Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

“Lucy Pickering”:http://uk.geocities.com/awfullysensible/ has a nice piece on “haole identity”:http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2006/76/haole.html/view?searchterm=pickering over at “Bad Subjects”:http://bad.eserver.org/

Every so often anthropologists are asked questions about historical linguistics — typically something like “The words X, Y, and Z in these two languages are spoken in different areas of world — proof of alien colonization, perhaps?!?!?” The answer is: of course not — the Mayan sysadmins who first seeded our green world of clocks [...]

Over the weekend I went to a library sale at the Bishop Museum. It got written up by an article in the Advertiser. The quote from me in the article: “It’s always fun for a professor to come home after work and read a few monographs“

More later when I have time, but the long and the short of it is that we are all fine over here in Hawaii and although the quake hit people differently in different places, our experience of it was exactly that of the headlines over at the Advertiser: “For most part, residents roll with quakes, [...]

In the name of becoming _the_ central blog for all things having to do with Shaloha, I hereby link to “Holy Tongue”:http://www.betham.org/sermons/marder030523.html a sermon about reform Judaism that starts in Kawaiaha’o.

In addition to a job, I just got a new apartment with a nice big lanai — here’s the “view”:http://flickr.com/photos/53898944@N00/209874512/ Looks great eh? It’s less glamorous when you’re a bike commuter that has to pedal up to that view. Still, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Most histories of Jews in Hawaii note that the first Jew in Hawaii was a cook in the employment of Kamehameha observed by Ebenezer Townsend. I am sure that many have had the same feeling that I have had about this passage: huh? So I decided to track the reference down. The origin of this [...]

Because, you know, I’m keeping track. Jacob Adler: “Elias Abraham Rosenberg, King Kalakaua’s Soothsayer”:http://www.hawaiianhistory.org/pubs/hjhlist.html. Article from the Hawaiian Journal of History 4 1970. “An Early History of Jews in Hawaii”:http://www.konabethshalom.org/ourhistoryxx.htm

My latest op-ed piece for “Inside Higher Ed”:http://www.insidehighered.com/ is now available and you can “read it here”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/04/17/golub. I’m happy with the piece, at least stylistically, but it is a lot more personal than a lot of the blogging I’ve done recently (although still I think perfectly acceptable professionally). As usual, the snarky comments from IHE’s [...]

So cool: you can go to “HonoluluTransit.org”:http://honolulutransit.org/ and check out all the planning for what will — hopefully — be our brand new mass transit system. There are four possible routes that you can take a look at, including “how close it will get to my house”:http://honolulutransit.org/more_info/library/files/Alternative%204%20-%20Section%205.pdf (1 meg PDF). Yeah mass transit!

Yesterday I finally acquired my Hawaiian name: Ka’iolama. It’s not unusual for people taking Hawaiian language classes to be given Hawaiian names by their kumu (teacher) but I during my first semester of Hawaiian I never asked for one. There were lots of reasons why: I had just finished getting “my Chinese name”:http://alex.golub.name/log/2005/06/22/request-for-comments/ (which ended [...]

A state auditor has released “a report”:http://www.state.hi.us/auditor/Reports/2005/05-15.pdf on the state of UH finances which is universally being described as “sharp” and which claims UH “cannot fully ensure fiscal accountability.” The university has published a “response”:http://www.hawaii.edu/offices/eaur/govrel/otherdocs/SystemFinAuditPhI-12-2005.pdf. A nice summary of these two documents is available from “UH News”:http://www.hawaii.edu/cgi-bin/uhnews?20051230114534.

First, let me congratulate Christians everywhere on the birth of their god: Congratulations! Second: this is my second Christmas in Hawai’i. This Christmas, as last year, I received many cards and emails asking me “how it feel to be in place where it isn’t snowing on Christmas.” The answer is: exactly the same way every [...]

The Chicago School of Sociology is always something that I’ve wanted to get a better grasp on, but moving to Hawaii has moved this up my priority list. Although many don’t realize it, the sociology department at the University of Hawaii was basically established by University of Chicago Ph.D.s and a lot of the early [...]

5766 in the house. Congratulations to the world on reaching another birthday, and I hope you all have a sweet (but not cloying) new year. High Holy Days have been relatively uneventful for my Scarily Erudite Beloved and I — indeed, I’ve been so busy teaching and such that it seemed like the Days of [...]

Why? Because the Encyclopedia Brittanica has never even _heard_ of “Spam musubi”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_musubi.