Michael Agar
Ethknoworks LLC

Time to change the web page again.

How has the page changed? I'm working on a new book with the current joking title of "Fatheads and Sweethearts." It's meant for a general audience, and I'm using it to go back to school again and learn some things I never got around to. The focus is on human 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. At the top of the column on this page is a draft of the first chapter. (NOTE: I took it down for a little bit, decided it needs more work). It looks at evolutionary origins, the so-called Culture Big Bang. Fascinating to learn about, or start to learn about. If anyone takes a look, please send comments and suggestions.

One thread that continues is an interest in so-called complexity theory, though what that interest means molts like a Diamondback on steroids. (I know, you shouldn’t read Tony Hillerman and Raymond Chandler at the same time.) We’ve been riding a centuries old wave of how to make sense of the world. We explain how a system maintains order at a point in time through linear causal mechanisms. This makes sense if you’re designing a car. It doesn’t work very well if you’re trying to understand social worlds. Complexity turns this ancient way of thinking inside out and upside down. For social systems, we snap on a different lens. We look at how a system that mixes order and chaos changes over time through multiple interconnections and feedback loops.

The thing is, what I’m doing now is never just about complexity. Rather, it uses complexity together with a lot of other ideas and problems to get someplace new. In the consulting realm, I’m doing more workshops/short courses, often in health care settings or professional or academic conferences, always mixed with ethnography as the nonlinear dynamic social research mode that fits a complexity perspective on human worlds.

Organizations often ask me to configure a focused ethnographic approach to a problem. Now the configuration involves complexity in all kinds of interesting ways. Several past and current projects have experimented with this mix. It’s getting to be time to write about it more.

Another angle is the leap from ethnography to a computer representation, usually called an agent-based model. More requests come in now for assistance at making this most difficult transition.

I'm trying to develop projects that I’m interested in but that it’s harder to get paid to do. I'm now an affiliate of the only center dedicated to the integration of ethnography and complexity under the leader ship of Carlos Reynoso of the University of Buenos Aires. His group is called Antropokaos (www.antropocaos.com.ar). Fulbright just made me a "senior specialist," a title about which I have mixed emotions, so I'm hoping to work with Antropokaos more.

As part of the new Argentina connection, I’d like to re-focus on my old language interests, especially on English/Spanish issues in a variety of ways. Lately I’ve given workshops in Mexico and in Honduras and, living in the Southwest, there are plenty of opportunities around questions of immigration and the responses to it in practically every domain you can imagine. My language is improving--my Spanish I mean, my English remains stuck in second gear--the Honduras workshop was in a Spanish that worked only through the help of the participants. But I’m getting there.

A good omen for a return to language is news that a new 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. An old article, The Biculture in Bilingual, is going to be reprinted in a book called Sociolinguistics: Critical Concepts, edited by Nikolas Coupland and Adam Jaworski, published by Routledge.

Two thousand and seven was way too busy with way too much travel in airborne cattle cars--Work with a UN committee, a cancer hospital in New York, a development center in Argentina, a Latin American consulting group, a regional health care center in Sweden, an anthropological institute in Copenhagen, mental health centers in Florida and Massachusetts, a VA hospital in Texas, a language/culture panel for the military, and a services research project in Baltimore, a workshop on complexity and health research in the Canadian Rockies, another at the Qualitative Cafe at the University of New Mexico. And I was honored that the National University in Tegucigalpa invited me to talk about complexity and social program design in November.

This year started out mellow but the pace has picked up for spring and summer. I attended a conference on qualitative research in management, one of the best I've been to in years, and a draft of the article that resulted can be downloaded. It's at the top of the left-hand column. A health care center in Sweden asked me to do a workshop on how human social research is mutating in May and I'm very much enjoying working on that. An organization called Break the Chains found my recent research on drug epidemics and used it to argue against inequities and community consequences of our failed drug policy. An honor that it was useful, and I'm looking forward to their conference in June. It looks like I'll do some teaching in the Netherlands in August, an EU workshop on qualitative research in the drug field.

Life is interesting.