Every society has coming of age rituals, and institutions where they occur. Each society nees to figure out how to transfer rights and responsibilities from anxious adults, to their children. This requires adults to surrender some of their authority, and youth to take up some responsibility. This is often a process fraught with dangers, and every society handles it differently. The view from here in Germany is that the United States seems to focus disproportionately on the use of alcohol by youth.…
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.
Epiphanies Happen Even When Speaking German
I have been in Germany since August, and taking German lessons since September. I force myself to go to events that are in German, even though I know that I will not be able to understand everything, and that as the evening wears on, I will slowly come to the realization that I understand nothing of import.
Last Saturday evening, I had a minor epiphany. I went to a barbecue, and sat around and talked for two hours, understood almost everything, and even was able to participate in the conversation.…
Message to HTS Anthropologists: You Need an Experimental Control
Colonel Martin Schweitzer testified before two House Armed Services Committee Subcommittees on April 23 about the Human Terrain Team operating in Afghanistan. After reading it, I was not sure whether to jump up and down and yell yippee! because the military is discussing the role of culture in rural Afghanistan, or simply groan because so little of how social scientists think seem to have gotten through yet.
The statement was interesting for outside social scientists to read for a number of reasons, especially for how the military talks about culture, how the military’s understanding of culture works, and general social science research methods.…
School Bureaucracies and Childhood
Well, I just got another contract to write another great thriller. The first title was “Bureaucratizing the Child,” and it is about how schools shape childhood and adulthood in the United States. This is no longer the title, but it is not clear yet what it will become. First, I need to come up with about 350 pages by August 2010! I picked the subject because I have been profoundly affected by the education system, as I expect most people are.…
More on AAA “Do No Harm” Policies, and Human Terrain System
All this Ethnography.com writing about the Human Terrain System, AAA, and the various ethical questions involved leads me to reflect on my own impressions of the US government overseas during the ten years I have been an expatriate.
Except for the one year I was a Fulbright Scholar, I have always been impressed at at how embassy people generally avoid other expatriate Americans like me, or anyone with a bent that does not match their world view. …
The Battle for Kosovo on the Internet
Cees van Dijk is a Dutch free-lance academic living in Kosovo, which declared its independence in February, 2008. He would like to share this commentary about the use of the internet to frame and counter-frame claims about Kosovo’s legitimacy by Serb and Kosovo activists. He finds the argument interesting in the context of the Kosovo that he experiences daily where “Albanians are insulted as Jihadists by Serbians despite the fact that just like in European or North American cities, hardly any women are veiled or wearing a hijab, women roam the streets freely, men, defamed as radical Islamists enjoy a drink once in a while (it has to be noted that Kosovo’s Peja beer brewery is one of the largest ones in the Balkans) and there are no road bombs or kidnappings.”…
Sour Grapes and Fake Names
Last week, Mike responded to one of my postings about the difference between the quality of education at Chico and Berkeley with a two word response: “sour grapes.” Presumably, this is because he does not agree with me that Chico has higher quality undergraduate programs than Chico State. Maybe, it is because he went to Berkeley, I don’t know. Anyway, I would hope to have a good discussion on-line or by email about why he disagreed with me.…
Would a President Obama Bring an Anthropological Perspective to the White House?
I was impressed with Barack Obama’s statement on race in America. It showed an awareness of empathy, race, and culture that I am more accustomed to hearing about in university seminars in say, anthropology, than political addresses in the middle of a campaign. I hope that Obama is correct in assuming that the American people are ready for such an approach.
Obama himself of course has had unusual exposure to anthropological thinking. …
Culture and Car Bombs
Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb by Mike Davis is about culture albeit in a very macabre fashion. It is about how the car bomb (actually a horse-drawn cart), “invented” by a Mario Buda who bombed Wall Street in September 1920 is became a tool of create urban terror. Buda’s wagon killed 38-40, and injured 200 passers-by. The response by the US government of course was quick and harsh–and Buda was never caught. …
Thomas Barnett, the military, and anthropology
Mark Dawson posted the video of Thomas Barnett’s talk to Ethnography.com on Febrary 2 in the expectation that you might be pissed off, or you might be impressed. I appreciated seeing it. I was mostly impressed, and not too pissed off even though I disagree with a number of Barnet’s basic assumptions about how the world and the military work. Anyway, Barnett seems like an articulate guy, and I recommend you have a look.…
Popular and Traditional Culture
Living in another country means that you are always drawing comparisons with your own culture. Sometimes it seems like globalization runs rampant. Commonalities are seen all around you, in our case between our home in California, and our temporary home in southern Germany. An example is my daughter’s analysis of the television show “Deutschland Sucht den Superstar” (DSDS), which in English is “Germany searches for a Superstar.”
“Just like ‘American Idol,’” Kirsten said. …
Letter of Recommendation, Academic Influence Peddling, and Related Pet Peeves
Letter of recommendation writing season has come and passed. I probably did 10 or 15 letters for a variety of academic jobs, graduate school applications, and served as a reference on a couple more job applications. I do not mind writing the letters, because I know that my students need to get past this hurdle. I also always try to do well by them, although without fabricating things. But there are things that bug me about this whole process, such as the forms that ask us to make untenable numerical estimates of a students abilities (i.e.…