Polanyi:
and re-embedding gender.

Ainu and Hebrew:
Distant relations.

On Steven Weinberg's "Without God"

In 2008, the renowned physicist, Steven Weinberg, delivered the Phi Beta Kappa lecture at Harvard. His oration, entitled "Without God" was edited and printed in The New York Review of Books in the September 25, 2008 issue.

Although I may tend to agree with some of Weinberg's points, and I certainly sympathize with the apparent motivation for his lecture--the politicization of science by the religious right during the Bush years--I nevertheless felt that Weinberg's approach to…

Textual Archaeology: Analyzing Form and Content in Poetry

This past week, literary trolls got the best out of me and somehow forced me to write daily lectures from Death of the Author to theories of form to interpreting the interpreter.  The topic was Formalism in literary criticism.  At first, instead of responding in an essay form, I wrote a parody in a Sapphic stanza complete with syllabic count, spacing, metering, and adonean line, which I turned into a literary negation.

The Imagist

I do not ask what brush or…

North of the Border: narcocorridos

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b01dvw70

This BBC radio documentary explores the narcocorrido (drug smuggling ballad) as a popular genre among Mexicans in the U.S. Denselow, the journalist points to the ambivalence of the the border in the Mexican imagination. He traces the background to 1848 when the U.S. effectively annexed half of the landmass of Mexico including California. Ballads of…

Hofstede on Cultural Difference - To Sneer? Or Reflect?

Having been invited to a conference on business anthropology to be held in Guangzhou (a city I used to call Canton) in China, I have been thinking about the relationship of anthropology to business—actually, given my interest in material and other forms of knowledge, the relationship of anthropological knowledge to the knowledge taught in business schools and created and written about by their faculties. The conference has provided the occasion, but my thinking about this topic is also…