Author: Tony Waters

The Journal of the Siam Society just published an article about suicide among the Mlabri of Northern Thailand by Gene and Mary Long, who are missionary linguists who have worked with the Mlabri for over thirty years, and myself.  The Mlabri (or Mla Bri) have a attracted a great deal of attention from anthropology over the last 50 years because they subsisted as hunter-gatherers on the fringes of highland societies until recently. …

I am helping re-translate Max Weber’s classic essay „Politics as Vocation“ from the original German into English.  One problem that emerged regards how to translate the German word Führer, which is key to the essay, into English.  Führer is of course a word that most English-speakers are aware of because of how Adolf Hitler used it between 1933-1945.  But Max Weber though wrote in 1919, and had (presumably) never heard of Hitler who at the time was simply a washed-up Austrian corporal beginning to take an interest in politics.…

There is a report from AAA that Horace/Harold Miner’s 1956 article “Body Image Among the Nacirema” is the most downloaded from the AAA journals for 2012.  It was downloaded over 11,000 times in 2012.

Missing from AAA’s statement about the Nacirema article is a basic distinction about the article which is that it is not “science,” but “fiction,” or maybe “satire.”  Yep, the Nacirema are a made up “tribe,” as legions of delighted undergrads who have read the article have discovered for 57 years.…

Rex at savageminds.org has written a nice post “How to Explain Anthropology to a Physicist.”  The explanation applies equally to evolutionary psychologists, geneticists, and others who are likely to dabble in anthropology.

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.

David Brooks, the center-right columnist at the New York Times today published a column about the limitations on neuron research.  He’s not against neural research, just the hubris that tends to collect around it.  Like research on DNA, research on neurons is great stuff—but no matter how enthusiastic the scientists may be, it does not explain the products of culture, sociality, or humanity.   And this conclusion is not the result of a political bias, but is a critique widely shared in anthropology, sociology, and beyond.  …

I will be in Thailand this summer for five weeks teaching a course for the University of Nevada, Reno, as a Visiting Professor.  As part of the employment procedure, I had to sign a loyalty oath indicating “I will support, protect and defend the Constitution and Government of the United States, and the Constitution and Government of the State of Nevada, against all enemies, whether domestic or foreign…”  Unlike the other papers I signed for the employment, thisone needed to be notarized. …

We have had a good week on Ethnography.com grappling with the diffrerences between the Social Sciences, and the Cognitive Sciences.  Last month it was the Social Sciences and Population Genetics.

I am of course a Social Scientist, and much more in tune with what Michael Scroggins and Max Holland write.  They are squarely in the traditions of the social sciences regarding the nature of culture, definitions, and interpretations of data.  They are also well-read in the natural sciences, and trying to tie the two fields together, a difficult task. …