Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

You know for a blog that is purportedly centered on anthropology, I spend remarkably little time talking about what I actually do. Along with Thomas ‘Strong Thomas’ Strong, I’ll be in Portland, Oregon next weekend where we are organizing a conference in honor of our undergraduate advisor entitled “Fashioning Anthropology: Papers in Honor of Gail Kelly”:http://web.reed.edu/gailkelly/. We have a number of very well known people giving papers: James Faubion, Joel Robbins, Jill Dubisch, Steven William Foster, Dennis MacGilvray. Dell Hymes wanted to come but I think he is not as mobile these days as he used to be. Steven Nugent was also in the queue, but you know London to Portland is a _long_ way to go for a weekend.

I am never quite sure what to make of my education at Reed. It was, by the standards of most anthropology programs, incredibly regressive. My ‘anthropological theory class’ started with _The Andaman Islanders_ (which we read in its entirety) and ended with _Political Systems of Highland Burma_. To this day when I hear that people are assigning Foucault in Intro Anthropology courses I often wonder alound why they don’t assign Durkheim. Many of my class mates consider me hopelessly backwards for preferring to read Levi-Strauss, Mauss, and Halbwachs to Deleuze, Latour, and Virillio. However, at the same time they often express an appreciation for the depth of my knowledge of anthropology’s history. How can you expect to get one and not the other?

Most of the time I find this puzzling. However, since Professor Kelly was notorious opinionated and intolerant, I am planning on having a great time writing a completely unfair and imbalanced spleen-venting screed against the excesses of contemporary ‘theory’. Now that the 90s are over I can finally tell everyone exactly what I think of ‘resistance’ and ‘hegemony’ as adequate analytical concepts. Feel free to drop by if you’re in that neck of the woods.

The less-screedy version will show up on this website at some point. In fact, Tom and I have tentative plans for a disgustingly progressive publish-on-demand creative commons type festschrift.