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MacLeish’s New Book Highlights the Soldiers rather than the War

March 6, 2013 by

Growing up in the post-9/11 world meant a heightened sense of fear and awareness of a war away from home.  With more than a decade between then and now, much has changed including the faces of tomorrow’s soldiers. The kids that I sat with in my fourth grade classroom when the country was attacked are suiting up and shipping out to military bases with the Army, Marines, Navy, and Air Force. From the time they enlist until the time they are finished with their military experience, outsiders looking in will not see anything that is not relayed through the media- but these are not the only stories about the war worth sharing.3-6 Making War

When we think of the war, chances are we do not think of the living situations, the relationships, and the trauma that are had by the soldiers who are fighting or who have fought. News stories about the war are concerned with who, what, where, why, and how of major incidents. Personal perspectives are rarely news worthy and are generally saved for personal storytelling. In his new book Making War at Fort Hood, MacLeish humanizes the wartime experience and reminds us that a war is not a one dimensional topic. What happened and why are usually what we read about but MacLeish examines the lives of soldiers and why their stories are equally as important.

MacLeish discusses some of the topics that he covers in his forthcoming book in an article for Publishers Weekly titled “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About War.” It is a good overview of what he covers in Making War at Fort Hood and why the are topics worth examining. It is a good place to start before picking up a copy of the book.

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About War

The first story in this book is about a soldier I met when I was doing research at and around the US Army’s Fort Hood, in central Texas, in 2008. In the book I call him Dime (the identities of all of my research subject are kept confidential). He was a tank driver who had survived multiple IED strikes and firefights during two tours in Iraq. One bomb attack left him trapped inside his tank for hours while it burned. He narrowly avoided another that hit the tank in front of him, the one his best friend was driving. When Dime and his fellow soldiers went to look for survivors, he told me, his friend’s body was just gone, completely destroyed. When I met Dime he had been diagnosed with severe orthopedic damage and a traumatic brain injury (TBI) from the bomb blasts, as well as posttraumatic stress disorder. He had been transferred into a medical hold company while his complex and debilitating injuries were evaluated and treated, and his days were filled with tests, briefings and doctor’s appointments. Dime clearly took pleasure in being a soldier and cared deeply about his comrades. But he also felt frustrated and bullied. He was grieving, in pain, disoriented from his head injury, numbed and sedated by a shifting regime of drugs, and lonely—he had lost friends in the war, and his wife left him during his first deployment and took their kids. He was angrily and anxiously waiting for the Army to decide what was wrong with him and when to let him go and to see what happened after that.

Most of the war stories that civilians are familiar with hinge on what war is about—why we are fighting, whether we are winning or losing, whether we should have gone to war in the first place. Or they heap those who fight with sentiment and cliché and try to take some virtue from that. In all such stories, the violence of war and the actual work of making it appear as the exception rather than the rule. All the harm that comes with war is cast as tragedy or side effect, something that should not have happened. And the stories wrap these unfortunate events up with a beginning, a middle, and most importantly, an end.

Read the FULL article.

 

Filed Under: Anthropology, Sociology, Twitter

Natasha Dow Shüll Discusses Gambling on the Leonard Lopate Show

February 6, 2013 by

2-4 addictionWho can resist the bright lights, the whirling noises, the chance of winning big on a casino slot machine? However, while the rewards can possibly be big, the consequences of gambling can land a person not only in debt but also in a place of addiction. Natasha Dow Schüll, author of Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, describes in her book how and why these flashy machines are able to place gamblers into a trance like state until they quit from physical or economic exhaustion. In a recent interview on the Leonard Lopate show, Dr. Shull discussed her book and how video slot machines are contributing to gambling addiction. Check out the interview below or here.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Anthropology, Interview, Sociology, Twitter

NEW ANTHROPOLOGY CATALOG

November 15, 2012 by

We invite you to browse and download our new anthropology catalog.
http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/anthro13.pdf

Be sure to check out Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method by Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce and T. L. Taylor. It provides practical and detailed techniques for ethnographic research customized to reflect the specific issues of online virtual worlds, both game and nongame and draws on research in a range of virtual worlds, including Everquest, Second Life, There.com, and World of Warcraft.

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll is also new this year. It takes readers into the intriguing world of machine gambling, an increasingly popular and absorbing form of play that blurs the line between human and machine, compulsion and control, risk and reward.

You will also want to check out In Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman. Who are computer hackers? What is free software? And what does the emergence of a community dedicated to the production of free and open source software–and to hacking as a technical, aesthetic, and moral project–reveal about the values of contemporary liberalism? Coleman tracks the ways in which hackers collaborate and examines passionate manifestos, hacker humor, free software project governance, and festive hacker conferences.

The catalog is full of great books by great authors. We hope to see you at the AAA annual meeting in San Francisco, CA. We invite you to a party celebrating the launch of our new series Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology with series editors, Tom Boellstorff and Bill Maurer. Wine will be flowing. Details:

Friday, November 16th, 2012
4-5 p.m., Booth #507, Exhibit Hall

We look forward to seeing you there.

Filed Under: Anthropology, New Catalog, Twitter

Ethnography and Virtual Worlds is virtually everywhere

November 13, 2012 by

As our existence and interactions have grown increasingly virtual, the arena has rapidly evolved into a new frontier for human life, with many of the complexities, cultural nuances and and social problems of the ‘real’ world. Several years ago, anthropologist Tom Boellstorff, arguably the first anthropologist to study this realm in its rich complexity, published his breakthrough fieldwork in Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human.  Now he has coauthored, along with Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce, and T.L. Taylor, Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method, the first ever guidebook for conducting ethnography in virtual worlds, and the book is getting a ton of attention in the blogosphere.  For some of the highlights, check out the Mixed Realities piece on the relevance of an avatar, or the wonderful excerpt from the book on New World Notes, or the authors’ Virtual Worlds Education Roundtable here. Naturally the book has gained an enthusiastic following with the Second Life crowd, popping up everywhere from Second Life News to the Center for Computer Games and Virtual Worlds. Boellstorff is such a natural in virtual worlds that he’s been known to throw book parties in Second Life, where he’s been virtually unfazed by his publicist’s awkwardly manned avatar.

 

 

Filed Under: Anthropology, Technology, Twitter

Paul Seabright on the Relationship Between the Sexes

October 2, 2012 by

 

Women occupy fewer positions of power in business than men. Why is that? What explains the types of relationships that men have with women and the different ways in which men and women network with friends and acquaintances? In this Social Science Bites podcast, Paul Seabright, author of ‘The War of the Sexes‘, combines an economist’s perspective with insights from biology and evolutionary science to give answers to just these questions.

Filed Under: Anthropology, Biological Sciences, Cognitive Science, Cultural Studies, Mind, Pod/Vodcast, Popular Science, Psychology, Sociology

BOOK FACT FRIDAY

September 21, 2012 by

FACT: “Farming began in Bali with the arrival of the Austronesians, who colonized the Indonesian archipelago between 4,500 and 3,000 years ago. The Austronesians were farmers and fishermen whose agricultural assemblage included pigs, dogs, and chickens; root and tree crops such as coconuts, bananas, taro, and bamboo; and a tool technology that included stone adzes.”

Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali
by J. Stephen Lansing

Along rivers in Bali, small groups of farmers meet regularly in water temples to manage their irrigation systems. They have done so for a thousand years. Over the centuries, water temple networks have expanded to manage the ecology of rice terraces at the scale of whole watersheds. Although each group focuses on its own problems, a global solution nonetheless emerges that optimizes irrigation flows for everyone. Did someone have to design Bali’s water temple networks, or could they have emerged from a self-organizing process?

Perfect Order—a groundbreaking work at the nexus of conservation, complexity theory, and anthropology—describes a series of fieldwork projects triggered by this question, ranging from the archaeology of the water temples to their ecological functions and their place in Balinese cosmology. Stephen Lansing shows that the temple networks are fragile, vulnerable to the cross-currents produced by competition among male descent groups. But the feminine rites of water temples mirror the farmers’ awareness that when they act in unison, small miracles of order occur regularly, as the jewel-like perfection of the rice terraces produces general prosperity. Much of this is barely visible from within the horizons of Western social theory.

The fruit of a decade of multidisciplinary research, this absorbing book shows that even as researchers probe the foundations of cooperation in the water temple networks, the very existence of the traditional farming techniques they represent is threatened by large-scale development projects.

We invite you to read Chapter 1 here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8186.pdf

Filed Under: Anthropology, Asian and Asian American studies, Biological Sciences, Book Fact Friday

Can you spot the PUP title in this photo published in Harper’s?

September 7, 2012 by

“Don Sapatkin, Deputy Science & Medicine Editor, 6:44pm, 2009.” Photograph by Will Steacy from his series Deadline, which documents the past four years at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

 

That’s Nancy Lutkehaus’s Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon in the bottom left! The photo ran alongside David Sirota‘s report, “The Only Game in Town,” published in the September issue of Harper’s Magazine.

Filed Under: Anthropology, Friday Fun, Photography, Princeton University Press, Publishing, Twitter

BOOK FACT FRIDAY

September 7, 2012 by

FACT: “The forerunner of the modern gambling machine was invented in Brooklyn in the early 1880s, based on draw poker. The countertop contraption contained five drums with fifty card faces, five of which flipped up into a viewing window after a player set the drums in motion by pulling a side handle. Versions of this model, some with the cards affixed to five reels, became popular in cigar stands and bars across the country, and were known as ‘nickel-in-the-slots.’”

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
by Natasha Dow Schüll

Recent decades have seen a dramatic shift away from social forms of gambling played around roulette wheels and card tables to solitary gambling at electronic terminals. Addiction by Design takes readers into the intriguing world of machine gambling, an increasingly popular and absorbing form of play that blurs the line between human and machine, compulsion and control, risk and reward.

Drawing on fifteen years of field research in Las Vegas, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll shows how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state they call the “machine zone,” in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, for as long as possible—even at the cost of physical and economic exhaustion. In continuous machine play, gamblers seek to lose themselves while the gambling industry seeks profit. Schüll describes the strategic calculations behind game algorithms and machine ergonomics, casino architecture and “ambience management,” player tracking and cash access systems—all designed to meet the market’s desire for maximum “time on device.” Her account moves from casino floors into gamblers’ everyday lives, from gambling industry conventions and Gamblers Anonymous meetings to regulatory debates over whether addiction to gambling machines stems from the consumer, the product, or the interplay between the two.

Addiction by Design is a compelling inquiry into the intensifying traffic between people and machines of chance, offering clues to some of the broader anxieties and predicaments of contemporary life.

We invite you to read the Introduction here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i9156.pdf

Filed Under: Anthropology, Book Fact Friday, Sociology

BOOK FACT FRIDAY

August 10, 2012 by

FACT: “From the Middle Bronze Age, when they first became relatively common, swords were a standard accouterment in well-outfitted men’s graves; graves, in other words, that contained other special kinds of objects, such as feasting vessels, wheeled vehicles, and gold ornaments. A sword can thus be seen as a standard part of the elite man’s outfit from the middle of the second millennium BC until the seventh and eighth centuries AD, when the practice of outfitting graves with goods gradually declined in much of Europe. Swords almost never occur in otherwise ‘poor’ graves, and it is unusual to find a wealthy man’s grave that does not have a sword (or, during the sixth and early fifth centuries BC, a dagger).”

How Ancient Europeans Saw the World: Vision, Patterns, and the Shaping of the Mind in Prehistoric Times
by Peter S. Wells

The peoples who inhabited Europe during the two millennia before the Roman conquests had established urban centers, large-scale production of goods such as pottery and iron tools, a money economy, and elaborate rituals and ceremonies. Yet as Peter Wells argues here, the visual world of these late prehistoric communities was profoundly different from those of ancient Rome’s literate civilization and today’s industrialized societies. Drawing on startling new research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Wells reconstructs how the peoples of pre-Roman Europe saw the world and their place in it. He sheds new light on how they communicated their thoughts, feelings, and visual perceptions through the everyday tools they shaped, the pottery and metal ornaments they decorated, and the arrangements of objects they made in their ritual places—and how these forms and patterns in turn shaped their experience.

How Ancient Europeans Saw the World offers a completely new approach to the study of Bronze Age and Iron Age Europe, and represents a major challenge to existing views about prehistoric cultures. The book demonstrates why we cannot interpret the structures that Europe’s pre-Roman inhabitants built in the landscape, the ways they arranged their settlements and burial sites, or the complex patterning of their art on the basis of what these things look like to us. Rather, we must view these objects and visual patterns as they were meant to be seen by the ancient peoples who fashioned them.

We invite you to read Chapter 1 here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9831.pdf

Filed Under: Anthropology, Archaeology and Ancient History, Book Fact Friday

David Vine on the proliferation of “lily pad” military bases

July 19, 2012 by

According to TomDispatch, David has undertaken a tour of military bases around the world and his findings so far are that the number of bases “isn’t shrinking at all, and that ‘dismantling’ isn’t yet on the American horizon.” He reveals that while large bases may be on the decline, the Pentagon has built numerous “lily pad” bases. What does this mean for American foreign policy and security? Vine cautions:

 

While relying on smaller bases may sound smarter and more cost effective than maintaining huge bases that have often caused anger in places like Okinawa and South Korea, lily pads threaten U.S. and global security in several ways:

First, the “lily pad” language can be misleading, since by design or otherwise, such installations are capable of quickly growing into bloated behemoths.

Second, despite the rhetoric about spreading democracy that still lingers in Washington, building more lily pads actually guarantees collaboration with an increasing number of despotic, corrupt, and murderous regimes.

Third, there is a well-documented pattern of damage that military facilities of various sizes inflict on local communities. Although lily pads seem to promise insulation from local opposition, over time even small bases have often led to anger and protest movements.

Finally, a proliferation of lily pads means the creeping militarization of large swaths of the globe. Like real lily pads — which are actually aquatic weeds — bases have a way of growing and reproducing uncontrollably. Indeed, bases tend to beget bases, creating “base races” with other nations, heightening military tensions, and discouraging diplomatic solutions to conflicts. After all, how would the United States respond if China, Russia, or Iran were to build even a single lily-pad base of its own in Mexico or the Caribbean?

For more from David Vine, check out his book Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia.

Filed Under: Anthropology, International Relations, International Studies, Twitter

BOOK FACT FRIDAY

June 29, 2012 by

FACT: “By 4300-4200 BCE Old Europe was at its peak. The Varna cemetery in eastern Bulgaria had the most ostentatious funerals in the world, richer than anything of the same age in the Near East. Among the 281 graves at Varna, 61 (22%) contained more than three thousand golden objects together weighing 6 kg (13.2 lb). Two thousand of these were found in just four graves (1, 4, 36, and 43).”

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
by David W. Anthony

Roughly half the world’s population speaks languages derived from a shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did they manage to spread it around the globe? Until now their identity has remained a tantalizing mystery to linguists, archaeologists, and even Nazis seeking the roots of the Aryan race. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language lifts the veil that has long shrouded these original Indo-European speakers, and reveals how their domestication of horses and use of the wheel spread language and transformed civilization.

Linking prehistoric archaeological remains with the development of language, David Anthony identifies the prehistoric peoples of central Eurasia’s steppe grasslands as the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European, and shows how their innovative use of the ox wagon, horseback riding, and the warrior’s chariot turned the Eurasian steppes into a thriving transcontinental corridor of communication, commerce, and cultural exchange. He explains how they spread their traditions and gave rise to important advances in copper mining, warfare, and patron-client political institutions, thereby ushering in an era of vibrant social change. Anthony also describes his fascinating discovery of how the wear from bits on ancient horse teeth reveals the origins of horseback riding.

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language solves a puzzle that has vexed scholars for two centuries—the source of the Indo-European languages and English—and recovers a magnificent and influential civilization from the past.

“[A]uthoritative . . . “—John Noble Wilford, New York Times

“A thorough look at the cutting edge of anthropology, Anthony’s book is a fascinating look into the origins of modern man.”—Publishers Weekly (Online Reviews Annex)

We invite you to read Chapter 1 here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8488.pdf

Filed Under: Anthropology, Archaeology and Ancient History, Book Fact Friday, World History

Gabriella Coleman featured in Fast Company

June 25, 2012 by

With the exponentially growing importance of the internet, hacking is quickly becoming a subject worthy of study in an anthropological setting. Gabriella Coleman was interviewed by Adam Bluestein of Fast Company and discussed how exactly she gravitated toward studying hacking and digital activism, her fascination with the hacker collective Anonymous, and the introduction of hacker culture as an acceptable subject for an anthropology major. Gabriella’s forthcoming book is called Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking and addresses some of these topics.

Read the entire interview here!

Filed Under: Anthropology, Law, Sociology, Twitter
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