Carlos Mondragon has a blog
by Alex
“He cannot hide from me.”:http://salul.wordpress.com/
For everyone who was wondering about the ancient and enduring ties between Mexico and Vanuatu, look no further.
“He cannot hide from me.”:http://salul.wordpress.com/
For everyone who was wondering about the ancient and enduring ties between Mexico and Vanuatu, look no further.
“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.
“Air Conditioning and the Material Culture of Routine Human Encasement”:http://mcu.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/3/251?etoc
There are many factors shaping the relationship between human bodies and their immediate environments and the mechanical control of ambient thermal conditions is playing an increasingly important part. It is with this in mind that this article travels to the tropical island of Singapore where the assumption that the air surrounding people should generally be cooled has quietly become entrenched. Specifically we focus on the young people we find in this country and consider how the presence of air conditioning has become implicated in particular combinations of social practice and sensual expectation amongst this group. The conclusion we draw is that it is only by attending to the contextual interplay of bodies, clothing and immediate climate that we gain the fullest sense of the processes underwriting a much wider retreat into indoor social spaces where these elements could be usefully understood as the material culture of routine human encasement.
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…
For the next time I have to advise students re China/Taiwan/Ethnicity: “Melissa Brown”:https://www.stanford.edu/dept/anthropology/cgi-bin/web/?q=node/106.
On both the American culture and intellectual history tip: “Michèle Lamont”:http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/soc/faculty/lamont/
“Matt Sharritt”:http://www.situatedgaming.com studies video games.
“Bernard Levinson”:http://www.amazon.com/Deuteronomy-Hermeneutics-Innovation-Bernard-Levinson/dp/0195152883/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220217346&sr=1-2 studies the hermeneutics of legal innovation in Deutoronomy.
Two Quicken replacements for Mac are “iBank”:http://www.iggsoftware.com/ibank/ and “MoneyDance”:http://moneydance.com/. “Sente”:http://www.thirdstreetsoftware.com/site/introduction.html manages your library.
“Geoff Eley has a reader on Nationalism”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0195096614/ref=sib_dp_pt#reader-link from the mid-90s that is… well… very mid-90s.
I am not the only one thinking about “the ethical issues of social impact assessment”:http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a902020273~db=all?jumptype=alert&alerttype=new_issue_alert,email
“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/)
As Alexandre would say:
I don’t really study the RMT angle of WoW but here are two interesting sites: “WoW Econ”:http://www.wowecon.com/ and “MOO Bux”:http://www.mmobux.com/. I also don’t really study the game design angle or the fantasy RPG angle but two recent volumes stand out, both from AK Peters: “Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1568813473/1n9867a-20 and Matt Barton’s “Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role Playing Games”:http://www.amazon.com/Dungeons-Desktops-History-Computer-Role-playing/dp/1568814119/ref=si3_rdr_bb_product (this last a fuller version of his virtuostic series of blog entries on the genre). These last courtesy of “Brainy Gamer”:http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2008/04/the-rpg-syllabu.html.
On the science fiction tip: “Agamben and UFOs”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2008/07/the_truth_is_out_there.html as well as “the relation between science fiction and colonialism”:http://www.amazon.com/Colonialism-Emergence-Science-Fiction-Classics/dp/0819568740/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218911017&sr=8-1. More tangentially related to the second: “A cultural history of causality”:http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-History-Causality-Science-Systems/dp/0691115230/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218910967&sr=8-4 and, more vaguely, “Agamben in Mesopotamia”:http://www.zonebooks.org/titles/BAHR_RIT.html for the first.
Finally: “Liah Greenfeld on nationalism”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liah_Greenfeld and talk about the super hot videos: “Voegelin, Gadamer, Lonergan and _Allan Bloom_ gone wild”:http://www.fritzwagner.com/ev/eric_voegelin.html with a cast of thousands.
“Ryan Pini”:http://results.beijing2008.cn/WRM/ENG/BIO/Athlete/5/8000395.shtml is “in the 100m butterfly finals!”:http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/news/stories/200808/s2336656.htm?tab=sport Go go go! Looks like “Masalai blog is cheering him on as well”:http://masalai.wordpress.com/2008/08/14/ryan-pini-one-mans-dream-and-a-countrys-hopes/.
“Dika Tou”:http://results.beijing2008.cn/WRM/ENG/BIO/Athlete/1/8000921.shtml placed eighth in her event as wel.
??????????
It occurred to me the other day that I might as well google “Life of the Mind” to see what the Internet thought that it was about. The result, after some clicking around, was learning a bit about “James Schall”:https://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/schallj/, a Jesuit and professor at Georgetown. Schall does political philosophy (of the old school) and has also spent a lot of time thinking and writing about liberal education (of the old school). His site includes open access copies of long essays like “A Student’s Guide To Liberal Learning”:https://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/schallj/WS17BJVS.htm. Having come out of a liberal arts background I think it is always interesting to watch someone else think about it out loud, especially — forgive the indelicacy — someone so old: his bibliography includes works that look very interesting to me but are just outside the horizon of my own experience.
That said, Schall definitely writes like he was ordained before Vatican II — there are just not a lot of people around today who insist that _all_ young people absolutely _must_ read _Phaedrus_. But so what if he is To The Right? One must be open to all sorts of things. As a person to encounter intellectually and whose work might be useful to teach to students in certain circumstances.
“Culture and Human Rights: Anthropological Perspectives”:concepts of discovery, registration, etc.; pace layering; browsing in the library; thinking about your intellectual regime and life of mind (for the THE chapter)
“Minor Arts of Daily Life”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0824828003 (Kerim-approved)
“Early Human Kinship”:http://www.amazon.com/Early-Human-Kinship-Wendy-James/dp/1405179015/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215245687&sr=8-1
“Russell Jacoby”:http://www.history.ucla.edu/people/faculty?lid=827 (file under ‘interesting profs’)
“On Justification: Economies of Worth”:http://www.amazon.com/Justification-Economies-Princeton-Cultural-Sociology/dp/0691125163/ref=cm_lmf_tit_12_rsrssi0 (a trend I’ve been meaning to encounter for some time and… haven’t yet)
“An Engine, Not a Camera”:http://www.amazon.com/Engine-Not-Camera-Financial-Technology/dp/0262134608/ref=cm_lmf_tit_13_rsrssi0
and
“The Sociology of Financial Markets”:http://www.amazon.com/Sociology-Financial-Markets-Karin-Cetina/dp/0199296928/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216651345&sr=8-1
You know, it is not like the scholarly literature on Max Weber is small. And although most social scientists have worked through some of his stuff at some time or another not all of them are as interested in his work as I am. But even with that said, when Amazon.com sends you an email telling you they have a new book about Weber that they think you might enjoy my general impulse is to run far, far away. This time, however, they got me pegged. “Weber, Passion, and Profits: The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism in Context”:http://www.amazon.com/Weber-Passion-Profits-Protestant-Capitalism/dp/052189509X/ref=si3_rdr_bb_product looks really fascinating, and “Barbalet’s research and publications”:http://www.jackbarbalet.com/index.php?page=current-research look even more interesting. I can’t wait to read some of the stuff on the Chinese diaspora. And talk about small worlds — he’s even taught at the UPNG. Looks like I have some reading to do!
“Ben Kafka’s”:http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Ben_Kafka article on “paperwork, state power, and the French revolution”:http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/abs/10.1525/rep.2007.98.1.1 is really oodles of fun.
What a lovely “article on Don Knuth”:http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2006/mayjun/features/knuth.html. Biella should really write a paper about how he is the epitome (and original) of a certain kind of hacker subjectivity.
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.
“If the claim here is that all social situations are working overtime to avoid becoming standoffs, then perhaps we do indeed need a kind of metaphorical Hostage Rescue Team to periodically rescue hostage of social life from ourselves and each other” — Robin Wagner-Pacifici in _Theorizing The Standoff: Contingency In Action_
And its called “Methods Man.com”:http://methodsman.com/ — some usefuls stuff on qualitative research and his own experiences. Still… it makes me wonder if he knows about “the other guy”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_Man.
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.
“Sociological discourse of the relational: the cases of Bourdieu & Latour”:http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2007.00749.x
A quick note — I’ve moved from my old Textdrive server to the new Textdrive-absorbing Joyent server. So there will be some outages as I move stuff over from one server to the other but on the positive side: MUCH faster load times.
“Alice Marwick”:http://www.tiara.org/blog/?page_id=299 studies identity online.
“Passively Multiplayer”:http://passivelymultiplayer.com/ — the PMOG blog.
“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.
“Charles Ellwood”:http://www2.asanet.org/governance/ellwood.html — the last of the pre-Parsonian sociological synthesizers
“Stephen Turner’s vita”:http://isis.fastmail.usf.edu/fair/save/displayvita.asp?emplid=00000019055 — his article in the Levine festschrift on “The Maturity of Social Theory” is superb.
“Rudolf Sohm”:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-4189(198004)60%3A2%3C185%3ARSOC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-2 — the guy Weber got ‘charisma’ from
“Joseph Bensman on bureaucracy”:http://www.springerlink.com/content/x8ggw3n16597n707/?p=a51d8e0ad49c4fc4807b17abdc94991c&pi=4
“Guy Oakes on Weber and the southwest German school”:http://www.springerlink.com/content/p54g804550574085/?p=a51d8e0ad49c4fc4807b17abdc94991c&pi=7 as well as “his response to comments”:http://www.springerlink.com/content/w5374583vm73k048/?p=a816ee5bf3fe42408031c3d31cc709c1&pi=11
“Eva Illouz”:http://sociology.huji.ac.il/illouz.html — someone else for me to read.
“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.
Additional works I noticed and will never have time to read:
“War and Human Civilization”:http://www.amazon.com/War-Human-Civilization-Azar-Gat/dp/0199262136/ref=sr_1_4/105-4927962-4957223?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192742547&sr=8-4: If you had to read one book on War, I guess this would be it.
“The Body Multiple”:http://www.amazon.com/Body-Multiple-Ontology-Practice-Cultural/dp/0822329174/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-4927962-4957223?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192743363&sr=8-1 by Annemarie Mol — medical anthro
“The American Faculty”:http://www.amazon.com/American-Faculty-Restructuring-Academic-Careers/dp/0801882834/ref=sr_1_1/105-4927962-4957223?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192743435&sr=8-1, the definitive book of my profession
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!