This is the first in a series of posts I wrote for an Introduction to Anthropology blog I kept for my students. That site got eaten in the Great LeafyHost Collapse of 2006, but I’ve held onto the content backups in the hopes of someday reposting it. Finally I realized that it was unlikely I’d get the whole site back up, so I’m reposting the content here.
Image via Wikipedia
Read Horace Miner’s classic essay, “Body Ritual among the Nacirema”. The Nacirema are strange, alien, maybe even a little exotic. For many readers, a sense of superiority is felt — the way the Nacirema live seems inefficient, superstitious, backwards, primitive, even silly. Be that as it may, the thing that stands out for most anthropologists is that no matter how odd the customs of a group of people might seem to an outside observer, somehow the group manages to get along — those customs must , in some way, make sense to the people who practice them. It is our job, as anthropologists, to determine what sense they make: why people do the things they do, why there is so much diversity in the practices, beliefs, and lifestyles of people around the world, how various practices are invented, spread, and challenged in various communities, how societies create a sense of “belonging” in the people who make them up — how people in general live in this world of ours.
To do that, anthropologists have divided their work into four subfields, each of which looks at humans and human behavior from a different perspective, but all of which are, ultimately, necessary to fully understand who we are. Physical anthropologists are concerned with the biological make-up of the human body — how did it evolve, what are it’s limits and possibilities, what do we have in common as a species, and what variations exist between various populations? Linguistic anthropologists are concerned with the use of language to create and convey meaning between people. Archaeologists look at the material traces humans have left — their bones, ruins, and artifacts — to understand our past and, increasingly, our present.
@SonjaFoust Book catalogs/bibliography managers are an obvious match for handheld devices, but rarely have mobile versions. It’s a mystery. in reply to SonjaFoust#
I’m posting this to test out Poster, an app that lets me post to WordPress blogs from my Palm Pre.
I can add images, bold text, underline, and italicize. Also, add links like this: Don’t Be Stupid. And that’s it – will be interesting to see how useful it is. So far seems easy enough to use.
(Update: The image didn’t insert right, although it did upload. It had to be resized significantly, of course, to fit the post. I must have done something wrong, because there’s no reason to have thie upload in the app if you can’t do anything with the image from your phone.)
After a couple years of fretting, I finally figured out how to transfer this site from it’s old Drupal install to a shiny new Wordpress install. If you’re a Drupal evangelist, believe me, I know: it’s a great system, but way too much power — and too much work — for a single person’s blog.
All the content’s here (although a picture might be missing here and there, and I’m still trying to figure out to do with some longer essays that were posted as special pages on the old site). I’ve also posted a fairly thorough portrait of my academic self in the Portfolio section. Most of the links from the old site will still work, but an odd link here and there will be broken, and for that I apologize. (On the other hand, the search function on this site works much better than on the old site.)
I’m hoping to get to posting more often, but between teaching and freelance writing and maintaining some kind of human-like social life, I’m kept pretty busy. We’ll see what I can do…
Another positive review of Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War has appeared, this time in the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford (JASO). The reviewer, Iain Perdue, sees the book’s discussion of Cold War McCarthyism and militarism as a timely intervention in today’s debates, writing:
The issues of ethics and the ramifications of anthropologists performing government work are being revived in a renewed and vigorous debate in the American Anthropological Association on this very subject. The debate arises from social and political circumstances extremely similar to those presented in this book, and this does not go unremarked by its contributors.
Perdue also notes that the book’s “solid contribution” towards addressing the deficit in the current historiography of Cold War American anthropology. The full review section from the journal can be downloaded in PDF format here; my review starts on the third-from-last page of the file.
As an aside, this review coming out a mere 18 months after the book’s U.K. publication is considered “timely” for an academic review. I’ve had reviews of books that were over a year old when they were assigned to me take over two years to appear in print — after the six months I was given to write the review! This review marks the first critical response to the book in an academic journal, which gives me hope that more academic response can be expected in the months ahead.
An academic book is a lot of things, but one of the most important things it is is an entry in an ongoing conversation about one’s discipline. Waiting two, three, or more years to hear back from your colleagues is almost unbearable (though, I suspect, not as unbearable as waiting forever and never getting a response…) so it’s nice to see that the ice is finally starting to thaw a bit.
I recently drove cross-country, passing through the Texas panhandle, which gave me the opportunity to have a look at Cadillac Ranch outside of Amarillo. Plopped down in the middle of a field just south of I-40, Cadiallc Ranch was commissioned by eccentric rich guy Stanley Marsh III and built by artist/architect collective Ant Farm. The sculpture consists of 10 50s-era Cadillacs half-buried nose-down, and covered with a riotously-colored palimpsest of graffiti, which is encouraged.
Cadillac Ranch is considered the inspiration for Nebraska’s Carhenge, whose virtues I’ve extolled here before.
The academic publishing world moves slowly, oh-so-slowly. After almost a year in print, Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War has received its second review, a thoughtful response by Robert Lawless at the Anthropology Review Database. Lawless focuses heavily on one of the big undercurrents in the book, the similarity between how anthropology articulated with US interests during the Cold War years and the way it does today. I take exception with one point Lawless raises — he says I treat these the Army’s Human Terrain System and its anthropological champion Montgomery McFate too gently; in my defense, HTS was just a proposal when I discussed it, and McFate just a military anthropologist who had written a couple of articles. Today, we know how poorly planned and executed HTS turned out to be, and we know McFate primarily as the anthropological voice behind the Army’s new counterinsurgency manual — I doubt I’d be so “gentle” with her and her legacy today.
That aside, it’s a very positive review, of the sort of review I like best: those that engage deeply with the text and look to add to the topic, rather than simply assess the book. Lawless’ conclusion:
Required reading for those interested in the history of the discipline, this book joins other important works, such as Price’s Threatening Anthropology, on the deleterious effects of the Cold War on anthropology.
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