I just got back from a six day concert tour in Mexico sponsored by the Orquesta del Nuevo Mundo in Mexico City.  It was an intriguing experience in many ways and, as I was sitting in the Toronto airport waiting to find out if I would get home again, a number of thoughts wended their [...]

continue reading.....

The past couple of months have been insanely busy, and the pace will keep up for the next month at least.  Part of this comes from the “usual” things (teaching, writing, consulting, etc.), but a lot of it, for the past couple of weeks and the next two weeks, comes from a hectic concert schedule [...]

continue reading.....

For over a month, now I have been wresting with ideas about education, training and ethics.  Last night, I received an email from a student asking me if we could have an extra class added into my course in applied epistemology so that everyone who is presenting could have more time for their presentations.  In [...]

continue reading.....

This past weekend, I was down in Kingston at the biennial IUS Canada conference presenting a paper on the use of ethnographic knowledge in Romano-Byzantine military PME (Professional Military Education) as part of a larger session on “Educating for Cultural Awareness” organized by John Hawkins.  It was an interesting session in a lot of ways, [...]

continue reading.....

I just finished re-reading a very interesting post by John Matthew Barlow over at the CT Lab on Objectivity and Revisionist Historiography.  Towards the end of it, he notes
As the American historian Peter Novick notes, the idea of objectivity in history is about progress, moving towards some objective truth about the past. But this is [...]

continue reading.....

I’ve been heavily involved with the Hamdan Symposium over at the CT Lab, and a lot of the time I had for blogging (which isn’t all that mch :)) is being taken up over there for now.  Things should get back to normal over the weekend.

continue reading.....

Note: This is a very difficult post for me to write.  The difficulty doesn’t lie with the subject area but, rather, in what language I will have to use in order to try and communicate my thoughts on the topic.
One of the axiomatic assumptions that professions, as a group, seem to hold is a taken-for-granted [...]

continue reading.....

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”; [...]

continue reading.....

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 [...]

continue reading.....

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 [...]

continue reading.....