I’ve just posted a few comments on Arizona’s recent legislative attack on ethnic studies at Savage Minds. It started as a post for this site, but as I got into the argument it seemed more appropriate to post there. The nutshell version is: Traditional US history, literature, and civics classes are clearly in violation of Arizona’s new HB 2281, which prohibits courses that “promote resentment towards a race or class” or that “advocate ethnic solidarity”. In fact, the law itself, based as it is on a notion of “Americanness” that clearly excludes Americans of Hispanic origin, does both.
Read the rest at Savage Minds.
 Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency, edited by John D. Kelly, Beatrice Jauregui, Sean T. Mitchell, and Jeremy Walton, is available for pre-order on Amazon and will be released in both paperback and hardcover on April 1st. Based on the proceedings of the Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency conference at the University of Chicago in 2008, the book explores not just current counterinsurgency efforts but the relationship between anthropology and the military and state intelligence apparatus in general. My essay in the book, “The Uses of Anthropology in the Insurgent Age”, takes a historical look at state uses of anthropology to explore the many failure points that make it difficult, if not impossible, for anthropologists to work effectively under military/intelligence auspices.
Although not all presentations are included, audio from many of the presentations at the conference (including mine) is available on the U of Chicago’s Center for International Studies website.
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This is part of 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.
When we encounter a group of people like the Shakers, there often seems to be an insurmountable wall between “us” and “them”. The practices of other people often seem so incomprehensible that we describe a “cultural barrier” standing between us (or a “language barrier” or a “gender barrier” — differences of all sorts can seem like a wall that prevents any kind of understanding). Anthropologists are, primarily, facilitators of communication across those walls — which, it usually emerges, exist more in our heads than in the real world.
Although anthropology as a professional, academic discipline did not emerge until the 19th century, seeds of it can be found deep in the world’s history. Herodotus, a Greek historian who travelled through the regions conquered by the Greeks in the 5th century BC, wrote about the culture of the verious peoples he encountered in a way that many see as anthropological. Ibn Khaldun, a 14th c. North African Arab scholar, did the same as he travelled through Europe. In a sense, we all do anthropology all the time, whenever we are confronted with difference and try to overcome it (whether between us and the people around the world, or us and our neighbors, spouses, and friends), or whenever we consider the things that hold us together as a community and make us different from other communities. But most of us lack the disciplinary knowledge and methodology to make much sense out of the differences and similarities we come across — this kind of “anthropologising” comes more out of unconsidered biases and prejudice than any real comparison of depth of knowledge. [Continue reading] »
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In Part 2 of my “Introduction to Anthropology” series, I mention the Shakers, so I thought I’d post some information about them.
My favorite resource is the the absolutely stunning documentary film, Ken Burns’ America: The Shakers. The homepage includes a timeline of Shaker history, links to online resources about the Shakers, and a pair of video clips from the movie.
For further information on the Shakers, visit the homepage of the Canterbury Shaker Village, a museum reproducing life in a typical Shaker village.
The article, “Living A Tradition”, was originally published in Smithsonian magazine, and is available online here. There are three “sidebars” — “I Was A Teenage Shaker”, a gallery of Shaker crafts, and a collection of Shaker recipes.
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.
The fourth subfield, cultural anthropology, is the subject of these posts. [Continue reading] »
 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.)
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