Briefly Noted

“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 Goldenweiser, Robots or Gods, A.A. Knopf 1931, p. 138

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 rather than Job’s unveiling that is the main attraction. Sad.

3. How is the iPad making Amazon “nervous about the Kindle”? Amazon’s business is selling DRM’d digital books, Apple’s business is selling consumer electronics to read them on… and this is an issue how? The kindle is merely the sixty buck inkjet printer for which Amazon will sell you refills.

4. There shoulda been a Newton reference in Jobs’s presentation.

5. I have this vague feeling that I can’t really justify yet that the transition to handheld devices is going to result in the elimination of free content. I’m not sure really why I think this — people are going to get used to paying for content and will not demand it free, new devices will have app stores and no browsers, content providers will ditch their website for app stores… I’m sure there’s a point there.

Not related to the iPad but:

6. The Roku guys refused to let me include “convenient streaming of instructions from my Martian overlords” as a positive benefit in my review of it on their website.

Ok I’m done now.

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, it as a different story. My usual MO in life — learned from one too many computer role playing games, I reckon — is to minimax: learn thoroughly and completely the things that I have to know and do my best to completely ignore everything else. This was true of my cellphone as well: after a bike accident in 2005 I found myself in the emergency room with no way to contact my wife. When I recovered, we both agreed that this was not something that should happen again. I got a cellphone, figured out how to use it to call my wife, and then did my best not to learn anything more about it. When I arrived in PNG in 2009 I found that everyone — as in ‘my sister in the village’ everyone – had cellphones, and that my fieldwork required me to call people constantly. As a result the mobile became central to what I did, so I decided to figure out how it worked.

I knew that my phone had tons of features that I had never used before that I really should have known how to use — at least to avoid the awkward situation of being unable to text back Kerim in the middle of AAAs — but what as really gratifying was to learn all the functions it had as a tool I didn’t know about, or turned out to be much more useful than I thought. Everyone who already knows how cellphones work, please feel free to stop reading now.

At the most general level, phones are tremendous time sinks which can be used to fritter away spare minutes. In the context of my work life, this was a major reason I decided it would be better if I didn’t figure out how to customize my wallpaper. But in the context of corporate fieldwork, which often involves spare minutes sitting in foyers with nothing to do, screwing around with your cellphone is a welcome diversion. If I were doing ‘village’ type fieldwork, these types of spare minutes would be filled with other things — I mean really, when you’re in the field, nothing is a ‘spare minute’. But for office fieldwork, yeah, its nice to have that escape.

More specifically, I think this is the trip where I finally wrapped my head around the idea that a mobile phone is something that you can both stuff in your pocket and shoehorn a ton of applications in. Mine has an alarm clock (good for travelers), my sisters has a flashlight (superb idea for developing countries). Why haven’t they engineered a church key into the back of mine yet? Then it would be truly complete.

Of all of the tools shoehorn onto the cellphone, the camera is the one I get the most use out of. I lived through the Great Blog Explosion of ’03 suffering through the endless procession of auto-documenting bloggers posting images of their lunch and their friends feeling that this was a tie sink I definitely did not want to get into. But in the context of fieldwork an endless procession of images of your lunch and friends is exactly what you want. Having something at hand lowers the barriers to taking pictures dramatically, reduces the need to carry around a separate camera (and batteries), and in may situations can cue a whole series of positives social interactions, which is anthropologese for ‘when you’re board, you can start taking photos of your friends, all your friends start taking photos of you and everyone else, and everyone has a good time’. Then the next time you are board you bluetooth that good stuff back to your computer and have fun with your family looking at the photos and tagging them up and suddenly you find yourself developing a pretty decent photoarchive/census of your village. Yeah cellphone!

Of course I am hopelessly behind the times — even as I write this the cellphone is ceasing to exist, replaced by multiple new devices which represent strange convergences of the iPod, Blackberry, and game console. But I think for now I like the idea of staying on the low end of the market. My rudimentary understanding of the ‘handheld device’ market is that it is becoming more and more an ‘all your eggs in one basket’ sort of approach. For fieldwork — at least in PNG, where theft/lost of shiny consumer electronics is a real concern — I much prefer a ‘big metal in the center’ approach: a big fat basket in a secure location, backed up regularly, into which you put all your eggs; a panoply of several smaller, cheaper devices that are raskol-donatable when push comes to shove (or just one low-range mobile); and a second serviceable low-end computer like an ASUS eee PC or one of those cheapo mini laptops which can be used to take fieldnotes if you are traveling away from your base for a couple of days, or if your main computer has a mishap. I guess another way of saying this is that you need only three devices of decreasing power and complexity: a big fat computer, a smaller backup/travelling computer, and a handheld device.

A second thing I learned in the field this time, connected to these thoughts on taking technology to the field, is this: take many flash drives. Many, many flashdrives. Back up your data on them, put them in a plastic bag, and then bury them in a location only you know. That, my friend, is the way to backup your data. Of course, you will still probably need a big terabyte drive if you are doing videos, photos, and audio. But you know what? BURY THAT ONE TOO. Then make a third copy of your data. Put it in on a flash drive. Make a small slit in the fleshy part of your back, insert the flash drive, and then stitch it back up again to make sure you have copy of your data on you at all times. No just kidding. Just keep the third copy of your data in your pocket when you walk around.

(Thing I learned 2.5: If you have to chose only 1 network, go with BMobile — Digicell has no coverage in Porgera (enormously important to you, I’m sure), and this way you don’t pay outrageous interchange fees to ring landlines.)

Here is a third, and more embarrassing, admission to make about something I learned in Papua New Guinea: if you plan to interview some of the richest and most powerful businessmen in the country, be sure to bring a pair of long trousers. I have no idea why this did not occur to me sooner, but for some reason I thought I could just waltz into these lushly appointed corporate offices in my shorts without my shirt tucked in wearing a baseball cap with the flag of Papua New Guinea emblazoned on it and get taken seriously as a researcher. What was I thinking? I conduct my research in PNG wearing what I usually wear everyday in Hawai’i: a button down shirt (not tucked in), cargo shorts, and L.L. Bean chaco-style sandals. The big difference between PNG and Hawai’i is, frankly, that in Hawai’i I wear long trousers to class and shave on a Tuesday-Thursday schedule, whereas in PNG I shave regularly but don’t wear long trousers. I realize now that dressing like this was a mistake — while this look is pretty standard for some segments of the white anglophone expatriates crowd, in a corporate context it just seems bizarre. Much of the first five minutes of my visit to an office involves doing a certain amount of Goffmanian impression management to let people know that I’m to be taken seriously. Usually the balding, multi-syllabic speech about social network analysis — what I have glossed in my fieldnotes as ‘professor face’ — gets the job done pretty quickly. In fact towards the end of my fieldwork I found I had to tone it down to keep from scaring people away. Office wear in PNG is pretty much the same in Hawai’i — except even muted aloha shirts are not really done by expats, although PNGian seem to go for them. In retrospect what I should have done was gone for a look that I think of as ‘associate dean at a fundraiser’: Green UH polo shirt with logo on breast, tucked into khaki slacks, brown belt with blackberry holstered, and like friggin’ Rockports or something.

In the event, the only long trousers I have are a pair of black jeans and some blue Dickies for visiting Porgera, which look a little more ‘mailman’ than they do ‘executive’. This is ok in the context of mining companies, where even corporate headquarters have prominently placed fire extinguishers, men in reflective/protective gear enter and leave regularly, and little clocks record with pride how long it has been since any of the secretaries has suffered from a Lost Time Injury. But in certain prominent law offices whose indirect lighting, art premier-adorned walls, and acres of casually spacious office at the top of pricey office high-rises, showing up looking like you’ve come from the assay lab is just tacky.

Fourth thing I learned in Papua New Guinea: I respect Ben Stiller’s oeuvre. After condescendingly assuming that Stiller-branded broad comedy was beneath me in the past four months I’ve been really pleasantly surprised by how much I like his work. Some of this — Tropic Thunder and I think its called Keeping The Faith (which for idiosyncratic reasons my wife and I both loved) — I saw in the states, but a lot of his other movies are popular in PNG and I’ve liked what I’ve seen here as well. Of course I’ve also become totally fixated on You Don’t Mess With The Zohan as well, so maybe I’m just going soft-headed.

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 often is in tension with certain forms of the Papua New Guinean imagination for which ‘traditional culture’ is often imagined to be ‘intact’. One well-known anthropologist who has made this argument much more persuasively, and much longer ago than me is inimitable Roy Wagner. Shortly before I left PNG I reread his book The Invention of Culture for the first time since I started graduate school and was blown away by its power and insight in a way that I don’t remember being when I was a first-year graduate student.

And so, in honor of Roy I wanted to share some pictures that I took recently. These come from a social club in Port Moresby, specifically from floor-to-ceiling murals each of which is about two meters long. There are three in the set. They are ‘dogs playing poker’ murals, except it is not ‘poker’ but ‘snooker’. And instead of — or rather, I should say, in addition to — wearing bits and pieces of Victorian apparel, some of them are wearing traditional PNG bilas.

One dog with a bilum and another with a pig’s tooth necklace:

Here’s a closeup of the necklace dog:

And the bilum dog:

And here is my favorite: a dog with a bilum cap.

This is a little too rich for me to untangle. There is something going on with race here (white attire/traditional bilas/anthropomorphism) that I don’t understand. Or not. Looks like its hard to make a bridge with your fingers when you have a paw — that guy with the necklace is shooting across his forearm.

Creativity: It Happens.

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 more pressing for regular readers of this blog, many of whom live in places where a building built in 1900 does not count as ‘historic’ — the big loss is the KMC franchise, which went up in smoke along with the Tribal Den night club, the Internet cafe and (apparently) the National Narcotics Bureau. Here is a picture courtesy of the “Madang — Ples Blo Mi” blog:

Adieu, KMC.

(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 go.

A large of part of being an anthropologist is learning to see the details of the world in a way that is lost on others. These details typically slide away and beneath us for two reasons: first, because they are so familiar to us and we see them so regularly that we parse them quickly, taking them all in in one big gulp of typification (as we say in the business). In short, we lose the details because they are too easy to see. Second, we lose the details of a world because, when we encounter it, it is strange and new to us, and people who experience new worlds either force them into familiar frameworks of understanding(blotting out the truly novel) or else the novelty is blindingly bright, rendering us unable to appreciate its man subtleties or nuances. For anthropologists — or anyone else who has become thoughtful about what it means to observe — the goal is to strike a balance between being keyed-in enough to understand a situation, but not so keyed-in that the details start slipping away beneath them. In typical ‘culture shock’ fieldwork, anthropologists get to experience both of these extremes, beginning as neophytes and ending, so we like to think, as ‘insiders’.

I always say that human are the most sensitive and complex recording devices on the planet, but also, alas, one of the worst storage devices. We take everything in — smells, sounds, textures. We can listen to the sound of a crowd and then focus on an individual conversation, all without rearranging any microphones or messing about with recording levels. We can feel social dynamics and moods uncapturable on video, even when this takes of smacking ourselves on the head five minutes after the fact and exclaiming “she wanted me to kiss her!” And then we fall asleep, wake up the next morning, and the details is gone, turned into an amalgam of remembrance and impression.

A good example of this are my many errors in describing the KMC shop in town. As Nelson points out, I got the spelling of the name wrong (no surprise to regular readers of the blog): it is in fact Kenmaity (without an ‘e’) as Emmanuel spells it in his blog post. My description of the “the white piece of paper slowly peeling of the wall next to the cash registers which reads ‘a TEAM is MANY hands doing ONE job’ in a vaguely elegant italic font” while right in intent, only vaguely captured what is actually written on the wall (I don’t have the full text yet but hope to get it at the start of my next visit).

Some of my descriptions were more accurate. Consider, for instance, my favorite poster (or perhaps my second favorite given a newly-noticed poster that I will describe below):

One of the the most enigmatic of these posters features the torso of a white toddler (unusual in a country where most people are not white) emerging from the bottom of the frame, a beatific smile on his face — of longing? fulfillment? — wearing a pair of overalls over a collared shirt. His hands are lifted straight up, straining towards a Delicious Chicken Burger which is as large as he is. What makes this particularly unusual is the fact that these images are superimposed over the background of a beach, complete with saves and a seagull flying away. However, the beach scene is upside down — as if the Delicious Chicken Burger has been dropped out of a plane and the baby shortly afterwards, they are both about to be land in the water, and someone has hung the picture upside down.

Here is a picture (from the Gordon’s branch, but the same poster):

The baby is in a t-shirt, without a collar. I didn’t mention the KMC logo in the upper left hand corner of the poster (perhaps I didn’t think it important to mention). And now, as I revisit the scene, I increasingly think (but cannot prove) that the child is pursuing a fishburger rather than a chicken burger. Or so it seems to me now.

Here is another photo, which I described as an “image of a young girl with tremendously round eyes who looks as if she is in a trance state or startled by a loud noise, who sits with her hands down on a table on which lies a bucket (to scale, this time) of fried chicken.”

The big thing that I missed here is that she is holding her hands to her head, rather than down on the ‘desk’. Also, on second thought I would describe the look on her face is ‘overwhelmed’ or ‘over-awed’ by the chicken beneath her. You might also describe it as a look of fixation or longing for the chicken. Also, the airbrushed white lines which are meant to represent the alluring warm scent of the fried chicken are worthy of mention, methinks.

Here is a third picture, of “ a round-faced child… about to bite into an enormous drumstick which is immediately adjacent to some copy describing the benefits of feeding young children fried chicken”

Here my description is accurate, but only because it is so brief. The chinglish text is truly amazing but I didn’t write it down. Also, on reflection, I believe this child is being fed chicken by another, unidentified person.

And finally, here is the money shot:

Having visited the KMC at Gordons (and waited a long time for my chicken) I’ve had a chance to see another KMC, and I think this has given me a chance to see the one in town with new eyes, giving me things to look for. This last time, for instance, I missed a poster which I saw at the Gordons shop. This one, which I think is now my favorite, pictures four white people seated close together around a table, smiling and looking down at a hamburger so enormous that that only its bun, about four feet across, is visible in the frame.

In many ways this discussion of KMC is not a very good representation of ethnographic fieldwork. All of my writings about KMC are based on memory, since I did not take any notes in the restaurants. Also, while anthropologists often write about places where interactions happens, this description focuses on objects and totally excludes people, which are what I actually study. I’ve done this mostly because I don’t want to blog descriptions of my informants (who are entitled to privacy) or, even worse, my friends here in PNG who are not expecting to be put under the microscope at all.

The difference between an anthropologist and a tourist (and I know that sometimes people have trouble telling the difference) is that tourists seek to be amazed by the unusual while anthropologists train themselves to finding the mundane amazing. While it is true that the posters at KMC are titillatingly weird to Americans, I think they help exemplify the way in which anthropologists learn to see things in new ways, and how this vision requires its own sort of discipline — one which cultivates curiosity, rigor, and a belief that the world will never stop being surprising.

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 time. Much of my mornings are spent phoning offices and assign if there has been any move in scheduling an appointment with Mssrs. X, Y, and Z.

Sometimes people have genuine reasons not to see me — some executives travel regularly for their work and are rarely in town. Some are in the middle of particularly busy periods during my time here. Contacting these very busy people is complicated by the fact that none of them, as far as I can tell, keep an appointment book, agenda, or schedule: it is very rare for me to be able to say “well if this week is bad, how about four weeks from now on Tuesday at 2”. For whatever reason, they simply do not plan like that, as far as I can tell.

At other times, however, I have encountered something that feels like the run around. Sometimes I think this might be because of negligence on the part of the secretarial staff: I call for an appointment, they promise to call me back, they never do, I call them back, they say they are waiting on me to drop off a hard-copy of my informed consent sheet so they can pass it on for review before the executive sees me, I drop it off, I don’t hear back, I call them up and ask if the executive has received the form, then they say that I shouldn’t have dropped off the form and the proper procedure would have been to call first. Then I tell them I did call first and was told that I’d have to drop off the form, to which they respond that I had best start over by calling tomorrow and asking for an appointment. This cycle repeats, and this time they tell me I should email first. Then I email, don’t hear back, call, am told my call will be returned, wait, call back, and then they ask why I haven’t dropped a paper copy of my informed consent sheet off. In some cases I eventually hit on the right combination of secretaries and media and manage to get an interview scheduled. There are still a few offices, however, where I have saturated them with every conceivable form of information about my project and still have had no luck.

There are legitimate reasons for this, I suppose. This endless round of broken promises to “call you back” and repeated requests for the same information you have already sent people twice does act inadvertently (“never blame on malice what can be explained by incompetence”) as a filter to screen out random people who are looking to waste executives’ time. However in my case I have a legitimate reason to speak to these people, particularly as most businesses in PNG — and especially the mining and petroleum sector — are hyper-committed to transparency in order to stave off accusations that they are secretive greedy capitalists. So while business might be well served by keeping some people away from executives, I do not believe they are well served keeping me away from them. I certainly have never been refused an interview when I have gotten through to the person in question and, frankly, I think people enjoy talking with me — it is not often that you get a chance to talk about things that interest you with someone who understands in relatively good detail what you are on about.

Of course, even if it is true that I am the sort of person who should be able to get a meeting with the country manager of a major corporation, this fact might not be apparent to the front office: I mean, how often do you have anthropologists calling up and scheduling appointments? So I think my status confuses people as well. The first step of my research was to visit all of these offices and ask for annual reports and other publicly available documentation so that when I did interview representatives from these companies I wouldn’t have to ask moronic questions like: “so, do you currently have a mine operating in PNG?” There are a few offices of mining companies that I have walked into – typically the ones who have ‘environmental issues’ — and begun describing who I am only to see the smile on the face of the secretary tighten into a rictus, as if they were preparing to not lose their composure when I chain myself to the desk and start carving the words ‘no more riverine tailings disposal’ into my chest wish a pen-knife. When I say that I am only there for a copy of the annual report their relief is palpable.

After a month of attempting to get important people on the phone, it seems to me that this is the best strategy: call as specific a number as you can — if you have the direct line to their personal secretary, call that rather than the main desk. When someone picks up the phone, ask confidently for the person in question by their first name. Make sure you know what their first name is, and how to pronounce it. If they have a nickname that you know they use in the course of daily business, use it. Don’t lie to people about who you are or your relationship with the person you are trying to contact, but don’t request refusal in the guise of asking permission either. If for some reason they do put you on the line directly with the person in question, introduce yourself and schedule an appointment and thank them for the call.

If your call is routed past the first few secretaries and is intercepted by one further up the line — which is the most likely thing that will happen — and they ask who is calling, then introduce yourself in the most formal terms possible. I regularly describe myself as “Dr. Alex Golub, a professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa”. If you are doing dissertation fieldwork on a Fulbright, introduce yourself as “Ms. Jane Smith, a Fulbright Scholar from the University of X.” Don’t embellish or brag: “at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, a world center for the study of the Asia-Pacific”. This is just gross. But do present yourself in the most formal light and don’t be self-effacing. You have official titles for a reason and you shouldn’t be afraid to use them judiciously.

Just, you know, don’t make up extra titles for yourself. I haven’t gotten very far in the offices where I’ve introduced myself as Professorsaurus Rex.

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 a PMV from Porgera and a month or two on a steady diet of rice and Maggie noodles the mixture of protein and grease — eaten in the privacy of a hotel room no less — provided a pretty primal form of solace, not to mention two days worth of calories. Since the late 90s the king of high-end chicken and chips in PNG has been Big Rooster, whose cartoony mascot and red, white, and blue signage once reigned supreme over Boroko and Town. But no longer. Since my last visit to the country a contender has stepped into the ring: KMC.

That’s KMC, not KNC. It stands for ‘Kenmaiety Chicken’. There are at least two branches of the chain, which my friends agree is a ‘chinese business’ (some versions of the logo do have Chinese characters in them) but which I think might be a chain from Singapore or Taiwan. The menus in plastic display stands which are scattered around the tables include images of bento meals which have been covered with small white stickers on which the words ‘not available’ have been handwritten in pen. I know these details because I recently visited the Moresby branch, which is across the street from Pacific Place (the premier high-rise building in Papua New Guinea) and in the same run down building as the Tribal Den Hotel, which is the kind of place where girls who look like they should be in high-school sit out side smoking insouciantly and appear to be waiting for — what is the polite way to say it? — a piece of the action. Just off the main drag of Champion Parade Ground, then, KMC is in the down-scale block of Port Moresby.

The restaurant is part of a two-story complex of store fronts which includes a wang ba I don’t frequent and some second hand shops. On the inside it is an extremely large, open space with plastic fast food tables — sort with brightly colored molded plastic seats bolted into a metal stand fastened to the floor, like the MacDonalds I used to frequent as a kid. The counter is wide and behind the attendants are the heated glass storage cases filled with various forms of fried chicken. Behind these you get a glimpse of the kitchen, where men and women in disposable paper hair nets prepare meals. The people who take your order wear visors with the KMC logo. Its more corporate branding than most restaurants or businesses in PNG have, and the seriousness with which KMC takes its business can be seen in the white piece of paper slowly peeling of the wall next to the cash registers which reads “a TEAM is MANY hands doing ONE job” in a vaguely elegant italic font.

The menu of KMC chicken is, as you might expect, tilted towards fried chicken. I think they may do burgers. In addition to different amounts and sizes of chicken and chips, they also have the ‘chop’ (a boneless chicken schnitzel with orange breading and a slight hint of cayenne pepper, which rates a chili-pepper super imposed on the image of it on the large picture menu hanging over the front counter), and a ‘mexican chicken wrap’ (tortilla with tomato, lettuce, chicken nuggets), and various ‘combos’ which combine chicken, chips, and a drink.

The color-scheme of KMC is yellow and bright green, with red highlights Like big rooster, it has adopted as its motto an image of the live version of the animal that you consume in the store — although the happy, anthropomorphic chicken in a chef’s toque which serves as KMC’s mascot is rather more closely observed than Big Rooster’s smiling, tremendous-chested paragon.

Perhaps one of the most fascinating things about KMC is the series of large posters which hang on the walls depicting people eating food. One poster near the cash registers is unusual in that it depicts a pretty young Asian woman attempting simultaneously to smile and lick an enormous soft-serve ice cream cone. More frequently, however, the photos are of children who are just moments away from eating food. One of the the most enigmatic of these posters features the torso of a white toddler (unusual in a country where most people are not white) emerging from the bottom of the frame, a beatific smile on his face — of longing? fulfillment? — wearing a pair of overalls over a collared shirt. His hands are lifted straight up, straining towards a Delicious Chicken Burger which is as large as he is. What makes this particularly unusual is the fact that these images are superimposed over the background of a beach, complete with saves and a seagull flying away. However, the beach scene is upside down — as if the Delicious Chicken Burger has been dropped out of a plane and the baby shortly afterwards, they are both about to be land in the water, and someone has hung the picture upside down.

Other pictures include: a round-faced child about to bite into an enormous drumstick which is immediately adjacent to some copy describing the benefits of feeding young children fried chicken, and another image of a young girl with tremendously round eyes who looks as if she is in some sort of trance state or has just been startled by a loud noise, who sits with her hands down on a table on which lies a bucket (to scale, this time) of fried chicken.

Perhaps my deepest regret about KMC is that my research now keeps me so sedentary that I can’t in good conscience eat the amount of chicken necessary to sample fully from the menus of both KMC and Big Rooster to decide who truly has the best chips in town. I will work on deciphering the Chinese characters in the logo, though.

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 I figured I’d better have something to teach them. Of course, I’ve done fieldwork before, but I felt that I wanted to take the high road, as it were, and give them a very formal version of fieldwork, and then try to let them know about other, more casual options out there. The other option, which is to tell people that field work is ‘just hanging out’ but that somewhere there are books with ‘scientific’ methods that are morally and epistemologically dubious, is not really very responsible — its much easier to learn how to hang out when you’re in the field than it is to come up with your own system of coding fieldnotes. How to ratchet ‘down’ rather than ‘up’ as it were.

Moreover, I actually brought the books I’ll be using in the methods class to the field with me, and I’m reading them as I do my fieldwork. Hopefully this will allow me to teach them better, since just reading about what sort of fieldwork strategies they suggest is quite different from reading them while you are waiting outside someone’s office for an interview. And waiting is something I am doing a lot of — my fieldwork this time around involves formal interviews with busy, important people who are concerned about how they will be represented in the press and the wider world. Unlike my earlier fieldwork, which was in part classical ‘living in the village’ type of stuff, my current research is much more typical of what I imagine a certain type of urban sociology is like. People want to see a professional, courteous researcher and are willing to talk to people who think adhere to professional standards. So… I am trying to adhere to them! Of course, I’ve always done my best to be a careful, prudent scholar. But now I have an entire apparatus to signal to people who have only just met that this is what I’ve always done.

Second, when I moved to a four-field anthropology department, I really took on board the critique of loosy-goosy cultural anthropology that came from the Other Fielders. I was already sympathetic — the rigorous, humanistic anthropology I was trained in was, in general, skeptical of the excessive epistemological cynicism that marks a lot of cultural anthropology today. So the question became: Instead of talking with your friends in your fieldsite about what an interesting and unanswerable question some topic was, and rather than write essays in which you wondered what the answer to it might be, what if you actually tried to find out what the answer was. I’ve designed my research this time around to be very focused around an empirical problem, while still leaving room for all of the general ‘hanging-out’ which is an important part of fieldwork.

I think this willingness to embrace a ‘scientific’ rather than a ‘humanistic’ notion of rigor has been a major turning point for me in my post-doctoral career. At the same time, it is a qualified turning point. Nothing is more boring than the moral and personal agendas of people who feel ‘science’ provides some sort of deep truth/is a replacement for religion or the meaning of life (Mars In Our Time!) and naively worship fantasies of assembly-line 100% accurate bench science which are light years away from the experience-actual experience of lab work as described over and over again in memoirs ethnographies of science. But I figured, as long as you approach it in a decentered way (as Habermas might say), it would be fun to see what this sort of mind-set yields?

So I think my first realization was the power and utility that comes from being willing to wean oneself away from epistemological commitments that one gets thoroughly stuck to in graduate school. Its called ‘growth’.

Shortly after arriving back in Papua New Guinea though — my fourth trip to the country in the past 11 years — I found myself immersed in all of the precise, demanding, microscopic interaction that comes with fieldwork: learning to see through the lens of long experience in a country, but also having to learn how to give up what you know in order to see the things that will make you learn; learning to be who people want you to be interview situations, without being untrue to yourself or to them — finding that version of yourself that fits best with them; learning to be a guest with people who you are living with and with whom pretense really does not solve the big problems of how you will share space and time; managing the delicate balance of reciprocity that is so much a part of life in PNG, ‘even’ in urban Moresby, a balancing act I’ve spent so much of my life learning how to do, and even more learning how to think through; and most importantly, telling the next chapter of my life together with the friends and family I’ve come to have in this country, trying to make sense of our relationships now that my two-years stay moves more and more into the past and our biographies change in ways that none of us could have imagined when we first met.

One of the things that my insanely broad-scoped reading around for my methods course has taught me is that I’m much more sympathetic to the how-to literature in ethnographic sociology than in anthropology, and as I designed the syllabus I kept asking myself ‘what is anthropological about this? If ethnography is a method used by many disciplines, what is distinct about anthropology’s take on it? Except perhaps that that is the part I like least?’ Having come to the field expecting to be taught the powers of a ‘scientific’ conception of research, what I discovered was the incredible human potential that inheres in the occasion of ethnographic fieldwork: like raiding in World of Warcraft, ‘the field’ is a space charged with emotional importance, deeply attached to your sense of self and self-worth. And above all, it is a space full of other people. As one wise member of my guild once said about raiding “the possibilities for progress or regression are immense” — I feel that, in fieldwork, you are faced with such an enormity of relationships, simultaneously over-analyzed and also only intuitively half-grasped, that the only way to do good work and maintain your mental health is to become a good person. Of course, there are shortcuts and temptations: the license that comes from being a first world white in a third world black country, the ease of deceit and dissimulation. This time coming through Port Moresby I feel as if life is applying tremendous pressure to every joint in my body, forcing every dislocated sentiment and inclination back into its proper place and warning me that the nay options involve pathological tearing of the ligaments of my soul. (I also think that the best way to be a great anthropologist is to be a good Jew, but I’ll save that rumination for Sof).

Of course, this is true of many kinds of fieldwork, including ethnographic sociology. But I think maybe this sort of potential for self-transformation is particularly present in anthropological fieldwork, where ‘immersion’ is so prized. Of course, anthropological fieldwork is classically also the least ‘answerable’ since it is the most get-away-with-it-in-the-field-y discipline of all social sciences. But despite the fact that not all of anthropology’s previous practitioners were as great as they could be, the fact still remains that the intensity of social contact in anthropology, and the willingness to blur boundaries between ‘work’ and ‘life’ may make it unique in the opportunity it affords one to straighten out one’s internal and external object relations. This was my second realization doing fieldwork this trip — or at least in the first two weeks! — that I came for the ‘science’ but stayed for the ‘humanity’.

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 is cold-calling people, which is an unpleasant task both for me and for the person on the other end. Just as surely as I get tired of repeating the same introductory paragraph about who I am and what I want, so too I am sure that the secretaries who have to deal with me have better things to do than to figure out which office to transfer the anthropologist to.

One of the most unexpected aggravations of cold-calling people, however, has been dealing with the phonebook itself. As most readers of my blog know, Papua New Guinea is usually pronounced PNG (pee ‘en jee). And many of the businesses and institutions that I deal with have names that start with some version of PNG: The PNG Chamber of Commerce, the PNG Chamber of Mines and Petroleum, etc. etc. Often times important institutions simply are not listed in the phonebook, and in this case I have to start asking my personal contacts for information about them. But in other times, they are listed, but they are listed under ‘Papua New Guinea’ instead of ‘PNG’ (which is alphabetized between ‘PM’ and ‘PO’ in the phonebook). And best of the the ‘P’ section of the phonebook begins with a section dedicated to companies whose names start with ‘P.N.G.’ since P. is alphabetized before Pa, for some reason. As a result I have to look every institution up in multiple locations to make sure that I haven’t missed it. Sometimes groups are listed twice, or there are ‘see also’ entries. I am sure that there is some reason why there are three separate entries for PNG in the phonebook but this drive me nuts. Of course, since I am probably the only person in the country doing something as crazy as calling everyone with an institutional name that begins with ‘PNG’ I suppose I am also the only one put out.

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 I write them. Even my patented Obviously Avoidable Blog Misspellings don’t mar the coherence of my prose as seriously as my own hand. But letter writing, I know.

Always on or always off, that I can handle. But the intermittent, expensive, half-available nature of Internet communication in PNG is a different sort of beast. If I lived here I suppose things would be different, but at the moment I am trying to juggle between a mix of expensive wireless access which requires me to lug my laptop around everywhere and purchase Hotel Espresso in exchange for a seat in the wi-fi zone, and the apparently-on-dialup wang ba wedged into the far end of one corner of Chinese-run shops in the Steamships in town. Suckage. If any readers can recommend a good Internet café (preferably in town) or have an office with a big computer and an enormous information pipe that is like, you know, going totally unused, then feel free to drop me a line.

My new strategy is to write these blog entries at home, after my normal anthropological daily diary, and then try to find a time to post them. When that time will be I’m not sure — I may end up posting them after I arrive back in the states. Or maybe I’ll time my Hotel Espresso runs for moments when I can post batches of entries at a single time. We’ll see. For now — over and out.

“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 and have their first thought be “I can’t eat that right now” instead of “I should eat that”. I mention this because I am going through this process myself today. It changes your world to realize that you are surrounded by piles and piles of food being sold by a dozen vendors and you really cannot eat any of it. I think if Americans’ first thought was “I can’t eat that right now” instead of “Mmmmm, brownies!” a lot about the country would change.

“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.

*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.

“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 point the second and third times drove home rather forcefully.

3. As a result I value human life now in a way I didn’t before.

4. I think Arvo Part’s style works well for instruments but not voices, so stop asking.

5. I think lists like this are a rather cheap form of narcissism given the amount of navel-gazing the Internet enables.

6. Deep in my head at night before I fall asleep I am writing two novels set in Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Ekumen” universe.

7. I prefer to eat small, intensely flavored objects.

8. My wife says I am “compulsively irreverent”

9. I am 90% sure that I know who I was in my previous life, and a little disturbed that I could believe in such a silly thing.

10. I believe in the positive power of conflict and am skeptical of people who want to ‘resolve conflicts’ instead of seeking ‘empowerment through crisis’.

11. I don’t care if I am on the top of the ‘healing done’ meters as long as I am at the bottom of the ‘percentage overhealed’ meter.

12. I am against cruelty to animals but I am not going to stop eating foie gras and I cannot reconcile these two commitments intellectually.

13. I totally believe that we must not give in to the “bigotry of low expectations” even if the phrase was popularized by a President I didn’t vote for advocating for a kind of education reform I oppose.

14. I can sight-read a Palestrina motet, and I’m proud of it.

15. I used to be obsessed with obsession, but I think I’m getting better now.

16. I believe in human duties, not human rights.

17. I think it is about time that we dusted off second wave feminism and gave it another go.

18. Latkes, not hamentaschen.

20. To the extent that I still have a favorite movie, Miller’s Crossing is it.

21. I think the best text that can be used to understand how borders organize difference is the “Mexico” episode of Tony Bourdain’s “No Reservations”

22. I believe that Real Artists Ship.

23. I have never listened to Led Zeppelin II or Help so that I will not ever run out of things to listen to by The Beatles and Zep.

24. I was going to write a long blog entry pondering what it says about America that in the original Star Trek Kennedy-Era liberalism’s fantasy of the Racial Other was an Ashkenazi Jew playing a Vulcan but in Obama Era new version of Star Trek it is a Mexican until I learned that Zachary Quinto was Italian.

25. I think Willow Rosenberg is a fine role model for Jewish people everywhere.

“Did you ever see Star Wars? It was very accurate.”
- Jazz musician Sun Ra speaking to music critic Francis Davis

Via the excellent “American Ethnography”:http://www.americanethnography.com/article_sql.php?id=71 — a sort of cross between Gapers Block and American Ethnologist.

I’ve been remiss in promoting myself.

I was recently “featured at WoW Insider”:http://www.wowinsider.com/2009/01/06/15-minutes-of-fame-anthropologist-digs-into-wow/ which has sparked some “other”:http://news.gotgame.com/anthropologist-studies-wow-nerd-rage-and-guild-friendships/23203/ “coverage”:http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/88496-Anthropologist-Studying-Culture-of-WoW-Raiders — some of which even “makes me blush”:http://e4ae.blogspot.com/2009/01/alex-golub-my-new-hero.html. I think I expected a lot of things to happen to me in my life, but a blog post entitled “Alex Golub is my new hero” was certainly not one of them!

I gave a paper about my research on World of Warcraft at the American Anthropological Association meetings in San Francisco in November. It was entitled “Raiding, Its Projects, and Its Publics or, Where Is The World of Warcraft “:http://alex.golub.name/res/Golub%20Raiding%20Projects%20Publics%20AAA%202008.pdf and you can read it just by clicking on it.

Meanwhile the paper about WoW I submitted to a journal six months ago is still mia…. sigh.

And now some notes on Cultcha:
Two books on the wider concept too expand beyond my typical scope: “Culture 1922: The Emergence of a Concept”:http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7371.html and “Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture”:http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6731.html

And two new albums:
“Corigliano’s settings of Bob Dylan lyrics”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001DELX6W?tag=wwwnaxoscom-20 is finally out, w/Hila PLitmann singing.

Also “Steve Reich’s Daniel Variations”:http://www.amazon.com/Daniel-Variations/dp/B0016O6ZA8/ref=dmusic_cd_album — I actually like the piece for vibes quite a bit.

This is in general a sign of my warming to minimalism… or at least _listening_ to it…

“Michael Kimmel”:http://www.concertideas.com/mk/michaelswork.htm has a “new book”:http://www.amazon.com/Guyland-Perilous-World-Where-Become/dp/0060831340/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219339310&sr=8-1 that is relevant for my work on WoW. Meanwhile a “report of female social science Ph.D.s”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/08/21/socsci also recently came out. And of course Papua New Guineans have “gender defying goats”:http://www.viceland.com/int/v15n8/htdocs/meeting-kevin-rudd-130.php

(The “RIA has an outreach program”:http://anthropologistabouttown.blogspot.com/)

A mix with piano interludes from the Boston School.

*Corn Meal Dance*
William Parker

*Leaving Again/In The Wee Small Hours*
Kurt Elling
_Lyric by Kurt Elling, based on Keith Jarrett’s untitled improvisation form his 1994 trio recording, “At The Blue Note”_

Sleeping / Waking / Crying / Leaving again / It’s morning / I have to go
Though every night pretends / begins in quiet hoping that it never ends / they’re always ending again / breaking another dream / a dream where we could breathe in the heavy curtained prairie air of summer night / watching lightning over wheat fields through a bedroom window /
And the prairie gently rose up with a feeling and embraced us

And when morning found us I pulled you to me and promised to stay
But that was the night / and now day

In the we small hours of the morning / while the whole wide world is fast asleep
You lie awake and think about the girl / and never ever think of counting sheep

And when your lonely heart has learned its lesson / you’d be hers if only she would call
For in the wee small hours of the morning / that’s the time you miss her most of all

*”Foss”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lukas_Foss / For Lenny: Variations on New York New York*

*Ballad of Maxwell Demon*
Shudder to Think
Shudder to Think has always been one of my favorite bands, mostly because Craig Wedren is one of my heroes, vocally speaking. This track is from the soundtrack of Velvet Goldmine, Todd Haine’s movie version of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust. Here Wedren channels Bowie (iirc) in a late-1990s modality while the performance is personated by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, dripping in desperate androgynous eroticism.

*Caffe-in*
Mario and Peaches

*Back in the Twentieth Century*
The Cutters
I discovered this fun track by accident — its the soundtrack to the preview movie for the virtual world “There”. The video shows beautiful avatars air-surfing and making out while this plays in the background.

*TV Party*
Black Flag

*New Logo*
Channels
(The?) Channels feature a lot of the line-up of Jawbox, another dischord classic. They rock, and this song in particular just demonstrates to me the sort of virtuosity that comes from veteran musicians who know how to rock live. Also the lyrics kick ass.

*”Fine”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Fine / Music for Piano 1: Prelude*

*Old Man of the Sea*
*Little Boy Billee*
*Cape Cod Girls*
These three songs come from the album Rogue’s Gallery, which happened when Johnny Depp decided to spend some karma points getting an album of traditional sea shanties and ballads made. Gore Verbinski flew to LA, New York, and London and holed up in a studio. Famous people came buy, put together the songs, and went nuts. The first and last of this set feature the incomparable Baby Gramps.

*We Both Go Down Together*
The Decembrists

*”Shapero”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Shapero / Sonata No. 1 1. Allegro Preciso*

*Moody / Canticum Canticorum 1. Surge, propera amica mea*
From the Song of Solomon.

*Harvey / Come Holy Ghost*
I sang this for the first time on Pentecost.

*Whitacre / Cloudburst*
Setting an Octavio Paz text, this piece for chorus and a few instruments recreates exactly what it describes. The impulse verges on New Agey, and the implementation verges on gimmickry, but the overall effect is, I think, revelatory.

When I talk about mining to other academics the connection that they have with this form of primary industry are photographs of people working at mines — Sebastian Salgado’s work, typically. But here’s another one to give people some sense of what these things look like — “Edward Burtynsky’s photography of quarries, mines, etc.”:http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/index.html.

The thing about mines is that there’s no real way to understand how big they get until you are in one. These photos at least give you a sense of how awesome they are as aesthetic — and sometimes very sinister — objects.

For a paper I’m working on:

“The New England Town of men’s deepest aspirations was a utopia: a corporate body free from power-seeking, from conflict, from hard bargaining among separate interests, from exploitation of the week; free, in short, from politics. But there was no eliminating the facts of private ambition and group hostilities from social life. Colonial yankees strove instead to overcome them through their “precepts of peace” and, failing that, to escape them through a distinctive style of politics by denial. Men stood for office by renouncing ambitions, all the while discretely publicizing their availability among friends.” — The Minute Men and Their World pg. 14-15

There’s another good quote in there about how individual and collective are miraculously harmonized but now I can’t find it.

“The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism”:http://www.amazon.com/Invention-World-Religions-Universalism-Preserved/dp/0226509893/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b/105-4927962-4957223 by T. Masuzawa

“Allies for Armageddon”:http://www.amazon.com/Allies-Armageddon-Rise-Christian-Zionism/dp/0300116985/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-4927962-4957223?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1193103521&sr=8-1 — book on Christian zionists by a journalist

“The Hebrew God”:http://www.amazon.com/Hebrew-God-Portrait-Ancient-Deity/dp/0300090250/ref=sr_1_1/105-4927962-4957223?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1193103565&sr=8-1 by Bernhard Lang — “in my copious free time”

“Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization”:http://www.amazon.com/Bound-Together-Preachers-Adventurers-Globalization/dp/0300112017/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-4927962-4957223?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1193103631&sr=8-1 — looks promising.

“The Tarde-Durkheim Conference”:http://www.tarde-durkheim.net/Conference.htm — a theoretical tendency becomes a movement by forging a disciplinary history

“Economic Sociology, the European version”:http://econsoc.mpifg.de/ — check out the newsletter.

This is Extreme Bibliography Geekery: not only is Rowan and Littlefield having a 40% off sale at the moment, but they are “now browseable on Google Books”:http://rowmanblog.typepad.com/rowman/2007/08/rowman-littlefi.html! Is it sad that I am so totally psyched by this? Now I can finally browse the “Imperial Maine and Hawai’i”:http://books.google.com/books/p/rowman_littlefield?id=qHilua4CqjwC&pg=PA62&dq=imperial+maine&ie=ISO-8859-1&sig=YvIet28fP6u0r_w5WbiTFq9YIsE#PPA61,M1 online! Huzzah!

Welcome to 5768 all — may you have a sweet new year.

It looks like the “threatened strike at Lihir”:http://www.postcourier.com.pg/20070831/news03.htm is actually “on and affecting world gold prices”:http://investing.reuters.co.uk/news/articleinvesting.aspx?type=goldMktRpt&storyID=2007-08-31T055314Z_01_SP269982_RTRIDST_0_MARKETS-PRECIOUS-UPDATE-1-CORRECTED.XML.

The superb first paragraph of the acknowledgments of Steve Johnstone’s _Disputes and Democracy: The Consequences of Litigation in Ancient Athens_:

The difficulty is not beginning, it is knowing where to end. Ordinarily, the boundaries seem clear. Readers think of a book as a discrete object, the product of a single author, a commodity, a physical thing, an elaborated argument. As an author, however, “my book” does not primarily describe the object you are holding but one of the principles that has organized my life for many years, a kind of askesis or discipline. I do not think first of my claims about Athenian litigation but about my writing routine: By 7 each morning I am at work at my desk, which sits in a sweeping bay window looking east over the stacked houses in Noe Valley. After at least two hours work, about the time the fog begins to thin, I walk down 24th street, stopping for coffee and to read the morning paper. I time the rest of my morning by the shouts of children at recess at 10 and 12 across the street at St. Philip’s School, and so on. This peculiar, sometimes even obsessive, discipline has governed not only my own life but those of the people around me as well. Thus, there are many I want to thank not only for supporting me in this project but also for acquiescing themselves to the discipline of the book.

Timothy Oliphant.

Joss Whedon.

Man From Atlantis remake.

You heard it here first.

“Picasso’s Old Guitar Player”:http://www.nhusd.k12.ca.us/kit/students/student%20web%20pages/Student%20Work/Fermin/bond.html — scanning it, it looks unremarkable… until you get to the end…

I’ve been away on vacation for two weeks and am now combing through the fortnight of noosphere that I missed. Here’s a brain dump of links I’ve not read yet:

“Enga ‘Rambo’ Slain”:http://www.thenational.com.pg/062707/nation6.htm

“Love on Campus”:http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su07/love-deresiewicz.html

“Change and difference are not what separate us or tear us apart but the constituents of what glues us together — the very dynamic of all social process” — Neil Blair Christensen, _Inuit in Cyberspace_

Here I am today, sixty-two years beyond my beginning, the embodiement — refugee, survivor, and witness — of the forces that have moved across and within my life. As I survey this pastness that belongs to me alone, this unique tangle of public-private, shared-solitary, accidental-intentional, known-unknown that is my life-so-far what I long to find is some particualrity, soem singularity that makes it not only in fact, but in truth, mine. I search for a _point_, a a meaning; and the truth is that if there is a meaning, I _am_ the meaning. And where is meaning found? It is found in the search for truth.

The truth I have in mind to for is not the sort that, once you find it, you can have it wrapped to go. And once you get it home it fits right in and it never wears out. My view of truth is, first that there is such a thing and, second, I can approach it only if I keep in mind the impossibility of grasping it. The truth that interests me is problematica, partial modest — and still breathing. It is not normally dramatic or revelatory, and its attainment depends far more o nthinking hard than feeling freely. To put it another way: I think that speaking truthfully is a more fitting ambition than speaking the truth.

–Leslie Farber (heavily edited)

Originality grows at the margin of the incessant repetition of the familiar – Gyorgy Ligeti

Today in class we are watching some Borat clips to talk about some basic issues in the politics of representation. Here they are:

“Borat Trailer”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/borat/trailer/

“Ad for Borat Soundtrack”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXGMfNRwc1g

“StopBorat.com”:http://stopborat.com/ — a fake anti-Borat website. Will the recursion ever end?!?!?

“Kazakhstan embassy on Borat (NPR)”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6276973

Like all normal people I waste time in the office googling for pictures of Jean-Claude Van Damme. I found “this one”:http://www.kreweofbacchus.org/kandt/1994kt.html. I am not sure exactly what is happening here, except that if you are on that page you are only one click away from “this one”:http://www.kreweofbacchus.org/kandt/1995kt.html and “this one”:http://www.kreweofbacchus.org/kandt/1996kt.html. So the message is: if you want to melt your brain with pictures of random celebrities dressed up in Medieval Times garb, this is the place to do it.

Update: “oh”:http://www.kreweofbacchus.org/kandt/1985kt.html “yes”:http://www.kreweofbacchus.org/kandt/1987kt.html

Update update: “I admit”:http://www.kreweofbacchus.org/kandt/2004kt.htm

*A great guide to superb “oblivion”:http://helpdesk.gamehelper.com/kb/683.htm “mods”:http://helpdesk.gamehelper.com/kb/682.htm.

*”Zazzle”:http://www.zazzle.com/ — because, yes, someone googling for the meaining of the word “pudicity” _will_ click on a google add for “put this definition on a shirt!” at freedictionary.com. I want a t shirt with just a big picture of Nirnroot and nothing else.

*Levi-Strauss on Mauss’s _Les techniques du corps_: “The Publication of _International Archives of Body Techniques_… would also be a project eminently well fitted for coutneracting racial prejudices, since it would contradict the racialist conceptions which try to make out that man is a product of his body, by demosntrating that it is the other way around: man has, at all times and in all palces, been able to turn his body into a product of his techniques and his representations.” (Introduction to Mauss, pp. 8-9).

I liked the movie more than Henry but ultimately I agree with him on why “the world doesn’t need superman”:http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/07/why_the_world_doesnt_need_supe.html#more.

“Trulies.”:http://www.superdickery.com/dick/9.html

“It is a widely spread Oceanic tale of the origin of death… that human finitude is the result of a choice or conflict between a stone and a banana. Bananas are large, perennial herbs which put forth tall, vigorous shotos which die after producing fruit. The choice, the conflict in these tales is between progeny followed by death (the banana) and eternal but sterile life (the stone). The banana always wins.” – J.Z. Smith, _Map Is Not Territory_ pp. 303-304.

To follow up the quote on Burke here is a nice on from Wayne Booth’s _The Company We Keep_:

“In principle, then, my subject must be all narratives… Even the life we think of as primary experience — that is, events like birth , copulation, death, plowing and planting, getting and spending — is rarely experienced withotu some sort of mediation in narrative; one of the chief arguments for an ethical critciism of narrative is that narratives make and remake what in realist views are considered more primary experiences — and thus make and remake ourselves.

We all live a great proportion of our lives in a surrender to stories about our lives, adn about other possible lives; we live more or less _in_ stories, depending on how strongly we resist surrendering to what is ‘only’ imagined. Even those few tough-minded ones among us who claiim to reject all ‘unreality’; even those who read no novels, watch no soap operas, and share no jokes; even those (if there are any) who echo Mr. Gradgrind and have truck only with ‘the facts’; even the statisticians and accountants must _in fact_ conduct their daily business largely in stories: the reports they receive from and give to superiors and subordinates; the accounts they deliver to tax lawyers; the anecdotes and parables they hear told by a histrionic president as he sells his panaceas; the metaphors, living or moribund, implied in the bignettes that glood the office correspondence and publicity releases. Many of us indeed approach an opposite extreme, living so much of our lives in stories that we must wonder what to call primary, the plowing and planting or the stories about plowing and planting. And when we go too far along that line, or when we embrace certain kinds of destructive ‘realities,’ we are rightly declared deranged.

Our subejct then is the ethical value of the stories we tell each other as ‘imitations of life,’ whether or not they in fact claim to depict actual events. The borderlines between such stories and the rest of life is necessarily vague. When mothers tell fairy stories, do their children experience fictions or ‘life’? When the wife shouts ‘I hate you!’ and throws the coffee cup, bother her statment and her action fall otuside her domain. But if she goes on to say, ‘because you promised me to be faithful and then, after ten years, I learn that you have been having an affair with my best friend,’ she has told a story (true or false) and opened the door to the ethical critic of narrative.”

MIT is have a “big sale”:http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/browse/browse.asp?btype=11&order=d9. Often times when presses have sales their prices don’t drop much beyond those of Amazon’s retail price of the price of as-new used copies in the Internet. Just eyeballing the titles on sale at MIT though, there are some real finds for people who are into MIT’s blend of hard science and cultural studies.

UMass has an awesome “page of WEB De Bois”:http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/collections/galleries/dubois18.htm pictures which include him meeting famous people like MAO. That’s right: “WEB De Bois and Mao”:http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/collections/galleries/dubois/MS0312-0741.jpg. Talk about two great tastes that taste great together. I want to make an energy drink which has this picture on every can.

The “National Library of Scotland”:http://www.nls.uk/ has a lovely site full of “scanned-in broadsides”:http://www.nls.uk/broadsides/index.html that you can browse through. They are redolent of period, and the best place on the web to find “all the lyrics to ‘where did you get that hat’”:http://www.nls.uk/broadsides/broadside.cfm/id/15063/criteria/where%20did%20you%20get%20that%20hat.

As I was riding my bicycle into work today I saw protestors outside the state capitol demonstrating in support of immigrant’s rights. Honolulu is a long way away from the US-Mexico border, and I’m sure that several of the protestors where there more because they’d support _anything_ that was anti-Bush than because immigrant’s rights was an issue spoke directly to their personal experience. But it was still heartening to see them out there.

It seems that a lot of people today think of the struggle for decent wages and equality and so forth to have begun with the civil rights era. They forget about thre progressive movements and labor unrest of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In Chicago — where today people are celebrating the 120th anniversary of the “Haymarket Strike”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_Riot the memory of the strike has been completely expunged from the geography of the city and is only now beginning to be re-incorporated, this time as a monument to the workers rather than the police. The ‘extreme’ demands of the Haymarket strike was an 8 hours working day.

The tragedy of the Haymarket strike was not the unfortunate death of the police officers or strikers who were killed in the course of it, although of course those deaths were tragic. It was the aftermath — in which the government hanged four people who helped organized the strike, holding them responsible for the actions of a person who threw a bomb into a line of policemen, killing several of them. There was no proof — it was death by association. I wish I could say that today in this country the law followed the dictates of reason and justice rather than summary judgement, paranoia, and fear, but unfortunately that isn’t always the case.

So I see today’s march in Chicago — of _three hundred thousand people_ — as having a long and honorable genealogy. For those interested in following the demonstrations going on in Chicago today “Gapers Block”:http://gapersblock.com/ which reccomends “flickr searches”:http://flickr.com/photos/search/tags:immigration%2Cchicago/tagmode:all/ and “Trib updates”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/custom/newsroom/chi-060501immigration-rally-snapshots,0,4426951.story?coll=chi-homepagepromo440-fea about the march. They also point to a “new book on Haymarket”:http://flickr.com/photos/jvoves/138538875/. Of course since I’m in the middle of the Pacific by the time I get done blogging about all this events in Chicago will already have taken place.

Weird that “Galbraith passing away”:http://flickr.com/photos/jvoves/138538875/ today as well.

If “Allguiness”:http://drmandrake.blog-city.com/ were a professor, he would write “Anonymous Professor”:http://drmandrake.blog-city.com/ which features such great entries as the one entitled “yet another thing I hate hearing my students say”:http://drmandrake.blog-city.com/yet_another_thing_i_hate_hearing_my_students_say.htm which reads, in its entirety:

I really hate it when one of my students says to me that “My wife and I” or “My husband and I” are trying to get pregnant.

Do you think I really give a fuck that you are fucking?

Thank god it’s Friday.

You know, sometimes people ask me whether I think it’s a good idea, professionally speaking, for me to blog. My answer to them is: there are bloggers and there are bloggers. Jedi fan fiction is one thing. Anonymous Professor is quite another. Who can blame the unbloggwise when they get hot under the collar about entries like this one? And that’s only one of the most temperate of entries from AP. The key point to realize is that not all academic bloggers are like this one.

But I also have to admit I find it very very funny. Inappropriate, sad, and setting themselves up for a fall. But hilarious.

These are some phrases that I’ve read today that struck as cutting to the chase about the nature of the universe. Why? I don’t know. I just liked them:

experiential irresolvability — sometimes the answer is not more data, but better theorizing.

unrealistic career management strategies — used to describe Sapir’s biography, but a euphemism I will almost definitely have to use at some point in the course of serving on academic committees.

tethered to ecological rationalism — said of misperceptions aboriginal Australians.

it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken — From “the computer world”:http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html. I think there’s a lesson here for all of us.

You know, at the end of the day the fact of the matter is that despite some infelicities, I’m pretty happy with Andrew Huff and the Pool of Lost Souls.

“Joss throws in the towel”:http://www.ew.com/ew/report/0,6115,1141343_1_0_,00.html.

It’s interesting — the franchise doesn’t have legs. I wonder if the mythos will?

Why is the fifteenth hit on an Amazon.com search for “Bruce Ackerman” — well-known lawyer and historian — the movie ‘Curse of the Queerwolf’? And what does “a young man bitten by a transvestite who undergoes a strange transformation during a full moon” have to do with “the electoral crisis of 1801″:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674018664/002-1728795-4172847?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance?

Talk amongst yourselves.

“Natural Symmetry”:http://naturalsymmetry.com/ is the website of Runjuko Pugh, a Honolulu photographer and SEB student. Although the website is just recently unveiled (and done in Flash), it gives you a chance to see some of her strikingly beatutiful photographs of indigenous Hawai’ian flora. In another life she was a microbiologist, is why.

My good friend and sometimes-collaborator Biella ‘m4d0g’ Coleman has redesigned her website apparently — now called”Interprete”:http://healthhacker.org/satoroams/ — and is up and blogging again. So if your subscription to her RSS feed got bj0rked, as mine did (even though her URL stayed the same), go check it out. If you don’t know why you would want to read her, check out these “awesome chapters”:http://healthhacker.org/biella/coleman-prologue.pdf from “her dissertation”:http://healthhacker.org/biella/coleman-chapter-six.pdf.

Interestingly enough, I was discussing bodily fluids (always a favorite for Melanesianists) with my class over the summer, and the way that pretty much every culture has pretty strong feelings about semen, blood, feces, urine, and any other bodily discharge even though (and this was my point) what that feeling was was arbitrary and conventional. I gave examples from a couple of different locations. Then someone asked me about farting. I was taken aback. Even ‘the lesser discharges’ such as tears, belching, and so forth are something I know about. But farting? I hadn’t thought about it much, other than lamely suggesting that the student in question check out Norbert Elias. But now, thanks to the Mad Dog, my knowledge of the literature “has been rectified”:http://www.frontlist.com/detail/0312234937.

Paul Ricoeur is dead. I’ve posted more details over at “Savage Minds”:http://savageminds.org/2005/05/21/paul-ricoeur-is-dead/.

I know that, as a convert, I am already preaching to the converted. But still. At the end of my first day of work after my dissertation — catching up on correspondence, blog design, making graphics, etc — I don’t think I ever touched a piece of software (other than the OS) that was not either free as in beer or free as in speech or both. Professional design people etc. need professional programs and so forth, but for most of us Open Source or Free As In Beer Software really eliminates the need to buy anything. Consider:

Office Productivity: Open Office
Email: Thunderbird
Browser: FireFox
Coding/text editor: Notepad++
SVG Graphics: Inkspot
Photoshop: GIMP
Photo organizing: Picasa2 (there are a multitude but that’s what I use)
Music: WinAMP (steadily getting lamer, but still around), AudioGrabber
SFTP: Fillezilla
SSH: Putty
Half Life 2: Ok I’m still working on finding a replacement for this one

And then the webservices! I think today I used flickr, bloglines, rojo, del.icio.us, CiteULike, amazon, scholar.google.com, wordpress, wikipedia… it’s enough to make your head spin.

This isn’t news, I’m well aware. But, I don’t know… today it just hit me how little point there is in buying software applications anymore.

“Rojo”:http://rojo.com/, the ‘RSS reader with mojo’ has gone public. It’s basically RSS feeds + tags. It was the belle of the ball at a few emerging techology conferences in the past year or so, but excitement about it seems to have cooled since then. I think you can still sign up on their site, but if anyone needs invites I’ve got ‘em.

I have to give props to Biella for keeping the DGI website going while I have been busy working on my diss — and this depsite the fact that she is working on her diss as well! Her latest post on “hacking as a jousting competition”:http://digitalgenres.org/?q=node/23 features some raw prose, but some very good ideas and some great data.

Soon, soon, I will have time for DGI stuff. Until then, bask in the glow of the prose of the MadDog!

The guy whose blog I found this at (forgot who — sorry) really is right: the design makes both your ears and your eyes bleed. However, if you turn down the volume on your speakers for long enough, this “site on computer mediated anthropology”:http://www.cas.usf.edu/anthropology/cma/ is quite helpful.

Two links of interest from The Mad Dog: The first being Radical Software, the website for the historic video magazine, and Geniza, which appear to be a group blog with a very nested sort by category menu.

Yet another MMOG Ph.D.: Lisa Galarneau runs SocialStudyGames.com (using Mambo, no less) as well as Relevancy, a blog. Her Ph.D. proposal is here.

Bloggers blur the definition of reporter’s privelege. What happens to a journalist’s special consideration for the anonymity of his sources if the court believes that everyone with an MT install is a ‘journalist’?

Ulukau: Making resources available for the use, teaching, and enhancement of the Hawaiian language and for a broader and deeper understanding of Hawaiʻi. Good free online books here and here.

Ms. Galloway has poster her 2005 Sociology of Science and Technology syllabus. At times Anne can get a little too cultural studiesy for my taste, but anyone who teaches Feyerabend and Stelarc in the same class has got my vote.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has a new report on blogging: 8 million Americans have created a blog. 27% of internet users read them. 62% of internet users have never used them. I believe it.

Bob Matsui has passed away. It’s the end of an era and sparks reminsences of my childhood.

The Steinkuehler CV: you’ve seen the papers — now get the CV!

Whose Lives Count? Tv Coverage of Natural Disasters. Answer: Whitey.

Here are some pretty decent syllabi on computer-mediated communication.

Christopher Johnson: His book on Levi-Strauss is the bomb.

This one’s for Ian: China Mieville’s short story on Christmas.

I changed the Bio on the about page of my blog. Fwiw.

Plagiarism sucks. The Chronicle has another article on professors who have gotten away with it (note: behind paywall). They also have a nice little piece on what plagiarism is that is suitable for being handed out in class.

Game Related Syllabi on the Web. Rock.

CPIS has a great archive of films for teaching about the Pacific

Voices 1900/2000: 20th Century Choral Music I almost, but didn’t, add to my amazon.com wishlist.

Other Players Proceedings: More good papers on MMOGs than you can shake a stick at.

Holo Mai Pele: A website with details by Lilikala Kame’eleihiwa.

Trans-Pacific Open Source Software Convention. I’m so there.

Dude. Local composer Jon Magnusson is working on Hawaii-styleoperas with librettos by Gavan Daws and Queen Lili’uokiliani!

The University of Chicago is the most blogging uni in the world. Check out Dan Drezner’s book picks.

The new issue of Game Studies has a new article on Ultima Online. We are slowly rounding out the literature on each of these virtual worlds.

The latest Grawemeyer award is out, and George Tsontakis is the big winner. Yet another thing to request, fruitlessly, on Gene Schiller’s ‘all request’ show.

The Papua New Guinea National Disaster Center: For those of you looking for updates on the explosion of the Manam Volcano, this is the site for you.

MacEnterprise.org: How to make OSX do important stuff, enterprisewide.

The Human Development Capability Association: Sen and Nussbaum just won’t stop coming.

Tabu and Sacred in Time and Space: a nicely rounded, if unambitious, syllabus.

Difficult Questions About Video Games: Sory of like the catechism, but about video games. And with Jesper Juul.

Interviews with famous anthropologists. A spectacular collection of historic interviews with famous anthropologists, courtesy of Alan MacFarlane. If you are an anthropologist you really should check this out. Trulies.

li(v)egirls: phone sex meets marketing meets politics meets moral values meets hypocrisy.

www.fuckthesouth.com: A refreshingly piquant little rant.

Mervyn Meggitt, the well-known ethnographer of Enga Province, has passed away. More news as its available.

Madison raises more capital for Mt. Kare.

Book reviews by Ian ‘Bookninja’ McCullough at amazon. Ian is the only man I’ve ever posed with in a picture where I had a knife between my teeth.

The Orthodykes FAQ: Lesbianism and Halakha for Orthodox Dykes. Don’t ask me how I found it.

literally the best comics evar.

Does this guy rock or what? Damon Salesa : Maori-Samoan Rhodes scholar who specializes in race mixing in Victorian Britain. I want to read everything by him. Now.

Two Porgera-related PDFs. One from Timothy Andambo (!!) on Ipili use of mining revenues (from a World Bank-sponsored meeting on local management of mineral wealth) and Richard Jackson on capacity building in PNG.

So Long Been Dreaming: Post Colonial Sci Fi

Madison’s official Mt. Kare website.

Yet another anthro blog: Bits and Bytes.

10 x 10: Every hour, 10×10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories… The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories.

Images of Self and Other in Cross-Cultural Context: An online course bibliography.

Figs, elephants, hierophants

Biella ‘Mad Dog’ Coleman is teaching anthro courses on hackerdom. Her reading list is truly superb. I wish I could take that course. Yeeeaaaahhhh Biella!

Text as Property/Property as Text: yet another awesome syllabus from Chris Kelty.

There’s a new Janet Klein album out, and if you like that why not check out kewlly-named Eritrean soprano Awet Andemicael’s Black Manhattan, which features hot jazz tunes of the 20s and 30s.

The American Anthropological Association is holding its annual meeting in San Francisco at a Hilton caught up in a strike. What should we do? There’s an AAA Unite blog to help unify and track those of us out there who think that crossing a picket line is just plain wrong.

The Open Citation Project: We all have this feeling that free (as in speech) articles have more impact than treeware copywrit ones. The OCP studies this full time. Kewl.

Wow, according to exkiap.net it looks like Ian Downs died 24 August 2003 at the age of 89. He was an important and interesting figure in Papua New Guinea’s history, and particularly in the history of Eastern Highlands and will be missed. His papers are at the National Library of Australia.

Publications from the Native Title Research Unit of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islanders. Includes “Anthropology in the Native Title Era,” which I wish I had a copy of.

Shock and Awe: A new book examining the world-making project behind contemporary political rhetoric. If you’ve always wondered what a Santa Cruz-based political samizdat featuring both Marilyn Strathern and Adrienne Rich would look like, look no further.

Tribal Frontier: A documentary on the Hides Gas Project.

Explaining why ‘memes’ is not a good way to explain culture has always been a thankless task. Perhaps I could just direct people to Kuper and Bloch’s essays in Darwinizing Culture

Headhunt Revisited: A women’s account of an expedition to Papua New Guinea gets re-examined in a nifty web site.

Audacity open source sound editor.

The Legal Rights Debate in Analytic Jurisprudence from Bentham to Hohfeld. More PDFs of Singer’s work here

Classic Chinese texts with roll-over pinyin transliteration. I’m sure I’d be interested in this, if I spoke Chinese…

Tom Waits. New album, new feature. I didn’t know he used to record in Locke.

WordPress 1.2.1able for download.

Open Office 1.1.3 is out and ready for download.

Aio, quantitas magna frumentorum est: All the Latin mottos you can shake a stick at.

two quick Hawai’i sites: ‘Ono Kine Grindz blogs kine grindz in Honolulu while the Hawai’i Open Source Foundation continues a long tradition of mainland lefty tech nonprofits here on O’ahu. Wish their prose was less thick tho.

Sean Kingston Publishing: (re)prints of obscure but useful Melanesianist tomes.

USP Land Tenure and Conflict Symposium: Papers available on-line

With teletype interface and Fortran language, the ‘home computer’ of 2004 will be easy to use!

The Alternative Energy Racing Intitiative: Going really really fast in order to save the environment.

The Internet Deprivation Study finds that most people can’t go five days without packet exchange. That’s four and a half days longer than me.

Port Moresby has been voted the worst city in the world. Again.

I know everyone’s already heard of MIT’s OpenCourseWare but it’s worth noting that the anthropology courses have grown since last I visited. The readings for their ethnographic methods course look interesting.

So you’d like to study Central Asian History?: A terrifyingly long list of books that I’ll never ever read. I might take a look at Dale Eickelman’s reader though — I have fond memories of Knowledge and Power in Morocco.

Quentin Tarantino’s Blog: Seems to actually be him. Even if it’s not, it’s close enough for me.

Shovelbums.org: The professional’s resource for jobs in Archaeology and CRM. They even have their own wiki. Or, perhaps, you may prefer Wasteflake’s list of more exciting, albeit fictional anthropologists.

Looking biological anthropology texts for your intro anthro course? Jonathan Marks’s homepage has a slew of his stuff in PDF.

It’s nice to see a website that does a good job of explaining what shrunken heads from the Amazon are actually all about. As usual, wikipedia has more details.

Fortnight: Patricia Barber’s new album soon in stores. MP3 and streaming audio at the site.

The X-President. Time travel, tobacco, and Bill Clinton.

World history Archives: Documents to support the study of world history from a working-class and non-Eurocentric perspective.

Soon Half Life 2 will arrive. Will your computer be able to run it?

We’ve got a new departmental website thanks partly to Dave, as I understand it. For those interested in the ‘adjuncts hatin’ on academe’ meme, our career placement page may be grist for the mill.

Timeline of anthropological figures: Wish it included more people. And that it didn’t claim that Malinowski died in 1992.

Global Mining Campaign: News of mining’s impacts, from communities worldwide.

Representations of Digital Identity: A conference in Chicago that I won’t be around to attend.

Condensed Chinese History. Will enrage specialists with its simplicity. Will simply inform the rest of us

World History Site. Condensed. Accurate. Kewl.

A good page on the Scottish Enlightenment.

Political Machine: the video game where you run for president

Clay Shirky on Spectrum

This looks glossy and superficial, but is a beautiful and wonderfully detailed language atlas

Mookitty’s ’show category’ hack for Wordpress rawks