English speakers seemingly use the word Burma or Myanmar to describe that country. My impression is that it is somewhat interchangeable. If you use Burma instead of “Myanmar” it is some how ok—you just sound a bit old-fashioned, which is perhaps how the United States Embassy in “Burma” sounds to ears inside Myanmar. On the other hand, some who are in opposition to the current Myanmar government prefer the more traditional name of “Burma,” and favor it when speaking English.…
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.
Quick Repatriation of Rohingya Refugees is Not a Durable Solution
I published the following last July in The Irrawaddy, an active publisher about current events in Myanmar, and publishes (and broadcasts) in Burmese, and English. One of my PhD students, Mon Mon Myat publishes there regularly in both languages and urged me to do submit the following article.
The article is about the Rohingya refugee camps established in Bangladesh in late 2017 for 600,000 to 700,000 refugees. Since then, there have been attempts to induce refugees to voluntarily repatriate back to Myanmar. …
Ethnography.com is reborn for 2019!
Well, it looks like Ethnography.com is going through a third or fourth re-design! Christina Quigley is taking over the web-master duties and getting the blog ready for 2019! This comes after a 1-2 year hiatus when little new content was posted. This will hopefully change, as both Christina and I begin to post ethnographic observations from around the world. In Christina’s case, this will be some combination of Chico, California, and Tanzania. …
My Life as an Honored Potted Plant
Meetings are rituals, and rituals need symbols, and decorations, in other words potted plants. I’ve been to a lot of meetings in my time as an academic where I sat bored and confused, but still clap on cue. The most obvious place I am such a decoration is in May graduation ceremonies. I sit in a hot black robe in May, with the faculty and react in unison with those around me. …
Gallows Tale III: The Hanging Files of Tanganyika, and Are We Hanging the Right Man?
Quick capital trials were undertaken in the remote corners of Tanganyika Territory, even those places that did not have their own gallows. But the sentence could only be carried out at one of the officially designated gaols where execution by hanging was carried out on a permanent or temporary gallows built and conducted to official specifications. A willing European officer also needed to be available to release the trap door. As you will read in this series, transport of prisoners along the rough roads, trails, rails, and ships of Tanganyika could be slow and complicated—it might involve a five week walk, a trip on a third-class boat trip accompanied by four officers of the court, or presumably other similar arrangements.…
Gallows Tale II: The Hanging File of Tanganyika 1920-1928 and the Risk of Escape!
- The risk of escape of a condemned prisoner who is required to undergo a long journey on foot [of 230 miles] to the place of execution must be considerable
Britain had took control of German East Africa and renamed it Tanganyika Territory in 1920. This meant that the German justice system, which had been found throughout the territory would be replaced with a British system. Among other things, this meant that death by firing squad would be replaced by hanging.…
Gallows Tale I: The Hanging File of Tanganyika Territory 1920-1928 and the Extra “Whack”
…Another point requiring your attention in the cross bar which holds the trap door in position. When this is released and falls into its groove in the wall, it should be caught by a socket of some kind, to prevent its rebounding on contact with the stone. At present it is quite possible that, in the rebound, it hits the hanging man as he drops from above. True, if the hanging is properly done, the man is probably dead before he receives the blow from the iron bar: but you will agree every possible precaution should be taken against any suggestion of inhumanity.
Are There Two Kinds of Stupid? Gump, Nietzsche and “Stupid is as Stupid Does,” or “Power Makes Stupid?”
There are lots of good reasons to read Bent Flyvbjerg’s 1991 book Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice. But for this blog, I want to focus on his description of why people in power are stupid in one particular unique way. He writes that people in power have the opportunity to define what is rational, which means that they inevitably define some things that are irrational as irrational. And because they have power, no one challenges them when they make a mistake, with a result that “Power makes Stupid,” as Nietzsche said.…
Ethnography as a Contact Sport: the Mla Bri and the Long Family of Phrae, Thailand
Ethnographers and a Lack of Common Sense
How many ethnographers are crazy? This question came up for me in a Facebook post recently by Gene Long, a missionary/linguist/ethnographer who has lived with the Mla Bri (Yellow Leaf) hunter-gatherers of Thailand since 1981. In other words, he and his wife Mary Long have 34 years of participant observation data about people who have the rare habit of hunting and gathering for subsistence—an anthropological rarity.…
A Baker from Dresden
I returned home to Friedrichshafen on the train from central Germany last Sunday. My wife, daughter, and I had second class tickets on the slow train—which meant a lot of stops. On the second stop, an elderly man got on the train, and asked if he could sit across from me. Sure, I grunted. I liked him, but still had some hopes of escaping a conversation and not revealing my horrible American accent.…
The Last Auschwitz Trial, Moral Guilt, and Criminal Guilt
On June 2, 2015, I attended the trial of Oskar Groening, a German SS officer who was assigned to Auschwitz in 1942-1944. He is being tried for being an accomplice to murder of 300,000 people at Auschwitz, the number of people sent to the gas chambers during the time he was there. Another 100,000 were sent to work during the same period, where many more died from hunger and the cold.…
Mirror Neurons and the Looking Glass Self: The Neural Sciences meet Sociology
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. …