Koyama, Jill Making failure pay: For-profit tutoring, high-stake testing, and public schools. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2010

Constrained possibilities for future research: following people making and dealing with particular difficulties.

in Bali and in Indochina: adapting to a physical setting, transforming it, and dealing with the complexity of what was done by ancestors (or distant contemporaries)

1. Culture as disability
   1. The human production of handicaps with consequences for all
2. Consequences for the governors and the anthropology of the "State"
   1. The dilemmas:
      1. localities,
      2. nations,
      3. empires
3. Focus on difficulties
   1. From "concerns about people" determined by observers steeped in a polity (e.g. applied anthropologiest) TO "difficulties" as revealed to the observers by participation with people
      1. recapturing Boas in Latour
   2. Given a century of theoretical developments, what are the implications of such a shift
      1. For ethnography: A focus on difficulties in everyday lifeor ethnographic writing: the importance of one's rhetoric, metaphors, and conceits and the need to control them.
      2. For addressing the publics of anthropology: from scholars to (colonial) administrators, to the media and through it a more general public of college students, present or future policy makers and politicians.
4. Implications for anthropological research: what to study? The focus on dissention (rather than sharing), transformative or reconstrive political activities (rather than return to homeostatic states): education!
   1. For example: Lansing on sorting out the complexity of rice agriculture in terraces on a volcanic island.
   2. For example: Koyama on sorting out what is possible under constraints imposed by State mandates that themselves evolved as responses to particular difficulties
5. Implications when addressing the publics of anthropology, for example
   1. from Bond and Vincent (1997): anthropologists as:
      1. handmaidens,
      2. social workers,
      3. social critics
   2. for or against
      1. the "aid" and "development" discourses and their practices
      2. the "reform education" discourses and their practices
   3. For ethnographic writing
   4. matters of form and what has become controversial (using Abu-Lughod 1999 [1986])
      1. "The Community" (: 1 and passim) ---> "The local set of people I argue can be treated as a unit for my particular purposes."
      2. How to refer to people in local settings:
         1. "In Xxxx ideology"
         2. Xxxxxs act
         3. of Xxxx society
         4. Xxxx code of honor
      3. how to present generalization (subjects and verbs)
         1. "Despite centuries of contact ... the Xxxxs maintain a distinct cultural identity" (p.42) ---> "... we should pay attention to a form of cultural distinction we will label Xxxx"
      4. how generalizations (subjects and verbs) constitute a theoretical
      1. "... gif ts do not establish relationships; rather they reflect their existence and signify their continuation" (p. 69) ---> this implies an object that is signified in performance (in structural linguistics the gift would be the "signifier" of a signified object)
      2. "kinship ideology shapes individual identity and the perceptions and management of every day social relations." (p. 50) ---> lingering culture and personality?
6. For addressing the publics of anthropology: modes of reporting and participating
   1. Malinowski: details to get at the "natives' point of view"
   2. Geertz: "what other shepherds ... have said" and its interpretation
   4. starting an ethnography of presentations at the AAA meetings: initial indexing
      1. very few papers on details without broad interpretative statements
      2. reports on instances demonstrating the limits of general interpretations (the "anthropological veto")
      3. history of public institutions and public discourses (as exemplified by the papers by Fahni and Hatem in Abu-Lughod 1998)
      4. reports on contemporary public discourses with an emphasis on what is not being said, is hidden, or is attempting to impose an ideology (as exemplifed by most papers in Abu-Lughod 1998)
      5. investigative reporting
      6. evaluation of programs in term of general principles
      7. .....