Now/here no/where woman

I received a letter from a friend today! It's been ages since we've heard anything from each other. The last time he had anything to say to me, it was about what he called The Tragedy of the Privates . My dear friend, Five years ago, I left your cozy little kitchen to work in the field. It might have felt to you like we lost touch. Not entirely, if you ask a sweet potato. I've told you how news travels in the plant world. You've moved to another city and word has reached me that you have planted some of my relatives in your small plot of soil in back of your apartment. This is wonderful, because now I can send you this message. Since we last spoke, I've been doing extensive fieldwork around the world, in places where humans and root crops are dependent on each other. In a conference at which sweet potato fries were served for snacks, I learned of auto-ethnography. Intrigued, I decided I should give it a try. As you can imagine, it's challenging for a ...

Wanderlust strikes again. We made our way to Lias on April 27, 2015, a place in the Mountain Province we'd never been before, because I broke a glass in our bedroom in the first week of April. Muttering irately to myself, I grabbed a spread from an old newspaper and began picking up the larger shards of glass. As I placed the broken glass on the newspaper page, the word "Lena-u" caught my eye. It was the title of an article about a local delicacy in Lias, which would be prepared during the coming Changyasan Festival on April 28. Intrigued but also in a hurry to clean up, I used my phone to snap a picture of the paragraph containing the phone numbers of the author and festival coordinator, Sixto Talastas. Then I swept the floor, bundled up the broken glass in the said page from the Mountain Province Exponent and dropped it in the bin, article and all. But lena-u had worked its spell on me. I had to get to Lias, no matter what. There is no rhyme or reason to wande...

Some of you may recall that sometime last year we had a visiting scholar, Camote, Ph.D . He has been in the field since August 2014, but sent us this short essay reacting to the culling of approximately 60 trees by SM , in Baguio City. Stock photo of Camote, PhD. Taken July 2014, towards the end of his fellowship in our kitchen. THE TRAGEDY OF THE PRIVATES*  News travels quickly through the underground networks of plants. Leaving aside the anguish that coursed through our roots as the trees on Luneta Hill fell Saturday night, I offer up this food for thought for the human communities of this city. Image credit: Sherwin Cabunilas and Bringing 182 to the Supreme Court. In 1968 Garrett Hardin wrote a seminal essay in Science Magazine entitled, The Tragedy of the Commons . His ideas will be familiar to many. Hardin used the metaphor of medieval European herders to argue that in a commons, a shared resource with open access, all rational individuals will seek to maxi...

"None of the above and/or All of the above. It's the all-inclusive, non-conclusive Answer!" *Mr. Camote is our resident sweet potato head who holds a PhD in the anthropology of matter that matters.  His research interests include food, mediation and translation of academic language, and the culture of tubers. He currently lives in the kitchen.

It's no coincidence this turned up on my AnthroDaily widget . Obviously, the spirit of Margaret Mead is with me and knows where I'm headed. (Image from the Asian Ethnographic Collection, Division of Anthropology , at the American Museum of Natural History)

POSTSCRIPT to Pop Ethnography of Dutch PhD Promoties 1: According to one of my more knowledgeable and senior informants, in the past the paranimfs really did go to defenses armed, to protect the promovendus from attacks from outraged professors. This was way back in the 17th century, when "science was very important" and a defense could last for days. My over-active imagination went into overdrive: perhaps some of these 17th century defenses ended in duels! But that's pure speculation and not based on any anecdotal -- much less empirical, evidence. It was very possible for a defendant/promovendus to black out from exhaustion and the paranimf was then allowed to continue to defend the thesis on behalf of the out-cold promovendus. (As expected, the younger members of this society are no longer aware of the origins of certain elements of the ritual. For them, these elements have become, simply, "The way it has always been done.")

As an anthrogeek I've decided to approach next week's "promotie" (an esoteric dissertation defense ritual practiced in academic circles in the Netherlands) as participant-observation taken to the extreme and to do some research prior to the event. Apparently, a promovendus (one who would be promoted), is supposed to have two paranimfs. What are paranimfs? I googled paranimfs and found only Dutch information, the most accessible being Wikipedia of course. (Disclaimer: I know. Wikipedia is not the most reliable of sources of information.) I copy-pasted the whole text on paranimfs into babelfish and the translation that came up is priceless so here it is verbatim: (Disclaimer: I know. Yahoo Babelfish is not the best tool for language translation, but the babelfish on the other hand... Oh never mind.)   Image source: Leiden University The promovendus is generally accompanied by two paratrooper nymphs. The original meaning of paratrooper nymph is bride noblema...

A litson rice review with the discerning Dawgs .

Or, What We Have Forgotten... There is a way of thinking about the world around us that has become so persistent that we take it for granted. We think of nature or the environment as something out there, as being about trees, wild animals, mountains, pristine lakes and oceans. We think of ourselves, humans, as being above nature because we are rational, calculating, and conniving. We think of our cities as being separate from nature. We think of our technologies as management tools that we can use to control nature. We speak of Ondoy as a natural disaster. It's time to change our habits of thinking. Ondoy, the natural disaster, is gone from our country. That particular typhoon is over but we are still in the throes of a social disaster created by nature and humans both. The possible human causes for this social disaster include, among other things, excessive waste generation and improper waste disposal, lack of foresight in the zonation of our cities, our contributions to greenho...

Photo by FGSLP "The university as arena for competing discourses" -- Prof. Delfin Tolentino That's the first line of notes I wrote during the Baguio Centennial Conference, which was held in U.P. Baguio on March 6 and 7. Two whole days of discussion from academicians, activists, advocates, and Actademixvocates ! The geek in me was thrilled to attend this occasion as an observer, and the participant in me left exhausted. Before I go on and share some of my notes on the conference, here is an introduction to the actademixvocates. The Actademixvocates are a fascinating tribe. They are a proud people but, strangely, are often quick to deny their identity due to a strange cultural discomfort with being "put in a box," as they are often heard to say in casual conversations. A semi-nomadic people, they migrate from issue to issue until they find a time and place where their skills and knowledge may best be suited to prevailing conditions, at which time they may decide t...

So you use skin-whitening products? Check out what young, educated, Indonesian women have to say about women who would rather be pale and vapid than dark and sultry.

It is the end of Ramadan. The Artist-in-Residence was appalled that some of her classmates thought the holiday would be moved to Monday. According to her they only stopped insisting when she pointed out to them that it would be equivalent to GMA declaring that Christmas should be celebrated on the 20th instead of the 25th of December. Here is a view of Islam most of us -- growing up in a predominantly Christian and prejudiced society -- would never have thought of: Islamic pop culture!

Indiogenius muzik! It's been my long-time dream to write for the PCIJ, and this year my wish was granted! The piece is not of the brilliantly earth-shattering, mind-opening, cataclysmic types that PCIJ generates, but I'm thrilled nevertheless heehee.

I heard ten papers presented today at the International Cordillera Studies Conference. By the end of the day my eyes were glazed, and all the other cordianthronerds looked dazed and confused. There were three highlights for me today: 1. Dean Raymond Rovillos paper on the Subanon of Siocon, Zamboanga del Norte. The case study he presented on ancestral domain claims and mining issues provided useful points of comparison with similar situations in the Cordillera. I was struck by how an anti-mining Subanon leader was later undermined by the findings of a pro-mining organization led by a "pure" Subanon, who made the counterclaim that the former's claims to speak for the Subanon people were not valid because he was half-Ilokano and not pure Subanon. The NCIP, in response to this situation, withdrew their support for the ancestral domain claim of the Ilokano-Subanon, and supported instead the pro-mining pure Subanon. Interesting identity politics. Quote from RR: "There is n...

Reading a dictionary as material culture can tell you a lot about a society. karya means 'work' or, depending on the context, 'opus' in Bahasa Indonesia. One of the root word's affixed forms is dikaryakan . It means to use a possession as a means of earning money. The example of usage in the Indonesian-English Dictionary by John Echols and Hassan Shadily goes like this: Mobil dinas mereka dikaryakan. Malam-malam dipakai sebagai taxi . In English: They are earning money with their official cars. They use them as taxis in the evenings . In conversations with Jakarta taxi drivers and Kalimantan villagers I was often told, not without a hint of pride, that in 2003 Indonesia was the Number One corrupt country in the world and the Philippines was only Number Two. (I wonder where they all got the figures from.) When I ventured that things were just as dire in the Philippines as in Indonesia, they countered that nothing could be as bad as korupsi in Indonesia. Apparently ...