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?! …
Category: General Anthropology
Aspirations to Practicing Anthropology are OK!
Rick Holden is a practicing (non-academic) cultural anthropologist who is relatively new to the field. . This is the first in a series of nuts and bolts blogs by Rick about ”leasons learned.” He wants to encourage graduating anthropology students to think about how anthropologists go about making a living ouside of the academy. Tony Waters
Most of what’s written about getting into practicing anthropology is written by well established figures at the end of a successful career, most of whom describe falling into it after receiving their PhD’s and a brief stint in academia.…
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. …
Good News from Tanzania!
Here is some good news from a former student at the University of Dar Es Salaam:
“My daughter is growing up, she is now 9 years, though still not able to walk, sit, or talk, It is a very hard task but I am happy to be her mother and she is still my inspiration.
“On top of all that, at last I have been able to meet a man who have decided to spend his life with us, I had problems with men accepting my kid, but this time it seems different and I hope all goes well.…
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. …
Your professors job is not to be smarter than you.
It is funny how many prof’s and students forget this wee detail, but it is true. At the end of the day, you as the student are there to LEARN and to achieve YOUR goals. The job of your instructors is to GUIDE you and show you how to be a better and more rigorous thinker. Sadly, in the real world in order to get through Grad school you are going to be kissing a lot of professor ass because, well, they got sh*t on all through grad school and so now its your turn.…
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. …
New Magazine of Current Events, with an International Bent: Current Intelligence.net
Mike Innes, who has written books and articles about security issues, and worked in places including Afghanistan, Bosnia, Belgium, and Kosovo. He alsoworked for NATO for seven years, and his written books, chapters and articles about strategic defense issues. But now, he is also the founding editor of a new magazine, Current Intelligence, at www.currentintelligence.net. Current Intelligence is a magazine of current events, broadly put. Updates will be daily, but also grouped into monthly electronic issues. …
Constitutional Amendments Or Doing Stuff?
Three organizations I am a part of are now going through the process of “constitutional revisions.” These include the local water association, the Sociology Department, and the California Sociological Association. Actually the water association is not going through revisions, but last night one of the new members actually found a copy of “The Constitution,” and sent an email noting that we no longer follow the rules, mainly because we never get a quorum. …
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. …
Undergraduate Seminar: Doing that 1st fieldwork project for class
At some point as an undergrad, particularly if you are taking a social science class you may be asked to do some kind of field project as an assignment. The kind where you have to go out and talk to live, squishy people… preferably strangers, write down what they say and do some form of perfunctory analysis of it.
Now of course you have some decisions to make as we talked about in other entries on this topic: you’re thinking about the grade you want, how much time it is going to take, and how to fit it in with your hectic schedule of binge drinking and procrastination.…
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. …