The good and the bad of #AAA2016 or, THE AAA MUST NEVER USE THAT SCHEDULING APP AGAIN
The annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association is now over, as is Thanksgiving. Now that we are over the hump and have a bit of perspective, we…
Author: Rex
The role of #openaccess in Trump’s America
Trump’s victory yesterday was the result of many factors. The politics of academic publishing was hardly an important part of the elections results. Large for-profit publishers like Elsevier and…
“Nor are we big enough to have a place for you as a cameo carver”: Kroeber on why Berkeley wasn’t good enough for Sapir
In my past few walks down the history of anthropology, I’ve tended to focus on white guys being cruel to each other. I thought I’d try to widen…
“I know of Malinowski’s despotism”: Mauss to Radcliffe-Brown
The people who fill our theory readers are real people who lived vibrant, quirky lives. It is easy to reduce them to a set of ideas or to…
Malinowski and Hats
The alternate title for this post was going to be “Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, and Boas walk into a bar…”. This is a little autobiographical passage from pages 46-48 of History,…
Anthropology and the MacArthurs
The 2016 MacArthur Fellows were announced yesterday and — unlike some years — there were no anthropologists on the list. Established back in 1981, the grant was intended…
Dialogical Anthropology in an Age of Controlled Equivocation
I’ve been thinking about Dennis Tedlock and reading Marisol de la Cadena’s Earth Beings at the same time lately. Much of Earth Beings is concerned with intimacy, translation, and understan…
Chicago’s “Trigger Warning” Letter Is very un-Chicago
Jay Ellison’s recent letter on trigger warnings made the rounds of social media late last week, and this week the story continues to circulate. It’s a topic that hits close…
Paul Friedrich, Dennis Tedlock, and Generational Change in Anthropology
It seems like I’ve been writing a lot of obituaries lately. Between Elizabeth Colson, Edie Turner, and Anthony Wallace and Raymond Smith, I’ve spent a lot of my time…
Vale Elizabeth Colson
When Elizabeth Colson passed last month at the age of 99, anthropology lost one of its preeminent figures. Colson was a unique figure in many ways: She straddled…
Vale Edith Turner
Edith Turner — Edie as she was universally known — passed away on 18 June 2016. Perhaps the quickest and least accurate way to describe Edie is “Victor Turner’s wife”.…
With ‘Cold War Anthropology’ David Price brings his trilogy on anthropology and American power to a powerful conclusion
Price, David H. 2016. Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology. Duke University Press. A few years ago, I had a…
What we learned from #anthroboycott
Please join me in reading responsively We learned that Boycott supporters felt silenced and intimidated by the anti-Boycott sentiment in their departments while on the other hand anti-Boycott…
“It has taken more work and time to place our students in decreasingly attractive jobs.”
File under “Graduate School Has Always Sucked“: There was a time when graduate school didn’t suck that much, financially speaking at least. And then it did start…
Canberra’s loss is Mānoa’s gain as the ANU walks away from decades of excellence
I do not normally write about my duties as a professor at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa on this blog, since the blog isn’t associated with UHM…
Grad school has always sucked: “I am sorry to be so discouraging, but the truth requires it”
This is the start of a new series in the history of anthropology where I will document the way that grad school in anthropology has always sucked, there…
Academia: It’s like Game of Thrones, except there’s no throne
I’m giving season 6 of Game of Thrones as pass because, frankly, I don’t enjoy watching people be cruel to each other the way I used to. And yet in…
Tools We Use: Aeon Timeline 2
There are a lot of things in life that can be solved with a good timeline. While most people tend to think of them as a specialized way…
Smeared Disguises: A Reply to Hirschkind
(Savage Minds is pleased to present this occasional post by Gregory Starrett, professor of anthropology at University of North Carolina at Charlotte. This piece is a response to…
Vale Bernard Bate
I was saddened to learn yesterday that my friend and colleague Bernard Bate passed away. A scholar in his prime in his mid-fifties, Barney (as he was known) was a…
The Global Social Media Impact Study goes Open Access
As an undergraduate, I was deeply impressed with Daniel Miller’s Material Culture and Mass Consumption — in fact, in one of my first published articles I used Miller’s concept of …
Teh new ethnographeez
I’m in a reading group with sociologists — no, really, it’s been a good experience — and they said to me “it’s been a while since we read…
Why the world needs World Anthropology Day
Today is World Anthropology Day, a global celebration of all things anthropological. The American Anthropological Association beta-tested this new holiday last year as ‘National Anthropology Day…
Sapiens: Good (Maybe Great) But Not Transformational (So Far)
Last week marked the launch of Sapiens, a brand new website bankrolled by the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The unveiling is especially welcome to those of us who think about public…