It is college ranking season again, sponsored by US News and World Report.  Once again, US News left Chico State out of their ranking system, I think because the big kids thought that they would lose if it came to any measure of undergraduate education.  After all as I have long asserted, Chico State beats UC Berkeley when it comes to quality of undergraduate teaching; what possible advantage could some university in southern California hope to have over any of us in northern California?! 

    Nevertheless, during this season professors steeped in the scientific method and research courses throw caution aside, and loudly brag about whatever significance such rankings may or may not have.  For whatever it is worth the University of Southern California (USC) now out ranks the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), a story that made the front page of the Los Angeles Times.

    Notably, even the staid Atlantic magazine seems to have taken up my cause, with their recent story which asked “What’s Wrong with the American University System?” by Jennie Rothenbert Gritz, an alumna of UC Berkeley, no less.  She agrees with my original posting that the US News ranking system is unrelated to the quality of undergraduate education, too!

      One of the other blogs I participate on is a local one in our local county.  There is lots of local politics on the blog, of little interest outside of our little county in California.  Except that our Congressman, Tom McClintock, is a national figure.  He is the guy who stood up in on the floor of the House of Representatives in Washington to complain when President Felipe Calderon of Mexico told the US that they had a lot of really stupid immigration laws which do not do a lot to regulate immigraton one way or the other.  This was not necessarily politic of Calderon even if it was the truth, but so goes it.  McClintock replied in kind, plus some, by advising Calderon to get in line in order to get a US green card, presumably by waiting umpteen years at the US Embassy in Mexico City where such things are sometimes issued.

      I didn’t like McClintock’s speech on the House floor because it was cheap demagoguery (and yes I am one of the hundreds of thousands who watched it). Immigration reform is a major problem in the United states, in large part created by the United States fascination with cheap labor, and the inability of the United States to come up with an administratively simple guest worker visa for the last fifty years or so. Oh, and then there is lack of US American interest in deporting the people who mow our lawns, staff our restaurants and sweat shops, and re-roof my house.  For that matter many illegal immigrants make donations via fake social security numbers which they will never collect, so their money goes straight to today’s retirees.  Yeah, this is obviously a real simple problem which can be addressed by Arizona’s new anti-immigrant law gone national, as guys like my Congressman seem to believe.  But then since McClintock seems to like demagogic ranting better then the hard slog of solving real difficult problems like immigration, let me make a suggestion.

       Let’s deport Arizona.  Yep, we can cut them loose, and be done with a whole bunch of problems.  After all, Arizona wanted to go in the past—they seceded in 1861 and joined the Confederacy in order to preserve slavery, even though they didn’t have any slaves.  Then when the rest of the states finally let them in the Union in 1912, they said no thanks, because we want to wait to join on the date on which they seceded to join the Confederacy and fought to keep the slaves they never owned (this is a true story—look it up in Wikipedia).  And then what did Arizona do once they were graciously admitted to the Union, despite the bad manners?  They stole a whole bunch of Colorado River water after California appropriated it from Mexico fair and square. In the 1990s they were the last state to make Martin Luther King’s birthday a holiday, which kind of goes with their old fascination with the Confederacy thing.   Now in 2010 they pass an immigration law which is obviously unconstitutional under the equal protection, and search and seizure provisions of the US Constitution.  What can I say?  Typical Arizona.

       That’s Arizona for you.  Is it any surprise that we continue to get really stupid legislation from them like their immigration bill, or the bill banning school teachers with accents like California’s Governor, Arnold Schwarzenneger?  I say, let’s enforce the United States’ laws, and send Arizona back to where it came from.  Which I think is Mexico, by the way.  Do you think President Calderon might take Arizona back?  Maybe he can take time out of the decades long wait at the US Embassy for his US visa to consider this proposition.  It’s a win-win.  We get rid of Arizona, and Calderon doesn’t have to wait in line any longer for a visa to visit Tucson.  

      So now Congressman McClintock and I are even.  We have both had our demagogic rant.  Are we any closer to dealing with the problem of immigration and labor in the United States?

Most of us like to rant now and then.  Usually we do this in the quiet of a bar, with the assumption that as long as we never run for political office, the rants stay in the bar.  But with the invention of the world wide web, there are new parameters to the dissemination of rants.  Witness what has happened here on www.ethnography.com during the last week where Mark Dawson shot his virtual mouth off with the rant right below this posting.  Witness too the responses over at zeroanthropology.net.  Two guys in virtual bars a continent apart rip into each other, calling each other “moron” and “bigoted” across cyber space, while the rest of us vicariously and anonymously enjoy the fireworks.  The good news for www.ethnography.com is that the two rants by Mark Dawson during the last month or so have sent the hit rate, the thing that counts in cyber-space, through the roof.  His first successful rant was an April Fool’s joke about the dissolution of the AAA, and in May there is the “butterfly” rant.  It seems that some people like rants much more than ethnographic commentary; I guess that it gives us déjà vu to when we were eight years old.  In contrast, Mark has done some enchanting writing about the ethnography of clowns, and some girl’s picture on his bedroom dresser which have attracted less than 100 hits even after 3 years.  All people seem to care about are his rants—which can go into four digits within a few days of posting.

Rants by definition are rooted in opinion and emotion.  They are not logical or analytical.  Good rants make us look at the ridiculousness of life.  As Max Forte has implicitly pointed out, Mark Twain was a great ranter.  On the other hand, bad rants make us roll our eyes and mumble “there he goes again.”  Mark did this for me last week with his first rant about Anthropologists for Justice and Peace.  The rant was emotional and made a big deal about other people who were making a big deal over not much.  In other words, there was ranting about others’ ranting.  Big deal.  This type of rant is common on talk radio.  If you want to hear more such ranting from the right, I recommend Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck.  On the left you can go to a Michael Moore movie.  Depending on your political views, you will find them funny or not (for the record I typically put on rock and roll when Hannity intrudes into my evening commute).

But to Mark Dawson’s credit, he caught himself in a boring rant, and posted a mea culpa about butterflies and the Anthropologists for Justice and Peace.  This riposte in my view was a really good rant, and had me laughing.  I laughed at the rant because the rant made more general fun of cultural anthropology’s tendency to put their own political views at the center of their discipline.  Max Forte has in turn responded with an astute and thoughtful paragraph about the contagion of laughter, and what it might (or might not) mean about the one person in the room who is not laughing.  If you want to read it, scroll down into the comments section of Forte’s blog—it is thoughtful.

Anyway, to stick to Mark’s version of ranting, I have seen the political self-absorption described in Mark’s rant in any number of disciplines in the academic world, and agree that is a great thing to make fun of.  Much such ranting is on the left, but over in the Business and Engineering schools, there are plenty of people doing it on the right.  Perhaps I like hearing cultural anthropology made fun because the condition is worse there, but I doubt that it is any worse than Physics, Business, English, Biology, Sociology, or anywhere else.  Maybe I enjoy seeing cultural anthropology made fun of is more likely for more selfish reason, i.e. because my own application for graduate study was rejected in 1987-1988.  Whatever. Like I mentioned earlier, rants are not about analysis, and certainly not about self-analysis.  But, speaking of Mark’s butterfly posting, judging from the hits we’ve taken to the site since the revised version was posted last Wednesday, lots of people are laughing with us, since they have been linking it to their Facebook accounts to share with their friends and family.  In the blogosphere this is a definition of success, so whoop-ti-do, and good for Mark.

I will admit to wishing that my more academic and boring comments on www.ethnography.com would be a bit more popular.  I would really like it if readers posted them to your Facebook account like you do the rants that Mark writes.  For that matter, Mark would appreciate it if you read his ethnography of clowns, and the girl’s picture on his bedroom dresser.  But warning:  Such posts tend to describe ethnographic techniques, research methods, cite guys like Erving Goffman, and talk about the British Library rather than ranting about morons, fascists, and bigots, words which I think should be excised from ranting vocabulary.

Bottom line: Such serious ethnographic postings get far fewer hits than rants.  All I can hope for is that Mark’s rants besides making some of us laugh, point people to the more serious and boring stuff that Mark, Cindy, Donna, Jennifer, and I have posted to www.ethnography.com over the last 5 or 6 years.  But I have little hope.  In our post-modern world rants work, and Malinowski doesn’t.  Just ask Glenn Beck over at Fox News.  He never cites Malinowski!

     My son Christopher graduates next month with a Bachelor’s degree in Archaeology.  I think that this happened because we made him a sandbox as a child, and he seemingly has not grown out of it, as most of us do after age 8.  Only now he is more geeky.  So instead of digging for plastic soldiers and banana peels in the sand, he looks for shards (pieces of pottery, I’m told), and sherds (pieces of glass) on Caribbean islands.  And mostly what he really finds are really old chicken bones. 

       Completely consistent with archaeological geekiness are Christopher’s long disputations about archaeological ethics.  This seems to be a hazard of the major, and includes rants against treasure hunters, mumbling about stratigraphic context, expressions about the need to involve locals in research, the nature of local museum collections, and the importance of being able to converse in local languages.  And of course, as Durkheim might say, every chicken bone is sacred.  This is fine, and I can relate.  We sociologists too like to believe that we are important enough to harm someone, and therefore need ethics, just like doctors and soldiers.  We are not as fascinated by chicken bones, but to each their own.

      So at least until two weeks ago, Christopher seemingly was seemingly headed toward a standard academic career in boring archaeology, which as far as I can tell is not that different from being a young civil engineer, medical lab tech, or other standard fare.  But then he confused us by insisting that for the graduation ceremony, his sister must provide him with a fedora to replace the mortarboard, and a whip.  It turns out that like to many male graduates of archaeology, he thinks his degree and expertise in chicken bones makes him into some kind of Indiana Jones, rather than just another drudge.  In fact, he deludes himself into believing he has a resemblance to this guy, even though his chief archaeological mentor is female professor specializing in (among other things) underwater archaeology a totally cool sub-discipline which Indiana Jones has never even attempted (can Indy even swim?).  And anyway, what does Indy know about with sherds, shards, ethics, or chicken bones?  Is Indiana Jones really that great of a role model for archaeologists?  

      So I asked a couple male archaeologists, about how I could cure Christopher of his Indiana Jones fetish.  Oddly, they did not consider this a problem.  In fact, they just looked at me quizzically, as if to say, why wouldn’t he be like Indiana Jones?  The unspoken response was, “isn’t every archaeologist kind of like Indiana Jones—particularly the really cool part?”  They will acknowledge that Indy as portrayed in the movies is a treasure hunter and a fraud, but they blame this on the writers, not Indy himself.  Like Christopher, they fantasize that indeed, archaeology is just like the movies rather than the sandbox and the lab. And even when the film-maker makes bloopers, like asserting that Indy learned Aymara (or was it Quechua?) while riding with Pancho Villa, they blame the filmmaker and point out that Indy really really rode with Hiram Bingham.  The fictional non-existent Indy never gets the blame.  No, even archaeologists like Cindy Van Gilder blame poor Steven Spielberg, a mere film-maker, for the bloopers and politically incorrect story lines. 

     Out of frustration, I went to the Archaeological Institutes of America web-site.  I figured they would have a dignified response to the claptrap of Indiana Jones “the archaeologist.”  But no, there it got even worse.  They elected Harrison Ford, an ACTOR, to the Board of Directors in 2009.  They even gave him a major award—an occurrence that only one lonely and ignored archaelogical blogger, Dr. Tim McGuiness, has the good sense to protest. 

      So what is it about archaeology that makes them take the fictional Indiana Jones so seriously?  After all, Ford played Han Solo in Star Wars, and was an outstandingly cool alpha male there too, but he was not elected to NASA’s board of directors.  Agatha Christie was never given a special position at the British Home Affairs office because her characters Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple outdid Scotland Yard’s detectives.  Nor do any criminal justice types assert that Dirty Harry was a good thing, “except for the part the writers got wrong.” Nor has the American Criminological Society given Clint Eastwood their highest honors

      Nor is the Air Force going to give a medal to Tom Cruise and place him on the Joint Chiefs of Staff for acting in “Top Gun.”  They have far more restraint than that. And hey, I know about such restraint, since I’m a sociologist, and we can legitimately claim America’s number one actor, none other than Ronald Reagan himself, as one of our very own (Sociology BA, class of 1932 Eureka College).  Note we can even do this without resorting to Reagan’s FICTIONAL film work in his well-known movie, Bedtime for Bonzo, or in any other high profile role he may have had in Washington DC.  Ronald Reagan is, by training, one of us!  But, modestly, we sociologists for over 60 years resisted the temptation to elevate the world’s best-known actor to the Board of Directors of the American Sociological Association.  ASA even resisted the obvious temptation to give Reagan a major award, preferring instead to attract the attention of the world through the elegance of our regression equations, and sophisticated interpretations of post-modern meaning.  Why can’t the AIA in particular follow our dignified lead, and modestly admit that Indiana Jones is ONLY A MOVIE CHARACTER, just like Ronald Reagan was ONLY A MOVIE CHARACTER.  (Ok, so maybe Reagan was more than a movie character—but Indy ain’t!)

       None of the of course addresses the basic problem of how to deal with a Indiana Jones wannabe in the family.  Is this some kind of permanent disorder?  Or is it treatable? Perhaps someone out there in the Ethnography.com community has some advice to offer?

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. I have yet to post my undiluted field notes for all and sundry to see. I did, however, file a human subjects protocol, and I wonder if one could look it up at the office at my PhD-granting institution if one wanted to. I like to think that being forced to think bureaucratically (that is, having to file paperwork certifying that you have thought about it) about risk, and harm, and doing thoughtful research, is one of the best ways to try to ensure, as a discipline, that such thoughtful and responsible research is carried out. Sort of like, if you think someone is watching, you might behave better.

So at what point does the difference in the degree of transparency, between the run-of-the-mill anthropologist (moi), and the HTS practitioner (not-moi), become a difference in kind?

2)How damn hard it is to write when you are not in graduate school anymore. And have kids. And work a little bit. And want to have time to fart around on the internet, go for walks, and occasionally interact in meaningful ways with spouse, friends, family. No one speaks of this while you are in graduate school! Maybe they did, and I wasn’t listening. This sounds like whining, but I really do have a point: in graduate school, all you have to do is read and write. The whole setup is supposed to facilitate that. So those people who were doing grad school at the same time they had other obligations have a leg-up on those of us slackers who Just Did Grad School. Now, in my ostensibly grown-up life post-graduate school, I’d like to write a bit, and read some intellectual stuff that’s not just what I’m making my students responsible for, but the energy and inclination is not there. I’d have to form an infrastructure from whole cloth. Find writing partners. Schedule time for “writing.” Schedule time for “research.” And carve that time out of the rest of my existence. This sounds like a very sorry-ass-tiny-first-world-problem, I’m sure, but part of what I want to point out is that there is no systemic anything that gives young academics in the non-tenure-track workforce support to write. I suspect the non-tenure track thing might also be key, because there are infrastructures in place to facilitate tenured faculty writing. The rest of us are On Our Own.

In graduate school, the motivational structure around productivity is external. Outside of graduate school, and in the absence of tenure requirements, the motivational structure needs to be internal. Clearly, I am finding these conditions challenging.

3) The fact that Barack Obama’s mom was an anthropologist. Ruth Behar has already written movingly about this, so I don’t have to, but I’ve been pondering anthropological thoughts throughout the campaign, and even after the election, and wish that there had been some sort of Anthropologists for the Anthropologist’s Son group around, pushing us as a discipline into some kind of spotlight. Surely, his mother’s passion for anthropology, the one that led her to eventually settle and build a family in Indonesia (among other places), informs the choices that the President-Elect makes/will make about how to move through the world? About his approach to his own racial identity? About his perspective on the role of government in society?

There’s another blog entry waiting to happen, and clearly it is not coming from me.