Michael Agar
Ethknoworks LLC

Time to tune the web page.

How has the page changed? I'm working on a new book with the current joking title of "Fatheads and Sweethearts." The joke is, consciousness is like our taste for sugar and fat. All three evolved to improve early humankind's ability to adapt but lately all three have turned into a pathology. 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. It looks at evolutionary origins, the so-called Culture Big Bang, the generativity and constraints that made it possible, the way those constraints are maladaptive now. Fascinating to learn about, or start to learn about. I think the real title will be "Evolution: An Upgrade."

One thread that continues from earlier web pages 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. And in fact I did, courtesy of an invitation to talk to a conference on qualitative research in management. The talk turned into an article coming out in Organizational Research. A preprint is available at the top of the column on the left.

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 Antropocaos (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 Antropocaos more. 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.

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. Recently 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 the conference on qualitative research in management that I mentioned earlier. A health care center in Sweden asked me to do a workshop on how to think about contemporary human social research in May, and I lectured at an EU sponsored qualitative training course for young researchers in the drug field in Amsterdam in August. Working on those two projects started me thinking it might be time to write more about ethnography, though I'm understanding in my old age that all this blah blah is really about the centuries old question--Is human social research a different kind of "science," science in the sense of making a case based on evidence. And if it is different, then how do you do it?

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, so I accepted their invitation to be on a panel or two at their conference in Baltimore in June. Refreshing and unusual to be part of a conference of people from so many different backgrounds all committed to cooperation and aimed at action.

In July I headed to Buenos Aires for a week of project development, including a proposal for more elaborate work with Fulbright. The University of Montreal invited me to a workshop on intersubjectivity and the construction of ethnographic knowledge in September. I'm working on that now and watching it fit into the flow of an emerging angle on human social research to better connect the thinkers of the nineteenth century with the researchers and practitioners of the twenty-first.

And I'm excited about my course in introductory geology that starts at Santa Fe Community College in September. After wandering the Southwest for a few years I fantasized a book that combined geology and art criticism called "Gothic Shapes and Cezanne Colors." The journey of several hundred pages begins with a few new words.

Life is interesting.