The Gideonse Bible   With the beard? Yeah, you!

Yeah, I know that this feature hasn’t been around for a while. But it wasn’t dead. Just resting. And I’ve come across some doozies that I wanted to share.

• Dick Shweder, one of anthropology’s biggest deals, wrote an Op-Ed in the Times about the current sturm und drung over the US military’s use of anthropologists in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some backrgound: While the ideological battle has been going on for more than a year, the Times took it to the public sphere when it published an article on the “Human Terrain Team.” And the discussion at Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology has been fascinating, and intelligent. Shweder, unlike many of our colleagues, does not rigidly denounce the military use of the anthropologists, writing, “I think it is a mistake to support a profession-wide military boycott or a public counter-counterinsurgency loyalty oath.” Many anthropologists in the US seem to think that goal of our profession is the undermining of America’s cultural and political power in the world, and they see any cooperation with the government as suspect–except when it comes to NIH, NIMH, or Fulbright money, of course. I always thought that the goal of anthropology was the educating people about how other cultures function and why, all for the purpose of spreading peace. If the military hires anthropologists to decrease cultural misunderstandings and unnecessary deaths, then three cheers for the military.
• You can’t make this shit up, Part 1: Elisabeth Hasselback discusses Foucault.
• It turns out that the wildfires were not handled as beautifully as everyone is claiming. At least not for the immigrants in San Diego County. I was forwarded a report from a grad student in the Ethnic Studies Department at UCSD, who had been talking with undocumented workers about the fires and the shelters, and it was horrifying. I want to post the whole thing here, but I haven’t heard back from him about permission. However, it seems that the Times got hold of it, because they have a lot of similar information in a story printed today. The money quote: “Some of the illegal workers who sought help from the authorities were arrested and deported.” And guess what? None of the major media outlets in San Diego have even mentioned this stuff. Shocking, I know.
• You can’t make this shit up, Part 2: New York City construction workers discuss “The Wall,” and not the Pink Floyd one.
• CNN has a fascinating story today about Native American tribes expelling members for often, it seems, specious reasons. There’s tons of money at stake, and the tribal leaders are making sure that their enemies can’t have any of it. And they also want to make sure that people aren’t calling themselves, say, Narragansett just because of the casino money and free healthcare. The situation is interesting to those of us who study identity construction. Naming yourself as a member of a group is not only emotionally powerful, but it can be culturally and economically powerful, too.
• Some new-ish blogs that I’ve been reading, digging: BKNY 2.0 and Hippie Hippie Hoorah. And RIP, We, Like Sheep.
• While he tends to drive me crazy because of his irrational hatreds of people like Hillary Clinton and Michel Foucault, every once in a while Andrew Sullivan writes something so brilliant and insightful, I am in awe. His dissection of our torture regime in his post titled “Imaginationland” sums up the psychological pathology of the Junta in a way I’ve never really read before. It’s quite upsetting actually, and it’s not at all hysterical, like so many pundits are. The money quote: “We may therefore be sacrificing our liberties for a phantasm created by brutality spawned by terror. We don’t know for sure, of course. But that’s what torture does: it creates a miasma of unknowing, about as dangerous a situation in wartime as one can imagine.”
• And Sully linked to a hilarious Foreign Policy story on the world’s worst airports. On the Mineralnye Vody Airport: “Other amenities include snow and ice inside the terminal, feral cats wandering around, and Brezhnev-era copies of the Kama Sutra in the gift shop.”