~ a group blog on a variety of topics related to anthropology, sociology, and ordinary people ~
This challenging mind bender puzzle is great fun to do over coffee, with friends, or on the toilet…alone. Imagine you are working as a cashier at a liquor store, late in the evening, the night after St. Patrick’s Day. Note: all California Super Lotto transactions are not entered in the cash register, but they must be paid for and so entered in the debit/credit machine only; lotto cannot be played on “credit” and there is a 50-cent “debit” fee.…
There need be no explanation for most occupations– but ethnographer? At least one of Argentina’s beloved poets would not have asked what I do if we’d met at a cocktail party, so I’d told him I was an ethnographer. It’s 1969, an assortment of olives and cheese crumbles between us, I swirl my dram glass nervously, to be conversing with the great Jorge Luis Borges, who seems to perceive the troubling nakedness under Ethnography’s cloak of neat dichotomies, authoritative conclusions, and its lone hero.…
This blog is about why ethnographer Erving Goffman’s observation of stigma are important not just to ex-cons, but also to professors like me on foreign exchange programs. Goffman, as many sociologists and anthropologists know, observed the maneuvers of the marginalized and stigmatized in society, and then wrote about how they thought about their disability. He saw that the marginalized were constantly managed their spoiled social identities because they feared public exposure of their disability.…
“I never thought I’d be a second class citizen,” he lamented. “Where I come from, education is the most important thing. A man with a PhD is respected, listened to.” He shook his head gravely. “What did I do to cause such treatment, that I wouldn’t be listened to by my colleagues?”
He dug a shovel into the ground and leaned into the wooden handle. “What did I do?” he asked again.…
Someone told me once that a PhD is a license to write for other PhDs. As Donna Lanclos notes, this is different than making a living, and getting a full-time tenure-track job. Nevertheless, as Donna herself demonstrated with her own book about childhood in Northern Ireland, this is a license that we can actually on occasion use.
But, while a PhD may be a license to write, what is really fun is getting people to read what you wrote.…