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This past weekend was the annual Association of Private Enterprise Education (APEE) Conference, which meets in Las Vegas in alternate years. Scholars across disciplines presented research, held roundtable discussions of books new and old, and hosted panel discussions on topics of interest. In plenary sessions, Robert Levy discussed Supreme Court decisions that expanded the reach of the state, Lawrence White talked about his forthcoming book The Clash of Economic Ideas, and Peter Leeson discussed his in-progress book Anarchy Unbound. I (and others) tweeted observations at the hashtag #APEE. A good time was had by all. Here are a few observations and thoughts on the 2012 edition of APEE, held at Harrah’s.

I spoke as part of three panels and moderated another session. In the first panel, I gave an abbreviated version of a talk I’ve titled “Why Not Socialism?” that will appear as a working paper sometime soon. In the second panel, I discussed Gordon Lloyd and Nicholas Capaldi’s edited voume The Two Narratives of Political Economy, which I recently reviewed for Conversations on Philanthropy. The third panel I was on was called “The Best of The Freeman,” and I discussed my article with Steven Horwitz in which we summarized Thomas C. Leonard’s research on the eugenic origins of Progressive Era reforms like minimum wages and child labor laws.

In one of the first sessions of the conference, I was part of a panel that included Bradley Thompson, James Otteson, Peter Boettke, and an overflow crowd. Professors Thompson and Boettke made powerful cases against the notion that Marxism is a benign (or benevolent) social ideal that was handled poorly. Professor Thompson defended the thesis that “Marxism’s moral ideal is repulsive,” noting that Maoism and Stalinism were not corruptions of Marx’s doctrine but implications of it. Professor Boettke and his co-author asked whether Marxism was good for anything and answered “absolutely nothing.” In this session, I discussed Mises and Hayek’s critiques of socialism. While I didn’t spend much time discussing Marx, here’s an article on Marx I wrote a few years ago.

The plenary sessions were especially informative. Robert Levy discussed some of the seemingly-inexplicable Supreme Court decisions that have allowed the state to expand its grasp, Lawrence White discussed changing ideas about political economy and how they mattered for economic performance, and Peter Leeson discussed his research on anarchy.

Leeson’s talk was especially interesting for people interested in global development issues. Leeson’s work suggests that statelessness is not only feasible but almost certainly better than the governments that rule some African countries. He focused some of his attention on Somalia, which performs better in the absence of a state than many of its neighbors that actually have governments. Given that governance of the quality we enjoy in the United States is probably not an option for many African countries, attempting to build state capacity in developing countries could very well be a fool’s errand. Here is more from Leeson and others in a Cato Unbound symposium on anarchy.

The sessions I attended were extremely interesting and informative. In a session on “Industrial Change and Organization,” I learned from Andres Marroquin and Grete Pasch about the history (and future) of privately-provided library services. I learned from Brian O’Roark and Clair A. Smith about social norms in the open-source programming community. I learned from Clemson University graduate student Anna Chorniy and her advisor Michael T. Maloney about drug pricing.

I also learned from L. Dwayne Barney and Paul A. Cleveland about the insanity of the NCAA cartel. In particular, Barney and Cleveland are exploring how complex regulations emerge and how organizations tend to get unwieldy. Apparently, it is permissible for institutions to provide student-athletes with bagels between meals, but there is a serious discussion going on within the NCAA about whether cream cheese counts as an “extra benefit.” I’m not sure whether there are rules on the kinds of bagels that can be provided as an everything bagel is clearly superior to a plain bagel, but I’m sure professors Barney and Cleveland will have an answer when their paper is finished.

In another session, Edward Lopez, Douglas Rasmussen, and David Henderson discussed the economics of “security” with applications to the Transportation Security Administration and other regulatory agencies (here, via Twitter, are a few things I’ve written on the TSA). Professor Lopez pointed out that some 75% of Americans think the TSA is effective when there is considerable evidence to the contrary.

David Henderson questioned the assumption that the government actually provides security and pointed out how prescription drugs are more expensive and harder to get because of FDA efficacy requirements. For those who might think this is acceptable in the name of “safety,” Henderson cited estimates from the economist Daniel Klein suggesting that there are some 50,000 preventable deaths every year because of FDA-related delays in drug approval. Professor Henderson also pointed out how Social Security also makes us less secure because there is such a low probability that the government will make good on its promises. Finally, Professor Hendersonwho teaches at the Naval Postgradaute School in Monterey, Californiadiscussed how war and foreign interventions actually make us less safe by turning people against us and by destabilizing the areas where we intervene. In short, a lot of the things that are done in the name of keeping us free and safe actually make us less free and less safe.

Finally, I attended a roundtable session discussing Robert Higgs’s Against Leviathan. Professor Higgs was unable to attend, but panel chair Peter Boettke and panelists Edward Stringham, Sanford Ikeda, and Christopher J. Coyne provided us with a very useful summary of Higgs’s contributions to a general criticism of the idea that government is necessary.

Pagani has released a 15 minute short film about the concept and development of the new Pagani Huayra.

Horacio Pagani references Leonardo Da Vinci as a source of inspiration by stating, Art and Science are two disciplines that must walk together, hand in hand. The spirit of the Italian Renaissance, applied in todays world, to create an object outside the common boundaries.

Due to the almost mythic reputation of the Pagani Zonda, it was clear from the start the next Pagani would not be a replacement of the Zonda, carrying over its race car character. Instead, a new breed had to be born from a new inspiration.

The concept of the new car was inspired by the fascination of flight, by the elments air and wind. It was our goal to transform these somehwat intangible aspects into a material creation, continues Pagani.

The styling of the Pagani Huayra took place over the course of five years. Eight scale models and two full scale models highlight the changes made over the delicate research.

Learn more about Pagani and the Huayra in the short film posted above.

Even though Ive been writing about mixed martial arts since 2005 and been training in several disciplines for over a year, I never took a hardcore interest in Bruce Lee, the cultural phenomenon who made a huge impact on pop culture during a life that ended way too soon.

That interest changed this past week after seeing I Am Bruce Lee, the Spike TV retrospective that spanned Lees entire life with tons of clips and interviews with his family, friends and a legion of celebrity admirers that were more than happy to talk about what he meant to them.

There was an interesting section around the middle of the two-hour show that focused on him being referred to as the father of mixed martial arts, something UFC president Dana White has touted for years. His widow and daughter seemed hesitant to associate him with the UFC, while friends and biographers acknowledged that Lee would probably like the concept of MMA and could be considered a pioneer of the sport but not the father.

Then, there was Gene LeBell, the judo master and part of Ronda Rouseys team. LeBell knows how to cut promos and he is also acknowledged as being an early adopter of MMA. In 1963, he battled boxer Milo Otis in a boxing vs. judo challenge, choking him out in the fourth round of a five round fight.

LeBell cut a promo on Lee (someone he worked with during his stuntman years and was a friend), growling that If Bruce Lee is the father of mixed martial arts, than I am its grandfather. But Lee is one of Whites childhood heroes and its a hell of a lot cooler to associate a pop culture icon with your sport than a 79-year-old man.

Along with White, fighters Jon Jones, Stephan Bonnar, Cung Le and Gina Carano gave their thoughts on Lee, highlighted by an odd bit of dialogue by Jones explaining how by beating opponents, hes doing them a favor by beating fear and weakness out of them. Despite their conflicts with the UFC, Spike didnt try to bury the promotion or awkwardly force in Bellator talent that no one would know.

However, there was one bit that felt like a dig on White. Near the shows close, Lees death is discussed with his wife saying it was caused by a bad reaction to headache medication. His daughter Shannon says that theres plenty of ridiculous theories about what happened and mentioned conspiracies. We then immediately cut to White saying that the circumstances around Lees death are shady. The way it was constructed made White look a bit buffoonish, but overall, he came across fine.

According to the numbers, I wasnt alone in watching I Am Bruce Lee as last weeks debut did the best ratings of any documentary in Spikes history with a 1.0 rating / 1.4 million viewers. That viewership nearly doubled a 2009 documentary on Muhammad Ali.

Fans of MMA, martial arts or biographies in general will love this documentary and I highly recommend searching your cable listings for re-air times. It was fast paced, fun, interesting, insightful and touching with plenty of food for thought. Was Lee the true father of MMA or is this more of a culture play given the alternatives?

You and I have the invitation to use this portion of the year to evaluate our lives, to seek an awareness of our spiritual needs, and to commit to growth toward our full potential. Whether or not a person is a follower of Jesus, I believe it is safe to say that all of us fall short of our potential, and can use a season of reflection and renewal.

There are many processes that can make these 40 days of Lent a productive season for personal and spiritual growth. Throughout the centuries, the traditions have been numerous. Many people will give up something for Lent, thereby sacrificing a favorite treat or habit to get a taste of the sacrifice that Jesus made on our behalf.

Others increase their worship time, both at home and in the community. (Many of my local colleagues are rotating to lead a weekly Bible meditation at Lenten lunches hosted at the Richmond Hill United Methodist Church now until Holy Week.)

Youll see many fast-food and sit-down restaurants feature a seafood special this month and next, acknowledging their patrons who give up other meat on Fridays or for all of Lent. A change in routine can encourage change in the status quo.

Lent is a time for such disciplines. Discipline, in this context, is not focused on punishment and correction. I refer instead to discipline, as an athlete does during spring training to enhance his skills, or the rigors of study to which a student disciplines herself to build knowledge and talents. Lenten disciplines can bring about self-awareness and self-improvement.

But unlike New Years resolutions and other self-centered attempts at increased fulfillment, the benefits of Lent occur through spiritual, God-powered enhancements. Whatever we can accomplish on our own pales in comparison to what the Lord can accomplish within us, when we set aside our selfishness and align more with Gods pattern for our lives. Lent asks us to sacrifice some of our self-confidence, in order that we discover a stronger identity within us, because our God-confidence has increased.

There are many resources to get us onto such a training regimen toward matters of faith and faithfulness. Many congregational and denominational web sites provide links toward spiritual growth. There are books and online devotionals which draw us into scripture reading and prayer.

Call one of the local pastors and talk about your longings to be better at whatever has until now held you back. Ask a church-going neighbor to pray for you, that these next six weeks will draw you closer to the Lord and to the real you that God intends you to be.

Greg Gillispie is pastor of Richmond Hill Presbyterian Church. Readers may comment on his column via rhpchurch.com.

Edmund Carpenter, an archaeologist and anthropologist who, impatient with traditional boundaries between disciplines, did groundbreaking work in anthropological filmmaking and ethnomusicology and, with his friend Marshall McLuhan, laid the foundations of modern media studies, died on July 1 in Southampton, N.Y. He was 88.

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Adelaide de Menil

Edmund Carpenter during a trip to Greenland in the 1990s.

His death was confirmed by his wife, Adelaide de Menil.

Mr. Carpenter, a disciple of the anthropologist Frank Speck, started out excavating prehistoric Indian sites in the Northeast but soon showed signs of the intellectual restlessness that marked his entire career.

At a time when few anthropologists showed much interest in the Arctic and its peoples, he embarked on a series of expeditions among the Aivilik people and published several books on the Inuit: “Time/Space Concepts of the Aivilik” (1955), “Anerca” (1959) and “Eskimo” (1959), republished as “Eskimo Realities” in 1973.

His interest in language and culture led him into a fruitful collaboration with McLuhan when both taught at the University of Toronto in the 1950s. Together they organized the influential Seminar on Culture and Communication to discuss the role of radio, television, film and print in transforming human relations.

Mr. Carpenter took the lead in editing Explorations, the interdisciplinary journal that grew out of the seminar; it published writers like the anthropologist Dorothy Lee and the literary critic Northrop Frye.

In 1969, he and Ms. De Menil, a photographer whom he would later marry and a member of the family that founded the Menil Collection in Houston, went to Papua New Guinea to observe the effects of modern communications on tribal peoples. Invited by the Australian government, he accepted the post of research professor at the University of Papua New Guinea because it offered “an unparalleled opportunity to step in and out of 10,000 years of media history, observing, probing, testing,” he wrote in “Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me!” (1972), his best-known book. “I wanted to observe, for example, what happens when a person — for the first time — sees himself in a mirror, in a photograph, on films, hears his voice; sees his name.”

He was deeply skeptical about scientific claims of impartiality and worried about the destructive effects of modern life on tribal peoples. Although he continued to teach anthropology and supported numerous ethnographic filmmakers, he disengaged from the profession.

He taught intermittently in the United States and spent eight years at the Museum of Ethnology in Basel editing the papers of the art historian Carl Schuster, which were published in 12 volumes as “Social Symbolism in Ancient and Tribal Art: A Record of Tradition and Continuity” in the late 1980s and in a one-volume condensation, “Patterns That Connect: Social Symbolism in Ancient & Tribal Art.”

Edmund Snow Carpenter, known as Ted, was born on Sept. 2, 1922, in Rochester. As a boy he dug for artifacts at the family’s summer home at Gull Lake, Mich. At 13 he met Arthur C. Parker, a Seneca anthropologist and director of the Rochester Museum and Science Center, who invited him to take part in excavations of prehistoric Iroquoian sites.

He enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania in 1940 to study with Speck but joined the Marines a few months after Pearl Harbor. He saw action in New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, the Marianas and Iwo Jima. After the war ended, he was assigned to oversee several hundred Japanese prisoners, whom he put to work on an archaeological dig in Tumin Bay, Guam.

After being discharged from the Marines in 1946 with the rank of captain, he returned to the University of Pennsylvania, which awarded him a bachelor’s degree. He received a doctorate in 1950, writing his dissertation on the prehistory of the Northeast.

At the University of Toronto, where he began teaching in 1948, he became entranced by what he later called “the nonsensory spirit world of electronic media.”

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LARGO The allegations were startling: that three black detention deputies at the Pinellas County Jail were treating white inmates harshly while favoring black inmates.

A five-month internal investigation by the Pinellas County Sheriffs Office that was released this week never proved or disproved claims of racial preference claims that were made by inmates and fellow deputies.

But in the end, two detention deputies were suspended after investigators determined they had violated policies governing the treatment of inmates. The third deputy around whom many of the complaints swirled resigned in February before the investigation was finished.

Former Sgt. Lesley Rowe was demoted to deputy and given an 80-hour suspension for violating agency policies. Deputy Trina Landrum also received an 80-hour suspension for the same reason. Former deputy Melinda Mason resigned.

Investigators said Rowe witnessed Mason, her subordinate, belittling inmates over minor infractions, but Rowe didnt address it. Rowe also admitted she ordered deputies to withhold food from inmates who were talking during breakfast, which contradicts a Sheriffs Office policy.

Investigators determined Landrum witnessed Mason telling inmates to dump their food trays as punishment and didnt report it, and also threatened inmates that they would have to forfeit their meal for talking.

Rowe declined to be interviewed for this article. Landrum and Mason didnt return phone calls seeking comment.

According to the 925-page report, the allegations came to light in October when a jail corporal approached a captain and said three deputies in a housing facility for female inmates wanted out of the unit because inmates were being mistreated.

One of those deputies, Angela Fisher, had been keeping notes about questionable incidents and told investigators she had considered resigning because of the stress of working with Rowe and Mason.

Its incredibly stressful Nobody wants to go to an environment where youre looked at differently or you have to hear people belittle people or yell at them for hours at a time and stand there and listen to them say these things, Fisher told investigators.

Fisher and several other deputies said they didnt report the problems because they were afraid of retaliation by Rowe, a sergeant. At least five deputies said they believed Mason, Rowe and Landrum, or some combination thereof, were favoring black inmates and only came down hard on white inmates.

One deputy said some black inmates referred to the trio as the Black Squadron and seemed to believe theyd get preferential treatment from them.

However, that deputy said Landrum had addressed that issue with inmates at one point, making it clear she would not play favorites.

Most complaints centered on Mason, who deputies and inmates said had a habit of lengthy and degrading tirades against inmates. The incidents reported about her included:

That she took off her handcuffs, pepper spray and Taser, and challenged two different inmates to fight in separate incidents. Investigators said that put other deputies at risk and was contradictory to agency policy, which encourages jailers to de-escalate aggression.

One inmate said she was forced to stand and listen to Mason degrade her for more than an hour and a half after she moved to a different bunk. There is no policy assigning women to specific bunks in that unit.

The same woman said Mason told other inmates she was a snitch. She said she was scared to death of Mason and Landrum, and thought Rowe was part of their team.

Another inmate said Mason screamed at her for more than an hour and a half, threatened to hit her, and encouraged other inmates to criticize her.

Mason told investigators that she did not try to engage inmates in fist fights. She denied some of the allegations and admitted others, ultimately agreeing that she had violated agency policies.

Landrum told investigators that she had been fair and just with inmates and had never made an inmate dump a tray. She said she only told inmates they could be sent out of the chow hall because that was Rowes directive.

Rowe admitted violating agency policies, saying she felt some of her orders, such as dumping food trays, were based on discretion. She acknowledged that she witnessed Mason being verbally aggressive at times and failed to handle those situations properly.

All three deputies were reassigned. When asked how things were in the unit with their absence, the deputy who had thought about resigning had this to say: Peaceful.

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HATFIELD, Pa., June 15, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Today, the School and College Organization for Prevention Educators (SCOPE) opened its doors and began welcoming its first members. SCOPE serves as an interdisciplinary hub for prevention educators. SCOPE is the first organization of its kind to encompass the full breadth and depth of the field of prevention. SCOPE prioritizes the advancement of primary prevention research, practice and implementation.

Schools, communities, agencies, colleges and universities all over the world employ prevention professionals who are tasked with addressing a range of high-risk violence, health and safety issues, but until now, no membership association has been able to bring these dedicated educators into community with one another. SCOPE fills that need.

SCOPE was created by a generous grant from the parents of a college student who wish to remain anonymous. Through their generosity, SCOPE can function and thrive independently as a not-for-profit association of like-minded professionals who serve the prevention needs of schools, colleges and communities in the United States and internationally.

Prevention professionals have historically joined professional associations, participated in listservs and attended conferences in their specific disciplines. This has resulted in the delineation of prevention efforts by subfields. SCOPE recognizes that there is more commonality to prevention efforts than there are distinctions. What alcohol abuse educators know can benefit what sexual violence prevention specialists do. Prevention of hazing and bullying have much in common. Additionally, we know that many areas of prevention intersect. SCOPE aims to bridge subfields by joining prevention professionals from across the prevention disciplines together to learn from one another, explore best practices and further shared goals.

Conferences focused at school, college and community audiences address sexual assault, eating disorders, peer education, advocacy, alcohol, hazing, drugs, suicide, mental health and other risks. Until now, no conference has gathered prevention professionals in a multi-disciplinary setting to guide, shape and lead the prevention field. SCOPEs Annual International Conference will bring school, college and community prevention educators together to share resources, apply research, and empower the synergies that result from bringing the disparate constituencies of prevention together into common cause.

Knowledge Groups are a central SCOPE resource. Knowledge Groups represent specific content areas relevant to the field of prevention. Members participate in one or more Knowledge Groups, as well as having access to topical materials. SCOPEs Knowledge Groups include:

• Advocacy
• Alcohol Abuse
• Bullying
• Bystander Intervention
• Drug Abuse
• Eating Disorders
• Hazing
• Mental Health
• Peer Education
• Primary Prevention
• Relationship/Domestic/Intimate Partner Violence
• Research
• Sexual Assault
• Social Norms
• Stalking
• Suicide

SCOPE embraces an ecological, inclusive, holistic, feminist, public health, evidence-based and multi-disciplinary vision of prevention. To effectively promote the aims of the prevention community, SCOPE members deeply examine the causes of violence, health and safety risks within society — including hate, intolerance, apathy, gender bias, racism, homophobia, stigmatization of mental health, objectification of the human body, ignorance, predation and discrimination — to foster effective, interconnected, strategic prevention.

For more information, please visit http://www.WeAreSCOPE.org or contact:

Michelle Issadore, M.Ed.
Executive Director
execdir@wearescope.org
610-993-0227

This press release was issued through eReleases(R). For more information, visit eReleases Press Release Distribution at http://www.ereleases.com.

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Our house in the western Catskills overlooks the Pepacton Reservoir, a 20-mile ribbon of water between Margaretville and Downsville. Maps on the Internet, depending on their scale and detail, will show you where the reservoir is in relation to nearby towns and roads. What they won’t show you, although every resident of the area knows about them, are the four towns — Arena, Shavertown, Union Grove and Pepacton — that were flooded in the middle ’50s so that the reservoir could be constructed. (Today, after more than 50 years, resentment against New York City remains strong.)

The maps and pictures of the reservoir are determinedly linear; the eye follows the water in its journey down Route 30 toward the city. But for the the old-timers, and the new-timers who have been caught up in the romance of the lost towns, the eye stops and looks down to what are now the geological layers of civilizations, one on the surface and claiming a literal, no-nonsense empirical reality (“If you want get from Andes to Downsville, you can travel on either side of the reservoir”), and the other below the surface, where lie subterranean Brigadoons that emerge not every hundred years but whenever the reservoir gets so low that pieces of a drowned culture suddenly and unnervingly come into view. At those moments the eye simply cannot travel the straight line encouraged by visible coherences and road signs; the natural pull of forward progress is forestalled and one begins to ruminate on what lies beneath our every step as we raise our feet to take the next one.

There is now a (relatively) new discipline in which this breaking down of time into spatial units that are read vertically rather than horizontally is the obligatory gesture. It calls itself GeoHumanities and its project is nicely encapsulated in the title of one of the essays in a collection that officially announces the emergence of a field of study. The collection is called “GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place”; the essay (by Edward L. Ayers, an historian and president of the University of Richmond) is entitled “Mapping Time.”

Ayers’s project is to map the changes that followed upon the emancipation of the slaves after the Civil War. He and his colleagues begin with a simple map and then they locate populations on the landscape and “put down one layer after another: of race, of wealth, of literacy, of water courses, of roads, of railways, of soil type, of voting patterns, of social structure.”

The layered picture that results can then be “read” and a story can be told, the story of complex relationships that are frozen by the analysis but which, of course, are really in motion. The next step is to acknowledge the motion by using cinematic techniques that present the passage of time as spatial units that succeed one another. “By converting time to motion,” says Ayers, “we can visualize the passage of time (as one watches the hands of a clock move).”

Ayers calls this technique of representation “deep contingency,” and he acknowledges its artificiality. The metaphor of a layered reality “is a fiction of course, since the layers continually interact and the ‘top’ layer of humans constantly changes the ‘bottom’ layer of landscape; but it is a useful fiction, since it reminds us of the structural depth of time and experience.” The project is a synthesis of geography (now renamed Geographic Information Science, or GIS) and history: “GIS is about patterns and structures; history is about motion; by integrating the two, we can see layers of events, layers of the consequences of unpredictability.”

That is, we can read events not merely historically, as the product of the events preceding them, but geologically, as the location of sedimented patterns of culture, economics, politics, agriculture. What is being attempted is a reorientation of perception, an alternative way of interpreting the world in which “space is not merely in the service of time, but has a poetics of its own, which reveals itself through a geographical or topological imagination rather than a historical one” (Paul Smethurst, “The Postmodern Chronotope”).

The interplay in these quotations between a literary and a geographical vocabulary tells us what GeoHumanities is all about; it is the elaboration, by methods derived from the humanities, of “the stratified record upon which we set our feet” (the title of another essay and a quote from Thomas Mann). It is the realization, in a style of analysis, of the “spatial turn,” a “critical shift that divested geography of its largely passive role as history’s ‘stage’ and brought to the fore intersections between the humanities and the earth sciences” (Peta Mitchell in “GeoHumanities”).

“Intersections” is perhaps too weak a word, because it suggests two disciplines that retain their distinctiveness but collaborate occasionally on a specific project. The stronger assertion, made by many in the volume, is that the division between empirical/descriptive disciplines and interpretive disciplines is itself a fiction and one that stands in the way of the production of knowledge.

An apparently empirical project like geography is, and always has been, interpretive through and through. “The map has always been a political agent”(Lize Mogel), has always had a “generative power” (Emily Eliza Scott), and that power can only be released and studied by those who approach their work in the manner of literary critics. Geography “demands a reader who is at once an archeologist, geologist and geographer, a reader who … is at all times attentive to the stratification of history, memory, language, and landscape and who can read obliquely through their layers” (Peta Mitchell).

If interpretive methods and perspectives are necessary to the practice of geography, they are no less necessary to other projects supposedly separate from the project of the humanities. And that is why, in addition to GeoHumanities, we now have Biohumanities (“the humanities not only comment on the significance or implications of biological knowledge, but add to our understanding of biology itself — Karola Stotz and Paul E. Griffiths), Disability Studies (of which the X-Men films might be both a representation and an instance), Metahistory (the study of the irreducibly narrative basis of historical “fact”), Law and Literature (the laying bare of the rhetorical and literary strategies giving form to every assertion in the law), Cultural Anthropology (an inquiry into the very possibility of anthropological observation that begins by acknowledging the inescapability of perspective and the ubiquity of interpretation), Cultural Sociology (“the commitment to hermeneutically reconstructing social texts in a rich and persuasive way” — Jeffrey C. Alexander and Philip Smith), and other hybrids already emergent and soon to emerge.

What this all suggests is that while we have been anguishing over the fate of the humanities, the humanities have been busily moving into, and even colonizing, the fields that were supposedly displacing them. In the ’70s and the ’80s the humanities exported theory to the social sciences and (with less influence) to the sciences; many disciplines saw a pitched battle between the new watchwords — perspective, contingency, dispersion, multi-vocality, intertextuality — and the traditional techniques of dispassionate observation, the collection of evidence, the drawing of warranted conclusions and the establishing of solid fact. Now the dust has settled and the invaded disciplines have incorporated much of what they resisted. Propositions that once seemed outlandish — all knowledge is mediated, even our certainties are socially constructed — are now routinely asserted in precincts where they were once feared as the harbingers of chaos and corrosive relativism.

One could say then that the humanities are the victors in the theory wars; nearly everyone now dances to their tune. But this conceptual triumph has not brought with it a proportionate share of resources or institutional support. Perhaps administrators still think of the humanities as the province of precious insights that offer little to those who are charged with the task of making sense of the world. Volumes like “GeoHumanities” tell a different story, and it is one that cannot be rehearsed too often.

Postscript: In my column on the conflict between faculty and administration at Idaho State University, I failed to mention that the provost, Gary Olson, is a humanities scholar who has written extensively about my work.

RIO RANCHO, NM — Rio Rancho city officials said four men in the fire and rescue department harassed a rookie male employee about his body, and now they?ll be punished.

Of the four employees, three will be suspended without pay and the fourth employee will get a written reprimand.

A fifth department employee was also suspended for trying to pressure the new employee for cooperating with the investigation.

The city will not release the names of the employees who have been disciplined

SuperSport rolled-off the Gaining Insight from Training (Gift) programme in Kenya that will see local trainees imparted with high quality television production skills on Wednesday.

The pioneer class of 41 is almost coming to an end of the six months course that will see the firm partner with Strathmore University in subsequent modules.

Speaking at the launch, Youth Affairs and Sports Minister, Dr. Paul Otuoma, lauded SuperSport for establishing the Gift programme to empower the country’s broadcast technicians in addition to promoting sport by sponsoring the Kenyan Premier League football and providing coverage for other disciplines.

“As a ministry we are proud of this initiative and their partnership since it shows the company’s commitment to this country. As a Government we are committed to ensuring the initiative works by providing any required State support.”
SuperSport’s Head of Africa Gary Rathbone said the giant broadcaster had partnered with Strathmore University to ensure it was affiliated to a learning institution of repute as well as providing the facility where subsequent training will be conducted.

“The Gift programme is much more than creating jobs for us but also creating dreams for better local television production personnel that will bring the best quality production. We will allow those we train to work for other stations in the country to share the expertise.”

SuperSport Director of Media Solutions, Africa, Andre Venter, said the programme would be conducted in six-month modules where some of those who complete the course would be absorbed into the firm’s activities with the rest offloaded elsewhere.

“We received over 240 applications for this course and we had to whittle it down. We are training them in three disciplines, vision control, camera and audio and the fourth VHS will be rolled after we get the right teacher for the job,” Venter added.

He stated SuperSport would procure television production equipment and install it at Strathmore for training purposes.