One of the nice things about being a pessimistic romantic is that one can still have a sense of wonder about everyday things.  That sense of wonder kicked in again today upon reading a very nice, plain English exposition by Cobalt on why Anthropologists working with the US military can be unethical (actual, “a dick”; [...]

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Galrahn over at Information Dissemination, just produced another brilliant piece on the realities of 21st century networks called The Challenges of the 21st Century Conversation.  While the subject of the post is US Naval “evangelists” (”Champions” in business terms), the post itself examines the complex interplay between narrative, myth, discourse control and the role of [...]

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In much of the debate over the past several years on the potential ethical dangers of the relationship between Anthropology and the Military, the vast majority of the ethical concerns that have been raised have, to my mind, been based on a collectivist model of ethics (aka “morality”).  I’ve noted this in a several posts [...]

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Canadian universities are suffering from an ethical failure of nerve.
Many of us have become diffident about our roles as professors, administrators, staff and students. We seldom engage in genuine debate about the university’s role in society. We seldom discuss the good and bad uses to which our research might be put. We seldom ask ourselves [...]

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CTlab member Brian Glyn Williams, PhD, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, recently testified as an expert witness for the defence in the trial of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, “Bin Laden’s Driver”, in the first US military tribunal since World War II. He has since been interviewed about the case on National [...]

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“The question comes down to how we can as artists make the case to Canadians that the arts deserves healthy vigorous funding,” S. Randy Boyagoda, a novelist and a professor of literature based at Ryerson University, said on Thursday.
Source CBC.ca
Canada seems to have a love-hate relationship with the Arts.  On the one hand, certain arts [...]

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Years ago, when I was researching Western Magic, I came across a then-obscure book called the Kybalion (my copy is from the 1940’s).  It is a masterpiece of the esoteric genre; a genre designed to hide information in “plain sight”.  Reading the comments on Wired in response to Steve Featherstone’s recent Harpers article brought the [...]

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One of the more interesting ethical problems in the Anthropologists cannon is the question of when you are required to lie.  For me, it is not only three particular question of when you must lie but, in reality, the perceptual assumptions that structure that “ethical” injunction.  This wasn’t much of a problem for me in [...]

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