The Human Terrain System is under critique again, and this time not from the AAA, but from a pro-military Congressman who finds that the program was rife with waste, fraud, and abuse. As the Army Times reports, Congressman Duncan Hunter reports “It’s shocking that this program, with its controversy and highly questionable need, could be extended.” Apparently Human Terrain contractors burned through $726 million in the name of providing actionable social science to the military.…
Category: General Anthropology
Is an NSF Grant Just Another Cult Fetish?
I made a somewhat off-hand comment one of Ryan’s posts about graduate education on Savage Minds.Org some time ago. I warned graduate students about “fetishizing” various types of grant sources like NSF, NIMH, Fulbright, and the various others sources of grad student funding which students compete to get. This initially got me a deserved sharp rebuke from Ryan. After all, who was I as a fully tenured, overpaid, and underworked full professor to complain about graduate stipend which (obviously) are few and far between? …
The Educated Class in the United States: It still pays to be wealthy!
Here is a really cool graphic describing the advantages of class and wealth in the United States from DegreeQuery.com. It is a good reminder that there is indeed a strong correlation between wealth and advantages in the American education system. It is also very nicely presented!
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.
Return of Vigango statues from Denver museum to Kenya
There is a nice article in the New York Times about the repatriation of Kenya’s Vigango funerary statues from a museum in Denver here.
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.
Troping the Enemy: Culture, Metaphor Programs, and Notional Publics of National Security
By Robert Albro
American University
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) – established in 2006 in the spirit of the Pentagon’s DARPA to sponsor research for groundbreaking technologies to support an “overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries” – is a little-known US agency that social and behavioral scientists (especially sociocultural anthropologists) should pay more attention to. This is because IARPA is notably social scientific in orientation and has been developing concepts in specific ways for use by the intelligence community (IC) that US anthropology in particular is significantly historically responsible for introducing to the social sciences, if in different ways, most obviously: culture, its coherence and the extent of cultural consensus, its relationship to society and to human agency.…
Gates On Diamond
2013 was a year marked by yet another Jared Diamond book and yet another round of anthropological hand-wringing over Jared Diamond’s public profile. I won’t launch into a criticism of Diamond. Instead, I will sum up the year of Jared Diamond with the following Bill Gates takeaway:
…He (Diamond) describes several areas in particular, like raising children, dealing with the elderly, and eating well. He doesn’t romanticize these societies, as I thought he might, or make some grand pronouncement that they all do these things better than we do.
It’s finals time and that means paper grading…
The latest hottest whine on the internet is this essay “The End of the College Essay” in Slate. The complaint is that students hate writing papers, and professors hate grading them. Both statements are true perhaps, but sometimes unpleasant things are also good for you in the long run. Things like writing papers, and grading them, perhaps?
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.
The Longing for Moral Authority, the Right Kind of Leaders, and Fuehrer-figures
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote about the longing modern people have for “a leader but the right kind of leader” recently. In describing this kind of leader, he was writing about the human longing for a someone they can follow who breaks conventions, and is able to satisfy the craving for “genuine leadership” and “moral authority,” rather than (presumably) the leadership that resorts to police violence, craven manipulation, bureaucratic smallness, and deceit. …
Linguistically Speaking in Yosemite National Park, USA, part 1
By Merrily McCarthy
This series discusses linguistic experience in one specific work example, The Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park in California, USA. A National Historic Building built in 1927, The Ahwahnee, whose halls echo the sounds of many languages has for 86 years invited the voices and languages of many global cultures to gather within its stone walls. Over the next month or so I will blog about ethnographic observations from there in a series of posts as I explore linguistic interactions in a real live working environment.…
The Mlabri and Suicide: Durkheim in Northern Thailand
The Journal of the Siam Society just published an article about suicide among the Mlabri of Northern Thailand by Gene and Mary Long, who are missionary linguists who have worked with the Mlabri for over thirty years, and myself. The Mlabri (or Mla Bri) have a attracted a great deal of attention from anthropology over the last 50 years because they subsisted as hunter-gatherers on the fringes of highland societies until recently. …
Generosity and Culture
An interesting commercial has been released in Thailand which emphasizes the importance of giving in life. As a number of Facebook friends have pointed out, it is a real tear-jerker whether you are in Thailand or anywhere else.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=1439519962939897
Being Thai, this is undoubtedly inspired by Buddhist concepts of karma. But the story, for different reasons, also perhaps reflects Calvinist ideas of pre-destination, or what is sometimes called “theology of works.”…
Academic Deans, The NSA and Censorship
Jay Rosen has written a fascinating article in the Guardian today about Johns Hopkin’s response to this blog post by Professor Matthew Green.
The short version of the story is that Green wrote a blog post about the NSA and cryptography on September 5th. Last Monday, Green received a takedown request from the dean of the engineering school claiming that his blog post contained “classified” information and that his use of the NSA logo was a violation of some kind.…