevitable. In a poor country, such as Mali or Cambodia, foreigners are likely to be willing to pay more for artifacts than the locals would. The logic of the market would pull the choicest objects into foreign collections and foreign museums. Many see this as undesirable, and so most countries maintain some form of ban on trading antiquities.…