HOW TO BE AN EXPERT

I’ve been thinking lately, what makes someone an "expert" in his or her field? Apparently Lorelle VanFossen has been thinking the same thing, because she recently wrote a post called What Gives You the Right to Tell Me? at The Blog Herald that explores the issue of expertise in some depth.
For me, the question started to percolate through my mind when I was invited to speak at an academic conference on anthropology and counter-insurgency recently. Apparently, I have become an expert on the topic, someone people look to when they want more information.
How did that happen? This is not a topic I studied at school nor the subject of my dissertation; in fact, it wasn’t even really a topic at all until the US Army released their new counterinsurgency field manual last year and started recruiting anthropologists for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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