Michael Agar
Ethknoworks LLC

Web page tune-up 5/25/09

Someone opened the door and let all the projects out. Since the last post a couple of months ago I've re-learned my way around Albuquerque airport. The collapse of world capitalism motivated me to ditch the semi-retired mentality and look around for some interesting things to do. Not that I didn't enjoy the time to think and write--Several things are still floating around out there in reviewerland. But I have to admit, engaging and helping out with a variety of projects helps get the heart and the head started in the morning.

Too much to detail right now, but here's the current menu. One project that I've been working on for awhile is an assessment of HIV/AIDS treatment in Washington. The new ones include: 1. Developing a research model to look at land use fragmentation as a social and political process with a group of ecologists from five arid land sites; 2. Working with computer scientists and game developers to try and put "culture" into language-learning games; 3. Building an agent-based model, based on qualitative research, for a hospital in Texas to improve quality of care; 4. Doing some workshops on qualitative research and discourse analysis for Dublin City University; 5. Working up a plenary address for a Canadian group interested in "knowledge transfer." And there are a couple of other things floating around that might or might not come to pass.

This odd list which really isn't at all is making me think of what they have in common, which is a grounded theory of human social life, an ethnographic epistemology, and a continual effort for clarity of expression about impossibly vague and ambiguous worlds. So I'm re-visiting graduate school to explore old concepts. I've always written to learn, and I've always been frustrated with professional journals, so I started a blog on this web site. I'll start it off with a few pages I wrote on "intentionality" to try and get clear on that fuzzy much overused concept.

Since there's a blog now, I figured I'd also put up some abstracts for the workshops and talks that I do. Maybe they're useful to someone; maybe there'll be some comments to help me do them better. Right now the descriptions of the Dublin workshops and the agent-based modeling workshop for the Society for Applied Anthropology are posted.

The final paperwork is done for the article on qualitative research in management, coming out in Organizational Research. A preprint is available at the top of the column on the left. It's revised quite a bit from an earlier version I posted. It's an odd mix of an ethnographic perspective and some complexity-based concepts like "leverage points" and "positive deviance," with a grateful nod to Schein's concept of "clinical ethnography." This last round a reviewer asked permission to use it in a class in business/management school, so that's a good sign. Except maybe the reviewer wanted to use it as the "before" picture.

The book from hell I've been working on is now called Culture: An Upgrade. It still aims at point of view, perspective, where it came from, why it causes so many problems in the contemporary world, how it might be better adapted to the global society we live in. But now the argument is that culture as we have come to think of it is part of the problem, not part of the solution. The first part of the book looks at evolutionary origins, the so-called Culture Big Bang, the generativity and constraints that made it possible, and the way those constraints are maladaptive now. The second part considers how the world has changed and left the old notion of culture behind, rooted as it was and is in the ancestral condition. The next part of the book changes the concept of culture to one of perspective and develops how that allows us to look at differences in a less distorted and more useful way. Finally the book reconsiders the culture concept, finding it useful, but only in a few limited and extremely restricted ways. It's out for review now.

I'm an affiliate of the only center dedicated to the integration of ethnography and complexity under the leadership of Carlos Reynoso of the University of Buenos Aires. His group is called Anthropocaos (www.antropocaos.com.ar). The group just translated three of my articles on ethnography and complexity modeling into Spanish, an honor, and they will be part of a forthcoming edited book. Anthropocaos is one of the most creative and progressive groups in social research. I'm still trying to figure out a way to visit there.

A good omen for more language-oriented work is news that an article just came out that looks at language learning and translation as models for ethnography. It is in the Journal of Intercultural Communication and a web link is at the top left of this page. And I'm hoping that a second article on ethnography and translation, now under review, is accepted. More news at ten.

A New Mexico state geologist and I have finished a draft of a hiker's guide to a popular mountain trail to show how to better understand the story of the earth they walk on, sort of a rock appreciation course. We're looking for ways to publish it now. And I forgot my major accomplishment, second prize in a Santa Fe short story fiction writing context for a mystery/comedy. Positivists have been telling me I've been writing fiction for decades so I figured I might as well make it official.

Life is interesting.