academia

The two most exciting things that happened to me today were meeting the person who buys all the anthro books for my uni’s library and the “hot new library homepage”:http://library.manoa.hawaii.edu/index.html which is so superior to the “terrifying older version”:http://libweb.hawaii.edu/index.htm.

Yeah library!

After complaining in print a month or so ago, I can now report that I am the proud recipient of “a chili pepper”:http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/SelectTeacher.jsp?sid=403&orderby=TLName&letter=G at Ratemyprofesor.com.

W00t! After semesters of teaching I am now finally an official professor: I have “a rating at ratemyprofessor.com”:http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=753498! Apparently I am a good teacher, although exactly why is still a little unclear. Indeed, sometimes the comments verge on the enigmatic, such as the line “one of the books he has chosen for the class is very different from other books.”

I rate a 4.8 out of 5, which is pretty good. In fact, it is higher than most of the other professors in my department. But don’t get too excited, though — I am also one of the few in my department who has not earned the coveted chili pepper before their name to indicate that they are ‘hot.’ Transference: it’s complicated.

I know some professors harbor considerable resentment to sites like Rate My Professor for one reason or another, but I’m just happy that someone cared enough about my course to register an opinion one way or the other. I’m even more delighted that the opinion was a good one. However I also found out today that one section of my intro anthro course is full and I haven’t even finished teaching the ones for this semester. Perhaps I should try to be scarier so I can get smaller class sizes where a discussion-based format would work better?

The New York Times reported today that “Wayne Booth”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/11/books/11booth.html passed away yesterday. In addition to sharing a university, Wayne and I had another connection — I worked as his personal assistant troubleshooting problems with his computer at home. For much of graduate school I supported myself by working in computing in various ways, including make house calls to help professors out. Typically this included emeritus types who fell through the cracks of the support policies of their divisions as well as very busy professors — I am one of the few people who can say they’ve been paid to defragment Homi Bhabha’s hard drive. But out of all of those people I remember Wayne the best, and I am truly grieved at his loss.

When I first began working with Wayne I knew that he was a famous professor, although I had not done more then glance at some of his work. As someone who provided desktop support to professors, I knew that they sometimes had egos or a sense of self-importance that needed fixing as often as their computers did. It did not take long after my meeting with him to get a sense of his unique personality: laconic in the great tradition of the American frontier, but extroverted as well. In fact his writing could sometime seem self-absorbed — this was a man, after all, who wrote articles about his hearing aid in local literary journals. By the time I met him, Wayne was a man who had already spent decades being feted as one of the most important intellectuals in his discipline. He was a teacher who had not just won every teaching award Chicago had to offer, but had helped define the character and goals of the College at the University of Chicago. He was a faculty member hardened by decades of departmental politics — all of which he had won. He was in many ways a real role model to me.

One of the things that impressed me about Wayne was how he had managed to do this without becoming proud and haughty. He had an ego — you don’t get to the top of any field without feeling the need to prove something about yourself to the world — but he wore it lightly, and he put it in service of his work with others. One of Wayne’s biggest problems when I knew him was his hearing — he wore a hearing aid and had special amplification on his phone. As a result I spent more than one occasion defragmenting his hard drive or dowloading his mail while listening to him work over a dean or department head on the phone. On these occasions he demonstrated the self-confidence and emotional intensity necessary to get one’s way in institutions like Universities, where influence is the currency that power comes in. But in his personal life he was a remarkably loving father and husband — he and Phyllis had been married for more than a half century and had an obvious and uncomplicated love for each other that was amazing. As I helped him send and receive email I occasionally read correspondence between his daughters and himself which revelead their relationship to be equally open. Indeed, their encouragement to him as he worked through health problems and general old age revealed a kindness of character which was the ultimate proof of Wayne’s ability as a father. And of course, over the computer were pictures of grandchildren and other relatives. When he worked, his family was literally never out of his sight.

I know that Wayne was a great teacher because he taught me. Many senior professors patronize the younger and less able, but Wayne’s ego directed him to teach rather than judge. He was generous of his time with me and his paychecks were always ten or fifteen dollars more than I had asked for. His situation at home was a mess — an ancient, virus-filled computer running a modem connection on faulty wires operated by a man who knew little about computers, but whose scholarly life depended on word processing and email. When I had to back up his data, wipe his hard drive, and reinstall his operating system in order to convince the networking people his computer was virus free, he bore it out with a patience and trust that few of my other clients did. As we got to know each other better, we discussed areas of common interest. We were both musicians, both had an interest in rhetoric, and were both opposed to the war in Iraq (he called himself a ‘dove’ — a term from a conflict decades gone). At one point I waived my usual fee and asked instead for an office hours so that we could talk about Kenneth Burke — a unique opportunity for me. He not only spent an hour with me talking about Burke and suggesting readings, he offered to lend me books from his own personal library and then, at the end of the session, insisted on paying me for my work on his computer anyway. I still own and teach from the copy of “The Craft of Research” that he gave me — I wish now I had the nerve to ask him to sign it for me.

Working with Wayne was a unique opportunity for me to watch a genuinely good person and an unquesitonably great professor live out a life filled with success and happiness. I send my condolences to Phyllis, the rest of his family, and his colleagues.

I’m happy to announce that I got an email today from the American Anthropological Association informing me that I have received second place in their essay contest “How will AnthroSource transform anthropological scholarship?” for my essay “AnthroSource — actually useful?”:http://savageminds.org/2005/05/24/anthrosource-actually-useful/. Maybe I would have gotten first if I had answered more enthusiastically in the affirmative? At any rate, this means some minor fetting at the AAAs in Washington in December and cash money totalling US$250 — in other words, the cost of five brand new computer games. I’d like to thank the AAA for their appreciation of the essay, as well as their enabling me to unite the Grove Street Families and take back San Andreas, retake the galactic republic from the evil clutches of the Sith, explore the minimalistic themepark of Darwinia, and relive my late-80s Sid Meier-fuelled swashbuckling in fully-rendered 3D.

Or maybe I’ll just buy all three volumes of Fornander’s Hawai’ian Antiquities.

I’m very pleased to announce that I have been selected to become a member of the AnthroSource Steering Committee. “AnthroSource”:http://www.anthrosource.net/ is the American Anthropology Association’s version of JSTOR and they (or, I guess now I should say ‘we’) are trying to build it out into something new and wonderful. While I have some competency thinking about technology and have managed various technology organizations before, I’ve never served on an Official AAA committee before and have no idea how it works or what specifically we will do. However, by signing on to the AnthroSource Steering Committee it does become at least partially my responsibility. So if for some reason you have something to say about AnthroSource, feel free — I am now one of the people you can say it to.

After some searching through the Oregonian’s painfully organized website I was able to fish up “Gail Kelly’s obituary”:http://www.oregonlive.com/obituaries/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/obits/112514055358120.xml&coll=7. It’s remarkably brief and quite a counterpoint to the responses I’ve received to my blog entry to her.

In a weird sort of an inversion of an internet quiz site, I’m writing a summary of my teaching evaluations for the anthro department at UH Manoa, where I taught over the summer (this is the only place I’ve taught where I give them the summary rather than the other way around). Anyway I never blog about my classes — it’s not my students fault I have this nasty habit, after all, and they deserve privacy — but I think now that it’s done the class went really well and I had a great time. Apparently, within a few standard deviations, they did too. So, if any of you are listening: MAD SHOUTS OUT TO ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS. KEEPING IT REAL IN SUMMER 05 YO!!!!!

Ok enough of that. On to the real topic of this post, question 18 of the faculty evaluation: “What two or three single words best describe the instructor?” I’ve not encountered this question before, and tabulating the answers gave me a strange sense of being seen through other peoples’ eyes that a 5 point scale about “instructor’s ability to communicate subject to students” didn’t. Anyway, here are the results — of which I’m very proud and happy — in case you were wondering what I am like in real life (or at least anth 300):

knowledgeable (listed 7 times)
intense (positive way) [sic]
expressive
fair (3 times)
interesting (2 times)
funny (2 times)
enthusiastic (2 times)
articulate (2 times)
smart
extrovert
engaging
humorous
genuine
open
accepting
prepared
conversation provoking
cheerful
learned
pink [sic]
informative
contemporary

Alas, “artist with the light saber” and “clean movement through his passagio” didn’t occur. It’s just a matter of time, though.

(I just got this from the department secretary so it looks like the end times have indeed begun):

AN ANNOUNCEMENT FROM THE
DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Dissertation Defense of *Alex Golub*

“Making The Ipili Feasible: Imagining Global and Local Actors at The Porgera Gold Mine, Enga Province, Papua New Guinea”

will be held Monday, June 6, 2005 at 3:30 p.m. in Haskell 101

The Dissertation has been approved for hearing by the following members of
the advisory committee who are:
Marshall Sahlins (Chair)
Manuela Carneiro da Cunha
Danilyn Rutherford
Michael Silverstein

Attendance is open to faculty and graduate students. (Would faculty who
plan to attend please so inform Anne Ch’ien so that you may be counted for
purposes of constituting a quorum.) Copies of the Abstract, Table of
Contents, and the author’s CV are available in Haskell 119.

Précis

Making The Ipili Feasible: Imagining Global and Local Actors at
The Porgera Gold Mine, Enga Province, Papua New Guinea

Based on 22 months of fieldwork from October 1999 to August 2002, this dissertation examines the relationship between the Ipili speaking ‘landowners’ of the Porgera Valley and Placer Dome Inc., the Canadian mining transnational which operates a large gold mine on their land. The dissertation examines the ‘feasibility’ of the Ipili in two ways. On the one hand, ‘the Ipili’ made to assume a certain shape as an ethnic group if it was to be the sort of entity with which corporate and governmental actors could sign the legally binding documents necessary to create the gold mine. On the other hand, political, economic, and military considerations created a moment of opportunity in which the Ipili could become feasible (efficacious) political actors who successfully extracted numerous concessions from both Placer Dome and the Government of Papua New Guinea. This dissertation presents a close ethnographic analysis of high-stakes negotiations between landowner and company representatives as a leaping off point for a broader consideration of Ipili identity, the relations between extractive industry and indigenous people in Papua New Guinea more generally, and the interaction of ‘global’ and ‘local’ forces. This dissertation finds that relationships between institutions hinge critically on the personal relationships and idiosyncrasies of their representatives. It argues that the dynamics of land registration in Porgera involved the creation of groups which, although rooted in past practice, take their form in response to the elicitation of outside forces. This contrasts sharply with how this process is envisioned by Papua New Guinea’s elite, who consider registration successful if it is a transparent recording of primordial and unchanging ethnic identifications and entitlements. At the most general level, the dissertation finds that in order for these abstract institutions to appear to act, the coordinated action of networks of particular individual people must be portrayed as something done by collective subjects such as “the Ipili,” “the State,” “the Company,” or even “globalization” more generally. Thus despite supposed differences of scale between ‘global’ and ‘local’ institutions, both rely on a similar dynamic of ‘mediation’ to appear in the world.

Keywords: Papua New Guinea, mining, globalization, kinship, identity, governance, capitalism

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.

Well it is official. My dissertation is now over 500 pages long. This means spell checking it take twelve frickin’ hours. Great. I am a moron in formatting. My dissertation is over 400 pages long when the “do not split paragraph across page break” box is unchecked. This means that spell checking it takes ten frickin’ hours. Great.

The upside is that my defense is now officially set of ’sometime in June’. I need to spellcheck one more chapter and then send it off. I’ll do that today. Then I have six more weeks to revise two more chapters. Tick tock tick tock…

I’ve just finished revising the third chapter of my dissertation. I have six chapters in my dissertation, so finishing the third means that I am half way through. The page count at the moment is 475 pages. It will most likely grow to 500 by the time I am done. Given my progress my committee is tentatively planning to have me send the last chapter in on 1 May and then defend in mid-May at some point. Depending on scheduling — and my ability to do good work — we may or may not have to wait until the fall. Right now I am just excited that it is coming along so well.

From a student in my latest Intro Anthro course:

!http://alex.golub.name/pics/wanted2.jpg!

I’ve changed the motto in this blog’s masthead to reflect the fact that the date of my dissertation defense is now written, if not in stone, than in very very hard plastic and is only two and a half months away. Dissertations are complex documents — mine is now 375 pages long — and finishing them is so deeply entwined with your psychologicla well-being and professional progress that opening that black box of your psyche and looking inside in order to figure out ‘how you feel about your dissertation’ simply doesn’t make sense.

Better to just focus on the finish line. I’ve always liked Steve Levy’s charming little book _Insanely Great_ on the history of the creation of the first Macintosh, and I’ve now adopted Steve Jobs’s motto as my own. As Levy writes:

Jobs’s speeches were punctuated by slogans. Perhaps the most telling epigram of all was a three-word koan that Jobs scrawled on an easel in January 1983, when the project [the release of the first Mac] was months overdue. REAL ARTISTS SHIP. It was an awesome encapsulation of the ground rules in the age of technological expression. The term “starving artist” was now an oxymoron. One’s creation, quite simply, did not exist as art if it was not out there, available for consumption, doing well. Was [Douglas] Engelbart an artist? A prima donna — _he didn’t ship._ What were the wizards of PARC? Haughty aristocrats — _they didn’t ship._ The final step of an artist — the single validating act — was geting his or her work into boxes, at which point the marketing guys take over. Once you get the computers into people’s homes, you have penetrated their minds. At that point all the clever design decisions you made, all the tists and turns of the interface, the subtle dance of mode and modeless, the menu bars and trash cans and mouse buttons and everything else inside and outside your creation, becomes part of people’s lives, transforms their working habits, permeates their approach to their labor, and ultimately, their lives.

But to do that, to make a difference in the world and a dent in the universe, you had to ship. You had to ship. You had to ship.

Real artists ship.

It is a little amazing to me to realize that the bibliography of my dissertation is longer than most of papers that I wrote in College. Too. Many. Books.

My favorite line from chapter four is “Indeed, the success of George Murdock’s program for the scientific study of kinship is perhaps best indicated by the fact that his most well-known student was David Schneider.” Trust me – it’s real funny.

As of today the dissertation is 100 pages long and I’ve still got a long way to go. Steady progress the past couple of days in more or less rough-draft type writing. As I move on to actually citing people and looking over my fieldnotes, it’s going to grow even more.

My plan for world domiation proceeds apace even as my CV grows to fullness. I’ve just been granted cash money to fly out to San Diego to use the Melanesian Archive at the University of California San Diego. I am super excited – it is perhaps my own particular peculiarity that my idea of a good time is flying out to sunny SoCal and then spending 10 hours a day inside reading books. Last year the Melanesian Archive puchased a rare carbon copy of Jack Hides’ report of his 1934 Strickland-Purari patrol after they got the tip off from me that a copy was available for sale. Now I hope to have my picture taken with it. I already have a picture taken of me with John Black’s 1939 field diary from the Hagen-Sepik patrol. I might start putting up a gallery of Me With Famous Patrol Reports on my website. Anyhow San Diego has one of the coolest librarians around, as well as a number of Kind Melanesianists, so I’m psyched to be going out there and – hopefully – giving a talk. And best of all, they’re so accomodating they’ll actually fly me back in the library when I’m ready to return to Chicago. Go UCSD!

Just one 30 page paper to go and I’ll be over the hump of the marathon paper giving and application spree that was this winter. Twenty pages to write in two days. Must. Keep. Going.