Dan O'Huiginn Comments

by: H.J. Klein

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 03:47:33 +0100

Jones was scholarly although others noticed language family similarities as well. His work is of tremendous importance in language studies and the law. There is even more on language following the first paragraph.

Neither Jones nor others at the time
knew what we do today about anthropology. He contributed to the content of comparative linguistics and historical linguistics although not in methodology. Anthropological linguistics came way later.

by: Dan

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 17:53:20 +0100

Chris, that’s fascinating to read. Thanks for dropping by!

by: Chris

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 17:50:48 +0100

Sorry, this is such a late comment, but I’m just being turned on to this fact. I’m currently stationed in Mosul and have befriended some men from Sri Lanka. Their medical providers are reluctant to provide care. The toilet facilities are unkept and unsanitary. Most importantly, their dining facility provide rice and fish heads, that is if the food shipment arrives. All left over waste from the american DFAC is trashed. Many people know about this including the public affairs officers here.

by: Оптимизация сайтов санкт-петербург

Sun, 03 Jun 2007 23:57:29 +0100

Оптимизация сайтов санкт-петербург

by: Francis Irving

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 19:41:52 +0000

Well, I think I’ve subcribed to your new feeds and won’t lose you forever…

by: Mike

Sun, 05 Mar 2006 20:05:27 +0000

A British military psychiatrist I met last May told me that something like a fifth of all serving US troops in Iraq are taking, or have recently taken, anti-depressants. UK armed forces are apparently not allowed to be in theatre if they are taking psychiatric medication of any sort, although he did tell me about one UK soldier he recently saw who had been returned to the UK, having served served several months in Basra before it emerged that he had been forgetting to take his anti-schizophrenia medication. The most striking thing being that in the context of soldiering in Iraq his behaviour had escaped notice for several months. Jeez.

by: Administrator

Thu, 23 Feb 2006 18:51:31 +0000

It really is. According to the BBC, 100 people have already been killed through revenge attacks. It’s only been 36 hours, the revenge against the revenge hasn’t even started.

by: Francis Irving

Thu, 23 Feb 2006 17:05:50 +0000

“catastrophic” or “very very bad” Well, that answers the question I had as I read the news reports earlier - is it bad?

by: testanchor58

Sun, 16 Oct 2005 05:31:52 +0100

testcomment780

by: Dan

Sun, 21 Aug 2005 21:46:07 +0100

Oh, hello you!

The bit of Jerome was more about psychological manipulation - trying to get the one Christian in a family to convert her relatives for their own good.

I am completely intrigued by how religions prove their legitimacy (that’s sort-of what my dissertation was about). For tantric buddhism, the method seems to involve being as counter-intuitive and controversial as possible while saying nasty things about other buddhists. Compared to that, bald assertion is positively logical.

by: Tim

Sun, 21 Aug 2005 21:30:33 +0100

“Maybe the Jerome method works”

Well, something certainly seems to work for Christianity (God’s on their side, I guess) - all those terrible posters you see outside churches, where they quote a bit of the Bible about Jesus being the Son of God, or whatever. I don’t understand why they think these bald assertions will persuade anyone; and yet, presumably, they do.

by: Mike

Wed, 23 Mar 2005 02:00:33 +0000

Raban’s Coasting is equally good at the sea. He wanted to think about Britain and Britishness, and decided, quite logically, that the only way to understand Britain was to see it, literally, from outside. So he got in a 30 foot boat he’d never sailed before, and sailed all the way around it. So a nautical book that should be about the sea (and is, of course, in parts), is actually about the land. I think you’d like it.

by: Dan

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 19:29:27 +0000

Thanks Mike, that’s wonderful!

by: Mike

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 12:17:08 +0000

Timothy Mitchell’s otherwise wonderful latest book on colonial and post-colonial Egypt contains the most elaborate academic flaming I have ever read. Chapter 4 purports to be an expose of the dubious intellectual genealogy of ‘peasant studies’. In fact, it’s an extended critique of a single author, the American journalist/pop anthropologist Richard Critchfield. Mitchell describes his work as “a collage of familiar Orientalist images juxtaposed with clippings taken - in fact plagiarized - from earlier writings”. As if 20 pages dissecting Critchfield’s study of an Egyptian village isn’t enough, then comes a six-page postscript, explaining that after the chapter first appeared as an article in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Critchfield wrote to him to defend his “paraphrases” of other work, and then died shortly after - a death that Mitchell recounts with juicy irony, coming as it did on the occasion of a publication party for one of the books Mitchell has just dismantled. Critchfield’s departure presumably frees Mitchell sufficiently from defamation law to spend the next four pages suggesting that Critchfield was in fact not principally an anthropologist or a journalist at all, but actually a CIA agent. The individuals thanked in Critchfield’s prefaces - the wife of the CIA director Richard Helms, Robert McNamara, and others - were “unusually well placed associates for a man who insisted in each of his books that he was just a journalist who wrote about peasants in obscure parts of the world. One might also notice the way his choice of villages, always portrayed as out-of-the-way places, followed the changing focus of U.S. imperial concerns, some of them at the time quite secretive.” A beautiful join-the-dots conspiracy theory finishes the piece, with Mitchell tracking Critchfield’s hidden hand from the CIA training of Tibetan guerilla refugees in 1960s Nepal, to mid-60s Vietnam, the CIA’s backing of Suharto’s 1966 coup in Indonesia, the governor and cybernetics, for obvious conceptual reasons but opaque phonetic ones, come from the Greek kubernetes “steersman,” perhaps based on 1830s Fr.ench cybernétique “the art of governing.”

Actually, the phonetics aren’t that opaque: apparently governor in English comes from the Greek via Latin then French - “the -k- to -g- sound shift is perhaps via the medium of Etruscan”, while Norbert Wiener’s neologism just short-cuts back to the Greek. Duh.