Weak Endnotes

by Cliopatria

Women's History Carnival will be hosted at Sharon Howard's Early Modern Notes on 9 March. Use the form to nominate the best in women's history blogging since March 2010.

Diana Silver,"Up, Up, Up," NYT, 11 February, and Bryan Appleyard,"Going to Town," Literary Review, March, review Edward L. Glaeser's Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier.

Wendy Doniger,"The Real Roots of Yoga," TLS, 2 March, reviews Mark Singleton's Yoga Body: The origins of modern posture practice.

Adam Goodheart,"Civil Warfare in St. Louis," American Scholar, Spring, is adapted from his forthcoming book, 1861:The Civil War Awakening.

Tony Barber,"Così fan tutte?" Financial Times, 4 March, reviews David Gilmour's The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Regions and their Peoples, Michael R. Ebner's Ordinary Violence in Mussolini's Italy, Emanuela Scarpullini's Material Nation: A Consumer's History of Modern Italy, and Elisabetta Girelli's Beauty and the Beast: Italianness in British Cinema.

Deborah Fallows,"The First Chinese Exchange Students," NYT, 5 March, reviews Liel Leibovitz's and Matthew Miller's Fortunate Sons: The 120 Chinese Boys Who Came to America, Went to School, and Revolutionized an Ancient Civilization.

Nicholas Lemann,"The New New Orleans," NYRB, 24 March, reviews four films: Katherine Cecil's Race, Spike Lee's If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise, Lee's When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, and Tia Lessin's and Carl Deal's Trouble the Water.

Manan Ahmed,"Flying blind: US foreign policy's lack of expertise," The National, 4 March, is a devastating critique of what passes for expertise in contemporary American policy-making.

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More Comments:

Manan Ahmed - 3/7/2011

Thanks Chris for the ref to Robin, I will pick it up. And thanks for the favorable read!

Chris Bray - 3/6/2011

Manan Ahmed is dead on about the culture of imperial expertise. A couple of comments:

The Bureau of American Ethnology doesn't really represent a break from the pattern. When the staff ethnographer James Mooney went to the Great Plains to investigate the Ghost Dance, he investigated the hell out of it, stayed for many months, and had a long series of friendly and open-minded discussions with the participants.

When he got back to D.C., Mooney wrote a report concluding that the Ghost Dance religion was comparable to Christian faith, with a belief that prayer and rituals of worship could cause divine intervention in a period of crisis. The bureau issued his report with a don't believe what you read warning that their researcher had spent way too much time among the savages, and had gone totally batshit native. The expected report would have concluded that oh my god these people are crazy, send the army.

Also, about Cold War area studies, Ron Robin's The Making of the Wold War Enemy is an absolutely wonderful book about the culture of expertise in think tanks and academia. I especially like chapter nine, which looks at efforts by think tank behavioral scientists to apply the tools of their disciplines to Vietnam: rational choice theory tells us that X tons of bombs will compel Vietnamese peasants to perform cost-benefit analysis and calculate that resistance is against their self-interest. No need for local specificity, because the formulas of social science are universal.

In many times and places, the experts turn out to not really be experts, in the same predictable ways.