AU Public Anthropology Conference

Call For proposals

American University's Department of Anthropology
10th Annual Public Anthropology Conference
October 5 & 6, 2013 in Washington, DC

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Faye Harrison, University of Florida

Call for Panels, Papers, Workshops, & Non-traditional Presentations:
"PAC at 10: A Decade of Resistance"
Submission deadline extended: August 15, 2013.

Submit abstracts to: aupublicanthro @ gmail.com or http://www.american.edu/cas/anthropology/public/
All activists, scholars, disciplines, fields, and students are welcome!

Join us at American University as the Public Anthropology Conference celebrates its 10th year of organizing and resisting with academics, activists and communities.

In 2003 the Anthropology Department at American University convened the first Public Anthropology Conference. This year we celebrate a decade of resistance and social justice. The 10th Annual Public Anthropology Conference seeks to reflect on what it means to resist, and the ways in which people are working to achieve social justice(s). Among the questions we seek to answer through this conference are: How has academic and popular resistance to domination and injustice changed our world in the past ten years? Where have our overtures to social justice fallen short and what must change in our analyses and approaches? We welcome your creative submissions on the following ideas, broadly envisioned, and of course your own ideas:

Pedagogy:
How can activists and academics work together to build a more socially just world? Many academics work with activists, or are activists themselves. What works in these relationships and where can those relations be improved?

Community/Action:
What are the challenges/ barriers involved in working towards social justice, and more importantly, how do we overcome them? It is easy to point out where the system is broken, but the challenge lies in formulating a solution. We welcome your critiques and suggestions for how to engage in effective resistance and make social justice a reality.
What does the material world offer us that might help us imagine alternatives ways of being, doing, and knowing? In what ways can we learn from historical social justice movements? The world is constantly changing, and the way that we actively resist must change to, how do we proceed?
How can we move from analysis of perennial concerns like gentrification, housing, and food justice to academically informed collective action?

Collaboration:
How can we work across disciplines, across sectors, across agendas to resist domination and oppression? In what ways do the barriers divide us and facilitate domination? How can academics be more collaborative with one another and with public scholars and community members outside the academy to effect social justice? How can we improve the academic environment to facilitate the work of activist-scholars and students?

These are just a few examples of the kind of papers, panels, workshops, roundtables, posters, and presentations we would like to see, and we welcome your ideas on a variety of topics broadly related to social justice and resistance. Submissions from all disciplines, activist and community groups and others are welcome and encouraged! Please send us your submission by August 15, 2013. Submit to aupublicanthro @ gmail.com or http://www.american.edu/cas/anthropology/public/

 Wisdom of the Elders and the Liberation of Overurbanised Cities

Capitalist war against cities have produced a deadly landscape where citizens have lost autonomy and sovereign.

Beyond Eurocentrism, "The Epistemology of the South" by Santos, and the concept of Bio-Cultural Diversity allow us to redesign our impoverished cities towards the consideration of Public Space as the basis of Food Sovereign.

Our desire is to share this presentation on virtual space; from Andalucía!

Thanks!

A New Geocentrism

In my last post I introduced a new concept I’ve been working on called “geocentric media ecology.” The addition of “geocentric” to “media ecology” is a move inspired by Bruno Latour’s recent Gifford Lectures wherein he stressed the importance of what he called “The Sublunary Matrix” — the planet earth, in simpler terms. In my view, Latour’s aim in highlighting the sublunar dimension of human existence is precisely to re-situate our matters of concern towards the fact that we are not heading for the stars — there is no escape from our earthly drama, at least not anytime soon — and if we are to break with modernity and form an ecological polis we must once again forge a new perspective on human life.
http://knowledge-ecology.com/2013/07/14/a-new-geocentrism/

While the geocentrism of Ptolemy has long since been overturned by Copernicus — an overturning which transformed the relation between human and cosmos forever — we are nevertheless tasked with the reality that the earth still is very much our center. Thus after all of modernity is said and done we end up back where we started, in a new geocentrism. However, the new geocentrism is nothing like the old one: It is not God-given nor certain, and it promises more peril than hope. We are stuck in our geocentrism unable to remove ourselves from the bottom of the giant gravity well we call home. One thing we need, then, is new concepts that help us situate amidst this new geocentrism.
One of these concepts is surely the now infamous term “The Anthropocene,” which suggests that at the same moment we discover the importance of our geocentric existence we discover that our own species is to blame for the sixth mass extinction event in the planet’s history, and the first caused by one of the planet’s own creatures. But another more subtle concept also emerges as a possibility for thinking this new geocentrism, and it has to do with the recovery of a sense of “cosmos” over “universe.” Take for example Ed Casey’s distinction between the two:

The universe is the passionate single aim of Roman conquest, Christian conversion, early modern physics, and Kantian epistemology. In contrast, “cosmos” implies the particularity of place; taken as a collective term, it signifies the ingrediency of places in discrete place worlds. (The Greek language has no word for “universe”; instead, it speaks of to pan “all that is,” “the ALL.”) In its aesthetic being — “cosmetic” and “cosmos” are second cousins via the sharing of aisthesis, that is, bodily sensing — cosmos brings with it an essential reference to the experiencing body that is in close touch with it, takes it in, and comes to know it. The universe is mapped in physics and projected in theology: it is the transcendent geography of infinite space. The cosmos is sensed in concrete landscapes as lived, remembered, or painted: it is the imminent scene of finite place as felt by an equally finite body. (1998, p. 78)

Through Casey’s research we find that the new geocentrism has more to do with a re-newed conception of cosmos —a series of finite, bounded, aesthetic, fragile, and concatenated places — than it does with the modern image of the universe as a “transcendent geography of infant space.” However, while a new geocentrism must recover a sense of cosmos, it cannot abandon the sense of universe, either (too much of our well-being depends upon its ahuman mathematical schemas). For this reason, the new geocentrism integrates cosmos and universe into a new composition whereby one recognizes the infinite, place-less, void of universe, whilst articulating and giving new life to the particularity of felt sense reality inherent to living on this particular planet, and participating in its highly unique history.
A new geocentrism operates at the transecting of planes more different in kind than degree — the earth as a new center of vulnerable emplacement, and the shell from which the transcendental operations of modernity hatches. The term “geocentric media ecology” adds to these concepts by foregrounding the traditional anthropocentric view of media ecology as the study of the ways in which humans modify their environments and affective sensibilities, but also suggests that media ecology has always been a multispecies affair. A geocentric media ecology, then, aims to produce descriptions of the ways in which multispecies entanglements can be brought together in new cosmopolitical arrangements.

Getting a Book Published

How to Get an Academic Book Published

            I am frequently asked by young scholars how to start out in the publishing world.  Usually, the specific question is how to turn a Ph.D. thesis into a book.  The time has come to write down some tips.
            First, the basics.  Publishers want a prospectus.  This is a summary of the book, with special attention to its main points and its distinctive findings and insights.  Different presses have slightly different requirements, which they conveniently specify on their websites.  The general formula is the same:  about four pages summarizing the basic message of the book; quick summaries of the specific chapters; and information on marketing it.
http://www.krazykioti.com/articles/getting-a-book-published/
This last is basic and important—the publishers have to know the details.  First and most important is the target audience.  Who is actually going to read this book?  Interested “laypersons”?  All anthropologists?  Only experts in kinship?  Only experts in Chinese village studies?  What types of students will read it?  Will it be accessible to freshmen, or only to upper-level students, or only to Ph.D. candidates?  Should this book be in every bookstore, or only in specialized bookstores, or only offered online? 
Publishers naturally want to reach the widest possible audience, and you should too, since you have really valuable and important findings to share. Write the book and the prospectus accordingly.
Your prospectus will have to include not only this information, but also the competition.  You will have to list other books with similar content, and often give details on who buys them and how many copies they sell, but the really important question is how your book is different from theirs—why people should buy yours instead of, or as well as, theirs.  Then you will be expected to say where the book should be marketed, what journals would be good places to advertise it, and so on.  This is really important.  My food book Everyone Eats was published by an academic press with little trade-book experience.  It did not occur to them to market it in cookbook stores, gourmet food stores (almost all of which carry books), and places like that, and it did not occur to me to tell them.  I lost probably 50% or more of my potential sales because of that.  If you write a book that potentially has wide appeal, you have to think TV and other media as well as print media.
The best thing is to write a generic prospectus—covering things that all the publishers’ webpages ask for—and send it out as widely as possible.  Saturate the publishing world.  However, so as not to waste effort, do your homework first on who actually publishes the sort of book you are writing.  Academic presses are specializing more and more now.  If you’re writing about Mexico, look first to University of Arizona and University of Texas.  If political ecology, go for Duke University Press.  For Northwest Coast studies, University of British Columbia and University of Washington.  Commercial publishers also have specialties:  Brill in history and other humanistic areas, Edwin Mellen in specialized scholarly books, and so on.  Do not confine yourself to these—anybody may publish anything—but start with the most likely venue.  A corollary is: do not be discouraged if the first 50 publishers turn you down cold.  You may just not be within their specialized profiles.  The 51^st may well see your ms as just what they’ve been desperately seeking for all these years.  Many publishers have series (such as Duke’s political ecology series) and these should be targeted if you are writing in the relevant areas.  Series can suddenly disappear or change focus, so check recent publications and webpages.
Increasingly, book deals are made at conferences.  All the major publishers have representatives at the American Anthropological Association meetings, and many send reps to SfAA, SAA, and other smaller associations.  If you seriously want to publish your book, you have to go to these meetings, bring copies of your prospectus, talk at length to the publishers’ reps about what they want, and drop off a copy of the prospectus with each one who shows any interest at all.  Forget all shame—sell yourself and be persuasive!  You have an ms that you invested a lot in, that you care about, and that you believe in (I hope and trust).  Say so.
If you have a choice, always go with the largest and most prestigious press!  Beware of excessively small presses.  One-man outfits are often desperate for mss. and will cut good deals, but then you get poor marketing—or worse.  A coworker and I once had a book accepted by a good but tiny press—basically a one-man operation.  Things were going well till we started getting strange emails.  Finally one said (roughly) “Are you aliens from another galaxy?”  We had no idea what to make of this until we got a letter saying (more or less), “We are the receivers for ***.  The editor has unfortunately suffered a nervous breakdown and is resting in a mental hospital.  We plan to bring out the books accepted by this press…”—which they did, in a timely and professional manner, but we quickly brought out a second edition with a large, reliable publisher!  I’ve had small publishers go broke on me, editors die or change jobs, and so on.  Be warned.  (Of course, it goes without saying that you do not publish it yourself.  Self-publishing is great for family cookbooks and memoirs, but gets you nowhere in academic publishing.)
Publishers currently want books in the 70,000-100,000 word range.  Anything much over 120,000 words has to be a Blockbuster (capital B) to get much traction.  Such books do, however, exist, and are not even all that rare, so feel free if you have really important data.
Simon Batterbury reminds me that an increasing amount of publishing is now electronic, and e-books are something that must be considered.  Check with the publisher on this.  He also notes that in his home, Australia, academia and publishing are somewhat differently structured from the US, and the same goes for Europe and elsewhere.  The same general ideas apply, but structures and systems differ.
Illustrations are now very cheap to produce, so use lots of them.  But getting permission for commercial ones is another matter, so take good photographs.
One final issue: anything major and important that goes in a published book has to be there with the full permission of the people you are writing about.  You have to get their signed permission, after seriously explaining what you are going to do with the material (i.e., publish it).  Then you should provide the people in question with the fruits of your labor.  Bring copies of the book back to them when it’s published.  I worked hard to get my main work on the Quintana Roo Maya published in Quintana Roo and in both English and Spanish (I would have done it in Maya too if I had found a good translator).  Think seriously about coauthorship and other means of insuring that intellectual property rights are respected.  And—this really should not be necessary, but unfortunately it is necessary, to spell out—anything confidential, or anything that could endanger your consultants, should NOT be published.  I once wound up in an unexpectedly very hairy situation that prevented me from publishing anything for 7 years and prevented me from ever publishing a great deal of the data I got!  Remember, the various anthropological codes of ethics emphasize that your first duty is to the people you work with—not to serve them or argue for them, necessarily, but certainly to protect them by not publishing highly sensitive material, or ripping off material that they want to keep for themselves. 

So much for the grubby business side.  Now to the serious stuff.
First, believe in your work.  If it isn’t what you deeply feel and care about, change it. 
Some thesis committees, with the best will in the world (I hope), really insist on having their personal views, ideas, and citations represented at enormous length in the thesis.  Others insist that you cover the entire history of anthropological theory (or whatever branch of it you are using).  Publishers dread this, and the larger academic presses actually say right out on their website that if you are submitting a thesis book be sure and take out all that stuff first!  So, the main thing to do in turning a thesis into a book is usually trimming down the stuff the committee made you put in, and focusing on what YOU want to put in.
Alternatively, some students are shy about putting their deeply held views and their favorite facts and stories into academic books.  Forget that.  A book is SUPPOSED to be about your deeply held and valued material.  Obviously you have to confine your views to reasonable statements for which you have evidence, and you have to be properly dignified and civil in writing style.  No strong statements about the evils of this or that.  But you need to have enough passion for your work to motivate you to write it and then sell the ms.
That said, the next step is to write for the widest possible audience.  If you are doing the cognitive aspects of mother’s brother’s daughter marriage on the Upper Nowhere River, this may be only 20 people worldwide, but at least write for all 20 of them.  The horrible jargon that polluted anthro in the 1990s is mercifully gone, and not lamented.  Stick to normal English words in their normal English meaning.  (No, “imaginary” is NOT an English noun!  And cultures do not hybridize, they naturally blend; “hybridity” used for cultural matters is a racist term that should be absolutely unacceptable.)  Use six-syllable words only if they are genuine technical terms, not cover terms for ignorance and sloppiness.  (Prime examples of the latter: “neoliberalism” and “globalization.”)  Write in clear English and try to reach all the people who would naturally be interested in your findings. 
Actually, even the Upper Nowhere River marriage lore may be of very wide interest.  Ideally, a piece of scientific or humanistic research is intended to provide the key finding that will unlock a whole area of knowledge, or the key insight that solves a very wide problem.  Maybe the Upper Nowhere case is the criterial case that shows the entire field of anthropology needs to rethink everything.  At the very least, it may confirm one view and disconfirm a rival view.  Such dramatic findings are rare, but they do happen.  One recent case in anthropology was the serendipitous discovery of the Denisovan lineage of humans.  Another was the finding of Göbekli in Turkey, a large, complex site with monumental architecture several thousand years older than such sites were supposed to exist.
However, general, “popular,” Jared Diamond type books are not the way to go unless you’re a Famous Senior Scholar.  Pop books are not respected, and there are reasons for that (see any review of Diamond).  However, they can be perfectly good if done by a seasoned scholar with a lot of perspective on the field.  In general, for a beginning academic, the way to go is a thorough case study, but one with very wide implications that you trace out and spell out in detail, with full awareness of and citation of the relevant wider theoretical and practical literature.  It is also quite possible to do a good short overview book on a specific field or area, like Don Joralemon’s Exploring Medical Anthropology (2004).  We need more books like that.

So, think about what you found, and see just how big a deal it is in the wider picture.  Chances are that it is a very big deal indeed, and you should be seeing it and writing it as a major breakthrough in a large field, not a humble “thesis book.”  Do a good deal of original thinking about this.  Professors often do not teach students to see how important their stuff is.  Alas, some thesis committees seem dedicated to preventing that; they think of students as followers and helpers, mere contributors of bricks to the great building that the full profs are putting together. I am the opposite—I can think of nothing I like better than having my students succeed right off and eclipse me in the field.  It gets my good ideas out in ways I never could have done by myself.  Also it makes me pretty proud of having done well at teaching!

How much of your own experiences and feelings should go into the book?  That depends on the book and what is necessary for it.  There are reasonable limits.  Saying nothing about your experiences in the field is not a good idea; we readers seriously need to know what you actually did, whether it worked out, and how you dealt with issues of objectivity, privacy, confidentiality, intellectual propery rights, sensitivity, and so on.  At the other extreme, an anthropology book is supposed to be about the people studied, not about the ethnographer—unless it’s a deliberate autobiography.  Telling stories about your naïve early field experiences is particularly unworthy; every anthropologist knows about that and has gone through it, and there is no profit in saying it again.  I am always reminded of what the old bear says to the young wolves in Kipling’s Jungle Book:  “Ye need not stop work to inform us, We knew it ten seasons before.” 
In short, write what you feel is necessary, and no more; but if you have to err, err on the side of inclusion, because matters of rapport maintenance, intellectual property rights, and so on need more discussion than they have had heretofore.

In lieu of more extended discussion, let me list a few books (randomly selected—not a complete list!) that I think exemplify the best in anthropological writing—i.e., that are clear, decently written, and make extremely important general points on the basis of thorough but narrowly focused case studies.  (This list runs heavily to ecological anthro, because that’s what I do, but I try for a mix of humanistic, political, and biological studies, and of old as well as new ones.)

Cruikshank, Julie.  2005.  Do Glaciers Listen?  Local Knowledge, Colonial Encouinters, and Social Imagination.  Vancouver:  University of British Columbia Press.

Dove, Michael.  2011.  The Banana Tree at the Gate:  A History of Marginal Peoples and Global Markets in Borneo.  New Haven:  Yale University Press.

Feld, Steven.  1982.  Sound and Sentiment.  Princeton:  Princeton University Press. 

Firth, Raymond.  1936.  We the Tikopia.  London:  George Allen & Unwin.

Gonzalez, Roberto.  2001.  Zapotec Science:  Farming and Food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca. Austin:  University of Texas Press.

Greenfield, Patricia Marks.  2004.  Weaving Generations Together:  Evolving Creativity in the Maya of Chiapas.  Santa Fe:  School of American Research.

Hunn, Eugene.  1991.  N’Chi-Wana, The Big River.  Seattle:  University of Washington Press.

Lansing, Stephen.  1984.  Priests and Programmers.  Princeton:  Princeton University Press.

Li, Tania Murray.  2007.  The Will to Improve:  Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics.  Durham:  Duke University Press.   

McCabe, J. Terrence.  2004.  Cattle Bring Us to Our Enemies:  Turkna Ecology, Politics, and Raiding in a Disequilibrium System.  Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press.

McCay, Bonnie.  1998.  Oyster Wars and the Public Trust:  Property Law, and Ecology in New Jersey History.  Tucson:  University of Arizona Press. 

Mooney, James.  1991.  The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890.  Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press.  Originally appeared in the Bureau of American Ethnology annual report #14, for 1892-93, published in 1896.

Netting, Robert.  1991.  Balancing on an Alp:  Ecological Change and Continuity in a Swiss Mountain Community.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press.

Rose, Deborah.  2000.  Dingo Makes Us Human:  Life and Land in an Australian Aboriginal Culture.  New York:  Cambridge University Press.

West, Paige.  2012.  From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social World of Coffee from Papua-New Guinea.  Durham:  Duke University Press.

on Disaster Capitalism in the Wake of Katrina

For those interested in disaster anthropology/capitalism, I point your attention to a new book by Vincanne Adams:

http://www.dukeupress.edu/Catalog/ViewProduct.php?productid=46576&viewby=author&lastname=Adams&firstname=Vincanne&middlename=&sortewest

She is also author of "The Other Road to Serfdom: Recovery by the Market and the Affect Economy in Post-Katrina New Orleans," Public Culture 24:1 (2012), also published by Duke U. Press.

David

A Colossal Wreck, A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption and American Culture

Dear University Bookstore,

 

I have a very important book to add for my "Doing Anthropology"class that starts in September.

It's "A Colossal Wreck, A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption and American Culture," by Alexander Cockburn, 2013 London:Verso. ISBN 978-1-78168-119-0.

 

Please order this as a hardback. And order it directly from Counterpunch themselves, as it will not be available for some time from Verso, I believe. Here's how to order: 

http://www.easycartsecure.com/CounterPunch/CounterPunch_Books.html

I'm ccing Jeffrey St. Clair and Becky Grant to this message because they can expedite the order.

 

I'm halfway though this book and can see that it will become an instant classic, a testament to a great radical anthropologist. 

 

If you have any questions, please let me know.

 

Best,

Brian

PARADIGMA, Número 15

Queridos compañeros/as,

Como cada semestre os enviamos de nuevo el archivo de la revista de cultura de la
UMA Paradigma. Este número 15 tiene como tema central la fragilidad. Como indicamos
en la editorial,
en este número se presentan diversas reflexiones sobre el sentido de lo frágil y la
fragilidad en el transcurso de la actividad literaria y musical y por extensión de
la artística,
la fragilidad de la ciencia y de la verdad del conocimiento científico, la
fragilidad de nuestra sociedad actual y la de nuestro yo personal.


Podeis encontrar este número en el siguiente enlace:

http://bit.ly/186nB5s

The internet from all species

http://www.ted.com/


** July 10, 2013
------------------------------------------------------------


** Today's TED Talk
------------------------------------------------------------


** The interspecies internet? An idea in progress...
------------------------------------------------------------
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20:01 minutes · Filmed Feb 2013 · Posted Jul 2013 · TED2013

Apes, dolphins and elephants are animals with remarkable communication skills. Could
the internet be expanded to include sentient species like them? A new and developing
idea from a panel of four great thinkers -- dolphin researcher Diana Reiss, musician
Peter Gabriel, internet of things visionary Neil Gershenfeld and Vint Cerf, one of
the fathers of the internet.

Peter Gabriel writes incredible songs but, as the co-founder of WITNESS and
TheElders.org, is also a powerful human rights advocate.

As Director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, Neil Gershenfeld explores the
boundaries between the digital and physical worlds.

Diana Reiss studies animal cognition, and has found that bottlenose dolphins (and
Asian elephants) can recognize themselves in the mirror.

Vint Cerf, now the chief Internet evangelist at Google, helped lay the foundations
for the internet as we know it more than 30 years ago.
Watch now »
(http://assets.tedcdn.com/talks/the_interspecies_internet_an_idea_in_progress.html?utm_sourceewsletter_daily&utm_campaign=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_content=button__2013-07-10)


** Quote of the Day
------------------------------------------------------------
“

I maintain couchsurfing and crowdsurfing are basically the same thing — you're
falling into the audience and you're trusting each other."
Amanda Palmer


** Amanda Palmer
------------------------------------------------------------
Amanda Palmer: The art of asking
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Meet the hidden players of global corruption

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** July 8, 2013
------------------------------------------------------------


** Today’s TED Talk
------------------------------------------------------------


** Charmian Gooch: Meet global corruption's hidden players
------------------------------------------------------------
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14:27 minutes · Filmed Jun 2013 · Posted Jul 2013 · TEDGlobal 2013

When the son of the president of a desperately poor country starts buying mansions
and sportscars on an official monthly salary of $7,000, Charmian Gooch suggests,
corruption is probably somewhere in the picture. In a blistering, eye-opening talk
(and through several specific examples), she details how global corruption trackers
follow the money -- to some surprisingly familiar faces.

Charmian Gooch is co-founder of Global Witness (http://www.globalwitness.org/) .
Watch now »
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** Quote of the Day
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Reason helps us to understand that other people, wherever they are, are like us,
that they can suffer as we can. … Reason is not just some neutral tool to help you
get whatever you want. It also helps us to put perspective on our situation."
Peter Singer


** Peter Singer
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Peter Singer: The why and how of effective altruism
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Rupert Sheldrake - The Science Delusion BANNED TED TALK

Guess I'm old-fashioned re science; got most of my sci edu in the 50s & 60s.  The scientific "dogmas" he lists sound okay to me, at least as working hypotheses; the Newtonian world still works pretty well for most physics and engineering, etc.  It does seem, as the TED folks claim, his talk crosses into pseudoscience and was therefore banned.  But I don't have the expertise to make that call.

I can see Sheldrake is striving, for one, to rebutt Richard Dawkins of THE GOD DELUSION fame.......whom I've been rebutting ever since THE SELFISH GENE came out, but as an anthropologist, not a religious person.

So I'm not, as I think most anthropologists are not, a reductionist.  And in agreement with Sheldrake, I don't think mind=brain.

Beyond that, as a religious person who has taught on religion and the sociology & anthro of religion, I would prefer simply to explain it this way:  Science is very good at what it does, but it can only deal with the empirically known and knowable world, and that's its strength.  Science (like magic) is a belief system, not a value system, tho scientism would be a value system,  perhaps in danger of falling into dogmas, as Sheldrake senses. 

Religion, OTOH, is both a belief and value system, and it covers both the empirically known/knowable and the unknown/unknowable -- the seen and the unseen, as the Credo suggests.  It is sort of a totality or total all-encompassing approach to the material & spiritual world that goes well beyond science.

Now what is interesting is that religion is a human, sociocultural creation -- involving a world view and ethos, which as Geertz nicely points out reinforce one another. 

Social sciences qua sciences can only study the empirical world (incl cultural creations, like religion).  My own neo-Parsonian approach is non-deterministic and includes the impact of the all pervasive/interpenetrating environmental, biological, psychological, social, and cultural dimenisons, as analytical, not concrete distinctions.  Which is perhaps why I think mind cannot be reduced to the brain, or even anything psychologists might come up with within their narrow field.

However, as a religious person I also conceive of a mostly unknown/unknowable "spiritual" dimension, all-pervasive interpenetrating -- not to be confused with "religion" (which is a human creation, even if "inspired" by God and mystical experiences).  I think the spiritual has something to do with the totality Bellah speaks of; it has its own "divine economy" and makes its own sense, of which we might only get tiny glimpses, IFF we are totally open to it, tho it remains pretty much incomprehensible, as in the finite trying to grasp the infinite.  This spiritual dimension goes beyond the purview of sciences and social sciences and is not what we social scientists study, tho it is an elusive topic for theology.

I think my concept of the spiritual dimension goes well beyond what Sheldrake had in mind, bec there will never be any science that can encapsulate it, so my take on Sheldrake's banned TED talk is that he's beating around the God-flaming bush.  Almost as if he's trying to make science become religion.  And if so, then he has failed just as badly as Dawkins failed.

Lynn
 

---

Date: Sun, 7 Jul 2013 12:22:53 -0400
From: mckenna193@AOL.COM
Subject: Rupert Sheldrake - The Science Delusion BANNED TED TALK
To: EANTH-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU

Telepathy, the new physics and radical anthropology. . .

by a formally non-anthropologist (who quotes many top anthropologists like Daniel Moerman)

Rupert Sheldrake - The Science Delusion BANNED TED TALK

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKHUaNAxsTg

Comments welcome.

BMcK



FROM JOUTUBE:

Publicado el 15/03/2013

Re-uploaded as TED have decided to censor Rupert and remove this video from the TEDx youtube channel. Follow this link for TED's statement on the matter and Dr. Sheldrake's response: http://blog.ted.com/2013/03/14/open-f...

If anyone would like to prepare a transcript or caption file in any language so non-English speakers or the deaf and hard of hearing can enjoy this talk, please do so and I will be happy to upload it. Just PM me. Or the video is embedded on the Amara project website, so you can add subtitles there at: http://tinyurl.com/bwexn5q

RUPERT SHELDRAKE, Ph.D. (born 28 June 1942) is a biologist and author of more than 80 scientific papers and ten books. A former Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he studied natural sciences at Cambridge University, where he was a Scholar of Clare College, took a double first class honours degree and was awarded the University Botany Prize. He then studied philosophy and history of science at Harvard University, where he was a Frank Knox Fellow, before returning to Cambridge, where he took a Ph.D. in biochemistry. He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, where he was Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology. As the Rosenheim Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he carried out research on the development of plants and the ageing of cells in the Department of Biochemistry at Cambridge University.

While at Cambridge, together with Philip Rubery, he discovered the mechanism of polar auxin transport, the process by which the plant hormone auxin is carried from the shoots towards the roots.

From 1968 to 1969, based in the Botany Department of the University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, he studied rain forest plants. From 1974 to 1985 he was Principal Plant Physiologist and Consultant Physiologist at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India, where he helped develop new cropping systems now widely used by farmers. While in India, he also lived for a year and a half at the ashram of Fr Bede Griffiths in Tamil Nadu, where he wrote his first book, A New Science of Life.

From 2005-2010 he was the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project funded from Trinity College,Cambridge. He is a Fellow of Schumacher College , in Dartington, Devon, a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences near San Francisco, and a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut.

He lives in London with his wife Jill Purce http://www.healingvoice.com and two sons.

He has appeared in many TV programs in Britain and overseas, and was one of the participants (along with Stephen Jay Gould, Daniel Dennett, Oliver Sacks, Freeman Dyson and Stephen Toulmin) in a TV series called A Glorious Accident, shown on PBS channels throughout the US. He has often taken part in BBC and other radio programmes. He has written for newspapers such as the Guardian, where he had a regular monthly column, The Times, Sunday Telegraph, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, Sunday Times, Times Educational Supplement, Times Higher Education Supplement and Times Literary Supplement, and has contributed to a variety of magazines, including New Scientist, Resurgence, the Ecologist and the Spectator.

Books by Rupert Sheldrake:
A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation (1981). New edition 2009 (in the US published as Morphic Resonance)
The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature (1988)
The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God (1992)
Seven Experiments that Could Change the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Revolutionary Science (1994) (Winner of the Book of the Year Award from the British Institute for Social Inventions)
Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home, and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals (1999) (Winner of the Book of the Year Award from the British Scientific and Medical Network)
The Sense of Being Stared At, And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind (2003)

With Ralph Abraham and Terence McKenna:
Trialogues at the Edge of the West (1992), republished as Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness (2001)
The Evolutionary Mind (1998)

With Matthew Fox:
Natural Grace: Dialogues on Science and Spirituality (1996)
The Physics of Angels: Exploring the Realm Where Science and Spirit Meet (1996)

http://www.sheldrake.org/

These videos are released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license, so they can be freely shared and reposted. (from http://www.ted.com/pages/about)

• Categoría

  Ciencia y tecnología

• Licencia

  Licencia de YouTube estándar

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Mejores comentarios

• 
  ZorbaTheDutch hace 4 días

  Speaking of closed minds...
  

  · 5 en respuesta a Clay ton (Mostrar el comentario)
• 
  Harish Kumar hace 2 días

  The same behaviour was seen again during the Belgian UFO phenomenon, in which the UFOs were seen by thousands of people on the ground and was also tracked by Air Force Radar and F-16 pilots obtained a "lock" on the objects. The scientists and the skeptics denounced it as a classic case of mass delusion. As if only when the CSICOP scientists, Michael Shermer and James Randi, view it, it is an observation. Otherwise, it is a delusion ! Anybody should have the freedom to observe and experiment.
  

  · 4

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Respuestas en vídeo

• • Rupert Sheldrake vs. Richard Dawkins on Psychic Skepticism de vicx05 69 reproducciones
• • Dr. Rupert Sheldrake talks about his banned TED talk on Skeptiko with Alex Tsakiris 02/04/2013 de revolutionloveevolve 33.902 reproducciones

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Todos los comentarios (2.472)

Inicia sesión ahora para publicar un comentario.

• 
  Elhardt hace 1 hora

  He gave valid hypothesis' and then gave specific examples from experiments and also from the scientific community's own measurements. You're doing what is so typical in youtube commenters, and that's shooting the messenger and giving absolutely no specific examples as to what exactly he said that was wrong or repugnant. It's the equivalent of those people who just respond "You're an idiot", with nothing to back it up with.
  

  · en respuesta a Simon Kimberley (Mostrar el comentario)
• 
  Elhardt hace 1 hora

  "Pictures are valid evidence, eye wittness accounts are not."
  Pictures (photos?) have only been available for the past 150 years, and so science didn't used to depend on them. It was based on observations (eye witness accounts). For eye witness accounts there's something called corroboration. If you have lots of independent witnesses whose observations match each other's, then you rule out lying and confusion. No photos of Dark Energy, Dark Matter, or the Big Bang exist. Must be false then.
  

  · en respuesta a Simon Kimberley (Mostrar el comentario)
• 
  jungcarlgustav hace 11 horas

  You are guilty of personal attacks and appeals to authority here. What part of his argument do you actually disagree with?
  

  · en respuesta a Simon Kimberley (Mostrar el comentario)
• 
  Tory Wright hace 21 horas

  I don't think so. It seems that what occurred was a claim of proof of a negative based upon the assumption that the principles are understood. That shouldn't be condoned. If "we need physical evidence" is what is meant, then that is what should be said. We are all only human after all.
  

  · en respuesta a Simon Kimberley (Mostrar el comentario)
• 
  pentremansion hace 23 horas

  Karl Sagan, where are you ?
  

  ·
• 
  Simon Kimberley hace 1 día

  This guy... is repugnant. A man with qualifications such as these is unlikely to believe the nonsense he's saying, he's just preying on foolish people's inexperience of the actual scientific methodology and community, and preying on their miscomprehension.
  If you want to see real academic and intellectually honest criticisms of science this is not the man to look at. He adds nothing to the dialogue from what I see.
  

  ·
• 
  Simon Kimberley hace 1 día

  "Its almost as if only scientists can make observations, and if anybody else does it, he or she is delusional or hallucinating."
  Pictures vs. eye wittness account. Pictures are valid evidence, eye wittness accounts are not.
  Drawing this out as some kind of unreasonable bias is frankly quite stupid.
  

  · en respuesta a Harish Kumar (Mostrar el comentario)
• 
  davveist hace 1 día

  What about socks? Or shoes?! ....
  

  ·
• 
  Marcela Figtree hace 1 día

  life-affirming!!!
  
  

  ·
• 
  Dain Q. Gore hace 1 día

  They are hypotheses and opinions, as easily dismissed as saying "I disagree."
  

  · en respuesta a Dillon Bowen (Mostrar el comentario)

"Respect" in traditional environmental knowledge

In most of the Polynesian cultures that I work with, and I know many other indigenous languages, nature is conceived as kin. The respect for one's elders that you point out and the respect for nature are therefore indistinguishable. In the creation story for the Hawaiian people he kalo (taro) plant is literally the still-born elder brother of the first man, and therefore the same relationship that would exist between a kaikuaana (elder of the same generation, not an elder of a elder generation) needs to be applied to every interaction with the kalo plant. Interestingly in the oral traditions different plants and animals are arranged into different generations of relationship and therefore demand different levels of respect. In Hawaiian culture again there is elders of your generation, elders of an upper generation (makua), elders of the grandparent generation (kupuna) and elders of older generations whom are often deceased but embodied into spirits that are respected (aumakua). The level of respect for the generations grows the older the generation is, and that aspects of the natural world are related to people using the same generational concept to me is very telling. 

Aloha 'aina is often the term today that is used to denote the overall concept of respecting the land and nature in Hawaii.  While most people would interpret this as "love the land" today, the first interpretation of aloha is actually "mercy," and includes a broad range of definitions including sympathy, kindness, affection, and to venerate. 

Malama 'aina is the other term often used to capture this relationship with nature, and again today most people would translate it as "to care for the land." But again the varied uses of the word include definitions such as to serve, to honor, to support, loyalty, to preserve or protect, to keep or observe, to adopt. 

I think this speaks a little bit to what you were after.

I also wanted to say I loved the comment that TEK gets you ostracized from any indigenous culture.  Very true!  And understandably so...I find it a derogatory and reductionist term.  "Traditional" in the term implies to a degree that it is no longer applicable or actively practiced, and minimizes the knowledge itself.  And I agree that "ecological" in the term reduces the knowledge from a broad, holistic knowledge that encompasses the people, nature, and a preferred way of living to simple little facts about the environment.  

Noa Kekuewa Lincoln

-------------------------

PhD Candidate, E-IPER

Stanford University

808.217.7710

nlincoln@stanford.edu

~We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children~

On Jul 8, 2013, at 6:42 AM, Eugene N Anderson wrote:

I'm looking for ethnographic help.  I have found that quite a few Indigenous languages in Asia and North America use words that translate "respect" to refer to caring for the environment, respecting it, and specifically for not taking too much--not overhunting, not overfishing, not overcollecting plants, and generally taking good care and leaving some for others.  Usually the word is the one used more commonly for respect for one's elders.   In Mongol the word is "shutekh."  in Akha (south Chinese/northern Southeast Asian minority group) it's taqheeq-e (this from recent extremely good and extremely valuable PhD thesis by my student Jianhua Wang; the q marks low tone rather than being pronounced).  In Nuu-chah-nulth it's iis'ak'.  There are equivalents in other Northwest Coast languages.

Now, it seems to me that this is a pretty general thing, and worth exploring.  My question is:  have any of you out there run into this usage?  Do other languages do this?  

best wishes all, Gene Anderson

In most of the Polynesian cultures that I work with, and I know many other indigenous languages, nature is conceived as kin. The respect for one's elders that you point out and the respect for nature are therefore indistinguishable. In the creation story for the Hawaiian people he kalo (taro) plant is literally the still-born elder brother of the first man, and therefore the same relationship that would exist between a kaikuaana (elder of the same generation, not an elder of a elder generation) needs to be applied to every interaction with the kalo plant. Interestingly in the oral traditions different plants and animals are arranged into different generations of relationship and therefore demand different levels of respect. In Hawaiian culture again there is elders of your generation, elders of an upper generation (makua), elders of the grandparent generation (kupuna) and elders of older generations whom are often deceased but embodied into spirits that are respected (aumakua). The level of respect for the generations grows the older the generation is, and that aspects of the natural world are related to people using the same generational concept to me is very telling. Aloha 'aina is often the term today that is used to denote the overall concept of respecting the land and nature in Hawaii. While most people would interpret this as "love the land" today, the first interpretation of aloha is actually "mercy," and includes a broad range of definitions including sympathy, kindness, affection, and to venerate. Malama 'aina is the other term often used to capture this relationship with nature, and again today most people would translate it as "to care for the land." But again the varied uses of the word include definitions such as to serve, to honor, to support, loyalty, to preserve or protect, to keep or observe, to adopt. I think this speaks a little bit to what you were after. I also wanted to say I loved the comment that TEK gets you ostracized from any indigenous culture. Very true! And understandably so...I find it a derogatory and reductionist term. "Traditional" in the term implies to a degree that it is no longer applicable or actively practiced, and minimizes the knowledge itself. And I agree that "ecological" in the term reduces the knowledge from a broad, holistic knowledge that encompasses the people, nature, and a preferred way of living to simple little facts about the environment. Noa Kekuewa Lincoln ------------------------- PhD Candidate, E-IPER Stanford University 808.217.7710 nlincoln @ stanford.edu ~We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children~ On Jul 8, 2013, at 6:42 AM, Eugene N Anderson wrote: > I'm looking for ethnographic help. I have found that quite a few Indigenous languages in Asia and North America use words that translate "respect" to refer to caring for the environment, respecting it, and specifically for not taking too much--not overhunting, not overfishing, not overcollecting plants, and generally taking good care and leaving some for others. Usually the word is the one used more commonly for respect for one's elders. In Mongol the word is "shutekh." in Akha (south Chinese/northern Southeast Asian minority group) it's taqheeq-e (this from recent extremely good and extremely valuable PhD thesis by my student Jianhua Wang; the q marks low tone rather than being pronounced). In Nuu-chah-nulth it's iis'ak'. There are equivalents in other Northwest Coast languages. > Now, it seems to me that this is a pretty general thing, and worth exploring. My question is: have any of you out there run into this usage? Do other languages do this? > best wishes all, Gene Anderson

The Emperor Strikes Back

Governments abhor transparency, and governments lie.  To keep them (comparatively) honest, an engaged and informed citizenry is indispensable.

That requires media that are aggressive and probing, and that are not afraid to speak the truth.  We have precious little of that in the United States today.

 

Government media policy, bought and paid for by corporate interests, has done the cause of transparency incalculable harm.  The Internet driven decline of print media hasn’t helped either.

 

Investigative reporting is now on the ropes, along with almost every other facet of genuine journalism.

 http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/05/the-emperor-strikes-back/

CounterPunch

Weekend Edition July 5-7, 2013

The Hero's Reward and the Judgment of History

by ANDREW LEVINE