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Local controls of mask (not) wearing
Nurse to other nurses (in a health care setting where nurses and patients must wear masks, but where the “office”…
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Ordering,Disciplining and Schooling
[with thanks to Miranda Hansen-Hunt whose research on disciplining schools triggered this post] PROPOSITION: That the problem with schooling is…
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Getting caught
I do not remember when I started writing about people getting “caught by” when putting into words what I would…
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Wondering about “the [music] of [human beings for the last 60,000 years]”
Recently, I argued, controversially, that one type of “othering” is what distinguishes anthropology from the other sciences concerned with humanity…
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Counterfactuals, alt history, and the anthropological veto
Over the past few days I discovered some things that were somewhat new for me that led me to reassemble…
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Saussure, thought, bodies and expression
September 20, 2021 Last week, I introduced students to the short passage in Saussure on “linguistic value” ([1915] 1966: 111-122…
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Modeling acting bureaucracies
Balzac was one of the first writers to make bureaucracy the subject of serious fiction, notably ..., where he takes…
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A coda on Corona and governmentality
A while ago I mused about the ending of the Corona epoch. Many parts of the world are now in…
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Chimpanzees, culture, diffusion (and ode to joy?)
This post was triggered by something in the New York Times about “Julia,” a chimpanzee in a sanctuary in Zambia…
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Constructing the virus and the defense against it in the Corona epoch
On March 5 2020, I left New York City headed for California. I was to give a series of lectures…
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Musings about possibilities in the scholarly life of a professor of education and anthropologist