Max Weber uses a great German noun Stimmvieh to describe unthinking voting behavior. Literally translated into English, it means “voting cow,” or “voting livestock” which Weber wrote in 1918 or so. At the time, he had this love-hate relationship with the United States, so two of his illustrative examples of “voting cows” both came from there. He saw “voting cows” in both the United States Congress where voting members are herded into party line voting, and in the urban areas of the early twentieth century where ward bosses rounded up recent immigrants to cast votes based on pre-existing ethnic loyalties, rather than the issues involved. …
“What Makes Something Ethnographic?!” It’s a Good Question to be Asking!
This is a 2012 article about “What Makes Something Ethnographic?” by Carole McGranahan at SavageMinds.com. Somehow it popped up on my Facebook feed this morning. I read it, and recommend the thoughtful musing about the definition of ethnography. It reminds that as the editor of a website called ethnography.com I should be thinking and writing about this subject as well!…
When is Peer Review the Gold Standard, and When is it Only Tin?
Fair warning from an anonymous peer reviewer on one of my recent 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…”
As is well-known, “peer review” is the gold standard of academic achievement. It is assumed that peer review gives rigor and legitimacy to new ideas. This assumption persists even in the context of well-publicized fraud scandals involving high fliers in physics, human cloning, and cancer research which indicate that peer reviewers at journals like Science and Nature can be as sloppy as anyone else.…
The College Status Game: Why I Think Chico State is a Better University than UC Berkeley
College is not just about learning, it is about status and hierarchy, too. So what do the fine nineteen year-olds at UC Berkeley think about us at low ranked Chico State? And how do we think about the snobs at UC Berkeley? Dismissiveness, preening, and sour grapes are part of the ranking game.
Status is the posturing we do in order to be a member of a desirable group. We posture because status has implications for how valued resources such as money, prestige, power, and honor are distributed.…
My Afternoon as a Social Welfare Case: Treating my Eye Infection in a Thai Hospital
After three months working in Thailand and paying the premium of about $20 per month, I was given my “social insurance card” which entitles me to treatment at one of the local public hospitals. I did not have a chance to do any participant-observer until yesterday though when for the second day I woke up with an eye infection. With diagnoses of Zika Virus dancing my head (put there by my daughter, I might add), I had to make a decision.…
A Late Tribute to Workers
I had some fun on Labor Day last year. My husband and I went to a Billy Joel concert on the Saturday before Labor Day, and as I listened to the Piano Man sing some of my favorite songs, I realized, his concert was perfectly suited for Labor Day, given the tone of some of the music. So I woke up on Labor Day, and wanted to share some of my favorite working songs with my Facebook friends, then spent the next few hours digging up facts about workers, songs, and linking to YouTube.…
Participant Observation at Its Best: How Max Weber Concluded Nine out of Ten Politicians are Windbags!
It was January 1919, and Max Weber was on a roll in his career as a German politician, journalist, and academic. Germany had on November 11, 1918, more or less surrendered to the Allied forces of France, Britain, Italy and the United States, and Germany slowly began to collapse into an anarchic state. Bavaria sort of seceded under the apologist Kurt Eisner, and set up its own government—this new government was releasing documents from the Bavarian archives so that the Allies meeting at Versailles could better make the case that World War I was indeed started solely by Germany.…
Johnny Cash on the Importance of Listening to Your Mama about Open Carry of Guns
In my Criminology class, I used to lecture about “ecological theories” of crime. For example, the “ecology of bars” lend themselves to violence. Basically, ecological theory says that if you put together young males, alcohol, and guns, someone is more likely to get hurt than if any one of the tree elements is removed. Remove any one of the three, and the danger goes down. Which is why the youngest males are not allowed in bars, there are hours after which alcohol is no longer served, and you are to leave your guns outside the bar. …
“Could be Worse!” Adventures in Maximum Security Prisons and Our Forthcoming Book
This essay begins in February 2009, and picks up again in November 2011. And now it is going to pick up again in 2016, as I anxiously await the publication of our book “Prison Vocational Education and Policy in the United States: A Critical Perspective on Evidence-based Reform.” The book is authored by Andrew Dick, Bill Rich, and myself, and despite the title, is really quite a good read. …
Battle Ritual Among the Nacirema
By Guest Writer Finn Johansson
Battle ritual among the Nacirema
In anthropological and ethnological research, scientists face new cultural specialties every day. Yet there are some rites, so deeply inherited by the practicing community, that ritual behavior might astonish even the most experienced researchers. Accessing those abnormalities from an empirical point of view in order to simplify cross-cultural communication is one of the main tasks of the rite-specified anthropologist. In order to do so, he often has to overcome his own fears and preserve his open-mindedness, even if every civilized muscle of his body wants to escape a situation so far away from what he is used to.…
Farmer Power: The Continuing Confrontation between Subsistence Farmers and Development Bureaucrats
Day by day, the peasants make the economists sigh, the politicians sweat, and the strategists swear, defeating their plans and prophecies all over the world—Moscow and Washington, Peking and Delhi, Cuba and Algeria, the Congo and Vietnam (Shanin 1966:5)
Economists, politicians, and strategists since at least the end of World War II dream of the world’s rural farmers becoming a wealthy, healthy, and modern middle class. Implicit to this dream is peasants moving off the farms of China, India, Africa, and Latin America to staff factories in an ever-wealthier world. …
The Honor Codes and Sins of Academic Administrators and Professors
Max Weber wrote about the nature of both the bureaucracy and politics in his essays. Central to his writings were descriptions of what a administrator actually is, and their reasons, incentives, and habits for doing the things they do. As a professor, of course I work for such administrators—they are the chairs, deans, provosts, and vice presidents who run the California State University. In their job they try to discern what their superiors want—and then carry out that order, regardless of whatever personal opinion they may hold about the goals of the university.In…