Our academic virtual world is filled with rouge’s galleries of photos showing who is who in our various departments. Often blurry, ill framed, poorly lit, such galleries seem to shout amateur. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing? Do we really want head shots that look like we’re members of a law firm or corporate execs at a fortune 500 company? I’m not sure.

There is something about the placement of head shoots in a gallery (virtual or otherwise and as useful as they might be) that invokes in my mind the venerable space of a trophy room, filled with the heads of stuffed animals, that one might fin in an old Scottish hunting lodge.

Very often such professional head shot organizer come up with appropriate places for faculty to be taken. If you’re a lab scientist – then the setting should be a lab; an art historian then in an art galley; historians belong in archives, librarians in libraries, and the filmmaker should hold a camera and be in a cinema . . . It is as though these spaces somehow stand in for the ecological setting within which the wild specimen might be found by the valiant hunter.

As in a game park, the hunter has no need to actually find that which he (allow the presumption of gender) will shoot as the specimens will line up voluntarily for this virtual trophy taking and mounting.  We march in as lambs to the slaughter giving up our selves for the honour of being professionally mounted to show off to the wall – look a trophy academic.  But in reality, we are not the real trophies, we are simply the back drop against the real trophies parade.  For without the wall of mounted head shots the ‘truly’ brilliant have nothing to shine against.

I have started a new project creating anthropology profiles.  What I have done is invite a range of anthropologists that I know to share one to three journal articles or book chapters that they have written.   The criteria that I have used is that these should be  pieces that the author feels either shows the nature and scope of their work particularly well or that they focuses on some aspect of the anthropologist’s work that they would like others to pay attention to.

I offered up two things in return for the cooperation of my colleagues and friends:  (1) I will read each piece that is shared with me and provide summaries posted on this blog, and (2) I shall start the ball rolling with some suggestions of my own.

I have selected two articles that speak to the nature of my current work over the last few years and something rather old that reflects a longstanding interest of mine but which I haven’t spent much time on of late.

Current work:
(1) Putting Words into Action: Negotiating Collaborative Research in Gitxaała.  Canadian Journal of Native Education. Volume 28, 2004, Numbers 1/2.  PDF link.

This is an article published in an excellent, but relatively obscure, Canadian journal who’s primary focus is aboriginal education issues.  My paper speaks to the matter of building respectful research relations and draws from my work on the north coast of BC.  There are also two videos that we have produced that connect well with this piece.

(2)  Dm sibilhaa’nm da laxyuubm gitxaała: Picking abalone in gitxaała territory.  Human Organization. 69(3) 2010.   PDF link.

This piece emerges out of my longstanding research on the north coast with Gitxaała Nation.  The origins of the article was an expert opinion written for a court case.  The published article was rewritten to fit a journal format.  The central point of the article is that the harvest of abalone was sustainable up until the point that relatively unrestrained dive fisheries began.  The impact on indigenous communities has been heavy as many elders speak to the absence of abalone in much the same way that one speaks with sorrow of those who have passed away.

Something old and ‘fun.’
“BETWEEN THE STATEROOM AND THE FOC’S’CLE: Everyday Forms of Class Struggle Aboard a Commercial Fishboat,”NEXUS: Vol. 8:1. PDF link.

This was written while a grad student -and- it shows it 😉  I share it as it talks about issues and themes that remain close to the heart if not actively written about today.