Favored Links

A few links of interest as my paper continues to take shape. I hope to be back up and running in about a week and a half (I doubt I’ll be blogging the IABS, but if there are requests to do so, I will attempt).

• WTF!? I read KI-Media regularly, but I have to call bullsh*t on a lot of their revised headlines. This one is particularly atrocious, especially when you read the actual article. Original Headline in Bangkok Post: “Islamic groups raise funds for teachers jailed in Cambodia.” Rewritten headline on KI-Media: “It looks like Thai Muslim insurgents who are meddling in Cambodian affairs, not the other way around.” Seriously, Bullsh*t.
• Closer to home, and on the heels of a really genuine-sounding apology from seemingly almost every Canadian national politician of note, we need an apology to Native America here in the US. For the Residential Schools, for ongoing Environmental Genocide, and the mismanagement (read theft) of funds “managed on behalf of the tribes” by the notoriously corrupt BIA, to name just a few. Thanks to Open Anthropology, I discovered – to my horror – that Fort Snelling here in Minnesota, less than 15 minutes from my home, has a great exhibit on the concentration camp for Dakotas during the wars that resulted after (I’m tempted to say, ‘from’) Minnesota statehood. Why horror? Because nobody knows about it, and the exhibit is barely being promoted in Minnesota’s sesquicentennial year. (Thanks to Griff for the correction above – see comments).
• Speaking of indigeneity and its associated trope of originality, purity, and ‘untouchedness’ (yes, I just made that word up), SavageMinds blogged again on those supposedly ‘uncontacted’ peoples in the Amazon that were all the rage a few weeks back. As anyone who’s read Clastres even cursorily could have told you, and as anyone who knows the word Cahokia could have guessed, many ‘uncontacted’ peoples are precisely the descendants of enormous, even imperial, civilizations. Instead of descendants, we might also say, ’survivors.’
• Finally, a few good bits: CKelty over at SavageMinds has published his book! Congratulations to him, and to his commitment to using open source strategies to both promote, and make available, for free, the entire text of his book. And congratulations to PUNK ROCK DUKE U PRESS, for going along with it. It takes courage to do the completely rational thing, when many other presses are still insisting the world is flat.
• SavageMinds blogged about the so-called “Edu-Punk” tendency in the universities today, including (but not explicitly mentioned in the post), groups like the EduFactory, and thinkers, like, say, my friend and fellow workers Nate and Adam. I’m less enamoured of the supposedly liberating effects of new technologies in education than the good folks over at SM, but I love the fact that for whatever reason, more and more young academics are considering their professional lives a non-negotiable part of their political lives, and vice-versa. Private to Nate: Still have to talk to you about that post you tagged me with, friend.
• And, for those still interested in agricultural methods and such, check out this great pair of postings (via the Agro-biodiversity Weblog (get an acronym, folks!, that’s a mouthful) on urban agriculture, including no-dig (similar to the Fukuoka method) and low water. saweet.