~ a group blog on a variety of topics related to anthropology, sociology, and ordinary people ~
Or, perhaps this post could be sub-titled, “Why Bill Gates can’t believe what anybody tells him,” simply because no one can really be honest around big money.
Or, as the young Karl Marx wrote in 1845:
…That which is for me through the medium of money – that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy) – that am I myself, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power.
Last Friday, I went to an Education conference to talk about my book Schooling, Bureaucracy, and Childhood: Bureaucratizing the Child. It is a book which emphasizes that questions whether schools can change as fast as school reformers have often wish. The point is to explain that as bureaucracies, schools are embedded in persistent habitus, which resists changes, even of the most articulate and passionate reformers.
Somehow, this degenerated into a discussion of what social scientists call agency.…
I have been staying in Germany the last few weeks, hanging around academic types. Two that I came across were Chinese PhD students are studying at German Schools of Theology. Christian theology. One is trying to figure out the nature of Eschatology in a Chinese context. Eschatology is about the what happens to people after death, judgment, and final destiny (it is true—I just checked the dictionary). The other dissertation is a historical thesis about the nature of tolerance and intolerance in Augsburg, Germany in 1520-1530.…
Colonial Burma has a strange hold on the colonial British imagination—it is a remote and exotic place where the British were not very successful in holding sway. And the place it emerges occasionally is in the inability of the west to “understand” the east. Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce Wayne’s butler in the film Batman Returns (2008) had some experience in colonial Burma which sheds some light on how the British might have thought about their imperial adventure there.…
I am teaching a Population class here in Chico, California, this semester. Sometime during the class, I generally ask students about how many children there are in their families, and what their own fertility intentions are. To avoid the complications of the modern family, divorce, remarriage, and so forth, I break it into three questions, which are:
1) How many children does your mother have?
2) How many children does your mother’s mother have?…
This blog was originally posted in 2010. However, the issues raised I think are timeless. “Debates” about crime and immigration reappear it the presses around the world periodically, usually without much context. Rather a person who happens to be an immigrant is caught doing a crime, and then inferences is made to all members of a group. The fact of the matter though is that immigrants tend to be ore law-abiding than native born populations. …
Schools primarily teach vocabulary and inflection, styles of dress, aesthetic tastes, values, and manners only 1 percent of American teenagers attend independent private high schools of an upper class nature. (G. William Domhoff Who Rules America? 1998, 80–81).
The schools for the “1 percent” of teenagers, in America or elsewhere, are isolated from the rest of us, and in these cocoons the ultra-rich cultivate norms and connections. In 2007, I had a peak inside one such institution in St.…
This is an extract from our book Prison Vocational Education in the United States. Palgrave MacMillan 2016, by Andrew J. Dick, William Rich, and Tony Waters.
The passivity of the education administrators was at first striking, but I came to understand it as a normal response to this system where the concept of safety as defined by custody officials always holds sway. Custody was in charge and they held all information confidential.…
German has two words for the English word “education.” Erziehung describes the school system, and the mechanics of what is taught and conveyed from the world of adults to that of children in order to “bring them up.” Focus is on skills adults need like literacy, numeracy, history, and the factual basis citizens need to understand to participate socially, culturally, and economically in society. The German education system is designed to educate all children in such basic skills.…
Translated by Tony Waters, Jiranan Sirikunpahisan (Taew), Airin Horatschek (Airin), Kwanjira Wiwattana (Palm), Mayweya Koryaklang (Fang), Kuansiree Suanek (Meaw), Supon Phonchatchawankun (Su), Thirawit Pung-nagm (Thor), Krittaporn Ruankaew (Yo), Hande Yilmaz (Hande), Sasithorn Katika (Cake), Nattaporn Chantajitpreecha (Nati)
Note: This is a translation by a Thai author, ‘Rong Wongsawan about his trip in California in 1976. It was read at a recent meeting of the Informal Northern Thai Discussion Group in Chiangmai, Thailand. …
Here is a test on graduation songs. I have actually been to many graduations, and each of them has special songs performed. Most of them I have long-since forgotten. But four of them I remember. Here are some of the places I have been to graduations. See if you can match the song with the locale.
Song
“Onward Christian Soldiers”
“Pomp and Circumstance”
“Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd
“Alleluia Chorus” by Handel
“Climb Every Mountain” from The Sound of Music
School
–California State University, Chico, where I have taught for 20 years
–Zeppelin University in Germany, where I was an exchange professor
–Bear River High School in Grass Valley, California, where my kids went to high school
–Payap University International College in Thailand
–Karen Kawthoolei Baptist Bible College in a Karen refugee camp in Thailand.…
My wife and I recently completed re-translating Max Weber’s classic essay “Politics as Vocation” which is part of a book Weber’s Rationalism and Modern Society. The essay is about how the nature of politics, which is about the exercise of power, creates the type of human-being who is accustomed to telling other people what to do. Bill Clinton also lists it on his Presidential library site as one of his favorite books of all-time.…
