11.08.2011 09:01

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The 1st General Assembly of World Anthropologists to Support Occupy Wall

Please join us for the 1st General Assembly of World Anthropologists who are involved or interested in the recent occupy movement for global economic change that is sweeping the globe. The details of our meeting and the actions we take will be determined by the consensus process during general assemblies that is being practiced by all of the occupations. David Graeber, one of the organizers of Occupy Wall Street, will be on hand to help facilitate and participate in the initial assembly.

It figures that David Graeber would go and get himself (more) famous by the time I actually am in the same place as him

also this seems dorky and I think that anthropologists just want to do some twinkling participant observation

10.13.2011 10:28

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Anthropology has not been provocative for 30 years. It has been complacent.

— John Hawks commenting on What’s wrong with anthropology?

10.13.2011 10:24

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Where are your students getting a job? If you think it’s not your problem, then why do you have students?
The highest-ranking anthropology Ph.D. programs today allow roughly half their students to finish by the end of their sixth year, and place half their students in jobs at graduation. Those jobs include academic and applied contexts, both temporary and permanent. Those are the best programs for student outcomes, the average outcome is much worse. Only 20 anthropology programs in the United States finish more than a fourth of their Ph.D. students in six years.
When those figures were published by the NRC last year, most anthropologists met them with a shrug. What can we do? We all know that fieldwork can drive anthropology Ph.D. programs to seven years or longer. If you don’t do your time in the field, you’re not an anthropologist.
As a result, students who could be bright anthropologists find much brighter options in other social sciences. The best sociology programs finish around two thirds of their students in six years and place 90-100% of them in jobs at graduation. Geography programs also place nearly 90% in jobs at graduation. The reason is not hard to see: These social sciences have forged much stronger ties in corporate, government, and industry settings than have anthropologists. While we’re busy talking to ourselves, other social scientists are talking to people who matter.

— What’s wrong with anthropology?

04.24.2011 09:41

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In reflecting on the Lizot case, we observe that anthropologists, like other human beings, are sexual creatures. Inevitably, sexual attraction and sexual relationships will develop between anthropologists and those they encounter during field work, including members of the populations under study. Every anthropologist is familiar with successful long-term partnerships that began in such relationships, and every anthropologist is equally familiar with cases where such partnerships failed, or where relationships seemed from the beginning to be ill-advised and exploitative. The task force notes that sexual exploitation is not always imposed by the anthropologist on a member of the study population; there are cases in the literature of the opposite type, including violent rape (Moreno in Kulick and Wilson 1995). There are also cases where members of study populations cynically exploit the attractions they hold for an anthropologist to gain access to perceived wealth or privilege. Nonetheless, the task force points out that in most field situations, most of the power in a relationship with a member of the study population will reside with the anthropologist. Given this problem, we believe that sexual relationships with members of study populations should be undertaken only after the most careful reflection on this point, and with full attention to the dignity and autonomy of the potential partner. The contemplation of sexual contact with children or young adolescents should not survive such reflection and attention.

— Allegations of inappropriate sexual relationships with Yanomami by anthropologists [interest reignited via]

02.02.2011 09:27

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Imagine how liberating this would be, in our discipline of self-righteousness. We claim to no longer work as colonial imperialists but without sharing our own vulnerabilities and seemingly “unethical” behavior in the field we remain infallible beings, apart and above our communities. We need to humanize own experiences to pave the way for future anthropologists’ reflections on their fieldwork. Without analyzing how our fieldwork affects us, we’re missing the point. Anthropologists don’t have to feel guilty or ashamed for whatever they experience in the field. Of course there are limits (and it’s up to every anthropologist to decide what those limits are) but many things happen that are a natural consequence of participating in the communities we study.

— Absent

02.02.2011 09:20

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Absent

Doctoral student in anthropology, Anna Wilking discusses the struggles of fieldwork, especially when (and honestly, when don’t you) you find yourself in the subject:

I’m testing the waters with this confession as discussing one’s own personal battles in the field is still taboo in anthropology. Anthropologists never share their behavior during fieldwork—we are supposed to be neutral observers who “do everything right,” when in fact everyone knows plenty of anthropologists have sex with their informants in the field, for example. But still, no one ever includes such “horrors” in their final academic products—it would be frowned upon in the academy. We are supposed to be “perfect” beings, perhaps a touch “superior” then our informants.

Seriously, read it. [via]

01.14.2011 19:23

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…not to get too deep into irrelevant anthropology nonsense

jenniferanne:

I find it kind of entertaining and strange how up in arms people are getting over this. (The American Anthropological Association edited the word “science” out of it’s mission statement, for those of you not following this.) I mean come on guys, cultural anthropology at least is widely acknowledged as inhabiting a position somewhere in between the social sciences and humanities. We are really the softest of the soft sciences. What’s wrong with that? Historians don’t feel so self conscious about occupying that kind of place.

Since I suppose I stand on the postmodern fluffhead side of the spectrum I’m just not too concerned with having to be taken seriously as a Scientist, but I don’t hate science either. I just want science to be self critical. We can use quantitative methods when they’re helpful (and they are probably more helpful closer to the archaeology, physical and even linguistics corners of the broader discipline than they are for cultural) and stick to our fluffhead participatory multivocal text stuff when that’s helpful. What’s the big deal? But then I guess I go to an unequivocally postmodern school. We follow the British “social anthropology” approach and not the North American four fields approach to teaching anthropology, so sometimes I forget that there’s a whole world outside of the stuff I’m into that worries about these things. Come on science, stop being so butthurt over the 90’s. It’s long past and most of us now see the value of both sides!

Not too be too much of a postmodern fluffhead, but I think ones position on this whole science thing really depends on where you’re standing. Trends in the AAA have moved towards over representation of cultural anthropology, especially in the conference proceedings. A lot of people’s reactions seem like they’re more related to the fracturing of the Boasian approach to American anthropology and the alienation of the subfields from each other, rather than the AAA’s attitude toward applied anthropology/scientific positivism.

I’m mostly a cultural anthropologist, but my specific area of anthro (medical anthropology) can straddle multiple sub-fields and gets a lot of stock out of science-ism. In our training, we’re strongly encouraged to identify as scientists. It’s helpful to not be seen as totally anti-science when you’re trying to get them let you watch them produce their knowledge.  Idk, I also really don’t like the soft/hard sciences division. I don’t really think it says that much about what makes disciplines different from each other, but more about how much prestige they carry within the academy/the general population.

I also think there’s a lot of importance to four field training, and i think it makes stronger -whatever- anthropologists to have an idea what other anthropologists are doing. Its also what makes us anthropologists, and not qualitative sociologists, historians, evolutionary biologists, zoologists, or literary critics.

Also, I think that its true of most academics and especially anthropologists that grudges can have a long lifetime. I know there are several departments still sorting out their shit from the pomo crisis. Like, I think Stanford reuniting has happened in the last 5 years.

I was tempted to quote the Kroeber chestnut about anthropology being the most humanistic of the sciences and vice versa, but, you know, its corny.

(Source: chronicle.com, via becoming-wave)

01.14.2011 18:49

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But perhaps the most serious misrepresentation in news-media coverage of this affair was the depiction of cultural anthropology as overrun by “postmodern fluff-heads” on a crusade against science. In the mid-1990s, when the “science wars” were at their height, and you had to be either for or against Foucault, there might have been some truth in such a characterization. Those were the years when it was fashionable to talk about “the social construction of scientific knowledge.” As a sign of the times, the Stanford University anthropology department split into two departments, one of anthropological sciences and one of sociocultural anthropology.
But times have changed. The two Stanford departments have remarried; the French anthropologist Bruno Latour, high priest of the “social construction of science” school, has long since published an anguished article in Critical Inquiry—”Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern”—worrying about the tacit complicity between “postmodernist” social thought and oil companies seeking to deny the reality of climate change.
In my experience, younger cultural anthropologists tend to describe themselves as pragmatists, and they see the debates in the 1980s and 1990s about “writing culture” and the politics of knowledge, which were so formative for an older generation, as a part of the discipline’s history they have assimilated and are moving beyond. While the self-identified scientific anthropologists were filling my inbox with angry messages about the hegemony of antiscientific postmodernists, many anthropologists who use French critical theory in their work also e-mailed me to ask if the word “science” could not be restored, given its importance to colleagues. It is important to note that throughout this whole episode of e-mails, blogs, and news-media coverage, not a single anthropologist whom I am aware of insisted that the word “science” should stay excised.

— What if They Had a Science War and Only One Side Showed Up? [via]

01.08.2011 11:04

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Papers in Award Winning Anthropology Writing

[via]

Kerim of Savage Minds compiled a list of anthropological works that have won writing awards. Will be interesting to comb through.

01.07.2011 13:23

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Anthropology News: surprise, it’s bleak!

thelastgreatpoolparty:

At the annual meeting of the [American Anthropological Association] in November 2010, the Association Operations Committee (AOC) and the Executive Board (EB) received the Final Report of the Commission on Race and Racism in Anthropology(PDF). Formed as an ad hoc commission in 2007, the 13-member CRRA co-chaired by Janis Hutchinson and Thomas C. Patterson was charged with examining diversity and academic climate in the discipline as well as efforts within the profession to address enduring racial inequalities.

via AAA Commission on Race and Racism

The quote I pulled is long (and damning) but worth the read, if only to show you just how much the field of anthropology has failed its participants and how far we still have to go:

[…] the CRRA conducted two focus groups at the 2008 annual meeting and surveyed members of the Association  of Black Anthropologists, Association of Latina/o Anthropologists, and the Association of Indigenous Anthropologists for their experiences and examples of “best practices”. Participants repeatedly and in different ways expressed their experiences as graduate students. These include but are not limited to:

(1) many departments give lip service to diversity, devalue the kinds of research questions that minority students want to pursue, and allow discrimination to go unchallenged; (2) at a more subtle level, they believe that many faculty assume that minority students are less capable than other  students, silence them  in courses, do not give them honest feedback on their work, are either uncomfortable in their presence or interact with them as patrons; (3) they occasionally feel put on the spot by faculty who require them to share personal experiences (have you every been arrested?) or to serve as the representative of  a group in discussions about race and racism; (4) they feel overt resentment or hostility from  faculty and peers who feel threatened by their standpoints and critiques; (5) they frequently feel that they must self-censor in discussions of racism or immigration, for example, in order to avoid retribution if their views do not conform to faculty thinking on the subject; (6) they perceive that everyday life in the departments are infused with subtle forms of racism that make them feel isolated, invisible, excluded, vulnerable, unworthy, unwanted, or treated as  research subjects, which leads some to seek mentors elsewhere (in different programs or even different universities) and others to drop out; and (7) they feel pressure to prove that they deserve any funding they have received, especially in a time when there is not sufficient support for graduate training.  Both graduate students and faculty pointed  out that (8) many faculties and graduate student bodies are not diverse. Some faculty members said (9) that they were in other departments (e.g., African-American Studies,  Latin American Studies, or Women’s Studies), because their work was not respected in anthropology, because of their research was viewed as falling outside  the scope of the discipline;  (10) they felt marginalized, used as a consequence of practices like cross-listed courses, or even locked out of the field. There was a feeling that (11) some departments want visual differences in their faculty and graduate students but not differences of opinion that emerge from the everyday experiences of minority anthropologists.

While overt racism is less acceptable than it was 35 years ago, the subtle forms of structural racism prevail and keep the numbers of minority students low.

Welp.

(Source: blog.aaanet.org)

01.05.2011 08:05

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Tools used in this occupation:
* Calipers — Mandibulometers; Sliding calipers; Spreading calipers
* Power saws — Precision saws; Thin section saws
* Scanners — Digitizers; Flatbed scanners; Laser scanners; Slide scanners
* Temperature cycling chambers or thermal cyclers — Polymerase chain reaction PCR thermocyclers; Thermal cyclers
* X ray radiography examination equipment — High resolution industrial computed tomography CT scanners; Industrial micro computed tomography CT scanners; Portable x ray machines; X ray cabinets

—

19-3091.01 - Anthropologists [via]

Would like it if i was using more of these on the regular. They seem to have forgotten AV equipment, though.

12.01.2010 09:31

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Why anthropology is ‘true’ even if it is not ‘science'

On the one hand, then, we need to recognize that knowledge is still knowledge even if it is not ‘scientific’. I think it important that anthropology stand up to people who push narrow and impoverished definitions of understanding and insist that what we do counts, matters, and is important even if it does not look like the kind of knowledge production they are used to

On the other hand, I think it is also important that anthropologists fight to maintain their right to speak within the scientific community to define what science is. The version proffered in the blog posts I’ve read is incredibly unnuanced, unreflexive, and simpleminded. We cannot let voices like this own the definition of scientific work.

Best thing I’ve read in my quest to read everything on the internet about changes to the AAA mission statement (obviously its finals weeks and I am procrastinating otherwise i might be doing something more meaningful)

12.01.2010 09:21

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Anthropology Association Rejecting Science?

The weekend before Thanksgiving, at the closing of the annual convention held this year in New Orleans,  the Executive Board of the AAA discussed a new long-range plan that alters the AAA’s mission statement. The new mission statement deletes the idea that anthropology is a science. It also blurs the intellectual boundaries of the discipline and, ironically, inserts a stronger warrant for using anthropology to engage in public advocacy.

i feel really conflicted about all of this. On one hand, I agree with the idea that science is one culturally specific way of looking at the world. Like, you know, medicine. That doesn’t mean that either of them aren’t real, or valid methods and systems. I like postmodern and critical anthropology as much as anybody, but that does’t mean it has to be all of anthropology. I think that the strength of anthropology comes from the four field approach, and the cultural-anthropology-ificiation of the AAAs seems really unproductive to the organization and the discipline of american anthropology. 

09.24.2010 21:16

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Do Anthropologists merely replicate anthropologists?
Yes, that is part of what they do. Except I would say that they replicate anthropological thinking, which, in my opinion is very valuable. Nobody complains about academic economists replicating economic thinking or academic engineers replicating engineering thinking. That’s because these two modes of thought are generally accepted to be valuable - they have “real world” applications. Whereas anthropology is seen as merely academic. But anthropology does have real world applications, and it does interact with and move within the “real world.” Anthropological thought is valuable because it forces us to see beyond our limited cultural and historical frame, it forces us to consider the possibility that the world could be other than what it is (to borrow from Ghassan Hage). Economics, engineering, political science, even sociology in some cases - these tend to replicate the world as it is, while anthropology offers a look into a world that is possible. I think more anthropological thinking is a good thing, and we need to replicate it now more than ever.

— What Does Academic Anthropology Do?

08.07.2010 17:46

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One of our senior colleagues recently reflected, somewhat ruefully, that anthropology has lost control over its two most basic terms, culture and ethnography; that, in the age of deconstruction and critical postmodernism, we have entered a conceptual free-for-all in which our disciplinary quest has no terrain of its own anymore. Our tropes have been taken over, our signs seized.

— John and Jean Comaroff, Preface, Ethnoraphy and the Historic Imagination. [via]