Having just completed an article, I suppose it is too late to go back and site “Internet and self-regulation in China: the cultural logic of controlled
commodification”:http://mcs.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/29/5/772?etoc by “Ian Weber”:http://comm.tamu.edu/people/profiles/weber.html
“Psychedelic White”:http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/S/saldanha_psychedelic.html — sounds interesting but I’m already too far in to the semester to think I’ll have time to read something so off-topic. Ah well, to file away for later I suppose.
In like two years I am for sure going to teach the first chapter from this book. But I might forget about it before then so here is a link now to it — about how to do fieldwork in France about witchcraft: “Deadly Words”:http://www.amazon.com/Deadly-Words-Witchcraft-Bocage-Msh/dp/0521297877/ref=sr_1_1/103-6905344-2487020?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1187812455&sr=8-1
Article of the day: “Friends don’t let friends listen to corporate rock”:http://jce.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/36/4/438?etoc
I always encourage my students (and myself) to write well — beautifully, clearly, and intelligbly. So when I picked up _Dark Light_ by Linda Simon I thought to myself: “that we should all write this well.” Check out the first paragraph of her book:
This book is about a particular historical moment: the advent of electrification in the second half of the nineteenth century. It is a book about energies, and the many and surprising ways that term was understood at the time; and about illumination, of public and private spaces, of the human body, and of the spirit and the mind. It is a book about anxieties generated by technological innovation, and because of that, besides being about the past, it is about us, now. As we respond to new technologies — human cloning, for example, or genetic engineering — we carry with us an inheritance from those who gazed with fascination and trepidation at the first incandescent bulb, and at the astounding shadowy image of their bones, made visible by an inexplicable dark ray. _Dark Light_ offers us a way to reflect upon our response, to illuminate who we once were, and to imagine who we might become.
Perfect. You know what the book is about, you know why it is important, and you immediately want to read more. That we should all write this well!
The “latest edition of New Media and Society”:http://nms.sagepub.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/content/vol9/issue4/ is a special issue on women and games/The Intarweb featuring an article by “Shoshana Magnet”: on “Suicide Girls”:http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/9/4/577. Very Boing-Boing.
PNG is often described using ‘primitizing’ metaphors like ‘stone age’, ‘ancient’ and so forth. But it doesn’t get much more literal than this: “Ropens: Live Pterosaurs in Papua New Guinea”:http://www.ropens.com/.
Inside Higher Ed is running a “piece on a new study about ratemyprofessor.com”:http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/06/05/rmp. If you want to skip directly to the two papers that they’ve sited, I’ve added some quick links here:
“Attractiveness, Easiness, and Other Issues: Student Evaluations of Professors on RateMyProfessors.com”:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=918283 by Felton et. al.
“Ratemyprofessor.com versus formal in-class student evaluations of teaching”:http://pareonline.net/pdf/v12n6.pdf by Coladarci and Kornfield
Hellboy is still my favorite movie by Guillermo del Toro, but his “interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7000935 about Pan’s Labyrinth gives it a run for its money. Since I’ve been thinking about what it means for a corporation to be the moral author of your actions, I was particularly struck by this quote from him:
I find that type of obedience, where you find refuge in the corporate or when you find refuge in the political or the religious majority is such an absolutely despicable cowardice. That is the cowardice the captain [in Pan's Labyrinth] displays by making the others nonhuman so he can torture or kill them. I think that every time you turn towards a truth that is not your own, that you confide the guidance of your soul to somebody else’s choices, you are making a huge mistake.
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 with our kind scrambled our neuronal cortex in order to erase all such clues. C’mon folks — these guys were _professionals_. The other main answer to give people is some sense of what historical linguists do — for which I just want to bookmark here “How do linguists decide how languages are related”:http://www.zompist.com/lang9.html#10 as well as “Deriving Proto-world with tools you probably have at home”:http://www.zompist.com/proto.html and “How likely are chance resemblances between languages?”:http://www.zompist.com/chance.htm all of them over at Zompist.com. I first got on to these writings in the course of tracking down the relationship between “Quechua”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quechua and “Hutese”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huttese_language (the later is modeled on the former) and rather than googling around forever for them again I thought I’d make a note of them here as I’m currently attempting to explain to someone that there is no phylogenetic relationship between Berber and Hawaiian (other than the well-developed 19th century notions of a semitic origin for Polynesian people, some of which have sort of sunk into the culture around here).
It’s made its way around the Internet for some time now, but Kathleen’s recent invocation of “Terry Eagleton’s scathing review of Richard Dawkins’s book”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html finally got me to sit through the whole thing and I must admit it is a fascinating document. As a point of academic bloodspot it is superb, of course, and the piece also interesting for those of us who remember earlier incarnations of Terry Eagleton…
There is a nice “TLS piece on the new translation of Madness and Civilization”:http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25347-2626687,00.html. It spends a lot of time dissing Foucault’s scholarship, which is sort of interesting if you read Foucault for the ‘theory’ and have been going along assuming that it wouldn’t matter if “everything Foucault said was wrong”:http://www.springerlink.com/content/nh4t51v6u2681102/.
Behold: “Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations”:http://infosthetics.com/archives/2007/03/even_more_multitouch_screen.html and “Beyond the Body Proper”:http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=3845-1!
I just wish we could see the TOCs on these guys…
“Philip Smith”:http://www.yale.edu/sociology/faculty/pages/smith/
…
Oh sorry… that should be a Dukheimian _studying_ the panopticon!
…right after I post this link:
“Selected Essays by Nicholas Wyatt on Royal Ideology in Ugaritic and Old Testament Literature”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0754653307&id=BP-WezDMkDQC&pg=PA205&lpg=PA205&ots=ye68UnkZQf&dq=myths+of+power+ugaritic&sig=gJxPq97iGCwnbXKlAf4fiB-3KXA#PPP1,M1
I’d love to read this book, but when I see the word “Ashgate” on the spine of a book I know that means “we printed three of them and each one costs US$300″. I could just go back to the original fora where these essays were published, but they’re obscure and not available online. This kind of specialized literature is exactly the sort of thing where an open access approach would work. Ah well…
For the truly geeky — now you can download “Thomas Hobbes’s translation of Thucydides _History of the Peloponessian War_ for free”:http://oll.libertyfund.org/Intros/Thucydides.php.
Go nuts, and happy new year!
More on unpacking this image when I have time, but I thought I’d dock it here:
“Science: It works, bitches”:http://xkcd.com/c54.html
And here’s another book I’d like to get to in my Copious Free Time: “Gold Rush Capitalists”:http://www.amazon.com/Gold-Rush-Capitalists-Growth-Sacramento/dp/0826328229/sr=8-1/qid=1162428785/ref=sr_1_1/002-0199581-3412860?ie=UTF8&s=books — not only is it about Sacramento, there are also cheap used copies.
I often use Dawkin’s outrage with religion as an example to my anthro students that science, too, is a culture. Rather than use interviews with him now, there’s a “whole new book”:http://www.amazon.com/God-Delusion-Richard-Dawkins/dp/0618680004/sr=8-1/qid=1162357679/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-0329361-8750447?ie=UTF8&s=books that I will have to look over in my Copious Free Time.
Here’s something I’ll try to read in class tomorrow if I can ever get around to it — Nancy Sullivan on “the Trobriand art of persuasion”:http://www.nancysullivan.org/article-thetrobriandsartofpersuasion.htm. Yes, people other than “professional baseball players:”http://www.dushkin.com/olc/genarticle.mhtml?article=27128 believe in magic…
Not much of a post, but I thought I’d break radio silence on this blog to post a link to this “anthropological analysis of companion parrots”:http://www.psyeta.org/sa/sa11.4/anderson.shtml as part of my longstanding (and long dormant!) interest in human-animal interactions which I found via “Tracks”:http://timothyjpmason.com/wordpress/. In other news I’m working my way — slowly — through Rebecca Cassidy’s “Sport of Kings”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN052100487X&id=A-QYXw9Wl9YC&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=sport+of+kings&sig=HqaMihlGyD04O7ioDGQkBHnQDUQ which is not, I think, quite as interesting to an American audience as it is an English one. Nevertheless it does grow on you, and the bit on fashion amongst established families is quite good.
Ok, back to work.
I recently read — in, like, a day — _I Am Alive And You Are Dead_ by Emmanuel Carrere. It’s a biography (sort of) of Philip K Dick. I’ve always loved read PDK and I knew that they were all more or less true. That is to say, that he struggled with mental illness, died believing God was beaming information into his head, that he transcribed his own exegisis of the bible/science fiction novel that would eventually be articulated through him and so forth. But I had no idea just how bizarre Dick’s life was, which is to say, crazy beyond belief. He is the archetypical person who is too smart to go crazy but does so anyway — definitely a type I’ve encountered more than once in my life.
Carrere’s prose is racy and streamlined and clearly very French, although it never suffers from appearing to have been thought in one language and then written in another. Apparently there is now an extensive literature on PDK, none of which I’ve read. So while I have no idea how Carrere compares to the others, I must say that as far as I am concerned if you are looking for just one book to read on PDK this is it. It is a biography, but it is written as a novel in the third person but with long passages explaining the various mental worlds and dilemmas that PDK was living through. However it is also a guide to the content of his most important novels. This treatment of the subject, ignoring as it does the line between documented events, what the author merely imagines his subject to have felt, and the description of the actions in various novels, is quite fast and loose with the facts. This would only be a problem, of course, if your subject was anyone but PDK, who really didn’t see any difference between all of these worlds.
Given the ultimate tragedy of PDK’s life, the book is more than a little depressing. But the audacity with which PDK lives means that it is also very funny. And most importantly, it’s a fantastic read about a fantastic author. I highly reccomend it.
I’ve mentioned “Liberty Fund”:http://libertyfund.org/ in the past as a good source of classic social thought. When I visited their site recently again today I was flabberghasted to see that they now also have the “Online Library of Liberty”:http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/index.php featuring an absolutely sick collection of open access full text. This includes not only important but difficult find pieces like “Millar’s”:http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/Author.php?recordID=0660 The Origin and Distinction of Ranks but also works that are not from their print catalog — public domain pieces which they have reproduced as HTML. So now not only can you read “Origin and Distinction of Ranks”:http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/Author.php?recordID=0660 (warning: 2 meg PDF) but also the HTML of “Letters of Sidney, on Inequality of Property. To which is added, a Treatise of the Effects of War on Commercial Prosperity”:http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/Book.php?recordID=1318. Their catalog is very deep and includes many important thinkers and is a superb resource for teaching. Thanks Liberty Fund!
“Eriberto ‘Fuji’ Lozada”:http://www.davidson.edu/personal/erlozada/ looks like someone doing interesting work in China. But then again thinking about working in China is terrifying since there is no end to the people and writings out there.
If you were a sociologist interested in the recent heavies in theory and wanted a quick crib sheet, you might look “here”:http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/toc/sore/53/s1. Honestly the most interesting thing about this issue (after the article on DMS) is _who_ they choose to write about. Spivak has those kinda legs in sociology? Who knew.
UPDATE: Sorry, the full citation is Roland Munro. 2005. Partial Organization: Marilyn Strathern and the Elicitation of Relations. The Sociological Review 53(s1): 245-266.
I recently ordered a copy of They Say/I Say, Gerry Graff’s new book, to use in teaching writing. I like it and love the way it is full of great quotations and examples of writing. In particular it led me to track down this quote from Kenneth Burke, which is a great way to describe to students how academic writing works. It also helps remind us that just because Bakhtin is all about heteroglossalia, not all heteroglossia is about Bakhtin:
“In equating ‘dramatic’ with ‘dialectic,’ we automatically have also our perspectice for the analysis of history, which is a ‘dramatic’ process, involving dialectic oppositions. And if we keep this always in mind, we are reminded that every document bequeathed us by history must be treated as a _strategy for encompassing a situation_. This, when considering some document like the American Constitution, we shall be automatically warned not to consider it in isolation, but as the _answer_ or _rejoinder_ to assertions current in the situation in which it arose. We must take this into account when confronting now the problem of abiding by its ‘principles’ in a situation in that puts forth totally different questions than those prevailing at the time when the document was formed. We should thus claim as our allies, in embodying the ‘dramatic perspective,’ those modern critics who point out that our Constitution is to be considered as a rejoinder to the theories and practices of mercantilist paternalism current at the time of its establishment.
Where doe the drama get its materials? From the ‘unending conversation’ that is going on at the point in history when we are born. Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, other have long prededed you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one preent is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.”
-Kenneth Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, pp. 109-110
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
The Ottowa Citizen has published a “lengthy article on the Ipili and Placer”:http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=26bacccd-fa28-4f96-b067-a436b6a6d881 by Kelly Patterson. Patterson spent a LOT of time emailing me about the article and I’m quoted extensively in it. She’s also interviewed my colleagues Jerry Jacka and Glenn Banks. It is a little strange seeing one’s words reproduced on the page, but I guess that turn about is fair play and as an anthropologist I’m the last person who should complain about how strange it is being reported upon! The article is quite long and does an excellent job of summing up what has become an incredibly complex and emotional topic, for which Patterson deserves credit. I am sure that it will not please everyone, and that several of the groups party to Porgeran politics will feel that they have not been sympathetically rendered, and that others got off too light. But this is just the way things go in the valley.
I’d recommend the article to friends and family interested in learning a little bit more about some of the issues involved in my fieldsite.
Via a few links via Leuschke, the superb poem “The Book of My Enemy has been Remaindered”:http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v10/0368.html
Note to self: next time I teach about plolygyny in class, be sure to use “Michelle Cottle’s”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w060501&s=cottle050306 recent piece in TNR to spur discussion.