Blogging My Life

Clémence Jouët-Pastré was kind enough to invite me to serve on the Brazilian Studies Committee, which met tonight. Met some interesting types. James Ito-Adler was there, ex-oficio. James Cavallaro plans to publish last year forum on human rights as a book, co-edited by Edward Telles. I or someone critical has got to write something for the race part!

Conversation just now with Sarah about her research in the fishing industry. She works in Gloucester on legal anthropology and law issues related to fishing. Recommended a small article in the book To work and to weep: women in fishing economies, edited by Jane Nadel-Klein and Dona Lee Davis on fishermen’s wives association on safety and religious discourses. She agrees that safety in the fishing industry would be lively topic, that there would be lots on rituals and superstitions. We decided the comparison between fishing and trucking might be an interesting and logical one, and she noted that it is also am emic one with the fishing industry, that people move back and forth and see the two domains and related.

Nov. 11, 2004. Presentations by Mark Auslander (Brandeis), David Guss (Tufts), Deborah Pacini (Tufts), Nina Kammerer (Brandeis), Ann Bookman (Sloan School, MIT), and Sally Merry (Wellesley). More a show-and-tell session, mostly for the Tufts program, than theoretical or political issues.
Contact Ann Bookman for advice on an ethnography of affirmative action in corporations.
Sally stressed the various ways public anthropology can be imagined: choise of topic (like Trouillot’s nice argument in “Adieu, Culture”?), direct advocacy, program development, the public intellectual. Brought up issues of critique versus support. Debbie mentioned digital storytelling. Ann Bookman talked about research itself, interviewing, for example, as itself a consciousness raising activity. Nina Kammerer referred to the introduction to the most recent edition of James Peacock’s book The Anthropological Lens for the vague distinction he makes between public and applied anthropology.

Met with visiting scholar Sachiko Tanuma yesterday. She has finished her ethnograhpic fieldwork in Cuba and is struggling with how to negotiate official and utopian visions of Cuba, both in the field and in academia (!). I sent her articles from the Troubles in Paradise class and my thesis. Her husband, Takashi Osugi, is here for the year, and works on Cuba and Trinidad & Tobago. SHe sent me a recent article, which she has published in Japan and is trying get published in English in Venezuela. Saved as ~/archive/articles/text/anuma_sachiko_venezuela_version.doc.