While having dinner with a famous novelist of South Asian descent he tells me how admirative of Singapore he is. He tells me he was invited there and impressed by its environmental policies. Yes, S'pore has much greenery but where do you think the sand comes from I ask him? [1]🧵 He shrugs off my lived experience of growing up in Singapore (its authoritarian gov't) and my explanation of how sand is purchased from neighboring countries like Cambodia and its destructive consequences (see Kalyanee Mam’s Lost World) [2]

🧵Was asked to share advise with anthropology students. Here is part of what I wrote: Do not romanticize anthropology. If you love anthropology and want to study it then see it for what it has been, continues to be, before building your dream of becoming an anthropologist [1/5] Only after you have acknowledged the history, continuity of colonial structures, unequal power relations, extractive nature of our research, and how anthropology reproduces the problems we often research, you will be free to learn, to dis/agree and dis/engage when necessary [2/5]

THIS just happened at the #aiascs2019, joint conference of the Archaeology Institute of America and Society for Classical Studies. Another classicist was told that he got his job because he's black! This is not exclusive to Classics/ Archaeology but pertains to Anthropology.

https://twitter.com/FlavianSophist/status/1081636820469788672

2) That some academics, especially senior ones, feel emboldened to speak their minds about "diversity" and "decolonization" at conferences as if the principle of meritocracy was somehow in danger. And lets not forget who (class, status, gender) usually benefits from meritocracy