~ a group blog on a variety of topics related to anthropology, sociology, and ordinary people ~
Last week, Tony Waters commented to me that something has changed in me this year.
“You’re acting like an Assistant Professor,” he said to me late last week. “You’re not slinking through the shadows like all the other lecturers any more. After ten years you are starting to participat in faculty governance, and everyone was glad to come over to your house to meet the job candidate last week. It works!…
Festering discontent at Chico State seems to have reached a point of boiling over in recent weeks following the abrupt resignations of two provosts since 2012, the loss of dozens of faculty across the campus in recent years, and a 2015 Campus Climate Survey which revealed significant dissatisfaction among the faculty and staff. The underlying issues revolve around the concept of “shared governance,” a term which the administration at Chico State and the California State University Chancellor’s office claim to value, but many faculty and staff say isn’t happening.…
One of the neighbor kids came to play at our house last week, playing and painting and hanging out with my 7 year old daughter, Evelyn, and almost 5 year old son, Cristopher. Kevin, the 5 year old neighbor, was painting with the kids, creating a landscape with people in it. Evelyn was teaching the younger kids how to mix primary colors to make new paint colors.
“Evelyn, I need ‘skin’ color; can you make ‘skin’ color for me?”…
Vigilantism in a Tanzanian Village, 1997
from
When Killing is a Crime, by Tony Waters
Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1997
…By Essau Magugudi in Kigoma
NOVEMBER 27, 1997, is deeply etched in the memories of Shunga villagers. It was on this day that they took law into their own hands and hacked to death three bandits who they suspected of carrying out acts of robbery in villages surrounding refugee settlements of Mutabira and Muyovozi.
In this extract from Max Weber’s classic essay “Politics as Vocation.” Max Weber is about to let loose regarding the insistence of the victorious Allies of World War I that Germany accept fault for starting the war in 1914, and feel “guilty” for doing so. He doesn’t like this, and compares it to the ethics of a romantic cad.
…
You will rarely find a man, who no longer loves a woman and therefore turns to another, will not feel the need to justify himself by arguing: “She was not worth my love, or she disappointed me”—or what other reasons there may be.
The first time I was told to “teach like you do in America” was in 2003-2004 in Tanzania where I was a Fulbright Scholar at the Sociology Department at the University of Dar Es Salaam (see Waters 2007). UDSM is a large sprawling African university, spread across “The Hill” near the Indian Ocean coast. UDSM prides itself for schooling presidents from Tanzania, Uganda, Congo, and South Sudan and its many graduates who played critical roles in first the decolonization of Africa, and now the political leadership of many countries.…
One of my favorite sociological essays is Teodor Adorno’s 1941 “On Popular Music.” Adorno didn’t much like the popular music he heard on the radio in Los Angeles, and said so. He found it simplistic, monotonous, limited and manipulative. With an emphasis on manipulative. For besides being a classically trained musician, Adorno was also a leading critic of capitalism, and especially its need for endless consumption so that large corporations could generate profits.…
A few years ago, one of my colleagues called to ask me a favor. She was organizing a “Town Hall Debate” about legalizing marijuana, and was having a difficult time finding someone from the university to sit on the panel who would argue in favor of legalizing marijuana. It took me a few seconds, but I responded “sure, why not?” and a few more seconds before I realized, as a non-smoker, I actually don’t have an opinion of whether we should legalize marijuana or not; how would I ever advocate one way or the other?…
“Teach like you do in America!” is the default instruction I receive when teaching overseas. I have heard it in Germany, Tanzania, and last summer in China. It is the default instruction by my hosts who assume that university classes are “about the same” everywhere in a globalizing world. What can I say? It ain’t completely true, and I wrote 4,000+ words to make this point in Palgrave Communications, a new Open Source journal.…
While writing my dissertation, my routine goes something like this most mornings:
August 2nd, 2015
This is the principle reason why California has a water shortage: agriculture where it shouldn’t be. One side of the freeway is the natural, unirrigated terrain; the other side is irrigated almonds. We should never be growing luxury crops in desert climates.
We’re in the San Joaquin Valley. There’s no natural source of water here, like in Chico; these almonds have to be watered about three times the amount of the trees in the northern Sacramento Valley.…
Aggrieved students find books dangerous; neoliberal administrators say they’re useless. I’d take the former any day
Corey Robin is a political science department chair from New York. He finds that bottom-line focused higher education administrators to be a greater risk to an educated society than aggrieved students. He has a provocative essay in Salon “Higher Education’s Real Censors What We’re Missing in the Debate over Trigger Warnings and Coddled Students.”…