The meritocracy is a ideology that is too often known for its failures, rather than its strengths. Cindy Van Gilder noted this on this blog. And if that’s not enough, I am reading The Price of Admission by Wall Street Journal Reporter Daniel Golden which demonstrates that the most meritocratic of America’s universities—those at the top of the US News and World Report list—maintain admissions offices that are carefully structured to favor the already privilege, including well-heeled donors, the powerful, alumni, the wealthy, and celebrity.…
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.
Goodbye Germany, Hello Chico
Last year I took a break from my regular job teaching Chico State undergraduates, and taught graduate students at a private university in Germany. Classes were tiny, students hard-working, and engaged in the esoterica of social theory. I really liked it a lot. One of my students even managed to get a book review published in an important sociology journal, Sociological Review from the UK. Every essay, from all 14 students per semester, started with a concise outline, and the entire essay was carefully divided into an Introduction, Body, and Conclusion.…
Whining about Practitioners
Mark Dawson has touched on a common whine of “practitioners” about academics whose research is not “good” for anything, at least not good for anything they want. This is a common complaint in which so-called practitioners (as if academics don’t “practice” anything), who assert that if it ain’t good for achieving their policy goals they have already concluded are important anyway, it shouldn’t be done.
But, too often the demand for research in policy making circles is what Stephen Jay Gould once criticized as “advocacy masquerading as objectivity.”…
Something about Homecomings and The Innocent Anthropologist by Nigel Barley
One of my favorite anthropology books is The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut by Nigel Barley. It is a memorably written story of Barley’s experience doing fieldwork in rural Cameroon. The strength of the book is that it includes the personal problems that emerge out of the frustrations, boredom, tribulations, and mis-interpretations that emerge in the context of “doing ethnography.” In this sense it is much different than the dispassionate, theoretical, and scientific ethnography typically assigned undergraduates in which the ethnographer somehow always ends up being always erudite, and insightful. …
US Embassy in Germany Protects Americans from Soccer Fans Armed with Bratwurst
Tonight is the semi-final Euro-cup match between Germany and Turkey. People here in Germany really like soccer, and do things like watch it on outside screenings. But the US Embassy is on its toes! Americans in Germany are warned that such sporting events can result in boisterous behavior, and even a fight now and then. At a minimum, the US Embassy tells us, such events can result in bad things like traffic jams!…
High Schools and Declensionist Narratives
Years ago at a conference, I heard a paper about “declensionist narratives. “ Declensionist narratives are the stories we tell each other about how/why today is an even bigger mess than the past. Since most people prefer complaining to praising, such narratives are quite common. They include your uncle who talks about how kids were more obedient in the old days, newspaper reporters who claim that a new type of “super-predator” has emerged in the ghetto, and teachers who claim that today’s student are more defiant or stupid than those during the good ol’days. …
Freshman Drinking and Coming of Age Rituals
Every society has coming of age rituals, and institutions where they occur. Each society nees to figure out how to transfer rights and responsibilities from anxious adults, to their children. This requires adults to surrender some of their authority, and youth to take up some responsibility. This is often a process fraught with dangers, and every society handles it differently. The view from here in Germany is that the United States seems to focus disproportionately on the use of alcohol by youth.…
Epiphanies Happen Even When Speaking German
I have been in Germany since August, and taking German lessons since September. I force myself to go to events that are in German, even though I know that I will not be able to understand everything, and that as the evening wears on, I will slowly come to the realization that I understand nothing of import.
Last Saturday evening, I had a minor epiphany. I went to a barbecue, and sat around and talked for two hours, understood almost everything, and even was able to participate in the conversation.…
Message to HTS Anthropologists: You Need an Experimental Control
Colonel Martin Schweitzer testified before two House Armed Services Committee Subcommittees on April 23 about the Human Terrain Team operating in Afghanistan. After reading it, I was not sure whether to jump up and down and yell yippee! because the military is discussing the role of culture in rural Afghanistan, or simply groan because so little of how social scientists think seem to have gotten through yet.
The statement was interesting for outside social scientists to read for a number of reasons, especially for how the military talks about culture, how the military’s understanding of culture works, and general social science research methods.…
School Bureaucracies and Childhood
Well, I just got another contract to write another great thriller. The first title was “Bureaucratizing the Child,” and it is about how schools shape childhood and adulthood in the United States. This is no longer the title, but it is not clear yet what it will become. First, I need to come up with about 350 pages by August 2010! I picked the subject because I have been profoundly affected by the education system, as I expect most people are.…
More on AAA “Do No Harm” Policies, and Human Terrain System
All this Ethnography.com writing about the Human Terrain System, AAA, and the various ethical questions involved leads me to reflect on my own impressions of the US government overseas during the ten years I have been an expatriate.
Except for the one year I was a Fulbright Scholar, I have always been impressed at at how embassy people generally avoid other expatriate Americans like me, or anyone with a bent that does not match their world view. …
The Battle for Kosovo on the Internet
Cees van Dijk is a Dutch free-lance academic living in Kosovo, which declared its independence in February, 2008. He would like to share this commentary about the use of the internet to frame and counter-frame claims about Kosovo’s legitimacy by Serb and Kosovo activists. He finds the argument interesting in the context of the Kosovo that he experiences daily where “Albanians are insulted as Jihadists by Serbians despite the fact that just like in European or North American cities, hardly any women are veiled or wearing a hijab, women roam the streets freely, men, defamed as radical Islamists enjoy a drink once in a while (it has to be noted that Kosovo’s Peja beer brewery is one of the largest ones in the Balkans) and there are no road bombs or kidnappings.”…