Author Archives: oook

links for 2011-01-19

  • Chinese "Etymology"
    talking of Labors of Love…
    (tags: Chinese language whoa history)
  • No News is Good News (for Them)
    Has anybody said it better?

    Couldn’t our “news” channels give us some background, interviews, etc., about these key developents? It is almost as if the “news” corporations are trying to keep us away from real news by giving us fluff and narrow shouting matches. It is almost as if they think it is better if the public of the world’s most powerful country were not very well informed about US policy, labor protest movements abroad, and the dynamics of politics in US allies…

    (tags: argybargy media)

links for 2011-01-14

  • Lord of the Rings Re-Read Index
    Kate Nepveu’s re-read commentary is almost complete, almost two years after she began it. Me, I first read LOTR in 1955, and I've been through it several times since then (though I tend to skip over what seem to me the boring bits). Time spent on this site is, I think, much better invested than time spent on watching the films. All those orcs… and as somebody said…
    (tags: LOTR reading)

From Charlie Stross

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I confess a hazy understanding of genomics (well, it’s probably even more vaporous than ‘hazy’), but this from the author of Accelerando‘s recent list of things to feel good about makes me think I should try again to wrap the mind around the subject:

There’s been enormous progress in genomics; we’re now on the threshold of truly understanding how little we understand. While the anticipated firehose of genome-based treatments hasn’t materialized, we now know why it hasn’t materialized, and it’s possible to start filling in the gaps in the map. Turns out that sequencing the human genome was merely the start. (It’s not a blueprint; it’s not even an algorithm for generating a human being. Rather, it’s like a snapshot of the static data structures embedded in an executing process. Debug that.) My bet is that we’re going to have to wait another decade. Then things are going to start to get very strange in medicine.

On tribespersons

I’ve been slowly working my way through James C. Scott’s excellent The Art of Not Being Governed: an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia, enjoying the challenges it poses on pretty much every page to Received Wisdoms. As a teacher of anthropology I was especially allergic to the witless collective term ‘natives’ and to its flabby cousin ‘tribesmen’ and finally I have a clearer understanding of just why. Scott puts it beautifully:

The entities represented as “tribes” seldom exist with anything like the substantiality of state imaginings. This misrepresentation is due not only to the official identities cooked up by the state but also to the need of ethnographers and historians for social identities that can serve as a coherent object of description and analysis. It is hard to produce an account of, let alone govern, a social organization that is continually going in and out of focus. (pg. 209)

Starting from this short passage, one could rewrite (or anyhow reimagine) a lot of the ethnography of the golden age, which was mostly written from (and in service to) the state/official perspective. If only I’d seen this more clearly back in the day…