Score One for Our Side

James Franco reprimanded for texting in class. Juicy details here.
Guess, his spidey-sense failed him. Okay, I thought that was pretty funny. (Although, truthfully, I had no idea who James Franco is, good thing the article told me.)

Welcome to My World

Enough said?

Now does everyone understand why I rant so much. Any and all expressions of pity, outrage, disgust, and disbelief are most welcome.


(Thanks to the World's Most Beautiful Sociology Professor for her iphone and WTF moment. Just when you think it can't get any worse, huh?)

Thought for the Day and Possibly my only Sarah Palin Post

I wonder how old Sarah Palin thinks coal (clean or otherwise) is?

Video Killed the Radio Star

Argh! Ever since I put my classes online, I can't get a classroom version to make in the summer. And they will all happily log and only half will finish. We can't rewind we've gone too far.

Reason Number 5,782,496 Why Anthropologists Are a Pain in the Ass

Conversation on the way to the photocopier:

Psych person anxious to share with me his desire to spread the gospel of Service Learning: "My students had such a good experience helping to build homes for Katrina victims in New Orleans when we went a couple of years ago. It really gave them perspective on their lives. It really achieved what I wanted. They really felt sorry for those people."

Pamthropologist: "I am not really sure I want my students feeling sorry for people, that whole superiority thing, you know."

Psych person: "What do you mean?"

Pamthropologist sliding further down the hall and feeling awk...ward having only just realized where this was going because she was too busy wondering if the copier had been fixed and forgot to be diplomatic and was her usual blunt self: "Well, you know, my discipline isn't really comfortable with the idea of creating an us/them perspective which pits the "other" as the victim. We kind of like the idea of meeting as equals. Plus, we aren't, necessarily, into the whole idea of having students have "emotional" experiences. We look at things a bit more analytically. Oh my, look at the time must get this done."

Couldn't Resist

Nonverbal communication clip that has no controversy and is easily understood by any and all students....and it cracks me up every time.

Twitter Practice

Oooo...I just brushed my teeth and drank grapefruit juice....headrush.

Babies? Anyone have any babies?

For those of you who have enjoyed my past Angelina Jolie rant: a moment of fun. Seems even SNL has realized that she jumped the shark:




*giggle*

Its a double post day! Two posts. Two videos. What more could you want?

Question of the Day

Just doing the same old, same old in lecture today. Add/drops are over. So I thought I would start the real stuff. Easy stuff. Sub-disciplines of Anthropology. Biological anthropology. Hand raised. "Are Hispanics more fertile than other people?" *blink* "I mean, I am one and we have a lot of babies."

This is my life.

Savage Minds, citing yours truly, says they need to be more relevant for the new year.

Ya think?

Material Culture Alert!

Good news. This will be the last year you have to look at these doofy glasses at Times Square. Next year there will be a whole new commodity to consume.

Prehistory World Sim: The Ice Age Endeth

We have this thing in Texas called Hobby Lobby. My daughter forces me to go there to buy yarn--although now she has found a much better online site--for her crocheting, which is one of those things passed down matrilineally. My grandmother Helen Nora taught me and I taught my daughter Katherine Nora. Anyway, we took a wrong turn and I discovered an aisle full of treasures--including the prehistoric life toob (it was, totally, spelled that way). The prehistoric life toob was a plastic tube full of really amazingly dorky plastic figures of megalithic wild life, mega-buff early modern humans, and a few scenic additions like a tree and a volcano. All semester long my students have had great fun enacting scenes on the desk in my class. Usually one guy in the class will do the renactments and usually the animals; sometimes in pairs, sometimes in groups are positioned to be either killing each other or having sex. Or both. At the same time. Go figure.

Wednesday night we had an unusual event in Houston. It snowed. Several inches. The next morning, I came into a final exam with a couple of unused snowballs. So we re-enacted the beginning of the glacial retreat. Mid-way through the final, the volcano fell off the ice and all hell was breaking loose--not the Dante one but the other one.

See, I can do World Simulation exercises, too.

Thanks to the World's Most Beautiful Sociology Professor for the picture, since I am too tired to get mine off my phone. (Aren't those IPhone people smugly superior?)

I can't wait to get the Jamestown Settlers Toob.

Hedgehogs and the Internets

I have temporary custody of my daughter's hedgehog. He can't go to college with her. She promises me that next year she will live in a house in Austin and will take him. This I am counting on. I am tired of boiling eggs for him. I am tired of his shit encrusted wheel. He is, however, terribly cute. And not named Sonic. Say hi to Theodore. He is very shy. But very sweet. In a hedgehog kind of way.

We have issues. After living with him since last Spring, I appear to have become allergic to him. I can't get anywhere near him without my eyes itching and swelling and non-stop sneezing. This makes it difficult to meet his minimal hedgehog needs. And I have pulled a back muscle from all that sneezing. I do not believe that it is psychological. But the good thing about psychology is that you never know...and the bad thing is you never know.

What does a pseudo-academic do when faced with such a challenge? Off I go to Google "hedgehogs and allergic reactions". What do I learn? Every hedgehog information site has the exact same cut and pasted, copied, plagiarized (?) snippet. Quite a few. Same thing. Over and over.

Seems I can't be allergic. Hedgehogs don't have dander. The same thread of reasoning on site after site. My students would assume that was "fact". At least, that is what I have been told.

I understand "students today" don't understand plagiarism. They are so used to this phenomenon of cutting and pasting the same "truth" over and over that they think all knowledge is open season.

Except, a ha! Pulled up were also the posts you usually ignore. But the ones with all the truth. Posts written by owners, offering hedgehogs--with all their hedgehog accessories--to good homes because their owners have developed allergies to them. Many have long sad stories of love and commitment backed up by commodity fetishism. I have bought this for them...that for them....tried this bedding...that bedding...

Most clicks does not equal most accurate is my supposition. Nice example of the Google version of truth and reality.

Don't worry. Teddy and I will make it through. New bedding is on the way. This weekend I managed a bath--for the hedgehog. I will keep pretending that a solution is in sight. Baby girl, you better make it to Austin.

The Anthropology of Olympic Gymnastics

I saw Savage Minds has a post up about having to say something about the Olympics. Funny because I had been thinking the exact same thing. Fortunately, my wonderful students have saved me. We were discussing gender today and one of my female students offered the following observation: "I just think its wrong when you see a man doing the floor exercise in gymnastics". That led to a really interesting discussion of our gender concepts, expectations, cultural constructs, and homosexuality around the world, and why Blades of Glory was a really funny movie. Sometimes, I really do love my students.

Although the woman in me just had to agree with her on that one. Like, what's up with the synchronized diving?

Ah, sometimes its hard to be an anthropologist.......

The Bret Michaels Narrative: or never piss off a stripper redux

There have been some polite inquiries about the last blog post from gentle souls far too polite to post a comment. With your kind indulgence, I will expand a bit. The woman pictured on the blog page is "Heather" one of the two finalists in Rock of Love, Season One. And, yes, she is the "stripper who became pissed off". This clip shows her statements at her exit from the show and some rather interesting reasoning about what is owed to a woman who tattoos your name on the back of her neck.

I daresay my students were far more interested in other issues in the running of the show (the tattooing always releases loud hoots and jeers as does the general drunken debauchery and liberal use of stripper poles) but one of the fascinating aspects of the show for the interpretive anthropologist in me was the (no doubt, scripted) narrative that Bret Michaels employed week after week to dismiss the women in a way that reinforced the constructed image of him as a caring, sensitive man. Some of his successful themes included the repetition that had they had more "time to get to know each other" they may have made a match, that the "time" was just not right for each of them. (A former contestant from Season One who goes by the nickname of Rodeo, has been quoted many times as saying that she believes that they would be together today, if not for her having to leave the show prematurely to return to her son who had fallen ill.)

For Heather, widely and continually viewed by all the other contestants on the show (both Seasons one and two) as Bret's "natural" match, another narrative of rejection was employed. The song continually played on the show, his biggest hit, "Every Rose Has It's Thorn", was, supposedly written by Bret about his failed relationship with a stripper. And Heather was a stripper--meaning, she had been paid to act in that capacity. An important distinction, in a setting where the use of a stripper pole does not a stripper make. The label "stripper" comes to define the totality of Heather as a person and depending on your perspective prevents or saves her from becoming Bret's chosen one.

The final couple of episodes went out of their way to portray Heather as of questionable and, most certainly, out of control sexuality in much the same way that British Colonial society in Africa depicted African women; although, as is more fitting of our cultural context, it was the suggestion of bisexuality and a willingness to "share" Bret that was used to discredit Heather-- both of which Heather vehemently denies. And we arrive full circle at the anger that Heather experiences in losing control of her own identity and public image.

I will leave it to you to attach all the additional meanings you choose to the ongoing narrative. It is a fertile field. But students are able to tease out some of the meanings in regard to gender, love, and the codes of treatment we have internalized as members of a TV watching American society. And, yes, you can take it a bit further and suggest some personal ethics (as I tell them, I am a "mom" after all and with the label comes some territory).

Never Piss Off a Stripper: the ethnography of reality television

Lisa Wynn's article, "What is a prostitute?" from American Sexuality Magazine (a publication of the National Sexuality Resource Center) is making its rounds of the Anthro blogs this week.

It started at Culture Matters, made its way to Antropologi and was cross-posted at Alternet where there was some mildly interesting follow-up discussion. The article was a relatively casual musing on the use of the label of "prostitute" in Egypt. Not surprisingly, from the anthropological point of view, the label is not easily applied for the simple case of "sex for money". Rather, the term represents a complex judgment by Wynn's Egyptian informants and friends as to a woman's behavior and appearance relative to her social position. Wynn indicates in the follow-up discussion at Alternet that she believes interesting comparisons can be made with American beliefs and terminologies (whether the English-language term "whore" works as a substitute, for example)--although, in the article, she is quick to point out that her own initial judgment of the use of the term was filtered through the American lens of payment made for sexual services rendered.

I wonder if she has ever watched Rock of Love on VH1? For the last two semesters, my classes and I have been discussing the phenomenal success (it was the most watched cable T.V. show of 2007, I believe) of this reality, dating show whose stated goal is to find a woman who can "rock the world" of Bret Michaels, the apparently follicly challenged, bandanna-wearing lead singer of the '80's hair band Poison. In on-going class discussion my students, much like Lisa Wynn, have explored the terminology, philosophies, and judgments of the contestants on the show and our own reaction to them. For example, in both seasons of the shows, the female contestants have spent an inordinate amount of time discussing which women are truly "there for Bret". Quick and harsh judgments are levied against those few contestants who question whether Bret would meet their needs. My students became quite adroit at guessing who would be the next aspirant to be eliminated based on the "not there for Bret" criteria. I wish now I could replay those discussion with a new twist. The application of the term" ho "(16 pages of definition at the Urban Dictionary): its meaning and the circumstance of its use on the show.

Most of these discussion were very useful. Not only were students active and engaged, it allowed them to think for themselves; to engage with anthropological ideas in an arena where they felt competent. And you know, the shock value of the discussion, actually, worked in my favor. It was artificial, to be sure, but it still had the feel of the "exotic". It was not your usual academic discussion and it took them out of their comfort zone in all the right ways.

My happiest moment came, however, when I did one of our discussion wrap-ups. In my years of teaching, I have learned to always end any free-range discussion with the phrase. "What did we learn?" The response by one of my young men? "Never piss off a stripper!" His mother would be proud.

BTW: Season One is out on DVD.

Updated: Anthro Blog Contest Followers, Part II of this post (with the actual tattoo reference) can be found here. So, keep reading.