Duke University Press Log

David Price Writes on Minerva Consortium

David Price, author of Anthropological Intelligence and Threatening Anthropology, writes about the Pentagon's Minerva Consortium in Counterpunch. The Minerva program aims to solicit the advice of social scientists to aid in analyzing and fighting various security threats such as terrorism,  Iraq,  and growing Chinese power. Price writes, "In my field, anthropology, there is an overwhelming disciplinary amnesia of the extent to which research has been directed by the Pentagon and intelligence agencies in the past." (Both Price's books address how anthropologists have interacted with the government in the past). Price concludes, "The problem with Gate’s Minerva vision is the problem with Soviet science: ideologically dependent science’s purse strings cannot lead to good results.  If Gates really wanted good social science, not social science that tastes good (and familiar to the Pentagon’s limited palate), he would be lobbying congress to increase the funding of generalized social science—including dissident social science—not pushing to Sovietize the social sciences."

Glave on NPR's Tell Me More

Thomas Glave, editor of Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Caribbean, appeared on NPR's Tell Me More today. Glave and host Michel Martin talk about how the book came to be published, homophobia in the Caribbean, and the diversity of the region.

Hans Staden's True History Reviewed in London Review of Books

The London Review of Books features a review of Hans Staden's True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil. (The full review is not available for non-subscribers on the LRB's website, but author John Elliott provides the full text here.) The book will be published in August. Staden's 1557 account of his captivity by Brazil's Tupi Indians has not been available in English since 1929. Duke's new translation includes an introduction by noted anthropologist Neil L. Whitehead. Elliott writes of the original: "[Staden's] account proved to be immensely influential in shaping the European vision of America, not only because of the gripping story it told, but also because, when it was published in Marburg in 1557, it was accompanied by 56 crude woodcut illustrations, all reproduced in this new edition. As Whitehead comments, these illustrations, which move in unison with the narrative, add enormously to the effectiveness of the text. But it was the reworking of 28 of them in copperplate engravings by Theodor de Bry that implanted the image of the Brazilian cannibal indelibly in the European consciousness, even though it deprived the illustrations of part of their context and immediacy."

Carole Boyce Davies on Essence Bestseller List

Left of Karl Marx:  The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones by Carole Boyce Davies is number three on the Essence nonfiction bestsellers in paperback list for July 2008.  The book assesses the activism, writing, and legacy of Claudia Jones (1915–1964), a pioneering Afro-Caribbean radical intellectual active in the U.S. and U.K.

Human Terrain System in In These Times

More on the military's Human Terrain System from In These Times. David Price, author of Anthropological Intelligence and Threatening Anthropology, is quoted. Speaking at the Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency conference held at the University of Chicago, he said, "Military planners 'dream that culture can fix what thousands of tons of munitions broke. We should use anthropology to keep us out of these invasion fiascos in the first place.'" For more on Price's activism, see these posts.

Duke Authors Comment on "Pregnant Man"

Two Duke authors are quoted in a New York Times piece about Thomas Beatie, a transgendered man who is due to give birth next month. Judith Halberstam, author of Female Masculinity, comments, "When there’s a lot of fascination around a figure like Thomas Beatie, it points to other changes already happening elsewhere in the culture.” And Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of Tendencies and Touching Feeling, says, "The Beatie case seems like a way of having some of the Trans 101 discussions publicly, giving them one kind of a face and doing it in a way that’s not asking anybody for anything. He’s pregnant, he seems happy. It’s not in happening in any kind of a judicial, let alone criminal, context so it’s not a matter of claiming a right. It’s a matter of exercising one.” She continues, "People experience gender very differently and some have really individual and imaginative uses to make of it. That’s an important thing for people to wrap their minds around.”

Scholars Weigh in on Pentagon's Minerva Program

Yesterday the New York Times reported on the Pentagon's new Minerva program, which will recruit social scientists to strategize with the military about security threats such as Iraq and global terrorism. While some scholars are excited about the project, many more have serious reservations. Anthropologists have been particularly vocal about their opposition to academics collaborating with the Pentagon. As reported in Inside Higher Ed, the Network of Concerned Anthropologists issued an open letter to the Pentagon in late May, criticizing the Minerva project. In response to that letter, the Pentagon was considering inviting the National Science Foundation to play a role in peer review for the Minerva project. David Price, a founding member of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, has been quite outspoken about his belief that anthropologists should not work directly for the military. He cites his research on the role of anthropologists in World War II (the topic of his new book Anthropological Intelligence) and on the persecution of anthropologists during the McCarthy era (covered in his first book, Threatening Anthropology) as a cautionary tale. Hugh Gusterson, another co-founder of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, also cites the McCarthy era as a warning: "One reason the State Department misread Vietnam so badly in the early 1960s is that the liberal experts on East Asia were purged under McCarthyism. I fear that a conversation about the sources of violence and terrorism run under the auspices of the Pentagon might be similarly misshapen.”

Bananas and Commodity Chains

There's an interesting op-ed in today's New York Times about the price of bananas at the grocery store. Writer Dan Koeppel says the banana's days as a cheap staple are numbered due to the increasing costs of fuel, reduced supply because of floods in Ecuador, and a potentially catastrophic fungus working its way through the trees. Because all commercial bananas are the same genetic variety, the fungus could completely and permanently wipe out the crop. This op-ed reminds brings to mind several Duke books for further reading. Steve Striffler and Mark Moberg's Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas brings together anthropologists, historians, economists, and geographers to tell the history of the Americas through the cultural, political, economic, and agricultural processes that brought bananas from the forests of Latin America and the Caribbean to the breakfast tables of the United States and Europe. Striffler is also the author of In the Shadows of State and Capital, which looks at the history of the banana industry in Ecuador. And finally, From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500-2000, edited by Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank, examines bananas as just one of many commodities that have influenced Latin America over the past 500 years.

McLemee Picks Williams to Break Out

In his second column on university press books that have the potential to have crossover appeal to a general audience, Inside Higher Ed's Scott McLemee mentions Linda Williams's Screening Sex. Books on sex, McLemee writes, "always generate attention." He sums up Screening Sex: "Moving between personal recollections of how she responded to particular films and in-depth cultural and historical analysis, Williams begins with cinematic representations of the kiss — though the book becomes considerably less chaste in very short order. Larry Flynt used to do jail time for publishing things less explicit than some of the movie stills in this book."

Duke on Adorno

Carlin Romano writes about a new biography of Theodor Adorno in this week's Chronicle Review. Duke recently published a popular special issue of New German Critique entitled Adorno and Ethics. These essays reconsider Adorno’s unique brand of aestheticism, revealing a “politics of aestheticism” and exploring the political and ethical dimensions of his writings. We're also pleased to announce that in 2009 we will publish a translation of Gerhard Schweppenhäuser's Theodor W. Adorno: An Introduction. We also published an interesting book by political theorist Paul Apostolidis a few years ago, Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian Right Radio. Apostolidis uses and reworks Adorno’s theories to interpret the nationally broadcast Focus on the Family, revealing how the cultural discourse of the Christian right resonates with recent structural transformations in the American political economy.