[pause]

Scarily Erudite Beloved: You mean that “World’s Happiest Baby” DVD?

Me: Isn’t that what I said?

This conflation of body and identity is particularly troubling to the more rabid versions of American protestantism obsessed with ‘individualism’. Indeed, so troubling to them is this the deep connection between mother and child that they define the origins of individual life so early in a fetus’s career that they consider day-after pills to be murder. On this account the mother is, as Luther once said of the virgin Mary, ‘a mere container’.

But not Jews. We know that new entities are all occasions on which special care must be taken. We also know that new entities are made through separation, mavdil. Our duty to cut the world at its divinely-defined joints is what ennobles us and makes us co-participants in god’s ongoing construction of the universe, a universe that otherwise would be tohu v’vohu — all mixed up. By naming children, as we have today, we make them individuals – sons of and daughters of someone. Not, any longer, parts of them.

But as Maurice Godelier reminds us, a man and a woman do not make a child — they make a fetus. The actual kid is made by the community it is part of.  One of the great insights of people living in Melanesia, where Godelier and I both have lived, is that people are made up out of other people and objects: blood, semen, breastmilk and, in our case, bagels, lox, and the occasional musubi. Christian culture oscillates endlessly between its self-imposed paradox of insisting on individual autonomy while longing for communion with the group (a paradox resolved in their central religious ritual). But for Papua New Guineans there isn’t really ‘society’ and ‘individual’, there are just people grown out of other people, bodies that relationships pass through. Where I used to live in Papua New Guinea, when a woman becomes elderly, her children give pigs and money to their mother’s side of the family, to compensate them for using up the woman’s body which was grown by her parents. When a man dies the killers give pigs and money to his family, who in turn distribute it to everyone has a claim on the deceased — anyone who ever fed him. It is these constant exchanges of food, wealth, and human bodies (and occasionally body parts) which human life is all about. People are not connected by being the same in Melanesia, they are connected by being different — by take roles in rituals that establish who they are to one another.

This is true of Jewish life here in Honolulu as well. Since the kids have come home we’ve had a steady stream of visitors filing into our apartment and filling our refrigerator with food. Our kids are already being grown by the community, and the community, in turn, is being elicited by their bodies. This circumcision and the seudat mitzvah to follow is creating not just two new people, but new relationships amongst all of us. We separate ourselves into new people — giver, receiver, father, son, the person willing to make the last-minute costco run. Lador vador — as one friend of mine emailed me, generations are passing through us.

Finally, people in Papua New Guinea have something else in common with us — they realize that making people is the most serious and important work one can do in life, and they aren’t afraid to mark that seriousness on the surface of the body. Circumcision is a hard thing for parents to do to their kids even if, today, there are various surgical means to keep it from being painful and even — in the long run — permanent. Many people ask: why continue with such a traumatic custom? The answer is that we do it because it is hard, because it is irrevocable, and because it is permanent — just like our commitment to Judaism. Our globalized world is chock-full of people who think it is a good thing to be completely free to chose which cultural tradition you will embrace, like searchers for ‘spirituality’ who flit between religious traditions on a weekly basis. Too often today ‘tradition’ means a colorful ethnic outfit worn once or twice a year or a  small menu of ‘heritage’ foods. Against this backdrop of single-serving heritage we continue to insist that Judaism is an identity that is inscribed on our bodies and cannot be taken off. It can not be worn only when convenient, or cast off lightly when one tires of it. Today we’ve made a very, very serious decision for our children without their consent, knowledge, or understanding. We have written that decision on their body in a way that will cause them physical pain and doom them to life as a tiny minority group that few people in the islands know about or understand. We have done this because their bodies, like ours, are not our own, but something that Judaism passes through. We have made this intervention in their lives serious in order to signal how seriously we believe that Judaism is the best possible and most important decision we could make for our children. Eventually Dan and Sam will be able to decide for themselves whether or not to chose Judaism. But in order for that to happen Judaism must chose them first. And is what we have done today.

I use Things as a GTDish type device — to capture everything I need to do so I don’t worry about it and can focus on work. I also use it to schedule all events and deadlines. I can’t be bothered with ‘projects’ since I do a better job keeping track of those in my head than making lists in Things. I also don’t use it for contexts, except the library — I throw all the LOC #s for things I need to get out of library in there, print them up, and mark them off.

The biggest thing I’ve found Things useful for are repeating projects: everyday I wake up to find Things has added three tasks to my to-do list: “Read for :30″ “Write for :30″ and “Transcribe for :30″. If I do all three of these things — on top of my teaching and other responsibilities — then I allow myself to browse the web for all the books I’ll never have time to read.

In terms of note-taking programs for Mac, I tried: Yojimbo, Together, Scrivener, Notae2, Mori, Notebook, Evernote and a few more whose names escape me at the moment. What I was looking for was: price (they’re all about US$30-40), decent way to export data (for when I code fieldnotes or the sofware stops being developed), robus support and developer community (aka track record), ability to clip webpages (important for WoW research), get data in via the finder (pretty much all of these now have a button or drawer you can drag documents or highlighted text to to create new documents), and the ability to categorize entries by ‘tag’ or ‘smart folders’ (apparently increasingly called ‘saved searches’ these days). I was particularly interested in finding a program that would let me keep multiple databases open, each of which had its own separate category structure — that way my WoW Research categories do not get mixed up with my PNG research categories.

Pretty much all of these products can do this in more or less the same way — and they are all much better than what I started using 2 years ago. I went with DevonThink despite the fact that it has tons of features I will probably never use because of the ability to open and close multiple databases, tag/group with ease, and because I might grow into its features as I need it more. 2.0 is much easier to use than the earlier versions I attempted unsuccessfuly to love earlier.

Speaking of software I use regularly, but which I forgot to mention in my last post: Dropbox. It’s finally managed to hit the sweet spot of online storage and version control. Let’s all give it a big round of applause folks.

As for dissertation-writing books, I must say that I am taken by Demystifing Dissertation Writing by Peggy Boyle Single. Like most people I got to know the book through her columns in Inside Higher Ed (and really if you’ve read them you already know 70% of what is in the book). Despite the fruity cover and kinda-lame name her ‘Single System’ there is a lot to like in the book: a clear outline of how to write, a small but useful bibliograpy, and just the right amount of depth. The book sort of orients you to what successful method is like but does not micro-manage you. One of her main points — the writers block comes from not enough ‘prewriting’ — really resonated with me.

Also, I like the book because the process it describes is familiar to me from doing fieldwork: take a living, buzzing world, simplify it by putting it on paper, reduce it down more and more to just a few quotes, and then start building up in a new, parsed form. This complex -> simple -> complex dynamic is more or less what I teach in my field methods class and I think it really works. That said I have not actually inflicted the volume on anyone but me yet, so I can’t really say I have experience using it in teaching.

One more quick shout-out — Single’s publisher, Stylus, actually turns out a lot of good books on teaching. I’d be interested in exploring them more, but requesting review copies is burdensome and requires giving up WAY to much personal information, etc. Yo Stylus: make it easier for me to publicize your books.

On category of things that did not make the cut with me, there are two that did not make the cut with me: first, academic socialbookmarking services like CiteULike or Zotero. Let’s face it: the problem these days is not discovering new things to read. Zotero and CiteULike are great programs for some people. But for me, who already as a long to-read list, cares about easy storage of PDFs and metadata, it is just far far better to spend the money on Sente.

Second, PDF management systems like Yep or various finder-enhancements that let you tag files etc: I think Alex Payne summed it up best when he said: “If you want to store data of differing types within a lightweight organization system, I encourage you to check out THE FILESYSTEM”. For academic books and articles I have a special program. For everything else, I have the finder. There is one exception: I wish there was a decent program for filing away syllabi as I download those things like a mother. Right now my half-solution is to store them in DevonThink. Ditto wih CVs.

In sum, one key to my recent optimization has been getting clear on what specifically I need programs to do, and then chosing one (1) program to do it. I resist programs that do more than one thing, and I resist the urge to do more than one thing with one program. Of course some things fall through the cracks this way — I no longer have long lists of books that I might someday read before I die. But that is the point: the stuff that I am not actually doing for a good reason does not fit in the system, and so I do not do it, which leaves me more time and focus to do the things that I need to do for a reason. Which is, of course, the goal.

First, I’ve rejiggered, reevaluated, and rethought the set up of my outboard brain. After testing a bunch of different combinations of note taking programs, PDF managers, and bibliographic software I’ve found that yes, the same combination of programs that everyone uses are in fact the best things to use: Sente for bibliography, Things for task management, Delicious for bookmarking, and DevonThink for notes. I tried Evernote, but I don’t have a Mobile Device and frankly, I fear the Cloud and want my data somewhere where I can lose or compromise it myself. Also it’s actually not that powerful in terms of bintiliions of ways to organize folders etc. Now if I can just take the 800 fieldnotes out of my OLD note taking program I’ll be really set…

Second, better scheduling. After years of sorta-using GTD I have finally shoved every bit of anxiety-provoking task into Things and my life really is much better. Also, I recently had a student come to me asking how I took notes or managed reading books for the purposes of writing articles, what my process was when it came to writing, etc. and I found that I basically had nothing to tell them — a mixture of intuition and a reliance on the power of enthusiasm to muscle my way through this process meant that I ultimately had little to pass on to anyone who wasn’t me. It also meant, I realized on reflection, that I was still relying on grad school strategies to do professorial work — and I mean here not only training students but also my own research and writing. And lets face it, how many of us really want our dissertation and first fieldwork to be the zenith of our research prowess?

So, having done some serious work on research methods over the summer I’ve spent the past semester doing a lot of work on handling ethnographic materials and writing them up. A lot of this, I’m not ashamed to admit, has involved trying out the various methods in the ‘how to write a dissertation’ books I have field-tested in course of learning how to be an adviser. Not surprisingly, a lot of them are really really good. In particular (I am ashamed to admit) I’ve started taking notes on readings in a structured and regular way for the first time. Like ever. This really beats surrounding yourself with dozens of opened, heavily underlined books and searching for quotes you remember in them.

Overall, it has been a good experience and all the rethinking is finally beginning to get amortized off in the form of actual productivity. Speaking of which… back to work!

Is there an anthropological basis for the emotion of love?
No. You can easily fall in love without having taken any classes in our department.

Does love serve a useful purpose or is it extraneous?
Falling in love is one of the most wonderful, life-affirming experiences that can happen to you, so if you think ‘having wonderful, life-affirming experiences’ counts as ‘useful’, then there you go. Additionally, when you fall out of love you feel absolutely terrible, a feeling which serves the useful purpose of giving blues musicians more to sing about than just racism and alcohol abuse.

Are certain societies or cultures more predisposed toward feelings of love?
Love is a Western concept, although obviously you don’t have to be Western to come to care deeply for another person. Still, I think your standard haole American has got to be particularly predisposed to fall in love. American culture imagines the entire world as if it were a business, worrying constantly about the ‘useful purpose’ of everything, and Americans are obsessed with sharing their feelings for others. As a result they carve out a very small niche in their lives — romantic love — in which ‘love’, ‘feeling’ and ‘caring’ are carefully separated from ‘economics’, ‘buying’, and ‘selling’. Thus Americans believe prostitution to be wrong because it combines love and intimacy with spending lots of money. Which thus makes it completely and totally different from Valentine’s day.

What difference, if any, are there between the way people express love in Hawaii and New York?
People in New York are often much colder than we are when they fall in love.

If you are married/involved, how do you plan to spend your Valentine’s Day?
My wife and I are going to get totally baked and watch ’300′ like seven times in a row. No just kidding. We are planning to do all the “Love Is In The Air” achievements in World of Warcraft together, though. We might even try to farm the Big Love Rocket that drops off of Apothecary Hummel.

The deeper I go in to life, however, the bigger the challenges get and the longer and more complex the work becomes. I think if I feel anxious about anything it is about the decade to come, not the decade that has passed. I’ve always joked that my goal in life, starting as a very young child, was to be a middle-aged professor and NOW AT LONG LAST THAT GOAL IS IN REACH. I even got ahead of the game by going bald a decade early. Hells yes. Middle age here I come! Stay tuned.