Marshall Sahlins on Foucault

Amused by this:

In short there has been too much appropriation of inappropriate stuff. When Foucault writes about discipline and capillary power in early modern Western history, anthropologists pick it up and use it to think the institutions of every and any society. In the event, this poststructuralism becomes a paranoid style neofunctionalism: everything-family, kinship, second-person Vietnamese pronouns, Brazilian workers’ housing, Korean shamanism-is reduced to a power function. For myself, I think that anthropologists who have had the experience of cultural-ontological differences should not give a Foucault.

Anthropology summer reading circle

While I’m linking to Savage Minds their summer reading circle this year is Donald S. Moore’s Suffering for Territory: Race Place and Power in Zimbabwe.

We’re hoping it will draw in people in geography, politics, maybe legal or environmental studies, so tell all your cool friends in the other disciplines too.

The book is substantial, 400 pages, 3 sections. I will try to post something by July 15th on the introduction, and then shoot for 1-2 chapters per week until mid-late August. I hope all the Savage Minds will chime in, and if anyone else wants to write anything substantial about a section of the book, I will happily post it here on your behalf. Let the suffering begin!

More here.

Disciplinary spaces of architecture

Examples courtesy of Architectures of Control

A traditional British school classroom often had high window-sills—to prevent the seated pupils from being distracted by more exciting events outside, or indeed staring out of the window.

‘Redesigned to face contemporary urban realities, this bench comes standard with a centre arm to discourage overnight stays in its comfortable embrace’—from Belson

Oxford bus stop

This is only one step away from Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon [7] and Michel Foucault’s argument (in Discipline and Punish [8]) that by embedding punishment systems in architecture and institutions (e.g. prisons) rather than meting out direct retribution publicly (e.g. public execution or floggings), the likelihood of adverse public reaction to the punishment is greatly reduced. In the park bench example, a public confrontation between police and a person sleeping on the bench (with possible sympathy from bystanders) can be avoided entirely by preventing anyone sleeping on the bench in the first place (using the architecture to control). Not for nothing are speed humps commonly known as ‘sleeping policemen’ in the UK.

(h/t Savage Minds)

Pomo = LaRouchian wingnuttery?

One of the things one occasionally has to deal with are people’s prejudices and misperceptions, bordering on hatred, of anything that seems to threaten the scientific method.

Now personally I’m all in favor of the scientific method in its place, but for many people an interest in say Rorty, Latour, Foucault etc. bespeaks an anti-scientific mind on a par with the outer reaches of weirdness. Or, of Lyndon LaRouch, who is apparently making a comeback on campuses and who attracted the ire of this science-based blog for his interest in physics.

LaRouche is quoted as writing:

Once we recognize that scientific knowledge is obtained, not by contemplating the universe, but by studying how we may generate those thoughts which enable us to efficiently act to change the universe, then the principles of cognition underlying the discovery of lawful physical principles, are the epistemological basis for defining the underlying determination of validatable physical laws.

Now that might not make a whole lot of sense but it seems hamless enough.

Not so! To the rescue rides this commentator:

I hate to break it to you, but your local departments of english literature/women’s studies etc etc etc are almost certainly propagating equally nonsensical propaganda to your students, and doing far more harm than these guys. Officially sanctioned crackpottery is far worse than this kind of random lunacy.

The ramparts are under attack. Hold the line!

Despite a few attempts to keep things civil, a poster named “caveman” replies:

Don’t be disingenuous. You know perfectly well that a straw-man caricature of post-modernism is exactly the same thing as post-modernism.

It’s not inevitable that these discussions degenerate into caricature, and debate is good, it’s just surprising to see these old warmed over relic opinions from the culture wars.