Home About us Contact
|
Home About us Contact | ||
|
|
||
I Highlight (i + highlight)
Selected AbstractsCODE IS SPEECH: Legal Tinkering, Expertise, and Protest among Free and Open Source Software DevelopersCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 3 2009GABRIELLA COLEMAN ABSTRACT In this essay, I examine the channels through which Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) developers reconfigure central tenets of the liberal tradition,and the meanings of both freedom and speech,to defend against efforts to constrain their productive autonomy. I demonstrate how F/OSS developers contest and specify the meaning of liberal freedom,especially free speech,through the development of legal tools and discourses within the context of the F/OSS project. I highlight how developers concurrently tinker with technology and the law using similar skills, which transform and consolidate ethical precepts among developers. I contrast this legal pedagogy with more extraordinary legal battles over intellectual property, speech, and software. I concentrate on the arrests of two programmers, Jon Johansen and Dmitry Sklyarov, and on the protests they provoked, which unfolded between 1999 and 2003. These events are analytically significant because they dramatized and thus made visible tacit social processes. They publicized the challenge that F/OSS represents to the dominant regime of intellectual property (and clarified the democratic stakes involved) and also stabilized a rival liberal legal regime intimately connecting source code to speech. [source] The seven deadly sins of comparative analysisJOURNAL OF EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY, Issue 7 2009R. P. FRECKLETON Abstract Phylogenetic comparative methods are extremely commonly used in evolutionary biology. In this paper, I highlight some of the problems that are frequently encountered in comparative analyses and review how they can be fixed. In broad terms, the problems boil down to a lack of appreciation of the underlying assumptions of comparative methods, as well as problems with implementing methods in a manner akin to more familiar statistical approaches. I highlight that the advent of more flexible computing environments should improve matters and allow researchers greater scope to explore methods and data. [source] Obvious pretence: for fun or for real?THE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 2 2007Cross-cousin, international relationships in Sri Lanka Rather than understanding ,lying' or deception as a weapon of the oppressed, I use a Machiavellian and Nietzschean framework to investigate linguistic technologies of power that involve deception in contemporary Sri Lanka. My argument is based on distinct speech events collected in the village of Udahenagama and elite circles in Colombo: youthful flirtations, ritual negotiations with spirits, conversations with government officials and soldiers, a reported presidential diplomatic exchange, and everyday village banter. I highlight how the focus of the deceptive recorded interactions is revelation, rather than concealment, and I thereby propose a supplementary translation of the practice of telling boru, as obvious pretence. Obvious pretence is an important aspect of Sinhala linguistic technologies of power which imbue interdependent micro- and macro-level political spheres. I use Bakhtin's work on tones to describe how ,obvious pretence' intertwines, on the one hand, a tone of domination, aggression, and superiority, and, on the other hand, a tone of accommodation, conflict avoidance, and courtship. An aesthetic of power , as the power to deceive , lies in the tension between those two opposing tones, which are encompassed within the single linguistic and pragmatic practice of ,obvious pretence'. [source] Conducting fieldwork with Tarieng communities in southern Laos: Negotiating discursive spaces between neoliberal dogmas and Lao socialist ideologyASIA PACIFIC VIEWPOINT, Issue 2 2010Steeve Daviau Abstract Based on research with ethnic minorities in Laos aimed at understanding how they cope with and negotiate political and economic ,double domination', this article examines the experiences of prolonged fieldwork in a remote Tarieng area in the Annam Range, southern Laos. After briefly reviewing Lao ethnographical policy and practice regarding ethnic minorities, I introduce the Tarieng people. I detail how I initially gained access to these local communities via long-term engagement with a range of development project initiatives. Then, after eight years of conducting such fieldwork in a Tarieng area ,below the radar of the state', I managed to obtain official authorisations to continue research as a graduate student. In this new position, I accessed the field via different negotiations with central, provincial and local official bureaucracies. After detailing this process, back in the field I reveal my strategies to create a discursive space that has allowed me to access dissident Tarieng voices and agency. Finally, I highlight four central elements that have continued to shape my field research: language proficiency, working with research assistants, awareness of political relations and cultural sensitivity, and ethical concerns. These have emerged while the possibilities and constraints of political engagement with the Tarieng people are explored. [source] | ||||||||||