SOUNDING on Random Theoretical Notions, July 2, 2010

Some things that have crossed my wires (in all senses) recently, that I’m keeping track of:

• Theory is a force that gives us meaning. A very good post which makes a point similar to that of the revered J.Z. Smith: in order for theory to be truly useful, it must be at least temporarily granted the opportunity to direct and determine portions of our reasoning.  Or else it’s largely just academic window dressing. My students will be reading this next Spring.
• “But Don’t We All Just Feature In Our Own Stories?” No. Against Narrativity.
• The flexibility of memory.  An awesome Slate Magazine project in mass manipulation, demonstrating media’s awesome capacity for mind-control, even in the supposedly democratic anti-ideological age of the !n†3rw3Bz. Also, remember Satanic Ritual Abuse? It never happened either.
• Another great post by Economic Anthropologist Keith Hart on Marcel Mauss: Mauss on gifts, markets, and money.
• A nice intro to Whorfian-style language-constraint theory on BoingBoing, of all places.
• Highlight the connections between people! A call for doing anthropology differently, along the lines of what I think as the Deleuzian dictum: “Relativism is not the the relativity of truth, but the truth of relation.”
• OOOOOOH!  Anthropology Timelines!
• Some thoughts on whether folktales, the sort of which I have spent a fair bit of time studying, translating, and interpreting, were involved in Khmer revolts of the Middle Period.