From Arts (practical), to Life (psychological), to Education (social) in the attempts to understand and analyze, in order to educate…

I am always viscerally skeptical of fads in anthropology. Often, they disappear after only a few years, or move back…

[this was drafted in August 2024 but could not be posted at the time] « Un spectacle extraordinaire, unique au…

[ORIGINALLY POSTED ON FEBRUARY 17, 2024] One of our doctoral students, Ms. Mako Miura, recently challenged me with a question…

[ORIGINALLY POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 3, 2023] I would probably not have gone to see Barbie (the movie) if I had…

From the time when I played “les coboilles et les indiens,” 70 years ago, in the streets of small Southern…

I first mused about the end of the Corona epoch (a.k.a “COVID-19") two years ago. I did it again a…

Half a century ago, when I searched for a catchy title for the book building on my dissertation (1972), I…

September 16, 2022 “Pattern recognition”: inevitable though fragile (and necessarily dis-...ing?) productions on which to base some future action---or not.…

... scholars and other shamans might be as puzzled as two senior professors when they read the title of an…

If a “lived experience” is one that one has, personally, experienced, then I have never experienced COVID (the virus). I…

In recent years, students have heard me wince when they talk about “lived experienced.” “Could there be ‘dead experiences’?” I…

Nurse to other nurses (in a health care setting where nurses and patients must wear masks, but where the “office”…

[with thanks to Miranda Hansen-Hunt whose research on disciplining schools triggered this post] PROPOSITION: That the problem with schooling is…

I do not remember when I started writing about people getting “caught by” when putting into words what I would…

Recently, I argued, controversially, that one type of “othering” is what distinguishes anthropology from the other sciences concerned with humanity…

Over the past few days I discovered some things that were somewhat new for me that led me to reassemble…

September 20, 2021 Last week, I introduced students to the short passage in Saussure on “linguistic value” ([1915] 1966: 111-122…

Balzac was one of the first writers to make bureaucracy the subject of serious fiction, notably ..., where he takes…

A while ago I mused about the ending of the Corona epoch. Many parts of the world are now in…

This post was triggered by something in the New York Times about “Julia,” a chimpanzee in a sanctuary in Zambia…

On March 5 2020, I left New York City headed for California. I was to give a series of lectures…

It would hardly be fish who discovered the existence of water. (Kluckhohn 1949: 11). If we describe a community as…

Or On the ignorant in capitalistic action Like about everyone else I started the week of January 25, 2021, from…

The peak Corona epoch is ending. This may be deemed optimistic if one only listens to the New York Times…

I rarely I find a New York Times analysis that echoes something I wrote. On October 1, 2020, Carina Chocano…

Six months into Corona, I “decided” to get tested for the virus I label 'C19.' I had no symptoms but,…

In my last post, I asked readers to marvel at the multiplicity of institutional responses to similar triggers. It is…

For many weeks, I was struck by the extent to which media like the New York Times, or governors like…

I am not an epidemiologist. Or am I, as an anthropologist concerned with production of human activity and its diffusion?…

To recapitulate: A question like “What time is it?” or an order like “Do no enter!” are to be taken…

Our department decided to improvise a graduation Zoom event. I was asked to say something about “COVID-19” (as it appears…

April 24, 2020 I like to quote Rousseau’s origin myth for humanity: THE first man who, having enclosed a piece…

My earlier posts were mostly about ways to analyze the evolution and spread of Corona as what Mauss called a…

This post is an exercise in imagining what social scientists need to do in order to learn about the spread…

Again, C19 may kill you, Corona closes restaurant. (March 28, 2020) So, what is “Corona”? In my younger days, I…

Corona is neither simply juxtaposed to nor simply superposed over COVID-19. In a way, Corona substitutes itself to COVID-19, in…

Let’s settle one thing first. A virus can kill a body but cannot close a restaurant. Only some people can…

Rancière is altogether optimistic about “ignorant school masters” ([1987] 1999 ). He advocates for a radically “democratic,” non stultifying education…

In my case, and while on the road, about everything I have learned about the virus I learned through the…

This is going to get complex fast, and will take several posts. This is also a development on my last…

The New York Times is a major adult education institution in the United States. Mostly it educates implicitly but, quite…

While looking at archives from my childhood, I found what may be my first “ethnographic” text. It is a few…

I remain surprised by the continuing success of Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities ([1983] 1991). When it is was first brought…

For some reason, my anthropological imagination, these past months, has circled around renewed wonder about that reality indexed by words…

I ended my last post with a sentence about the “body two Others-to-each-other constructed.” In parenthesis I suggested this body…

Today [July 9, 2019]] is one of these exceptional days in Aumage with almost steady rain, interspaced with rumbling thunder…

Those who follow this blog will notice that the last posting was more than a year ago. They may correctly…

Learning with others is, necessarily, a political matter. Thus my insistence on writing about "polities" of practice. Still, it remains…

Should anthropologists pay attention to “memetics” and see if any of it may be useful? Have those in that field…

I paraphrase one of my favorite Garfinkel quotes as “when you screw around, then you get instructed” (2002: 257). The…

Once upon a time culture was everything, even the kitchen sink (Tylor [1871] 1958). And then culture became a “value-concept”…

Recently, Audrey Le successfully defended a most interesting dissertation about “hackathons.” Like me a while ago you may have no…

NOT play does not have rules. It is about making rules, and then not following them whether for resistance of…

Those who know my work know that I am a great admirer of the historian Lawrence Cremin whom I happily…

And researchers who specialize in individuals will never understand humanity (or why psychology is hegemonic in America).

One of the many after effects of Trump’s election has been an altogether astonishing flowering of high fallutin exercises in…

McDermott and I complained about Bourdieu, Foucault, et al., but more for their understanding of the processes of reproduction rather…

Michael Scroggins, in one of drafts of the dissertation he will soon defend, brought out something I do not remember…

And, as we ponder the questions, we must face the fact that philosophers cannot control people, even when they are…

A few times over the past week, I had to face the reality that Lévi-Strauss is mostly summarized as being…

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of one of many field defining papers by Clifford Geertz: “Religion…

Those who follow my work know that I look for evidence (empirical? evidential?) that Bourdieu’s hypothesis about habitus driving (mis-)consciousness…

Imagine a situation (from experience in a small town in Southern France): Person A announces “I do not speak to…

To paraphrase from my favorite quote from Lévi-Strauss on culture (1969 [1947]: 4), the Sagrada Familia stands as “a synthesis…

One must start, not with the apparently habituated adult, but with the suffering (or playing) body amazed at what it…

Experiments by Professor Shafir at Princeton and others have documented how poverty itself leads people to make self-destructive decisions, perhaps…

(Nimuendajû 1942: 17)Last week, I heard a most interesting paper by Oren Pizmony-Levy and Gita Steiner-Khamsi about, of all things,…

Last Monday, Stanton Wortham gave a wonderful talk on his work in Norristown, Pennsylvania.  There he got to know a…

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Could the hegemony of “policy” be coming to an end? For many years state officials, “private” foundations, benevolent billionaires, academia…

In this post, I am doing something somewhat different from the usual.  I am maintaining the order I think I…

After 40+ years of American Anthropological Association meetings, I cannot pretend that they are not familiar.  I registered  in the…

Ray McDermott and Jean Lave once told me that they asked Rancière whether his writing influenced his teaching.  As they…

What is a book about when it is titled The elementary structures of kinship (Lévi-Strauss 1967 [1949])?  For about thirty…

Everytime I introduce my work with Ray McDermott, I echo something he probably says more eloquently than I: “What schools…

Negotiating the institutionalization of robots will not be a rational process, but one more akin to driving through a four…

I should probably say something like: any event lived with (inescapable condition arising in temporality) can be approached both as:…

When the arbitrary occurs (earthquake, food distributed here but not there, diseases imported, new languages added to the mix, etc.)…

This may have been my second surprise after I landed in Port-au-Prince and took a walk between the Hotel Olufson…

So what do people do at major intersections when several avenue intersect with none of the external help one might…

At some point in their career, people who are moving towards being acknowledged as Mds enter what is known there…

In the first few minutes of the conference, Ray McDermott put it this way: “when someone says stupid or mean…

After the end of the February 26, 2015 conference on “‘Applying’ anthropology,” Jean Lave wondered whether we had not “reified”…

Whether this job description is “neo-liberal” (as temporarily label for an epoch following “post-modernism”) or not, it will remain a…

Is the apparent devolution by the “Sovereign” (people, nation, state) of some of its political controls onto alternate “non-governmental” agencies,…

So, one might answer the questions about property, ownership, and control of my expression, with a quip: the Benevolent Billionaire…

I have a doubt: who controls anthropology at the AAA meetings? Is there a spider at the center of this…

1) Before (at home, in the ivory tower) University professors, faced with students planning research, will, at some point, ask:…

Ray McDermott and I were discussing, in our usual meandering way, the possible roots of Dorothy Holland’s work and what…

I fear that my saying anything about Daniela, as a person, might lead some in my audiences to assume that…

So, it is not so much whether the “conscience individuelle” (in its moral or cognitive sense) is full of “vested…

Many will agree that George was “formidable”–both in the American and French (quite different) meanings of the qualifier. He could…

Those who read this blog regularly may remember that I have been writing a paper with Juliette de Wolfe on…

Thanks to Michael Scroggins for telling us about the post by Izani about “Charting territories without maps.” Drawing one’s own…

[my current thinking about the title and rationale for an event the Joint Program in Applied Anthropology at Teachers College,…

Our regretted colleague, George Bond, insisted that our doctoral students start their apprenticeship with us by struggling with Durkheim’s Rules,…

My readers and students know my skepticism about the financial, or human capital, “value” of college education (December 12th, 2012;…

The Hero(ine) fights the centralized state (always represented as urban, decadent, evil, obtuse – see The Hunger Games) in the…

We also need what might be called an "ethnography of the exercise of power" if we are to trace the…

My question for today: is an academic discussion of the production of diversity in its poetic and political contexts the…

The big issue is that experts are not always (mostly?) not aware of their own ignorance about all these matters…

Bias, a point of view, a starting point and an angle of attack, is essential: how else would we chose…

I take the comments about the striking worker of the Lip clock factory as a call for detailed ethnographies of…

Over the past weeks, while teaching Ethnography of education, and in a discussion of research in educational linguistic, I was…

Katy Steinmetz, a journalist for Time Magazine recent summarized “What Twitter Says to Linguists” (Time Magazine, September 9, 2013). Actually Steinmetz…

So, things fall apart (why-ever). As Garfinkel once put it “when you screw around, then you get instructed.” That is,…

One does need to imagine situations, to be shared together by the observer and the observed (i.e. ethnographic participant observation),…

One of my favorite quote from Geertz on anthropology as an experimental science: The “natural laboratory” notion has been equally…

Given any ordered social state (system, pattern, culture, ...), this state will always re-order itself into any number of new…

It is not quite enough to talk about "shared governance" without specifying "with whom" and on what grounds, formally and…

What I am arguing here is that, in the political life of any polity (whether small town or corporation), the…

We need research into the process that make some people fail schools (and much less research on why some other…

What happens if potential students, their parents, and employers, discover that there are cheaper and more efficient ways of producing…

Our students will conduct what I imagine as the fourth generation of our collective work. They, I am quite sure,…

Did the human beings who moved into the plains of Russia where they had to survive on milk did so…

Thus, our scientific task is more aking to physicists disputing “gravity” (islanding, culture) than to medical researchers looking for the…

Today, I am trying something new–at least for me in my place [role?] as agent of a degree granting university…

What we need to ask is why should colleges be given the task of producing workers? Is there any evidence…

Sculpting new genitalia into a human body may be the ultimate in the (social) construction of new realities, the making…

I suspect that Bourdieu’s readers could be assumed to be so well versed in Marxist scholarship that he did not…

I have been imagining titles for a possible book where I would bring together my papers of the last few…

What strikes me now is how much the culture of poverty made sense for the most liberal of concerned sociologists…

So, I would predict (in the Saussurian sense) that no sociologist (economist) can predict how NCLB will end and into…

I am reading this quote from Boas analogically to the work we have been conducting within “societies” (e.g. the United…

Well, I tried.  Check here. Actually, Rancière is well-hidden in this piece behind some of Teachers College's most beloved rhetoric…

Last week, at Lisa Le Fevre’s proposal hearing, we discussed what there might to study in a small Bulgarian village,…

Recently, March 28 2012, I spent the afternoon at the plenary session of an “International Conference” on “Educational Assessment, Accountability,…

New York City found out on February 28 that an elementary school teacher I know well rates a “34 (7-73)…

My entry from March 2 played, very seriously, with the kind of deep play policy makers in the world of…

Stanford offered a class, on Machine Learning . 104,000 students registered. 13,000 completed the course. Most of them must have…

The publishing of individual teachers scores by New York City is a research boon as it allows us to test…

as the live humans scratch their heads to develop a meta-knowledge about the machines (above the everyday knowledge they may…

At the simplest level, the point of having a “judicial” brain is precisely to control and repair what the pre-judicial…

This story is told as one person coming up with an idea, refining it, and then convincing people in his…

What Eagleman never considers is the question of what makes a response more appropriate than another. Early in the book…

Two news item, one from Afghanistan, and the other from Guinea by way of New York City. Both deal with…

In everyday life, at home, “learning” is not a simple automatic matter proceeding below deliberation or symbolic expression. In everyday…

Imagine a new Google service. Imagine that Google, as run by some revolutionary government, traced my queries, adapted its answers…

In brief, everyone, about, can read Wikipedia (and other sources available on the Web). But Wikipedia writers cannot assess what…

... We are talking about entering ongoing conversations about assessment with professionals and political actors of all types and, potentially,…

Given a setting that may be "quite an experience," how might one write a research question to investigate the participants'…

The question Gordon is now asking me to address concerns the possibility of finding different ways to sequence assessments given…

Recently, I happened to watch Martin Scorcese’s documentary on Bob Dylan’s early career.  It is titled “No direction home” and…

Most of us get most of our scientific education from journalists.

In my earlier post about some of my experiences at the 2010 meetings of the American Anthropological Association, I talked…

Producing new cultural orders while riding elevators with redesigned operating methods

We must investigate carefully how people, in their everyday life, find out about the scientific research that is presented as…

how to design new methods for needs assessment and service delivery that takes into account the ongoing education people give…

This is an initial attempt to state simply (I hope) where I am placing my expertise: “Education into matters of…

The first thing to notice is that Lévi-Strauss is embedding two arguments. The first argument starts with a postulate: that…

Ethnography, like most (all?) scientific methods, must initially proceed on the postulate that there is, over there, some “it” to…

One of the most puzzling aspect of facing for the first time G.H. Mead's (and all other pragmatists') consideration about…

In the earlier post, I marveled at Oprah’s pedagogy ... as an anthropologist interested in education. As such I am…

What sort of policies might be established to control the kind of systematic education that is not controlled by experts…

(social) constructions do not "convince" or "make it appear to" individuals; they are, just, that, objects, things, that individuals then…

that essential reality can only approached through signs and in conversations that challenge earlier representations, and thus on the possibility…

First attempts at representing graphically our work on schooling in America

In 1972, Geertz asked “what is it that we, anthropologists, do?”.  He answered, provocatively but not quite rhetorically: “we write.” …

if one can teach oneself about, say, the philosopher John Locke, has one learned anything? How would 'we' know? Does…

on modeling "autism" as a cultural fact, that is as an enabling and disabling resource for all those who cannot…

comments about education, its settings and agents, triggered by a New York Times story about cancer death rates.

On the drifting of interactional orders during a longish sequence of videogame play among four players, as reported by Aaron…

on the relationship between "sex" and "gender" in American law and politics, as distinguished from what it might be in…

I have a question of etiquette (?) that is actually related to Gus Andrews' research.  She noticed a formatting error…

College students using Ritalin to increase their test scores and the implication of this practice as an education for class…

Mar 11, 2009 09:20:41 AM, &&&&&&@aol.com wrote: What does "lol" or "l.o.l." mean? [response:]Laugh Out Loud Rolling On the Floor…

Professor fiddles with computer in full view of about 30 graduate students.  Complains audibly that he can’t get rid of…

Musings about arbitrariness, distributed syntagms, orderings, and trouble