General Anthropology – Page 28

The Case of the Stung Ducks: A Study of Law from Sukumaland in Tanzania

Posted on February 16, 2010 by Tony Waters

This is a story about the nature of law, what is like to feel like an outsider in court. It is about laws of liability which are rational, reasonable, and legtimate by local standards. However, as I think that the following example shows, such assumptions about liability and law are always embedded in the unspoken culture that is the epistemology which gives cultural life meaning.

The encounter discussed below took place in Tanzania in 1986 when I was working for the Lutheran World Federation’s refugee development programs. …

How to Get Deported for Christmas

Posted on February 12, 2010February 15, 2010 by Tony Waters

File this one under…I don’t know what. My story begins with the desire to get cheap airplane tickets to visit our family in Germany this winter. Simple: Leave at an uncomfortable hour, fly Christmas Eve, save $200 per ticket, and still arrive at Grandma’s in time for Christmas breakfast. Anyway, we arrived at the Sacramento airport, produced tickets, passports, and so forth, and off we were to Chicago. In Chicago, out came the boarding pass, our passports were scanned again, and last flight was off to Frankfurt am Main. …

Learning Foreign Languages

Posted on February 8, 2010February 8, 2010 by Tony Waters

I was reminded of the importance of foreign language learning twice in the last week or so. This morning I read a commentary in the New York Times about how poorly Americans do at foreign languages. Several of the authors remind us that Americans have long done poorly at foreign language learning, and that demands for foreign language learning are declining in the United States, despite attempts by the Chinese government (and others) to get Americans into language classes.…

The Connection between Crime and Immigration: A Complicated but not Conflicted Issue

Posted on February 8, 2010February 24, 2010 by Tony Waters

My first book was based on my Ph.D. dissertation, and called Crime and Immigrant Youth (Sage 1999). I of course really like it when people read it, even though it is becoming dated. In this context, I read the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) new “Backgrounder” called Immigration and Crime: Assessing a Conflicted Issue by Steven Camarota and Jessica Vaughan in November 2009 with interest. This paper has since received wide exposure in the popular press. …

PhD, or not PhD

Posted on January 10, 2010 by Donna

A column in The Chronicle of Higher Education, as pointed to by my friend Matt Bandy, has an interesting take on the essentialness (or lack thereof) of a Ph.D. The column is specific to the humanities, but is easily transferable to the social sciences, and I think most particularly, to Anthropology. Matt makes his points specific to archaeology, but I think that getting a PhD in any kind of anthropology these days is a particular kind of folly.…

I Hope That The Human Terrain Teams Read The Deceivers by John Masters: An Anthropological Novel

Posted on January 10, 2010January 10, 2010 by Tony Waters

One of my favorite all-time historical novels is The Deceivers by John Masters. Published in 1952, the protagonist William Savage is an administrator in a remote district for the British East Indian Company. The book is set in 1825. Savage speaks four Indian languages, and has spent 19 years in the colonial service. As a colonial administrator, he is “the law” in his district. But to do this, he lives in an Indian village, embedded in Indian cultures and languages.…

Mark said we’re not blogging about HTS anymore

Posted on January 9, 2010 by Donna

but I thought this was a good story, not specifically about HTS, but about one anthropologist’s work with the military, as a professor at the Marine Corps University at Quantico.

Not surprisingly, I agree with the points she makes about grey areas, and about how each anthropologist needs to “draw their own line.”

Donna

…

Pete Seeger Sings Classical Social Theory

Posted on December 30, 2009October 29, 2014 by Tony Waters

Classical Sociology is typically considered to be a course about the three “classics” of sociology who are Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and W. E. B. DuBois. Marx tells us why capitalism and materialism is important for organizing society, Weber explains that the spirit of capitalism and a religious-like ethic in uniformity which he calls “rationality.” As for Durkheim, he actually explains what religion and morality are, as well as why it is important to have “deviants” who will mark out the boundaries to society of what is moral.…

Johnny Cash, my family witch craft and why it is so ordinary.

Posted on December 19, 2009 by mark

My family – mother and father sides – are from the Appalachian regions. We are from, as my father said “Coal miners and dirt farmers.” I was the 3rd person in either family to ever get a college degree, my father and older brother being the 1st and 2nd. When dad was younger he worked the Ohio river: on tugs, in bars and a little bit of coal mining and petty larceny as he worked his way to becoming a doctor.…

“The Onion” continues to support all four fields of anthropology

Posted on December 17, 2009December 17, 2009 by mark

Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of ‘Friendster’ Civilization!!

mark

www.ethnography.com

…

Here is a call for papers, a nice reason to see Liverpool in the Fall.

Posted on December 13, 2009 by mark

The 5th Annual Joint University of Liverpool Management School and Keele University Institute for Public Policy and Management Symposium on Current Developments in Ethnographic Research in the Social and Management Sciences.

In Association with the Journal Ethnography

Work, Organisations and Ethnography

Wednesday 1st – Friday 3rd September 2010

Venue:
Queen Mary, University of London. Mile End Road, London, England

Call for Papers

In recent years, ethnography has become an increasingly popular mode of research enquiry within the social and management sciences.…

Contemporary Ethnography Across the Disciplines Hui

Posted on December 13, 2009 by mark

This announcement showed up in my e-mail, nicely formatted too:

Contemporary Ethnography Across the Disciplines Hui

17 – 19 November 2010

University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

Kia ora koutou (Greetings to everyone)!

New Zealand’s first international ethnography hui will give participants the opportunity to meet with like-minded researchers and experience the rich cultural tradition that is Aoteaoroa, New Zealand. The hui, or conference gathering, will take place at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand from 17-19 November, 2010, with exciting pre-conference workshops scheduled for the afternoon of Monday 16 November 2010. …