~ a group blog on a variety of topics related to anthropology, sociology, and ordinary people ~
When I first taught in Thailand in 2011, I sought Thai sociologists to help me figure out what was different from my American-style sociology. In California, I taught many years of Classical Social Theory, focused on Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, and wondered: what might Thai Classical Theory look like?
The Thai sociologists I asked about Thai Social Theory often gave me a blank look and noted that they too used at least Weber and Durkheim. …
By TONY WATERS 24 June 2019
(Reposted from The Irrawaddy of Yangon, Myanmar)
Yangon’s INGOs are full of consultancy reports which offer “professional” opinions about conditions in Myanmar. NGOs, INGOS, and UN agencies investigate transitions regarding democracy, environment, federalism, ethnicity and, of course, gender. These are the subjects that donors are interested in—and thus willing to pay consultant companies tens of thousands of dollars to “research.” This is largely because evidence-based research provides a basis for what well-funded development projects promise their home governments, all on the assumption that the Myanmar people have a “will” to transition from what is bad, to what is good.…
There need be no explanation for most occupations– but ethnographer? At least one of Argentina’s beloved poets would not have asked what I do if we’d met at a cocktail party, so I’d told him I was an ethnographer. It’s 1969, an assortment of olives and cheese crumbles between us, I swirl my dram glass nervously, to be conversing with the great Jorge Luis Borges, who seems to perceive the troubling nakedness under Ethnography’s cloak of neat dichotomies, authoritative conclusions, and its lone hero.…