Tribute to Prof. Antoun and anthro roundup (#AAA09)

last updated: 09 Dec 09- 11:30

A super post:

How to Improve the AAA Meetings

Now I remember why I dislike academic conferences so much:
1. I don?t like having papers read to me (does anyone?).
2. I don?t like having one image projected on a screen and never changed for the 15 minutes when someone is reading to me.
3. I don?t like time hogs who use up discussion time: there is never time for discussion
4. I don?t like constant references to failed technology or unfamiliarity with projectors, computers, presentation software, or DVDs.
5. I don?t like that most presenters have no clue how to construct a text slide: your squinting audience is not proof that they are intensely interested. The fact is they can?t see what you wrote in your 12 point type.
6. I don?t like ?, well, you get the idea.
Anthropology Association Condemns Work With US Counterinsurgency
Huffington Post (blog)
Anthropologists should not be helping US military forces gather information about Afghan villagers and their way of life, a study commission sponsored by

Panel Criticizes Military’s Use of Embedded Anthropologists
New York Times
The committee, which released the report on Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, the discipline’s largest …

Anthropology and the Military

At its annual meeting, scholarly association criticizes a Defense Department program that uses social science as a strategic weapon.

Army anthropology program in Iraq criticized
USA Today
Army anthropologists‘ assignment to collect counterinsurgency intelligence in in Afghanistan and Iraq “can no longer be considered a legitimate professional

?Anthropology Song? Performance at the Annual Meeting

Dai Cooper, a musician and anthropology graduate student at U. Toronto, will be performing ?The Anthropology Song: A Little Bit Anthropologist? on Saturday around 2:00pm in the Marriott exhibit hall as part of the graduate school reception. She will also perform during the first band break at the AAA?s Saturday night dance (9:30-11:30pm, Grand Ballroom Salon I, 5th floor). Please come out to show her your support.

Poster Session Highlights Undergraduate Work

Thanks to Deborah Rotman and Agustin Fuentes (U Notre Dame, top right) for their great work in organizing this year?s undergraduate poster session.

The session attracted students working in an incredibly diverse set of research areas, such as Amber Herkey (U Notre Dame, bottom right) with her poster, ?Negotiating Negatives and Maintaining ?Mainstream?: Considering Gang Realities from Community Perspectives.?

AAA and Bedwetting

I am not going off to the annual American Anthropological Association meetings until Friday, and then only for a day. In fact, I have not been to the meetings in years. We are a two-anthropologist family (a dangerous enterprise) and it always seemed more important that my husband go and keep us his contacts since he had the tenured position and I simply floated from one temporary teaching job to the next. Now, don?t get all gender-pissed at me: I can uphold my feminist credential against any onslaught but the fact is, we under-employed anthropologists have to pick and choose how we spend our non-existent conference dollars and how we exercise our minor status. The meetings, quite simply, just make me feel bad when I see so many happily employed anthropologists in one place.

Prominent folklorist Bess Lomax Hawes dies at 88
89.3 KPCC
(Audio: KPCC’s Alex Cohen talks with Sabina Magliocco, the anthropology department chairwoman at Cal State Northridge, about Hawes’ work. …
BESS LOMAX HAWES, 88, FOLK SCHOLAREl Paso Inc
Remembering Bess Lomax HawesHuffington Post (blog)

AAA Celebrates S. Ann Dunham Book Launch

Thursday featured a press briefing and book release reception for S. Ann Dunham?s Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia, edited and with a preface by Alice G. Dewey and Nancy I. Cooper, with a foreword by Maya Soetoro-Ng (at left) and an afterword by Robert W. Hefner.

Opening Old Wounds in Anthropology

At their annual meeting, scholars fan the flames of a decade-old controversy over research on a South American tribe.

Sympathetic ethnography of surrogate mothers

Frequent awesome BB suggester Avi Solomon sez, “Yes, I know I’m totally biased, but I honestly think that my wife Dr. Elly Teman’s forthcoming ethnography ‘Birthing a Mother’ will truly blow your mind if you’re concerned with how technology forms and reboots core human experiences like ‘Motherhood’.

In other news:

Power to the Paint
The Rice Thresher
Combining Mormon imagery with vibrantly colored stencils from and inspired by Chilean stencilistas, anthropology doctoral candidate Michael Adair-Kriz has

Alternative teaching methods increase
Observer Online
?Within anthropology, I think there is an ethos of community-based learning, both because the students embrace service learning and because it’s a good fit

Russian supernatural fandom e-seminar transcript now online

Please find the e-seminar on Sudah?s working paper online at: http://media-anthropology.net/workingpapers.htm

0.171: Anthropology and the Will to Meaning: Vassos Argyrou

from OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY by Maximilian Forte

This interlude in the series is to finally introduce the work of Dr. Vassos Argyrou (Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Hull), specifically his book, Anthropology and the Will to Meaning: A Postcolonial Critique (London: Pluto Press, 2002) which I have referred to in the past on several occasions (a condensed version of his argument can be found in ?Sameness and the Ethnological Will to Meaning? [full text PDF].

Professor Richard Antoun, murdered Fri. Dec. 4, 2009: We Will Miss You, May God Bless You

from OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY by Maximilian Forte

DR. RICHARD ANTOUN

I am utterly distraught by the news that. Dr. Richard Antoun, a very dear former professor of mine in Anthropology at Binghamton University, died yesterday afternoon after having been stabbed multiple times in his office by a graduate student. I am in disbelief. Professor Antoun was a blessing to all of us who took his courses. He was exceedingly gentle, soft spoken, and took an active interest in our research. It is to him that I owe thanks for endless brilliant little tips on doing ethnographic research, down to how to ask questions, and for sharing some of his wealth of knowledge on the Middle East and Islam. It is to him that I owe thanks for his course on Reinterpreting Tradition, so memorable that since I took it back around 1996, it feels like I was just sitting in his class, remembering individual lectures, his extensive notes occupying all the boards in his seminar room next to his office.

Binghamton professor stabbed to death
WCAX
AP – December 4, 2009 7:45 PM ET VESTAL, NY (AP) – A 77-year-old anthropology professor was fatally stabbed in a science building at Binghamton University

Prof. Richard Antoun remembered as gentle man dedicated to dispelling …
Elmira Star-Gazette
A professor emeritus in anthropology, Antoun, 77, joined the BU faculty in 1976. He was a well-regarded scholar and author of six books and numerous

Binghamton Univ. Prof. Stabbed To Death, Suspect In Custody (VIDEO)
WENY-TV
A male graduate student allegedly stabbed 77-year-old anthropology professor Richard Antoun Friday in a science building on BU’s campus.

NewsCrimeProf. Emeritus Richard T. Antoun stabbed, killed at Binghamton …
New York Daily News
A longtime Binghamton University anthropology professor known on campus as “a really nice guy” was stabbed to death in his office Friday by

Talal Asad on Anthropological Inquiry

[Note: In preparing for my role to respond to presentations on the work of Talal Asad and the Anthropology of Islam at AAR recently, I reread portions of the edited volume Powers of the Secular Modern (edited by David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, Stanford University Press, 2006, pp. 206-207). In doing so I found a valuable excerpt at the start of Asad?s specific responses to the essays int he volume. Given the interest at the AAR meeting in anthropological and ethnographic approaches to Islam, I think Asad?s general comments below on the role of anthropology are relevant and worth perusing.]

Binghamton Student Says He Warned Officials
New York Times
Dr. Antoun, an anthropology professor who focused on Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, retired in 1999, becoming a professor emeritus at Binghamton, …

Grad Student Charged in Fatal Stabbing of Professor
Inside Higher Ed
Abdulsalam Al-Zahrani, a graduate student in anthropology at the State University of New York at Binghamton, has been charged with second-degree murder in

Richard Antoun, 1932-2009

Last Friday, like many of my fellow anthropologists, I was attending the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Philadelphia. I was excited to be back in Philly, where I went through the graduate program in anthropology in the 1970s. At a session on Saturday I heard the alarming news that emeritus Prof. Richard Antoun had been killed the day before. Following on the continual newsworthy but ethically unworthy chain of killings in the media spotlight, this was all the more a shock since it involved someone whose work I knew and whom I had met at previous professional meetings.