Mark Dawson commented on his Facebook page about attending the International Studies Association meetings in New Orleans this year, and promises to write something for this blog later this week. This brought back memories to me. I attended the ISA meetings about ten years ago in the hope that they would be interested in my research about the nature of NGOs and refugee assistance in Africa. I was interested in what were the best ways to deliver refugee aid in a fashion which was efficient, effective, and culturally appropriate. …
Category: Cultural Questions
The Case of the Stung Ducks: A Study of Law from Sukumaland in Tanzania
This is a story about the nature of law, what is like to feel like an outsider in court. It is about laws of liability which are rational, reasonable, and legtimate by local standards. However, as I think that the following example shows, such assumptions about liability and law are always embedded in the unspoken culture that is the epistemology which gives cultural life meaning.
The encounter discussed below took place in Tanzania in 1986 when I was working for the Lutheran World Federation’s refugee development programs. …
Learning Foreign Languages
I was reminded of the importance of foreign language learning twice in the last week or so. This morning I read a commentary in the New York Times about how poorly Americans do at foreign languages. Several of the authors remind us that Americans have long done poorly at foreign language learning, and that demands for foreign language learning are declining in the United States, despite attempts by the Chinese government (and others) to get Americans into language classes.…
A Rejuvenating and Inspiring Experience.
I had the opportunity to attend a youth summer camp that the company I work for (http://www.uaii.org) holds every year in Big Pine, CA. The camp is for American Indian children (ages 5 to 17 years) residing in the Los Angeles, Bakersfield, and Fresno areas and it is a week long. This is the second time I’ve attended, as I did attend last year’s camp as well, and just like last year I was so inspired about the overall
experience and specifically a couple different things.…
Well I’m not blogging either, so there.
Cindy’s not the only one not blogging. Here are a few things I’m not writing about:
1)Transparency. Mark wanted me to write about it ages ago, and I’ve thought about it, and don’t know what to say. Part of what troubles me about HTS is the overt lack of transparency (does that make them transparently opaque?), in the name of national security. Is this just a question of degree? Because, really, none of us who do or who have done research among our fellow human beings are completely open books.…
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. …
What are the most pressing issues for anthropology to work on?
A couple of months ago I spent the evening at CSU Fresno with students and faculty and we had a wonderful wide ranging conversation about anthropology, ethics, war, peace and a few minutes on circumcision just for good measure.
One of the questions we asked ourselves was who is really working on the most pressing issues of the day? Do we really need another study on gender and identity as expressed among pre-schoolers when the ice cap is turning to a slushie?…
Thomas Barnett: The Pentagon’s new map for war and peace
Every year in Monterey, CA there is a famous conference called TED. Think of it as the Burning Man of the Digerati and Intelligencia crowd. Invitation-only and a few thousand bucks to attend. The speakers are often very high profile, or obscure and thought provoking. Thomas Barnett has been a Pentagon adviser on how the military and how its used must change for many years. In this talk on the need to two kinds of military force, you can get a glimmer of where cultural expertise can be applied in an ethical and transparent manner: The abstract of his presentation from the TED website sums it up well:
“In this bracingly honest and funny talk, international security strategist Thomas P.M.…
The Verb “To Chill”
Most Americans know of the common English slang „to chill.“ It is clearly a verb, and used to describe teenagers what teenagers do when they go somewhere together. My understanding of chilling is that it is something you do with friends, it is unplanned, and you do low key sort of things like lie on a couch, talk, watch videos, play games, and eat doritos.
My daughter Kirsten came home from her German school yesterday to tell me that she had learned a new adjective at school “chillig” which is a borrowing from English of the word “to chill” but with the German adjectival ending making it into the English equivalent of “chill-ish.”.…
An Ethnography of the African Art Trade
Monica Udvardy from the University of Kentucky is involved with the repatriation of stolen vigango statues from US museums, to their owners in Kenya. Vigango are funerary statues which are typically removed (with or without the permission of the owners) from hillsides in Kenya, into a thriving local art market, and on to North American museums. Her story involves field ethnography, teaching, activism, and the ethics of both anthropology and business.…
Quick what do you think of when I say “Sloan Valve Company”?
This is not a trick question, just my very unscientific survey of passive brand persistence:
Please put your answers in the comments
No Googling! Lets just see what comes up as a top of mind response
If you want to add the information, age and gender could be interesting.
Tak and the Power of Publicity
Yesterday morning my four year old daughter begged me to watch a tv program she had seen advertised earlier this week on Nickelodeon, entitled, Tak and the Power of Juju. For better or for worse, I was popular culture savvy enough to know that the characters and setting of this cartoon are based on a popular set of video games.
Here is my understanding of the show, cobbled together from my one episode and a little reading on their website: Tak (voiced by Hal Sparks of Talk Soup fame) is a teenager of indeterminate age who lives as part of the Pupununu tribe in a jungle setting including at least one volcano (“lava rock” was referred to multiple times in the episode I saw).…