Ooh, interesting reading. I just happened upon New Mandala -- New Perspectives on Southeast Asia, a blog written by a couple Australian academics -- an anthropologist and an international development doctoral student with a background in Asian Studies.

I found it because, slow to read my email, I finally looked at the American Anthropological Association homepage and found their open letter to Prime Minister Sundaravej, opposing Thailand's War on Drugs. I was looking to see if there's an online petition regarding this issue and happened upon Andrew Walker and Nicholas Farrelly's discussion of anthroplogy's potential contribution to this cause, "Anthropology goes to war".

I was pleased to see the AAA engaged in human rights issues, and also pleased to discover that there's now a AAA human rights blog.

Last night I met some of the new recruits to my programs at dinners sponsored by the departments. Yay for great students and free food. I also enjoyed a couple happy hour drinks at Cafe Habana with K&J. It was a wonderful day, with a talk with Eri, who was in the midst of nursing and burping her newborn baby girl, and positive tenure news about a beloved professor. And it was SUNNY. And I made a decision, for better or worse, that I'm not going to apply for any more summer funding to travel, because I think it would be better for me to stay in the States this summer, work on my existing papers and studies, and REST.

Women of color at the University of Michigan

Campus Lockdown conference at University of Michigan, Saturday, March 15, 2008.

In response to a number of women of color being denied tenure recently at the University of Michigan, there is a growing crowd of folks at U of M as well as other universities drawing attention to the situation and trying to advocate on their behalf, and for diversity at the university, in general.

For this conference, there's quite a star-studded panel of speakers:

Piya Chatterjee, University of California, Riverside
Angela Davis, University of California, Santa Cruz (via teleconference)
Rosa Linda Fregoso, University of Southern California
Ruthie Gilmore, University of Southern California
Fred Moten, Duke University
Clarissa Rojas, San Francisco State University
Audra Simpson, Cornell University
Haunani-Kay Trask, University of Hawai'i

From Ann Arbor to Rajasthan to the Nile

Tonight I saw "In the Trail of the Ghawazee: Gypsy Dances from Rajasthan to the Nile" with Leila Haddad and the Ghawazee musicians of Luxor, thanks to a friend who got some extra tickets and kindly invited me. I was about ready to pass out because I'm so tired from grading and everything. (Okay, part of the effect is due to the fun of celebrating K&J's engagement last night!!) But the music and dancing were quite beautiful, and it was humanizing to be with friends doing something besides my everyday labor. I couldn't help but think of my friend and his research on the Gypsies of Rajasthan, though, and our informal interviewing of groupies in the audience at the Sziget a few years ago.

Yesterday I saw a lecture on the origins of domestic food production by the illustrious Kent Flannery, entitled: "The creation of agriculture: So easy a caveman could do it." Katie and I were both excited to learn about teocinte.

Contract negotiations continue for the University of Michigan graduate student instructors, via the Graduate Employees Organization. There's serious talk of a possible walk-out, depending how the conversation goes over the next couple of weeks. We've already extended our expired contract for a couple of weeks to allow for additional negotiations.

Meanwhile, there's a policy change called "continuous enrollment" being discussed at U of M's Rackham graduate school that has lots of us very concerned, to the point that the Dean met with the Graduate Student Forum today and there's another lunch meeting with the dean being scheduled for students by the GSF in another week or two. The arguments in favor of the change that were presented by the dean today centered primarily around (a) the data on degree completion from research that included both institutions that have such a policy and institutions that don't, and the apparent fact that the policy will, in fact, be revenue neutral, and (b) that the decrease in candidacy tuition will counterbalance the increase in semesters of enrollment while a candidate.

There are many issues being raised among students and faculty in disciplines that depend on extended field research in discussions that I don't want to go into here, but a couple of the things that puzzled me about what she said yesterday were the following: (1) she indicated that the cost of tuition is set by a different body than Rackham, who obviously would preside over this policy. So in principle the candidacy tuition could rise at a later date, making the argument b look rather less convincing. (2) While the dean indicated that data that include all disciplines in sciences and humanities indicate that the rate of completion of degree is higher when continuous enrollment policies are in place, when pressed by a student in the GSF with the question "Do institutions with continuous enrollment policies have greater degree completion rates than the University of Michigan?," she said that those data were unavailable, but that anecdotal evidence indicates that there are some that have better rates of completion and others that have far worse.

. . .

My neck pain is excruciating after grading my undergraduates' papers. I'm almost through all of the 75. I know I can't afford a massage, but I may need to find a way to pay for it anyway, because I can hardly turn my head. I wish there were affordable acupuncture in Ann Arbor.

I almost missed the most exciting news! My dear friend Eri just had her baby. I don't know exactly what time, or the stats or anything. But they both look positively radiant in the photos.

Help Save the European University at St Petersburg.

There's been a lot of traffic recently on Eastern European-oriented academic listserves regarding the status of a well established post-graduate institution in St. Petersburg, the European University at St. Petersburg, which has been closed indefinitely due to "firecode violations".

The situation seems very dubious and the effort has been to get international attention on the problem, to generate signatures on a petition to re-open the university, and to solicit donations for building repairs and letters to the Russian authorities. If you are interested in learning more, there is a blog devoted to this issue. This has also received some attention in the English-language press, with an article in the Guardian and an editorial in the New York Times.

There are a few different petitions online now. Here is a petition and letter of support authored by Alexei Yurchak and Michele Rivkin-Fish, two well known and respected American anthropologists of Russia and the former Soviet Union.

The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies has also generated a statement regarding the EUSP closure.

I include, below, an open letter from the EUSP students. Similar reports have come from faculty as well.

Open letter from EUSP students
Dear colleagues!

As students of the European University at St.Petersburg (EUSP), we would like to ask for your help and support. On February 8th, the activity of the EUSP was suspended for 90 days by order of the district court.

The result is that the university has been paralyzed for the whole semester. This situation is totally unacceptable from our point of view.

The official reason for the suspension of educational activities at the EUSP is that fire-safety violations have occurred at the university building at 3 Gagarinskaya Street, St Petersburg. No problems of this kind had previously been identified by inspections of the fire service. As indicated in press-releases issued by the EUSP administration, the university leadership has taken measures to eliminate the problems revealed by the state fire inspectorate, though some of the problems identified will need months, or even years, to be eliminated completely. The EUSP’s building is a listed building (monument of architecture), and so this process requires huge financial outlay and numerous agreements with a whole range of different official bodies. Hence, the EUSP petitioned to be allowed to conduct its academic activity at the same time as carrying out the work required. The district court has, however, refused to satisfy this petition. On February 18th, the decision to suspend the academic activity of the EUSP was left in force. We are now extremely worried our university will not survive.

The motives underlying this situation are mysterious, and we do not propose to speculate about them. What is crucial for us is that we are now denied the opportunity to study, to attend seminars and lectures, and to carry out our own research. Yet many of us have come to St Petersburg from other cities in Russia with the precise purpose of doing all this, and of enjoying the renowned facilities of the EUSP.

The EUSP is known all over Russia as a graduate school that provides an education of outstanding quality. It accepts only graduate students, those who have already obtained their first degree and decided to devote themselves to research. For the time of over a decade since it was founded, the EUSP has proved that it can train young researchers to the highest international levels, as is shown by the fact that dozens of foreign students from all over the world come to study here every year. Many members of staff at the EUSP have degrees from Western universities, or have taught for significant lengths of time abroad, but have preferred to come back to Russia and make their contribution to developing knowledge here. Those who have completed degrees here are teaching at universities and working at research centres all over Russia, and making a unique contribution to Russian academia. One of the aims of the university is to stimulate young researchers to stay in Russia, to give them chance to realize their research potential here, despite the practical problems of academic careers (low pay etc.) that make these unattractive to many young people.

Now all our plans for the future are under threat because of the shutdown of the university. Essentially, we will lose most of the second semester of the teaching year, a long break that is likely to do serious harm to our professional development. Without having access to the university building, we cannot work at the unique university library, which provides materials not available elsewhere in the city; our research plans have been completely disrupted.

It is essential that the EUSP must be allowed to renew its academic activity in the shortest possible time. A reasonable solution to the existing situation must be found. We see no reason why the elimination of fire-safety violations could not be carried out alongside teaching, or why classes could not be moved, on a temporary basis, to another building while the supposedly most dangerous problems are dealt with.

In order to ensure a swift reopening, we are now asking you to help us. Please get as much publicity as you can for our case. Write to newspapers, make posts on the Net, state your position in public, send letters of support to official organizations and governmental bodies, both in Russia and in your home country. We are desperate to resume our studies; please take our cause to your hearts.

Students of the European University at St.Petersburg
http://www.eu.spb.ru/index.php?lang=en

(Note: The above image is borrowed without permission from the website of the university.)

Loose ends

Well, just one more big messy hurdle to get through.

Or . . . one big messy day, three big messy hurdles. Return the student papers, finish out my time at AFG, and submit my field paperwork for my MSW.

It'll be nice to be back at AFG; just sad, since it'll mark the end of an era there. But I'll be back in January to do some more work on the evaluation. So the only difference will be no more clock ticking, no more surveillance of the same variety. I don't like to be surveilled.

I have submitted the student grades, submitted all my work for the time being, and am now sorting through the detritus of the end of the semester. I got to the bottom of the laundry hamper and realized two interesting, if slightly disturbing things: (1) I had clothes in there from Thanksgiving, which means I probably haven't done laundry since then, unless I did it and just left the handwashables at the bottom (which is possible, but in any case, I can't remember, and that in and of itself is kind of telling) and (2) my laundry was so cold, there is no doubt that it helps to insulate the wall the hamper sits against in my office. Hmm.

Well, now I have both the washing machine and the dishwasher running, and I'm debating what to do next. Something about having an intense stress-induced adrenaline rush for several days makes it a bit anticlimactic just to go to bed, though it probably would be wise. I feel a bit too pumped up for that, anyway, though. If I drive to the supermarket to buy O'Douls and get gas, though, I'll probably be done for the night. Well, at least I wouldn't have to stop for gas in the morning on the way to Detroit.

One option would be to work on my field paperwork now, but my arms are tingling from all the typing for days. So I probably shouldn't be blogging, either, I know.

I did buy a ticket to California, FINALLY. Hooray. And I've left enough time for me to clean up the house thoroughly before I go, so everything will be pristine and fresh and tidy and all my personal crap will be a little less overwhelming. So I pulled out a suitcase, and can finally start thinking about being a person who is something other than a teacher and a student and a social worker, for at least a few days.

Oh, just to give myself a sense of accomplishment, I just tallied up my writing I've done since Thanksgiving: 1 28-page paper, 7 pages of short response papers on readings, 1 23-page paper, 1 35-page paper, 1 8-page paper, and 1 page of prelim questions. That's 102 pages, and just shy of a hundred if you knock out title pages and bibliographic material. Nutty. And that doesn't even include comments on student papers, or emails, or blog writing. I guess it's been a productive few weeks. I'm not saying all of it is good. Heck, plenty of it isn't. But a little of it, I think, actually is.

Between that and the very exciting meetings with a few faculty members I love, I think I'm going to head off to California pretty blissed out despite all the last-minute stress of grading and running around for field placement.

Little victories

Well, having eaten enough to sustain a small village for a night or two (bacon and pierogie fried with onion right in the bacon grease, covered with sour cream, and washed down with a bottle of nonalcoholic beer, perfect food after working for two days straight with hardly a crumb in my stomach, and then trudging home in the snow), I'm going to bathe and go to bed for a few hours. I pulled my second all-nighter last night (okay, okay, I slept from 8 am til 1 pm on Monday and 5:40 to 8 am this morning, but that doesn't really count) to get the portfolio finished for my democracy course, but it is FINALLY in. I'm accepting incompletes in my independent studies, and have worked out the arrangements with the professors. Now, on to finish my undergraduate grading, and to magically make an ungodly number of field work hours and my final field work paperwork happen between now and Friday, and I'll be finished with this semester of craziness. Thank God I never have to be a first-time Anthropology 101 GSI ever again. Next time, it'll be the second. And that makes all the difference in the world!

By the way, my final paper for Democracy ended up being 35 pages. And you know, I feel pretty good about it. I hope she likes it too.

The other good news: I have a prelim committee forming, and prelim ideas being generated, for Social Work. And the whole team is people I think are amazing and fabulous and whom I love working with, and am excited to spend time getting to think with. And they seem enthusiastic too. About the ideas and about each other. Score. Like, major score. I just need to talk to the last of the four (four is the upper limit; three is typical and I've already got three on board), but assuming she has time, I'm pretty sure she'll be game, because I know she's positive about working with me although I haven't approached her specifically about prelims. She gave me an A+ in her class. So yeah, I think I can hope for her support. :) So, life is looking nice from here. Although it's a little blurry, since I need to rest my eyes. Now, on to the bath. Hello and good tidings to you, world.

Coulda woulda shoulda

I should have been in Budapest today.

But instead I am writing. Writing, writing, writing. It's late, but it's coming, finally.

'Tis good, though. I think that what I'm writing isn't crap. Lately that feeling is pretty unusual, I have to say. Actually, I think it might even be good. But it's early to tell.

It's taken me AGES to get through my field data from Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania to the point that I can make heads or tails of it. I didn't leave my house all weekend, and today only went as far as the cable company a few miles down the road to restore my troubled internet service. I filed away about two inches of papers into a three-inch binder, added tabs to six field notebooks, and have been creating indexes for myself. I feel like this is the kind of stuff they don't teach you. An archival methods course would be so handy. I know there are probably more intuitive digital ways of creating cross-referencing tools. But I'm just working with the skills and tools I've got. This is even before transcribing, which will add PILES and PILES to the data I've already got in the form of field notes, photographs, and documents from field contacts.

I've started making a more comprehensive database than I've had up until now, except the one in my head, and realized today that I probably have met at least a few hundred people "in the field" at this point who have something to do with my project. No wonder I feel a little loopy sometimes, and like I haven't had a real chance of synthesizing my life while I've been doing coursework. Thank God I took a semester to do independent study so I could start to process this, a little.

I'm dreaming of a California Christmas . . . but it sure is white outside.

It is so incredibly snowy here, you would hardly believe it. But we're expecting up to 8 inches in Southeastern Michigan. And it looks like there already nearly that much piled up on the whole world around the cottage. It feels a little like being in a gingerbread house with icing piled up around it.

I've added some posts over the past couple of days to Our Lady of the Woods, a place I envision for environmentally-oriented posts, links to media reports, information about consumption, and so on. It may be artificially segmenting my life to section those things off, but I envision this spot as a little more personal -- not in the sense of more important to me, necessarily, but just more chatty, more about my quotidian life, and far less likely to be of general interest to someone who doesn't know me. Also, I know Mom is deeply disturbed by my Keeper, so this way she doesn't need to hear all about things like that if she doesn't want to. :)

I am sitting here hidden away in my winter wonderland, reading my field notes from Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania, in 2006, trying to make sense of everything, and thinking about bonds, partnerships, "sweat equity," and participation in housing programs in Central and Eastern Europe. I love the idea of this paper, but it's going to be hard to pull it together in the next day. I seem to be headed in the direction of thinking about global housing builds as a simulated religious experience for international volunteers, drawing on Victor Turner as well as an outstanding book called Participation: The New Tyranny? edited by Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari. I'm also going to be drawing on the readings for a course I took with Julia Paley last spring, on Democracy: Ethnography and Social Theory. Great class, great readings.

Now I just need to pull it all together . . . . and keep my mind calm while knowing that I still need to grade 15 more undergraduate papers, all (75) of the last quizzes, and check off the museum assignments of my students, and issue their final grades by the 20th, as well as writing my evaluation report for AFG and finishing up 22 more hours of field placement work. Luckily I can be writing my report in those hours. But still. That's all I have to do by the 21st. That, and work out the details of my academic planning with my advisor, and meet a professor to talk about prelims and hopefully manage to convince him that it's worth it to work with me even though he's about to leave the University of Michigan.

And my family wonders why I can't fathom talking about when I'm coming home for Christmas. Well . . . Mom, that's why! :( I miss you guys . .

Grey ice fisherman eating banana bread and bathing babies in three cultures

Grey, grey, unrelenting grey.

The lake appears to be frozen over completely, though it is still on the thin side in parts. The boats' cold grey metal matches the ambient air and the ice all around. Only the bits of exposed grass and wood of trees and tree stumps provides any color contrast at all.

It takes a second or third look before I even notice anything but the flat grey of the ice. But here's something interesting. . .

It appears someone has been out there . . .

Could it be that the ice fishermen are already testing the thickness in anticipation of their favorite winter pastime? And are those hockey goals? And human footprints?


Most of the evidence I see around here these days is from my other neighbors.


I tried this morning to make friends with a squirrel sitting and taking a drink by licking at the snow accumulated on the railing of my back deck. I was slow and steady in offering an outstretched hand of sunflower seeds, but the animal was not eager to trust me. Perhaps it's just as well; I have some ambivalence about humans forging paternalistic relationships with our other animal neighbors.

. . .

I woke briefly at 7:00, but returned to sleep and didn't get up again until 1:00 this afternoon! That's what Tylenol PM does for me, I guess -- a bit over nine hours of uninterrupted sleep and then a whole day of foggy semi-delirium. But better that than the tossing and turning of most nights, especially when I'm writing and navigating multiple deadlines.

Last night, after collecting a mass of article printouts, films, library books on children, parents, adoption, children and the state, children and anthropology, interdisciplinary perspectives on child abuse and neglect, etc, for the paper I'm working on for Dr. Sarri, and splurging on a manicure that helped a bit with the eczema I get on my hands in this weather, I met up with Zac, Alice, and the gang at Leopold's to celebrate Zac's birthday. Shayla stopped by to pick up my copy of Discipline and Punish, reinforcing my latest habit of never going to a bar without an academic text in my handbag. We had a grand old time, and I had a fabulous conversation with an old college friend of Alice's, Tim, who's in the B school and the school of public health. We talked about Brazil, and Roma, and community development practices in Detroit, and so many other things I lost track. . . lovely indeed to make a new friend.

We all shuffled over to Happy's Pizza at about 1:00 or so and shared some surprisingly good pizza in the rather surreal, very un-Ann Arbor-like environment there. Of course it was about 3 by the time I got home to the cottage, and I followed what's become my standard practice of putting on my slippers, turning up the heat, and remaining in my down coat to watch an episode of something on ABC's website to distract me until the house isn't quite so frigid.

Last night it was the second half of the Grey's Anatomy cliffhanger. I enjoyed it, but . . . I don't suppose I'm the only one who's finding this season to be rather dull in comparison to previous ones? Does this have to do with the writers' strike? I wish the f-ing networks would just settle with them, already. It's time to recognize the importance of the contribution they make to good entertainment. I'm a little embarrassed by how attached I've become to silly TV programs, but they really help me relax and unclutter my mind when so much of my day requires so much of my brain capacity.

. . .

Anyway, it was because I didn't bathe and crawl into bed until almost 4 am that I slept so bloody late, and I'm actually still finishing up my "morning coffee." It took me about an hour to get my computer to recognize my external hard drive, for some reason. Just one of those days, I guess.

It was just the right kind of day to bake, so I made a loaf of banana bread, just the way I like it, scant on the sugar, heavy on the bananas, with loads of walnuts, and just whole wheat flour with a hint of buckwheat flour added.

While I was waiting for it to finish baking, I settled down on the couch to watch some old ethnographic films by Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, in the Character Formation in Different Cultures series. I didn't know anything about the films, but I found them through Mirlyn when I was doing research for this paper, and they caught my eye. I thought they might have some piece of interest in this rather amorphous paper I'm working on for Dr. Sarri. And I knew they'd also have really great ethnographic footage, because I'd expect nothing less from Margaret Mead.

And finally, I have a lot of interest in a few related things that make me keen to give some more attention to the Boasians: (1) how anthropologists present (and have presented) their findings to the/a "public" beyond the academy, particularly through museum exhibitions and films, but also in other media (2) the use of film by ethnographers, both as a data collection tool as well as a medium of "writing up" or codifying findings into a final product, (3) how these products, in turn (from both items 1 and 2), have shaped, reinforced, transformed, or otherwise influenced discourses about culture, difference, and boundaries, that circulate in popular media, and (4) ethnography and activism.

They're odd little films, both of them, illustrative of the typical concerns of the Culture and Personality school in American anthropology (see also Alabama students' site) -- childrearing practices and their influence on the development of adult character and human behaviors within a given cultural context. They also demonstrate the same kinds of flaws I saw in other works from this school's work when I was reading Mead and Benedict in Traditions a couple years ago -- a nagging essentialism (a tendency to see culture as a reified and bounded set of traditions, practices and beliefs, rather than as a process and series of relationships), a tendency to exaggerate certain similarities and differences, and an apparent action agenda imbedded in the

One is called Bathing Babies in Three Cultures and it documents the bathing practices of a handful of mothers in New Guinea, the United States, and Bali. First, we see two Yetmo mothers going in succession to the Sepik river in New Guinea to bathe their children in the river, all "brisk and businesslike," working quickly with one child at a time, holding the child at all times, in an environment that frequently has crocodiles.

Second, we see two examples from the United States, first from the 1930s and then from the 1940s, demonstrating what Mead describes as the "careful, conscientious" approach of the American mothers, who keep their hands nearby, "ever watchful, while giving [the child] an illusion of independence". Mead notes the continuities between the '30s and '40s in American mothers' bathing practices: They both bathe the children in a porcelain tub, take time to play patty-cake and with rubber bath toys, and dry the children in large towels, and immediately diaper and dress the babies. But she also points to a departure from the 1930s concern for a regimented day according to the clock in the later bathing sequence, and the consequent increase in the mother's apparent calm. "The child is fed when he is hungry," not according to a schedule "mediated by the clock" that makes mothers anxious, she says.

Finally, we watch a couple bathing sequences in Bali. Here, the child stands in a small tub for the bath. The first mother is relaxed, and very playful. The mother splashes the child, the child splashes back. This apparently forms the basis for Mead's characterization of Balinese mothers' "playful, teething, but inattentive" manner of bathing their children, in contrast to the ways of American and New Guinean mothers. But I wonder why she makes the claim so strong when her second example, of an older mother who is bathing her youngest child, who demonstrates "not as much inclination to play" as the first mother does, and is from my observation, almost as "brisk and businesslike" as the New Guinean woman dipping her baby into the Sepik river.

The second film, A Balinese Family, follows about a year or so in the life of one particular Balinese family, the Karmas of Bajoeng Gedé. The family is quite large, with six children, and some of the children live not in the nuclear family home of the Karma parents, but the homes of their grandmothers. Mead (writing and narration) and Bateson (photography) guide us through a series of observations of parenting practices, and interactions between parent and child, and among the children. At the risk of sounding essentializing, myself, and noting that this is one family observed at a particular point in time in the 1940s, I'm noting down some of the more salient points for my purposes right now:

• At least in this larger family, there is childrearing of older children by extended kin in separate housholds
• Balinese children are fed by giving them a coconut bowl that they can carry as they walk about, feeding themselves at their own pace.
• Rather young children are assigned the duty of being a "child nurse" to his or her younger sibling. The child-nurse learns to wrap the baby in a carrying sling to hold him or her against the child-nurse's hip.
  
• This child-nurse is responsible for carrying the baby around in this fashion for a whole year
• When the baby grows to be too large to be supported by the child-nurse, an older sibling takes responsibility for bathing the child
  
• Support for children learning to walk is provided in the form of a "walking rail," a single dowel elevated by two stakes and placed in the center of the courtyard, where very young children can use it to balance themselves for standing and walking around it, without being confined (as in an American playpen). They periodically fall on the ground and stand up again without parental intervention.
• There's are distinctive affects, according to Mead, that characterize youngest and second children, and even in this family, where there is no youngest child after Kenjeon, she begins at a point in time to demonstrate the typical "unresponsiveness of a second child in the Balinese family".
  

(That last point is one I'm curious about, but anyway, that's what she says.)

Hmmm. Nothing more to say about that at the moment, but it was an intriguing thing to watch while slowly making my way through my coffee and eating my first couple slices of banana bread.

Okay, well, thanks for humoring me while I think through the films a bit. I think I'm demonstrating that I'm just about ready to go back to the rhythm of seminars again, since I'm seeking the opportunity to talk about my research in the bar and in my blog. Ack.


Some stuff for further reading:

Stocking, George, ed. (1986) Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict and others : essays on culture and personality.

Robert A LeVine (2001) Culture and Personality Studies, 1918-1960: Myth and History.
Journal of Personality 69 (6), 803–818.

Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in Bali: Their Use of Photography and Film
Ira Jacknis
Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 3, No. 2 (May, 1988), pp. 160-177

Husmann, Rolf (1992). A Bibliography of Ethnographic Films. Berlin
-Hamburg-Münster: LIT Verlag.

Ulewicz, Monica and Alexandra S. Beatty (2001). The Power of Video Technology in International Comparative Research in Education. National Academies Press.

Hockings, Paul (1995). Principles of Visual Anthropology. Walter de Gruyter.

Web links:

Ethnographic Film Series

University of South Carolina Educational Films Database

Carnegie Mellon Anthropology Video Filmography

Overview of Methods in Visual Anthropology

Thank goodness for the little successes

Today's successes:

1. I submitted my portfolio for Qualitative Methods. Finally. What a relief!

2. I contacted the IRB (Institutional Review Board, who oversees any scientific research with human subjects, which weirdly enough includes sociology, anthropology, and social work, but not history or journalism), which I'd been dreading, putting off, and otherwise freaking out about for three months, and submitted the remainder of what I needed to so that I could return to data analysis for my research internship with their approval. PHEW! So, I'll be able work on that paper I mentioned last night, even if it means going back to interviews from the summer of 2006, without fearing reprisal from them.

3. I rescheduled with the prof I was stressing about, and will meet her on Monday, when I will have had enough time to think lucidly and write something substantial for her. In fact, I've been in touch with all the people in supervisory roles with me in the past few days, and am in good standing with all of them. I'm on target to get everything finished for my MSW but my research internship by the end of this semester, I think, and will have all my incompletes from Social Work off my back finally.

4. I've arranged to have the next several days free, which means a big solid block of time to work on papers, whether at home or at the library. Which is, after all, pretty much the only way I can write properly. Running from teaching to office hours to exam writing to my internship to a meeting, and having 5 papers I'm working on at once, I don't have my head screwed on straight enough to sit down and write quality work. I'm down to three papers I'm working on now, one of which is a program evaluation for AFG, and one of which I've already got a clear, focused idea about (the one I mentioned last night). So now I just need to figure out what I'm writing for this "Parenthood, Childhood, and the State" course I am pursuing with Dr. Sarri. And I have the weekend to think about it. Phew.

Grad school highs and lows

The good news: I have finally, after more than a year and a half of delay, finished my two final papers for Qualitative Methods. I have my portfolio all ready to submit, and will do so tomorrow. It's not perfect, but it's done. And that is something. And actually, I do really like one of the papers, and my colleague I wrote about seemed to, also. That's also something.

The other good news: I have a paper idea for my Democracy course (also for finishing out a long-incomplete class) that my other professor likes, that she thinks will work well with the course materials, and that I know will also help me tremendously in kick-starting my work on my research internship, which I have to finish next semester. I'm going to examine ideas of participation embedded in housing programs for Roma in Central Europe, considering cultural assumptions about Roma implied in the policies and implementation, and reflecting on connections to rhetoric of the deserving and undeserving poor in American social welfare history. There's really a there there, and I'm excited about it, I have the field data to support this line of analysis, and I'm looking forward to thinking about it.

The bad news: I'm supposed to have submitted work to the professor with whom I'm doing an independent study, today, in preparation for our meeting tomorrow. I have nothing done. I've been teaching, writing and helping prepare the final exam for the Anthro 101 students, writing for other courses (see above!), and commuting to and working in Detroit to finish out my field placement at AFG. Really, that's about all I've been doing except writing in my blog and taking photographs. I've had the occasional Gilmore Girls break to keep myself vaguely sane, but then gone back to writing. And obviously I've taken care of the minimal daily requirements of sleeping, eating, maintaining the minimal level of hygiene, and filling up my grocery cart and my gas tank. Seriously, that's really it. But, it doesn't change the cold stark fact that the work isn't done. Fuck. What do I do?

What I want to do is delay our meeting yet another few days and bust my ass reading and writing this weekend. But I fear I've lost my credibility now. Argh!!! Why is this so hard? And I'm so damned tired -- I only got back from our exam meeting in Ann Arbor at 11:00 last night. SIGH.

Update: I wrote to her asking for another damned extension and telling her about my revised schedule plan. I'm going to work work work tomorrow afternoon and Friday and the weekend and Monday, so that by the time Wednesday rolls around, I can hopefully have solid work done on my doctoral papers and can focus on my field placement. And then somewhere in there I'll fit in my grading for 101.

There's really no doubt about it: This is totally an insane life. After not writing a word all semester for a professor's eyes other than emails, I'm now on my 47th page in a week. Thank God for snack food, no neighbors complaining about my late-night music or observing my computer light on at 2 am or my belly-dancing around the cottage to keep myself sane. Thank God for Regina Spektor and the ability to wear my pajamas without showering all day long while I sit here artificially constructing a qualitative paper as the first step in a hypothetical mixed methods study for university administrators interested in the needs of graduate students in terms of their work spaces for scholarly labor. Thank God for my amazing talent for bullshitting. Thank God I'm almost finished with the phase of my graduate life where I'm working simultaneously on four degrees, and where I'm effectively doing three jobs. Because, um, can I just say again how totally unsustainable this is!?

It's so silly! I absolutely LOVE to write! So why does it take me such an amazingly bloody fucking long time to get down to the business of actually doing it?

It was absolute torture getting started on my first Qualitative Methods paper. Absolute torture!! I was hiding under the desk, getting ready to scream, going around the house dusting while calling all my friends. But then, finally, finally, I picked up Ben Highmore's Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, a book I've had sitting on my shelf for-fucking-ever, and I read a bit, and it started the rusty wheels of thought. There was an interesting confluence in Highmore's using Sherlock Holmes as an example, since I'd just heard the editor of the recently published volume of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's correspondence talking on Diane Rehm a few days ago. And then Highmore led me to Weber, with some interesting thoughts about Marx and Kafka along the way, and Weber got me all excited about the stahlhartes Gehäuse and the subtleties of the new translation. And then she's off!

(from my Qual Methods paper)

In a particularly famous moment of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber asserts that capitalism has fundamentally transformed the nature and degree of human autonomy. Eschewing previous translations referring to our 'iron cages', Peter Baehr and Gordon Wells render his words thus:

Today's capitalist economic order is a monstrous cosmos, into which the individual is born and which in practice is for him, at least as an individual, simply a given, an immutable shell, in which he is obliged to live. It forces on the individual, to the extent that he is caught up in the relationships of the 'market,' the norms of its economic activity. The manufacturer who consistently defies these norms will just as surely be forced out of business as the worker who cannot or will not conform will be thrown out of work" (Weber 2002 [1905]: 13).

Weber continues, . . .

"Puritans wanted to be men of the calling—we, on the other hand, must be. For when asceticism moved out of the monastic cells into working life, and began to dominate innerworldly morality, it helped to build that mighty cosmos of the modern economic order (which is bound to the technical and economic conditions of mechanical and machine production). Today this mighty cosmos determines, with overwhelming coercion, the style of life not only of those directly involved in business but of every individual who is born into this mechanism, and may well continue to do so until the day that the last ton of fossil fuel has been consumed.

"In Baxter's view, concern for outward possessions should sit lightly on the shoulders of his saints 'like a thin cloak which can be thrown off at any time' [312]. But fate decreed that the cloak should become a shell as hard as steel [stahlhartes Gehäuse]. As asceticism began to change the world and endeavored to exercise its influence over it, the outward goods of this world gained increasing and finally inescapable power over men, as never before in history. Today its spirit has fled from this shell—whether for all time, who knows?" (Weber 2002 [1905]:120-121) In a dystopic vision of a possible future, Weber suggests that, in the absence of "new prophets" or "powerful old ideas and ideals. . . reborn at the end of this monstrous development," we might become "specialists without spirit, hedonists without heart, . . . nonentities [who] imagine they have attained a stage of humankind [Menschentum] never before reached" (121).

I lapse into this lengthy quotation from the new translation of Weber because I find his metaphor to be highly relevant and useful for understanding many of the issues Ms. Grad Student Colleague raises about her experience as a graduate student being socialized into one or more professions. Weber suggests that the social structure of capitalism has created the expectation that we must embody our calling to the extent that it transforms our way of being. As the translators note on the change in language in this edition, "a shell has an organic quality and symbolizes something that has not just been externally imposed but that has become integral to human existence. Whereas a cage confines human agents but leaves their powers otherwise intact, a shell suggests that modern capitalism has created a new kind of being" (lxxi).

. . . And then, on to Crotty, and Giordano & Boscoboinik (who not only edited a volume on anthropological understandings of risk, but also coauthored a paper on Romani identity in Bulgaria, weirdly and coincidentally enough), and from there to Tom Wengraf to talk about BNIM. A few more linkages, a conclusion, and the integration of the material I have that I want to use from my interview and my colleagues' written memos, and maybe a word or two about Nagarjuna, and I'll be done. From start to finish is so easy. It's just getting to the starting line that could possibly kill me . . . .

Well, anyway, for now it's time for a bath and bed. What'll it be tonight, hmm? Lavender and orange again? Maybe some chamomile? Oh, I love aromatherapy. Liles, I can never thank you enough for introducing me to the practice.