Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Le charmeur des serpentes, 1880 In 2007 I published Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid with the University of Washington Press. The build-up to its publishing is a story that spans almost six years. Originally I had planned to include a chapter on Said’s Orientalism in a book I was writing called Islam Obscured: The Rhetoric of Anthropological Representation, which was published in the SAR series of Palgrave in 2005. But as I began to work on the chapter, it quickly took on a life of its own. I had first read Orientalism when returning from ethnographic fieldwork in Yemen in 1979. It sat on my bookshelf and I dutifully included the author’s “introduction” (the most readable part of the book for undergraduate students) in my course on Middle East anthropology. But as I delved back into Said’s book and started collecting the original reviews (which turned out to be more than 50) and the plethora of writings about Orientalism, I discovered that this dense book was fraught with errors of fact and methodological missteps. While working on both books-to-be, I delivered a paper at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in 2001 entitled “Dissing Orientalist Discourse: What Said Said and What Ethnographers Did,” followed by talks on my evolving text at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, the University of London and New York University. The AAA talk prompted a young employee of Routledge to ask if I was thinking of writing a book on the subject. Naively, I said yes and after another year had a draft ready to drop off in their New York office. Time went by and by and there was no word from Routledge. Eventually, after several months, I received a letter from the Sociology editor noting that Routledge at the time no longer had an Anthropology editor and my manuscript was not of interest to him. I thus learned that there were sociologists who seemed not to know much about Edward Said. But they did send the reviewer’s comments and these were well taken. In fact my first draft was in need of major revision. So revise I did and then I accidentally stumbled across a website of a book agent inviting queries. (more…)

Although there’s been quite a bit of rumbling over the AAA’s “open access” policies over the last several years, one positive development IMHO has been to move the association’s newsletter, Anthropology News, to an online and OA format. And now readers of this blog can benefit.  The most recent issue features several articles on the [...]

Antipode has published Tom Perreault’s “Dispossession by Accumulation? Mining, Water and the Nature of Enclosure on the Bolivian Altiplano.” The article is noteworthy not only because it discusses some of the objects of discard studies–namely, pollution– but also because it figures industrial discards as a form of accumulation. The accumulation in question is capitalistic primitive accumulation … Continue reading »

Well, it’s not really ↑Henri Poincaré (1854-1912)—eminent mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science—talking about science and technology studies (STS) proper. Rather he talks about the fundamentals of epistemology, the position of the natural sciences, and their relation to reality. And here we are at the core of STS. Wherever you read about STS it is stated that STS are founded on the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of science stemming from the former. The great achievement, absolutely indispensable for STS, was to relativize scientific knowledge and to look at it from a social constructivist vantage point. To put scientific knowledge on a par with other kinds of knowledge, and thereby stripping it of the nimbus of being something special, of being apart, of being absolute.     Enter Bruno Latour, heavily influenced by, and fond of social constructivism. But at one point he feels that the relativizing trajectory of constructivism has gone too far. Especially when it comes to the things of the natural sciences. He feels the need for STS to backpedal a bit from the constructivist extremes. And here I wholeheartedly agree.     But at least one question remains for me: Who exactly was, or still is it, who without any reservation whatsoever believes in that all-encompassing absoluteness of scientific knowledge? The natural scientists? The wider public, impressed by the overwhelmimg success of science and technology? Well, for sure not the great grandmasters of science.     Below is an excerpt from the introduction to Poincaré’s ‘Science and hypothesis’ (1905 [1902]), a book written for the wider public. In this snippet from the opening pages we already find all the foundations of STS, up to Latour’s recalibration.     Here is the great Henri Poincaré’s healthy, justified epistemological relativism bolstered by sound arguments and expressed in clear-cut, direct, and understandable language: To the superficial observer scientific truth is unassailable, the logic of science is infallible ; and if scientific men sometimes make mistakes, it is because they have not understood the rules of the game. Mathematical truths are derived from a few self-evident propositions, by a chain of flawless reasonings ; they are imposed not only on us, but on Nature itself. By them the Creator is fettered, as it were, and His choice is limited to a relatively small number of solutions. A few experiments, therefore, will be sufficient to enable us to determine what choice He has made. From each experiment a number of consequences will follow by a series of mathematical deductions, and in this way each of them will reveal to us a corner of the universe. This, to the minds of most people, and to students who are getting their first ideas of physics, is the origin of certainty in science. This is what they take to be the role of experiment and mathematics. And thus, too, it was understood a hundred years ago by many men of science who dreamed of constructing the world with the aid of the smallest possible amount of material borrowed from experiment.     But upon more mature reflection the position held by hypothesis was seen ; it was recognised that it is as necessary to the experimenter as it is to the mathematician. And then the doubt arose if all these constructions are built on solid foundations. The conclusion was drawn that a breath would bring them to the ground. This sceptical attitude does not escape the charge of superficiality. To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions ; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.     Instead of a summary condemnation we should examine with the utmost care the role of hypothesis ; we shall then recognise not only that it is necessary, but that in most cases it is legitimate. We shall also see that there are several kinds of hypotheses; that some are verifiable, and when once confirmed by experiment become truths of great fertility; that others may be useful to us in fixing our ideas; and finally, that others are hypotheses only in appearance, and reduce to definitions or to conventions in disguise. The latter are to be met with especially in mathematics , and in the sciences to which it is applied. From them, indeed, the sciences derive their rigour ; such conventions are the result of the unrestricted activity of the mind, which in this domain recognises no obstacle. For here the mind may affirms because it lays down its own laws ; but let us clearly understand that while these laws are imposed on our science, which otherwise could not exist, they are not imposed on Nature. Are they then arbitrary? No; for if they were, they would not be fertile. Experience leaves us our freedom of choice, but it guides us by helping us to discern the most convenient path to follow. Our laws are therefore like those of an absolute monarch, who is wise and consults his council of state. Some people have been struck by this characteristic of free convention which may be recognised in certain fundamental principles of the sciences. Some have set no limits to their generalisations, and at the same time they have forgotten that there is a difference between liberty and the purely arbitrary. So that they are compelled to end in what is called nominalism; they have asked if the savant is not the dupe of his own definitions, and if the world he thinks he has discovered is not simply the creation of his own caprice.(1) Under these conditions science would retain its certainty, but would not attain its object, and would become powerless. Now, we daily see what science is doing for us. This could not be unless it taught us something about reality; the aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relations between things; outside those relations there is no reality knowable. (Poincaré 1905 [1902]: xxi-xxiv) (1) Cf. M. le Roy: “Science et Philosophie,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 1901. And as a bonus, here is a one-sentence definition: The method of the physical sciences is based upon the induction which leads us to expect the recurrence of a phenomenon when the circumstances which give rise to it are repeated. (Poincaré 1905 [1902]: xxvi) ↑POINCARÉ, JULES HENRI. 1905 [1902]. ↓Science and hypothesis. London, Newcastle-on-Tyne, New York: The Walter Scott Publishing Co., Ltd. Originally published as ↓La science et l’hypothèse. Paris: Ernest Flammarion. share this post

they're runnin but there's drones up aheaddrones in your beddrones in your homedrone give me headdrone give me domepreacher preacherleave them kids aloneMore on Sunny Ali and the Kid here.

Today I had the privilege of beginning work as Director of the Mathers Museum of World Cultures. I will surely write about the work of the museum extensively in the months ahead. Here I just want to thank the museum’s staff for welcoming me and thank the Indiana University administration for giving me this exceptional [...]

At the moment I am grappling a bit with Clifford Geertz in an attempt to get a firmer background in classical anthropological texts, although of course that can be both a blessing in a curse. On the one hand I am learning the language of Anthro and its ancestor cult (!) but I also risk adopting ideas that have been morei ntegrated, critiqued, surpassed etc...by now. I risk being out of touch. Oh well! While looking at Geertz have the impression that my emphasis on contextualization is closely related to his work but perhaps more postmodern in style. I begin from the point of recognizing his acceptance that there is a balance between biological and other reductionisms and a reliance on the intuitive. Somehow in the middle there must be a sort of common sense that can be agreed upon, although obviously not with unanimity. There must be a middle ground and there must be some room for fundamental assumptions, as it were, as far as I understand.   My own approach seems to be slightly more post-modern, as I was discussing with a colleague this morning. I am not entirely comfortable with drawing very direct lines between pieces of information so as to establish a motivation or a consistent meaning for ritual, but narratives about spatial practice and ritual are obviously not ignored. Concretely, what sorts of contextualizations are my concern? Mainly I am looking at a practice that I have come across in both in contemporary Turkey and much older sources. During my MA I read a piece of Moghul literature in which a woman (in this case Princess Jahanara, daughter of Shah Jahan) describes a retreat she undertakes, the climax of which is the placing f headscarf on the tomb of the saint to which she is devoted (Moinuddin Chishti). Perhaps not so surprisingly, in Istanbul, 2012, I found that women were also leaving headscarves in shrines here. The subaltern positioning of much of women's religiosity, for example. This is an act that is not textual and clerical and therefore asking people about it seems to not yield much material, I find. For now, what I know is this: Women have an historical connection, even dominance in the textile industry, weaving, which over time shifted towards male capital and governance although obviously there is not really a distinct patriarchal teleology at work. There is, though, a clear pattern, one that can be seen in the development of weaving guilds in Europe, for example. Fabric as a ritual issue is a distinct one in an Ottoman (and also to some degree Seljuk, Anatolian, Republican) context in which textiles often held ceremonial power, as almost all modern nation states also recognize in their use of flags, as well. The Ottoman examples are, however, more complex and more tied to everyday life, particularly as one travels up the socioeconomic hierarchy of the time. More and more I am seeing that when these factors of historical connection and meaning come together, it seems strange that a fabric would not come to represent the self in an offering of one's being or petition to a saint at his or her grave. After all, the mail saints in the Islamic world are often represented by a symbolic or actual fabric taj/tac ('turban') placed on a tombstone. How natural, then, that a self representing fabric could be presented to such a venerated figure. There is also the act of transference of self and status via the giving of cloth, whether a leftist bandana around the face or a Sufi khirqa/hırka etc... I could go on but the point is more a methodological and theoretical one. I am not claiming to use thick description per se but rather a more loose concept of context. I cannot explain definitely why anyone offers a scarf to a saint as such, but I can certainly present the historical circumstances and contemporary habitus from which culture takes its form and informs. By seeing this perhaps we can understand the ritual choices people make in their cultural/economic/ritual settings. Choices, I feel, are understood better in a contextual model and perhaps this is what so many post-colonial and gender scholars worries have really been about. A set of options present themselves to us şn a ritual setting. Which one will we choose? Or is the sense of choice a largely western construct? I suspect taht in an exaggerated for it is and that tradition as pressure and as an inherited set of choices both play a role in any ritual act but for these very unofficial ones, context and choice are key, unregulated and unobserved as they seem to be. We will see. Now back to actually writing this... Two pieces for reflection, one an image from Egypt and another, a traditional Turkish song from the Balkans translated by Judd King a friend and Turcologist: Mendilimin Yeşili (Amman Amman)Ben Kaybettim EşimiAl Bu Mendil Sende Sende DursunSil Gözünün YaşınıThe green of my handkerchief (alas, alas).I lost my husband/wifeTake this handkerchief, and keep it.Wipe your tears. Amman Doktor Canım Kuzum DoktorDerdime Bir ÇareÇaresiz Dertlere DüştümDoktor Bana Bir ÇareMercy, doctor, my dear, sweet doctor(find) a remedy for my sufferingI have fallen into incurable sufferingDoktor, (find) a remedy for me. Mendilim Benek Benek (Amman Amman)Ortası ÇarkıfelekYazı Beraber GeçirdikKışın Ayırdı FelekMy handkerchief is covered in patches (alas alas)Its middle (?) is the machinations of heaven (lit. the "Wheel" of heaven)in the summer we went out together.But in the winter, fate separated us.

M.P. sent in her collection of headlines about shooting dead people. I'm sure that the grammar is actually correct, when it comes to a person being shot dead and that person's life is thus ended. However, no matter how correct it could be, it still reads awkwardly (personally, I get visions of zombies). These are just a few of the examples I found. Is this a new trend? An old trend that came back from the dead? One example: "Off-duty police officer shoots dead outraged father who confronted him after he mowed down his four-year-old daughter" This is an old story — Geoff Pullum explained the syntax of such headlines in "Why shoot the dead ones?", 10/17/2010: … this is what linguists call a "Heavy NP Shift" construction: when a direct object is long, complex, or in some way heavy with pragmatic import, it is permissible to place it last in the clause, after everything else in the verb phrase. For example: The report stripped [ ] bare of its wrapping of euphemism the sordid reality of what this disgusting man had actually been doing. The empty brackets show where the direct object could have gone, and would obligatorily have gone if it were short: The report stripped his story bare of its wrapping of euphemism. That's a much better style choice than the very dubious alternative: ?The report stripped bare of its wrapping of euphemism his story. And certainly "[the] outraged father who confronted him after he mowed down his four-year-old daughter" counts as a heavy NP. If the object were just "[the] father", we'd have … shoots [the] father dead as the appropriate construction; but in … shoots [the] outraged father who confronted him after he mowed down his four-year-old daughter dead "dead" is too far away from "shoots" (and maybe too close to "daughter") to be clear. So it's normal to shift the object-phrase past "dead": … shoots dead [the] outraged father who confronted him after he mowed down his four-year-old daughter But now another potential problem is created by the headlinese convention of omitting articles, because now we've got … shoots dead outraged father … Sometimes it's worse: Here the normal order is Criminals shoot [a] man dead in [the] presence of [a] Bihar official This headline would be clear (and short) enough if left like that, with all the articles intact.  The object ("[a] man") is far from being heavy enough to shift — and if shifted, should probably go all the way past the locative adjunct "in [the] presence of [a] Bihar official". Shift the object and omit the articles, and the result strikes me as ungrammatical — except maybe in headlinese: Criminals shoot dead man in presence of Bihar official. This one's got exactly the same problem: Here's one that seem ungrammatical for another reason: "Sister, 19, accidentally shoots dead brother in the head while posing with gun for Facebook picture" My intuition, for what little it's worth, says that you can shoot someone dead, and you can shoot someone in the head, but you can't shoot them dead in the head. But even if it's (grammatically) OK to shoot your brother dead in the dead, I'm pretty sure that you can't shoot dead your brother in the head. The rest of these are grammatical headlinese, though potentially confusing: "Afghan policewoman shoots dead US military adviser" "Unknown Gunman Shoots Dead Teenage Kunduz Girl" And onward:

The song whose lyrics I published in my last blog post is this one, from a Turkish soap opera broadcast several years ago. [https:]

two lovers separated during the nationalistic shifts of the balkan wars exchange a handkerchief....again, this follows on from my last post on fabric and ritual...

  It reached forty degrees Celsius today. And then it rained, and rained and rained. And it was lovely.              

As you know, I do not make fun of people. I make fun of their inferences. But even I couldn't have predicted that there'd be so many to poke fun at, and that they'd be so various, and that I'd have such a splendid canvas on which to work. Locality 1 at Zhoukoudian. Note that this is no Lilliputian fence, nor was this a Lilliputian excavation.  The many, many metres of deposits visible in this illustration mean that this site was seriously mined in the early years.The US media giant NBC announced on New Year's Eve that Sinanthropus pekinensis syn. Homo erectus keeps on surprising, almost 100 years after its remains were recovered by, among others, Davidson Black and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. [I promise I won't say anything about the latter's involvement in the discovery of Eoanthropus dawsoni...that just wouldn't be fair.] It appears that excavations have recently begun again at the eponymous Peking Man site of Dragon Bone Hill [Zhoukoudian] near Beijing.Although this tourist map fails to give any idea of the scale, consider that Beijing is a sprawling metropolis along the lines of London or Los Angeles. Thus, the Sinanthropus pekinensis site indicated in the lower left would be about 50 km from the outskirts of the big city.The NBC News headline reads:Scientists say 'Peking Man' was more stylish than they thought: Fresh analysis suggests that human ancestor made clothes ... and stone drills? [I swear2gawd--I didn't put the question mark in that title! And don't forget that whenever a question mark appears in the title of anything the likely answer is "Not."]You already know that I find such claims laughable on their face, given the 'scholarship' that surrounds most such archaeological 'knowledge,' and the proclivity of most media mavens to exaggerate beyond credulity anything that sounds keel and has to do with our 'origins.' Therefore, in the interest of scholarly integrity and all that fluff, I'll do what I can to get my hands on the original findings and see what the latest team has to say. I'm not holding my breath anticipating a solidly supported revelation.In the meantime, you should probably be reminded that, from the beginning, Peking Man was thought to have used fire--as much as 700,000 years ago [sound familiar?]. Lew Binford tried to put the kibosh on that myth back in the 80s. Likewise that this fossil relation was a hunter. So, it's not as if the present excavators--Chinese nationals, all--have any axes to grind, Chauvinist-inspired reputations to uphold, ancestral archaeologists to revere, or careers to be made. [!] In that regard, the cognocenti among you will no doubt glibly point out that regardless of what underpins their new old findings, one axe they couldn't grind would be a 'hand' axe. That's 'cause Zhoukoudian is on the eastern side of the so-called Movius line, which delineates the easternmost extent of anything approaching a hand axe in the palaeolithic record [and we all know how weak the rocks on the eastern side must be if decades of archaeologists couldn't find a good hand axe amongst all the bifacially flaked pieces thus far recovered. [If I knew the antithesis to the oft-used phrase "And that's going some," I'd want to use it in this context.]So, by now you've realized that I have nothing new to add to this new Peking Man story, and that you'll have to wait as long as it takes for us all to be shown the physical discoveries that brought these old chestnuts [or was that cherry pits?] back into the spotlight. With that in mind, and by your leave, I'll be going now.  SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.

We--you and I--and I mean that, are closing in on a huge way marker in the Subversive Archaeologist's young life. Some time in the next hour or so the all-time page view counter down the right sidebar will click past 99,999 and reach an even hundred grand since the inception of this blog, a mere 456 days ago.      I couldn't have done this without my friends--new and old--who've supported these efforts for more than a year. In fact, I wouldn't have done this had it not been for you, gentle reader.     A huge thank you to all of you! And many more to come.     RobSA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.

Regular readers of LL know that I've always been a partisan of automatic speech recognition technology, defending it against unfair attacks on its performance, as in the case of "ASR Elevator" (11/14/2010). But Chin-Hui Lee recently showed me the results of an interesting little experiment that he did with his student I-Fan Chen, which suggests a fair (or at least plausible) critique of the currently-dominant ASR paradigm. His interpretation, as I understand it, is that ASR technology has taken a wrong turn, or more precisely, has failed to explore adequately some important paths that it by-passed on the way to its current success. In order to understand the experiment, you have to know a little something about how automatic speech recognition works. If you already know this stuff, you can skip the next few paragraphs. And if you want a deeper understanding, you can go off and read (say) Larry Rabiner's HMM tutorial, or some of the material available on the Wikipedia page. Basically, we've got speech, and we want text. (This version of the problem is sometimes called "speech to text" (STT), to distinguish it from systems that derive meanings or some other representation besides standard text.) The algorithm for turning speech into text is a probabilistic one: we have a speech signal S, and for each hypothesis H about the corresponding text, we want to evaluate the conditional probability of H given S; and all (?) we need to do is to find the H for which P(H|S) is highest. We solve this problem by applying Bayes' Theorem, which in this case tells us that Since P(S), the probability of the speech signal, is the same for all hypotheses H about the corresponding text, we can ignore the denominator, so that the quantity we want to maximize becomes This expression has two parts: P(S|H), the probability of the speech signal given the hypothesized text; and P(H), the a priori probability of the hypothesized text. In the parlance of the field, the term P(S|H) is called the "acoustic model", and the term P(H) is called the "language model". The standard implementation of the P(S|H) term is a so-called "Hidden Markov Model" (HMM), and the standard implementation of the P(H) term is an "n-gram language model". (We're ignoring many details here, such as how to find the word sequence that actually maximizes this expression — again, see some of the cited references if you want to know more.) It's well known that large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition is heavily dependent on the "language model" — which is entirely independent of the spoken input, representing simply an estimate of how likely the speaker is to say whatever. This is because simple n-gram language models massively reduce our uncertainty about what word was said next. We can see this Lee and Chen's experiment, which looked at the effect of varying the language-model component of a recognizer, while keeping the same acoustic models and the same training and testing materials. (For those skilled in the art, they used the classic WSJ0 SI84 training data, and the Nov92 Hub2-C1 5K test set, described at greater length in David S. Pallett et al., "1993 Benchmark Tests for the ARPA Spoken Language Program", and Francis Kubala et al., "The Hub and Spoke Paradigm for CSR Evaluation", both from the Proceedings of the Spoken Language Technology Workshop: March 6-8, 1994.) Cross-entropy Perplexity Word Error Rate 3-gram Language Model 5.87 58 5.1% 2-gram Language Model 6.78 110 7.4% 1-gram Language Model 9.53 742 32.8% No Language Model 12.28 4987 69.2% Thus using a 3-gram language model, where the probability of a given word is conditioned on the two preceding words, yielded a 5.1% word error rate; a 2-gram language model, where a word's probability is conditioned on the previous word, yielded a 7.4% WER; a 1-gram language model, where just the various unconditioned probabilities of words were used, yielded a 32.8% error rate; and with no language model at all, so that every item in the 5,000-word vocabulary is equally likely in all positions, gave a whopping 69.2% WER. The 3-gram language model allows such a low error rate because it leaves us with relatively little uncertainty about the identity of the next word. In the particular dataset used for this experiment, the resulting 3-gram perplexity was about 58, meaning that (after seeing two words) there was as much left to be learned about the next word as if there were a vocabulary of 58 words all equally likely to occur — despite the fact that the actual vocabulary was about 5,000 words. (The dataset involved a selection of sentences from stories published in the Wall Street Journal, taking only those sentences made up of the commonest 5,000 words.) The bigram perplexity was about 110, and the unigram perplexity about 742. (If you want to know more about such numbers and how they are calculated, look at the documentation for the SRI language modeling toolkit, which was actually used to generate them.) If we take the log to the base 2 of these perplexities, we get the corresponding entropy, measured in bits. And there's an interestingly linear relationship between the entropies of the language models used and the logit of the resulting WER (i.e. log(WER/(1-WER))): A different acoustic-model component would have somewhat different performance — the best reported results with the same trigram and bigram models on this dataset are somewhat better — but the overall relationship between entropy and error rate will remain the same, and performance on high-entropy speech recognition tasks will be poor, even with careful speech and good acoustic conditions. This all seems reasonable enough — so why does Chin think that there's a problem? Well, there's good reason to think that human performance on high-entropy speech recognition tasks can sometimes remain pretty good. Thus George R. Doddington and Barbara M. Hydrick, “High performance speaker‐independent word recognition”, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 64(S1) 1978: Speaker‐independent recognition of words spoken in isolation was performed using a very large vocabulary of over 26 000 words taken from the “Brown” data set. (Computational Analysis of Present‐Day American English by Kucera and Francis). After discarding 4% of the data judged to be spoken incorrectly, experimental recognition error rate was 2.3% (1.8% substitution and 0.5% rejection), with negligible difference in performance between male and female speakers. Experimental error rate for vocabulary subsets, ordered by frequency of usage, was 1.0% for the first 50 words, 0.8% for the first 120 words, and 1.2% error for the first 1500 words. An analysis of recognition errors and a discussion of ultimate performance limitations will be presented. If we project the regression line (in the entropy versus logit(WER) plot from the Lee & Chen experiment) to a vocabulary of 26k words (entropy of 14.67 bits), we would predict a word error rate of 90.5% — which is a lot more than 2.3%. Now, this projection is not at all reliable: isolated word recognition is easier than connected word recognition, especially when the words being connected include short monosyllabic function words that might be hypothesized to occur almost anywhere. But still, Chin's guess is that current ASR performance on the Doddington/Hydrick task would be quite poor — strikingly worse than human performance, and perhaps spectacularly so. And he thinks that this striking human/machine divergence points to a basic flaw in the current standard approach to ASR. For his diagnosis of the problem, see his keynote address at Interspeech 2012. I hope that before long, we'll be able to recreate something like to the Doddington/Hydrick dataset: a high-entropy recognition task on which human and machine performance can be directly compared. If this comparison works out the way Chin thinks it will, the plausibility of his diagnosis and his prescription for action will be increased.

As I was about to leave my fieldsite in April 2011 — almost two years ago now, I’m sorry to see — I have a conversation that goes like this: “I’ve had shallow relationships with people,” I lament to one of my closer comrades among the philosophy faculty. “J’aurais voulu pouvoir comprendre les vies des gens, comme un romancier, mais ça a souvent resté superficiel.” I would have wanted to be able to understand peoples’ lives, like a novelist, but it often stayed superficial. “Mais c’est comme ça que les gens se connaissent eux aussi,” responds M. But that’s exactly the way that people here  know each other. And he adds: “Le seul ami avec qui j’ai des échanges hors départemental, c’est B., avec qui je discute des choses personnelles…” The only friend who I talk about non-departmental stuff is B., we talk about our personal lives… I’ve written about this moment before, but re-reading my notes, I’m still struck by this testimony of the intensity of academics’ non-relations with each other, of the depths of their superficiality, of the way that friendship can come to seem the exception to the rule. It’s a good reminder that ethnographies of intimacy may in fact not always be a good way of understanding the social reality of a modern institutional world, where even the locals may not know each other that well.

Hi, again.     As some of you may know I'm what's known as an independent researcher [=unemployed, =broke, =intellectually starved, =begger on foot wishing for a horse]. That's why my eye was caught last year when I read about the activities of one Dr. Jon F. Wilkins. He was reaching out to the media on behalf of his ingenious idea to establish independent scholarship as a viable and indeed valuable branch of the academy [albeit a never-watered and unfertilized twig until now]. After some arm-twisting and under-the-table inducements I was accepted as one of the inaugural class of research scholars affiliated with the Ronin Institute of Independent Scholarship. Among his other achievements, Dr. Wilkins has worked to obtain not-for-profit status for the nascent organization. That work recently paid off, and now Jon is launching a fund-raising endeavor. I must admire his commitment, and his vision for the likes of me.     I'm keenly aware that I've stuck out my hat to you before now, so please don't consider the following to be a direct effort to milk you again, kind reader. Rather, as Jon points out in this statement, the aim is to reach small and large philanthropists so as to one day secure a lasting, indeed self-renewing means of support to promote the kind of meaningful research that non-academic scholars are more than capable of producing. Take note that the following is in the first person. So, don't forget what region of virtual reality you're perched, and that way you can't be confused by the self-references that don't fully jibe with the present context!     Ladies and gennlemen... may I introduce Jon Wilkins.Happy New Year,I wanted to take just a moment to introduce you to my new venture, the Ronin Institute for Independent Scholarship.I founded the Ronin Institute in 2012 in order to create a new model for doing scholarly research outside of the traditional academic system. While the traditonal system has a number of strengths, it also comes with serious limitations. These limitations include artifical barriers to interdisciplinary research and collaboration arising from departmental boundaries, large bureaucratic and teaching loads placed on faculty, and the financial demands involved in supporting the infrastructure of the university.The fact is, in many fields, the independent scholar with access to library resources can pursue research at the highest levels, often at a fraction of the cost of a university researcher. Furthermore, in the United States alone, there are tens of thousands of underemployed PhDs, representing a vast, untapped resource. We are identifying the most highly motivated independent scholars and working to ensure that they are able to make productive use of their expertise.At the moment, there are about twenty five Ronin Institute Research Scholars, representing fields from Physics to Biology to History to Philosophy. A number of us are engaged in full-time research. Others are pursuing a model of "fractional scholarship," engaging part time in academic research while working at another career, fulfilling family obligations, etc. Our goal is to create new career paths and funding opportunities to support a diversity of ways of engaging in scholarship.This fall, we recieved approval of our 501c3 nonprofit status from the IRS, meaning that we are now ready to move forward with raising funds to support individual projects, help send independent scholars to conferences, and providing small pilot grants to help to restart research programs for people who have taken time off (e.g., to have kids).I am hoping that you might be able to help us out, if not now, then at some point in the future. This could mean a financial donation, of course, and if you're inclined to donate, you can do so online [https:] or visit the Ronin Institute Donation page [ronininstitute.org] We are strongly dedicated to following donor intent. If you would like to discuss directing your donation towards a specific project or program, feel free to contact us at development@ronininstitute.orgAlternatively, maybe you know someone who is a highly motivated independent scholar, and you would like to point them in our direction. Or maybe you are looking for a collaborator on an upcoming project, in which case you might have a look through the list of our Research Scholars [ronininstitute.org] some of whom are actively seeking out collaborations, and all of whom are open to collaborating on the right project.To find out more about the Ronin Institute more generally, you can check us out on the web, on Facebook and on Google+ [ronininstitute.orghttp:] you're more of a listener, you can check out this radio interview that I did with WBUR in Boston over the summer [radioboston.wbur.org] can also contact me with any questions you might have at jon.f.wilkins@ronininstitute.orgWishing all the best for you in 2013,Jon Wilkins     Okay. You can return your attention to me, now. I realize that phrases like "make productive use of [Gargett's] expertise" might not be the first thing that whistles through your head with regard to my oeuvre when you're reading this blog. However, Jon Wilkins knows that I harbour deep within me the desire to make a greater contribution to this mixed-up discipline that we collectively refer to as archaeology. As you'll discover in the months and years to come, I have something to offer every age and species, every sub-discipline and field of anthropology, every corner of the past world. It's all there, just waiting for an unsuspecting audience to stumble upon my ravings.     I'm glad you're along for the ride, even if you can't afford me!SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. 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I'm currently at work writing a chapter on rai for my book (provisional title: Radio Interzone; who knows when it'll be done). One of the questions I've been trying to work out is the history of “pop-rai.”A number of accounts claim that it was the song by Oran artist Chaba Fadela, “Ana ma h'lali ennoum” (I don't enjoy sleep anymore), recorded in 1979, that launched the pop-rai era, with its chorus, “Beer is Arab, but whiskey is European.” Bouziane Daoudi and Nidam Abdi (“Records: Music from a melting pot - Rai, the sound of Algeria,” The Guardian, October 5, 1989) interpret the chorus thus: “I have no problem getting drunk on beer because whiskey is too expensive.” (Yes, beer is produced in Algeria, and in Oran, by the Brasserie Algerienne Oranaise.)Others have suggested that the term pop-rai dates back to 1974 or 1975, and that it emerges with the release of recordings by Messaoud Bellemou and his various collaborators. I agree that in order to understand how modern rai developed after Algeria's independence, it makes sense to trace the developments further back than 1979. Unfortunately, this period (rai in the nineteen seventies) has not been well documented, neither in the literature nor in the musical archive. The Sublime Frequencies compilation of 1970s rai music, 1970's Algerian Proto-rai Underground, released in 2008, marked an important and very welcome attempt to document what liner-notes author Hicham Chadly regards as an unjustly ignored period in rai. But it's just one compilation.Fortunately, and thanks in large part to the fact that so many Algerians are putting on the web previously very "rare" recordings, mostly on Youtube, there is enough material now to piece together  a somewhat more complete as well as much more complicated story than the one told previously.Boys take over: Belkacem Bouteldja Let's start with what happened to the cheikhat (singular, cheikha) tradition, one of the key sources of contemporary rai, which emerged in Western Algeria. The cheikhat of the Oran region gained a national reputation during the 1950s (several of them were recorded by French labels during this period), and some of them, like Cheikha Rimitti participate in the short-lived cultural efflorescence that marked the first years of Algerian independence (won in 1962). But as the revolutionary regime consolidated itself, and particularly after President Houari Boumedienne came to power in 1965, women were banned from singing in Algeria's cabarets and restaurants. Meanwhile, the government made gambling and the sale of alcoholic beverages in Muslim public places illegal, regulations which were in conflict with the popular drinking culture surrounding rai and particularly the music of the cheikhat. The government also imposed curbs on popular religious practices, such as the wa‘dāt, the saints festivals that typically included song and dance, and where cheikhat typically performed. The wa‘da was an annual festival held at the end of the agricultural season, honoring the patron saint of the region. (It was at one of these festivals that Rimitti reportedly received her nickname, which is alcohol-associated.)      In the wake of the marginalization of the cheikhat, it was young men from the greater Oran area who kept the musical tradition publicly visible and who took up the repertoire. They also performed the bedoui repertoire of the likes of Cheikh Hamada, Cheikh El-Madani and Cheikh El-Khaldi, another of the musical streams that formed the basis of what we now call "rai." It is perhaps the case that such younger artists began to displace the bedoui cheikhs from their position of popularity as well. Belkacem BouteldjaOne of the first to record and perform the cheikhat repertoire in the post-independence era was Belkacem Bouteldja, a young man from the El Hamri quarter of Oran. In December 1965, at age thirteen, Belkacem recorded his first 45" single, “Gatlek Zizia,” a song originally made famous by Cheikha El Ouachma (“the tattooed”) El Temouchentia (d. 2009), who recorded it for the French label Pathé in 1957. Cheikha El Ouachma was from Aïn Témouchent, a town 72 kilometers southwest of Oran, and she recorded a number of tracks for various French labels in the fifties and sixties. As of 1965, she divided her time between Marseille and Aïn Témouchent. When rai gained national renown in Algeria in the 1980s and achieved international renown in subsequent decades, Cheikha El Ouachma never gained the sort of recognition won by other great cheikhas, like Cheikha Rimitti. Mohamed Kali for his part calls Cheikha El Ouachma the "mamie du rai," rai's grandmother. And Kali tells us that according to  Blaoui Houari, the great singer in the wahrani style (sometimes known more precisely as wahrani ‘asri, "contemporary" wahrani), it was El Ouachma who succeeded in making the transition from "baladi" or country style cheikha music to what eventually came to be known as rai. Or to use other terms, she was responsible for the movement from rai trab (rai of the land, another name for the music of the cheikhat) to rai moderne. (Unfortunately, it is somewhat difficult to hear, at least for me to hear, the musical evidence for Houari's claim.)Bouziane Daoudi (Le rai [2000]) translates into French a line from her song "Gatlek Zizia"as follows: "Zizia te dit ce soir on couchera chez moi" (Zizia [diminutive for Zohra] tells you, tonight we'll sleep at my place). Daoudi also mentions two other songs by Cheikha El Ouachma, “Smahni ya el commandar” (Excuse me O commandant) and "Sid elhakem" (His honor the judge), both of which he says evoke the everyday experiences of ordinary people living under military repression during wartime. (If they are critical of the colonial regime, I wonder whether these songs might in fact have been recorded post-independence.)Have a listen to Cheikha El Ouachma's 1957 version of “Gatlek Zizia” here, and then check out Bouteldja's 1965 recording, here. Bouteldja's version is very much in the same style as Cheikha Ouachma's, his vocals backed only by the gasba (reed flute) and guellal (hand-held frame drum). Such was the characteristic accompaniment of both the cheikha and bedoui musical genres. The chief difference between the two recordings that I can hear is that Bouteldja's voice sounds like that of an adolescent, and indeed, he was only thirteen when he made the recording. The song's release seems to have marked the taking over of the of musical tradition and repertoire of the now-marginalized cheikhat by an emerging generation of young male singers.Bouteldja claimed, in an interview given in 2009, that the song in fact marked his supersession of both the cheikhat and the bedoui cheikhs. "Avec le titre Gatlek Zizia, j’avais mis fin au règne de Rimitti Allah yarhamha, cheikha Habiba, cheikha El Wachma, Hakoum, Kaifouh de Témouchent... J’avais déstabilisé le marché du disque de l’époque" (K. Smaïl, "Je vis dans la précarité sans retraite ni ressources", El Watan, January 6, 2009). (With "Gatlek Zizia" I put an end to the reign of Rimitti--God rest her soul-- Cheikha Habiba, Cheikha El Wachma [Ouachma], Hakoum, Kaifouh of Témouchent...I'd destabilized the music market of the time.) (Cheikha Habiba was from Sidi el-Abbès, and was popular in the Oran area during the sixties. Hakoum is presumably Cheikh Hakoum, who you can listen to here. Go here for a fragmentary bit of info on Cheikh Kaifouh.)According to French scholar Marie Virolle (La chanson raï, 1995), Belkacem Bouteldja recorded under the name Kacimo, and he had a small "orchestre" called Étoile, formed in 1964, whose members included Missoum Bensmir and Belarbi, and in which he played the melodica. (Bouziane Daoudi (Le rai) says of Mohamed Belarbi: "de son côté, fait ses débuts en 1952 à Oran dans l’orchestre de Jacques Vidal. Il jouera de la batterie dans différents groupes à partir de 1956 tout en intégrant les rythmes afro-cubains dans ses compositions." Missoum Bensmir was the son of a celebrated bedoui poet, Cheikh Hashmi Bensmir. Here's a nice track from Bensmir, with lots of photos on the Youtube vid. I have no idea when it was recorded.)Missoum BensmirMissoum Bensmir and unidentified musicianssource: here Belkacem composed over 60 songs over the next ten years, and made records in Casablanca, Algiers, and Paris. Belkacem was also known by the nickname "El Joselito" or "Little Joe," because of his androgynous sounding voice. He shared the nickname with a Spanish adolescent singer and actor (born, José Jiménez Fernández) who was well known in Algeria at the time due to his film and television appearances. Despite the recent (1962) departure of Oran's very substantial Spanish colon population, Spanish culture remained important in the city remained, and Oran continued to host foreign variety shows, especially from Spain, until the beginning of the 1970s (Daoudi and Miliani 1996). (One also wonders whether the "Little Joe" moniker might have had something to do with Little Joe Cartwright, played by Michael Landon, a character on the US t.v. show "Bonanza," which broadcast from 1959-1973 and was very popular abroad. I saw it when I lived in Lebanon, but I have no idea whether it was broadcast in Algeria.)I've been unable to locate any recordings of Kacimo with his orchestre. But here's another interesting recording by Belkacem Bouteldja from 1967 or 1968, which deals with issues of migration to France, called "Hedi Fransa" (This is France). One of Belkacem's best-known as well as most infamous songs from this period is the 1965 recording "Serbili Baoui" ("Serve me my BAO" -- the Orani-made beer produced by the Brasserie Algerienne d'Oran.) The picture below, from a recording of the song, shows Bouteldja pouring a fruit drink, not a beer. Belkacem recorded "Hedi Fransa" in the rural, cheikha style. "Serbili Baoui" is more or less cheikha style, but I believe that violins are also playing along with the gasba(s).All the recorded material of Bouteldja's from this period that I am able to locate on youtube is done in "traditional" style. "Milouda fine kounti" is a song originally done by Cheikh El-Younsi Berkani. There is also "Ya Binti." Sometimes violins added, as on "Serbili baoui" and "Ya Rayi," a cheikha song. Unfortunately, I cannot locate any of Bouteldja's work with Etoile, which must have had a quite different and more modern sound. It seems that his recorded "hits" were all done in the "traditional" vein.It appears that Bouteldja's career had fallen off somewhat by the early seventies, but was then revived when he began collaborating with Messaoud Bellemou.Messaoud Bellemou and "pop-rai"Messaoud BellemouPop-rai emerged, some claim, when Bouteldja and other young vocalists and musicians devoted to "Orani folklore" began to work with the legendary figure Messaoud Bellemou during the 1970s. Messaoud Bellemou (b. 1947), like Cheikha El Ouachma, was from the town of Aïn Témouchent, 72 kilometers southwest of Oran. While a student at the municipal school, Bellemou was encouraged, according to an article found on wikipedia, to learn the trumpet from a teacher named Henri Coutan, a French colon. Frank Tenaille, in his book Le Raï: De la bâtardise a la reconnaissance internationale (2002), claims that Bellemou's trumpet teacher was a Spanish colon from Oran. Given that Bellemou was from Aïn Témouchent and not Oran, and that the wikipedia article names the teacher, Tenaille is almost certainly in error.Kali tells us that when Bellemou started on trumpet, he played Western tunes, and in particular, the Spanish passacaglia. But he earned his living as a house painter. In the mid-sixities the Amar circus passed through Aïn Témouchent and recruited Bellemou to play trumpet in its orchestra. He toured with the circus for six months, working with seasoned musicians. After he returned home, Bellemou began to practice techniques for playing quarter tones on the trumpet -- necessary if one wanted to play Algerian music. It was also necessary if one wanted to perform the local, "folkloric" music of the cheikhat and the bedoui cheikhs, as the gasba, the reed flute, is central to the texture of both the bedoui and cheikha genres. So Bellemou attempted to recreate the sound of the gasba with his trumpet playing, but he also flavored his music with some Spanish paso doble and flamenco. (It's important to recall how strong the Spanish influence was in colonial Oran, and Oran province more generally. Orani residents of Spanish origin outnumbered those of French origin by two to one in 1886; by 1941, the ratio of Spaniards to French was three to one.) The ethnomusicologist Lechlech Boumediène, cited by Kali, states that Bellemou also seasoned his modernized rai with other traditional genres like gnawa and hawzi.Kali claims that what Bellemou did was a revolutionary development, and that he managed to produce quater tones by using his breath to modulate notes as one would do when playing a bugle. (Kali also tells us that the Lebanese trumpet player Nassim Maalouf was instrumental in designing a trumpet that could play Arabic modes, with a fourth valve half the length of the second--but this occurred some years after Bellemou made his breakthrough.)Bellemou's trumpet playing gave the local music what Kali calls a "jubilant charge." He began to play at wedding processions and was a big hit. (Playing at weddings was and is still an important source of income for musicians throughout the Arab world.) As a result of Bellemou's influence, the trumpet gradually began to replace the use of the double-reed ghaïta or mizmar which heretofore had typically been employed on such occasions, in Western Algeria. By 1968, at age 22, Bellemou started his own ensemble and was able to leave his painting job and to make his living from music.Bellemou's music got no radio airplay, and cassette recording had not yet come into existence. So at first he chiefly made a name for himself by accompanying the local soccer team when it competed in other town. He used to play every sort of music, local, paso doble and film soundtracks. Bellemou's regional reputation grew more and more.(According to wikipedia, Bellemou also used to accompany local singers (of both the cheikha and bedoui variety), including Cheikha Ouachma, Cheikha Bekhta and Cheikh Brahim, when they performed at weddings in the countryside around Aïn Témouchent. Unfortunately I've as yet found no recordings of Bellemou backing any cheikh or cheikha on trumpet, so I can't verify that this is in fact true.)Bellemou recruited other young musicians from the area who were interested in the local "folkloric" traditions and, and reportedly started to make recordings (at first on vinyl) in this style in 1973 (source: wikipedia). The wikipedia piece says Bellemou's first recording was a track called "Sidi H'bibi," featuring (according to the bog Kaloulou) Hamani Hadjoum on vocals. For her part Marie Virolle (La chanson raï, 1995: 54)dates the emergence of the new, modern sounding "pop-rai" to Messaoud Bellemou's recordings with Belkacem Bouteldja, beginning in 1974. (Wikipedia says the two started working together in 1975.) Kouider Metaïr ("Oran, berceau du rai," in Kouider Metaïr, ed., Oran la mémoire, 2004) meanwhile dates the emergence of pop-rai to a specific recording by Bellemou and Bouteldja, “Zarga ou masrara” (Brown and radiant), released in 1975. K. Smaïl ("Les initiales: B. B. du raï," El Watan, December 15, 2009) also claims that Bouteldja sang on "Zerga ou mesrara.”For his part, Kali states that Bellemou gained national recognition due to the release of two 1975 recording, one with Cheikh Hamani (i.e., Hamani Hadjoum Tmouchenti) on vocals, called "Ya hbabi ana bassit," and another track (unnamed) with Boutedlja.Based on the successes Bellemou achieved due to one or all of these recordings, he went on national tour, a tour that was noteworthy for the fact that he charged admission (and people paid to see him), at a time when typically concerts were put on by local state authorities and entry was free. Fortunately for the researcher interested in this history, it is now possible to locate, via Youtube, many of the recordings that are essential to it. (But not, alas, "Ya hbabi ana bassit" or "Sidi H'bibi"). It appears that the Bellemou recording called “Zarga ou Masrara” in fact features the Aïn Témouchent singer, Hamani Hadjoum Tmouchenti, rather than Bouteldja. Tmouchenti was one of those local musicians recruited by Bellemou as he developed a new sound for Orani "folkloric" music in the early seventies.Bellemou and Belkacem Bouteldja meanwhile recorded a song that sounds virtually the same as "Zarga ou Masrara," under a different title: “Andi Mesrara” (I have a radiant girl). (I eventually found this source, which correctly names the Belkacem hit though without attributing it to Bellemou as well.)Please listen to both the Hamani Tmouchenti version ("Zarga ou Masrara"): And now to the Bouteldja version, "Andi Mesrara" (note that the Bouteldja video below opens with a more contemporary concert clip, and the song in question doesn't start til 2:00).What is remarkable about these recordings is how Bellemou and his ensemble have modernized the patented cheikhat (and bedoui) sounds, especially when you compare them to Belkacem Bouteldja's 1965 “Qatlek Zizia.”Jacket of "Zarga ou Masrara" (45"); Bellemou in jacket and tieThe percussion on both resembles what one hears on the cheikha recordings, but it is also considerably punched up by the playing of a tbal, a drum that is much larger and louder than the guellal, played by pounding it with a curved stick. Here's a photo one from a collection of postcards from colonial Oran. It's played here by an Algerian Gnawa, but the instrument is widely used by various Sufi cults in Morocco and Algeria, such the Aissawa, as well as by the Gnawa in Morocco.Now here is Cheikha Rimitti, playing a guellal, whose diameter is much smaller than that of a derbouka.On these foundational pop-rai recordings you can also hear the sound of kerakeb (sing., karkaba), the distinctive metal castanets played by the Gnawa (or Bilali, as they're known in Algeria). A female chorus repeats the male vocals and also contributes ululation, adding to the fuller sound that characterizes the two "Mesrara" recordings, by comparison to typical recordings from the cheikhat and bedoui tradition. But what I find most remarkable is that on these two recordings, the essential place of the gasba is taken by both trumpet and saxophone. It's Messaoud Bellemou himself here on sax, and his brother Mouafaq (nicknamed Mimi) is on trumpet. Both the Hamani and Bouteldja versions maintain the feel of the cheikha roots, but overall it's a bigger sound, a deeper, groovier rhythm, and with a more "modern" touch provided by the sax and trumpet. Now check out another Bellemou and Bouteldja number, “Inta Âkli,” from 1976, which has roughly the same sound as “Andi Mesrara,” except that Messaoud plays trumpet instead of sax, and it also features an organist, whose playing is quite subdued. The person responsible for putting this video up on youtube, "maghrebreunion" (who as of this date has posted 352 videos--mostly rai--and to whom I am eternally grateful) also provides a photo of the members of Bellemou's troupe from the mid-seventies.They are identified, from left to right, as Kerbiche on kerakeb, Messaoud Bellemou on trumpet, Mimi Mouafak Bellemou on trumpet (I don't know why he is identified here as "Boumediane"), Hocine (holding a soft drink), the group's accordion player and organist, and Hamdane on tbal.Please also listen to Bellemou's “Mani M'heni,” featuring Hamani Tmouchenti on vocals.The rhythms on this track are quite amazing, and somehow the percussionist(s) manage to produce what sound like drum rolls.   l to r: Mouafak Boumediane ("Mimi ") and Messaoud Bellemou, trumpets, Hamdan on tbalAnd if you really liked the Bellemou and Hamani Tmouchenti recordings, here's another: "Ana bhar aliya."Listen too to another of Cheikha El Ouachma's recordings, “Hak Kachak Hak” (I'm not sure when this 45" was released). You will notice that Cheikha El Ouachma uses the Gnawa rhythms of the kerakeb here. It would seem possible therefore that when Messaoud Bellemou used kerakeb on "Zarga ou Masrara" and "Andi Mesrara" he may not have been innovating but rather following in the cheikha tradition, at least as practiced in the Aïn Témouchent region. (Recall that it is reported that Bellemou used to accompany Cheikha El Ouachma).The idea for incorporating the tbal and the kerakeb might also have been due to the influence of the Moroccan neo-folk ensemble Nass El Ghiwane (and other similar groups, such as Jil Jilala and Lem Chaheb).Nass El Ghiwane, huge superstars in Morocco, were notable for incorporating various regional and local Moroccan traditional musics and putting them together to create a new synthesis; they used both the tbal and (on occasion) karakeb. The Ghiwanian influence was enormous in Algeria at this time, and according to Bouziane Daoudi and Hadj Milani (L'aventure du rai, 1996), there were over 3000 Ghiwanian groups in Algeria in the early seventies. The young Khaled Hadj Brahim, later known as Cheb Khaled, started a group in the style of Nass El Ghiwane at age 11, in 1971, called Les Cinqs Étoiles (who, it seems, left no recordings). (The sound of Khaled's group, however, must have been somewhat different than Nass El Ghiwane, as Kalakoulou notes, since its instruments were accordion, bongos and violin.) Moroccan neo-folk quickly went out of fashion, however, after Morocco's occupation of the Spanish Sahara and the ensuing hostilities with Algeria in 1975. The influence of Moroccan neo-folk on Bellemou and company may have been that it provided a warrant for using instruments linked to separate folk traditions and putting them together to produce something new. It may have influenced Bellemou and company to use the tbal and kerakeb specifically. Or it may have been a more general influence, one which encouraged young people to take their local "folkloric" traditions seriously. Recall that we are discussing musical activity in Western Algeria, quite close to the Moroccan border. (The operative word here is "may," because I really have no idea.)But what about the incorporation of saxophone and the trumpet? (I am unaware of any other recordings, besides those Bellemou did with Hamani Tmouchenti as well as "Andi Mesrara" with Belkacem Bouteldja, on which he played the saxophone.) Young Algerians were, of course, listening to music by the likes of James Brown in Algeria in the 1970s. Bouteldja tells us, in a 2009 interview with K. Smaïl, that as a young man he was listening to James Brown and Otis Redding, in addition to various Algerian and French musicians. But could cassettes by Egyptian Nubian musicians like Ali Hassan Kuban, Bahr Abu Ghreisha, Hassan Jazouli, or Hussein Bashir also have been making their way to Algeria at the time? Egyptian Nubian music of this period was noted for its use of brass and saxophone, and sometimes when I listen to Bellemou recordings from the seventies, I think I hear similarities.Frank Tenaille (2002) claims that Bouteldja played accordion on some recordings, and that he used it to replace the sound of the zamr, a kind of double-reed clarinet favored in the bedoui music of Western Algeria rather than the gasba. I think Tenaille may be wrong again, both about Bouteldja playing accordion, and about the zamr, i.e. the ghaïta or mizmar, which was employed in wedding processions (as noted above) and not in bedoui music per se. Benteldja, however, says that he played derbouka in Bellemou's group. Here's a recording of the Bellemou ensemble with Bouteldja on vocals which features the accordion. Perhaps Bouteldja is playing it -- but I've seen no other claims other than Tenaille's that Bouteldja played one. More likely it's Hocine of Bellemou's group (see above). The song is "Bakhta," which was originally written and recorded by Cheikh Abdelkader El Khaldi, and it is an excerpt from a long poem that El Khaldi wrote about his lover. (Here's El Khaldi's "Goul L'Bakhat Goul," which I think is a song from a different segment of the poem.) "Bakhta" was also recorded, previous to the Bellemou/Bouteldja version, by wahrani singers Blaoui Houari, Ahmed Wahby and Ahmed Saber, and later by Khaled, on his N'ssi N'ssi album (1993). A wikipedia article summarizes a description Khaled gave of the song in an interview in 1997. (Wahrani is another of the sources feeding into the development of modern rai.)Sometime in the mid-seventies, Bouteldja was arrested, according to the testimony of Boutaiba Sghir in the very interesting 2003 documentary, Mémoire du Raï -- you can watch the segment here. I've not been able to find details on the arrest, only some vague references to Belkacem Bouteldja as a kind of "enfant terrible." Here's what he looked like in that period (from the cover of the 45" for the songs "Ndag Ndag" and Ya Rayi," recorded with Bellemou: you can listen to the latter here.)As far as I'm aware, Kacimo did not play guitar, but I suppose that a photo of him posing with one, along with his hairstyle and his pullover sweater, would have helped to create an impression of the music as "modern."(To confuse things even further: here's a live recording of Bellemou and Bouteldja, from the first rai festival in Oran, in 1985. They play "Ha Raï, Ha Raï," "Zarga Ou Masrara" [originally recorded, as we've seen, with Hamani on vocals] and then Bellemou does an instrumental. It's from an album, Le rai dans tous ses états, released on the French label Maison des Cultures du Monde in 1986, which also features tracks from Cheikha Remitti, Raïna Raï, and "Chab" Khaled.)Boutaiba SghirAnother young singer who Messaoud Bellemou recruited to work with him was Boutaiba Sghir (born Hafif Mohammed), from Chabate, a village located 7 kilometers from Aïn Témouchent. Bellemou in fact started working with this local vocalist even before he began performing with the Oran singer Belkacem Boutaldja. And although it may have been the Bellemou/Bouteldja collaborations (and particularly "Andi Mesrara") that put pop-rai on the map (at least in the Oran region), Boutaiba Sghir was equally crucial to the development of that "new" sound, especially given that Bouteldja disappeared from the scene for a time due to his jailing. The Sublime Frequencies compilation of 1970s rai music, 1970's Algerian Proto-rai Underground(2008) features three very fine tracks from Bellemou and Boutaiba Sghir. (For some reason, Bouteldja is absent from the album.)Let's examine now some of the sounds produced by the Bellemou-Boutaiba collaborations. This recording by Bellemou and Boutaiba, "Dayha Oulabes" (featured on 1970's Algerian Proto-rai Underground), has an instrumental opening, with two trumpets and accordion, that reminds me a lot of Egyptian Nubian music produced by the likes of Ali Hassan Kuban.On the Bellemou-Boutaiba recording "Manemchiche," dating from 1977-78, you can hear further development of the Bellemou ensemble sound, and in particular, the presence of bongos (or maybe derbouka), which give the song a distinctive rhythmic feel.Another great Bellemou-Boutaiba outing (also on 1970's Algerian Proto-rai Underground) is "Malgré Tout." (Note the French title; French is routinely incorporated into the local Oranais dialect). You can hear an electric guitar clearly on the song's opening, and the rhythm here is dominated by bongos. (The chorus goes, "malgré tout mazal n'brik," or, "despite everything, I still love you.") The drum rolls are similar to those on the Bellemou and Hamani Tmouchenti track “Mani M'heni,” discussed above. (I guess, but it's only a guess, that it's Hamam Ahmad Zergui on guitar -- see below.)Here's another excellent track from Boutaiba, I assume with the backing of Bellemou's ensemble, "Ki Kounti." It's notable in particular, from my view, for the strong guitar instrumental opening, and it's a real scorcher, with the percussion, vocals, trumpet, accordion and organ playing together to create a musical tempest. The person who posted it, "maghrebunion," says that it dates from the seventies and that it is off the album Ouine n'guiyel ana oughzali. Sublime Frequencies, or some other company with an interest in such material, needs to issue another compilation of seventies rai. If anyone does so, this track definitely belongs on it.Chaba Fadela, who as we noted above has been cited by many as the originator of "pop-rai," used to sing back-up on occasion for Boutaiba in the mid to late seventies, before she started recording under her own name. Here she accompanies Boutaiba on "Ya Khali", from 1978 or 1979. The notes to the video state that it is Gana El Maghnaoui on trumpet, who was another important figure in the development of rai in the 70s. (I have thus far been able to find little hard information about him, but you can find lots of his music on youtube.) It is worthwhile comparing "Ya Khali" to Fadela's famous "Ana ma h'lali ennoum" track of 1979. After listening to both, it seems clear to me that Fadela's song, said by some to mark the emergence of "pop-rai," is more of a piece with "Ya Khali," recorded with Boutaiba, than marking any kind of radical break with what came before it.Please check out "Ana ma h'lali ennoum" by Fadela (via Youtube). Helpfully (and once again, I am deeply grateful to the Algerians who have posted all these vintage recordings), it also features the jacket of the cassette, which looks like this:Note that the cassette jacket attributes the track is attributed to Fadela and Bellemou. In Arabic, meanwhile, it says Fadela al-Wahraniya, or "Fadela the Orani." The person who posted the track on Youtube writes in his/her notes that she was called Fadela al-Wahraniya at the time in order to distinguish her from the well-known Algerian singer of hawzi, Fadhéla Dziria (1917-1970). The spoken introduction to the song introduces her as "Chaba Fadela al-Wahraniya." The recording then also seems to be one of the earliest uses of the cheb or chaba as a name for rai stars. (Here is another version of the song, from 1985 or 1986.)The quality of the recording as reproduced on the Youtube vid is not very high. But you can hear electric guitar and accordion playing on the song's introduction. Although the cassette is attributed to Bellemou and Fadela, there is no trumpet playing. Perhaps it's Bellemou's "ensemble" who accompanies her. The accordion here substitutes for the gasba. We also hear (although it is not very strong) the electric guitar playing rhythm throughout. The song is also remarkable in that male voices (I don't know whose) respond to Fadela on the chorus. Compared to Bellemou's other recordings from the mid-1970s (at least the ones that are available), the major innovation of "Ana ma h'lali ennoum" song is that it features a female rather than a male lead voice. In that sense, it represents a partial return to prominence of female vocalists, the cheikhat, within the rai tradition. This return of women as featured vocalist in the "rai" tradition also happens to coincide with the cultural liberalization that occurred in Algeria after President Boumedienne (d. 1978) was replaced by Chadhli Bendjedid, who served as Algeria's President from February 1979-January 1992. (Chaba Zahouania, the other big female star of early pop-rai, reportedly started recording in 1981. Here's "Hey Delali" from Zahouania, recorded in 1981 with Groupe El Azhar.)Benfissa, Groupe El Azhar, Frères Zergui, and othersYounes BenfissaBellemou also recorded with another vocalist named Younes Benfissa during the seventies, and according to wikipedia, before he even began working with Bouteldja. The article suggests that Benfissa too, like Hamani Tmouchenti and Boutaiba Sghir, was from Aïn Témouchent or its environs. I have been unable to learn more about Benfissa, but he did make a number of excellent recordings with Bellemou during this period when "pop-rai" was developing. Here's one, entitled "Li Maandouche L'Auto" (He who doesn't own a car), which you can find on the album, 1970's Algerian Proto-rai Underground. And here's another wonderful track from Benfissa, "Derou shour," which features him on both vocals and 'ud.The 1970's Algerian Proto-rai Underground also features tracks from Groupe El Azhar and Cheb Zergui. I cannot find much information about these artists, but based on their available recordings, they certainly are worthy of more discussion and research. According to Hicham Chadly, on the album's liner notes, Groupe El Azhar used to accompany Cheb Mami in the 1980's, before Mami moved to France in 1985. But they also made a number of recordings in the seventies, and were very active on the scene.If you hunt around on Youtube, you can find tracks that Boutaiba recorded with Groupe El Azhar. Here's one, from 1975-76, which I think (based on the fact that maghrebunion reproduced the cover for it -- above) is called "Nar Guedate." Magrebunion also offers up this photo (below) of Boutaiba with the Groupe El Azhar, and he identifies the group's members as: trumpet, Saïd Tmouchenti (not shown); accordion, Bellebna (known as Hammani, RIP); guitar, Kouider; derbouka, Houcine Nahal; tar, Bellahouel. The violin and 'ud players are not identified.I've been unable to determine where Groupe El Azhar were from. But maybe if they had a trumpet player named Saïd Tmouchenti, they were also from Aïn Témouchent? There is also this track, "Ha Galbi Allah I'Ouatik B'Sbor", featuring Boutaiba and Groupe El Azhar. The Youtube vid features another photo of the group, I guess, but perhaps with some different personnel? It's hard to tell. Note that below we see someone on banjo and two violinists. The photo is not clear enough for me to tell what the gentleman standing in back is playing; perhaps it's a trumpet. Note that in both these recordings the ensemble playing doesn't really match the ensembles that are depicted. In particular, the trumpet is a central feature of both outings but the trumpet player only shows up (perhaps) in the photo below. Groupe El Azhar deserve a much larger place in the history of the early development of "pop-rai," perhaps as much as Bellemou and his collaborators do. Their recordings with the Frères Zergui in particular are especially interesting, most notably the wah-wah guitar playing of Hamam Ahmad Zergui. Check out this truly amazing track (title unidentified), featuring "Cheb" Zergui on vocals and guitar.Groupe El Azhar recorded with a number of other artists besides the Frères Zergui and Boutaiba  who were involved in the development of the pop rai scene. Via youtube, one can now find recordings they did with: Gana El Maghnaoui (mentioned above, 1978)Cheb Khaled (1978)Hocine Chabatti (Cheb Hocine) (1977) Chaba Zahouania, "Hey Dellali," 1981But... Cheb KhaledBased on all the research I've done, I was ready to proclaim Bellemou and his collaborators as the founders of modern pop-rai (possibly with the addition of Groupe El Azhar). And to give pride of place to the city of Aïn Témouchent over Oran, which has been conventionally cited as the originator of rai.But then I heard this song, from Cheb Khaled.The title is either "Mahna Sigliya" or possibly "Hala la (Mahna Sigliya Maamda Ala Zega .....)." Two sources claim that it is from Khaled's first album, an EP really, released in 1974, when he was only 14, and named after its title track, "Trig Lycée" (The way to the high school), which you can listen to here. (Sorry, this is the best photo I could find of the "Trig Lycée" EP.)"Mahna Sigliya" is immediately remarkable for its guitar work, which kicks in strong right from the beginning, is shadowed by a sax (at much lower volume than the guitar) and then is joined by an accordeon (perhaps played by Khaled). It has a quick paced beat (bongos and tambourine?), quite a bit quicker than traditional bedoui or cheikha rai. The accordion, sax and guitar play basically variations on the same riff over and over in between Khaled's vocals, but the interplay between them is quite intriguing, as the volume varies and the guitar and sax really go at it. It's really a wonderful track, fully as unusual (compared to what came before) and as compelling as Bellemou's "Mesrara" cuts.The much better known "Trig Lycée" is less wild, but it's the same ensemble (such recordings usually took place in one session), but without any guitar. (Khaled recorded a new version of "Trig Lycée," now called "Trigue Lycee," on his 1999 album Kenza.)I've been unable to determine who played with Khaled on this recording, but it is possible that he played accordion himself. (Unlike in the case of Bouteldja, there is not a shadow of a doubt that Khaled played accordion.) It could be Bellemou and his group. It could be Groupe El Azhar. Or perhaps there were some other musicians active in Oran (where the "Trig Lycée" album was almost certainly recorded) who were working in the same vein as Bellemou. (The Audotopia music blog says it was the Le Cinq Étoiles, but they don't really sound here like a folk band in the Ghiwanian vein.)Kalaloulou meanwhile says that "Sidi H'bibi," Bellemou's first recording, with Hamani on vocals, sounds remarkably like Khaled's "Trig Lycée": "La similitude est frappante: le phrasé, le rythme...seule la voix fait l'écart" (The similarity is striking: the phrasing, the rhythm...only the voice makes the difference). Given that "Sidi H'bibi" was recorded in 1973, the year before "Trig Lycée," Kalaloulou concludes that "Hamani Hadjoum passe pour être le premier chanteur de Raï moderne." That is, Hamani, not Khaled, not Kacimo, not Fadela, was the first "pop-rai" singer. What a pity that I can't find the "Sidi H'bibi" recording, or any photo of Hamani!You can find a truly amazing and invaluable treasure trove of early Khaled recordings here, including Trig Lycée, courtesy ƮᏲҾ дևծιστøρία. 20 albums! And if you are interested in Khaled's earliest material, check out the compilation, Ala Rayi: The Early Years, for some more tracks that sound like they came out of the same milieu as "Trig Lycée" and the "Masrara" material. It's also found at the Audiotopia link noted above.And a note on the term "rai"Boutaiba Sghir, interviewed in the film, Mémoire du Raï, says that both he and Bouteldja combined what he calls "gasba music" (the film translates "gasba" in French as "ancien") and the "modern" in their work. His use of the term "gasba music" rather than "rai" is quite interesting; Boutaiba means here the music of the cheikhat and the bedoui music of the cheikhs, and his formulation underscores how important the gasba was to this music.Some scholars call the music of the cheikhs bedoui citidanisée, or "citified bedoui," by which they mean bedoui (literally, "Bedouin") music done by urban cheikhs who sang and composed in a rural tradition.A youtube video of the Bellemou-Bouteldja recording of Cheikh El Khaldi's "Bakhta" calls this genre, Orani "makhazni." Bouteldja uses the term wahrani-makhazni well, in an interview he gave in 2009. This article about Cheikh Abdelkader Bouras, who was associated with Cheikh El Khaldi, says that makhazni gave "new life" to the bedoui genre, and that it was based on a change of rhythm that permitted easy transition from one qasida, or poem, to another. The ethnomusicologist Boumèdiene Lechlech, in a very detailed account of the bedoui genre, states that bédoui wahrani includes three main forms: guebli, performed without percussion, just the gasba, mekhzni, with guellal and gasba, and bsaïli, performed with only percussion, what he calls a kind of primitive rap. The term mekhzni, he writes, comes from the tribal cavalry, charged by the ruling elite (the makhzen) with collecting tribute and maintaining order. Its meaning then is upbeat music.Bedoui ensemble (screen save from Mémoire du Raï)According to Virolle (La chanson raï), it was not until the 1970s that a genre known as "rai" came into being. The music performed by the cheikhat, she states, was known prior to that time as "elklām elhezal" -- which she translates as "parole leger" in French, or "light, amusing speech." (This in contrast to elklām eljed, which apparently is more characteristic of the melhoun verse sung by bedoui artists.) The name rai trab, country rai, commonly given these days to the music sung by the cheikhat, as distinguished from rai moderne as well as from bedoui, is perhaps then a more modern invention.A cheikha and her accompanists (screen save from Mémoire du Raï)One imagines that recordings like Bouteldja's "Ya Ray," dating from the 1960's, played a role in giving rise to the name of the music, as it became known in the seventies. Note that this Bouteldja track features a violin in addition to the gasba and guellal; note too that the jacket of the recording advertises it as "Chante folklorique oranais" (Orani folkloric singing).It seems that the term "rai" really came into existence with the rise of pop-rai in the seventies.Mohamed Kali, writing in the Algerian daily El Watan ("Querelle des clochettes," July 9, 2011) also states that the term "rai" wasn't used to describe a musical genre until well after independence. (He gives no date for its first use.) It is used, he says, to designate a style of singing in which singer-songwriters refer constantly to their "reason-unreason" in their refrains, which is how he translates "rai." It is the "unreason" aspect of their songs, he claims, that made rai music subversive.More on the place of origins: Oran, Sidi Bel Abbès, Aïn TémouchentIn the past few years controversy has arisen over the place of origin of rai, especially as rai has become a kind of national folkloric institution and the occasion for festivals and tourism (thus far, mostly local). The main rivalry is between Oran and the city located 70 kilometers to the south, Sidi Bel Abbès. Kali says that it is partly true that Sidi Bel-Abbès has a claim on rai, because the music's practitioners were able to find a kind of refuge there after independence, especially after the strictures placed on female performance by the Boumedienne regime. (It's not clear from his account, however, exactly why Sidi Bel-Abbès was so protective of rai.) Some claim that it's Raïna Raï, who were originally from Sidi Bel Abbès, that gave rise to pop-rai when they established their group in Paris in 1980.Kali puts the origins of rai back much further, to the inter-war period. It was the Aïn Témouchent region, he claims, that was the true origin. The city sits at the center of the most intensely colonized and fertile region of colonial Algeria. During the summer harvest season, it attracted thousands of seasonal workers, known as "chouala," from all over Algeria, as well as from the Sahara and from Morocco. Women made up a large portion of the labor, as they were favored by the colons who considered them more easily controlled and manipulated than men. Rai, in its origins, was music sung by migrant female laborer, says Kali. (Recall that the wa‘dât, the saints' festivals held on the occasion of the end of the harvest season, were important performance venues for both the cheikhat and the bedoui cheikhs.)I intend in future to look more deeply into the issue of migrant labor in the inter-war period, and specifically in the Aïn Témouchent region. At minimum, this account helps make sense of the importance of Témouchenti artists like Cheikha El Wachma, Messaoud Bellemou, Boutaiba Sghir and others in the development of modern rai. It's unfortunate that they have not received the recognition they so greatly deserve for their role in inventing this incredibly important genre of music.

The last parts of Stanley Aronowitz‘s Taking It Big – C. Wright Mills and The Making of Political Intellectuals deal with The Sociological Imagination and Mills’s overall impact as a public sociologist, his successes and failures as such. “Mills’s refusal of psychoanalytic interpretations of history and politics and the absence of references to Nietzsche’s conceptions of power and history in his writings were by no means frivolous. His own idea of the politics of truth was anchored in a belief that reason could eventually govern human affairs if only beleaguered intellectuals stepped up to their moral responsibilities. In this sense, he exhibited an abiding faith in the Christian imperative to “speak truth to power,” although, in the end, Mills was less interested in taking power than in abolishing it. For Mills, it was not merely a matter of hectoring, although he did quite a bit of that. In the last years of his life, he was determined to live as a political and public intellectual. Or, to be more exact, he wanted to bring the political implications of critical social theory and commentary into the public sphere. And, perhaps more importantly, he assumed a mission to bring his writing and ideas into the mainstream as well as to audiences in and out of academia in the hopes of creating, despite the odds, a new public, which could be a catalyst for the emergence of a new Left from the shards of a confused and fragmented liberal center.” (196-197). Public intellectuals, though, have always had a hard time in the US (as opposed to Europe where there are more of them, including quite a few hacks though). “Mills held fast to the power of ideas to effect change, but he was not so naïve to believe that a relatively small band of intellectuals armed with a culture of critical discourse could by themselves be more than catalysts. Despite his critique of the massification of the public, he was still in Dewey’s camp and not Lippmann’s, insofar as he retained hope in the reemergence of a genuine public that could decisively affect the course of national politics from below.” (197). This is especially interesting. because, after all, Mills missed the boat on the social movements of his time, such as the Civil Rights (Aronowitz states that Mills found the movement intellectually uninteresting but he supported it), the women’s movement (although he might have already been dead by the time Second Wave feminism really took off) as well as other community-based movements (and he had already pretty much given up on the labor movement). “He regarded the American intelligentsia as totally lacking in “moral courage” and condemned intellectuals for their “moral cowardice” in the face of McCarthyite attacks on civil liberties and academic freedom and for their failure to grapple with the dark consequences of the permanent war psychosis.” (214-215) Nothing really changed here. But in addition to wanting to be a public intellectual, with The Sociological Imagination, Mills also engaged the social sciences in general and sociology in particular, in his own cranky way. “The Sociological Imagination is nothing short of a program for a new social science. It was written in opposition to what Mills perceived as the two dominant tendencies in social science: what he called “abstracted empiricism” and “grand theory.” Even though his main targets are some of the most influential sociologists of the post–World War II era, they are, as he makes clear, representative of social science as a whole. But what is new for Mills is the imperative to return to the classical tradition of Marx, Simmel, Durkheim, and Weber, all of whom, despite their differences, wanted to understand the social structure, its relation to history, and to the individuals who inhabit it.” (216) And Mill’s classical definition: “No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey. What is the sociological imagination? The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. It enables him to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social position.” (216). Everybody is familiar with the concept of “false consciousness”: ““False Consciousness” is a category of the Marxist theory of ideology. Among other things, it connotes the inability of individuals and, perhaps, entire social formations to locate “their position” in the social structure or even their interests. It may mean, for example, that the poor identify with the rich rather than with their own class or that ordinary people patriotically follow their rulers in conducting brutal wars and genocidal annihilations against whole populations or, as Mills was wont to reiterate, to experience their public problems as private troubles.” (216-217) But it is the practitioners of the discipline that bear the brunt of his critique: “He critiques social scientists for their penchant for “abstraction,” for beginning with categories rather than social problems (i.e., grand theory), or for employing methodologies of research that have little or no substantive content (i.e., abstracted empiricism). (…) He is not concerned primarily with correcting these tendencies for the sake of merely reforming the discipline(s). True to the entirety of his writings—beginning with his study, almost twenty years earlier, of pragmatism in the context of the university—he is obsessed with the conditions under which the public can become vital participants in the political sphere. The manipulation of the public—its reduction to a mass of individuals who feel “trapped” in a welter of “private” troubles that for Mills must become public issues—remains the genuine object of the sociological imagination. But this transformation cannot be effected unless and until social studies—including journalism—begin with the premise that the task is to understand social structures in their historical context as the framework within which individuals experience everyday life, however falsely. The claim for “social studies” (we shall see why he wants to jettison the term “science” in this respect) is that they must go back to the future by resuming the world-historical project of classical social theory. (…) “The practice of social scientists has been and continues to be focused on discrete studies of a variety of social problems and phenomena. These studies fail to draw the implications of the results for an understanding of social structure and the “historical scene” within which they occur. (…) “Mills writes: “Specialists in method tend also to be specialists in one or another species of social philosophy. The important point about them, in sociology today, is that they are specialists, but that one of the results of their specialty is to further the process of specialization within social sciences as a whole.” A consequence of this specialization is that it tends to obscure the study of problems of social structure.” (221) How many sections are there in the American Sociological Association these days? “Sociological and political theory have been relegated to specialties within their respective disciplines and, for the most part, consist of histories and commentaries on past social and political thought. With only some exceptions, theorizing about the global present has migrated to Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The United States does not have its Pierre Bourdieu, Edgar Morin, Norbert Elias, Jürgen Habermas, or Anthony Giddens. But Polish, French, and British sociologies have their Mertons, Lazsarfelds, and Parsonses. American positivism and empiricism have become global phenomena in those societies where intellectuals wish to free themselves from the burdens associated with theories, particularly historical materialism, pointing to social transformation.” (221) I find Aronowitz’s assessment a bit harsh here. What of Richard Sennett and Saskia Sassen? (Do they count as Americans or as fully global – highly privileged – intellectuals) I would add though Manuel Castells and Zygmunt Bauman to the list and be more skeptical of Edgar Morin. What of Southern theorists? The general point, though, is still valid when one looks at the training future sociologists get not just in the US higher education system but in Europe as well (even though there is indeed greater tolerance for “taking it big”). “Those who do not address problems of humans from the perspective of social structures and historical contexts that condition their troubles have tacitly or explicitly accepted the current setup and seek only to tinker with it to make it more just. (…) It means “taking it big,” by which Mills meant that social studies must be bold enough to grasp the whole social world.” (239) The last part of Mills’ critical sociology involved culture and its apparatus of production. “Mills left unfinished the project of a comprehensive study of the cultural apparatus. He was less interested in the aesthetic dimension of cultural production than its political salience. Specifically, he wanted to understand the relation of cultural products to political consciousness and the place of its producers to possible social and political transformations. Mills had come to the conclusion that it was not the economy or even self-interest in general that drove contemporary social agents to action or inaction. Mills concluded that in the epoch of what he termed “overdeveloped” capitalism, the masses were moved more broadly by “culture” than by reason. He had become convinced that the cultural apparatus played a central role in reproducing the entire “set-up.” (…) Mills’s invocation of the cultural apparatus, paralleling Horkheimer and Adorno’s idea of the culture industry, signaled that culture was no longer the spontaneous creation of the people but instead was an aspect of the organization and reproduction of social and political domination. If social transformation was at all possible, its protagonists were obliged to understand the process of the production and distribution of the key cultural forms, especially the mass media. Clearly, the implication of his projected study was to argue for a new counterhegemonic strategy of the Left that matched the force of the culture industry.” (242) “However, a half-century after Mills outlined a project for the critical study of the cultural apparatus, dominant disciplines, even the relatively recent domain of cultural studies, lack the grandeur of Mills’s proposal to ask the crucial question of the relation of the cultural apparatus to political and social power. Perhaps the major exception was the Birmingham School—Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, Dick Hebdidge, Judith Williamson, Paul Willis, and Richard Hoggart, among others—whose ethnographies of working-class youth subculture and television analysis were remarkably in sync with Mills. In contrast, many scholars of postmodernism have chosen to follow the broader tendency among the social sciences to confine their research to narrow topics and have failed to connect the implications of what they find to the larger questions of social theory. In fact, among the new generation of practitioners of cultural analysis there developed a suspicion of theory, relegating its main tenets to an outmoded modernism.” (243) I’m willing to bet that Mills would have no patience of postmodernists. They would make him especially cranky. But Aronowitz see a few signs of hope and more reason to stay cranky: “For example, the ethnographer Michael Burowoy’s inaugural 2005 address as incoming president of the American Sociological Association was a plea for sociologists to become public intellectuals. Some listeners understood that the speech was a tribute to the almost forgotten legacy of C. Wright Mills, who exemplified the category. Burowoy neglected to mention Mills, but he did invoke Antonio Gramsci’s idea of the “organic” intellectual—whom he defined as a person closely tied to social movements. Although careful to avoid criticizing his interlocutors, Burowoy’s implicit message to the gathering was that sociologists should enter the public sphere not mainly as experts subservient to prevailing powers but as allies of the agents of change. He argued that sociologists should orient their intellectual work to questions of concern to social movements. Burowoy listed four categories of intellectuals: professional, policy, critical, and public. He called for the “hegemony” of the last two, a project that at best remains a Sisyphean endeavor. Half a century after Mills’s death, public intellectuals dedicated to fundamental social transformation have become a rarity in American political life, along with the exclusion of a radical politics in the public discourse. Journalists are trained to believe they are ideologically neutral and are warned that reporting from a leftist standpoint is a violation of ethics (the right and center perspectives are far less proscribed, however). Despite Burowoy’s plea, the training of intellectuals in universities tends to discourage students from embarking on a dissident path if, in an ever-tightening academic employment market, they expect to obtain and hold academic jobs. Given these pressures, most academics are content to remain teachers and scholars or, if inclined to politics and other forms of public discourse, are obliged to confine their efforts to tweaking the existing setup.” (243-244) This is far from speaking truth to power (and let’s not forget the fiasco of the APA dealing with torture): “The knowledge generated by the policy intellectuals is, frankly, done in behalf of the national, state, and local power elites. Sociologists are among the main sources of social-welfare knowledge, much of it funded by public and nonprofit agencies. Knowledge is dedicated to assisting the state to regulate, in the first place, the poor. Having forsaken theoretical explorations aimed at explaining social events, the disciplines of economics and political science have, with the exception of a small minority of practitioners, become policy sciences. Economists assist and advise governments and corporations to anticipate and regulate the “market,” raise and spend tax revenues, and help direct investments abroad as well as at home. Political science has virtually become an adjunct to the political parties and to the foreign policy establishment; its polling apparatuses are guides to candidates on how to shape their messages and to whom to target their appeals.” (248) This seems to parallel Mills’s view of labor leaders. “Mills spurned the temptation to tailor his skills to the powerful but chose to study them using some of the tools of social research. While many socially conscious colleagues studied “down”—the poor, single mothers, homelessness, for example—Mills insisted on looking power directly in the face.” (248) I think French sociologists Monique Pinçon-Charlot and Michel Pinçon provide a good example of sociology of the elite that Mills would have approved of. In the final analysis, Aronowitz sees Mills in 3D: (1) political intellectual, (2) a theorist of American social structure, and (3) a meta-theorist of the social sciences, especially sociology. Because he died so young, it is hard to tell how successful he truly was in all three respects. It is also hard to see who walks in his footsteps today. Anybody? In Mills’s (and Aronowitz’s) view, it could not be someone from academia. So, where are the public sociologists today? Those trying to take it big? The stars of sociology of globalization? Castells? Bauman? Sennett? Sassen? Stephanie Coontz (albeit in a very specialized way, on marriage and families)?

Sculpture by Chahine Raffoul [This is the second in a series of poems translated from the Arabic of George Nicolas El-Hage’s If You Were Mine. For the first installment, and information about the poet, click here.] Exile My unbelief and sins and faith And black cares watch over me September and March come And I am in my room, collapsing A nightmare wears my sorrows … It comes to me also, comes to me News, my dark one, threw me Into your eyes’ hollow it threw me … Other years I wait December and January … The room swells in my breast I die slowly … The room swells in my breast I live through seasons, unaware, That exile is my country. (more…)

There are places in the world where there are lots of guns, and not just by bad guys. So what does a country awash with guns look like? According to the pro-gun hypothesis, it should be a crime-free heaven, right? Let’s see: “I recently visited some Latin American countries that mesh with the N.R.A.’s vision of the promised land, where guards with guns grace every office lobby, storefront, A.T.M., restaurant and gas station. It has not made those countries safer or saner. Despite the ubiquitous presence of “good guys” with guns, countries like Guatemala,Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia and Venezuela have some of the highest homicide rates in the world. “A society that is relying on guys with guns to stop violence is a sign of a society where institutions have broken down,” said Rebecca Peters, former director of the International Action Network on Small Arms. “It’s shocking to hear anyone in the United States considering a solution that would make it seem more like Colombia.” As guns proliferate, legally and illegally, innocent people often seem more terrorized than protected.” There is a chicken-and-egg issue though: are more guns the product of institutional breakdown and failed state or do more guns trigger institutional breakdown and failed state? After all, if a lot of private people (whether gangs or private security personnel) have guns, one can see how that could have a destabilizing effect rather than a response to destabilization. “Scientific studies have consistently found that places with more guns have more violent deaths, both homicides and suicides. Women and children are more likely to die if there’s a gun in the house. The more guns in an area, the higher the local suicide rates. “Generally, if you live in a civilized society, more guns mean more death,” said David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. “There is no evidence that having more guns reduces crime. None at all.” After a gruesome mass murder in 1996 provoked public outrage, Australia enacted stricter gun laws, including a 28-day waiting period before purchase and a ban on semiautomatic weapons. Before then, Australia had averaged one mass shooting a year. Since, rates of both homicide and suicide have dropped 50 percent, and there have been no mass killings, said Ms. Peters, who lobbied for the legislation.” And these facts will not make one bit of difference. Neither will those: “Guatemala, with approximately 20,000 police officers, has 41,000 registered private security guards and an estimated  80,000 who are working without authorization. “To put people with guns who are not accountable or trained in places where there are lots of innocent people is just dangerous,” Ms. Peters said, noting that lethal force is used to deter minor crimes like shoplifting. Indeed, even as some Americans propose expanding our gun culture into elementary schools, some Latin American cities are trying to rein in theirs. Bogotá’s new mayor, Gustavo Petro, has forbidden residents to carry weapons on streets, in cars or in any public space since last February, and the murder rate has dropped 50 percent to a 27-year low. He said, “Guns are not a defense, they are a risk.” William Godnick, coordinator of the Public Security Program at the United Nations Regional Center for Peace, Disarmament and Development in Latin America and the Caribbean, said that United Nations studies in Central America showed that people who used a gun to defend against an armed assault were far more likely to be injured or killed than if they had no weapon.”