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On Social Justice: Theory Readings Week 3... Part One

Gupta and Ferguson begin by thinking about anthropology's study of the marginal, of the marginal of the margins. Going back to early anthropology they consider the use of bounded places, such as the Torbriand, to study people in original states. They argue that there is no such thing as original states. That all places are places of contact and exchange. Modernity and globalization has sped the process of contact and exchange. Concern over homogenizing is dismissed with the understanding that great central concepts of what is and how to control what is, is always failing. An affective consideration is in how the elite of any globally connected place are more closely interconnected to one another than they are to the working class in their physical proximity. This is true on a level. Bill Gates can fly in the same manner as the wealthy of India or Arabia. They might visit the same resorts and concern themselves with the same common problems their status brings, similar diseases and
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Jargon Correct On: Liminal Meanings

"Jointly constructed participant frameworks help to establish whether an utterance is taken as earnest, sarcastic, playful, hostile, and so on, while establishing the target(s) of the utterance". Social scenes play a part in communicating the earnestness, sarcasm, playfulness, hostility, and so on, of a given expression while implying who the message is for and about.

On Analysis: Zamorano and Soup from the Garden I Don't Have

"This is due in large measure to the photographic images produced by scientific projects such as the Créqui-Montfort Expedition". The above quotation ends the paragraph that, like many academic paragraphs do, leeches significance from the broth of life. I wonder what of life is not significant? More specifically, how many assumptions of relevance might be made before an academic article feels right? I've come to the paper by Gabriella Zamorano who is working out of El Colegio De Michoacán.  Frankly, I only now read the name of the writer/analyst. I only now found the name of their institution. Only now identified that this school is likely in a Latin American country, that the scholar is female. I didn't consider either identifier until I looked more closely at the title page. I didn't think it significant. Now I do. I haven't yet decided in what way. It feels wrong to me to assume to what measure Zamorano's identity plays in the analysis of the knowle

On Somatics: Not Discarding the Body

Rosaldo's Grief and a Headhunter's Rage says something to my thoughts on the 5 Excellences. His understanding of the headhunters' practices required a lived experience of the words he heard from the informants. His informants on headhunting were responding to their grief, which he thought of as deep sadness, until Rosaldo himself experienced grief. When he felt the rage of grief he could then understand that headhunters were venting this aspect of grief when capturing their prey, murdering them, and discarding their heads. The word rage hadn't stood out in their informant's data until he was a respondent to his own analysis of the grief he felt over his brother's death and then his wife's. He now held visceral knowledge of grief and its many flavors; how it shocks one's being and produces profound experiences that can then be made into profound meaning. Relating this to his data on headhunters brought in a wider range of possibility in the importance of

On Social Justice: They See Only Bathwater

We have a problem here. Always. Having not read the book Medical Apartheid I have stood besides a woman who noticed another woman who was seated and hold this book. Should I give some thick description? I know neither besides some general, easily identifiable observation of identity. Both female. The one seated was is a headdress that read Muslim. The one standing besides me was dressed for the humid weather of the morning. The heat had eased after the late morning thunder storms. The bus kicked up the dirty water and smashed some on the sidewalk where a woman pushed a carriage. We three in the bus are in a historical moment which it seems to make the national discourse resemble a college seminar led by priests. In other words, there is a tradition of this. Ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and class are the concepts of interests and intersections too are contested. A few weeks ago a lesbian Jew at the Chicago Pride march was asked to leave. Here pink flag of Israel was triggering