Field Season Soon to Begin

Well, I can say my first year as an assistant professor at GSU finished successfully. I enjoyed teaching environmental anthropology and archaeological theory. Intro to Anthropology, however, became my twice a week performance piece. Exhausting year, though. But now I am just a week away from starting a field season in the northern Basin of Mexico. We are excavating a few small Epiclassic period sites (600-900 CE) as well as doing some survey of some other sites in the area. The project is called the Northern Basin of Mexico Historical Ecology Project, and this season's work is one notch toward that goal. I previously directed the Proyecto Chinampero Xaltocan, which is also related to this project's end goals. The project focuss on places most archaeologists ignore: small communities, agricultural systems, canal systems, even a hacienda. That said, we are doing some limited survey at an Epiclassic period political center. My posts this summer will show a bit of what we are doing, but my agreement with National Geographic might limit some of the things I can post. Plus, I am always hesitant to show data before it's been formally reported. But we'll see. Right now I am just focusing on logistics and trying to get a paper out the door before I leave.  Stay tuned...

Commercial Publishing Policies

I recently had an article accepted at journal owned by Elsevier, a publisher that already has been criticized heavily. This is only the second time I've published in one of their journals. The first time the review process was so fast that I was elated. This second time the review process was equally fast, though I wondered if it is too fast? I sort of feel cheated a little. As an untenured professor in need or pubs with a capital P, I am not in any real position to complain (especially nowadays). But it seems to be connected not so much to quality but, instead, with production. This is clear digital print capitalism, with all the shrinking of time (and space) that goes a long with it. The rapidity of review and acceptance is not the only issue. Making "in press" articles available for download has less to do, I think, with making information available than it does with increasing the number of downloads Elsevier journals receive. It is interesting as a social and historical process. If something is "in press" (i.e., without a clear volume, issue, and page number designation) but is still downloadable and formatted like a "published" one, is there a difference? Are we witnessing the transformation of the entire notion of "in press" itself?

So, my first publication with this publisher was also made available as an "in press" article . But they seem to have loosened their policy a tad. Now they are making articles available as "in press" or "accepted" even before generating the copy proofs. So now your colleagues can actually download the manuscript itself. If there is a typo or two, even if it was introduced in converting the manuscript to the site, they can be seen and read. So, Elsevier has found an even more creative way to compress the publishing time.

I just read a couple articles published recently concerning another of Elsevier's journals, Agricultural and Forestry Meteorology. Elsevier is going to start publishing or providing access to published articles' peer reviews alongside the articles themselves. I've only come across this news piece in a couple sites, where the post reads more like an advertisement for Elsevier than an actual news story.

For example:
Peer Review Transparency

I honestly don't know what to think about this policy at all. On the face of it I hate the idea. I imagine there are some Feyerabend-esq reasons for supporting it (i.e., showing a more complete view of the scientific process, nasty little comments and all). One could say it will strengthen both articles as well as the content of peer reviews. The latter does seem to be a problem, especially with journals that have weak editors who fail to see clearly problematic reviews (but I imagine it is a hard job to get reviewers and hound them for their reviews). Would this process eliminate the anonymity of the reviews? It seems clearly problematic to post anonymous reviews online anonymously. Editors know their identities, but the authors' and readers' do not. How, I wonder, is this connected to the compression of publishing time I just mentioned? There's gotta be some connection to numbers (dollars and cents).

There seems to be so much criticism of these commercial publishers lately. To what extent, I ask, are the journals of academic associations fulfilling their obligations to authors, readers, and the research community in terms of (1) time and (2) quality? Are they losing the battle in providing an alternative, especially with the institutional guns pointed at the foreheads of professors (especially those on tenure track)? I waited on a decision from one such journal for...19 months. Yes, that's right. It took them 19 months to give me a decision. If one path is insane in its compression of time, the other path doesn't lead to a well-balanced place of sanity.

Electronic Literature and Biodiversity

In a mad search for a pdf version of Standley and Steyermark's landmark Flora of Guatemala, I stumbled upon an amazing website and resource. 

Biodiversity Library 

As I posted a few weeks back, I am a strong supporter of sites that help to disseminate scholarly texts. Well, this site has an amazing source of classic, old-school texts on the world's biological diversity. Many, if not all of these, I imagine are not subject to copyright (so no legal worries). The books can be read online or downloaded (and I spent several hours downloading several Floras for my lab's computer). Many of these texts are historic artifacts themselves and, in fact, are primary sources on 19th and early 20th century scientific colonialism. Not all the texts are about plants and animals exclusively, however. I downloaded some early versions of Sahagun's and Acosta's histories, for example. My only critique is that I wish more was available, especially some of the Harvard Peabody Museum monographs in archaeology. This site is probably old news, and most scholars who use this stuff likely already know about it. But it is new to me....

Unfamiliar Things

Today, more archaeologists are pursuing various object-centered accounts of the past, whether trying to assign agency to things or to understand the mutual constitution of people, things, and "society.". I like a lot of this work, if only because some of it forces one to look differently at the material world and our place in it. Science and technology studies and semiotics are providing the conceptual tools for this project. Furthermore, behavioral archaeology (Schiffer style) is enjoying a return in popularity. These are different bodies of literature that suggest archaeologists look at things beyond just simple proxies for past social relations (a critique, in fact, that was not born out of "post-processual" approaches but emerged out of the debates between behavioralists and middle range theorists of the 1970s). In fact, one could argue that Schiffer's paradigm was the only one that held its course on "things," which explains the resurgence in interest (that is, the renewed popularity of behavioral archaeology is not due simply to the pursuit of theories of a distinctly archaeological sort).

Archaeologists tend to search for the familiar dimensions of often very unfamiliar things. Poets are good at expressing the unfamiliar dimensions of seemingly familiar things. I was reading some stuff by Elizabeth Bishop the other day that got me thinking of these things, especially some stanzas from her poem Objects and Apparitions: "Monuments to every moment,/refuse of every moment, used:/cages for infinity." This poem is an ode to the surrealist Joseph Cornell. Many of his works were boxes filled with strange assortments of objects removed from one context and re-contextualized via their deliberate association with other items. The juxtaposition creates a feeling both of familiarity and unfamiliarity, an ambiguity that is rich with potential meaning. They become, to steal a phrase from Mary Douglas, matter out of place.

So, these thoughts aren't entirely random musings on materiality. I am thinking them because this morning I was going over photos I took back in February 2009 in Chicago. For those of you who have never lived in Chicago, the city really only has two seasons: Autumn and spring are more or less just winter and summer battling it out. That first snow, especially the big snow, is usually pretty fun. If it causes cancellation in school, there is no better time to trek through the weather and drink some pints at a neighborhood bar. But then the snow gets yellow, brown, and black and does not really disappear until April. Back in 2009, we had a temporary respite in February, and the snow began to melt. My wife and I decided to trek around our neighborhood in Andersonville and take some photos of some of the stuff emerging from the formerly obscured surface. It was fun but also interesting. Many of these items seem rich with meaning, and this potential is largely due to the fact that they have been removed from their previous context. They almost beg to be interpreted. I have attempted to oblige them not only by photographing them but enhancing them a tad.

On another note, however, I think this material would offer a really great research project in itself, along the lines of Rathje's garbology: examining structured patterns of discard in seemingly unstructured refuse practices (i.e., littering versus institutionalized garbage).

Anyway, here are nine examples of some of the photos.

I call this first one Fallen Angel. It might be a pizza crust?? Actually, I think it is a banana peal. My wife thinks it looks like a severed penis.

I call this next one Dead Bird, because that is what it is.

This next one is called Jabba, of course.

 This is called Glass. It is not really glass, just some ice......

This is a bottle of whiskey. Unnamed.

Here's some blue jeans. Yes, good question...

A life history of the oral fixation?

Pumpkin. This is a testament to preservation as this thing is either from Halloween or Thanksgiving.

Caught red-handed.

Bye Bye Gigapedia/Library.nu

Of course, I've never downloaded a free book in PDF before....so, how did I find out about this?????.....

Bye Bye Library.nu


Library.nu, formerly gigapedia, is just the latest victim of the organized effort of commercial publishing to prevent the distribution of information in the absence of the dollar. I've had many students praise the website for saving them loads of money, especially in an era where textbook costs are insane, leading many professors (like me) to abandon them entirely (well, I won't be using a textbook for intro anthropology classes again).

Academics are increasingly alarmed by the tactics and the policies of commercial publishers, particularly with their journals. Several mathematicians, for example, recently boycotted all journals owned by a powerful publishing corporation (which I won't name as I have something in review at a journal owned by it...hey, I don't have tenure....).

Mathematicians Organize Boycott of a Publisher

The concerted effort to control information is scary. The debate over SOPA and PIPA just scratches the surface, and most people don't appreciate how parasitically systemic and global the tentacles of control are. Just consider Congress's efforts to limit open access (supported, paradoxically, by the AAA).

AAA Contra Open Access

Archaeologists have also been upset with this process. Mike Smith, for example, has been a vocal (and at times entertaining) critic of opponents of information through his blog.

Publishing Archaeology

Anyway, where did I begin? Oh yes, library.nu. What bothers me about the joint action is not that now I will have to head to the library to check out that book and get a TA to photocopy it. Instead, it is the insidious side of control over the flow of information and the flow of cash. My university, for example, is involved in a lengthy copyright infringement battle over professors posting scans of readings on the school's blackboard system. We have to be careful. Publishing companies have a vested interest in limiting our freedom to distribute information to students. The textbook rep who plagues the corridors of my department, for example, tells me that the I can customize a textbook and include all those added readings in the books themselves, reducing the cost for students. My response now is to eliminate the textbook entirely (afterall, anybody see any similarity between Kottak's textbooks and Weekend at Bernie's?). I'll tread carefully in how I make readings available and those I choose.

Archaeology, Living Wages, and the Informal Economy

Working in Latin America for well over ten years now as an archaeologist, I have seen the dollars and cents side of projects from a few different perspectives, though not as many as others and not as an employee. An important issue is pay rates that archaeologists offer folks who work and labor on our projects. This is an incredibly important question because it is a place where archaeologists create and perpetuate class conditions (i.e., McGuire 2008; McGuire and Walker 1999). We enter these communities not as solitary ethnographers or simply benevolent scientists. Rather we enter these places as employers. A friend of mine, who is a socio-cultural anthropologist working in west Africa, frequently tells me that anthropology is, at its roots, exploitation--harvesting of information that, in the very least, is used to enhance ones success as a researcher. Archaeology itself almost seems a perfect Colonial enterprise: just replace minerals and other resources with artifacts. I have observed archaeological projects in Mexico where directors pay local people 90 pesos a day. I have seen pay rates between 100 and 110 pesos a day. Many workers take the money and the physical labor because they have the need (and the hope that a better opportunity will arise).

There is no question that archaeologists contribute to the informal economy in Mexico, though to what extent is probably impossible to quantify. A recent article in La Jornada reports data from INEGI that the informal economy supported about 14 million people in Mexico in 2011, more than 1 million than 2010 and more people than have permanent employment and health/security benefits.

Here is a link:

La Jordada: la economía informal

One in three workers in Mexico, INEGI reports, receives no more than 120 pesos a day. This amount is more than minimum wages in Mexico. Thus, I've heard archaeologists paying around the 100 pesos a day rate slap themselves on the backs for the charitable contribution to local economies. But is this enough? Here is what La Jornada says can be bought with this salary (pardon my Spanish):

Así, uno de cada tres trabajadores remunerados del país tienen un ingreso que, para efectos comparativos, es suficiente para comprar: un litro de aceite comestible (23.5 pesos); un kilogramo de pollo entero (34 pesos); un kilogramo de jitomate (18 pesos); un kilogramo de cebolla (17 pesos); un cuarto de kilo de chile jalapeño (cinco pesos); un kilogramo de tortilla (11 pesos) y tres boletos del Metro (tres pesos cada uno). La suma del costo de esos productos es de 117.56 pesos.

Can or Should archaeologists pay more? There is a tension here between research and ethics, especially considering the enormous amounts of physical labor projects require combined with the limited amount of funding to support them. What should be the choice? My inclination is that many project budgets are set up to short change local workers as much as possible to retain a surplus for unexpected issues (research or otherwise). In fact, archaeologists are often well positioned for such Colonialist behavior.

But the problem is real and not easy to deal with sometimes. It can also create a lot of tension and stress in communities. My former adviser, Liz Brumfiel, who sadly passed away last month, was both archaeologist and activist. She pursued a living wage in archaeology agenda. I don't know to what extent she raised this item as an ethical issue generally in the field (though knowing her she did), but I know she invested considerably in making the people of Xaltocan, Mexico as important as her research. It was challenging to follow in her footsteps when I began working there, especially with funding limited by grad student status. Yet I tried to follow her lead, as did her other students who worked in Xaltocan and the area. We all recognized immediately when we began we were employers first and archaeologists second. Any other attitude is one or more of the following: (1) sheltered, (2) in denial, (3) deliberately exploitative. I'm not trying to put myself or my colleagues on some pedestal, but I know we paid our employees more than any other projects I knew of at the time. I would not hesitate for a moment to put Liz on one, however. She was a model to follow professionally, academically, and ethically. We will always miss her.

Should the SAA try to establish living wage goals for archaeologists working abroad?

McGuire, R.
2008 Archaeology as Political Action. University of California Press.

McGuire, R and M. Walker
1999 Class Confrontations in Archaeology. Historical Archaeology 33(1):159-183 .