Weaponized irony

There’s a fabulous little piece in the July issue of Harper’s from Graham Burnett and Jeff Dolven, a couple of professors at Princeton who put together a $650K, 3-year grant proposal for Lockheed Martin to identify irony and weaponize it.  An excerpt:

“Ideally suited to mobilization on the shifting terrain of asymmetrical conflict, inherently covert, insidiously plastic, politically potent, irony offers rogue elements a volatile if often overlooked means by which to demoralize opponents and destabilize regimes…

“If we don’t know how irony works and we don’t know how it is used by the enemy, we cannot identify it…. Without the ability to detect and localize irony consistently, intelligence agents and agencies are likely to lose valuable time and resources pursuing chimerical leads and to overlook actionable instances of insolence.  The first step towards addressing this situation is a multilingual, collaborative, and collative initiative that will generate an encyclopedic global inventory of ironic modalities and strategies.  More than a handbook or field guide, the work product of this effort will take the shape of a vast, searchable, networked database of all known ironies.”

Human Terrain indeed.

Harper’s notes that “Princeton declined to forward [the proposal] to Lockheed.”  It puts me in mind of David Vine’s vow to write a proposal for Minerva funding from the Pentagon to study “how overseas military bases affect relations with other nations, ‘how they’ve damaged our international reputation and how they’ve damaged the lives of people around the world.’”  Anyone know of other examples of this wonderful genre of grant proposal as parodic critique of the funding source?

–L.L. Wynn

Allen & Unwin non-fiction award for writing on Australia

Marlene Lage, one of our former Masters of Applied Anthropology students, just alerted me to a non-fiction writing award from Allen & Unwin. Called The Iremonger, the award offers $10,000 and guaranteed publication (and royalties too) for an idea on a contemporary Australian political, social or cultural issue.  Marlene thought that it would be “a great opportunity for ethnographic writing to expand its audience. They do say it can’t be a thesis itself, but it can be a modified version of one.”

It’s a great incentive for anthropologists (and other academics) who work on Australia to think about crafting their writing to reach a more general audience.  Does anyone know of any similar awards for writing on other parts of the world, besides the University of California Public Anthropology book competition?

–L.L. Wynn

Macquarie is hiring an anthropologist of Aboriginal Australia

Macquarie is hiring again! Please spread the word to anyone who works on the anthropology of Aboriginal Australia. Below is the official job ad, and here’s a link to where you can submit an online application.
________________________________

The Department is seeking to appoint an anthropologist to a teaching and research position in our department where exciting new synergies are developing after a series of fresh appointments. The appointee will teach at both undergraduate and graduate levels, including PhD theses and our Masters degrees in Applied Anthropology, and in Development Studies and Cultural Change.

Essential Selection Criteria: Experience and commitment to fieldwork in Australian Indigenous communities & demonstrated capacity to contribute to the teaching, research and supervision of Anthropology of Aboriginal Australia; PhD in Anthropology or related discipline; Demonstrated research record relative to opportunity as evidenced by peer reviewed publications.

Desirable Selection Criteria: The area of academic specialization is open but could include any of the following fields: Visual Anthropology, Anthropology of Performance, Anthropology of Environment, Health, Art or Law.

The position is available on a full-time (continuing) basis and may be subject to probationary conditions. Selection criteria must be addressed in the application.

Enquiries: Dr Christopher Houston on +61-2-9850-8471 or email chris.houston@scmp.mq.edu.au

Package: From $84,949 pa, including Level B (Lecturer) base salary $71,783 to $85,121 pa annual leave loading and up to 17% employer’s superannuation.

Information on the Department of Anthropology is available from www.anth.mq.edu.au

This appointment is currently governed by the terms of the Macquarie University Enterprise Agreement 2006-2009.

Closing date: 7 June 2009

Embodied ethics oversight

(If you haven’t read Part I of this series of postings on research ethics, it provides important background to this blog posting.)

I have a colleague in the United States who teaches medical anthropology to third-year university students. It’s a popular class that consists mostly of premed students, along with a handful of anthropology majors. The main assignment that my colleague gives these students in this class is to craft an illness narrative. He asks them to go out and interview a family member about an illness they experienced or an encounter they had with a biomedical doctor or healthcare system or alternative medical practitioner. But there are several restrictions that he places on the students: first, they can only interview family members. The other set of restrictions is this: they can’t interview children, the mentally disabled, or pregnant women.

When I found out about this limitation, I was indignant. It was a bit personal: during my two pregnancies, I was expelled from two medical practices for being a “noncompliant” patient, and I am ready to talk anyone’s ear off about the construction of risk and the way noncompliance is punished during biomedically “managed” pregnancies. (Seriously, colleagues. If you don’t want me to talk your ear off, don’t ask me for details.) So even though I wasn’t in line to be interviewed by any of those students, the idea that some other woman couldn’t be interviewed while she was pregnant bugged me.

But personal gripes aside, why was my anthropologist colleague grouping pregnant women in the same category as children and the mentally disabled?

Epic teaching stuff-ups

This week I made the most massive error I have made to date as a teacher.  I run a large first year class called Drugs Across Cultures with about 400 students in it.  On Monday we had the mid-semester multiple choice exam scheduled that’s worth 20% of their grade.  The students had all come in, sat down, and I had given the last instructions for how to hand in the quiz when they were done.  Then I handed out the quiz.  I’d passed out about 100 of the question sheets when someone raised her hand and said, “Umm, why are some of the questions highlighted in bold?”

Yes, that’s right, I printed out 400 question sheets with the correct answers in bold.

I had to cancel the whole quiz, write another one, and have them all take it again (online this time).

I was reflecting on my colossal stupidity with a colleague who told me this great story about another teaching stuff-up.  A man he knew was teaching a large undergraduate class on biological anthropology.  The mother of one of his students was a primatologist and had sent him a film of someone’s field research on gorillas.  He decided to use it in class but hadn’t reviewed it before-hand — it was completely unscreened.  So he went to class and put on the film.  It started with two male gorillas approaching each other, and everyone expected to see a battle for dominance.  But instead, one of the gorillas lied down and the other started performing fellatio on it.  According to my colleague, the gorilla ejaculated spectacularly all over the other gorilla’s face.

Now that’s another good story about giving students a bit more than they are expecting!  I just did a google search for “gorilla film homosexual fellatio” and got to this result, a 2005 Guardian UK article asking “can animals be homosexual?” which says, “There’s a video some researchers made of male bachelor gorillas engaging in fellatio, but it still hasn’t been shown in the US.”  Oh yes it has!

Anyone else have any good stories of epic  blunders they’ve made in their teaching?  Or of mistakes that your teachers have made?

–L.L. Wynn

Making ethics training ethnography-friendly

I’ve been meaning to write about an ethics project I’ve been working on, and now someone else has beaten me to it! Serves me right for neglecting poor Culture Matters for three weeks. I’ll tell you about the project and then I’ll tell you who has scooped me with a critique of my own website.

It all started out because I teach a couple of methods classes and I ask my students to do their own independent research projects. This requires a bit of careful work to secure ethics clearance with our Human Research Ethics Committee. Another time I’ll write about that what that entails. Here I want to describe my solution for giving the students training in research ethics. It became apparent to me that our ethics committee would be more comfortable about the idea of undergraduate students launching into their own fieldwork if they were sure that they’d been trained in research ethics, so I had the idea that I could develop a set curricula to use with every class that I want to send “into the field.”

My inspiration, and nemesis, was the U.S. NIH ethics training module. I had to take it when I was a graduate student, and so I had only dim recollections of what it covered. My first thought was that I could use it as a starting point for my students, but when I went back to look at it, I was shocked at how inappropriate it was for training anthropologists in the ethical dilemmas of ethnographic fieldwork. Like most international ethics codes, its basic assumptions about research are grounded in a model of a clinical (mostly biomedical) encounter. Plus it was full of U.S. regulatory code. Ad nauseum.

A screen capture from the NIH training module covering the concept of “equipoise.” I gotta say, I never heard of this word before.

So at first I thought, OK, it’s a government document so they would probably give me permission to adapt it for my own non-profit, educational use. I’ll just change a few things around, drop every mention of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and replace it with a reference to the Australian National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research, mention “ethnography” a few times, and add some stuff about Australian research.

But the more I played around with the idea, the more I thought it needed something completely new.

April Fools… and overheard: things only an anthro would say

A couple of quick things.  First, did anybody else get pranked by the AAA’s April Fools Day joke?  Unfortunately, it seems like it wasn’t a deliberate joke.  The AAA website said clearly in several places that the call for papers would end April 1st, 5pm EST.  But when I went to put in my abstract at about 2am on April 1st, it got rejected saying that the call for papers had closed at midnight!  Even though the very same page that was telling me that the call for papers had closed also said that the deadline was 5pm. I called the number listed at the bottom of the page and a very annoyed-sounding call service guy (who basically just takes messages all night long for the AAA — I was rather surprised that they had something like this!) said, “No ma’am, this is not a joke.  I do not have time for jokes.”

So a U.S.-based colleague who was organizing our panel called the AAA first thing in the morning.  Some guy lectured to her about how the deadline was midnight.  After she patiently explained, he said he’d call her back.  I reckon they must have gotten a lot of pissed off calls because a few hours later, the deadline had been extended to 11:59 pm on April 1st.

Tidbit #2: Overheard. An e-mail came around this week from an old friend to a group of former classmates. Rachel was wondering which digital tape recorder she should buy for an upcoming stint of fieldwork.  She wrote,

A while back, Sarah recommended the Edirol R-9, which I think she had just bought at the time but hadn’t yet used. I’m wondering if the rest of you have recommendations for recorders you have used, or if Sarah would report to the rest of us how she liked it.

Sarah responded,

I did like the Edirol.  A lot.  It is very very easy to use, I didn’t get confused and accidentally have the thing on standby when I thought it was recording, as happened when I used my ipod to record interviews, and the quality is good.  My only complaint is that the battery door thingie is very tricky and I would imagine it is very easy to accidentally snap off, which would make the machine unusable.  But I was just careful with it, and never had a problem, though if you record in the dark (evening music performances, exorcisms, that kind of thing) and have to change batteries quickly it could be tricky.

Don’t you love it?  “Evening music performances, exorcisms, that kind of thing” — something that only an anthropologist would say!  When we pointed that out to Sarah, she said,

I actually did encounter this situation, though for the most part those settings, the trance/exorcisms were relatively well lit, except when the electricity went out.

–L.L. Wynn

Macquarie Anthro Dept is hiring – 2 more weeks to put in applications!

The Anthropology Department at Macquarie University has extended the deadline to apply for the job of Director of the Applied Anthropology program. The listing is on the AAA website, but it looks to me like there are a couple of mistake. First, the AAA listing says that the salary is in the range of $85,000 a year, but at the level we’re hiring (starting at B1 for those of you who know the Australian system), the take-home pay is actually from about $72,000 Australian, which is the equivalent of about U.S. $46,500 at current exchange rates. I think there are 2 problems: first, the salary didn’t get translated into U.S. dollars, and second, it includes (without saying so) the 17% contribution that the university pays to superannuation. (Superannuation means a retirement fund or something like that — you’ll see it eventually, but not for decades.) Big difference between $85K and $46K.

I’ll look into getting that corrected.

There’s another thing that’s wrong in the listing. It says that “This employer does not offer health insurance benefits to eligible partners” but that’s not right. Macquarie helps all of its international employees obtain permanent residency in Australia which gives you access to free public healthcare, and it will pay for private medical insurance until the permanent residency comes through. (I know, because they did so for my famiy.) Also, residency is available to immigrants’ partners, including same-sex partners.

By the way, there are some people who gripe about the public healthcare system here, but as an American, I just don’t understand why. It’s almost always free and I’ve never been put on a waiting list. When I started getting migraines at quadruple the frequency that I was used to last year, I went to my on-campus doctor who ordered a brain scan. I made an appointment for the next day at the medical imagining center at the nearby mall. I walked over to the mall and combined the quick brain scan with lunch with colleagues. Total cost of brain scan if I did this in the US? A gazillion (U.S.) dollars. Total out of pocket cost here in Australia? $0. And no tumor! The health care system here is pretty good by just about any standard. (Unless you are Aboriginal living in a remote community in the Northern Territory — then you’ll probably die by the time you’re 45.)

So don’t let the $46K salary put you off, because not only do you NOT have to pay for your brain scans, you’ll be living in Australia, so it’s really $72K, and even though Sydney is an expensive city, that’s still enough to comfortably live on. Meanwhile, there are lots of fantastic perks about being at Macquarie that make up for the salary. There is generous start-up funding for new faculty members to do their own research, and a teaching load that is
super reasonable. The department distributes the teaching load on a carefully organized rotating schedule so that everyone takes turns getting semesters off from teaching to just work on research and writing. And it’s a vibrant, energetic, collegial department.

Besides that, we’re in Sydney!  MQ is about 45 minutes away from a dozen beautiful beaches, and an hour away from the first towns in the Blue Mountains, so whether you want to surf or hike or go canyoning or rock climbing or go bird watching or watch footy games or explore the local cabaret scene, it’s a pretty fabulous place to live.

Have a look at the job listing to see what we’re looking for, and spread the word to any colleagues who fit the bill and are considering relocating to Sydney.

Indian dance / anthropology at the Art Gallery of NSW

For those of you who are in the vicinity of Sydney, the Head of Macquarie University’s Anthropology Department, Dr. Kalpana Ram, has been invited by the Art Gallery of NSW to interview artists whose collaboration ‘Rasa Unmasked’ is being presented at Sydney Opera House 13-15 March.  It’s exciting to see the work of an anthropologist being highlighted in this way in a public art space.  Details below:

- Artist discussion: Emotion and South Asian performing arts.
- Wednesday 11 March 5.30-6.30pm
- Centenary Auditorium, Art Gallery of New South Wales
- How has the expression of rasa adapted as Indian arts move across cultures? Join the creators and performers of Rasa Unmasked, a Casula Powerhouse and Sydney Opera House Studio Theatre production for a practitioners’ view on the expression of emotion. Anadavalli, artistic director Lingalayam Dance Company, Dr Alex Dea, composer and ethnomusicologist and Ramil Ibrahim, artistic director Sutra Dance Theatre , Malaysia are in conversation with Dr Kalpana Ram, Anthropology, Macquarie University.

Reviews of Pyramids and Nightclubs: gracefully written, academically constipated

I haven’t made much of an effort to talk up my own book, Pyramids and Nightclubs, which was published at the end of 2007.  I do mention it whenever I can, and my colleagues will all confirm that they are totally sick of me boasting about how I got the phrase “sex orgies” into the subtitle, but I haven’t written here in Culture Matters about the writing and publishing process, even though I keep meaning to get around to it.  I think maybe that’s because by the time you get a book published, you’re pretty sick of the whole thing — I must have written 30 versions of that book — and it’s hard to make the effort to do the PR legwork that you really should do to promote your book.

But I’ve been thinking about Pyramids and Nightclubs recently because I’m mentally working on my next book (thinking about it in the shower is work, right?) and trying to figure out what sort of audience I want to write for.

Pyramids and Nightclubs is a version of my 2003 dissertation.  Anyone who knows me knows that I have a casual style in both speech and writing — in my opinion, one of the great virtues of Michael Taussig’s writing is his liberal use of contractions — and my dissertation was no exception.  (You don’t want to know how many errors there were in the bibliography.) But for the book manuscript (aside from fixing all those errors), I tried to make my writing even more informal, with the goal of reaching a wide audience.  I wrote a chatty preface about my own experiences in the Arab world that led to my decision to work on that particular research project, and I pared down the literature review considerably and embedded it within a discussion of what I and my fellow grad students were reading at the time.  So, for example, instead of just citing Tsing’s In the Realm of the Diamond Queen, I wrote about how I thought that book was the bee’s knees, and how writing about mobility was the cutting edge of anthropology, only to return from the field to realize that everyone was writing about mobility and travel, and to have my dissertation advisor remind me that it was nothing new: Levi-Strauss had scooped the whole hybridity/mobility genre a half century ago with Tristes Tropiques.

Oh, and following Larry Rosen’s advice, I gave my chapters snappy titles.  Whereas chapters of the dissertation were titled “Arab tourism part I” and “Arab tourism part II” (catchy!), the equivalent chapters in the book were “Transnational dating” and “Sex orgies, a marauding prince, and other rumors about Gulf tourism.”

The result was maybe a more accessible book, but possibly also a schizophrenic one. Now I’m seeing the results, as reviews start to trickle in.  So far, academics have mostly been generous.  James Jankowski reviewed the book for the Middle East Journal, and he wrote that

The sprawling title of this work is appropriate; it is a sprawling book.  Yet it is not unstructured.  Its main focus, a comparison of the differing nature of Western and Arab tourism in Egypt and how contact with each group contributes to the Egyptian sense of national identity is original in conception and by and large well executed in practice.  It is also an enjoyable book: the work’s personal tone, its reliance on the vivid narration of Egyptian experiences and of popular opinion as gathered in interviews, and its lavish use of photographs, all contribute to making the work an evocative portrait of contemporary Egypt.

So far, anthropologists have also been kind; the book was named the Leeds Honor Book by SUNTA (Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology), and Robert Rotenberg described it in with superlatives that even *I* wouldn’t use if I were writing an anonymous review of my own book on Amazon:

Gracefully written and theoretically astute, Pyramids and Nightclubs is an extraordinary ethnography… Multi-layered and fabulously textured, the book weaves meticulous ethnographic accounts of cross-cultural encounters with history, images and the anthropologist’s own experiences.

Sounds good, right?  So, speaking of Amazon, how has the general reader taken my attempts to write accessibly?  They’re somewhat less impressed.  Here’s a take from an Amazon.co.uk reviewer:

Unfortunately Wynn’s frequently entertaining text makes for frequent heavy reading because although it is presented as a ‘book’, in reality it is rather obviously still only a slightly retouched innocent and endearing university doctoral thesis by a serious young Texan (?) lady…. In fact the book sometimes suffers from a rather academically constipated style, formally repeating the same things ad nauseam, acceptable perhaps in a doctoral thesis but not in a book with the catchy title and the “bestseller” subtitle she or her editor has chosen.

He ends by judging it a “worthwhile read.”  Four stars!

So what I’m trying to decide is: just how academically constipated will my next book be?

–L.L. Wynn