Ethnography.com

Hey, I published a book last October, Max Weber and the Problem of Modern Discipline. It is about Max Weber’s view of authority, and why so many of us obey.  What follows is a lightly edited version of the introductory chapter where I have a bit of fun comparing subsistence peasants to well-paid UN bureaucrats..  To get to the more uplifting parts, you will need to read more—I suggest you order it from your library, or if you are feeling wealthy, get a copy from Amazon.com…

I spent last semester in Chico, California, where occasionally the issue of Burma/Myanmar would come up. A number of people in Chico are well-enough read that they have familiarity with the issues there primarily through writing in the western press, particularly The New York Times.  The western press highlights the role of the Nobel Laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.  She was a hero of the West for her opposition to the military government which ruled the country from 1962-2015, and continues to play a very very influential role.…

I published the following last July in The Irrawaddy, an active publisher about current events in Myanmar, and publishes (and broadcasts) in Burmese, and English. One of my PhD students, Mon Mon Myat publishes there regularly in both languages and urged me to do submit the following article.

The article is about the Rohingya refugee camps established in Bangladesh in late 2017 for 600,000 to 700,000 refugees.  Since then, there have been attempts to induce refugees to voluntarily repatriate back to Myanmar. …

Quick capital trials were undertaken in the remote corners of Tanganyika Territory, even those places that did not have their own gallows. But  the sentence could only be carried out at one of the officially designated gaols where execution by hanging was carried out on a permanent or temporary gallows built and conducted to official specifications.  A willing European officer also needed to be available to release the trap door. As you will read in this series, transport of prisoners along the rough roads, trails, rails, and ships of Tanganyika could be slow and complicated—it might involve a five week walk, a trip on a third-class boat trip accompanied by four officers of the court, or presumably other similar arrangements.…

There are lots of good reasons to read Bent Flyvbjerg’s 1991 book Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice.  But for this blog, I want to focus on his description of why people in power are stupid in one particular unique way. He writes that people in power have the opportunity to define what is rational, which means that they inevitably define some things that are irrational as irrational. And because they have power, no one challenges them when they make a mistake, with a result that “Power makes Stupid,” as Nietzsche said.…