Category: Blogs by Tony

Smadar Lavie’s essay, “Writing Against Identity Politics: An Essay on Gender, Race, and Bureaucratic Pain,” appears in the latest issue of American Ethnologist (Volume 39, Issue 4). The essay focuses on Israel’s single mothers on welfare who are Mizrahi—Jews with origins in the Muslim World. Here is its abstract:

Equating bureaucratic entanglements with pain—or what, arguably, can be seen as torture—might seem strange. But for single Mizrahi welfare mothers in Israel, somatization of bureaucratic logic as physical pain precludes the agency of identity politics.…

As frequent readers of Ethnography.com (if there is such a thing) know, our esteemed founder Mark Dawson has disappeared from these pages after last posting on April 1, 2012.  Amazingly, he has even disappeared from the internet. But as exclusively reported , AAA has hired him, and he is on a top-secret mission to save anthropology from the Mayan Apocalypse which is scheduled for–tomorrow, December 21, 2012.

As interim editor of ethnography.com,…

Can getting a master’s degree help your career outlook? Or is it more of a drain on your mental outlook? These are the questions education analyst Bree Hernandez explores in the next article.

 Today’s university students have more to balance than ever before, and Bree’s blog profiles many of the competing pulls. Still, the mental health and psychological well-being of students is not often addressed in enough detail. Bree’s piece seeks to spark discussion on this important topic.…

What is the relationships between the subsistence farmers and the bureaucrats of the World Bank, USAID, DFID, JICA, and the host of government-sponsored development aid projects?  Such projects are sponsored by clever, well-educated, powerful, and wealthy people.  And yet they often fail—and the clever powerful people turn around and blame the subsistence farmer.

But I do not think that this is the whole story.  The broader question is how do the impoverished farmers manage to frustrate the smart rich people who have degrees so consistently? …

I think that there is a difference between the nature of policing and the military rooted in the nature of legitimacy and emotions, specifically the emotion of fear.

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 terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, the DC sniper, and the Unabomber all have in common.…

Ever worry about how those Cs you had as a sophomore would look on  a grad school application?  Or maybe a D?

Worried because every grad school says “we only take the best,” or some such nonsense (look, no one can take the “best,” even if there is such a thing).

Ever wonder how long those bad grades can follow you through an otherwise fascinating and enriching career in “the real world.” …

Jill Koyama from  Educational Anthropolicy, a website created by Jill P. Koyama of SUNY Buffalo.  Like many anthropologists, she is pushing into educational issues here in the United States, and around the world.  She is a sociocultural anthropologist committed to providing a public platform in which anthropologists, educators, and students can engage.

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.

Mark Dawson disappeared into his undisclosed location about six months ago, presumably to deal with AAAs secret plan to save the discipline from the Mayan Apocalypse.  Presumably this is how he is going to demonstrate how “practioners” are so much more valuable than academic theorists—and still rake in the AAAs big buck!

Since he disappeared and is now defenseless and muted, I can now repost one of my favorite blogs, “Whining about Practitioners.” …

In case you’ve forgotten the sage advice of Cindy van Gilder, here is a reminder

CINDY’S TOP TEN THINGS ANTHROPOLOGISTS SHOULD NOT DO WHEN THEY ARE DRUNK

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.

The conference took interesting turns. Homage was paid to Goethe, Weber, Marx’ Theses on Feuerbach, and Bourdieu on the habitus of academic silos. Not the sort of thing that would have happened in our GE meetings at Chico State where the Engineers, Soil Scientists, and Business Profs would have shook their heads in bewilderment. Here in Geramny they did not. In CHico, I think that only the Sociologists and Anthropologists likely would be smiling at such references!…