Category: General Anthropology

I wrote a blog about the city of Yangon last month.  I visited there in February, and quite liked the city.  It is a vibrant city, busy, without being threatening.  I met some teachers there too whose company I really enjoyed, as well as a number of other people.  We talked about teaching, complained about students not studying enough—in other words the usual things.

Yangon is the commercial capital of Myanmar, and a five million person (or so) island of bustle and tranquility, albeit one where the ubiquitous Asian motorcycle is banned. …

Recently I ran across a Western diplomat, this one from an embassy in Southeast Asia.  I dream of having intellectual conversations with such people.  After all they hold the levers of governmental power, particularly the big aid budgets in Myanmar, Thailand and other countries in Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, the conversations are usually one sided.  Usually, I get an earful of talking points generated by a distant capital (think London, Washington, New York and Geneva) which shows that they are “up to date”—even ahead of The New York Times, which it seems is their main source of news and analysis.…

Here is a link to a book with a real original thought!  The Lost Ethnographies.  Most projects of course never get anywhere.  For example last month I wrote a brief blog about my trip to Yangon, and why I though it seemed like an interesting and engaging city.  I promised a follow-up blog about its putative relationship with the rest of Myanmar, particularly the areas in revolt, and the populations in diaspora.

Reposted from The Irrawaddy, February 11, 2019

James C. Scott is one of the major social science writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.  His first book Moral Economy of the Peasant published in 1976, studied Vietnamese peasants, and how they resisted social change while being rooted in a different “moral economy.”  In subsequent decades he expanded his work to include other countries of Southeast Asia.  And still later in his 1998 book Seeing Like a State he described how state-directed planning in Tanzania, Brazil, China, and the Soviet Union worked—and did not work. …

Hey, I published a book last October, Max Weber and the Problem of Modern Discipline. It is about Max Weber’s view of authority, and why so many of us obey.  What follows is a lightly edited version of the introductory chapter where I have a bit of fun comparing subsistence peasants to well-paid UN bureaucrats..  To get to the more uplifting parts, you will need to read more—I suggest you order it from your library, or if you are feeling wealthy, get a copy from Amazon.com…