Thomas Strong, Ph.D.

Andrew did some sleuthing around online regarding the Pekka-Eric Auvinen shooting. Auvinen was in contact with a sort of 'network' of YouTubers and others. Here is what Andrew found:

A bunch of stuff related to Pekka-Eric Auvinen

Sturmgeist89 was formerly NaturalSelector89 (a pun on "NS"? NS=NationalSocialist?).

Google cache of SG89's rant: http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:LQUFl5ZRKkUJ:nl.youtube.com/user/Sturmgeist89+%22sturmgeist89%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=10&client=firefox-a

another cached version: http://retecool.com/uploads/mirrordir/Sturmgeist89.htm

and at least one newspaper has reprinted the text: www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22722981-663,00.html they also have a story with a Reuters video in English and a capture of the now-deleted YouTube video: www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22722827-663,00.html < video is also here: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=369_1194449557 another video here: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=90d_1194444897 (Live Leak videos are downloadable as Flash docs, you need a stand-alone Flash viewer to watch them)

related You Tube users (who haven't been suspended yet):

http://uk.youtube.com/user/AryanKrieg http://uk.youtube.com/user/tanascheel http://uk.youtube.com/user/ThePsychopathicBitch

AryanKrieg claims that Tanascheel is his long-distance girlfriend, but it's not clear that this is true. Both seemed to have been in contact with SG89/NS89, though it's unclear what the nature of their relationships with him were. Comments suggest they were not friends, exactly.

Discussions on comments on both accounts suggest Tana "rejected" SG89 in some way and AryanKrieg wrote (on tanascheel's comments) "If anyone pushed that scrawny fagot to do what he did it was me. I called him on all of his bullshit. His fake claims and nonsense." ThePsychopathicBitch wrote "Tana THIS IS NOT YOUR FAULT. He was in love with you, you didnt love him, forget what he said, forget the "blood on your hands" thing. You didnt want him, you didnt love him. Its not fair. HE MADE HIS CHOICE. He was weak. This is NOT your fault. You are so much stronger than him. " TPB has Eric Harris (columbine) quotes on his (her?) profile and a video set to NIN's "closer" with quotes and pics of Harris (I think). A number of comments on various profiles compare the body count of the Finnish shooting to Virginia Tech, noting that Cho killed more ( e.g., gtfonewfag: "he didnt beat v-techs high score ]:<").

Other related users and videos:

"NaturalSelector89 is a sub par human" from TheAmazingAtheist: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGscnCn9fNY has a little historical insight into the angry craziness of NS89

an antagonist to these characters (dragonguyclassics, also suspended now): http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:O3QVS1MZMyAJ:www.youtube.com/user/dragonguyclassics+dragonguyclassics&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&client=firefox-a

There's a whole endless debate about "social darwinism" that all these youtubers and many others are involved in, it could take weeks to sort it out, but not sure it's even that interesting (debating philosophy with 18 year olds? funzies...).

Finally, a translated interview with a Finnish classmate (www.liveleak.com/view?i=11e_1194476692) confirms a Columbine fascination:

" EW: well, there were some signs. he apparently was fascinated about the school shootings in the u.s.a. and admired the shooters in those cases. for example in the columbine incident.

R: how do you know that? did he talk about it to you?

EW: yeah, besides he has sent material about this kind of acts over the internet, in which he describes how he admires those evildoers. an interesting thing also is, that apparently the gun he used was similar to the gun that was used in the columbine massacre, a .22 sig sauer mosquito."

Following last week's lecture and our discussion concerning how one learns how to 'do' anthropology, or how one learns to 'practice' ethnographic analysis, I thought it might be helpful to create a forum for students to discuss this issue outside of class. I am offering this thread on my almost moribund blog as a space for such discussion. This is completely open: please post your questions, concerns, complaints, and so on here. As a starting point, I will post a quote from Clifford Geertz regarding the anti-disciplinary nature of the discipline of anthropology.

Anthropology, or anyway social or cultural anthropology, is in fact rather more something one picks up as one goes along year after year trying to figure out what it is and how to practice it than something one has instilled in one through a systematic method to obtain obedience or formalized training by instruction and control. -- Clifford Geertz, "After the Fact"

What do you make of this statement? Is it helpful or unhelpful? Do you agree or disagree? What do you think he is getting at?

More concretely, this is a place for you to state out loud what exactly you feel you need to hear regarding how best to move forward in your studies. Here is a place where you can articulate concerns about how methodology classes relate to the work you do in other courses, what the requirements of the program are, and so forth. I will only be able to respond to some of these, as I am a temporary lecturer here. But in discussing both the abstract difficulties of learning 'ethnographic methods' and the concrete difficulties of making abstract anthropological knowledge relevant to one's own particular training and education, I hope to be able to help you figure out how to move forward in ways that are inspiring and enlightening.

In lecture today, I was citing quite a bit from Judith Butler's work 'The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection.' In a very careful manner, Butler reads together a number of theorists to produce a theory of the (unstable) production of persons as subjects. Following Foucault, Butler sees power as operating in the very tissue of our bodies and being. We don't experience power purely as external to ourselves, we also see it as something that enables us and that facilitates our apprehension of ourselves.

Thus she writes: "As a form of power, subjection is paradoxical. To be dominated by a power external to ourselves is a familiar and agonizing form power takes. To find, however, that what 'one' is, one's very formation as a subject, is dependent upon that very power is quite another. If, following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as well, it provides the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire."

Some thoughts for Thursday:

(a) On the question of 'subjection,' it might appear that Althusser and Foucault are in agreement, and Butler fuses them. For example, both want to conceptualize power as something 'more than' simple force. Thus, let's see on Thursday if we can orient our discussion toward finding salient differences. Among these will be the difference between Foucault's critique of governmentality and Althusser's critique of capitalism. What sorts of politics are attached to these?

(b) Foucault and Althusser are both interested in finding ways of reading material and mental together, of seeing 'discourse' in practice. Foucault especially sees the body itself as an effect of discourse (though he gives discourse a technical definition), in the sense that one cannot 'think' the body outside the norms that produce it (such as those involved in sexuality). In this sense, there can be no 'interest' or 'need' prior to its designation as such in the context of 'the system.' Do we reproduce the system because we see no livable position outside it?

(c) Race and double consciousness. We didn't touch on DuBois at all. But I want us to discuss the dynamics of consciousness brought up by DuBois in the context of Althusser's discussion of conscience and Foucault's notion of subjectivation.

I will be scanning in and posting the Svetlana Boym reading on Friday (23.02.2007).

You can use the following link to access the article I was quoting from in lecture on Tuesday about the conflict between Maori activists and fans of Bioncle toys.

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/anthropological_quarterly/v077/77.3coombe.html

Hi Everyone!

I will be conducting our Thursday discussions this week and next since Harri Siikala is at an academic meeting in the U.S. I want to make explicit a few things related to how the course is going:

a) All of your presentations so far have been excellent! Thank you for putting so much thoughtful effort into them! They have been a great springboard for discussion, which was exactly how I hoped they'd work.

b) Nevertheless, partly because the cases are so interesting, we sometimes end up devoting a lot of time to discussing them rather than the content of the required readings. This is mainly my fault. I want to make an effort to rectify this in future lectures by limiting discussion of case materials a little and focusing on readings a bit more. I think our discussions have been very good, but I wouldn't want us to let some of the important theoretical points made by the authors go by without comment.

c) So this Thursday, let's be sure to discuss the following:

1. The problem of legal protection for indigenous cultural forms and the authenticity of experience and identity. Do indigenous efforts to secure legal protection of sacred practices and non-indigenous cultural appropriations of those practices respond to the 'same' cultural dynamic: viz., the problem of authentic experience in mass mediated cultures? We will want to remember this question going forward when we begin to read about modern media technologies and especially when we read Benjamin. 2. Following this: We will want to remember Coombe's genealogy of trademark. Coombe reminds us that the distinctiveness conveyed by trademark arose in tandem with imperial exploitation of 'frontiers' & 'hinterlands' and their respective populations. Has the problem of cultural difference, and legal recognition thereof, always been thought within the context of commercial culture? Where the 'public domain' is invented as a legal term of art that refers specifically to the limitations of copyright or trademark, to what extent have other cultures always already been experienced as 'brands' in the 'marketplace of ideas'? Is trademark an elegy for the lost distinctiveness that it itself has helped to erase? 3. Brown warns us against absolutisms of any kind with respect to cultural creativity. In pursuing legal protections, do people thereby subject their creativity to the surveillant gaze of the state and its bureaucrats? 4. What kind of commonplace assumptions about the indigenous are reproduced in transnational 'rights' discourse with respect to cultural property? Here we will wish to remember Strathern's critique of the individualist (and by extension, commodity) metaphysics underlying concern for property rights framed as a concern of either 'private individuals' or 'public groups.'

d) We will want to keep all these ideas in mind going forward as we read Marilyn Ivy and Svetlana Boym on ideas about modernity, progress, and nostalgia. Are efforts to protect culture through law forms of nostalgia?

e) Remember you are welcome to comment on the content of lectures or discussion at my blog.

See you Thursday!

I have been notified regarding the missing pages in the Sahlins reading. Unfortunately, my computer is down and so it may be some time before I am able to upload the pages. Please do the reading anyway!

Discussion section will meet Thursdays at Auditorium VI, University Main Building from 14-16. The room seats 20 students. Remember to come prepared with questions, concerns, notes, observations, and such about the readings. Thanks.

An article in the New York Times concerning a new trend: disposable fashion. Think about this development in relation to the readings are doing on global economies and anti-sweatshop activism.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/25/fashion/25pollute.html?em&ex=1169960400&en=bde28c9c7f1c3234&ei=5087%0A

In a class like this one, we will zoom through many challenging readings. Our aim is two-fold: 1) to give a good sense of some of the questions that anthropologists are asking today, and 2) to develop a critical and imaginative sensibility that characterizes good theory-building. Broad 'coverage' of theoretical topics can be at cross-purposes with deep critical analysis. So I have structured our course around some central themes in order to bridge both 'range' and 'depth.'

Reading theory can be tough. The language is often idiosyncratic. Arguments are embedded in discursive and ideational milieux with which you may be unfamiliar. Part of my job will be to help provide context for the readings we will be doing: I will help to situate the concerns of these anthropologists within discussion in the human sciences. That said, this is also your job: you should try to make synthetic connections between our readings and what you have already learned in anthropology. Position authors in respect to different streams of anthropological argument. For example: how does this authors account of 'value' relate to the 'symbolic anthropology' of the 1970s? Does this theory of 'subjection' continue or revise theories of 'person' like that articulated by Mauss? Does this author work in a generalizing or a particularizing vein?

One important point: when you are reading these works, you are not attempting to memorize them. Read for the argument, the style, the gist, the main point. If something confuses you, try moving around it or make note of it and come back to it later. Above all, remember that you are not required to agree with the authors: be critical! Be imaginative! See where these ideas can take you.

Under 'assignments' on the course website, I have uploaded an image of a page of notes. I discuss there the activity of note-taking. All anthropologists should be good note-takers. But styles of note-taking differ. Please consult that link.