~ a group blog on a variety of topics related to anthropology, sociology, and ordinary people ~
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. …
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.…
published December 15, 2014 in the Synthesis (no longer in print)Mountain House and Brush Creek are part of an unincorporated area 25 miles or so east of Oroville, California. They are tiny burgs off the old Oroville-Quincy Highway, on the way to Buck’s Lake Wilderness, Quincy, and countless outdoor opportunities in Plumas County. These areas, steeped in mining and logging history, are rural and quiet, known for marijuana grows and conservative politics.…
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.…
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. …
Yesterday was the six-month anniversary of my friend Marc Thompson’s murder. Marc was a good friend of mine and a former Sociology student. A few years ago, we made a documentary together called If These Halls Could Talk. The movie also starred our mutual friend Joe Rogers. Like Marc, Joe is a Soc major and in addition to everything else he does writes for The Orion, the independent student newspaper at CSU, Chico; Marc would’ve graduated from there this last December with a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology.…
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.…
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 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.
I started adjuncting in spring 2006, about two weeks after turning in my MA thesis at California State University, Chico. I was hired to teach sociology by an Anthropology professor I’d taken in grad school who was also the chair of the social and behavioral sciences (SBS) department at Butte Community College. I reread my journal from that time and oh man, I was so happy to have a job right out of grad school.…
My mother would have called me a picky eater, if the term had been popular when I was a kid in the early 1980s; instead, people often said I was spoiled. I turned my nose up to onions, didn’t care for orange juice, and had a physical aversion to ground meat (that was my mother’s fault, though; she brainwashed me to believe, from a very young age, that ground meat was dirty).…
The Order of the Eternal Social Conscience, Part 4
A Ghostly Play in Five Acts
Featuring
Karl Marx, of London, England
Max Weber, of Heidelberg, Germany
Emile Durkheim of Paris, France
W.E.B. DuBois of Atlanta, USA
Special Guest Appearance
Charles Dickens of London
As Narrated to Jerri Bedwell of California, USA
Act 4
Funerals
or
…Strictly in a business point of view… (A Christmas Carol)
This perhaps the most haunting part of our tale when Scrooge, who by now we have come to sympathize with, learns what a mess he has made of his life and what his impact on others has been.…