I was back on the Chico State campus last week, and the new first year students are here, parents hovering nearby as they prepare to cast them out to wilds of Chico State. The newly minted frosh are of course relishing this—they realize that Chico Rocks, and that they have finally managed to land where they are meant to be, if only they can finally ditch their parents, and seek out what the college president insists are that elusive “Chico Experience.”…
Category: Rants
This Week in Ethnography: Second Digital Ethnography Week _ Trento 17-21 sept. 2012
There is not much to report in “This Week in Ethnography”, a segment I am inventing as a means of reporting on the global pulse of this most important subject. The one item that jumped out of my feeds at me was that I missed the application deadline (of July 22, 2012) for the:
…Second Digital Ethnography Week _ Trento 17-21 sept. 2012
The second “Digital Ethnography Week” (DEW), an intensive week focused on the study of digital methods and digital ethnographic approaches.
UCLA loses to USC, but is Still Afraid to Challenge Chico State in College Rankings!
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?! …
Is it Time to Deport the State of Arizona from The United States?
One of the other blogs I participate on is a local one in our local county. There is lots of local politics on the blog, of little interest outside of our little county in California. Except that our Congressman, Tom McClintock, is a national figure. He is the guy who stood up in on the floor of the House of Representatives in Washington to complain when President Felipe Calderon of Mexico told the US that they had a lot of really stupid immigration laws which do not do a lot to regulate immigraton one way or the other. …
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. …
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. …
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. …
Well I’m not blogging either, so there.
Cindy’s not the only one not blogging. Here are a few things I’m not writing about:
1)Transparency. Mark wanted me to write about it ages ago, and I’ve thought about it, and don’t know what to say. Part of what troubles me about HTS is the overt lack of transparency (does that make them transparently opaque?), in the name of national security. Is this just a question of degree? Because, really, none of us who do or who have done research among our fellow human beings are completely open books.…
As folks head into the AAA, a few thoughts about anthropology in the military –Part 1
Yes, I know. I rant about the AAA and yet I still download the PDF of the conference program. I wonder why we all do things like that? It’s not like I’m looking to change the stance of the AAA or the stance of people that get hysterical over anthropologists working in the military or intel communities. To me, those are all done deals, my mind is not going to change (at least not by the arguments presented so far) and I am not going to change someone else’s.…
Hurry, Deadline July 25th! Scholarships Announcement
I just received this from the EPIC folks!
Scholarships Announcement 2008 Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference
We [EPIC, not ethnography.com] are pleased to announce 3-5 scholarships for the EPIC conference in Copenhagen, 15-18 October 2008. Any student (undergraduate, master’s, Ph.D.) can apply! Scholarship recipients will receive free registration, in exchange for working 12-16 hours before or during the conference.
Deadline for applications: 25 July 2008
Application process: Please submit a curriculum vitae and a cover letter to scholarships@epic2008.com…
Well, at least the AAA meeting gave me some perspective
I didn’t say it was a happy one, but it is a perspective. Of course there were the expected strident calls of moral outrage over anthropologists in the military. Then it got worse when a voice vote was taken and passed that “no reports should be provided to sponsors [of research] that are not also available to the general public and, where practicable, to the population studied.” (from the Chronicle of Higher Ed.…
ADD is a financial asset, who knew?
We had a fellow come into the office to conduct a workshop in ergonomics. It sparked more interesting thoughts than you might think. For example, if slouching is so bad for you, why does it feel so good? Further, does it add more fodder to the growing pile of data that anything one might enjoy: bacon, sausage, beer and buffalo wings are all some form of cosmic bait and switch?
He also mentioned that a way to avoid injuries related to being a knowledge worker type is to stop working every 20 minutes, get up walk around, do some stretches, etc.…