Two weeks ago, we posted a really great essay by David Van Huff “A Tale Within a Tale: The Dual Nature of Ebenezer Scrooge.” David wrote this story for my class, and it helped me see Durkheim concept of the “Dual Nature” of humanity in a new way, which is why I wanted to post it. Anyway, in coming days we will post more such stories. What they will have all in common is that they are all fiction.…
Author: 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. 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.
Are Police “God’s Representatives on Earth?”
Max Weber writing in the early twentieth century marveled about the advantages that modern societies have over the earlier societies. One of the things Weber remarked about was the “stable peacefulness” that are found in large areas of the country protected by the police. No longer when you, your brother, or your sister were assaulted did you need, or want, to take matters into your own hands and seek your own revenge on behalf of your clan and its gods to whom you were tied to by blood oaths of loyalty.…
It was “Thank Your Local Criminal Day” in My Class Today!
Today was Emile Durkheim in my Classical Social Theory class, and I was again reminded of the beauty of Durkheim’s “Crime is Necessary” thesis. Basically his thesis points out that for there to be something “normal,” there must be something deviant. Or in the context of a state, this means that for something to be legal and creditable, there must be something illegal and punishable. This happens so that the normal nice people to be a group, there needs to be someone who is hung out to dry.…
Is Your Professor also a Waitress or in Retail?
The crisis in college teaching is old hat on blogs like this. The professoriate is divided into a two tiered system, in which one group-the tenure track-has the good fortune to have job security and a decent salary, while an often-time larger groups has only semester-to-semester job security, and a part-time teaching gig which may or may not pay the bills of a middle class lifestyle.
I was lucky—I only had to do two years of adjuncting before being gifted with the luxury of tenure track security.…
Sociology, the Running Conversation, and the Murder of Marc Thompson
The Synthesis is a local weekly newspaper in small-town Chico, California, generally specialized in Entertainment news—stories of local bands, the bar scene, and arts.
Recently, the small paper is branching into more critical hard-hitting news analysis. Emilano Garcia-Sarnoff published “Heart on Fire: The Murder of Marc Thompson” on September 29, which is about the recent death of a Chico State Sociology major found in a burning car in a remote area.…
Anthropological Subjects in the New York Times Last Week
Razib Khan published an interesting article “Our Cats, Ourselves” about the evolution of the domestic cat. The article describes how domestication of felines over the last 10,000 years has resulted in a critter that is both biologically and socially adapted to live with humans. The genetic element has resulted in smaller cranial sizes, and so forth. The social part at the same time includes adaptation to human-created environments that came with the invention of agriculture, and the emergence of “domestic” rodents.…
Anthropological Fieldwork by Daiva Repeckaite
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.
As Americans Go to the Polls, Here is a Little Wisdom about Voting Cows from Max Weber
As Americans get ready to vote on November 2 for all range of important stuff, it may help to ruminate a bit on Max Weber’s incisive word “Voting Cows,” Stimmvieh. As you go to the polls, please don’t be like me–
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.
Ethnography.com Reset, 2.0! Welcome Julie Garza-Withers
As promised last month, Ethnography.com is having a reset. Not only will we post more, we will have more people doing it. Most importantly, we will have Julie Garza-Withers posting and editing to her heart’s content.
As you can see from her biography (already posted), Julie comes to us via working class rural southern California. She somehow avoided the career track at Del Taco (a California fast-food joint), or a full career waitressing at a diner, before landing in Barnes and Noble in Chico, California, where she developed further her affinity for books.…
Fatuous, Naïve, or Bold? The Wonderful World of Peer Review
Fair warning from an anonymous peer reviewer of one of my academic articles…
The author is hampered by an inaccurate, naïve, and highly simplistic understanding of the basic principles…which leads him to make ludicrous statements like the following…
Yes, that’s me: inaccurate, naïve, and highly simplistic! And so forth. If you share that sentiment, do not read further.
I posted a blog about peer review for the first time in July 2008 after being pummeled in the peer review process.…
Ethnography.com Reset!
Ok, my book mss Is off to the publisher, academic article on the “forthcoming” list, summer travels done, and new class launched. In other words, no more excuses for ignoring Ethnography.com! So here are some of the plans.
–I’m going to go more aggressively after the field of anthropology. I became involved with Ethnography.com in the first place by whining how anthropology had abandoned the subject of culture back in 2007 or so.…
Nicholas Wade, Jared Diamond and Anthropology
Ok, Anthropology, one day after my post on Nicholas Wade, and that post gets more hits than the last five or six posts here put together. I get it, you like Nicholas Wade, and especially complaining about him. You don’t like biological reductionism, and think that such studies are used to reinforce racist ideologies. For what it is worth, I more or less agree.
But for some reason you don’t want to read stuff that critiques biological reductionism on its own terms, and opt for those presented by the anthropology’s favorite bogeymen, which from recent activity in the blogosphere seem to include Nicholas Wade, Jared Diamond, and Razib Khan.…