Academic
Office
In India, on January 12th, around one thirty in the morning, back from a long day of filming which had involved over nine hours of driving, I fired up my iBook just before going to bed. Thats when I got the email that would turn our lives upside down: I had been appointed as assistant […]
Neurobiology vs. Psychoanalysis
My brother reports on how the media is reacting to the riots in France:
My favorite TV program for the examination of television, Arrêt sur Images, had, as one of their guests this weekend the mayor of Clichy-sous-bois, the city at the epicenter of the recent events.
One of the commentators on the show was discussing how […]
Privacy
I long ago discovered that the best way to reduce the amount of SPAM is to have two e-mail addresses, one private and one public. I use the private one for writing to friends and for professional work, only listing the public one on the web. Now I even have a third, gmail account, I […]
Distractions
Words to live by:
I’m very paranoid about any metric of productivity. One person’s wasted time is another person’s productivity. For most of my life people saw me doing the things I liked to do and said, “you have too much free time on your hands.” I’ve decided that when you hear that, it means you’re […]
Taiwan Timeline
I’d like to issue a call for anyone and everyone who cares about the study of Taiwanese history to help contribute to the Wikipedia Timeline of Taiwanese History. Although I was aided tremendously by my handy copy of 臺灣史小事典, trying to sort out all the various dates and names of Taiwan’s various rebellions, rulers, institutions, […]
Wars and Words
A little horn tooting:
My Language in Society book review on both At war with words and War of words: Language, politics and 9/11 has finally been published!
Here’s the abstract:
Daniel Nelson writes that “we talk our way into war and talk our way out of it” (Dedaic & Nelson [henceforth DN], p. 449). Drawing on a […]
Japanese History
I missed this post by Tak at the time. It discusses the recent availability online of translations of Japanese history textbooks for middle-school:
Lastly, Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, the group of right-wing historians also known as tsukurukai or 新しい歴史教科書を作る会, has just published translations of their infamous textbook for middle-school students titled New History Textbook: […]
Sports
Anyone who knows me will be shocked to find that I’ve been writing about sports, but that is just what I’ve been doing over at Savage Minds. First a post about ethnic soccer clubs in Australia, and then a post about the representation of Aborigines in Taiwanese baseball.
{Aboriginal, anthropology, Australia, Baseball, Soccer}
Guns, Germs and Steel
Those who haven’t been reading my other blog, Savage Minds, have been missing the huge debate that arose about a couple of posts we wrote on Jared Diamond’s book, Guns, Germs and Steel. If you want to follow the debate in its entirety, you should start on this page; but with over 90 comments and […]
Seediq Bale
Back in January I read about how Taiwanese filmmaker Wei Te-sheng (魏德聖) is planning on making the “first Taiwanese epic,” about an Aborigine uprising against the Japanese which took place over 75 years ago. The film is tentatively titled Seediq Bale (賽德克巴萊). It seems they are still attempting to raise the money necessary to shoot […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
