Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua (Centennial Book) Review

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Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua (Centennial Book) ReviewWhen people want to know what everyday life in Nicaragua was like during what Eduardo Galeano has called "the time of beautiful madness," they invariably turn to Lancaster's book. Life is Hard gives an up-close, personal, and often poignant accounting of the experiences of three working-class families during the Sandinista period. But this accessible, engaging book is also more than a classic ethnography. The latter chapters (whose theoretical arguments ineluctably flow from the more descriptive chapters) provide a highly readable short course on much of what is most exciting in twentieth century cultural theory: semiotics, deconstruction, neomarxism, and the origins of queer theory.
Over the course of the book, the author takes the reader through various vignettes, life stories, and analyses. At the same time, Lancaster reveals different facets of himself, in context-appropriate passages: socialist, Southern working-class origins, white, gay... The result is an implicit argument about how complex, compound, and contingent identities are. The result is also that alert readers get a very good sense of how the author's experiences shaped his research questions- and how they affected his interactions with Nicaraguan informants spanning a broad social gamut: single mothers, soldiers, adolescent boys and girls, "macho" men, and a number of gay men (clearly quoted, sometimes at length, in the chapter on same-sex relations).
Lancaster's overarching analysis is complex. In a feminist vein, he argues that the Sandinista revolution failed, in part, because its leadership failed to undertake an effective renovation of gender relations and family life. In a gay studies vein, the author shows how the everyday stigmatization of male same-sex relations regulates and supports conceptions of "appropriate" manhood (nobody wants to be called a "queer"!)-- and how, in no small part, it was this quotidian homophobia that undermined Sandinista efforts at changing family life.
The nuanced picture Lancaster draws of family life in a culture of machismo, and the innovative analysis he develops of how same-sex relations function in that culture, have been corroborated by a host of scholars working in different fields: Tomas Almaguer, Ana Alonso, Annick Prieuer, Don Kulick, David Whisnant, Richard Parker, and many others. With good reason, this important book received both the Society for the Study of Social Problems' C. Wright Mills Award, and the Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists' Ruth Benedict Prize. I should add: this book has been used in several undergraduate and graduate courses I've taken. Invariably, students vote this the best-realized ethnography in the class.Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua (Centennial Book) Overview

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Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death (California Series in Public Anthropology, Vol. 1) Review

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Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death (California Series in Public Anthropology, Vol. 1) ReviewMargaret Lock discusses how organ transplant interests fostered the notion of brain death in North America and Japan. Until recently, Japan did not accept brain death as a sufficient criterion of death, even when the Japanese had all the technology and medical skills to carry out organ transplantation. By contrasting the muted discussion about brain death in North America with the heated, well informed public debates in Japan, Lock makes readers uncomfortable. Are people declared brain dead in America really dead, or do neurologists simply assume that they are dead to allow transplantation to take place? When does death occur anyway; is it a process or an event? Should physicians determine death with technological guidelines, or should death be defined by the people who are the most implicated, like relatives? Lock does not provide easy answers to those questions but her exhaustive research indicates how a different consensus about brain death emerged in the East and the West.
This book is a masterpiece of social research that does not succumb to cheap moralizing. Lucidly written, it is solidly grounded in anthropology but widely accessible. I strongly recommend it to anyone with an interest in medicine or anthropology.Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death (California Series in Public Anthropology, Vol. 1) Overview

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The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO's Strategies for Defeating the Devil's Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization Review

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The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO's Strategies for Defeating the Devil's Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization Review
With Jonathan Littman, Kelley provides in this volume a wealth of information and counsel which can help any decision-maker to "drive creativity" through her or his organization but only if initiatives are (a) a collaboration which receives the support and encouragement of senior management (especially of the CEO) and (b) sufficient time is allowed for those initiatives to have a measurable impact. There is a distressing tendency throughout most organizations to rip out "seedlings" to see how well they are "growing." Six Sigma programs offer a compelling example. Most are abandoned within a month or two. Why? Unrealistic expectations, cultural barriers (what Jim O'Toole characterizes as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom"), internal politics, and especially impatience are among the usual suspects. That said, I agree with countless others (notably Amabile, Christensen, Claxton, de Bono, Drucker, Kelley, Kim and Mauborgne, Michalko, Ray, and von Oech) that innovation is now the single most decisive competitive advantage. How to establish and then sustain that advantage?
In an earlier work, The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm, Kelley shares IDEO's five-step methodology: Understand the market, the client, the technology, and the perceived constraints on the given problem; observe real people in real-life situations; literally visualize new-to-the-world concepts AND the customers who will use them; evaluate and refine the prototypes in a series of quick iterations; and finally, implement the new concept for commercialization. With regard to the last "step", as Bennis explains in Organizing Genius, Apple executives immediately recognized the commercial opportunities for PARC's technology. Larry Tesler (who later left PARC for Apple) noted that Jobs and colleagues (especially Wozniak) "wanted to get it out to the world." But first, obviously, the challenge was to create that "it" which they then did.
In this volume, as Kelley explains, his book is "about innovation with a human face. [Actually, at least ten...hence its title.] It's about the individuals and teams that fuel innovation inside great organizations. Because all great movements are human-powered." He goes on to suggest that all good working definitions of innovation pair ideas with action, "the spark with fire. Innovators don't just have their heads in the clouds. They also have their feet on the ground." Kelley cites and then examines several exemplary ("great") organizations which include Google, W.L. Gore & Associates, the Gillette Company, and German retailer Tchibo. I especially appreciate the fact that Kelley focuses on the almost unlimited potential for creativity of individuals and the roles which they can play, "the hats they can put on, the personas they can adopt...[albeit] unsung heroes who work on the front lines of entrepreneurship in action, the countless people and teams who make innovation happen day in and day out."
Because organizations need individuals who are savvy about the counterintuitive process of how to move ideas forward, Kelley recommends three "Organizing Personas": The Hurdler, The Collaborator, and The Director.
Because organizations also need individuals and teams who apply insights from the learning roles and channel the empowerment from the organizing roles to make innovation happen, Kelley recommends four "Building personas": The Experience Architect, The Set Designer, The Caregiver, and The Storyteller. Note both the sequence, interrelatedness and, indeed, the interdependence of these ten "personas."
I am reminded of comparable material in A Kick in the Seat of the Pants. Specifically, Roger von Oech's discussion of what he calls "The Four Roles of the Creative Process" (i.e. Explorer, Artist, Judge, and Warrior). Also Six Thinking Hats in which Edward de Bono explains the need for a creativity "wardrobe" comprised of several hats. Specifically, white (rational, logical, and objective), red (emotional), black (negative), yellow (positive, hopeful, optimistic), green (creative and innovative), and blue (ordered, controlled, structured).
What Kelley achieves in this volume is to develop in much greater depth than do von Oech and de Bono what are essentially ten different perspectives. He does so, brilliantly, by focussing the bulk of his attention of those who, for example, seek and explore new opportunities to reveal breakthrough insights...and while doing so wear (at least metaphorically) one of de Bono's hats (probably the green one). Kelley devotes a separate chapter to each of the ten "personas," including real-world examples of various "unsung heroes who work on the front lines of entrepreneurship in action, the countless people and teams who make innovation happen day in and day out."
Two final points. First, most of those who read this book can more easily identify with "unsung heroes" such as those whom Kelley discusses than with luminaries of innovation such as Thomas Edison or with celebrity CEOs such as Andrew Grove, Jeffrey Immelt, Steve Jobs, and Jack Welch, all of whom were staunch advocates of constant innovation in their respective organizations. Also, presumably Kelley agrees with me that those who read and then (hopefully) re-read his book should do so guided by a process which begins with the curiosity of an anthropologist and concludes with the empathy of a caregiver. This is emphatically not an anthology of innovation recipes. Rather, it offers a rigorous intellectual journey whose ultimate value will be determined, entirely, by the nature and extent of innovative thinking which each reader achieves...and who then uses the breakthrough insights to drive creativity throughout her or his own organization.The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO's Strategies for Defeating the Devil's Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization Overview

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