Michael Agar
Ethknoworks LLC

Web page tune-up 5/​1/​12

This last year--academic, not fiscal or calendar, or Mayan with any luck--I went to two anthropology meetings, the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology. The former I felt like a tourist on the wrong bus, except for the session in my honor, the latter felt like home. Both meetings, though, were anthropological, in the sense that they were schmooze-fests in crowded halls. People come and go, interruption is not only allowed but encouraged, it gets kind of ADD in there after awhile. One especially funny thing is, people will ask you, and you’re expected to ask, “what are you working on now?” I joke some with answers like, “I’m looking for the bathroom” or “I’m trying to find a place to plug in the cell.” Because who can describe what they’re “working on” in an interruptible sound bite if the work is interesting at all? Especially when 1.5 sentences into it another old-timer comes up and says “When did they let you out of jail?”

So I thought I’d write a blog this time with the quick answers to that question. Not the one about jail, the one about what I’m working on.

The bad news is in academic publishing. I don’t want to go into that right now because I’m annoyed at all the gatekeepers and wondering, why am I bothering with academic articles and books at all at this point in life? Good writing and free labor and they want me to read ten books they happen to know about and make the style more boring? Life is too short.

There’s more interesting news than that. I’ve been working for awhile now with a group in LA. An article about some of the earlier work is under review at a journal right now. The current project asks for computational analysis of texts from any country that uses metaphors to make inferences about the representation of governance in that country in those texts. The money comes from those feds that make anthropology nervous, but I’m alright with it. It’s played by academic rules, open research and results, and since the Vietnam catastrophe that shaped my generation I’ve wanted to make the U.S. more intelligent about the world it deals with. I mean, when Wolfowitz said, shortly before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, that we wouldn’t have trouble there like we would in Saudi Arabia because there were “no sacred sites,” I almost cried. Ambrose Pierce has a famous quote about how war is god’s way of teaching Americans geography. I worked on a similar project years ago for an International Epidemiology Work Group at NIH and wrote a book manuscript called “Crossing Culture” for general readers that nobody wanted. The combination of anthropological and computational linguists working to formally represent that great challenging question of getting from the most micro of details in language to the most macro of conclusions about political economy is well beyond fascinating. The project has some structural problems, but I have to say it’s one of the more interesting things I’ve worked on.

Not that other projects are any slouch. The project with the ecologists at the University of New Mexico, funded by an NSF supplement, is finally finding its groove. Originally it had the goal of looking at social science in the context of the Long Term Ecological Research program that NSF has sponsored over the years. The combination of my own naivete, the diffuse question, the chaos of the booming social science/​ecology-environment academic landscape, and the fact that, really, social science doesn’t have a whole lot to say about a focused and controlled biological experimental design--the project drifted, through some interesting territory, but it never really found the trailhead. Mea culpa. After a hiatus, as in hiatal hernia, the obvious Southwestern solution reared its ugly head, a way to look at human social science, urban areas, and human/​environment relations at the same time in a way that might be useful. Water, of course. An earlier part of the project had made one lesson clear: In this day and age, if you want to find turning points with teeth as far as human reaction to and impact on the environment goes, look at court cases. That story is under review at a journal now. And once you mix water and courts and New Mexico into the blender you get a fascinating and complicated mix of history, culture, politics and law trying to adapt to a major problem buried under layers of development driven denial. I’m just starting onto this trail. It’s amazingly complicated, but this one is going to work.

I just finished working on a major proposal for NIH with my colleagues at the VA hospital/​University of Texas med school in San Antonio. We’d worked together on a project to design an agent-based model to describe and explain variations in clinical teams that made a difference for patient outcomes. That work is in press in a social simulation journal, and I’ll post the URL when it appears. The proposal builds on that to make team relationships more dynamic and emergent and to add complications into their work flow in terms of patient load and information. We also want this model to show how and when stress appears that effects team outcomes. If it’s funded that will run for awhile, and I hope it will be.

Then there’s the damn book, “The Lively Science.” I’m revising it again, slowly because I’ve gotten so busy with projects, so I’ll put the new Chapter One on the web page pretty soon. It’s part of the heartbreak of publishing story I mentioned at the start of this blog, as are the articles I’ve mentioned. I’ll leave it for now.

Some other “pro bono” activities are underway that I enjoy. I’m heading to DC for a second round with an NSF group who work for the SBE (social/​behavioral/​economic) division of NSF. They want to set up a call for proposals for a national system of “observatories”--I know, it rings of Foucault’s panopticon. Once you get past the poor choice of jargon, it’s interesting as a potential way to offer up national data on critical issues like economic and social change that go deeper and broader than the usual national data systems and polls offer. The fact that they’ve asked a few of us context freaks to participate is maybe a good sign.

Then I accepted an invitation to be on the board of a new book series on “interpretive” social science, that term meaning to get past the old “qualitative/​quantitative” divide. The masterminds are two political scientists, that in itself being something of a shock to my system. And I’m on the board for a conference of a group called Epistemological Perspectives on Simulation for this coming fall. And last but certainly not least, a grad student at the University of New Mexico from the communication and journalism department whose mind was distorted by some of my earlier work asked me to be on his committee. I often help out students, usually on email, but shy away from committees. This time I decided to do it--he and his committee looked like people I’d enjoy talking with--and we had our first meeting last week. It was that rare event, a stimulating and productive academic conversation, and I can’t tell you how much fun it was to be talking language-based ethnography again.

So that’s what I’m working on, as we all ask each other at anthropology meetings, the main projects anyway. In these difficult times for so many, my life remains interesting in spite of getting older and grumpier, something for which I thank the capricious forces of history every chance I get, sometimes in an abstract cosmic way, sometimes with the face of a Jewish Buddha, those two religions being the ones I know about that include a good sense of humor. Father Hennessy and Sister Agnes are no doubt spinning in their graves.