Michael Agar
Ethknoworks LLC

Web page tune-up 1/​1/​10

As we roll--stagger might be a better word--into the new decade, the old saying "going through the changes" comes to mind. Right now I'm supposed to be concentrating on which Medicare drug plan I want, but I don't have time because everything's changing in interesting ways. People ask me to give plenary lectures now--I keep thinking the invitation has something to do with plenary indulgences. I used to write about such events here on the home page but now I'm shifting them to the blog. Blog, what a word. I know it's short for "web log," but it really does sound like a verb that means something not usually discussed in polite company. We need computer scientists with a minor in poetry. I mean, the physicists called their quarks things like "charm" and "beauty," not "yech" and "harumph."

The two main projects I work on now represent new territory, finally a change from all those years in the drug field. I'll blog more about them later. The first is the NSF funded work with University of New Mexico ecologists who research at the Sevilleta long term ecological research site south of Albuquerque. Fascinating how so much of American sociocultural anthropology is now one or the other of many kinds of "ecological." Makes sense, I suppose, since the field has always been like jazz, incorporating and improvising on the themes around it, and "eco" and "enviro" and "green" and the like are everywhere now. At any rate, the UNM group wanted some work done in the city, and one traditional question they had was how population growth is a "driver" of land use change. I don't know why they say "driver" all the time. I keep thinking of the song about John Henry. I adapted the method used in my last drug study, where we looked at an epidemiological curve, marked the time range around the inflection point--the place where the curve turned upward--and then dived in to look at archives, media, do some oral history, gather up whatever information we could find to figure out the social and political and economic dynamics that explained where the increase in drug dependent people came from and how the consequences played out. The translation for the ecology project is, where did all those people come from all of a sudden between 1950 and 1970, why did they come at all, and what happened to land use as a result? So now I'm a student of zoning instead of the drug work where I was a student of the zoned.

The second project finally gets me back to language, the subfield of anthropology I worked on in graduate school, the one that has always been the major ingredient in all my work. My old friend and colleague Jerry Hobbs, a computational linguist, called and asked me to help out with the "culture" concept on a joint project between USC and a software company in Los Angeles. This one is interesting for different reasons, and controversial in anthropology because it's funded by the Office of Naval Research. The general idea is, you have this visually spectacular and algorithmically sophisticated computer that has been used to teach a second language using dialogues. Now add in cutting edge artificial intelligence knowledge representation, and then add in the different perspectives of actors, even though they are all using world English. Ordinary non-anthropological humans call those differences "culture," but that word makes anthropologists break out in a rash because most of us humans are cultural hybrids in motion now. But differences are still there. So the project is about mixing all this into a computational learning package, shaken not stirred, to see what the combined group can come up with. The differences among the group make for good and productive disagreements, the task is impossible, and we're making a lot of progress.

There are other things coming along, shorter term, but these two projects get most of my attention now, and they deserve it because they're both so interesting. I'll blog as I go. One thing I'll mention, a colleague just sent me a URL, http:/​/​www.economist.com/​blogs/​democracyinamerica/​2009/​09/​the_folk_pathways_of_preventio, that links to a, er, uh, blog from the Economist about the talk I gave at the U Texas El Paso anti war on drugs conference, described in my blog. Maybe blogs aren't so bad after all. How quickly they fall when they too are blog-flattered--blattered? At the same time, it's an interesting case study on what happens when part of a seven year project is limited to fifteen minutes, then a part of that is summarized in a blog/​article, then that summary is commented on in blog-bite.. On the whole I think it's a good thing--It broadcasts the fact that a lot of people aren't happy with a stupid policy--but as public discourse on the way to progressive change I'm not so sure.

The book from hell is still 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. Colleagues sent me helpful comments and I re-did it--again--and sent it back for another look. Now I've heard back that they'd like me to revise is with an introductory anthropology audience in mind. It's good advice but my heart's not in it. A university press asked to take a look so it's out roaming around again. I'll put the first chapter on the left hand side of this home page.

What with all the talks and projects going on right now, I'm feeling like I want to write a few different things but I'm not sure what they are yet. It's a good feeling, like starting an ethnography, where you have no idea where it's going but already know the trip is a learning adventure, and you know from experience you'll get there sooner or later.

Life is interesting.