So… onward! Upward! Who knows what biographical turn might galvanize this blog back into action again? Middle age awaits!

I’m also redesigning the main site with WordPress to make it prettier and shinier as well. You know, in my Copious Free Time.

Over the years my website was built with html, then Grey Matter (when it turned from being a ‘website’ to a ‘blog’) then Movable Type and then finally WordPress. PHP replaced Perl which replaced HTML. At the time it seemed amazing that with a click of a button a perl script could recompile all your html pages according to your specifications — an idea that now seems absurd in a world where pages are made on the fly and it’s server-end caching that needs to be updated.

Back then I had a one-column blog. Mostly because, frankly, that was the maximum number of columns allowed. But then as things got fancier and more possibilities opened up, I firmly resisted the multiple columns with their sidebars and column lists: it just seemed too new-fangled. Eventually the template took over and themes hand-rolled by mere mortals became a thing of the past: web design had professionalized. It became impossible to make a single-column theme, much less find one. And at any rate it just looked silly and old-fashioned.

And then came Manifest, the theme on the blog now and bam: the one column theme returned. Is it a sign? A new age on the blog? An old one? I love the throw-back look, which is such a return to how this blog used to be for years and years. It warms the cockles of my heart and, as Woody Allen reminds us, there’s nothing like hot cockles.

I’m planning for their to be an uptick in content quality this year. Go 2009!

What have I been thinking about this year? It was about this time last year that I realized the natural route out of my dissertation was to begin thinking seriously about Leviathan both in the sense of the concept as it is thrown around in the academy (such that it connects Job and Latour-n-Callon) but also in that it connects two key ethnographic areas for me: the ancient near east and the early modern period in Europe.

The ancient Near East — and a shallow but broad understanding of the contemporary Near East (is that the appropriate term? ‘middle east’? ‘west asia’?) — fit with my intellectual project for all sorts of reasons. Its the center of American politics and my own faith, a flashpoint for anthropological thought on segmentary lineage systems, and one of the first places where social complexity got off the ground. This last bit is the most important: in PNG the question is always “why is everything so hard to hold together” and of course the first place where people really began holding things together (so far as we know) was over there. As a way to continue connecting with my friends who did philological stuff, and to integrate myself into a four field department, learning about this area seemed a good idea.

Of course, there are states and there are states, and early Modern Europe is really the place to go to understand the genesis of the particular disciplinary forms that washed up and receded over PNG. Its also the period when the music I like the most was written, and yet somehow I didn’t know very much about it. The historical sociology of the state, in all its geeky Weberianicity, was a fun topic to return to. Having to teach Foucault to graduate students sharpens one’s interest in this period, and of course this is the period not only of Leviathan, but the air pump (and the birth of social science) so developing some sense of what it is like is important to me.

The other main ethnographic area which sits in the back of my thinking about PNG is, of course, the US. As the implicit contrast with PNG in all descriptions, it sits there in anthropological assumptions as ‘the thing the other place is being contrasted with’ and yet being American and knowing something about the US are quite different things. Consumerism, purchased food, advertising, and so forth all blossomed at the same time as the US, and you need to know something about their history ‘here’ before you understand how what is happening over ‘there’ is different. Reading up on social history of the nineteenth century helps, as does hitting up the ‘founding fathers’ stuff (a sort of late early modern state formation)– as a Californian you tend to think the world started with the gold rush 1848. And of course white colonization of the Pacific rim in the late 19th century has affected by adopted home as well. Finally, learning about American culture is important as I move into my study of American gamers.

Finally, learning about Americans means catching up with qualitative sociology — another one of the things I did this year was figure out what sort of sociological traditions have been running parallel to my own. This meant tracking down the Chicago school and its legacy and, incidentally, the pragmatist Dewey-James-Mead sort of origins of its thought (this brings us right round to 19th century US again). I’m broadly sympathetic — especially as I head towards psychological anthropology — but still can’t learn to enjoy James’s Victorian prose.

There are other themes: mmogs, PNG and more PNG, elites and social networks, the hydrocarbon industry, the sociology and history of anthropology, open access, teaching and pedagogy, but I think I have run out of steam. Hopefully this is at least a partial snapshot of what happened, mentally, for me in 2007.