I lived in Thailand as a young Peace Corps Volunteer in the early 1980s. To learn Thai, I would go into small local restaurants where I would sit at a table. As a lone single foreigner, my presence raised curiosity of the people working at the restaurants, or other patrons. Oftentimes is was a 30 or 40 year old woman who owned the stall, and made their living selling bowls of noodle soup. …
Category: Blogs by Tony
Dominance and Subordination, Max Weber Style
I am teaching a sociology class in northern Thailand to a group of nine Chico State students who are here for a special summer session. As with most of my sociology classes, I have assigned Max Weber’s classic essay “Classes, Staende, Parties” at an early point in the class. Particularly what Weber writes about what in German is called “Staende” is relevant to Thailand. Staende are the groups we form in which we have loyalty to others in the same group, to whom we are loyal, and share a way of life. …
Changing Thailand, Not Changing Thailand: Of Water Buffalo, Work Elephants, and Cultural Persistence
Karen Connelly was a Rotary Exchange student in Phrae Province, northern Thailand, in 1986-1987 as a 16 and 17 year old. She published an enchanting memoir about her experiences in Phrae Province Dream of a Thosuand Lives: A Sojourn in Thailand in 1993, a book that won the coveted Governor General’s prize for Canadian Literature. I can indeed understand well why the book won the prize. Her descriptions of Phrae bring alive the world of northern Thailand in the 1980s. …
Book Review! Rejecting Refugees: Political Asylum in the 21st Century
Carol Bohmer and Amy Shuman. Rejecting Refugees: Political Asylum in the 21st Century. London: Routledge, 2007. 304pp. $39.95 (paper), ISBN: 0415773768.
Citizenship is a tricky concept rooted in the relationship between the individual and her or his government. Citizens have a responsibility to respect the state and what Max Weber called its “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force”; in return, the state guarantees individual rights and respects the right of citizens to participate peacefully in self-government.…
UCLA loses to USC, but is Still Afraid to Challenge Chico State in College Rankings!
It is college ranking season again, sponsored by US News and World Report. Once again, US News left Chico State out of their ranking system, I think because the big kids thought that they would lose if it came to any measure of undergraduate education. After all as I have long asserted, Chico State beats UC Berkeley when it comes to quality of undergraduate teaching; what possible advantage could some university in southern California hope to have over any of us in northern California?! …
Working Class, Upper Class, Community Colleges, and Harvard U.
For anyone interested in social stratification and university systems, Julie Garza-Withers has written “Is the Community College Still the Best Bet for Working Class Students?” over on the “Working Class Perspectives” Blog. This blog raises similar issues to what I wrote about in my essay here “The Sociology of Status Hierarchy and Why I Think Chico State is a Better College than UC Berkeley?” Or more to the point, Garza-Withers’ blog asks why such a premium is put on where you learned something, rather than what you learned? …
Is it Time to Deport the State of Arizona from The United States?
One of the other blogs I participate on is a local one in our local county. There is lots of local politics on the blog, of little interest outside of our little county in California. Except that our Congressman, Tom McClintock, is a national figure. He is the guy who stood up in on the floor of the House of Representatives in Washington to complain when President Felipe Calderon of Mexico told the US that they had a lot of really stupid immigration laws which do not do a lot to regulate immigraton one way or the other. …
Musings about the Theft of Culture from Anthropology
Some years ago, I asked the question, “Who Stole Culture from Anthropology?” in a brief essay in Anthropology News in 2006. I raised the question because many anthropologists had complained to me since about 1987, about how they had trained “too many” anthropologists with the result that they were unemployed. The discipline seemed to be in a perpetual depression, wallowing in its own insecurities, seemingly like no other. This bothered me though, in part I guess because I was a victim of this insecurity. …
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. …
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. …
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. …