Arm wrestling
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.
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.
“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?
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 [...]
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 [...]
I love how ethnographic and well-crafted this description from Amy Bloom’s Normal is: During the Harry Benjamin symposium, I talk to other doctors besides Laub, and to psychologists, psychiatrists, even psychoanalysts, people who collectively have worked with a thousand transsexuals and their families, in the United States and in northern Europe. Among them is Dr. [...]
“she is compiled out of snakes, human hands and hearts, animal paws and talons, to compose so powerful an image that even the dumbly gazing outsider hears the threatening mutter of a terrible intelligibility” – Inga Clendinen, The Aztecs: An Interpretation p. 233
Fran said we had — and I quote here from her email — a “two scroll morning” so I will try to keep this relatively brief. I suppose I’ve known since I was a little kid that ‘torah’ means ‘instruction’. I think too often we are tempted to imagine this as ‘instruction’ as in ‘teachings’ [...]
“In the little affairs of university life I am alarmed by those who jet themselves through issues and arguments with a burning moral conviction. The result is nearly always bad: if there is someone else burning with an opposed flame, then nothing gets done; alternatively decisions are taken in the white heat of moral virtue, [...]
“The social Super-Robot, mighty Leviathan in his behaviorist’s paradise, is a stirring vision, not devoid of a certain icy grandeur. But the Mind remembers, as in a dream, its pristine thrills; and it turns it gaze away from the Robot… The creative urge stirs once more. Intuition leaps. The phantoms claim their own” – Alexander [...]
1. Yes, but does it play Warcraft? 2. It’s a bit sad that Jobs can no longer power the reality distortion field around his body — once upon a time the best part of Apple agitprop were the Jobs presentations. Now of the two videos on the Apple website, its the slickly produced iPad promo [...]
Probably the most important thing I learned from this trip to Papua New Guinea was how to use my cellphone. In 2007, my last trip to PNG, I had an American cellphone that didn’t work in PNG and mobiles (as everyone except Americans call them) weren’t as ubiquitous as they are now. This time, however, [...]
One of the arguments of my work is that Papua New Guineans are creative, innovative people and not the type of folks to try to carry on their traditions unchanged ‘from time immemorial’. Anthropologists reading this will know that I am not the first person or the last person to make this argument, although it [...]
This story is old news to people who live in Port Moresby, but the other day the Burns Phillips Building burnt down. For most of Port Moresby, this meant that the last of the big old colonial buildings are gone — a sad fate for a country which already has so few historic buildings. But [...]
(from last week) Since my initial blog post on Kenmaity Chicken I have conducted addition ethnographic observation of this institution on two separate occasions. First, I ate in at the KMC at Gordons on 5 July in the evening, roughly from 1900-2000. Then today I visited the KMC in town and got more chicken to [...]
Much of my research in PNG this time around includes trying to schedule meetings with highly-placed business men, in some cases some of the most prominent ‘captains of industry’ in the country. Getting ‘access’ — i.e. getting them to talk to me — has not been impossible but it has taken a fair amount of [...]
Chicken and chips have been a staple form of fast food in PNG ever since I have been coming here. I still remember fondly the kai bar across the street from the Rainbow Mart in Mt. Hagen where they added garlic to the oil they fried the chips (‘french fries’) in. After 8 hours in [...]
One of my main goals of this round of field work is to consciously improve my skills as a fieldworker — to do very uptight, professional, even ‘scientific’ fieldwork. There are several reasons for this. First, I am teaching the methods course for my graduate students when I return from PNG in the fall so [...]
A lot of my research this time around in Moresby begins with the phonebook: making lists of a dozen or so institutions to call for interviews, call them up, and then see if they’d be interested in talking with me. This means that a lot of what I’ve been doing the past couple of weeks [...]
The datasphere in PNG is thin and irritable. If I had no Internet access whatsoever, then I could deal: when living in Porgera I wrote letters, actual paper letters — physical correspondence which so many of us have already given up. Of course letters are easy to loose and, let’s face it, completely illegible when [...]
“A good interview with Joss Whedon”:http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=2152 (on monetizing web content) “Tanach On Demand”:http://www.lashon.net/CL/Tanach/Tanach.cgi PDF generator “Old Weird America”:http://oldweirdamerica.wordpress.com/ — a blog which combs through old Folkways recordings and mixes them up with other transformations of the songs/ideas/artists who are featured.
Someone should write a diet book called “The Passover Diet”. It could maybe have a blurb on the back from Madonna or have a picture from Kabbalah on the front or something. The secret of the passover diet is not ‘no leaven’. Instead, it would be the process of training people to look at food [...]
“Thanks much!”:http://www.whygodwhy.com/2009/the-compleat-lounge/
You know, if you made a movie which combined The Stand and Deliverance, it really wouldn’t be anything like Stand and Deliver.
“Erik Spangler”:http://www.sibeliusmusic.com/cgi-bin/user_page.pl?url=espangler (composer/DJ) “Clay Spinuzzi”:http://locus.cwrl.utexas.edu/spinuzzi/ (professor and author of a “book I want to read”:http://www.amazon.com/Network-Theorizing-Knowledge-Work-Telecommunications/dp/0521895049/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207878172&sr=8-7 but don’t have US$80 to shell out to buy it) “Elizabeth Rata”:http://www.education.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/education/about/schools/crstie/staff/educationstudystaff/elizabethrata.cfm (Maori academic) “Thorim”:http://www.wowwiki.com/Thorim_(tactics) (Titan boss)
*Roman Holiday:* It should have been Cary Grant *Bringing Up Baby:* It should have been Audrey Hepburn *Breakfast At Tiffany’s:* It should have been Mr. T *Solicitous Vampire Paramours:* Angel is number one. Everyone else is number two or lower.
The latest issue of JRAI taught me that “Yael Navaro-Yashin’s”:http://www.socanth.cam.ac.uk/staff/furtherinformation/navaroyashinfurtherinfo.html “work”:http://www.socanth.cam.ac.uk/staff/publications/navaro-Yashin.html looks really fascinating.
“Save The Words”:http://www.savethewords.org/ “Cornify”:http://cornify.com/ “Geophysical survey of world of warcraft”:http://technollama.blogspot.com/2009/01/geophysical-survey-of-world-of-warcraft.html
I refuse to force this ridiculous meme onto others but because people I respect have asked: 1. I am a Jewish intellectual from Northern California 2. There were three times in my life when I genuinely thought I was going to die. In retrospect, the first time I was just being overly dramatic — a [...]