~ a group blog on a variety of topics related to anthropology, sociology, and ordinary people ~
Nicholas Wade has a new book out, and the Anthropologists are sharpening their indignation—complaining because he treads on their private territory. Sorry, anthro, you are not medicine or law, and do not have a monopoly over who practices what you preach. Let it go. Sometimes I think that the entire discipline is beset by a big-time inferiority complex
The solution? Simply do good anthropology, and more importantly, promote good anthropology. …
Why do neural scientists need expensive MRI machines to “see” what classical sociologists Charles Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead saw by simply looking into the eyes of children? This is the subject of my recent article “Of Mirror Neurons and the Looking Glass Self” published in Perspectives on Science.
The Mirror Neuron is a hot thing today in the neural sciences. The Mirror Neuron hypothesis postulates that a person watching another person do something, imagines that the other person is doing. …
Nicholas Kristof has written an op-ed “Professors we need you,” in the New York Times. His point is that that professors like me need to write and express ourselves more clearly so all our presumed smartness is accessible to people like Kristof. Partly I agree. But partly I don’t. I also think that people like Kristof and the policy-makers he advocates for need to read more carefully.
This is a sore point with me, especially since I was lectured a couple of times by policy-making types about writing in op-ed length of about 750 words chunks—that is the sort of thing that Kristof is really good at writing.…
Last March, Michael Scroggins posted about “Gene Promoters: On Chagnon and Diamond,” pointing out that the connection between race, genetics, and social deterimination was rearing its head again. He was writing in response to a blog in Discovery Magazine by Razib Khan “Against the Cultural Anthropologists” in which Khan wished that cultural anthropology could be voted off the academic island.
The result was a spirited back and forth between supporters of Razib, and Michael over the month or so in which by and large I took the side of Michael. …
The Human Terrain System is under critique again, and this time not from the AAA, but from a pro-military Congressman who finds that the program was rife with waste, fraud, and abuse. As the Army Times reports, Congressman Duncan Hunter reports “It’s shocking that this program, with its controversy and highly questionable need, could be extended.” Apparently Human Terrain contractors burned through $726 million in the name of providing actionable social science to the military.…
I made a somewhat off-hand comment one of Ryan’s posts about graduate education on Savage Minds.Org some time ago. I warned graduate students about “fetishizing” various types of grant sources like NSF, NIMH, Fulbright, and the various others sources of grad student funding which students compete to get. This initially got me a deserved sharp rebuke from Ryan. After all, who was I as a fully tenured, overpaid, and underworked full professor to complain about graduate stipend which (obviously) are few and far between? …
Here is a really cool graphic describing the advantages of class and wealth in the United States from DegreeQuery.com. It is a good reminder that there is indeed a strong correlation between wealth and advantages in the American education system. It is also very nicely presented!
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.
There is a nice article in the New York Times about the repatriation of Kenya’s Vigango funerary statues from a museum in Denver here.
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.
By Robert Albro
American University
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) – established in 2006 in the spirit of the Pentagon’s DARPA to sponsor research for groundbreaking technologies to support an “overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries” – is a little-known US agency that social and behavioral scientists (especially sociocultural anthropologists) should pay more attention to. This is because IARPA is notably social scientific in orientation and has been developing concepts in specific ways for use by the intelligence community (IC) that US anthropology in particular is significantly historically responsible for introducing to the social sciences, if in different ways, most obviously: culture, its coherence and the extent of cultural consensus, its relationship to society and to human agency.…
The latest hottest whine on the internet is this essay “The End of the College Essay” in Slate. The complaint is that students hate writing papers, and professors hate grading them. Both statements are true perhaps, but sometimes unpleasant things are also good for you in the long run. Things like writing papers, and grading them, perhaps?
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.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote about the longing modern people have for “a leader but the right kind of leader” recently. In describing this kind of leader, he was writing about the human longing for a someone they can follow who breaks conventions, and is able to satisfy the craving for “genuine leadership” and “moral authority,” rather than (presumably) the leadership that resorts to police violence, craven manipulation, bureaucratic smallness, and deceit. …
By Merrily McCarthy
This series discusses linguistic experience in one specific work example, The Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park in California, USA. A National Historic Building built in 1927, The Ahwahnee, whose halls echo the sounds of many languages has for 86 years invited the voices and languages of many global cultures to gather within its stone walls. Over the next month or so I will blog about ethnographic observations from there in a series of posts as I explore linguistic interactions in a real live working environment.…