8.4.2008

Written by the fire at Apgar Campground, Glacier National Park, Montana.

I remember during one of the very first few days at UCLA, my classmates and I introduced ourselves to one another and the esteemed faculty, by sharing a little bit about ourselves, including what we did with the precious free summer we had prior to beginning our graduate studies.

I’d just returned from a month-long road trip with two close friends, driving through nearly thirty-five states, discovering the natural beauties of our nation, and exploring the serpentine streets and alleys of the metropolitan cities. So, when it came my turn to share, I thought back, relived those amazing moments and struggled to summarize those experiences in just a few sentences.

Discovering the beauties of our nation... (Glacier National Park, Montana)

“Two of my friends and I went on a month-long road trip, beginning in Monterey, crossing the nation and entering Canada at Niagara, then falling South to New Orleans, and finally taking Route 66 back home. We stopped along most of the major cities and a few of the more prominent national parks along the way.”

Though hardly descriptive or indicative of the adventure, life I’d experienced, the excitement that coursed through me every night, staring at an unfamiliar ceiling or set of stars, as I wondered where I would be on each tomorrow, my classmates and mentors were still struck by the sheer quantity of time I’d managed to find to get away from “real life” and the distance we’d managed to cover. Connie Hammen, the chair of the Clinical Psychology department at the time, made a comment, a prediction that would be frighteningly accurate, although perhaps not in the manner she’d intended.

“I hope you enjoyed it, because you’re not going to have an opportunity like that for a really long time.”

That really long time was supposed to be a minimum of five to six years, when I would finally earn my Ph.D. More likely though, those five or six years would really just have been the beginning of my illustrious career in academia. Following my hooding, I would no doubt have applied for a two to three year post-doctoral program at another top-tier research university, which would then need to be followed up with a tenure-track assistant professorship of God only knows how many more years of writing grant after grant, publishing study after study, and dining with researcher after researcher at the occasional events.

Or maybe I would’ve called it quits in that long path to the Ivory Tower and instead, found contentment in getting paid by the hour to listen, make reflective comments at very difficult moments, and hope to patch up some emotional, mental wound in a stranger’s life, while the growing, gaping, bleeding gashes in my own soul continued to drain me of the little life, if I had any, left. Maybe I would have still been taking the Zoloft every morning (and not at night, because I’d be awake for hours…), while praying, hoping that death would be swift, unexpected, and that the afterlife I’d believed in would not be real because of the presence of the very hopes of dying I’d harbored.

“You won’t have an opportunity like that again for a really long time.”

It wasn’t five to six years, or maybe even the fifteen to twenty years for tenure. I watch, listen, scour the news with pride as my classmates kneel, one after the other, to receive one of the highest honors a civilian can hold. They (hopefully) love what they do and I’m proud to know these people personally, by name, by their passions, by their unique personalities. I’m proud to call them friends, I’m proud to have called them comrades, even though, no, especially though I may not be with them, among them on that stage, surrounded by some of the nation’s, the world’s most promising, pioneering minds in the study of human mind, emotion, and behavior.

I sit, I stand, I write with great pride, hoping, knowing that y classmates too, are proud of me for the choice(s) I’ve made, the sacrifices I’ve made, the path I’ve followed that is truest, most sincere, to my heart.

It was three years, three very long years before I hopped on board that plane to Tokyo, then the Shinkansen to Kyoto, then a flight to Beijing, then what I thought was a final flight to Seoul, before my current most recent return to San Francisco. Leaving Los Angeles, I left behind a treasury of knowledge and opportunities, readily dispensed by the very minds that had conceived the cutting edge works, and arrived in a foreign country with only the accumulated self of the past and a hope to not start anew, but to start, period. A hope to fill myself with life.

Three years later, I find myself with only that I’d had before: a hope to fill myself with life. Except now, I carry this knowledge knowing that this very journey, this very hope, perhaps my only constant companion, will never leave my side and that I will not want anything but that, until the day I rest.

Global warming is real... Jackson Glacier is merely a shadow of its past now. (Glacier National Park, Montana)

Just one of several spectacular views from the Going to the Sun Road. (Glacier National Park, Montana)

Cheer me
and I shall be cheered,
for no one can tell me
what the sound is
of one tear clapping
in a thunder kiss
applauding the future
---- Douglas Gilbert
(Henry Le Châtelier)

Poetry Books By Douglas Gilbert

...did you ever have that dream where you are locked up in a library overnight? I don't mean the one where you sleep with the attractive librarian, but the one where you spend all night pouring over books, especially those from the ancient collections that usually take you gloves and a special permission to use?

Any Ph.D. student in the Humanities will at some point have pondered to have their snail mail forwarded to a library or an archive because they spend most of their waking hours there. You get used to "your" locker, "your" place to park your bicycle, and "your" working desk. And then there's the whole thing with the adorable librarian from Early Modern, Special Collections... but I digress. When I wrote my MA thesis, there were mornings where I walked up to the counter and my books were already waiting for me because, as said adorable librarian put it, "I recognized the sound of your boots on the linoleum when you entered".

At that point, I should have sat down and pondered getting a life. Instead, I signed up for a Ph.D. and now spend even more time chasing after even more obscure literature. Some volumes I need for my work tend to be "at the book binder" or simply "lost". With older tomes, I even get the occasional  "loss of war". Hours of research later, you then find out that there is one more copy, but it does unfortunately reside in the Communal Archive of *** [insert small, idyllic Southern Italian city of your choice here] that is only open in spring and autumn, and never more than two hours a day - that is, if you can charm your way past the archivar who in winter (construction work) and summer (duh, vacations) works as the local butcher.

Now of course the prospect of a few weeks in an idyllic Southern Italian community sounds fantastic, period, but when you have little money and even less time, it is not really an option.

Thankfully, though, there are libraries and initiatives around the globe that digitalize books that have escaped the clutches of copyright (I'm looking at you, 1927!) and make them available online, thus making research life so much easier. It may be an absolute nerd thing, but I never stop being excited when, for example, I can study a Shakespeare first edition right on my own computer screen.

An obvious start might be GoogleBooks, although their archive is limited, restricted, and tiresome to save for further uses. Most of the things I've been looking for were either not listed at all, or had no previews allowed. Apart from the ethical questions (one megacompany scanning up to a book monopol?), I find GoogleBooks to be of only limited service for scholarly research. If you need the publishing year for a volume, or just want to check on what pages a keyword is mentioned, it works fine (if the book you need is part of the archive). For actual work with texts, I prefer other pages.

One of my absolute favorites is Gallica, the online project of the Bibliothéque nationale de France. While they do of course have a strong focus on French works, there is a lot more to discover. The pages are easy to navigate even if you don't speak French and the works are displayed as single picture scan pdfs with a  preview scrollbar. But behold the button that says "télécharger" (it figures that the French have their own word for "download", as well... baladeur, anyone?) - not only does it create a free pdf download for the entire book you're perusing, no, you can also specify the pages you want exported as pdf ("from x to y"). Divine!

A solid source for all kinds of older texts, classics as well as the occasional oddball, is Project Gutenberg. The downloads are generally in searchable pdf or html format (everyone who ever lost days going over a 400 page-volume in picture-scan-mode to find ONE keyword will appreciate this). The navigation is easy, and if you want someone to read you a bedtime story, there's also an expanding audio book section, featuring classics from "Pride and Prejudice" to "Moby Dick"

The German Gutenberg Project, taken over by magazine "Spiegel", offers mostly html displays of classic German texts and older German translations that are free of copyright. Perhaps not the best source to quote from (no page numbers, for starters), but if you need a quick keyword search, the page works fine. A bit tiresome is the splitting into small sections that forces you to open every chapter in a new window and repeat the search, but I won't complain about a website that lets me browse the complete Casanova Memoirs instead of having me make it through the whole six volumes at the library.

Your research project leans towards the really old and really obscure, like Italian theater history? Chances are that the digital section of the University of Turin has exactly what you're looking for - among others, the complete Metastasio and the musings of Apostolo Zeno that have been out of print for several hundreds of years. All files are picture scans, so no search function, although browsing through these old prints really is worth the time.

Bibliophiles will probably know and love the Treasures in full, courtesy of the British Library. My actual stays there were more than pleasant and their website is completely au par with that impression - the "treasures" (single page picture scans with a preview scrollbar to the side) include some big guns: the Magna Carta, the Gutenberg Bible, the Shakespeare plays and the Canterbury Tales. They also include a large collection of European Renaissance Festival reports, so if you work on 16th century royal marriage festivities, search no more, this is your site.

A classic and true veteran of online digital works is the Italian project Liberliber. I first came across the page when I was working towards my BA degree and the site has since grown to include more and more Italian classics and now even music and an audiobook section. My mp3 player currently reads me Stendhal's "Cartosa di Parma", thanks to Liberliber. The works on the site are focused on Italian classics,  as downloadable txt, html or pdf, from Dante and Aretino over Petrach and Ariost to Tasso and, much later, Manzoni (yes, you just ran out of excuses not to read "I promessi sposi"). They also have a lot of lesser known works - not just, say, the "Orlando furioso" by Ariost, but also the "Orlando innamorato" by Boiardo, something that in the late nineties still took me a lot of bribing and begging so that traveling colleagues would bring a copy from their Erasmus semesters in Italy.

Another veteran among the literature online pages are the complete works of  Shakespeare, courtesy of the MIT. They were already around when I was an undergrad student and when I need to look up a quick quote, it's still my website of choice. The navigation is simple, works are displayed as html sites.

If your interest in  Shakespeare is a little more specific, I would recommend the early folio and quart editions that is being maintained by the University of Virginia. The texts are offered as html, ebook and palm version, in case you like to do some research during your daily commute or while waiting for the plane (make that train) to a Southern Italian village of your choice.

For researchers in early English literature, the university of Oregon offers the Renascence Editions, an "Online Repository of Works Printed in English Between the Years 1477 and 1799". Works are offered as html, in many cases also as pdf files.

You are a musicologist or a musician? The license prices you'd have to pay regularly ruin your ideas for concert programs? Good news, the Petrucci Music Library is back: pages and pages of public domain sheet music at your disposal. The site is structured much like a wiki and features search options by era, composer and setting. I admit that I lost more than a day of research by browsing through "Renaissance, vocal".

On a second and terribly exciting musical note, the Mozarteum Salzburg made the complete New Mozart Edition available online. Once you agree to the license, which is that you will only peruse those pages for your very private pleasure and research, the entire KV opens up to you and you can, again, lose days whistling along to your favorite operas.

And apropos operas, on a third musical note - in case you happen to be working on a paper on, say, the "Rosenkavalier": the score is online, in case you were wondering, thanks to the University of Indiana.

Another big project is the Universal Digital Library, which tries no less than collecting and offering literature worldwide. The drawback is that you need to install their tiff plugin since all works the UDL offers come as tiff files. I haven't worked with the UDL much yet, but the project is definitely worth mentioning.

Anyone in Humanities will, at some point, have to look up or quote some Roman classics, be it in Philosophy or Literature or Sociology. A really good source for many of the Latin Classics, including Cicero and Lucretius, is the Latin Library. It is provided via the Northern Virginian "Classical Christian School" Ad Fontes, but they house the complete Ovid Metamorphoses. And Catull! Perhaps Classical Christian is actually scholastically dialectic...?

And since we are already on the subject of big, classic texts: I recommend the Bibleserver for any quoting, citing and searching when it comes to the Bible. It supports many different languages and in the distinct languages, a variety of different editions. With all the different versions at hand, it does at once defeat fundamentalist ideas of single truths while also being a really handy research tool.

For Bibleophiles, there is also the Codex Sinaiticus, the presumably oldest Bible available. The website still isn't completed, but two more updates in late 2008 and mid 2009 will take care of that. The outlay is so gorgeous it is almost haptic to look at it alone, and it provides a double window with a transcription and a translated version underneath the original. A really good study edition not just for theology students.

Finally, my latest discovery to share with you: the Universities of Strasbourg have a collection of Digital old books (single page picture scans, pdf format) with some really fantastic oddballs (Józef Maria Hoëné-Wronski's writing on mathematics? Not a problem!) and some real classics - if you always wanted to read Galilei's "Cosmic System" (1633), here is the chance to do so.

...this would be my personal digi-treasure chest. How about yours? Have you got more links? - Please share in the comments!

Page 103.

Not much advance since Page 98, but the whole past week I've been out on library safari, hunting footnotes. That doesn't add to the page count (bad for motivation) and doesn't give you a nice trophy fur to walk on for your library or living room, either, but it's necessary work as well.

One more library trip tomorrow (one author misquoting another author... untangling other people's sloppy quotes is a highly annoying task!) and I should be back to page duty.

In retrospect I'm thinking I should have worked like this all along. When I started the project, I spent the first two years exclusively on reading and collecting material to get a grasp of my topic, so I could write in one piece later.

Erroneous assumption.

I could have been reading and researching for a decade and would still have gaps while writing that force me to take breaks and look for literature again.

It might have been smarter to start writing right away, since what you do not know becomes never more apparent than when you are trying to write about it, which then enables you to go on a more focused search for literature.

Back to the hunt.

Their article lays out a framework for understanding how some regimes are unable to resist external pressures to democratize. They use two concepts, linkage and leverage, to describe Western influence on authoritarian regimes.

Leverage refers to the power Western nations have over foreign governments to move towards democracy. Namely, does the West have the carrot or stick to influence the regime in question? Here it could be IMF loans, EU membership, or economic sanctions. It is limited in as far as foreign states have the economic resources to ignore pressure, whether the West has a competing security or economic interest in the stability of the current regime, or whether other Western powers have countervailing interests in the current regime thereby dividing Western concensus.

Linkage is more complex but moves in 6 main spheres: economic, informational, intergovernmental, social, civil societial, and geographic. (The authors note that there may be more) Importantly, the geographical dimension underpins the other five. Linkage helps to import ideas and interests that push for greater democracy. Of course, the closer geographically an authoritarian regime is to a full democracy, the greater the possibility for this transmission. Think West Germany and Czech Republic.

The argument rests upon the idea that if Western nations have both linkages and leverage with a country, then they will be able to push that regime toward democratization. Their conception does a lot of heavy lifting and is able to explain many outcomes. 

But it leaves one wondering; Isn't this a nice guide for regimes in the region under threat from Western coercion for avoiding democratizing pressure? Indeed, could this be a case where marginal regimes tighten control on the areas where they have the ability to do so, and increase the starkness of the paper's underlying result? It would be ironic if a paper examining the ways in which to subvert authoritarian regimes actually helped to cement some, but I imagine that academic influence is not as great as we all hope for, for good or bad.

**East European Politics & Societies, Vol. 21, No. 1, 48-66 (2007).

Academics have been plagued with this problem for years -- professors live in their ivory towers and look down at the world from their 30,000 foot view. I don't want to become that way, and I know a good many professors who aren't like this. I want to follow in their footsteps and make my work be practical. I'm trying to make sure that my research speaks to people who don't know about (or care about) theories in sociology, philosophy, or economics. Instead, I want to link theory to practice by focusing on the "so what?" questions and by framing issues in real world contexts.

Now, that's a lot to expect as a young researcher trying to be both a teacher and a student. I'm still figuring out my own research style and interests -- and I know that the thoughts I have today will (and should) change tomorrow. So, as I go along this path of academic socialization I've got to constantly remind myself of the big picture and ask myself "who really cares about all this?" Maybe then I'll be able to both contribute to my specific field with quality research, while at the same time appealing to an audience who may not have ever thought to care about my topic.

...

...sed nihil dulcius est, bene quam munita tenere
edita doctrina sapientum templa serena,
despicere unde queas alios passimque videre
errare atque viam palantis quaerere vitae,
certare ingenio, contendere nobilitate,
noctes atque dies niti praestante labore
ad summas emergere opes rerumque potiri.

Lucretius: De rerum natura 2, 7-13

...

In late February, I made a plan to finish my dissertation until July. You may remember my despair at the ever-lasting page 89 that insisted to be rewritten in a Groundhog Day time loop, only with the time passing on the side. That was one February 28th.

Today, it is July 1st and it turns out that my plan, uh, didn't quite work.

*curses, foiled again!*

I'm not quite sure where the past four months went, since it's not that I wasn't working. Planning classes, prepping, teaching and consulting. Trying to be a good teacher. Prepping candidates and holding exams. Translating things for supervisor  at gunpoint as "personal favor". Attending boring, but compulsory conferences. Attending more boring, compulsory conferences where paid people make university politics. Organizing, by obligation, a festival I'm not even remotely interested in and which took away weeks of my time. Trying to keep my fiction readers happy. Planning and organizing the classes for the winter semester.

Either way, between late February and today, the dissertation script has grown exactly four (FOUR!) pages. That's page 93, right now. That's one page per month. That's also rather embarrassing. At this speed, I will finish the script in thirteen years.

Mhhmm.

I might consider giving a speedier advance another try. Say, until October. October sounds nice. October also sounds impossible, but since impossible is a word that humans use far too often, why not give it a try.

While I have no idea what my motivation at this point will be except sheer disdain for the concept of impossibility, I refuse to give up, even though I already had to give up on the idea that I'd be able to finish my project in due time, and that I would enjoy writing it.

The main emotion at the moment is fearful frustration.

Second-, third- and fourthguessing every line, always afraid of using a word that, without notice, has suddenly come up new on the assistant supervisor's "death list", is draining. You write a line, you delete it again. You write the line again, differently, then you delete it again. You stare at the snake your screen like a paralyzed rabbit. You do that for a few hours straight, and you stop believing in anything you could possibly write. (note to self: improve level of "frustration tolerance")

And I can't and won't write just "anything", knowing that is it not good enough, or not precise enough, or not elegant enough, or knowing that it is something that I cannot back up by sufficient sources.

Well, at least I haven't corrupted my academic morals yet.

I'm not sure this will be enough to make me reach the "serene heights guarded by wisdom" that Lucretius is mentioning, but they sound like an awfully nice place that hence I'll be trying to reach in yet another attempt.

Status notes with current page numbers to be due on weekends, most likely with a fair share of bitching and whining. I need to keep track after all.

And now I'll post this and then scuttle back to the Eiger north face of Mt. Privilege, contemplating my next step next line. --- Off to work!

...

"But naught
There is more goodly than to hold the high
Serene plateaus, well fortressed by the wise,
Whence thou may'st look below on other men
And see them ev'rywhere wand'ring, all dispersed
In their lone seeking for the road of life;
Rivals in genius, or emulous in rank,
Pressing through days and nights with hugest toil
For summits of power and mastery of the world."

Lucretius, The Nature of Things. Book 2; 7-13
quoted in the translation by William Ellery Leonard, via www.ulib.org

An individual who thinks that racism is merely individual acts of hatred by mentally-ill white individuals does not understand that racism is systemic and pervasive. Racism is not exclusive to the political right and political conservatives, and hatred (explicit or implicit) against a racial group x is not necessary for holding racist beliefs about racial group x. Political liberals and even the political left may harbour racist beliefs that are based on misconceptions* about others' lack of competence rather than hatred. Even people of colour of any political orientation may be racist against their own racial group and other racialized groups because they have internalized the racist belief system that permeates our culture.

If an individual does not understand the systemic problem of racism and believes that racism is about random acts of hatred committed by crazed white individuals, then it is reasonable to infer that she also thinks that terms like 'systemic racism', 'internalized racism', 'racialized', 'microaggression', and 'microinsults' have nothing to do with reality and are academic posturing. If she does not directly experience systemic racism, internalized racism, racialization, microaggression, and microinsults, then she would probably believe that these are merely theoretical constructs invented by academics in ivory towers. If this individual believes that to use such terms is to complicate things, then she likely has a very simplistic and superficial understanding of how racism works. If an individual does not experience microinsults herself and thinks that the idea of 'microinsults' is meaningless academese, then she is merely projecting her own detachment and opaqueness with respect to racism on to the term itself.

That something is 'complex' or 'elusive' to white people does not mean that it is universally complex and elusive to all humans. There can exist things that are experienced at a very basic level of perception by one group of people, yet not be recognized by another group due to the other's lack of experience or lack of conceptual background. For example, East Asian cultures generally perceive umami or xiānwèi as a basic taste, but most Westerners would have to expend cognitive effort to taste it as 'umami'. Moreover, the type of Westerners who would use the word 'umami' tend to be more educated than the general population, but this does not indicate that the concept of 'umami' itself is elitist and academic.

Ultimately, if an individual feels that terms like 'systemic racism', 'internalized racism', 'racialized', 'microaggression', and 'microinsults' have empty referents, it is a manifestation of her aloofness, not the academic's.

The truly solitary researcher, a prisoner of his own self, would in fact have no sense of Self to start with (given the absence of an Other), and could have nothing to research or theorize, let alone fancy him or herself as a researcher or theorist. Real solitude would come from being born and raised in a complete vacuum, that thing we are told nature abhors (and indeed populates with animals and plants, so that solitude in a natural setting is still rendered impossible). And yet critics of the ivory tower would have us believe that this is exactly the kind of social vacuum in which academics exist, there among hundreds of students in their classes, students in their offices, constantly knocking elbows with colleagues, in a crowd waiting to get a spot on the bus, lined up in busy cafes, mulling over the political and economic changes that are reflected within the university, incredible solitude.

I have to apologize for the times I looked critically at colleagues deep in their endless re-readings of Marx, bouncing one theoretical text off of another, mixing and matching and contrasting Derrida and Spivak, and considered the whole enterprise to be a lonely, elitist, divorced-from-reality, kind of activity. "Get out there and do some ethnography why dontcha!" It's what gives us anthropologists a sense of self when we are forced to share a department with theoretical sociologists. It's also fundamentally wrong.

The lone researcher is a social and intellectual impossibility, and all academic work is collaborative. The one who aims to see farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, forcing Bourdieu to "speak" with Foucault, engages in a meeting of minds, in a dialogue. It's just not overtly noisy. But it's still a marketplace, internally noisy, full of voices. And those voices come after a lengthy education, along with socialization, since birth. All writing that results is the product of the weaving of a web of ideas derived from, inspired by, others. No wonder then that notions of collaboration have come into play when revisiting or revising our current notions of what constitutes plagiarism (as discussed here) -- it's a recognition of the fact that all research and writing is collaborative.

So when we proclaim the need for a collaborative anthropology, which assumes a non- or less than or inadequately collaborative past, going as far as producing a journal devoted to collaborative anthropologies, or handbook on collaborative ethnography, what is it that we really think we are doing and achieving, and what are the kinds of values embedded in the projects that need to be made explicit? I hope to cover more of this material in the future, as with everything else on this blog. For now, here are some links of possible interest to readers, which include some full-text items, in no particular order:

Lassiter, Luke Eric. (2005). Collaborative ethnography and public anthropology. Current Anthropology 46 (1): 83-106 ► open access pdf (thank you Luke)

Lassiter, Luke Eric. 2005. The Chicago guide to collaborative ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ► excerpt in html here

Antropologi.info: Collaborative Ethnography: Luke Eric Lassiter Receives Margaret Mead Anthropology Award. 2005, October 29.

Kleinknecht, Steven. (2006). Review of Luke Eric Lassiter, The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. Canadian Journal of Sociology Online. ► open access pdf (thank you CJS)

Savage Minds: Collaborating with Corporations? (John McCreery). 2006, October 8.

Walsh, Julianne and Ty Kawika Tengan. (n.d.). Public positions: Engaging anthropologists. Public Anthropology: The Graduate Journal. ► open access html (thank you PA)

I believe that some might have expected me to answer in the manner of the fictitious quote above.

Thus far, whenever I have spoken of "collaborative" work between researchers and their non-academic partners (because one can also speak of collaboration between researchers themselves) I have tended to present an argument that was only "positive," and by that I mean this was presented as the way to go in decolonizing the discipline, heightening its public engagement, and opening the process of knowledge production to less elitist/"professional" modes. There are a number of limitations, however, that need to be addressed.

One of these is that collaboration is a process, and the process really tells us little about results... except that the results were produced from collaboration. Moreover, collaboration in and of itself cannot take the place of ethics (there can be unethical collaboration -- collaboration between anthropologists and military counterinsurgency has been a dominant topic on this blog; collaboration that aims at producing false data and distorted interpretations designed to win benefits for a particular interest group, and so forth) -- nor does it stand in for a political stance (it is not automatically about liberation and social justice, since of course an anthropologist could also collaborate with very powerful groups, or with less powerful but very violent sectarian groups). So far I am leaving aside what collaboration can really mean, what forms it can take, what are the multiple and diverse activities that could be included under the heading of collaboration. So we have a question to address: if collaboration is simply a means toward an end, an end that could presumably be achieved by a variety of means, then why should collaboration even occupy our attention? Is the question of ends not the more important one?

Some have argued, and will continue to argue, that collaboration is in fact political and ethical. But it strikes me that this is true only if the target of change is a singular one: the role of the academic.

Collaboration is political in the sense that it undermines hierarchy in the production of knowledge, and erodes the walls of the mythical ivory tower, placing the anthropologist among colleagues, consultants, partners, friends. In fact, it can remove the academic so far from the academy, that one can question why the academic is even needed to begin with. Is the anthropologist simply to become an animator, a moderator, and is this not also a "privileged" position to occupy, and to claim? If our role in producing knowledge is so problematic to begin with -- if we are a contaminant -- then why not just dispense with us altogether? Indeed, this is an extreme that I sometimes seem to be endorsing in some of my looser statements. And it picks on the social scientist in particular: does the poet collaborate? Should the poet share in the writing of the poem, every poem? Does the painter paint with his or her hand, or should there be a thousand hands holding the brush, or a thousand brushes perhaps moving at cross purposes? Does the chemistry researcher pause and say, "I wonder if I should ask John Q. Public for feedback on what to do next with these highly unstable elements?"

Some have and will argue that collaboration is ethical -- indeed, some of the current ethical guidelines in anthropology and related disciplines stress the need, the value, for ongoing negotiation, communication, sharing one's writing with those written about. At the extreme, however, this can give a community veto power over a document. And what if I am doing an ethnographic study of a cell of the Aryan Brotherhood, or the KKK, or Nazi skinheads? I would imagine that some would pause at my calls for collaboration in such contexts. So collaboration can seem to be the good, ethical, thing to do...but only if one's research partners are not considered by a significant body of public opinion to be highly questionable on moral and political grounds.

So there can be nothing unambiguously "good" about collaboration.

And what if an anthropologist explicitly and consciously chooses to not collaborate, is it back to the mandate of the fictitious quote above? I can imagine that an anthropologist could come to this decision, consciously, for a number of valuable reasons:

• I need to be independent, so I can speak with some conviction of what I think, or know, to be "the truth"
• The value of my text is that it is not just a transcription of what other people say. After all, we live in an historical and technological setting where more and more people are in the position to say exactly what they want...on their blogs, for example. Once they have done so, is my role to simply repeat, or summarize?
• The value of my text is that it comes from an observer who can think critically, critically not just about wider institutions of power, but also about the quest for power among subordinate groups. If I am forever beholden to the politics of some group, then how can what I say be trusted should I choose to "preach" to the "unconverted"? Is not one valuable feature of the ethnographic text that it was produced by someone who has acquired some personal and prolonged familiarity with a given social situation, to speak knowledgeably, and to provide an alternative reading, an independent one? Is not the value of such a text to be found, not in that it speaks for others who can nowadays speak for themselves very directly, but that it can provide a different reading?

And while I am trying my best to be self-critical about my own cherished assumptions of the value of collaborative anthropology, there is one more issue to be tackled, though maybe not at length right here, and that is: anthropology as not ethnography. Before proceeding, one should note that I have already sung my praises of ethnography on this blog, not that I mean for it to become dogma. I have also written some very critical, sometimes tongue in cheek commentaries about ethnography, such as this one, or that one, or the other one, and then that one. What I want to add here is that we have these two words, these two labels, these two concepts: anthropology and ethnography. I don't believe it is wise to use them carelessly as if they were the same, as if anthropology is built on ethnography, as if all ethnography is inevitably anthropological in essence. Anthropology, for me, is way of speaking about the human condition that looks critically at dominant discourses, and maintains an ultimate concern for "everyday" persons in their "everyday" lives, with a keen emphasis on meanings and relationships, producing a non-state, non-market, non-archival knowledge. (Amazingly this is the very first time that I have been able to say, in one short sentence, what anthropology means to me.)

Ethnography is one means of getting to that end, and collaboration is one means of doing ethnography. But ultimately, I am thinking, anthropology can and should rise above the basic procedures, the inter-personal, the cups of shared coffee, the daily compromises, and do like the poet, the painter, and the scientist with a dream of something better -- to therefore be able to speak to what life is like, could be like, and maybe should be like on this planet.

Although a number of Ivory Towers exist, I’m just going to write about (in my opinion) the three most usual:

• The Conceptual Artist's Tower. The population of this tower tends to believe things are made out of Visio tiny elements without knowing or pondering what exactly implies each little box from a technical perspective. These people make decisions exclusively according to Gant diagrams or Visio schemas disregarding technical concerns. The key to open the padlock of this tower lies in Technical Knowledge. Sometimes the matter is a lack of knowledge and sometimes is just a lack of willingness to learn. For the first, there are cheap medicines: reading books, asking your team and listenning to them carefully (and judiciously). The cure of the second one is harder because it involves a change of mindset.

• The Tech-Geek's Tower. The residents of this technological prison ignore (or pretend to) the reason why things are done and particularly the expected results. They’re actually the opposite of the first tower people, but the actual sickness is almost the same in both cases. The Tech Tower prisoners search blindly the best technical solution regardless of the final product goals. The cutting-edge technology is used just because “it’s cool” and neither cost/money nor time are considered. The master key of this tower is called Business Knowledge. It comes to provide us with a healthy mid-long term vision which is the most useful tool when the designed product is going to face the harsh market reality over years. The point here is: the best product is useless if it hasn’t the right feature at the right market time.

• The Darth Vader's Tower. The lonely inhabitants of this tower think of themselves as legendary leaders while they harshly manage a gang of insignificant programmers-pawns. Unfortunately, praises are seldom heard of these small dictators (particularly among their teams). They could do a good work, but when things get worse they are usually stabbed and abandoned. The rope to escape from this tower is made out of stuff known as Interpersonal/Human Skills. These are the basic skills we use to interact constructively with one another, such as self-criticism, empathy, assertivity, confidence, sincerity, prudence and so forth. All of them make us first of all human beings and afterwards professionals. That’s why leaving this tower is at the same time the simplest and the most complicated goal to achieve.

Software architects who live in any of this tower will unlikely do a good work. Tons of time and talent are needed to get the expertise you need to become a master in business, technology and human interaction. Since I believe the super-professional doesn’t exist, the best way to address the issue is looking for a trade-off which lets you grow lowly and constantly.

________________________________________________________________

En el definen problemas clásicos de los arquitectos: crear estructuras sin ser el responsable de implementarlas, no seguir los requisitos del negocio o, peor aún, no entender el negocio. Este sistema de trabajo es (desgraciadamente) muy común, el perfil de "Ivory Tower Architect" abunda. Gente que ha dedicado más de 10-15 años de experiencia que no quiere aprender nuevos lenguajes pero necesita "estar al día" en un mundo tan dinámico como la informática. Por ello lee y se empapa de información, novedades y tendencias mediante sus revistas y sus feeds RSS, para ser "útil" a su compañía.

El resultado es una arquitectura de libro, muy bien documentada, elegante. Pero que el programador seguramente no entiende, que no considera problemas reales de un framework concreto (que en teoría no existen pero en las limitaciones de la implementación aparecen), que nunca ha sido probada ya que el arquitecto no ha hecho modelos de testeo y que seguramente será incompleta ya que difícilmente el arquitecto, por mucha experiencia que tenga, puede pensar en todo. Y, seguramente lo peor de todo, al ser desarrollada mediante un modelo "no ágil", modificar la arquitectura es sumamente costoso.

La consecuencia final es que el arquitecto en lugar de ayudar a la empresa, causa problemas y agranda el "divorcio" entre los departamentos de la empresa (como el financiero) que quieren usar el sistema y el departamento de IT que no consigue sus objetivos a tiempo. Si eres arquitecto de tu empresa, evita subir a esa torre. ]]> http://civitatedei.wordpress.com/?p=333 Thu, 15 May 2008 23:50:21 +0000 Andrew http://civitatedei.wordpress.com/?p=333 For a long time I have thought so, and I still do. But as I've gotten deeper into theology, sometimes I find myself wondering what the point of a lot of it is.

I have a rule of thumb I like to apply to myself when doing theology: if I couldn't answer the question, "Why should I care about what you are talking about?" to the average person (i.e., not an ivory-tower scholar), I probably should be doing something else.

The connection between theology and ethics has helped me retain confidence in the significance of theology, but sometimes the connection isn't obvious: i.e., what significance is there, exactly, to one's millennial position? In an extended sense, I guess, the way one looks at the direction of history might have some impact on one's behaviour, but sometimes I wonder if the difference each position makes is really too distant to have a real significance. The fact that there has been dispute might be an argument against this, I don't know (people don't tend to continue debating meaningless topics unless there is some ulterior issues involved, it seems to me).

I'm rambling in this post, but I just wanted to bring up that question, and then mention an idea I had recently that might add to the discussion of this question.

My idea is this: I think one could respond to the criticism that the general content of the theology curriculum is irrelevant to ethics by pointing out the limitations of the critic. That is, the experience of any particular individual or group is limited, and thus judgments of pragmatic significance are limited in finality. And if, in fact, God has revealed something to us, would that not be a significant reason to think that that thing is relevant to our lives? Of course, this won't persuade an unbeliever who is asking for the significance of theology, but it should persuade sincerely inquiring believers.

There are many other possible arguments to defend the significance of theology (e.g., that people tend to live out what they believe, that 'we become like what we worship', that wisdom is a virtue to be sought in itself, and even more specific arguments for specific theological doctrines), but I think this one is particularly helpful because it turns the tables on the questioner.

...

The "Complete Experimental Economy" by J.G. v. Eckhart may not describe grad student life, but the title sure fits the bill.

It isn't just work luncheons on fancy congresses. Ever since my funding ran out and looking at my account balance gives me stomach aches (usually while having to pay the electricity bill), I noticed changes in my economic behavior.

...Does any of the following sound familiar?

• You cancel your newspaper subscription, even though it has been your intellectual pride for years, and tell yourself you'll be able to make do with the online version. - Who needs the crossword in the bathroom, anyway?
• You consider letting your hair grow out again even though you dread the look, just to save the money you'd spend at the hairdresser.
• You meet your students for consultation hour in the overcrowded T.A. office (although it reeks of cigarette smoke) instead of at the student café, so you don't have to order a drink.
• You're secretly relieved when a colleague's birthday party is on a day where you have another engagement, so you don't have to spend money on a gift. Also, you're too ashamed to tell the friends with whom you'd go and "split" the gift that you can't really spare the amount of money they can.
• You can't remember the last time you bought yourself an item of clothing (no, wait... that five pack of socks last December?)
• You cancel your own birthday party since, much as you'd love to, this year you don't have the money to host a dinner buffet for 20 people.
• Your dinner plans are pretty much ruled by whatever ingredients are on sale at the supermarket.
• You read books at the municipal library, standing next to the shelves, since entrance and perusing is free, but you'd have to shell out the annual ticket fee to be able to borrow them.

...

Sounds familiar? --- Hm. --- Ph.D. student, right?

...

But then... some of the best things in life are still free.

Like spring.

Concerned about the devastation currently being inflicted on the people of Lebanon and Palestine by the Israeli Military Forces and with the very limited and biased reporting on these conflicts presented by most American media networks, we have organized a teach-in on the UC Berkeley campus in order to give students, faculty, and the Bay Area community at large a chance to gain a greater understanding of these events and to participate in an open discussion on their significance for both Americans and the people of the Middle East.

Although the above description makes the promise for an "open discussion," the panelists did not provide an environment suitable for such discussion. This issue of academia and activism is a delicate and important matter. The image of stuffy professors sitting in ivory towers with only the company of their books is an image many try, and for good reason, to smash. I have learned from my studies of gender and feminisms that feminist scholarship, according to Chandra Mohanty, "is a directly political and discursive practice in that it is purposeful and ideological." The same thought can be applied to a range of academic disciplines. It is important for scholars to acknowledge their personal political beliefs and when asked specific questions to represent their opinions but without preventing students from forming opinions of their own. In this "teach-in" there was no room for such development.

The purpose of this blog entry is not to dispute the content of the presentations. Though, I have reservations about them all with the exception of the moderator Saba Mahmood's. Instead, I’d like to highlight what I consider to be a glaring example of a crisis in academia by critiquing the methodology of one of the panelists.

The name Judith Butler is a staple in my academic repertoire. Her contribution to feminist, gender and queer studies, although controversial, has unquestioningly advanced these fields of study and I for one am a grateful beneficiary. Butler has described herself as an anti-Zionist Jewish American and believes that pro-Israeli groups manipulate academic freedom. Admittedly, this argument might be seen as the mirror opposite of my own, but again, it is not her views I am choosing to critique here but her methods of expressing them.

Butler begins her presentation with the following remarks:

I've been asked to discuss the situation with respect to Israel. I was absent at the meeting which this assignment was made (laughter from the audience). I've not been sleeping very well since that time (laughter from the audience)… I'm in a quandary about how to begin and it would seem that one way to begin is to think about the dominant media representation of events in which Israel is considered as a sovereign country with unproblematic borders and boundaries and that these boundaries were transgressed and there soldiers who were abducted and that Israel in justification breeched those same boundaries in order first to try and receive those lost soldiers and then secondly to try and root out Hizballah, a group described as terrorist who is responsible for that breech of sovereignty and that abduction. It became clear, I think, within days that the first aim, the retrieval of the soldiers, was supplanted by a second aim, the destruction of Hizballah, or the destruction of the power of Hizballah who threaten the national security of Israel.

Thus, the tone for her speech was set. It told listeners outright that she was incapable of presenting this topic in an unbiased way. The academic crisis I mentioned pertains to the politicization of Middle Eastern Studies to such an extent that it is no longer the intention of some scholars to attempt to present events and facts impartially. Rather than encouraging students to think critically about very complex issues by examining the wide range of perspectives and then forming their own opinions, they are told what to think.

It should be the responsibility of academics to try to be honest about how they feel without limiting students. I can empathize with Butler's reluctance to discuss the Israeli perspective. I would also hesitate to present a view from a perspective I fundamentally oppose. However the best scholars are those that can empathize, not sympathize, with their subjects. How else can we possibly understand why people do what they do? Even if something is contrary to my personal belief-systems, I try to understand them. It’s not that Butler is not capable of empathy, she wrestles with Zionism and Israel in her own work, but in a setting whose purpose is to encourage critical discussion she should allow students the opportunity to wrestle themselves. Saying such things as, "I'm in a quandary about how to begin and it would seem that one way to begin is to think about the dominant media representation of events in which Israel is considered as a sovereign country" is a disservice to students. She failed to present the debate.

Butler closed her presentation with a description of "true" Jewish values in an attempt to perpetuate her view of Israel as amoral and fundamentally opposed to Judaism. The bottom line is that this was not what she was asked to present on. These points would be poignant in a different "teach-in" and should be addressed in an appropriate context. But in this situation it just highlights the flippant disregard some scholars harbor toward differing opinions and their hesitancy to step into that risky, uncomfortable place of thinking about a subject from a different perspective, which seems to me to be the best way to continue to challenge and strengthen one's own scholarship. Not doing so and using a panel discussion as a platform to promote a political agenda is not only insulting and irresponsible, but lazy.

Butler alone should not be criticized for her presentation. One wonders why she was asked to present the Israeli discussion if she was knowingly unable to do so without bias. Or, why wasn't another scholar present to foster a more balanced debate? The entire "teach-in" was told from the perspective of one political side. There was no opportunity for a well-rounded, well-represented discussion—this is a failure of academia.

View and listen to Judith Butler's presentation

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1239949151693820357&hl=en]

Let me preface their discussion by noting that the "ivory tower" term--often used in accusing sentences that depict universities as elitist--is not one that is owned by any one political ideology. One can find individuals who fit some definition of political radicalism who make this charge, as well as more conservative types. It is convenient to use the "ivory tower" label in any argument in which the university figures. Marc Bousquet also notes this in his comments on the label as it "signifies all the way around the political clock", a "classic ideologeme – practically un-dislodgeable from any point of view".

In the introduction to their exchange, originally published in Mute, the "ivory tower" concept is immediately targeted as somewhat of an outdated caricature that is not in line with current political economic realities:

Far removed from the clichéd image of the ‘ivory tower', today's universities have been opened to the harsh realities of neoliberal economics: huge volumes of students, extreme levels of performance-geared management, casualisation of employment, and the conversion of students into ‘consumers'. In the name of democratisation and equality, the university has become a cross between a supermarket and a factory whose consumers are also its hyper-exploited labour force.

In line with this thinking, Terranova characterizes the contemporary university as an "open system" that opens out onto the field of casualised labour and "underpaid socialised labour power". (As someone working in a department where almost half the courses, and perhaps most of the students, are taught by colleagues who also suffered their way to a PhD, only to be rewarded with temporary positions and very meager salaries, I am no stranger to this process--indeed, their union is currently on strike after several years without a contract, in a long-standing conflict with a university run like a private corporation, but almost entirely on public funds.) "Networked intelligence" and "mass intellectuality" is how Terranova also envisions the current situation of knowledge production in which universities find themselves.

Marc Bousquet agrees that the university has never been sheltered from commerce or politics, and thus never really was an "ivory tower". He notes that in the U.S. at least 60% of high school graduates have some experience with higher education, and thus one might conclude it has increasingly become a mass product, a commodity with which most are familiar consumers.

The question emerges of how the university can be transformed and directed in a process of engaged social transformation, and whose interests are served in a site where production, reproduction, and consumption converge. If tenured faculty might be classically seen as those possessing the privileges associated with the idea of the "ivory tower", Bousquet observes that their position is somewhat more schizophrenic:

Tenured faculty schizophrenically experience themselves as both labour and management, a contradictory position reflected in US labour law. They also have another schizophrenia of seeking to produce or direct a cultural-material transformation while simultaneously serving capital (as reproductive labour) through the socialisation of a disciplined professional-managerial class.

This observation is not offered as if to somehow whitewash the political role of the tenured, for as Bousquet adds later, speaking of the high rate of unionization among the tenured in the U.S. in terms of "an old-style craft unionism, a labour aristocracy that preserves workplace hierarchy, and has been very much complicit in the perma-temping of the university workforce, preserving their own jobs while selling out the future".

Both Terranova and Bousquet agree--and here this really resonates once again with the situation I see in my home university--increasing numbers of students are themselves temporary workers, who engage in higher education (which some conservative stalwarts characterize as a "leisure" activity) in the hopes of securing better paying jobs. Even in Quebec, with very low tuition fees compared to the Canadian average, the fact remains there is a cost of living that students have to shoulder, since most are independent and self-sustaining. Given the limited job market, or inadequate qualifications, or poor wages, it's not surprising to discover that more and more of our students are seeking work in Montreal's thriving pornographic industry. At this pace, it should not be surprising if students begin to sell their organs to fund their studies. Most end up saddled with debt, a situation with which I am still personally familiar, and credit card companies mount stalls everywhere on campus to seek out students who are desperate from some extra, short term cash. The tuition may be "low", but we have an "emergency food fund" for students. Matters are quite grim now, and there is no promise that the situation will improve. That so many of these students, most I would say, maintain such a positive spirit, remain energetic and committed to their studies, produce so much high quality work and maintain such an active interest is not just a tribute to them, it defeats another set of myths: that of the "dumbing down" of students who are in university so we can "baby sit" them.

While Terranova and Bousquet both seem to agree, and repeat, that there is opportunity for transformation of the university system as a result of these changes, that massification will help to positively transform the social role of the university and open up new sites of resistance, I remain very skeptical about that. Indeed, some of the reasons for my own reticence here stem from some of the features that Terranova herself notes, especially the applicability of

Louis Althusser’s notion of education as ‘Institutional State Apparatus’....And there is no doubt, as Foucault once put it, that the university still partially ‘stands for the institutional apparatus through which society ensures its uneventful reproduction at the least cost to itself’. Sadie Plant used this quote to contest what she thinks is the ‘Platonic’ bias of many pedagogical approaches to higher education which contribute to making the university what Foucault said it was: the idea that knowledge is something that is ‘recalled’ ready made from an original source and then simply transmitted from mind to mind. This is really the uneventful reproduction of readymade knowledges for the purposes of social reproduction.

I may be mistaken, but I believe there is a theme that runs through their discussion that assumes that temporary teachers, i.e., part-time faculty, the "flex workforce" and "temps" they refer to, will be the source of the transformation of the university. As Bousquet puts it:

A big part of the academic ‘labour of reproduction' is the production, legitimation, and policing of inequality. I think academic labour, including organised academic labour, needs to submit itself to the tutelage of more radical forms of labour self-organisation. More radical than the trade union movement, as you say. Mass intellectuality implies a revolutionary transformation in the academic consciousness, faculty especially.

◘ ◘ ◘

Let me close with little side note that may be of interest to independent scholars, it is interesting to see how the Transformative Studies Institute (home of the journal Theory in Action--see the call for papers below), offers alternative arrangements to facilitate research in a system that caters for those with university affiliations:

If you wish to pursue grants without institutional restraints and politics, you can do so as a TSI research Fellow or Associate. We recognize that the traditional hierarchical and elitist journals, colleges, and foundations often do not take adjuncts, non-tenure track professors, independent scholars, and those employed in the less prestigious academy or other organizations too seriously. TSI however believes that there is a significant contribution to be made by all scholars regardless of one’s employment situation or affiliations. This is why we offer legitimate scholars an opportunity to affiliate themselves with TSI as research Fellows and Associates. Upon acceptance, you will be able to use your affiliation with us as your home institution. We will provide you with support, institutional email, letterhead, and other materials. Furthermore, since we do not require exclusive rights to your intellectual work, you are free to disseminate your research through any outlet. Should you wish to have your work published by the TSI we will do so. The TSI will require the customary 10% of the grant funds (commonly referred to as ‘indirect costs’) for the operation of the institute. However, you retain full autonomy with TSI support.

See http://transformativestudies.org/ for more information.

Over his/her professional lifetime, our doctor went from being an inexperienced, passionate, almost amateurish youngster, to being a seasoned, has-seen-it-all, hopefully still passionate leader. But always a doctor.

I was wrong.

At least, I was wrong for my profession. I am a software engineer. And, in software engineering, few people close the cycle as our good doctor did. Of the many young software engineers that start their careers in their early twenties, in my experience, most of them leave the profession to become other things. Managers. Salespersons. Whatever.

Of course, this doesn't happen in research organisations such as universities, because the ivory of which the walls of the tower are made insulates people inside from the maladies of the real world. And I am being only partially sarcastic here; I seriously believe that, in this case, living in an ivory tower is the only way to guarantee that you are kept free from what seems to be one of the stupidest popular beliefs of nowaday's dumb corporate ethics. Namely, that the best engineers must be promoted to become managers.

Do you remember the Peter Principle? It says that people tend to be promoted up and up until they achieve their level of incompetence. Since excellent engineers are excellent at what they do, upper managers may (and often do) think that they deserve better and promote them to middle managers. This move is, in most corporate cultures, seen as a "good" move. You know, more responsibility, managing people, making real decisions. Writing business requirements. A bigger salary. Wow. A good move.

A good move?

Tayloristic management is based on the idea that some people (the managers) are better at knowing what to do than other people (the managed), and therefore some of us are managers and some are managed. This axiom is arguable, but my point here is that being a manager entails a body of knowledge and skills that not everybody possesses. Like being able to write good C# code or knowing how to differentiate a common cold from the SARS, being able to manage people is something that you learn and can be good or bad at. This management body of knowledge does not materialise into your brain the very moment when your boss says "Morgan, you are our best engineer, so I think you should become the team's manager".

Few engineers possess the required knowledge and experience to be good managers, regardless of how good they are at engineering. The skill set is so different that little overlap exists. So, when an excellent engineer is promoted to manager, an excellent engineer is lost and a mediocre manager, at best, is won. Good move? Nope.

In my opinion, excellent engineers should be promoted to senior engineers, and then, if still excellent, to super-senior engineers, or mega-engineers, or engineering gurus, or whatever. But, for Pete's sake, don't turn them into managers!

If you need managers, recruit managers. Train people as managers from the very beginning. Educate them and give them the experience that they will need.

Engineering and management should be two different career paths. The appropriate cross-pollination strategies must be applied, of course, to ensure that managers are not oblivious to the engineering world and vice versa. But, still, two different career paths. And so different!