Meetings are rituals, and rituals need symbols, and decorations, in other words potted plants. Ie been to a lot of meetings in my time as an academic where I sat bored and confused, but still clap on cue. The most obvious place I am such a decoration is in May graduation ceremonies. I sit in a hot black robe in May, with the faculty and react in unison with those around me.…
Category: General Anthropology
Can Bad Grades and Graduate School Go Together?
Someone asked Ethnography.com founder Mark Dawson whether getting “bad grades” means for becoming an anthropologist. Every graduate anthropology program is different, of course, and there are no blanket statements possible. But, good grades are always a fantastic idea if you are trying to get into graduate school, in anthropology or any other subject. After all, the professors evaluating your applications mostly had good grades. And since the graduate school admissions process is in large part considered to be about identifying who will be a professor in the future (even if your goal is to be a practitioner), the admissions committee is typically looking for someone who will end up being something like them.…
Traveling Notes–Expect the Unexpected!
March 20, 2015
I am at Kilimanjaro International Airport, returning home after a five day whirlwind trip here. The reason for the trip was “business,” meaning that establishment of a relationship between two American universities, and a university in Moshi, Tanzania.
I am reminded thought the reason is not just business, but to experience the vitality of life. An important part of travelling is welcoming the unexpected.
And this trip has done it—despite being so brief.…
Hypocrisy in Politics?!?! Imagine That!
Max Weber is today known for his sharp sociological pen in which he created word pictures of processes like bureaucracy, politics, capitalism, power, and inequality which underlie not only his society, but ours today. He was also known as a proponent of “value free” sociology, in which the sociologist would analyze without respect to personal political views.
But Weber was not only a sociologist, he was also an active politician who through the force of his words, access to German power-brokers, and prolific pen brought him renown as an advocate for the German war cause in general, and his own German Democratic Party (DDP) in particular.…
Love, Duty, and Marriage in a Classic Thai Novel
Originally published here at ethnography.com in October 2011.
In summer 2011, I had the pleasure of co-teaching a Sociology/English class for American students in Thailand. One of the real pleasures was using novels to illustrate sociological principles. It was kind of like profession (sociology) meets hobby (reading novels). I hope that the students liked it—I certainly did, and this blog is about what was my favorite Thai novel of the summer, Behind the Painting. …
Something Good to Read from Savage Minds
I am going to be out-of-town working for a few days so I’ve scheduled some posts for the week that we think you should read, in case you missed ’em when they were here before. I’ll be back online Friday.
The folk at Savage Minds (one of our favorites) are doing a spring Writer’s Workshop series over on their blog and we wanted to let you know about it here, because we love writers and we love reading here at ethnography.com.…
Kennewick Man Sighted Buying Groceries in Virginia
by Cynthia van Gilder
Most everyone in the anthropological community is familiar with the controversial human skeletal find known as Kennewick Man. Discovered in 1996 by some hikers on the Columbia River, Washington, Kennewick Man was initially identified as a 19th century Euro-American settler, but closer inspection revealed a projectile point embedded in his pelvis that was common about 9,000 years ago, a date that radiocarbon dating later confirmed. In short, Kennewick Man sparked an epic controversy around two primary topics: 1) who should have legal stewardship of the remains; and 2) what was “Kenne’s” race.…
Where Have You Gone Robert Redford?
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. …
Leaky First Graders, Defiant Teenagers, Jocks, and Nerds
A review of my 2012 book Schooling, Childhood, and Bureaucracy: Bureaucratizing the Child was just published in Contemporary Sociology. The book review was generally pretty nice—so I recommend people read it (sorry to non-university people, it’s mostly behind a paywall). The reviewer highlighted Chapter 4 which is about child development in the context of standardized school grades as being particularly noteworthy. Here is a brief extract from that chapter. You can read a pre-publication version of Chapter 1 here.…
Mission Statements: Elite Harvard, Middle-Class Chico, and Working-Class Butte College
Education is an inherent paradox. At its most explicit, it assumes that students are trained for a fair, meritocratic, and competitive labor market in which learning is valued without reference to who they are or their social connections. This is why fair markets are “anonymous”….
But schools do not operate in anonymous markets. Schools emphasizing the visible honors of academic achievement, teacher-student relationships, are often the opposite. The tensions between the utility of skills in an anonymous labor market while monopolizing the distribution of visible status honors in the broader community is at the heart of the educational enterprise (see Weber 1920/2010).…
Gallows Tale V: Did Tanganyika’s Hangmen Go on Strike in 1924-1926?
Gallows File I The Extra “Whack”
Gallows File II Escape?
Gallows File III Are We Hanging the Right Man?
Gallows File IV The Advantages of Executing Locally!
Gallows File V: Did Tanganyika’s Hangmen Go on Strike?
…It must be remembered that quite apart from the question of gallows, the difficulty of persons to carry out the executions is exceedingly acute. A great number of people have the greatest abhorrence of the job, and no compulsion can be used where there is any conscientious objection.
Ethnography, Stigma, and Protecting a Potentially Spoiled Identity
Originally published here at e.com in April 2007. It’s one of my favorites and still makes me laugh out loud, I hope you enjoy it too. -Julie
This blog is about why ethnographer Erving Goffman’s observation of stigma are important not just to ex-cons, but also to professors like me on foreign exchange programs. Goffman, as many sociologists and anthropologists know, observed the maneuvers of the marginalized and stigmatized in society, and then wrote about how they thought about their disability.…