John McCreery's Blog (129)

john@oac

Reflections on Sunbelt XXX

I spent last week in Riva del Garda, a spectacularly beautiful Italian resort town that lies in what used to be part of the southern Tyrol, i.e., part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until it was ceded to Italy in 1918, at the end of WWI. I was there for the 30th annual Sunbelt conference, the annual meeting of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA), to present the latest findings from my ongoing research on…

Continue

Added by John McCreery on July 5, 2010 at 6:23pm — No Comments

john@oac

Theories and Tools

The following is something I wrote for a thread on Savage Minds. The topic is the relation of theory to ethnography. In it I recommend that we take seriously the metaphor that likens anthropological theories to tools and see training in anthropology as preparing people with a toolkit filled with a rich diversity of tools, some of which may prove useful…

Continue

Added by John McCreery on June 22, 2010 at 4:00pm — 6 Comments

Clarity and Surprises

In a commonsense frame of mind, we are likely to assume that clarity eliminates surprises. If only we can be perfectly clear, what we know will be unimpeachable.* Science teaches a different lesson. Clarity is a framing that exposes gaps in our knowledge, gaps through which surprises appear. We reach a perfectly clear conclusion; then reality…

Continue

Added by John McCreery on May 31, 2010 at 12:00am — No Comments

john@oac

Midlife Crisis?

From today's New York Times.

“We were stuck between meanings. Or…

Continue

Added by John McCreery on May 10, 2010 at 5:30am — No Comments

john@oac

What is it about Cats (the musical, that is)?

Today was Midori no Hi 'Green Day' in Japan, the…

Continue

Added by John McCreery on April 29, 2010 at 2:31pm — 4 Comments

john@oac

Truth in Fiction

There can be truth in fiction, truth as a topic, or truth as something that rings true, if only to one particular reader. For example, the reader is me; the fiction is Cloud's Rider, an SF novel by C.J. Cherryh. Third paragraph, page 87.

Truth, he'd been halfway religious before he became a rider. He was still trying to figure the ins and outs of the preachers' religion as it applied to him now that he'd…

Continue

Added by John McCreery on April 26, 2010 at 5:06pm — No Comments

john@oac

Millenium Assessment of Human Behavior

Are you aware of this project, now being promoted by Paul Ehrlich at Stanford University? Seems like it should be right up Keith Hart's alley.

Tip of the hat to…

Continue

Added by John McCreery on April 18, 2010 at 3:23pm — No Comments

john@oac

From Intent to Execution

Somewhere, can't put my finger on it just now, Alfred Schutz remarks that sociological theory treats its subjects like programmable automatons. The input is social norms and other information, and the output is predictable given the input. But hold on a minute? Is life ever really like that?

Over on…

Continue

Added by John McCreery on April 8, 2010 at 8:30am — No Comments

john@oac

Question No. 1

Over on Savage Minds, Kerim Friedman asks if it would make sense for anthropologists to try to formulate a list of fundamental unsolved problems, analogous to the 23 problems proposed by mathematician David Hilbert in 1890. In response, I have written…

Continue

Added by John McCreery on April 4, 2010 at 3:26am — 12 Comments