In its latest efforts to respond to today’s evolving publishing climate the American Anthropological Association (AAA) celebrates the decision by one of its most influential sections to undertake efforts to expand the way its signature journal is made available to scholars, researchers and the general public. In 2012 the AAA Executive Board invited its sections [...]
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AAA blog: AAA’s Society for Cultural Anthropology Paves New Way For Anthropological Publishing Program
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Language Log: Sign everywhere
The following sign was posted on Weibo (China's Twitter clone):
As it appears on the sign, the translator must have parsed the three characters 签到处 as qiān dàochù, though the correct grammatical order and wording for "sign everywhere" would be dàochù qiānmíng 到处签名.
Instead, 签到处 should have been parsed as qiāndào chù, lit., "signing-in place", i.e., "sign-in desk" or "registration desk / department", as one might encounter at a conference or workshop.
The erroneous rendering on the sign is taken directly from Google Translate.
This is a good example of how Pinyin (Romanization) with proper word division is clearer than writing only in characters without any spacing. If this kind of misunderstanding is possible with only three characters (and it happens a lot in daily life), one can well imagine the types and quantity of reading errors that result from character texts that have no spaces at all (as in Classical Chinese) or only when marked by punctuation as in Modern Chinese.
[A tip of the hat to Gianni Wan]
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Ethnography.com: Gene Promoters 4: Attack of The Armchair Scientist
The reason I post about cultural anthropology now and then isn’t that I want to argue or discuss with cultural anthropologists. Rather, I want to aid in spreading the message the discipline should be extirpated from the academy, just as Creationists have been extirpated from biology – Razib Khan
There is a long history of work claiming the mantle of science, which seeks to push forward essentialist theories of racial disposition and intelligence. Historically, racialist theories were formed upon a population typology which could be ranked along some set of criteria. Currently you can find modern armchair scientists hard at work behind their keyboards using programs like ADMIXTURE to form up new population typologies, which can be ranked along some set of criteria. See this nice article in the Annals of Human Genetics for an overview of the latter in terms of the former.
It isn’t hard to conflate population with race if you try, so I will let Khan explain how it is done:
The problem here is the word “race.” It has a whole lot of baggage. So many biologists prudently shift to “population” or “ethnic group.” I don’t much care either way. Let’s just put the semantic sugar to the side.
What Khan dismisses as so much “semantic sugar” is a notoriously arbitrary category, which varies widely across historical periods and cultural settings. For example, during the US census in 1790, a person could assume one of the following classifications:
1) free White men 16 and over
2) free White males under 16
3) free White females
4) all other free persons
5) slaves
By 1890, these classifications had changed to:
1) black
2) mulatto
3) quadroon
4) octoroon
5) Chinese
6) Japanese
7) Indians
But, why should Khan care either way?
Khan hangs his hat on the tight fit between computational tools, big data sets and a tiny bit of mangled theory he borrows from population genetics. The last few years have seen an explosion of both freely available genetic data and computational tools for statistically examining that data. Essentially, this is big data for genomic information. And it is a powerful and useful tool in the right hands. The skill, as in all research, lies in knowing where that point is and in having the discipline not to pass it.
But, as Nassim Taleb cogently points out:
big data means anyone can find fake statistical relationships, since the spurious rises to the surface. This is because in large data sets, large deviations are vastly more attributable to variance (or noise) than to information (or signal). It’s a property of sampling: In real life there is no cherry-picking, but on the researcher’s computer, there is.
. . .
Another issue with big data is the distinction between real life and libraries. Because of excess data as compared to real signals, someone looking at history from the vantage point of a library will necessarily find many more spurious relationships than one who sees matters in the making; he will be duped by more epiphenomena.
My point here is that there is a difference of kind between the type of knowledge produced by “discovering” associations (note: not necessarily correlations) in big data sets and the type of knowledge produced in the field or laboratory. The shorthand for this difference has always been that correlation is not causation, but one should never forget the ramifications of mistaking the two can be stark.
This is related to Taleb’s other point, the difference between “matters in the making” and the library. Latour, in rephrasing Kaplan’s sentiment of 30 years prior, famously termed this disconnect the “Janus Face” of science. Going forward, either in the field or at the lab bench, science is an exercise in patience and frustration. You very quickly learn that nature is anything but uniform and smooth. As I mentioned in the first post, nature can be made uniform in a test tube and miracles can be performed, but only for short periods of time and at great effort.
However, for desk jockeys like Khan, who sit safely ensconced behind their keyboards where they face neither uncertainty nor doubt, the data they encounter has already been made uniform. Like all big data, processing genomic data for analysis requires taking a few analytic steps to cleanse the data prior to use. This paper gives a nice overview of the process and perils of cleaning data. But, just how often is the cleansing of data reported upon?
Back to Taleb:
And speaking of genetics, why haven’t we found much of significance in the dozen or so years since we’ve decoded the human genome?
Well, if I generate (by simulation) a set of 200 variables — completely random and totally unrelated to each other — with about 1,000 data points for each, then it would be near impossible not to find in it a certain number of “significant” correlations of sorts. But these correlations would be entirely spurious. And while there are techniques to control the cherry-picking (such as the Bonferroni adjustment), they don’t catch the culprits — much as regulation didn’t stop insiders from gaming the system. You can’t really police researchers, particularly when they are free agents toying with the large data available on the web.
As I mentioned earlier, there is a long history of armchair scientists like Razib Khan, Charles Murray, and Arthur Jensen attempting to extract answers from questions that population genetics cannot and will never be able to give meaningful answers to. It should come as no surprise that the answers they “discover”, as Taleb implies, never fail to reinforce their whiggish starting assumptions.
The question I am left with after this back and forth with Khan is: Why do the publishers of Discover (a magazine of science?) pay this guy to represent science to the the public?
A question for the publisher of Discover magazine. Do you consider this science?
Because of the occupational constraints of Ashkenazi Jews, and their narrow ecological niche as an non-agricultural minority, the development of a religious specialist class whose stock and trade was extensive commentary and interpretation of law is not entirely surprising. But it is also totally parasitic upon the genuine productivity of a society. The reality is that for a society to flourish you do not need thousands of ethical rules to follow. Like many investment bankers and “patent troll” attorneys the great rabbis of yore many have had fast processing units, but they did not utilize them toward productive ends.
Please note that the emphasis is Khan’s own.
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Erkan in the Army now...: Bilgi’de Kurumsal İletişim Sohbetleri devam ediyor. Bu Perşembe Sabancı Holding’ten Suat Özyaprak
BİLGİ PRCC Kurumsal İletişim Sohbetleri No:3′te konuğumuz Sabancı Holding Kurumsal İletişim Direktörü ve Kurumsal İletişimciler Derneği Yönetim Kurulu Başkanı Suat Özyaprak olacak….
Facebook etkinlik sayfası.
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Yarın Kurumsal İletişim sohbetleri başlıyor. #prccsohbetleri Buyrun:
Bilgi Halkla İlişkiler ve Kurumsal İletişim Yüksek Lisansı başvurularında son günler…
Bilgi Üniversitesi’nde Kurumsal İletişim Yüksek Lisansı… ALES şartı yok, eğitim dili Türkçe…
Dr. Özgür Uçkan’la Sanat Felsefesi Konuşmaları devam ediyor: The Empire Project
31 Ocak’ta Kemal İlter (@Ilterkemal), Cumhurbaşkanlığı Kurumsal İletişim Direktörü, Bilgi’de…
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Open Anthropology Cooperative Blog Posts: Joi Ito's Nine Principles
Just stumbled across these thoughts from Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab, on Boing-Boing.
There are nine or so principles to work in a world like this:
1. Resilience instead of strength, which means you want to yield and allow failure and you bounce back instead of trying to resist failure.
2. You pull instead of push. That means you pull the resources from the network as you need them, as opposed to centrally stocking them and controlling them.
3. You want to take risk instead of focusing on safety.
4. You want to focus on the system instead of objects.
5. You want to have good compasses not maps.
6. You want to work on practice instead of theory. Because sometimes you don’t why it works, but what is important is that it is working, not that you have some theory around it.
7. It disobedience instead of compliance. You don’t get a Nobel Prize for doing what you are told. Too much of school is about obedience, we should really be celebrating disobedience.
8. It’s the crowd instead of experts.
9. It’s a focus on learning instead of education.
We’re still working on it, but that is where our thinking is headed.
I like the way Ito thinks. Do you? Why or why not?
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Discard Studies: Everyday xenogarbology: Space Dust
One of the central tensions in discard studies is the othering and externalizing of waste that originates in often intimate and everyday spaces and processes. This tension is maintained via material infrastructure (see, for example, Jennifer Clapp’s “The Distancing of Waste” or Coverly’s “Hidden Mountain“) and social), taboo (see Douglas’ Purity and Danger, or Inglis’ Dirt and Denigration), … Continue reading »
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tabsir.net: Islam: The Arab Religion
By Anouar Majid, Tingis Redux, February 22nd
A few months ago, I immersed myself in a kind of reading that I wish was available to me and my teachers when I was in high school in Tangier (Morocco) studying philosophy and Islamic Studies. It is the kind of slow—very slow—reading that keeps you constantly challenged and fully awake. It is archeological and historical work informed by a knowledge so vast that a reader must struggle to keep track of all sorts of cultures, languages, dates, and names. Only scholarship of this scope, though, can aim at the heart of gigantic myths—myths so powerful and persistent that centuries of generations have taken them for reality and billions continue to believe in their truth.
I decided to devote some time to the work of Professor Patricia Crone because her name kept appearing with increasing frequency in the literature I had been reading in the last few years, whether by scholars who share her general view or not. I thought it was time to have a first-hand experience of what Crone’s thesis is about. So, in no particular order, and rather quickly, I read God’s Rule: Government and Islam (2004), co-written with Martin Hinds; Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (first published in 1987); Slaves on Horses (1980) and Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World, the book she co-authored with Michael Cook in 1977 and which caused a storm in the rarified circles of scholars. Even though she may have changed her mind since she published the book in 1977, Hagarism and Meccan Trade totally upset the foundations of what we have grown to believe is Muslim history. They show, as do other writers in different ways, like Arthur Jeffery, John Wansborough, and, more recently, Fred Donner, Tom Holland and Robert Spencer, that what Muslims and non-Muslims learn in school about Islam is not facts that happened but literary compositions whose aim was to create a new religion with its own legitimizing mythology.
A Religion is Born
Muslims believe that their Prophet Mohammed, who was born in 570 AD and died in 632 AD, is the best human ever born in the world, chosen by God to spread his final and everlasting message, preserved in a heavenly tablet, the Koran. Starting out from humble origins in Mecca—a bustling crossroads in the caravan trade—and reputed for his honesty and wisdom, Mohammed married his older boss Khadija, received God’s message through the archangel Gabriel at a local cave when he was 40, fled his native city and migrated to Yathrib (thereafter known as Medina) when his persecution grew more intense, and later returned to Mecca as a triumphant Muslim conqueror. By the time he died, he had married several times and most of Arabia had converted to Islam. Soon his followers, known as Muslims, fanned out in a series of conquests (downplayed as futuhat in Islamic apologetics) that, within a century, had reached France and turned the Fertile Crescent, North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula into Muslim nations. (more…)
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Erkan in the Army now...: #PUB204 öğrencileri açıklıyor #TwitterKullanıyorumÇünkü
via [www.famousbloggers.net] // _
// ]]>
[View the story "#PUB204 öğrencileri açıklıyor #TwitterKullanıyorumÇünkü " on Storify]
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#pub204 sınavının ardından…
Pinleyen, anayasa yazan, tanıtım filmi çeken @bilgi_pr #pub204 öğrencileri şimdi kolektif hikaye yazıyor:
Erkan Saka ve Hıdır Geviş ile Yurttaş Gazeteciliği #medyaokulu #pub204 @benimadimhizir #yurttasgazeteci
Dijital Kültürler dersi #PUB204 etiketinden seçmeler…
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Erkan in the Army now...: Turkey’s President Abdullah Gül in historic Sweden visit… A FP roundup…
Turkey’s President Abdullah Gul (C) shakes hands with Sweden’s Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt (R) at the Royal Palace in Stockholm March 11, 2013, in this picture provided by Scanpix. REUTERS/Jonas Ekstromer/
Turkish President Gül starts historic Sweden visit
from Hurriyet Daily News
President Abdullah Gül was welcomed by Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia.
Reinfeldt presses Turkey to reform terror laws
from Yahoo News Photos
Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt on Tuesday urged Turkey to overhaul terrorism laws used to jail journalists, adding that he hoped the country’s EU membership talks would get a fresh start this spring
Terrorists ‘exploit’ EU rights standarts: Turkish President Gül
from Hurriyet Daily News
Standards of democracy, human rights, and freedom of expression are very.
Turks, Greeks to make joint researches
from Hurriyet Daily News
The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) plans to provide financial support.
Can Cyprus solve the Turkey-EU deadlock?
from Hurriyet Daily News
It would be nice to answer this question with a clear “yes.”
Turkey spent ‘$1.5 billion’ on Syrian refugees
from Hurriyet Daily News
The financial cost of Syrian refugees on Turkey has reached 1.5 billion dollars, a Turkish official says as Turkey signs protocols on the issue
Turkey emerges as true Iraq war victor
from FT.com – World, Europe
Demand for Turkish goods soars by an annual $2bn as exports to Baghdad increase 25 per cent a year, making it Ankara’s second-most valuable market
Davutoglu optimistic about future of bilateral relations with Greece
by Acturca
Ekathimerini.com (Greece) Tuesday March 12, 2013 By Tom Ellis Although accepting international law as the ‘backbone’ of any bid to tackle outstanding issues between Greece and Turkey, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu stops short of endorsing the International Law of the Sea as a basis for a solution, opting instead for bilateral talks. Turkey is
Head of EU delegation in Ankara praises Turkey
by Turkish Digest
Head of EU delegation in Ankara praises Turkey
Head of EU Delegation in Ankara Jean-Maurice Ripert, who chaired the EU-Turkey Conference of Journalists event in Istanbul yesterday, said that a critical process disappointing the two sides about Turkey’s full EU membership has been experienced for the last two and a half years, but this stage would be tackled thanks to concrete steps recently taken by the two sides.
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tabsir.net: Passport Blues
Yemenis seeking American citizenship pay exorbitant dowries in lucrative marriages of convenience
by Nadia Haddash, Yemen Times, March 7, 2013
Getting a visa from the American embassy in Sana’a is not easy for Yemenis hoping to travel to the U.S., and is especially hard for young, single men. So, many seek an alternative route: marrying a Yemeni-American woman.
By doing so, they typically become American, too, but could be in debt for years—they often have to pay huge dowries for their dual citizen brides.
Walid Al-Asimi, 28, met his wife, a Yemeni-American, in an English institute in Sana’a.
“When I knew that she would travel to America I decided to marry her,” he says. “I was surprised when her father asked me to give $30,000 as a dowry.”
The majority of Yemeni youths who marry women with dual citizenship pay very high dowries, ranging between$10,000-50,000, or around YR 2 million- 11 million. By comparison, a typical dowry paid to a bride’s family in Sana’a is around $4,000 or YR 800,000. The dowry paid to brides’ families in rural areas of the country is much less still. (more…)
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Erkan in the Army now...: PKK releases captives… PM Erdoğan staying at home due to flu
I will rest at home for a few days, Turkish PM says after leaving hospital
from Hurriyet Daily News
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said he would rest at home
Delegation reaches Iraq to receive hostages from PKK
from Hurriyet Daily News
A group, including two Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) lawmakers and non-governmental.
Public officers released by PKK enter Turkey
from Hurriyet Daily News
Public officers released by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) today have crossed the Turkish border
Turkish PM Erdoğan cancels program due to health issue
from Hurriyet Daily News
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan cancelled his program today, including..
Two party assembly members resign, press officer fired for leak, BDP says
from Hurriyet Daily News
Two members of the Peace and Democracy Party’s.
Turks, Kurds, women, and Prime Minister Erdoğan
from Hurriyet Daily News
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is dedicated to the growth of Turkey
Turkish hostages released by PKK in northern Iraq
from Hurriyet Daily News
A group including Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) lawmakers and non-governmental organization
Is Turkey Ready for a Kurdish Peace?
by Acturca
The National Interest (USA) March 12, 2013 Gonul Tol * Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has waged a 28-year war against the Turkish state, is an unlikely candidate for peacemaker. Yet recently he has become Ankara’s key ally in its efforts to end the three-decade-old armed struggle. On
Are Kurds a part of the ‘Turkish nation?’
from Hurriyet Daily News
Since the beginning of this year Turkey has been chasing a new hope: A peaceful settlement..
Door to door politics
from Hurriyet Daily News
The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) received instruction from its big boss.
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Language Log: Providence talks
Emily Badger, "Providence Wins Mayors Challenge Prize for Early Childhood Project", The Atlantic Cities, 3/13/2013:
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg likes to say that cities are the new laboratories of democracy in the United States (sorry states!), particularly in an era of political paralysis in Washington. This was the premise behind the $9 million Mayor's Challenge launched last summer by Bloomberg Philanthropies, inviting any city with a population larger than 30,000 to submit a groundbreaking idea for funding. This morning, Bloomberg announced the five winners – including a $5 million grand prize to Providence, Rhode Island – for potentially replicable innovations "bubbling up" from cities in early childhood education, recycling, data analytics, civic entrepreneurship and resident wellbeing. […]
Grand Prize ($5 million): Providence, Rhode Island: Research suggests that in just the first few years of life, low-income children hear millions fewer words than their middle- and upper-income counterparts, impacting the development of their vocabularies and setting back their long-term prospects for academic and career success. This program aims to close that "word gap."
The AP story explains further (David Klepper, "Providence, RI, wins $5M Bloomberg contest with plan to boost poor children's language skills"):
Providence's winning proposal will equip low-income children with recording devices that count the words and conversations they are exposed to. Combined with coaching lessons for parents,, the plan is designed to help poor children overcome a language skills deficit that develops before they even start kindergarten. […]
Called "Providence Talks," Taveras' plan will make use of a pager-sized recorder put in a child's pocket that acts as a language pedometer, recording every conversation and word spoken to them through the course of their day. The city intends to offer the voluntary program to children in low-income families, as determined by newborn screening assessments. Their parents will receive monthly coaching sessions from social workers in which they learn ways to boost a child's vocabulary, and social work agencies will be given bonuses if a child's language skills improve.
The recording devices work in English, Spanish and other languages and automatically screen out conversations from television and radio. The recordings will be kept confidential and once the devices' data are analyzed, any conversations on the recordings will be deleted. To prevent a 3year-old from losing or damaging the recorders, the devices come with specially designed clothing to hold them in place.
Providence Talks would begin with a small number of children participating and gradually expand the program to 2,850 families by 2018.
I haven't been able to find out who makes the devices, or what technologies they use for word counting, speaker identification, "automatically screening out conversations from television and radio", and so on. The story in the NYT (Jennifer Steinhauer, "Providence Is Top City in Contest of Ideas") is less informative and more confusing:
Providence took the grand prize for its plans to improve early childhood literacy. The children who participate in the program would wear a small device called a digital language processor that would record their daily interactions with adults. Those would then be converted into audio files containing the day’s adult word count and the number of conversational turns. That data would be used to help parents in monthly coaching sessions improve the quality of their conversations to improve their children’s vocabulary.
Here's a presentation of the project by Angel Taveras, the mayor of Providence:
The "30 million word gap" is an idea that comes from the work of Betty Hart and Todd Risley (Betty Hart and Todd Risley, "Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children", 1995; Betty Hart, "A Natural History of Early Language Experience", Topics in Early Childhood Special Education, 20(1), 2000; Betty Hart and Todd Risley, "The Early Catastrophe: the 30 Million Word Gap", American Educator, 27(1) pp. 4-9, 2003).
When I discussed this work a few years ago ("Word counts", 11/28/2006), I worried that big inferences were being drawn from a rather small sample. From Hart and Risley 2003:
By age 3, children from privileged families have heard 30 million more words than children from underprivileged families. Longitudinal data on 42 families examined what accounted for enormous differences in rates of vocabulary growth. Children turned out to be like their parents in stature, activity level, vocabulary resources, and language and interaction styles. Follow-up data indicated that the 3-year-old measures of accomplishment predicted third grade school achievement. […]
Our final sample consisted of 42 families who remained in the study from beginning to end. From each of these families, we have almost 2 1/2 years or more of sequential monthly hour-long observations. On the basis of occupation, 13 of the families were upper socioeconomic status (SES), 10 were middle SES, 13 were lower SES, and six were on welfare.
The "30 million word gap" compares the 13 upper SES families with the 6 welfare families, and the authors themselves caution against "extrapolating their findings to people and circumstances they did not include":
All parent-child research is based on the assumption that the data (laboratory or field) reflect what people typically do. In most studies, there are as many reasons that the averages would be higher than reported as there are that they would be lower. But all researchers caution against extrapolating their findings to people and circumstances they did not include. Our data provide us, however, a first approximation to the absolute magnitude of children’s early experience, a basis sufficient for estimating the actual size of the intervention task needed to provide equal experience and, thus, equal opportunities to children living in poverty. We depend on future studies to refine this estimate. […]
There's some more discussion of these issues in "Nick Clegg and the Word Gap", 10/16/2010, along with references to some much larger studies which confirm striking differences in vocabulary development, but do not tie these to measures of verbal experience.
The Providence project will draw everyone's attention to the importance of verbal interactions in early childhood, and should give participating parents useful feedback on their own young children's experiences. But I believe that the potential scientific results could be even more important, if the data can also be used to validate the Hart/Risely results on a large enough dataset that some of the many confounds in the original small study can be untangled.
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Ethnography Matters: Isolated vs overlapping narratives: the story of an AFD
Editor’s Note: This month’s Stories to Action edition starts off with Heather Ford’s @hfordsa’s story on her experience of watching a story unfold on Wikipedia and in person. While working as an ethnographer at Ushahidi, Heather was in Nairobi, Kenya when she heard news of Kenya’s army invading Somolia. She found out that the article about [...]
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Aidnography - Development as anthropological object: 4 reasons why MOOCs should be discussed in international development
I have been following the debate around Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) for a while now. In my own imaginary Wordle cloud, the word ‘disruptive’ probably features most prominently, but this post deals with the potential impact on Western educational institutions and higher education only on a side-note. But issues around MOOCs and development (policy) have not been really addressed, yet there is no doubt that Online learning and various new providers are responding to a major global development, the massification or universalisation of higher education that is creating huge and unmet demand in the developing world. [Source]In this post, I am more concerned what the rise of MOOCs and the growing interest in/from developing countries may mean for localhigher education institutions that are already often underfunded and are struggling to meet the demands for adequate education in the 21st century. I fully agree with Tony Bates’ critical reflections and what he describes as one of the 'myths’ around MOOCs (‘Myth 1: MOOCs increase access to higher education in developing countries’):Indeed, to suggest that Coursera is an alternative to conventional university education takes the pressure off governments such as South Africa’s to find their own, indigenous solutions to access to higher education. I will come back to this point in my final point, but first I want to outline three other areas that I think deserve more attention from the ICT4D and broader development community. 1. Invest in local partnerships!Even if your university or platform has the brand recognition and delivers content virtually, globally and 24/7 it may be a good idea to reach out to local institutions to tailor courses to local needs, build capacity of staff and forge links that can potentially lead to ‘offline’, non-MOOC activities. From my own experience I know that these can often be time-consuming processes as they mean that you have to engage with the political economy of local elites, institutions and power relations. As tempting as it is to simply circumvent them in the short-term, I do believe that only by engaging with them will you be able to foster more sustainable political and social elites and better research and teaching.2. Don’t reduce education and academia to teaching!MOOCs focus on teaching-but this is traditionally only one aspect of higher education. What is still difficult to access in many developing countries is the physical infrastructure around academia-from computer labs to libraries or simply a safe public space for debate and discussion. Yes, some of these aspects can be ‘virtualized’-and in some contexts may even be safer to explore online-but in the medium term I am worried about even less visibility of public intellectuals and the institution ‘university’. The campus university as a fertile ground for dissent, discussions and exploration of critical alternatives will not become obsolete in the future!3. The risk of ‘digital brain-drain’?I do not want to focus too narrowly on the traditional model of a full research university as colleges, community colleges, polytechnics or whatever institution that provides skills to young people all have a role to play in encouraging people to stay ‘local’ and gain skills and meaningful livelihoods domestically. Digital tools can certainly help, but I am a bit worried that the, say, MIT brand is a strong pull-factor to turn your back to the local providers and envision a better life abroad-which is understandable and often comes with benefits such as remittances send ‘home’ or engaging from the diaspora. But how can we make sure that MOOCs benefit the local economy and contribute to ‘digital brain-gain’?4. Investing in higher education is still a development issue!I remember one of my first workshops that I attended during one of my development-related internships. The Internet was a fairly new thing and one researcher basically laid out the vision of how in a few years time African higher education would be transformed through web-based teaching and learning. Well, sufficient to say that the story is a bit more complicated...but especially for friends and colleagues who teach and research in less ‘marketable’ subjects like anthropology, humanities or most social sciences, they continue to struggle with insufficient infrastructure or political and administrative unwillingness to support ‘critical’ research. I am sure there is a space for MOOCs to supplement local teaching efforts with cutting-edge insights from abroad, but in the end unless local philanthropists step up or international donors support programs outside a narrower focus on primary education that often promises better photo-ops and easier to measure ‘impact’. MOOCs may ‘disrupt’ long-term local endeavours in search for the next Internet-facilitated ‘revolution’ that still needs to be supplemented by local institutions, scholarship and academics.
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Ethnography.com: Max Weber, Cavalli-Sforza, Ethnicity, and Population Genetics
Ok, below is a complicate and attenuated definition of ethnicity by the classical sociologist Max Weber. Variations of this definition are found in many anthropology and sociological textbooks, though he is by far not the only source of wisdom. But be aware that as with most classical literature, it is often difficult to read. But for the purposes of this discussion with Population geneticists, I want to highlight Weber’s emphasis in beliefs about heredity and blood relationships in determining endogamy and exogamy. All ethnic groups encourage the youth to have babies with people who are “like us,” however defined. The result indeed is that in a rough way, genes are inherited within “ethnic groups,” or at least there are belief systems indicating that this happens. I wrote about this a bit earlier at Ethnography.com here. Note, this version is suitable for use with undergrads—it is easier to read than what follows.
Anyway, I like the broad brush analysis of blood alleles, and glotto-chronology that people like Cavalli-Sforza use to map deep history and very general relationships (OK I know that glotto-chronology is also known for its limitiations). This is the only effective way of studying such migrations, given the paucity of archaeological and historical data. Ok, so fine.
But we know a lot more from the studies of people like Weber (and his successors) about the overwhelming role that ideology, inequality, racism, etc. play in structuring mating habits. A sampling of Max Weber’s thoughts appears below in all its complexity. My question for the people following in Cavalli-Sforza’s tradition like Razib Khan is, how would you go about including such “variables” as Weber describes in mathematical models? My feeling is that given the inherently fluid nature of such definitions, and the compromises necessary to simplify research questions so that they fit into something that is “countable,” are a step too far. And as a result, you get the reactions of myself, and most social scientists that we should not depend too much on such quantitative data which inherently simplifies social complexity—ethnographic data is at least as important.
Anyway: Here is Weber’s description/definition of ethnicity. Links to the original articles are below. There version here is a translation I participated in, and appeared in the peer-reviewed Journal of Classical Sociology in 2010.
“When the most extreme consequences of stratification are pressed, the Stand evolves into a closed ‘caste’. That means, apart from the conventions and legal guarantees, rituals develop guaranteeing Stände-related distinctions. This is achieved by restricting any physical contact of members of higher castes with members of castes regarded as “lower,” and protects the higher caste …Therefore, the individual castes partly develop distinctive cults and gods.
As a result of these consequences, the Stände-related stratification only then lead to the development of castes where underlying differences can be found which are held to be “ethnic”. Particularly the “caste” is the normal form of Gemeinschaft communities which are the precursors of the Gesellschaft type-societies created who live along the lines of “ethnicity,” and therefore believe in blood relationship, and restrict both exogamous marriage and social intercourse. These aspects can be found among pariah peoples around the world….
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Ethnic and caste segregation also differ regarding their effects. Ethnic coexistence, which implies mutual rejection and disdain, also permits any ethnic community to value its personal honor as the highest. However, caste stratification is accompanied by a ‘vertical social gradation’, and acknowledges a socially accepted higher “honor” to the benefiting privileged castes and Stände. This is typically explained by arguing that ethnic differences were transformed into differences of “function” within a politicized Gesellschaft-like social order (warrior, priest, and craftsmen who are politically important for war, and building trades, and so on). Even the most despised pariah people somehow cultivate what is peculiar to them, in the same manner that ethnic and ‘Stände’-related communities do. They especially continue to cultivate the belief in their own unique “honor” (as do the Jews).
However, Stände which are both despised and negatively privileged show a specific deviation regarding the “sense of dignity” …But to understand this, it is necessary to focus on the position of the privileged. Their “sense of dignity” is the subjective precipitation in social honor and of conventional demands which a positively privileged “Stand” requires for the deportment of its members. As a result, it can be said that the positively privileged ‘Stände’ sense of dignity, naturally relies on its “who they are”, they do not rely on transcending values, but they refer to their own “beauty and excellence”. Their kingdom is “of this world”, and they live for the present and justify their privilege by referring to a glorious past.
Naturally the negatively privileged status group can only draw its sense of dignity by referring to a future which lies beyond the present, and is temporal or transcendent. In other words, this sense of dignity is nourished from the belief in a providential “mission”, or a specific honor before God as the “chosen people”. Therefore, the idea arises that “the last will be the first” beyond this life, or that in the present life a messiah will arrive who will shine a light upon the honor of the pariah people (Jews) or ‘Stand’, which has before been concealed from the world. These simple facts are the source of a pariah ‘Stände’s’ character of religiosity. …
This is to say that the ethnic origin of Stände formation is by no means a normal phenomenon. On the contrary, since objective “racial differences” are not based on every subjective “ethnic” mutual feeling, a racialized justification for ‘Stände’-related stratification is ultimately tested with concrete individual cases. Quite frequently, the ‘Stand’ itself creates ‘pure-breds’ [or stereotypes] which are an anthropological type. The Stand functions on a highly exclusive manner and is based on a selection of individuals who are personally qualified for membership (e.g. the Knighthood), based on their martial, physical, and psychological eligibility.
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So, from a practical point of view, the stratification by Stände goes hand in hand with a monopolization of ideal and material goods or opportunities, in a manner which we have come to know as typical. Besides the specific honor of Stand, which always bases itself upon distance and exclusiveness, there are all sorts of material monopolies”
Thank you for reading this far! It is work to read this far. (Now those of you who are mathematically inclined know how we feel when we deal with your elegant mathematical formulations!) Anyway, if you want to read more, please look at the entire translation of Weber’s work at the Journal of Classical Sociology (2010), as well as our commentary, which is also there. In my view, a meeting of minds between the population geneticists, and the sociologists/anthropologists would be useful for understanding such matters. I’m just not sure how it is going to happen.
An afterthought and a comment for Razib Khan:
Razib Khan over on one of Michael Scroggins posts linked two blogs of his from Discover Magazine. I read them, and appreciated that he was careful in his discussion of race, even though he did not cite the relevant anthropologists or sociologists (Note to Razib: Need Weber in there, or perhaps Cornell and Hartmann’s textbook Ethnicity and Race). I believe he even used the term “social construction” at one point, which hearkens back to the work of Weber and others.
[blogs.discovermagazine.com] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/02/the-social-and-biological-construction-of-race/
Razib continues
“the biology is more interesting than the sociology, which can be decomposed pretty easily.”
Ok I will let him have his own opinion on what is “more interesting,” but I look forward to his deconstruction of a classical text like Weber, or even a more contemporary approach like Cornell and Hartmann. Weber of course is difficult to read, but generations of sociology undergrads have somehow gotten through. Cornell and Harmann though is well-written and hardl
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ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY: A Pope for a New World: On the Significance of the Choice of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis I
“The manifestations of so many men and women of Venezuela, of the whole world, and the presence of the heads of states are worthy expressions of appreciation from those of us today who say goodbye and thank you wholeheartedly. To the vast multitude of men and women who prayed for the president and continue to [...]
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xirdalium: billy and michael
This is completely off topic, but just way too beautiful for not reblogging [and somewhat more entertaining than the papal election]. In January this year—2013—↑Billy Joel was at Vanderbilt University, New York for ‘An evening of questions and answers and a little bit of music.’ So, naturally, a piano was on stage with Mr Joel. Michael Pollack, one of the students in the vast audience, got the chance to pose a question, and his chance he took. He asked Billy Joel if he would sing ‘New York state of mind’ with Michael accompanying him on the piano … the result you can watch above.
via ↑entry at ↑boingboing
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Nineteen years and counting in Papua New Guinea: Open letter from Anton Lutz and the Kaiam community to Hon MP Byron Chan
Dear Sirs,
My name is Anton Lutz. I am a development worker with the Lutheran Church. We have been involved with the Andai people, also known as the Penale people, for close to twenty years now. My father, the late Dr Steve Lutz, began health work from Kupina in 1993. I have been workingfor the last seven (7) and a half years to build an airstrip with the local people at a site called Kaiam. We travel for two days upstream on the Karawari River from Munduku to bring in diesel, tools and food.
We are not only working on an airstrip, but also a health facility and school. This project has involved the entire population of this small and vulnerable people group and I know the 19 clans of the Andai people with great detail. The neighboring villages of Awarem, Andapet and Namata have come to work with the Kaiam people, their children come to school at Kaiam in the school we have built, and my health workers have been to Namata, Kupina, Awarem and even to Awim to visit patients. Awim is where Nancy Sullivan is based, 2 days hike from Kaiam. Suffice to say, I know the people and the land involved in ELA2008.
I am going to be traveling soon to go fix the machinery at the airstrip site, and have learned that RH and their partners have come to our neighborhood. I have asked the guys whether they went to this meeting and what they thought of it. They informed me that they had not even heard of it beforehand, and certainly had not attended. At the moment, in fact, they are concerned and angry that they have not been consulted or even made aware of what RH and the PNG Govt want to do to them. As far as they are concerned, they've been abandoned and ignored for generations. "And now some foreigners are going to be told its ok to do whatever-and-who-knows-what on their land without toksave? Husat toktok na ol laik kam long bus graun bilong mipela?!"
ELA 2008 appears to include most of the ancestral homeland of the Andai people, as well as other language groups, of course... and I simply do not see how the PNG Govt believes it can even contemplate beginning to think about granting Exploration or any other Licenses to RH or anyone else without even alerting the Asenam Clan (to name one of more than a dozen Clans) that RH wants the resources on or under their land. To date, there is not even a rumour in the area, much less accurate understanding of the disruption and upheaval - not to mention destruction - that can accompany "development" of this kind.
As responsible Ministers and leaders of this nation, I ask you, What are you going to do about this? Will you do right by the people? What will I ell the Asenam Clan next week when they ask me what's going on?
You have been approached by the applicants of ELA2008. But those applicants don't know the women and kids who live along the Arafundi River. They've never come to look around, never come to consult with people who've lived there for a long time, never taken the trouble to meet the clan leaders, to teach them, understand them, heal them, or to care about them. Your applicants see a chance and want to make more money. Is this the right time and the right way foryour Govt to let RH do this to the remote and vulnerable peoples of the Upper Karawari? You, with respect, don't know a thing about Yapis and Ana. If this nation is to be the nation it can be, i.e. a great nation, it must look first to its people and second to its profits.
I speak on behalf of only the Andai Clans who I will be going to live among in the next weeks. I know that Nancy Sullivan and her team have been working tirelessly to document the extraordinary caves of the Upper Karawari and I know that several of the Clans with whom I work have caves which they are still waiting for her to come and document. Her work is known and respected in the area, and because of the value of tradition which she highlights, the Andai people are slowly trying to take a serious and measured approach to cultural change and development. Sullivan and her team will no doubt be making submissions to your office expressing concern in light of the protection needed for these priceless sites and the people who safe-keep them.
The PNG Govt should be a partner with people like Sullivan whose priority is only to guide andprotect, to safe-keep, the lives and histories of PNG's forgotten and most remote peoples.
But there are other entities in this country which have other priorities, and I realize that a Government must make choices. Yet, the Government always has the choice to do the right and honourable thing.
I think you, Max and Byron, have a chance to make that mandate of honourable leadership a reality. Please do the right thing on ELA2008.
With respect and humble thanks for your time,
Anton Lutz
* Anton and his family have provided the ONLY medical care for the Penale people of the Upper Arafundi/Karawari, and they have worked tirelessly with the Kaiam people to create an airstrip for medical and educational services to finally arrive for these remote and vulnerable people. All of this work will be put at risk by mineral exploration and logging, should ELA 2008 be approved (Nancy)
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Museum Anthropology: Museum Ethnography Conference: Brave New Worlds
Museum Ethnography Conference: Brave New Worlds
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xirdalium: democracy’s fourth wave?
In 2011, the international community watched as a shockingly unlikely community of citizens toppled three of the world’s most entrenched dictators: Ben Ali in Tunisia, Mubarak in Egypt, and Qaddafi in Libya. This movement of cascading democratization, commonly known as the Arab Spring, was planned and executed not by political parties, but by students, young entrepreneurs, and the rising urban middle class. International experts and the popular press have pointed to the near-identical reliance on digital media in all three movements, arguing that these authoritarian regimes were in essence defeated by the Internet. Is that true? Should Mubarak blame Twitter for his sudden fall from power? Did digital media “cause” the Arab Spring?
In Democracy’s Fourth Wave?, Philip N. Howard and Muzammil M. Hussain examine the complex role of the Internet, mobile phones, and social networking applications in the Arab Spring. Examining digital media access, level of grievance, and levels of protest for popular democratization in 16 countries in the Middle East and North Africa, Howard and Hussain conclude that digital media was neither the most nor the least important cause of the Arab Spring. Instead, they illustrate a complex web of conjoined causal factors for social mobilization. The Arab revolts cascaded across countries largely because digital media allowed communities to realize shared grievances and nurtured transportable strategies for mobilizing against dictators. Individuals were inspired to protest for personal reasons, but through social media they acted collectively.
Democracy’s Fourth Wave examines not only the unexpected evolution of events during the Arab Spring, but the longer history of desperate-and creative-digital activism through the Arab world.
HOWARD, PHILIP N. AND MUZAMMIL M. HUSSAIN. 2013. Democracy’s fourth wave? Digital media and the Arab Spring. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
via ↑entry at ↑digitalislam
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