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…
Author: Rex
Farewell, Oona Schmid
No, it’s not the title of a whimsical new Wes Anderson movie, it’s news of changes within the American Anthropological Association’s publishing program. Ed Liebow, the executive dire…
David Bowie, Anthropology, and the Pleasure of Difference
I’m hardly the biggest David Bowie fan in the world, but when I heard he had passed away I knew I the news would make waves in social media.…
What really happened on Thanksgiving
(This is the second annual posting of a short, edited snippet of pages 55-66 of Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. In it Mann describes the history of…
What Happened at #AAA2015: The Good, The Bad, and the Bibs
Last week, Denver welcomed about five thousand anthropologists to its Gilded Age (and Gilded Age revival) downtown for the massive anthropological blowout that was the Annual Meeting of…
Savage Minds at #AAA2015
Welcome to Denver! If you are like me, you will be disappointed by the failure of the AAA to foreground the Mile High City as the location of…
Official #AAA2015 #tweetup planning thread
Ok trying to plan the tweetup for the AAAs on twitter is getting ridiculous because by the time you mention everyone who is involved in planning it there…
The _other_ enemy of Open Access
An article made the rounds of social media recently on whether or not the for-profit website academia.edu is outflanking the open access movement. It’s a great article that…
What a cooperative proposal means for the AAA
Social media was a-twitter (see what I did there?) today with an important statement about the future of anthropology publishing posted at both Cultural Anthropology and in the latest…
Happy Open Access Week!
This week is Open Access week! In fact, by the time you read this it will already be Tuesday or Wednesday of Open Access Week because I’m not getting to…
Vale Anthony Wallace and Raymond Smith
I couldn’t let this week slip by without mentioning the passing of two great anthropologist: Raymond T. Smith and Anthony F.C. Wallace. Raymond T. Smith was a social…
Encrypting Ethnography: Digital Security for Researchers
(This invited post comes to us from Jonatan Kurzwelly. Jonatan is a a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of St. Andrews. You can email him at kurzwelly@mailbox.org .…
On The Importance of Liking Students
Probably the most important trick to being a good teacher is believing that you have something to teach students, and that they are better of learning it then…
#OpenAccess as Famine
The current state of thinking about open access today is a lot like our contemporary understanding of famine. In the early 1980s Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze published the…
Osama Bin Laden, Chelsea Manning, and their anthropologists
Anthropology can turn up in the strangest places. While we often hold up Margaret Mead and… uh… well, mostly Margaret Mead… as examples of public anthropology, our discipline…
Malinowski’s Legacy: One Hundred Years of Anthropology in the Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea
(Last week a major international conference was held in Alotau, the capital of Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea, where Bronislaw Malinowski did the research on kula that…
Summer reading lists vs. What Actually Happened
Ah, summer reading lists: Elaborate plans for personal enrichment and literary sophistication made in the spring and carried out… when? It’s easy to find tons of summer reading…
Book proves culture leads to Asian American success, headlines claim opposite
A strong media push by the Sage Foundation has put Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou’s book The Asian American Achievement Paradox into the public sphere in the past couple of days, garnering…
Welcome Libraria!
When twitter lit up last week with the news that PKP and SPARC had partnered with EASA, SCA, and 4S your response was probably “WTF?” The new project is…
Vale Jack Goody
Keith Hart recently announced on social media that Jack Goody passed away. He was just a few days before his 96th birthday. Goody had a long and productive life and…
Fredrik Barth: An Intellectual Biography (book review)
Thomas Hylland Eriksen. 2015. Fredrick Barth: An Intellectual Biography. London: Pluto Press. Thomas Hylland Eriksen has a well-earned reputation for writing good, short books on large, intractable to…
Good bye (and good riddance) to Human Terrain System
Both Counterpunch and Inside Higher Ed ran stories recently on the end of Human Terrain System or HTS. What was HTS? A program run by the army and employing…
Committing Crimes during Fieldwork: Ethics, Ethnography, and “On The Run”
At this point the debate about Alice Goffman’s book On The Run looks something like this: Goffman writes a successful ethnography. Journalists are peeved that Goffman followed social science …
Anonymity, Ethnography, and Alice Goffman: Welcome, journalists
I think I’ve written and thrown away three separate posts on the Alice Goffman debate trying to find something to say that people will find interesting. I personally don’t find the…