It’s not hip to be square
I see shows like Star Trek as emblematic of a transitional period in American masculinity — at least on TV. The 50’s would have been pure Kirk, with…
Author: Kerim
Ethnographic Films: A Family of Resemblances
This is the third post in my series on the definition of “ethnographic film.” In the first post I laid out the basic approach I am using: one…
The Four Dimensions of Ethnographic Films
In my last post I argued that rather than choosing between overly narrow (“closed”) or overly broad (“open”) definitions of ethnographic film, it would be better to follow…
Do we even need to define ethnographic film?
Before this year I never felt the need to come up with a clear definition for what counts as an “ethnographic film.” Constructing better pigeonholes only seems to…
Population #ReadIn
“Racism” is such an unwieldy concept. Living in a world in which racism is one of the fundamental building blocks that shapes all our relationships, calling someone racist…
Pokemon GO comes home: Manners pedagogy in the Japanese linguistic landscape
[This is an invited post by Debra J Occhi, Miyazaki International College (aka Hyuga Natsuko1, yellow team). Debra is a linguistic anthropologist employed at Miyazaki International College. Her…
Pokemon GO comes home: Manners pedagogy in the Japanese linguistic landscape
[This is an invited post by Debra J Occhi, Miyazaki International College (aka Hyuga Natsuko1, yellow team). Debra is a linguistic anthropologist employed at Miyazaki International College. Her…
Seeing Culture Like a State
At this year’s Taiwan’s annual anthropology conference, the Taiwan group anthropology blog Guava Anthropology hosted a public event where blog members were invited to give five minute R…
Archiving for the longue durée (Tools we use)
Do you backup? Good. But not good enough. First, lets talk about backup. A good backup strategy should be regular, redundant, and involve multiple locations. Regular, so that…
AAA Boycott Vote Postmortem
By now you have probably heard that the boycott vote failed by an incredibly narrow margin: In the end an astounding 51% of its 10,000 members participated. The…
A Letter to the AA Regarding its World Anthropology Section on Israel
[Savage Minds welcomes the following invited post by Matan Kaminer. Matan is a doctoral candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is working…
Why I’m Voting for the Boycott Part 3: It’s in the Resolution
This is the third post in a three-post series of personal reflections on the AAA boycott vote. The first post discussed my own childhood Zionist education, while the…
Why I’m Voting for the Boycott Part 2: SQUIRREL!
This is the second of a series of posts I am writing on the topic of the AAA boycott vote. You can read the previous post here. Last…
Why I’m Voting for the Boycott Part 1: David vs. Goliath
Last November anthropologists attending the AAA business meeting in Denver voted by an astounding 1040-136 to endorse the resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions, but this was just…
Filming Empathy – Part 1
In their essay “Whatever Happened to Empathy?” Hollan and Throop1 cite the ambivalence that Franz Boas felt about the usefulness of the concept for ethnography: On the one…
Freddy’s Hair
Freddy Lim Campaign Photo A week before historic elections which swept Taiwan’s ruling Nationalist Party (KMT) out of power, KMT candidate Lin Yu-fang (林郁方) asked voters not vote…
Hunting as an Indigenous Right on Taiwan: A Call to Action
[The following is an invited post by Scott Simon. Scott is Professor in the School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Having conducted…
Jennifer Jackson’s Wonderful Description of Linguistic Anthropology
Jennifer Jackson passed away in May of this year at the young age of 39. Here is an excerpt from the obituary that ran on Anthropology News: We…
Highlights from the AAA Israel-Palestine Task Force’s Final Report
The Task Force on AAA Engagement on Israel-Palestine issued its final report today. It is a long and thorough report, so I won’t attempt to summarize the whole…
Jack Goody (1919-2015): an oral history
[The following is an invited post by Keith Hart, Centennial Professor of Economic Anthropology in the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and International…
Embracing Impostor Syndrome
image source It seems a fair amount of academics, especially women, suffer from impostor syndrome, “a constant fear of being discovered to be a fraud and a charlatan.”…
The new AnthroSource is fantastic! Here’s why I won’t be using it.
I haven’t yet seen any official announcement from the AAA about the change,1 but if you now click on the “Login to use AnthroSource now” link from the…
Kennedy and the Triumph of the Social
While everyone should be celebrating the monumental decision of the Supreme Court to recognize same-sex marriages, there is also something in there that, along with this weeks’ ruling…
Welcome new blogger Uzma Rizvi!
Savage Minds has long been looking for an archaeologist whose writing would mesh well with our own (predominantly cultural anthropological) sensibility, and so when Uzma Rizvi guest blogged…