Officers With PhDs Advising War Effort

[marct]

Hi George,

Marc:

More small humor from "the old coot" kibitzer.

Not at all! It is "the sharing of relevant experience". Besides that, I'm an Anthropologist and one of the things that we know is that stories are the basis of "learning" because they combine both emotion and logic .

Unique thinking, and different experiences can all help solve problems, including war and civil affairs issues, if one has an open mind and can relate the pieces of the puzzle in an understandable and practical outcome manner.

I totally agree with that. I remember, during the 2nd year of my Ph.D. fieldwork, I was asked to give a "critique" seminar to the career counsellors I was studying. Within 20 minutes, we got into an intense discussion of how to construct their seminars using a model from the study of ritual (actually, a variant of Victor Turner's work). The discussion moved through all sorts of different religious traditions and, by about 25 minutes int it, we were arguing the relative merits of ecstatic rituals vs contemplative ones in training people how to write resumes. There was something surreal about discussing Divine Pomander and The Gospel of Norea in a business boardroom, but the changes made in their seminars reflected that conversation and, in the end, proved much more effective in getting people to write good resumes.

Marc