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. …
Author: Tony Waters
Tony Waters is czar and editor of Ethnography.com. He came to us from the Sociology department at California State University at Chico where he has been a professor since 1996. In 2016 though he suddenly found himself with a new gig at Payap University in northern Thailand where he is on the faculty of the Peace Studies Department. He has also been a guest professor in Germany, and Tanzania. In the past, his main interests have been international development and refugees in Thailand, Tanzania, and California. This reflects a former career in the Peace Corps (Thailand), and refugee camps (Thailand and Tanzania). His books include: Crime and Immigrant Youth (1999), Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan (2001), The Persistence of Subsistence Agriculture: Life Beneath of the Marketplace (2007), When Killing is a Crime (2007), and Schooling, Bureaucracy, and Childhood: Bureaucratizing the Child (2012). His hobby is trying to learn strange languages–and the mistakes that that implies. Tony is a prolific academic, you can read more of his work at academia.edu.or purchase one (or more!) of his books from Amazon.com.
Is “Indiana Jones” a Psychological Hazard for Male Archaeologists?
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. …
What’s the Difference between Police and Military Action?
I think that there is a difference between the nature of policing and the military rooted in the nature of legitimacy. But does the US government in fighting in Afghanistan really understand this too? See the discussion at CurrentIntelligence.net, where I posted “Differentiating Between Police and Military Action.” Find out what Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, the DC sniper, and the Unabomber all have in common.
Tony Waters is czar and editor of Ethnography.com.
New Magazine of Current Events, with an International Bent: Current Intelligence.net
Mike Innes, who has written books and articles about security issues, and worked in places including Afghanistan, Bosnia, Belgium, and Kosovo. He alsoworked for NATO for seven years, and his written books, chapters and articles about strategic defense issues. But now, he is also the founding editor of a new magazine, Current Intelligence, at www.currentintelligence.net. Current Intelligence is a magazine of current events, broadly put. Updates will be daily, but also grouped into monthly electronic issues. …
Constitutional Amendments Or Doing Stuff?
Three organizations I am a part of are now going through the process of “constitutional revisions.” These include the local water association, the Sociology Department, and the California Sociological Association. Actually the water association is not going through revisions, but last night one of the new members actually found a copy of “The Constitution,” and sent an email noting that we no longer follow the rules, mainly because we never get a quorum. …
Campbell’s Law, Planned Social Change, Vietnam War Deaths, and Condom Distributions in Refugee Camps
Donald T. Campbell was a psychologist in the heyday of the 1970s. During this time, the belief emerged that society was a social engineering project that could be planned and evaluated. The general idea was that if you collected enough data, you could plan and control social change in a way that led to desired results. Economists from USAID believed this about economic development, military planners in Vietnam believed it, and Sociologists in the War on Poverty believed it. …
Why I Like Anthropologists Better than International Studies Types: AAA vs. ISA vs. ASA
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. …
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. …
How to Get Deported for Christmas
File this one under…I don’t know what. My story begins with the desire to get cheap airplane tickets to visit our family in Germany this winter. Simple: Leave at an uncomfortable hour, fly Christmas Eve, save $200 per ticket, and still arrive at Grandma’s in time for Christmas breakfast. Anyway, we arrived at the Sacramento airport, produced tickets, passports, and so forth, and off we were to Chicago. In Chicago, out came the boarding pass, our passports were scanned again, and last flight was off to Frankfurt am Main. …
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.…
The Connection between Crime and Immigration: A Complicated but not Conflicted Issue
My first book was based on my Ph.D. dissertation, and called Crime and Immigrant Youth (Sage 1999). I of course really like it when people read it, even though it is becoming dated. In this context, I read the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) new “Backgrounder” called Immigration and Crime: Assessing a Conflicted Issue by Steven Camarota and Jessica Vaughan in November 2009 with interest. This paper has since received wide exposure in the popular press. …
Ethnography, Tanzania, PhD degrees, and Something to Read at Bedtime
Someone told me once that a PhD is a license to write for other PhDs. As Donna Lanclos notes, this is different than making a living, and getting a full-time tenure-track job. Nevertheless, as Donna herself demonstrated with her own book about childhood in Northern Ireland, this is a license that we can actually on occasion use.
But, while a PhD may be a license to write, what is really fun is getting people to read what you wrote.…