I'm very happy to announce that Amazon.com is now distributing my film, Bethel: Community and Schizophrenia in Northern Japan, as a DVD, streaming rental, or streaming purchase!
: $24.99
rental
: $1.99
: $9.99
I'm hoping that using Amazon as a distribution source rather than the standard educational film distribution companies will mean that more people will be able to get access to the film at a lower cost.
A portrait of some of our current and former Japan anthropology zemi students at the 2009 American Anthropological Association meeting in Philadelphia.
From left to right, back to front:
Missing from this portrait are William Kelly (1980): Baseball in Japan, Ellen Rubinstein (2012): Hikikomori in Japan, and Elizabeth Miles (2010 M.A.): Masculinity in Japan .
Just a note that the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association will be held next week in Philadelphia. I'll be in Philly starting Tuesday as part of the Society for Visual Anthropology conference which starts right before it.
Which reminds me, the SVA is cosponsoring an exhibit called Ethnographic Terminalia:
The Icebox Project Space at Crane Arts will feature an innovative group exhibition entitled Ethnographic Terminalia from December 2-20, 2009. Scheduled to coincide with the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, this year in Philadelphia, the curators have brought together an international group of artists and ethnographers who are actively engaged in experimental and emergent cultural forms. Visitors are invited to join in a multisensorial happening that challenges the boundaries and borders that demarcate the margins of ethnographic, anthropological, and art practices. In this exhibition, a diverse group of artists and anthropologists present boundary troubling works in eleven separate installations. Each installation project in Ethnographic Terminalia offers a thought provoking and playful (or agitating) alternative to considering what lies both beyond and within imagined and constructed boundaries of the skilled practices of artists and ethnographers.
This exhibition features original works by: Trudi-Lynn Smith; Erica Lehrer and Hannah Smotrich; Kate Hennessy and Oliver Neumann; Marko and Gordana Zivkovic; Chris Fletcher; Roderick Coover; Jayasinhji Jhala; Craig Campbell; Mike Evans and Stephen Foster; Stephanie Spray; and Scott and Jen Webel. While these works are deployed within the rubric of anthropology they answer visual and aesthetic questions in unique and particular fashion, decentering the priviledged categories of both ethnography and art through various mediums.
According to the curatorial team: “This exhibit will be of great interest not only to professional anthropologists but other publics as well. By drawing the studied methodologies of ethnography into a familiar art environment this collective exhibition delivers an all too uncommon challenge to disciplinary and professional boundaries. By engaging with the politics of representation, memory, documentation, and archive Ethnographic Terminalia will impress upon all visitors their own stake in the interpretation of cultural worlds.” The works presented in Ethnographic Terminalia address the possibility of showing and interpreting cultural worlds outside of the traditional cinematic, museological, and textual frameworks of Cultural Anthroplogy while challenging the art world to consider the sensuous complexities and textures of everyday life.
Visit the website for more details about the show: www.metafactory.ca/terminalia
Exhibition Opening Reception & Shindig
4 December 2009 7:30-10.00pm
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Location: Icebox Project Space at Crane Arts, Philadelphia (PA)
1400 N. American Street
December 2-20, 2009
Wednesday to Saturday 12pm-6pm
Entry is free
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Curators:
Craig Campbell, University of Texas at Austin (Austin, Texas)
Anabelle Rodriguez, Temple University (Philadelphia, PA)
Fiona McDonald, University College London (London, England)
Organizational Team:
Kate Hennessy, University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC)
Stephanie Takaragawa, Chapman University (Orange, CA)
Upgraded to Snow Leopard (Mac OSX 10.6) and so far things are smooth with some exceptions:
And one of my buds had problems with Mail.app -- turned out that RSS feed prefs didn't transfer over well from 10.5. He trashed them and it started working again.
You know when you're procrastinating when you find out the only good anagram for your name is "Ran a Karma Nuke."
Well, the little iPhone Kindle app has convinced me that a Kindle2 might not be a total waste of money. I'm actually enjoying read both academic and non-academic books on the iPhone. Although the Kindle2 doesn't have a backlight, it looks like it'd be a good way to read before bed or on the airplane.
I wish the Kindle2 had WiFi, I guess that -- along with the backlight -- is my big concern for the unit. Especially as Sprint might be going bankrupt if it continues to bleed customers like it is now. I wonder what will happen to the Kindle's EVDO if that happens....
I'd love to hear from anyone who has one.
I'm setting up a media server in the anthropology department using Mac OSX 10.5 Server. With the demise of the C-Labs service, I wanted a secure way to make streaming video available for in-class use. The Mac OS X Leopard Server was an obvious choice.
Right now, I'm just using flat files and the Mac OSX Server built-in Apache server. In order to restrict the streams to just Yale students, I wanted to limit the contents of certain directories to just Yale IP addresses.
This should be easily done using .htaccess files. However, the default configuration doesn't have .htaccess services turned on (since it is server / file system intensive to do so). However, I couldn't for the life of me to get the Apache server to recognize my modifications in the /etc/httpd/httpd.conf file. ARGHH!!! It was almost as if it was ignoring it.
I upgraded our blogs to MovableType 4.23. I was panicked for a second since it looked like I had crashed the blogs badly and couldn't either upgrade or backout to the originals. What had happened was a typical n00b mistake in UNIX, I had copied the files to the mt-static directory but had accidentally copied the folder itself, not the contents, so for a while I had a directory named:
/usr/www/users/gpsy/photoethnography/mt-static/mt-static
with all the files in it and I couldn't figure out why it didn't work. Duh.
p.s. I wish MT did more sanity checking for idiots like me. :-)
My partner and I watched in disbelief reports of 3-7 hour waits at early voting polling stations -- with estimates that the lines will be even longer on Tuesday itself.
My partner asked me if Tuesday was a national holiday so that people could go vote. She was doubly astonished that it wasn't a holiday, so that people would have to take off work in order to vote.
Rachel Maddow is right on target when she calls the long lines at Southern polling stations a new form of the racist system of poll-taxes. The only people who can afford to take off an entire day to go vote are those in white collar professional jobs.
Obligatory Japan content: In Japan, I've never had to wait more than 5 minutes to vote. And this was for a country where we don't use electronic voting machines but good old paper and pen.
Fido Gets Motorcycle Side-Car (Aug, 1931): "
Ohmigosh, I have to build this for Momo.
(Via Modern Mechanix.)
I upgraded the blog engine to MT 4.1.1 and added the iNT plugin which allows for easy blog posts from your iPhone, like this one!
I'm very pleased to welcome a new guest blogger on Photoethnography.com, Jason C Romero. Many of you have already seen his comments on this blog, or read material that he sent my way. I'm very happy that he agreed to become a guest author and I personally look forward to seeing his posts!
JR gave me a heads up that my FeedBurner subscription broke when I upgraded to MT4.1. It looks like one of the softlinks went stale and FB wasn't getting new data. I've relinked it so it should work now.....
An 
