Ethnographers love to travel.They will always assert that travel is necessary to understand a culture.You need to travel, to feel the culture. And without such exposure, we reason that what is written is less valid because it cannot possibly be written with the critical perspective that local context provides.Or as Bronislaw Malinwoski himself once wrote, field observation is necessary “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world.”…
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Rants, Ranting, Flame Wars, and the Like
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. …
Fatuous, Naïve, and Bold at the Same Time: Welcome to the Wonderful World of Peer Review
Fair warning from an anonymous peer reviewer on one of my academic articles…
The author is hampered by an inaccurate, naïve, and highly simplistic understanding of the basic principles…which leads him to make ludicrous statements like the following…
Yes, that’s me: inaccurate, naïve, and highly simplistic! And so forth. If you share that sentiment, do not read further!
I actually posted a blog about this for the first time in July 2008 after being pummeled in the peer review process.…
“Teach Like You Do in America,” While Still Doing it the Tanzanian Way!
The first time I was told to “teach like you do in America” was in 2003-2004 in Tanzania where I was a Fulbright Scholar at the Sociology Department at the University of Dar Es Salaam (see Waters 2007). UDSM is a large sprawling African university, spread across “The Hill” near the Indian Ocean coast. UDSM prides itself for schooling presidents from Tanzania, Uganda, Congo, and South Sudan and its many graduates who played critical roles in first the decolonization of Africa, and now the political leadership of many countries.…
Fatuous, Naïve, or Bold? The Wonderful World of Peer Review
Fair warning from an anonymous peer reviewer of one of my academic articles…
The author is hampered by an inaccurate, naïve, and highly simplistic understanding of the basic principles…which leads him to make ludicrous statements like the following…
Yes, that’s me: inaccurate, naïve, and highly simplistic! And so forth. If you share that sentiment, do not read further.
I posted a blog about peer review for the first time in July 2008 after being pummeled in the peer review process.…
Troping the Enemy: Culture, Metaphor Programs, and Notional Publics of National Security
By Robert Albro
American University
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) – established in 2006 in the spirit of the Pentagon’s DARPA to sponsor research for groundbreaking technologies to support an “overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries” – is a little-known US agency that social and behavioral scientists (especially sociocultural anthropologists) should pay more attention to. This is because IARPA is notably social scientific in orientation and has been developing concepts in specific ways for use by the intelligence community (IC) that US anthropology in particular is significantly historically responsible for introducing to the social sciences, if in different ways, most obviously: culture, its coherence and the extent of cultural consensus, its relationship to society and to human agency.…