Ethknoworks LLC - Thoughts and Hallucinations

The Professional Stranger

Santa Fe New Mexican

Mike's auto-obituary published in the Santa Fe New Mexican

American Anthropological Association

Grupo Antropocaos

The backyard coyote

In the Zapatista village

Village Headquarters

The workshop at the medical school in Tegucigalpa

Pontificating at the Central American Anthropology meetings

My job description

Hiker watch

Quick Links

Selected Works

Nonfiction

The Lively Science: Remodeling Human Social Research

Wonder why studies you read about your world usually don’t get who you are and how you really live? Frustrated that “the numbers” don’t solve the problem? Does it bother you that policies and programs, more often than not, don’t work like they’re supposed to? People, organizations, countries–they rely on information about real human social lives. Usually they don’t have it because they only test what they think they already know in narrow situations of their own design. The results have value, some of the time, but it’s not nearly enough.

We need a human social science that begins and ends in the real worlds of the humans that it claims to be about. One has been around for a couple of hundred years. The Lively Science tells the story of its historical roots and the reasons for its neglect, blends in new intellectual tools, and argues that it’s time to get on with a science that changes research objects into human subjects and learns who they are and what they’re trying to do before conclusions are drawn.

Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation

Living in a world of linguistic and cultural differences

Dope Double Agent: The Naked Emperor on Drugs

A personal story of decades of work in the substance abuse field, a story of how our ineffective drug policy came to be and stayed in place. Now available as an e-book at iBook on iTunes and on Barnes and Noble.

Independents Declared: The Dilemmas of Independent Trucking

The story of the working world of independent truckers in a time of deregulation

Nonfiction, Introductory Text

The Professional Stranger (second edition)

An introduction to ethnography

Thoughts and Hallucinations

Dublin City University Workshops in Qualitative Research and Discourse Analysis

May 25, 2009

The Whole Qualitative Megillah
Workshop #1

Michael Agar

"The whole Megillah (in the Yiddish from which American English borrowed it, gantse Megillah) came to be a wry term for an overly extended explanation or story, or for something tediously complicated, or an involved situation or state of affairs." http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-mag1.htm.

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Thoughts on Intentionality

May 25, 2009

Trying to Get Clear on Intentionality

Mike Agar

In April of 2009 I participated in a meeting of biological ecologists. They wanted to integrate "social science" into a five-site comparative study of urban land fragmentation. It was—and continues to be—a pleasure to work with them. At that first meeting, I gave a standard Read More

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Society for Applied Anthropology Workshop on Agent-Based Modeling

May 25, 2009

Workshop Abstract for the Society for Applied Anthropology Meetings

Agent Based Models in Anthropology

“Agent Based Modeling” (ABM) may sound like a fashion show put on by the Drug Enforcement Administration. It is not. It is a useful new tool, a computer-based thought-experiment lab for the relationship between structure and agency, a device to Read More

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