[#PHOTO] Looking south from Wychwood towards the Hillcrest Complex

Looking south from Wychwood towards the Hillcrest Complex, a photo by randyfmcdonald on Flickr.

As I sit here sweating on a humid July night, I thought I'd post a picture from the last heavy snowfall Toronto got this year, in April. Here, I'm looking south from the Wychwood Park neighbourhood towards the TTC"s extensive Hillcrest Complex, located on the southwestern corner of the intersection of Bathurst Street and Davenport Road.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

Ocean mining, diasporas, Belarusians in Poland and Ukraine to totalitarians, Libya, and more!

• 80 Beats notes that deep-sea exploration of the Pacific has turned up large amounts of rare earths--rare elements of the periodic table--in the mud of the Pacific. Mining?


• At Acts of Minor Treason, Andrew Barton argues in favour of some sort of Canadian government outreach to the Canadian diaspora.


• Border Thinking's Laura Agustín argues that sociological research on international migration of sex workers needs to be carried out more impartially in the context of globalization and migration.


• Eastern Approaches observes that economic crisis has really hurt the Belarusian traders smuggling goods into their country from Poland.


• Far Outliers has two grim posts on interwar Ukraine, the first on the ways in which Hitler and Stalin saw Ukraine as necessary for the fulfillment of their plans, the second recounting the great famine of the 1930s.


• The Global Sociology Blog reviews a book on the noxious but increasingly common tendency to hire interns instead of workers.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Erik Loomis comments on the increasingly common interest of unions in establishing transnational links, i.e. the United States with Canada and Mexico.


• Personal Reflection's Jim Belshaw argues that the recent visit of William and Kate to Canada was made in part with the aim of promoting Canadian national unity and the Canadian-ness of Québec.


• At The Power and the Money, Noel Maurer comments on the war in Libya, noting the non-involvement of Egypt and Tunisia, the role of France in the light of domestic politics, the rebel-Berber alliance, and more.


• Slap Upside the Head celebrates the news that Ontario Roman Catholic schools have to allow GLBT support groups, gay-straight alliances in all but name.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the alleged decline of anthropology

Savage Minds' Rex has a despairing post about the future of anthropology. In the years of the baby boom, he argues, from the 1940s to the 1970s, an abundance of new anthropologists did an abundance of studies worldwide with an abundance of resources. Now? There's a serious risk of there being not enough anthropologists to read and index everything. There's still specialized research, but it's often private, commissioned for market research, say. The commons may be no more.

I'm guilty for this, I admit. I majored in anthropology in university, but I never became an anthropologist. The skills and knowledge I've acquired have served me well. I've an appreciation of different cultures and geographies, yes, I may have some interview skills, I know social theory, and I took a valuable lesson from my first day of Anthropology 101: "There's always a difference between a society's ideal behaviour and its actual behaviour." But I'll not be available to help keep the libraries of research functioning. Alas.

If you are an anthropologist of the Pacific you can find the senior Micronesianists, say, and they can give you the oral history of their discipline, including its origins literally from nothing to the present day. They know which anthologies and articles were ground-breaking, and which edited volumes were central to the academic networks that produced them. In the coming decades, though — and I don’t want to sound too grim here — the group of scholars to whom this oral history was transmitted is not going to be a couple dozen people, its going to be a couple of people.

Even as the oral learning is attenuated, we will still have the publications: the glorious, thick, un-DRM’d publications. Publications that do not wink out of existence if you don’t pay your monthly rental free to Ingenta, publications that don’t have special software designed to keep you from copying passages into your notebook. But in an era of scholarly decline, will there be enough personnel necessary for these works to be read in any serious way? As archival and unpublished work comes online, the amount is going increase exponentially. We will have a feast of digitized fieldnotes, diaries, and dissertations, and no one (or at least not enough) people to read them.

The situation is aggravated by anthropology’s penchant for particularism. We have fine regional syntheses (in PNG, for instance, edited volumes like Papuan Borderlands and Children of Afek) but most of our synthetic and generalizing papers derive from what Sahlins called “uncontrolled comparison”: reading tons until it comes together in your head, and then writing it up. This is a time-honored tradition, but requires large amounts of exactly what we lack: scholarly work cycles. Without any sort of rigorous metanalysis — or even standards for structuring our articles, wading through the literature is a rewarding but laborious project which is not fit for our upcoming shortage of labor.

[ISL] "Seychelles: A World Apart"

The Indian Ocean island nation of the Seychelles, a French-settled but later British-ruled archipelago in the Indian Ocean off the East African coast, is the subject of Carl Haub's latest post at the Population Reference Bureau's blog. I last posted about the Seychelles in 2005, with a post on efforts to promote Seychelllois Creole on the Internet and in public life and to so avoid the language's displacement by more prestigious English and French. Haub's post is an in-depth exploration of the island nation's insularity, of the isolation that at once makes life difficult for Seychellois through the inflated cost of imports and helps promote the island's economy through the insular isolation of the inhabitants' environment.

The country has a fascinating history. Vasco da Gama was the first European visitor in 1502 but the island remained uninhabited until 1756 when the French first laid claim. It did not become a truly viable colony until the 1790s. Prior to that, it is said to have served as a hiding place for the booty of pirates from Madagascar, such as “la Buse.” Even today, treasure hunters obtain permission to dig for probably imagined riches. French dominion was rather short and the British took over in 1810, although French landowners were allowed to retain their holdings. But much of French culture remains, especially the local language. Seychelles was initially ruled by the British from their colony of Mauritius, hence the designation of the money as rupee. The British conducted a campaign against the Indian Ocean slave trade. Freed slaves taken from slave ships were often brought to Seychelles, forming a large part of the original settlers. But slave ownership was still allowed and the practice continued until made illegal in 1835.

[. . .]

The August 2010 Census reported a preliminary population of 88,311, up from the adjusted 2002 Census count of 81,755. The rate of natural increase in 2009 was 1.0 percent. Net immigration is most likely negligible although difficult to measure since Seychellois who live abroad often have two passports. The total fertility is low for a developing country, averaging 2.3 children per woman for the 2006-2009 period. Life expectancy at birth is 73 years and infant mortality is 11 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in the same period although life expectancy has not risen appreciably for many years.

The country scores very high on many socioeconomic measures, such as education, health, and housing and has already achieved most UN Millennium Development goals. A visitor’s impression is one of a country with many developed country amenities. Car ownership is on the rise with 9,104 cars registered in 2007, or about one for every three households. There is now even the semblance of a rush hour from new developments south of Victoria. Younger Seychellois appreciate the new modern townhouse development but there is also some reluctance to cut oneself off from more traditional village family relationships.

Life can be an economic struggle as virtually all goods must be imported. A visit to the government supermarket in Victoria, revealed large numbers of recently-received items, such as hundreds of bottles of ketchup. Agriculture is almost non-existent due to the terrain. Out 42,000 employment in 2009, only 738 were employed in agriculture, forestry, and fishing. (The 2010 Census reported a higher level of employment than previously estimated at 48,000.) In 2009, the International Monetary Fund required the Seychelles rupee to float on the open market, raising the exchange rate to a more realistic 17 Seychelles rupees from the previous seven. While it created financial hardships, the move was necessary and beneficial and the all-important exchange rate has improved to 12 rupees to the U.S. dollar at this writing. Nonetheless, by 2009, prices for many food items had doubled since 2007 while incomes rose by only 50 percent.

About 25 percent of national income comes from tourism, less than figures often quoted. There is some industry on Mahe, such as Indian Ocean Tuna, called the second-largest tuna processing facility in the world, although it employs a good deal of foreign labor. Each town around Mahe has its own general store, called a supermarket, but these are nearly all run by Indians, primarily from the state of Tamil Nadu. A recently-built Hindu temple, built in the South Indian style, is now prominent in Victoria. The large majority of the population, 87 percent, is Roman Catholic, 7 percent Anglican, with the rest about evenly divided among Hindu, Muslim, Buddhism, and Baha’i. Seychellois are known as avid churchgoers. Many towns have churches which seem unusually large for their size. A recently-built Hindu temple, built in the South Indian tower style, is now prominent in Victoria and the country’s first mosque has been built.