What I'm Doing This Saturday

I'll be at the American Anthropological Association annual meetings in Chicago, and participating in this:

Amahl Bishara is the author of Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics. Rochelle Davis, the author of Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced. Samuli Schielke wrote The Perils of Joy: Contesting Mulid Festivals in Contemporary Egypt. They are all terribly clever. 

I don't know Joanne Nucho, who is a grad student at UC Irvine and "studies the notion of sectarianism in Lebanon and the way in which infrastructures, services and municipal planning create a sense of community as well as the conditions of possibility for various forms of conflict along sectarian lines." Nor do I know Elif Babul, who teaches at Mt. Holyoke and who wrote in a note to Rochelle Davis, that in her dissertation she "worked on the human rights training programs for state officials in Turkey, organized as part of Turkey's campaign for accession to the European Union." You can check out her pubs here. I'm sure that Joanne and Elif are terribly clever too. It should be fun.

#4

The Center for a Public Anthropology (based at the University of Hawaii and run by Dr. Robert Borofsky) recently released a study of social science faculty media impact at public universities. The aim, as Borofsky stated, was to permit the public to assess “the degree to which those who draw on public funding participate in public conversations in return.”

The project involved using the Google News archive from 2006 to 2011 to find how many times  faculty members were cited in any of 6,000 news sources, and then dividing the average number of citations for a school by the percentage of National Science Foundation funding the institution received. Schools then were ranked and, within schools, the political science, anthropology, psychology, economics and sociology departments were also ranked using the same system.

As reported in the University of Arkansas Newswire on October 11, 2013, the University of Arkansas social scientists ranked 5th in the country, out of 94 research universities, behind Rice University, Southern Methodist University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Texas, San Antonio.

As is typical in such cases, the top three faculty at the University of Arkansas were named in the Newswire: Janine Parry and Andrew Dowdle from political science and my colleague Peter Ungar from anthropology. Among departments at the University of Arkansas, political science ranked #1. Anthropology ranked #2.

Curious, I decided to dig a little deeper, and discovered this:

Yep, I was number 4. I didn't make the headlines. Of course, I did have a lot fewer cites than the top 3, but 50% more than the numbers 5 and 6.

It's not that I really care about such things (well, that's not entirely true, if this ranking helped me get a larger merit raise that would be great). The point for calling attention to it is (1) because who else will, since I missed the top three cut-off (the tyranny of trinitological thinking!) and (2) my citations are in all likelihood due to this blog; the fact that I display here my obsession with kufiyas; and that during 2007-2008 there was a "kufiya craze" and a fair amount of media attention to the phenomenon. I was interviewed by various media reporters about the kufiya, most notably in the New York Times.

There is no lesson here, or at least, there is no "model" for anyone who wants a similar amount of media attention so they can impress their college dean. The media attention was really quite random. Moreover, the NSF funding that also factors into the equation has nothing to do with me. Most of it, when it comes to my university, is probably from my anthropology colleagues, especially those in Biological Science. There is no direct line between NSF funding and media impact with an impact on the public.

AAA: Agamben, Governmentality, Sovereignty

I've not posted for awhile because I was at the American Association Annual Meetings last week, and managed to come down with a cold as soon as I returned. I always enjoy going because (1) I get away, usually to a fun city; (2) I get to hang out with a lot of old friends as well as meet new and interesting people; and (3) I am often intellectually stimulated by the papers. Although the positive aspects of going to AAA meetings by far outweigh the bad, a number of things bother me more each year. One is, the meetings are now way too big. I don't know how many thousands now attend, and sessions start at noon on Wednesdays, run as late as 9:45 on Wednesday evenings (but mercifully end by 5:45 Thursday-Saturday), and don't finish until 2 PM on Sundays. Moreover, the discipline is very hierarchical, with the prestige and resources accruing to faculty and students at the "best" institutions. There are too many "superstars." This system makes me appreciate the Middle East Studies Association meetings, where there is no analagous "star system."

Finally, what I noticed more this year than previous years was that grad students from "top" programs displayed a kind of herd mentality in their seeming need to cite the same authorities.
I don't know how many papers I heard that cited Giorgio Agamben, but based on my very unscientific survey, I venture to say that he's the most important theorist for anthro grad students at prestigious institutions to cite. In most if not all instances the citation was appropriate to the subject matter, but nonetheless the sheer frequency of citation was remarkable. Second in frequency was Michel Foucault's notion of "governmentality." Third key word perhaps was sovereignty (I'm a little less confident of this one), of concern of course both to Agamben and Foucault.

Now, I in no way want to argue that Agamben or Foucault or their ideas are unimportant, far from it. Rather, I'm interested and curious about the ebb and flow of the popularity and prestige of particular theories. Four or five years ago, it was Hardt and Negri's Empire. I recall talking to a grad student from Duke at an AAA meeting when Empire was all the rage, and she seemed relieved to hear that I didn't think that the book was essential for her proposed dissertation project. (Again, I have no intention of slamming Hardt & Negri; I've known Hardt since he was a grad student at University of Washington and have great admiration for him.) Shortly before that, if I'm not mistaken, it was Žižek, Žižek, Žižek. (And again, my props to Slavoj.)

It would be interesting to figure out why this happens. Are particular prestigious professors fueling this? Is it a matter of demonstrating one's cutting-edge theoretical abilities in a very competitive field?

(And oh God, was I like this twenty years ago??!)

It was refreshing by contrast to hear papers like Julie Peteet's, on the ongoing protests against the "separation barrier" at the West Bank village of Bil‘in, in which she used Mary Douglas to make sense of how the presence of Israelis at the demos appears to be "matter out of place." Or Avi Bornstein's creative study of emotion among ISM activists in the West Bank, where he referred to long out-of-fashion anthropologists like Fredrik Barth (on ethnic boundaries) without apology. And then there was a "star"-studded panel on "Sacrifice, Sovereignty, and the General Economy," inspired (I think, I was only there for the second half) by Bataille.

There are other useful theorists besides Agamben and Foucault, kids!

Other papers I really liked and learned a lot from were from Paul Silverstein, on Amazigh (Berber) activism (which involves philo-Semitism) in Southeastern Morocco. And just to demonstrate that I'm not inherently hostile to grad students from prestige-laden anthro departments, here are three other papers that I thought were particularly good: Neha Vora (UC-Irvine) gave a paper on South Asian elites in Dubai, from which I learned that those elites accrue many advantages from not having citizenship rights in the UAE, and that they benefit as much as wealthy Dubai citizen Arabs from the super-exploitation of migrant labor from South Asia. I also learned a lot from two papers on Iranian bloggers (whose blogosphere, I found out, is called Weblogistan), by Niki Akhavan (UC-Santa Cruz) and Sima Shakhsari (Stanford). (I wish I could recall specifics, but trust me, keep an eye out for their publications.)