"Is the “lone researcher” a myth?
Is the “lone researcher” a myth?
Elitists, isolated in their ivory towers, serving out life terms in self-imposed exile. It’s a great image, if you are writing a comedic novel, or perhaps aiming to produce a take on Great Expectations applied to an academic setting, or likewise some rendition of One Hundred Years of Solitude. One can indeed think of how many of these great novels were produced in solitary conditions, but note, by individuals with a great deal of “noise” in their heads, a great many voices struggling to be heard, in conversation or argument with one another, the author caught somewhere in between the (not so) fictional, allegedly “imaginary” voices.
The truly solitary researcher, a prisoner of his own self, would in fact have no sense of Self to start with (given the absence of an Other), and could have nothing to research or theorize, let alone fancy him or herself as a researcher or theorist. Real solitude would come from being born and raised in a complete vacuum, that thing we are told nature abhors (and indeed populates with animals and plants, so that solitude in a natural setting is still rendered impossible). And yet critics of the ivory tower would have us believe that this is exactly the kind of social vacuum in which academics exist, there among hundreds of students in their classes, students in their offices, constantly knocking elbows with colleagues, in a crowd waiting to get a spot on the bus, lined up in busy cafes, mulling over the political and economic changes that are reflected within the university, incredible solitude.
The Double Standards of the "Uncontacted Tribes" Circus
The story of the so-called “uncontacted tribes” in the Amazon has made its way around the world (even to Norway!). At the same time, there is a complete lack of interest in the story of indigenous people being publicly humiliated in Bolivia, the CultureMatters author Jovan Maud notes.
Joshua Marx, Anthropologist Among the Nationalists, Jumbies, and Whores of the Postcolony
Arthur, from Baltimore (as we already know), taught part time at a university in Queens, New York, last year. While there he managed to enchant some students with all his anecdotes, and photos, and footage, from his time in the postcolony where I still lived, where I lived unemployed but presumably doing independent research. Among the students was a very bright anarchist firebrand: Joshua Marx. This is the story of the grief that would be visited on Joshua Marx’s head and body, suffering the “boil down” meted out by the grim undercurrents and alleyway shades of a postcolony in 2007. This is the story about how Joshua Marx discovered that he was white, wealthy, an outsider, a conservative, and an imperialist. It is also a story of what Joshua Marx discovered about his innermost feelings for the postcolony, and how he reoriented himself professionally as a result, having been lucky enough to survive.
Anthropologists working for the military...again
Why I Want to Teach Anthropology at the Army War CollegeWhat Would Smedley Butler Do?
By BRIAN McKENNA
Critcher, C. (2008) Moral Panic Analysis
Chas Critcher 2008
Moral Panic Analysis: Past, Present and Future, Sociology Compass
Ethnographies of journalism
By Jay Gabriel
(query put to the Media Anthropology list)
Dear list,In response to my query last week regarding book-length ethnographies of journalism that were well received in undergraduate courses, I received much useful information. Below is a summary (I have tried not to mangle what anyone actually told me):
"To wage war, become an anthropologist." That's the opening line from a 2007 article in the U.S. Army War College journal "Parameters." The feature, by Oxford educated historian Patrick Porter, says, "from the academy to the Pentagon, fresh attention is being focused on knowing the enemy.".........
Associated Press - shocked by the value of enthnography
At the World Editors Forum in Goteborg, Sweden, today AP presented a paper produced by Baltimore-based Context-Based Research Group who conducted a research study around the world into how young people read news.The report is available from:
http://www.ap.org/newmodel.pdf
Four Stone Hearth #42
We at Neuroanthropology are very pleased to be hosting Four Stone Hearth #42, blog carnival of anthropology, especially at our new digs (anthropology.net is now our domain… we like the sound of that, domain). The global anthro-scape has been positively buzzing with excitement: new discoveries, familiar voices, and a few outlandish claims can be worth acres of text in the virtual world. We didn’t get a lot of submissions because we think everyone’s too busy blogging (that, or on summer vacation, we mean, busy with fieldwork). So this is what we’ve come up with. So, go ahead and grab your marshmallows, put a sausage on a stick, and gather round close because the Four Stone Hearth is ready to start cooking.Synesthesia & metaphor — I’m not feeling it
Wired online carried a story recently on a talk by ‘neuroscientist extraordinaire’ V.S. Ramachandran, one of the folks responsible for a lot of creative thinking in the brain sciences. Brandom Keim writes on a recent talk Ramachandran gave at the World Science Festival in a story, Poetry Comes from Our Tree-Climbing Ancestors, Neuroscientist Says. While I typically find his stuff both fascinating and resonant, this particular piece left me unpersuaded.
Normally, I might take issue with the sloppy logic of the title (’poetry’ coming from ‘tree-climbing ancestors’ being a dangerous conflation between non-proximate contributing factors and eventual effects — you could just as logically say that ‘poetry comes from spinning disk of post-stellar material in proto-solar system’…), but I’ve got bigger fish to fry: synesthesia.......
Cultural Aspects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Thinking on Meaning and Risk
Over the past year and a half, I have been conducting research among male U.S. veterans who have served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of whom have been diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). An anthropologist myself, I planned to follow the trail originally blazed by Victor Frankl and Robert Jay Lifton, psychotherapists who wrote a great deal about meaning in their descriptions of trauma and PTSD.
Early on, however, a psychiatrist whose work on trauma I admire opined to me that crises of meaning belong to the realm of depression rather than PTSD. He suggested that combat PTSD was best thought of as the physiological effects of living under conditions of extreme stress, while more meaning-related struggles were best understood as a symptom of depression. Given the frequency of comorbidity between PTSD and depression, I was for some time inclined to go along with his analysis.
Then two things happened. First, I began the work of talking with veterans themselves about their stories of trauma and PTSD, listening in detail to how they describe their own experiences. And second, I began to research the increasingly dominant Prolonged Exposure model of PTSD, which views the disorder as a pathology that develops when individuals fail to process their traumatic memories in the normal way....
Colonialism and the Archaeological Wild Man: Canadian anthropologists react to Indiana Jones
This item, published under the title of “Indiana Jones is no model of the modern archeologist” in The Calgary Herald today, speaks of Canadian academics who are involved in setting up ethical guidelines for “digging up the past,” and focuses on their reaction against the Indian Jones movies which “represent the dark side of archeology’s past and obscures the high stakes at play when discoveries involve modern communities.”
As Dr. Brian Noble, an anthropologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax states in the article, “Indiana Jones is a caricature of the past, but it sells at the box office. The public gets fed this racy old set of ideas and that concerns me. The public is not really aware of the stakes in this for the local communities.” Noble is part of the “Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage” project that seeks to establish ethical guidelines for archaeologists, among others.
From refugees to ‘envirogees’?
Scott Thill at Alternet has published an article on the social impact of climate change. The article goes as far as coining a new term: ‘envirogee’. The implication seems to be that ‘refugee’ has a certain amount of baggage, being intrinsically associated with political persecution. We are entering an age, mainly due to climate change, but also because of other cheery current/future phenomena such as peak oil, in which the traditional definitions of refugee will need to change to retain relevance. The article is certainly polemic in tone, but I think it does the job of provoking thought on what the world is goi
And what if I do not want to do “collaborative anthropology”?
“…then remove the uncollaborator from our midst and drag him by his heels to the gallows, where he shall be hung from his neck until life doth depart from his flesh…”
I believe that some might have expected me to answer in the manner of the fictitious quote above.
Thus far, whenever I have spoken of “collaborative” work between researchers and their non-academic partners (because one can also speak of collaboration between researchers themselves) I have tended to present an argument that was only “positive,” and by that I mean this was presented as the way to go in decolonizing the discipline, heightening its public engagement, and opening the process of knowledge production to less elitist/”professional” modes. There are a number of limitations, however, that need to be addressed.
