Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

It’s taken more than half a month, but I’ve finally found time to sit down and write a brief note here to celebrate the fact that my blog is now 11 years old. Perseverance in the blogosphere is easy, especially if you only bother to update your blog once a year! I think in fact I’ve posted more this year than I have last year, but I’m not ashamed of the slowdown here — it’s a problem of success. Twitter has stolen some of the more concise entries and Savage Minds the longer ones, and I have less and less to say publicly as more and more of my life is entangled in the biographies of others. It is one thing to try not to inadvertently create a Google trail for your spouse, quite another to manage to share information about your kids with your family and friends but without creating a resevoir of baby pics in the Internetz memory bank that will come back to haunt them when they start dating.

So… onward! Upward! Who knows what biographical turn might galvanize this blog back into action again? Middle age awaits!

Just a quick note for the occasional visitor to this site. I’m going to try to prune comment spam by using the (Tim) Burke solution: comments are still enabled but I’ve required you to register if you want to say something here on the blog. Hopefully this will encourage community and keep me from having to come through and clean out the viagra spam regularly.

I’m also redesigning the main site with WordPress to make it prettier and shinier as well. You know, in my Copious Free Time.

I’m a professor. I have a lot of books. After testing several bibliography apps I chose BookCrawler to catalog my home library (mostly so I could alphabetize it) with my iPod touch. The program is great — using Pic2Shop as a barcode scanner it easily sucked down info about my books. In one case when I did inexplicably manage to break the app, the developer responded to my email request for help literally within minutes. I’d really consider this a one-stop shop solution for book cataloguing for most amateur bibliophiles.

For professional and expert users, however, there are some things that could be improved. First, afaik Google Book’s metadata is a total mess. Doesn’t it WorldCat have an api? Since my main goal was to alphabetize my books and keep track of them, super-detailed metadata was not that important, but I have a feeling that this app could easily be improved if the developers found cleaner catalogs to consult. Or maybe its not.

Secondly, and more importantly, is exporting your data. The app features a super-convenient option to export your data in SQL or CSV formats, but few of these formats are supported by standard bibliography software. As a result, getting your data out of the app and into Sente, Papers, Zotero, Mendeley, BibDesk, or even EndNote can be a pain. Even more important than getting clean metadata, then, is producing an ability to export records in bibtex format, which iirc is more or less the defacto standard these days.

Overall, this is a great app by a great developer that is undoubtedly one of the best (if not the best) of its kind. I very highly recommend it — and with just a few more tweaks it will have all of the ridiculously specialized features that niche users like me clamor for!

(delivered at Sof this week)

I’ve organized my drosh for today around two song lyrics. I’ll tell you about the second one later. The first is from one of my favorite musicians, Tom Waits, who says in one of his songs: “The large print giveth, the small print taketh away.” Reading this parshah, right at the tail end of the torah, I feel very much that we are very much being given the small print: “inhaling fumes may cause vomiting, do not remove this tag unless owner, Improper use of dye may cause bleaching, try on a small, unseen sample first”

More seriously, though, this parshah poses a dilemma for us: its phrasing suggests that we follow God’s law for instrumental reasons: Do what I say, and you will be rewarded, disobey and you will be punished. Read literally, this parshah suggests that Judaism is ultimatly a back room deal, three of my quids for two of your quo. I suspect most of us find this troubling, for at least three reasons. First, because it reminds us that a part of our religion that did (and does) see worshipping God in these illiberal terms. Second, it implies that we should stop being Jewish if we found a more efficient means of achieving prosperity, and thirdly because, well, I’m sure we all realize there a lot easier things to do than Judaism. How can we understand a parshah that seems to so cheapen our faith? How can we recover the image of God as someone or something we love, respect, and stand in awe of, rather than someone who pays us an allowance when we do our chores?

One possible answer came to me recently when I met a family friend for lunch. She was raised an observant household, but stopped practicing as an adult, married an atheist. Then she had a daughter and bang! she found herself wanting to give her daughter some sort of Jewish upbringing. But how? Her folks were thousands of miles away on the mainland, and her husband was hostile to religion. Over poke we mulled over the question: if you could only do one or two things to raise a child Jewish, just something to give them enough of an anchor in our tradition that they could use later on in life, what would it be?

Here’s what I came up with: making shabbos and hearing people leiyn torah. I’ve thought it over, of course — turning small, impressionable children into observant jews is something that has been on my mind a lot lately for reasons that are currently drooling off on the stage right side of the congregation. When my wife and I first had our children, everyone at sof encouraged us to bring the kids to shul, no matter how old they were. They did it with great warmth. Well, to be honest, they did it with great force, really, is the term I’d use. This was a problem for us because we were totally exhausted and looking for someone to tell us it was ok to skip shul and take the day off. As a result we had conversations like this:

“You should feel free to come to shul. We won’t be bothered. I used to sit in the back and nurse my kid. In fact I gave birth, took a shower, and then proceeded directly to high holiday services, where I sang hineini and did the yom kippur amidah completely from memory.”

“Well, we’re really tired right now, we’re not sure we’re up for a whole service”

“You know you don’t have to sit in the sanctuary. Maybe you could just bring the kids and sit in the child care room”

“Maybe. We’re really tired though. Really tired.”

“You could always just drive up to sof and sit in the parking lot for a little bit — you know, just so the kids could look at the shul for a while.”

“My kids can’t see anything that’s more than a milk bottle’s length away from them.”

“Well why not just sit in your car in the driveway of your house with the engine turned off and think about shul for a while then?”

This is what we were up against: the incotrovertible fact that being Jewish is doing Jewish.

Being Jewish is doing jewish. Most people — I mean Christians — think of Judaism as a legalistic religion, a hide bound and inflexible carrying out of meaningless and incomprehensible rituals in a dead language, etc. etc. They say this about us to make them feel better about their supposedly more emotionally immediate and flexible faith. That is why they skip parshah like Ki Tavo: they think it’s the fine print, the perfect example of Jewish legalism and a punitive, Mosaic god. But we Jews know, as Jonathan Sacks so wonderfully put it, that ritual is to the soul what exercise is to the body. And that is why my second song lyric is from Ice Cube’s superb first solo album, 1990s “Amerikka’s Most Wanted”. On that album, Ice Cube argues that the inevitability of the future lethal violence that he will unleash against his enemies is “not a threat but a promise/I’m as crazy as they come see/ momma didn’t love me.” He then goes on to describe his nine millimeter pistol. But that’s not the important thing. The important thing is that we see ki tavo not as a threat, but a promise, an empirical statement about human flourishing and how it happens.

Judaism has strange, unintended consequences. Food taboos are an example. What sort of loving deity could deny us bacon? Why these hukkim? A well-meaing non-jewish friend of mine asked me this once. Exasperated to be asked this yet again, replied: “because everytime I go to a restaurant and look up at the menu, I know who I am. When was the last time something happened that made you say: I know who I am?”

I know who I am. There are two things to say about this. First, I can’t be a very classy guy if the only kind of restaurant I go to is the kind where the menu is directly above the head of the person waiting to take my order. Second, Judaism as a way of life is engineered to promote human flourishing. It rewards us and leads to prosperity — not because if we study torah God sends an angel to tell our boss to give us a raise, but because — wait for it — charity, good deeds and lovingkindess are good, but the study of torah is equal to them all because it leads to them all. And not because of God has the power to shape the universe, but because we do.

God’s self-limiting love for Israel (as Rabbi Hartmann puts it): That is why I suggested to my friend that her daughter listen to people chanting torah, and why you all suggested I sit in the drive way and think about shul. I mean how crazy is chanting torah? You’re siting there reading something without vowels or cantillation marks to a room full of people who can double-check all the mistakes you make. It’s the one person without the parshah who has to read it to everyone else! I mean just to get out alive you’ve got to keep a tikkun in your house to learn the trope. And then to really understand the trope you’ve got to understand the grammar, and then after you finally learn some Hebrew you’ve got to read what the torah actually says and I mean by the time you’ve done that the damn thing is basically engraved on your heart and…. hey… wait a sec…

I think it must be hard — or at least tiring — for God to have to explain things to people. I mean, she’s God. And we are not. I have trouble explaining to my students how language forms the horizon of a hermeneutic phenomenology, and she get stuck answering questions like “so you ordered the universe how?” I imagine God saying “Well it’s kinda…. I mean, it’s complicated, but… basically, well I separated the earth from the sky. I mean, that’s not really right, but well, and then I guess you could say, basically, I was over the waters, like hovering I guess you could call it…” The end of the torah, like the beginning, is God levelling with us — talking turkey, the straight dope — telling us the truth, even though we may not be ready to understand it.

In his essay “Jewish Continuity and How to Achieve it” Rabbi Sacks asks what anchors Jewish identity. Not ethnicity, he says, since we’re now from all over. Not a love of Jewish culture, since lots of people (including nonjews) love jewish culture. Cultural connoissieurship is different from memebrship in an am. No, he says, what makes us Jewish is ultimately a religious commitment — and there’s no way around that. I think Sacks is just now figuring out what God tells us in this parshah — that judaism is a way of life which is designed to be good, even if at times we don’t understand why. Its to our credit, and God’s, that we get a chance to hear — and try to understand — an explanation.

Shabbat Shalom.

With broadband adoption surging across the country, my wife and I are switching our netflix subscription to unlimited streaming + four CDs at home at a time. It’s the opposite of adoption patterns but makes good sense.

Think about it: after two years with a Roku box we are simply running out of things to watch on Netflix streaming — and particularly quality TV shows, which are our standard fare these days. No other flat-rate service can provide them, especially not the pathetic Hulu Plus, which not only makes you pay money to watch commercials, but basically takes a whole tranche of content and makes sure it’s not available to anyone with a dedicated content streaming device. I mean really.

Basically there is a doughnut hole in content offerings these days: a great, viable streaming option offered by Netflix with limited selection but great pricing; and ridiculously over-priced on-demand offerings from Apple, Amazon, and whatnot, which offer even greater selection and convenience, but which are just ridiculous overpriced when compared to every other way of watching television.

It might just be us — we were relatively early adopters of Netflix, have pretty strange tastes (read: only watch the documentaries our friends were in) and have been watching for a while. The cabinet is starting to look a little bare. But look: we watch basically two hours of TV a night after the kids go to sleep, which is like US$120 a night if you were to buy it off of your Roku at the cheapest prices going in the on-demand market. At that price, why not just pay for cable?

In the long run, it’s not clear to me that cheap flat rate services will win over premium-priced on-delivery — especially once Big Content gets its confidence back up in the new digital marketplace. At the moment, it looks like the right choice for us is yesterday’s media.

When I recently decided to bite the bullet and get to the bottom of sake tasting and nomenclature I purchased a copy of The Sake Handbook by John Gauntner. Even in the Internet Age, I reasoned, a sole-authored guidebook would be more useful than endless googling through Wikipedia pages, right? Sadly, after a month with this book, I’m not so sure…

The goal and format The Sake Handbook is a good idea — this is no coffee table book of beautiful pictures of sake bottles. Instead it introduces the reader to sake through the brewing process, explaining a welter of names and methods slowly and logically as it takes you through the production process. Subsequent chapters take you through Japanese tasting terms, different kinds of sake, drinking vessels, and so forth. These chapters successfully keep the reader from entering Overwhelm Mode by repeatedly defining Japanese terms when used (a glossary is also included, which is good). The prose is clear, although it also seems repetitive and padded — I’m not sure if the author was trying to lengthen this already-short book, or simply an attempt to make the volume welcoming to readers. Often, however, it just makes it hard to find information. The chapter on Ginjoshu, for instance, doesn’t actually explain what Ginjoshu is until you are a page and seven paragraphs in to it. Sometimes authors write forgetting how little their readers know compared to them — it seems like this might be the case here, where long digressions and reflections get in the way of serious information. If anything, much of the text could be reduced to helpful tables and charts which would orient the reader to topics like brewing method, taste terms, and so forth.

It get worse. Some of the chapters of this book are downright unhelpful. The section on ‘collecting sake labels’ is not actually about collecting sake labels but a discussion of the most common kanji characters that appear on sake labels. Readers searching for tips on getting labels off bottles, descriptions of how collectors organize their collections, etc. will have to look elsewhere. The chapter on sake bars in Japan and wholesalers in the US — 37 pages — will not be of use to most readers. Perhaps the intended audience is anglophone expats in Japan? At any rate for those of us in the rest of the world this section is of little use — the list of wholesalers in my state is already out of date. Honestly: who needs a phonebook when you have Google?

The most egregious problem with the book is the main section: the 100 pages of recommended sake to try. This section consists of pictures of sake labels and one paragraph reviews of the sake in question. This is the expert, value-added core of the book — it could be used as a guide for first-timers looking to try different sakes, or to read about sakes they have tried at a restaurant or bar. Unfortunately, the sakes are organized by the geographical region of their brewery, from north to south. It’s ridiculous. This essentially means it is impossible to browse the list on the basis of any of the criteria a reader would actually use: alphabetical listings of brands, types of sake, flavors, suggested lists of sakes for tastings, and so forth. The index does list brands, so the book is not a total waste, but it is certainly a disappointment.

Let’s face it: compared to the relatively well-written Wikipedia page on sake and the many brewery website out there, Gauntner’s book falls short. If you are not good at using the Internet and want to learn more about sake, it will do the job. But at base the book’s value proposition falls short: despite assertions to the contrary, you can beat free — but in order to do so you need to curate information better than this. A useful book, but I have to admit I’m a little disappointed that I bought it.

High production values and a satisfying blend of game elements make The Dungeon Saga a great deal of fun, despite some game balance issues.

The Dungeon Saga has been compared to a lot of other games, but is best conceived as a cross between Puzzle Quest and Dungeon Raid. You character advances across a very basic map and fights individual monsters like Puzzle Quest, but the battles are done using a match-3 mechanic like Dungeon Raid’s. Leveling, climbing up skill trees, and buying equipment all follow the Dungeon Raid mechanic. Derivative? Yes. But a lot of fun to play.

The game is attractive and gameplay requires thinking a step ahead. Anyone will enjoy the game, but it also has the depth necessary to keep the attention of ‘serious casual’ players. There are some missteps — after a while the music gets annoying, but you cannot turn it off without also turning off the sound effects. It would be nice to know how much gold you have when battling monsters, but this data isn’t available in the game display. You cannot read the description of skill higher up the skills tree unless you are ready to unlock them, which makes it hard to plan your progress. Not this this matters, since customization choices are pretty limited.

The biggest issue with the game is balance: like Puzzle Quest, you play against monsters, but like Dungeon Raid you earn gold and experience by matching them off the board. This fact, combined with how incredibly easy the first six levels are, mean that you spend most of the early game grinding gold and experience.

The Dungeon Saga lacks the depth and polish of a classic like Swords and Poker, but the mechanics feel less tacked-on than those in the latest version of Dungeon Raid, and the interface is iOS native, unlike Puzzle Quest. If you’re looking for an entrée into the genre, or just a light experience, this would be a good title to pick up on sale.

My scientist mother, reading “My Big Animal Book” with her children:

“Yes, that’s a guinea pig…sometimes they live in labs… they’re good models for the third trimester…”

Years ago I stopped writing reviews on sites like amazon.com because their terms of service basically gave them my work. Sure, I wrote reviews for works by friends that I thought deserved some publicity, and for particularly superb things I’d throw a review out there as a way to say thanks for people’s work. But overall I felt like I was doing unpaid work for a company — which might even have been ok if their appropriation of my writing didn’t take the creepy form of piracy via small print.

I’m still never going to give Facebook more data than I absolutely need to in order to communicate with my friends. But I recently reread the Amazon and iTunes TOS and I see that both now give themselves a nonexclusive license to your work, rather than just taking your copyright (as it use to iirc). I can live with that.

So In My Copious Free Time I might be able to squeeze out a recommendation or two… maybe… that’s the plan anyway…

If Gilles Deleuze and Roy Wagner had an arm wrestling match, who would win?

No wait!

If Felix Guattari and Roy Wagner had an arm wrestling match, who would win? That’s a better question.

Not the title of a derivative mystery novel or an article aping Marshall Sahlins. Rather, the list of people who wished me happy birthday when Teh Internetz told them it had occurred. There is some secret mission at which only this unique combination of skills can succeed but I’m not sure what it is. 10 man Molars of Navarrone?

This weekend I moderated a panel at a conference. One of the speakers there was one of the guys who is responsible for helping to measure Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (that’s what it’s called). There are a lot of Hawaii-Bhutan connections, and it occurred to me that Bhutan has a lot in common with another country that seems to have more than its fair share of entanglements with Honolulu: Vanuatu. Both countries are pursuing nationalist, cultural agendas which are both extremely traditional in aspiration but also very modern in their form — they are concerned with custom, but also extremely modern. Indeed, in a world where people wish for or describe the hypothetical possibilities of an indigenized modernity, these two places seem to be going for it whole hog, and with a fair bit of success.

Which is why I want to teach a course comparing Bhutan and Vanuatu, two countries that are superficially extremely different but also have a good deal of similarities. To get an ‘H’ focus on the course (something that makes it attractive to students here) I’d discuss how work done in both countries relates to the Hawaiian renaissance. Now would that be a cool course or what?

“The task of the anthropologist is to get as near as possible to what actually happens, but to place it and to think about it in a context of humanity in general”

-Meyer Fortes, Introduction to The Segmentary Lineage Model Reconsidered

“True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.”
—David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

I feel that we have gone to such great lengths to memorialize Elizabeth Taylor The Aids Activist and Serious Actor that we are in danger of forgetting the legacy of Elizabeth Taylor In A Slip In Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. Does that make me a bad person?

Me: It sounds corny but I think living in Hawai’i really has taught me to have more aloha for people.

Reasonably Famous Anthropologist: Yes, I wasn’t sure if it was having children or something else but you seem much less… agitated…

It’s a sign of how neglected this blog has become that I failed to blog its tenth anniversary on 1 Jan 2011. The neglect is a sign of success — tweeting, blogging for Savage Minds, writing for Inside Higher Ed, and of course working on actual academic publications. Still, it’s a bit sad that I made it to ten largely through benign neglect. I wonder what will happen when this blog has its bar mitzvah?

Over the years my website was built with html, then Grey Matter (when it turned from being a ‘website’ to a ‘blog’) then Movable Type and then finally WordPress. PHP replaced Perl which replaced HTML. At the time it seemed amazing that with a click of a button a perl script could recompile all your html pages according to your specifications — an idea that now seems absurd in a world where pages are made on the fly and it’s server-end caching that needs to be updated.

Back then I had a one-column blog. Mostly because, frankly, that was the maximum number of columns allowed. But then as things got fancier and more possibilities opened up, I firmly resisted the multiple columns with their sidebars and column lists: it just seemed too new-fangled. Eventually the template took over and themes hand-rolled by mere mortals became a thing of the past: web design had professionalized. It became impossible to make a single-column theme, much less find one. And at any rate it just looked silly and old-fashioned.

And then came Manifest, the theme on the blog now and bam: the one column theme returned. Is it a sign? A new age on the blog? An old one? I love the throw-back look, which is such a return to how this blog used to be for years and years. It warms the cockles of my heart and, as Woody Allen reminds us, there’s nothing like hot cockles.

As a new father, I am facing a dilemma that men before me have faced for generations: what songs should go into the first set that I learn to play on the ukulele to my adorable children? After some serious thought I’ve settled on:

I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning (Bright Eyes)

It’s You I like (Mr. Rogers)

Horchata (Vampire Weekend)

Lei Pikake (Hapa)

Patience of Angels (Boo Hewerdine)

Flowering Spade (Sean Hayes)

Also-rans include: Billy Bragg, Great Big Sea. Maybe for the next round.

My latest column at Inside Higher Ed is up — “The iPad for Academics“.

My review of the iPad was not unabashedly positive — I think it makes a great PDF reader, but that it hardly eclipses the laptop for most of the jobs that academics do. That said, I wanted to make a few comments about the iPad and the role it plays in the other major job in my life — raising my twin infant boys.

For raising small kids, the iPad is incredible. It’s small size means you can plop it down next to you anywhere, and you can work the thing with a single finger, leaving the rest of you free to burp an infant. When a good portion of your life is passively consuming media while juggling a bottle and a kid, the iPad is perfect for checking email, or reading the news. The speaker is big enough to be audible but small enough not to wake up people asleep in the next room, which means podcasts (wrapped up in fancy BBC or NPR apps, but still basically podcasts) of news are an option even if you were crashed out during the normal news time.

The iPad has turned me on to casual gaming — an area that I’ve ben trying to find time to explore for some time. I’m a little underwhelmed by the lack of tactile feedback on the glass screen, but with kids you don’t really have a lot of time to play real-time games. Turn-based stuff is ubiquitous on the iPad (including many cherished favorites like Rogue) and great to play in those half hour periods between when The Feeding Ends and They Fall Asleep, time that in the past, when I was less sleep deprived, I had the concentration to read.

What is so weird about the iPad + iNfant combination is the strange serendipities. The iPad isn’t just a netbook manque, it’s also become our photo album: we haven’t printed a single digital photo, nor had to view them on the strangely-ratio’d screen of our laptop. Instead the iPad lets us look through (and show others) baby pictures — and at a much larger size than most prints. We use the thing as a friggin’ nightlight when changing diapers at 3 a.m. in the morning. The white noise app helps the kids fall asleep, even if it doesn’t have the now-ubiquitous ‘womb sounds’ that seem to emanate from all childcare products these days. Just the fact that it doesn’t have to boot up and is on instantaneously makes it much easier to use than a laptop in situations where you need it up and running quickly.

There are a lot of apps that still need to be ironed out on the iPad (like a Mafia Wars client that connects with the actual Mafia Wars install on Facebook), but I will say that everyone in my household who is able to hold their own head up is glad that we spent the money on the device, despite the fact in the beginning that we worried it would be little more than an expensive frippery. No excuse me, I have a little boy who needs some supervised tummy time I’ve got to go see….

And so they look upon one another and make love, drawn into the genital “labyrinth of desire” that God created specially for them and obeying the “tacit commandments” engraved as a benediction in their very bodies, men and women avenge themselves upon their enemy, death. For to leave behind one’s own image — “drawn to the life in one’s child”  – is not to die

-Stephen Greenblatt, Fiction and Friction

Me: I think it’s high time we watched Secret Silent Baby Hunter Episode.

[pause]

Scarily Erudite Beloved: You mean that “World’s Happiest Baby” DVD?

Me: Isn’t that what I said?

One of the websites on chabad.org dealing with pidyon haben starts with the subheading “special care must be taken with new entities”. The idea is a well known one in Torah: first fruits and all that. But if there’s one thing that having a baby — and by that I mean ‘watching my wife have a baby’ — has taught me it’s that children are confounding because they are not new entities. In two ways, my wife’s c section drove home for me the cliché that reproductive rights are about a woman’s right to control her own body. First, because surgery is the plainest example of people not having control of their bodies, of their embodied humanity being reduced to a biological system to be mastered and controlled by medicine. And second, when women are pregnant, children are not IN their bodies, they ARE their bodies. Or rather she is theirs, or it belongs to both of them.

This conflation of body and identity is particularly troubling to the more rabid versions of American protestantism obsessed with ‘individualism’. Indeed, so troubling to them is this the deep connection between mother and child that they define the origins of individual life so early in a fetus’s career that they consider day-after pills to be murder. On this account the mother is, as Luther once said of the virgin Mary, ‘a mere container’.

But not Jews. We know that new entities are all occasions on which special care must be taken. We also know that new entities are made through separation, mavdil. Our duty to cut the world at its divinely-defined joints is what ennobles us and makes us co-participants in god’s ongoing construction of the universe, a universe that otherwise would be tohu v’vohu — all mixed up. By naming children, as we have today, we make them individuals – sons of and daughters of someone. Not, any longer, parts of them.

But as Maurice Godelier reminds us, a man and a woman do not make a child — they make a fetus. The actual kid is made by the community it is part of.  One of the great insights of people living in Melanesia, where Godelier and I both have lived, is that people are made up out of other people and objects: blood, semen, breastmilk and, in our case, bagels, lox, and the occasional musubi. Christian culture oscillates endlessly between its self-imposed paradox of insisting on individual autonomy while longing for communion with the group (a paradox resolved in their central religious ritual). But for Papua New Guineans there isn’t really ‘society’ and ‘individual’, there are just people grown out of other people, bodies that relationships pass through. Where I used to live in Papua New Guinea, when a woman becomes elderly, her children give pigs and money to their mother’s side of the family, to compensate them for using up the woman’s body which was grown by her parents. When a man dies the killers give pigs and money to his family, who in turn distribute it to everyone has a claim on the deceased — anyone who ever fed him. It is these constant exchanges of food, wealth, and human bodies (and occasionally body parts) which human life is all about. People are not connected by being the same in Melanesia, they are connected by being different — by take roles in rituals that establish who they are to one another.

This is true of Jewish life here in Honolulu as well. Since the kids have come home we’ve had a steady stream of visitors filing into our apartment and filling our refrigerator with food. Our kids are already being grown by the community, and the community, in turn, is being elicited by their bodies. This circumcision and the seudat mitzvah to follow is creating not just two new people, but new relationships amongst all of us. We separate ourselves into new people — giver, receiver, father, son, the person willing to make the last-minute costco run. Lador vador — as one friend of mine emailed me, generations are passing through us.

Finally, people in Papua New Guinea have something else in common with us — they realize that making people is the most serious and important work one can do in life, and they aren’t afraid to mark that seriousness on the surface of the body. Circumcision is a hard thing for parents to do to their kids even if, today, there are various surgical means to keep it from being painful and even — in the long run — permanent. Many people ask: why continue with such a traumatic custom? The answer is that we do it because it is hard, because it is irrevocable, and because it is permanent — just like our commitment to Judaism. Our globalized world is chock-full of people who think it is a good thing to be completely free to chose which cultural tradition you will embrace, like searchers for ‘spirituality’ who flit between religious traditions on a weekly basis. Too often today ‘tradition’ means a colorful ethnic outfit worn once or twice a year or a  small menu of ‘heritage’ foods. Against this backdrop of single-serving heritage we continue to insist that Judaism is an identity that is inscribed on our bodies and cannot be taken off. It can not be worn only when convenient, or cast off lightly when one tires of it. Today we’ve made a very, very serious decision for our children without their consent, knowledge, or understanding. We have written that decision on their body in a way that will cause them physical pain and doom them to life as a tiny minority group that few people in the islands know about or understand. We have done this because their bodies, like ours, are not our own, but something that Judaism passes through. We have made this intervention in their lives serious in order to signal how seriously we believe that Judaism is the best possible and most important decision we could make for our children. Eventually Dan and Sam will be able to decide for themselves whether or not to chose Judaism. But in order for that to happen Judaism must chose them first. And is what we have done today.

Obviously, it should not be a surprise that libraries collect works of fiction, but I have to admit that it seems strange to me. Libraries, in Alex Golub land, are for preserving knowledge and passing down knowledge — the kind of thing thing that normal bookstores don’t do. Why keep a copy of The Scarlet Letter in a library? When is that going to go out of print?

This is crazy talk, I know, but P has a bizarrely awesome depth with call numbers that stretch away into infinity in the same way that L does. P is like the jungle — you don’t really go in there without hacking your way through and looking for a very particular thing. PC, PF, PR — what is that all about? Occasionally I cut my way through various thickets to reach small clearings of the works of Russel Soaba or Ursula K. LeGuin, and I know there are communities of cultural studies and literary critics who have been hidden away from the rest of us in P, developing on a parallel track and worth a visit to see their exotic visions of social life, so similar to and yet so different from our own. Mostly, I stay away. Since P takes up so much space this means that there is usually at least a quarter of a floor I don’t have to mess with.

Recently the Ps in Hamilton have been declared a no-go zone because of mold that has gotten into the building as a result of the flood and other various dilapidation. They covered large sections of the stack in opaque plastic X Files “I want to believe” sheeting of the sort usually used to hide alien autopsies or deliver things to Area 53 and blocked off the aisles with tape. To get novels from this area you had to go down stairs, give the call number to a student worker, and then like one designated guy would go up — presumably in a biohazard suit — and get the book for you. When he was on shift. I was like: I am too hard core to be denied my Ursula K. LeGuin. I just stepped through the tape and got the book and I’ve not, to date, developed any strange off-world infections. So that made me feel pretty butch. Which is sorta sad.

The beginning of P is, of course, linguistics. This is a topic that I have a sort of love-hate relationship with. There is a lot of good stuff in linguistics that obviously dovetails with anthropology, but man then there is all the other stuff: the books of diagrams that look like they are diagrams for circuit boards but are actually what happens when you let impressionable young grad students read Godel, Escher, Bach at an early age. I think I secretly have linguist envy — a desire to understand their obscure and formalistic prose, their elaborately numbered and hierarchicalized lists. I am not sure that I really want to be a linguist, but I would like at least to understand the secret code language they use in the clubhouse. But as it is the last time I ventured into P was for a paper in an edited volume comparing how Brits, the French, and people from Brittany shake hands. Published in 1982, it was an analysis of the ‘semiotic system’ of handshaking. Ah, the days when people still thought human beings lived lives in code, before the pragmatics craze trended way up. There was a certain innocence of experience back then.

I’m a father. Mom and kids are healthy and happy. More info behind passwords in All The Usual Locations. At some point I will end up blogging something about my life as a father but finding the line between public and private in re: die kinder is tricky. So for now everyone who is need to know already knows. Cheers!

O is the Library of Congress Call Letter for home economics and cooking. Many researchers are surprised to find O dedicated to such a specific topic. However, cognoscenti such as myself know not just the contents of this call number, but the history behind it.

As many of you know, the modernization of the Library of Congress occurred in the early 1880s as a consequence of the provisions of the Great Compromise of 1877 which secured the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the creation of the solid south. While the Great Compromise is remembered largely for the creation of Jim Crow, a key component was also democrat concessions for Northern internal improvements in exchange for Republican patronage. Obviously, most of this took the form of northern capital and managerial experience for the Texas Pacific railroad, key to spurring industrial development in the south. Less well known, however, was the padding of the staff of the Library of Congress with Democratic ‘patronage-men’.

It was the result of this agreement that saw Julius B. Dintwoodie — Samuel Tilden’s cousin — installed as official cataloguer of the Library of Congress. Prior to Dintwoodie’s appointment the Library of Congress was essentially staffed by low-paid volunteers, typically eccentric Boston Brahmins who attempted to piece together what was left of Jefferson’s original founding bequest after its destruction in the War of 1812. These former librarians of congress also served as ersatz acquisitions specialists but, of course, had no comprehensive plans for developing the library’s collections.

Dintwoodie’s position as cataloguer was meant purely as a sinecure, with no actual responsibilities besides enjoying life in the capital and collecting his paycheck. Sickly and affected with a slight hunchback, Dintwoodie was too young to participate in the civil war and was widely regarded as a shut-in by his family. Tilden’s remembrance of his cousin was meant, apparently, largely to assuage the nagging of his aunt.

It was to the great surprise of everyone who knew him, therefore, when Dintwoodie courted and then successfully married Eliza M. Cantwell, the youngest daughter of one of Maryland’s oldest and most established families. Stout unionists, the Cantwells epitomized the Victorian bourgeoisie and Cantwell,  a sort of proto-Jane Addams, met Dintwoodie at the theater and apparently recognized him immediately as a ‘fixer-uper’. A regiment of the usual bizarre Gilded Age remedies followed — hydrotherapy, various diets of raw vegetables and milk, and so forth.

As a result Dintwoodie’s health improved enormously and he also spent increasing time at work, fleeing the tender and yet controlling embrace of his spouse. Active and improving work was the only excuse Cantwell would accept for Dintwoodie’s time away from home. While Dintwoodie’s famous flask of whiskey – originally concealed from his wife in a hidden compartment in his desk — is now on display in the Library of Congress rotunda as a beloved piece of naughty-librarianship, it appears that on the whole he proved remarkably active rationalizing the library’s holdings, slowly creating the system we know and love today.

Or at least this is the official story. Many historians have seen Cantwell’s hand at work in the organization in the LOC — for instance in her stout organization of C, and the subtopics relating to kitchen science in T. O, the most obvious of Cantwell’s impositions, however, is O, which reflects first wave feminism’s concern with rational mastery of the home and bourgeois internalization of Protestant concerns with order and cleanliness. Increasingly today, however, postmodern scholars of archival science have argued that O might have served as a baited trap for Cantwell, distracting her in order to allow Dintwoodie to have his way with the Ps. Even more audacious authors, inspired by De Landa’s rationalization of Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of assemblages, have argued that Cantwell had no hand in creating the LOC and that O was an ironic countergesture by Dintwoodie meant to mimic and hence displace the hegemonic voice of his wife, which he had internalized.

And that, boys and girls, is the completely true story of the origin of O.

My laptop temporarily melted. I blame the third party power source. Let this be a lesson to you, ebay shoppers. Back with O tomorrow.

I think of this as a sort of light, linen yellow. Daffodil. If that’s a color. I know where N is on the second floor of Hamilton, but to be honest there is only one thing that I remember (I think) about it: this is the place where, for god knows what reason, they store copies of Public Culture. I think this section is architecture and photography and… journals founded by Arjun Appadurai. Actually now that I think of it at one point while looking for Public Culture I found a bunch of fun books about/from the San Francisco Situationalist movement back in the late 70s. That was fun. I guess collage, public art, thus Public Culture goes in N.

Oh the horror. I have a strong sense the M is cantaloupe, even though I have no memory of what is in it. Actually that is not true — I think it is art. But then again that might be N. Or vice versa. I am guess that M is art. I seem to remember big books — the kind you store pictures in — in M. And… isn’t Res in M? So yeah. Art.

Banana yellow. And just as slippery. The flavor of that ‘banana flavor’ flavoring that tastes nothing like bananas.

There is an old saying — that I first heard one winter in college uttered by Jack Palance in his his strange baddie role in the movie Cyborg II — that if you want to dine with the devil, you will need a long spoon. I have never understood exactly what this meant until I first delved into the Ls. This is a section with call number. I learned this the hard way when I was looking for a book and jotted down the call number, LB 5000 .G4 figuring ‘how many LB5000 .G4s can there be?’ The answer: fifty linear feet. This call number is insane. It is perfectly feasible to head down to the stacks and search for LM3,247,564 .582752. I kid you not.

L is really also a haystack of a letter. As the ‘education and learning’ section it is difficult to find the needles. I spend a lot of time in this section since I have made a conscious effort to improve my teaching skills but man — you know you think that the anthropologists are way outnumbered by the historians, but they are both but a drop in the ocean that is the people who study education.

Some of the stuff in L is really really interesting and (which is the same thing for me) ethnographic. But a lot of it is… uh… not. And this is not an easy section to browse in. Have you ever seen the section on ‘teaching reading comprehension’? It’s mammoth. And a lot of the literature in education tends not to be very reality-based — abstract taxonomies of learning objectives, fiercely chauvistic lists of Great Books, Foucaultian intstitutional imperatives to drill and grade based on seemingly based in unreflective intuition about what learning is and ought to be or else on submicro level psychological studies of eye movements, extremely obvious things described in monograph form, but mostly just a lot of extremely vanilla institutional prose. This is an area that, like H, saw tremendous growth in the baby boom years, and is full of countercultural technocratic discourse in sans-serif font about how latest science shows chilling out is the way to go, man.

I tend to hang on by latching onto particular authors and presses, but even these are not hallmarks of quality. While there are small presses like Stylus, there are also massive behemoths like Josey-Bass. And then there are all the weird small-timey presses run out of high school printing rooms and university education departments printing primers on idiosyncratic teaching methods with cult-like followings that cost $2.50 each (the primers, not the cults). These are often my favorites.

There is something about education that tends to bring out the most formal in people, as well as to prompt even the least extroverted to share their life philosophy.

Why do I think that law, as a topic, is a pale, pastel pink?

It was when I was at Chicago, taking a course at the law school, that I had this sudden realization that some of the most brilliant thinkers of all time were lawyers. I don’t know why this seemed like a surprise to me. It is not as if — let me put it this way — I thought that anthropologists has cornered the market. I had not thought too much about what lawyers and judges do, but I had thought of about philosophy and I suppose I just sort of figured that that was what all the mind-bendingly brilliant people would occupy themselves with since, in the real world, you cannot start a special private school to train young mutants to use their powers for good. But of course speculation about what it means to follow a rule, or what ‘property’ actually means, or how passing a law does or does not actually change behavior are all questions for legal thinkers. And, of course, all those folks in the Gs and Hs who long for ‘application’ and ‘relevance’ should realize that actually sending to people to prison (or not) and giving them an easement (or not) is application in a very direct sense — no wonder so many smart people do it.

K is an unusual letter for me since it houses many scholarly books which happen to be about law, including a good number of journals such as the Melanesian Law Review, whose early numbers are a hoot (why shouldn’t cannibalism be legal in Papua New Guinea now that we’ve chased the Australian colonizers out in the name of our national culture?) But it is also the letter which houses an absolutely tremendous amount of actual legislation, instructions and regulations, and other professional stuff which is pretty much useless to me. And then there is the tremendous amount of stuff in between which poses a particular problem. I am sure you have had a run-in with this kind of work in your own field: volume after volume that seems really really relevant but which, when you crack it open, some how manages to be totally not relevant and often times doesn’t seem to say anything at all. How does that happen? At first I always feel relieved, but then I know that the real gems are the ones hidden beneath a lot of overburden and I feel like I have to search through all of them just to make sure the one that got away doesn’t get away.

D’Angelo, the law library at Chicago, was a trip. It is not just the library, it is also the faculty offices. Around the edge of the stacks are the professors offices. This fact, as well as my obvious complete and utter alienness when compared to the well-groomed lawyers-to-be who knew where all the books were and what the wireless password was and actually owned laptops instead of an aging Centris 650 yes that’s right that’s how old school I am a Centris 650 dude — all of these facts made me feel pretty out of place in the law library. But at the same time I also felt a certain placed-ness, as if certain volumes had long ago been hidden in the law library so that one day I might discover them. Who else was looking for those rare English translation of Gierke and Jhering? Did any of these tort-obsessed folks really care about Drucila Cornell’s edited anthology on violence and the law that featured both Walter Benjamin and Derrida’s essays on the force of law. So that helped.

At Manoa I visit the law library because of their excellent collection of works on indigenous people and the law, and especially Hawaii. Best of all, books are almost never checked out. It is not that law students don’t read at UH Manoa, but they seem to use the law school more as a study space, and to hit the noncirculating reference material. Or maybe I’m the only one interested in the copies of titles like The Long Interview by Grant McCracken or Kinship and The Unexpected by Strathern which are, for some reason, stored there. Also, and I don’t really know why this is, every time I go in there there is someone using the computer to order prayers from churches — apparently this is something you can do — or reading inspirational literature, blessingoftheday.com, and so forth. Why I am not sure. I think it is people who are not actually in the law school who use the public terminals. Also I like that the circulation desk uses the old, relatively uncomputerized way of checking out books. They are kicking it old school over at the law library.