Randomly Cool Things that should be Collected

• Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism. This is the first of two volumes in the CounterPower series by Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, published by AK Press. Buy Now.
• Keith Hart has been publishing a lot of fantastic videos of lectures at his website, The Memory Bank, recently. Extremely useful stuff. Here’s one on “An Engaged Anthropology for the 21st Century.“
• Original graphic art from William Burroughs’ astonishing work Ah-Pook Is Here found and made available on the interwebs. Wow. Via BB.
• Also via the mighty BB comes the link to the unbelievably good “Fucking Hell,” artwork, an intricate sculpture made of plastic by Jake and Dinos Chapman. The video, with music, is an event. Temple murals in Southeast Asia have been thrown a serious challenge on the gruesomeness factor. Not Safe For Children.

Links J13

• Dreams and the fear of the dead. A post referencing responses to Vaughan’s earlier SciAm piece on hallucinating the dead.
• Nina Paley has a new distribution plan for her amazing Sita Sings the Blues. With any luck, it’ll be released soon so that I can show it to classes.
• They’re auctioning off the Big Bopper’s coffin. That is all.
• Keith Hart has an excellent piece on Marxism and economic anthropology. And just today, he posted a series of video lectures on “development and anthropology.”
• Raj Patel has a good intro on the concept of food sovereignty.
• Andrej Grubacic and Staughton Lynd have released a book titled “Wobblies and Zapatistas.” As a supporter of the latter and member of the former, I’m really interested, and what I’ve read about the book so far is enticing. I’m not convinced by some of the major claims yet – that marxists and anarchists need to set aside their ideological differences – however: indeed, it seems that everytime the anarchists ’set aside their differences’ with the marxists, the marxists ruin everything in their rush to accommodation and consolidation of state power. Still, massive respect to Andrej and Staughton, whose interview over at ZNet is well worth reading.

Keith Hart’s Astonishing Blog

Keith Hart “is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London and Honorary Research Professor in the School of Development Studies, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban.” He’s the author of many important contributions to anthropology, including his famous book The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World. He also co-founded Prickly Pear Press, which has now morphed into Prickly Paradigm Press, the works of which are truly important, and some of which available for free download.

You rarely get a chance to see the big famous names in acadmic disciplines in fora like blogs. But that’s not the reason why Keith Hart’s blog and website The Memory Bank, is so wonderful. Nope. Hart has been blogging for years now, but I have only sporadically checked in with his site, largely because I’m truly lazy, and until a recent update, I couldn’t locate an RSS feed for his site. I was redirected there by a post at Lorenz’ wonderful anthropologi site, where he reprinted excerpts from an article by Hart and Horacio Ortiz on “How anthropologists should respond to the economic crisis.”

The stuff at The Memory Bank has been universally fantastic and inspiring, but here are some examples from recent posts which demonstrate some of the style and content which can be found there. If you don’t need anyore convincing, go there now. Otherwise, more after the jump…

Link Dump D1

Nom Banchok (a tasty Khmer soup) video by Preap Sovath (heartthrob pop singer) over at Stomachs on Legs, along with link to Alison’s recipe for same (soup, not heartthrob).

Claude Lévi-Strauss is 100 years old! (and still looks awfully dapper). Holy cats. Lots of good coverage at anthropologi, savageminds, and open anthropology.

Albert Woodfox, wrongly convicted for murdering a prison guard in 1972 (his conviction overturned in September), and who has spent 36 years in complete solitary confinement (think about that) as a punishment for his organizing efforts as a member of the Angola Three, must be released, according to the Judge who overturned his conviction. I’ve written about Albert before. Here’s hoping he is allowed out soon, and can rejoin (meet) family members, and find some ease and peace in the outside world.

Link Dump for O24

• Jeff Klooger has a new book on Castoriadis coming out from Brill! “Scheduled to be published in 2009 by Brill as part of their Social and Critical Theory series. The title will be Castoriadis: Psyche, Society, Autonomy.” [link]
• Somongkol has a funny, slightly bitter post about how Phnom Penh ’sucks’
• Kratzy highlights some of the Phnom Penh’s crime blotter items of particular interest:

TWO MONKS ON THE RUN FROM POLICE
Phon Sokum, 21, was seriously injured after two monks, Nuth Sok Phoun, 23, and Nuth Sovanny, 24, along with a number of other men, attacked him with axes and chains in Steng Meanchey commune, Meanchey district, Phnom Penh at 6:30pm on October 15. The police said that the attack was caused by an argument between the monks and the victim’s grandmother, which greatly angered the monks. Phon Sokum is currently recovering in hospital. The two monks are on the run. (Kumpuchea Thmey)
_________________________________

YOUNG MAN’S BODY DISCOVERED IN POOL
Chao Meung, 20, and 10 of his house mates were arrested by Banteay Meanchey police when the body of Piseth Sok Heng, 24, was discovered in a pool in their backyard in Village 1, Ponlea commune, Serey Sophorn district, Banteay Meanchey province Friday. The police said that Piseth Sok Heng had been murdered. Chao Meung has been sent to court. Chao Meung’s house mates have been sent home after the police made them promise that they would not get involved in any type of unwholesome activity again.(Rasmey Kampuchea)

• The relationship between farming and drug use, explained.
• Vaughan over at Mind Hacks has a great summary post referring to folks like Pascal Boyer and Quinton Deeley, on the neuropsychology of religion. Very worthwhile.
• Danny Fisher refers us to the free online film Contemplative Care, about Buddhist Chaplaincy. Good stuff!
• My favorite election-period video of the week. Boris and Vlad love Sarah Palin.
• This promises to be deeply useful to many of us, whose lives straddle the divide of anti-work and jobs devoted to ‘productivity.’ Lovely. via BB.

Developmental Nationalist Ventriloquism and Cui Bono?

David Lempert, whose distressingly hilarious and obviously self-authored wikipedia page is today’s must read, was mentioned in these pages briefly a few days ago, in which I characterized him as a person promoting a Cham homeland, and compared him to people who know better.

My qualifications on this discussion are extremely limited. I am a fluent Khmer speaker who conducted three years of fieldwork in Cambodia, one year of which was funded by the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship, and some time of which was funded by the Center for Khmer Studies. I mention these sources of funding to indicate that I share some of Lempert’s funding. I received other funding as well, which is not apparently relevant to this discussion.

Some of my fieldwork included fieldwork in village Kompong Cham, a province inside of Cambodia (not, as Lempert implies, somehow a mixed border area with joint jurisdiction between Vietnam and Cambodia). I do not speak Cham, and although I teach in a religious studies department, my expertise does not include Islam. I do, however, have the capacity for critical thought, and have no dog in this fight.

Link Dump – Anthropology, Labor, &c. for O20

Man, it’s a good thing that we all have such different work styles. My relative silence these last few weeks means that I’ve been working. Max, on the other hand, has been pumping out more and more interesting posts, from descriptions on his first foray into electoralism to notes on cosmopolitanism, to a clarion call for academics and activists to think more closely about violence, a much-needed call that has been poorly thought through since our fetishism of supposedly non-violent change.

From YourMonkeyCalled (basically a snarky twitter site, but something I adore), this gem:

This story is tucked inside Adam Gopnik’s great survey of John Stuart Mill’s thought:

[Mill] helped to save the American Union. Few Americans learn that the cotton spinners of Lancashire were among the heroes of the Civil War. Out of work and starving, because of the Union blockade of cotton imports from the Confederacy, the workers nevertheless supported the Union out of pure anti-slavery principles. Had England recognized the South, and acted to end the blockade, as nearly happened several times, the Union would have lost, no matter what Grant or Lincoln did. It didn’t happen, because the Lancashire workers were so against it; when the great American historian John Jay Chapman listed the English liberals whose words were most responsible for the workers’ resistance to slavery, he placed first the name of John Stuart Mill.

Is it uncool to still love Gregory Bateson?

I hope not, as I tend to think in tracks he inhabited. My overuse of the word ‘isomorphic,’ for instance, probably owes to him. Here’s a nice article from the Guardian on Bateson and his legacy, titled, “Everything is connected.” Indeed it is:

Elephant-sized Link Dump

In a fantastic display of public elephant-bevaior, Tharum posted a series of photos (one is to the left) of famed Phnom Penh elephant Sam Bo doing her thing.

The Cambodian American Heritage Museum in Chicago has begun a new exhibit, titled “Cambodia Born Anew,” which is about the years of struggle and recovery after the years of Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979) rather than about those years. I hope it’s still up in November, when I’ll be visiting Chicago.

Will Buckingham, a British novelist, philosopher, and self described ‘buddhish‘, (whose blog is wonderful and thoughtful reading, sporadically updated) has a lovely post on approaches to story-telling, with specific relevance to Buddhist literature. Since I’m teaching a class right now on “Buddhist Books”, I plan on forcing it on my students this afternoon:

But there is one final reason that I think that reading Buddhist texts as literature is beneficial, and this relates to the Sudanese storytellers I have quoted above. Think of the following:

This is a Buddhist text.
Right!
It is a lie.
Right!
But not everything in it is false.
Right!

Links for Monday, September 08, 2008

Thongchai Winichakul, whose work has been crucial for students of Southeast Asia in rethinking the issues of territory, sovereignty, and history (in his book Siam Mapped ), as well as for civil society in Thailand, has written an excellent editorial suggesting a remedy to the current crisis in Bangkok. In short, it amounts to this:

The PAD leaders should turn themselves in to the police to enter the justice process, while the anti-government rally can still continue in appropriate places.

I doubt Sondhi and company would ever be so straightforward, or allow himself to take such a risk (he seems to prefer to let others do that), but it’s a good suggestion, even if somewhat rhetorical. (Via BP, Prachatai).

There’s an excellent discussion taking place on the TLC-Studies email list that people may be interested in; if so, they’ll have to subscribe, since I don’t feel comfortable reposting them here. Many of the contested points have to do with comparisons between the 1976 massacres and the current situation, and the personalities involved in both situations.

The New England Journal of Medicine has an excellent article by Arthur Kleinman, called Culture and Depression, which reviews some of the anthropology which lies behind the well-known fact that depression manifests in vastly different ways in different cultures. It’s worth a read, but is behind a paywall. This post has some excerpts. In Cambodia, of course, one of the most common manifestations of somaticized depression and trauma is ‘blocked throat.’

The west has never been superior, says Jack Goody. Nice to see a Westerner say it so clearly, in his new book The Theft of History. Goody is also famous for his work on death with Richard Huntington, Celebrations of Death: the anthropology of mortuary ritual. Which I suppose makes it directly relevant to this blog. [via anthropologi

UPDATE: Dateline fixed, thanks to Maximilian!