Author: Samuel Gerald CollinsPage 1 of 2
Samuel Gerald Collins , April 3rd, 2022
In 1866, Alfred Russell Wallace proclaimed a “new branch of anthropology” premised on the Spiritualist movement that was then exploding in popularity in England. For Wallace, that anthropology…
Samuel Gerald Collins , February 17th, 2022
Margaret Mead Imagined Different Futures By Samuel Gerald Collins In the face of climate disaster, a continuing pandemic, and endless global conflict, it’s difficult to be optimistic about…
Samuel Gerald Collins , February 17th, 2022
Anthropologist Margaret Mead (center), actor Robert Redford (left), and historian Lola Van Wagenen (right) attend “A Future With Alternatives,” a symposium held in 1978 in New York City….
Samuel Gerald Collins , November 24th, 2021
The American Anthropological Annual Meeting has come and gone after a year hiatus. But, courtesy of the continued pandemic, it was not business as usual, and a combination…
Samuel Gerald Collins , May 26th, 2021
For many of us in anthropology, the advent of “big data” represents a threat. Why, after all, spend months developing rapport and interviewing 100 people when you can…
Samuel Gerald Collins , September 29th, 2020
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: sentiment analyses of new connections and communities in a COVID world. Quarantine re-makes the city around u…
Samuel Gerald Collins , September 14th, 2020
Just published, and not behind a paywall. You can find it here, in the Spring 2020 issue of Anthropological Quarterly. Update – now it is! Uggh – what…
Samuel Gerald Collins , May 4th, 2020
From Wikimedia Commons As I complete this essay, the quarantine imposed on Baltimore stretches into its second month, and I continue teaching online amid terror and despair.&nbs…
Samuel Gerald Collins , April 11th, 2020
(from our storymap) In my capacity as a fellow in our faculty research center, I’ve been doing a lot of support work for the unexpected shift to learning-at-a-distance. …
Samuel Gerald Collins , January 7th, 2020
From the conclusion to my contribution on “Social Media” in Wiley’s “The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology:” Anthropologists are still coming to terms with social media and its impact…
Samuel Gerald Collins , October 4th, 2019
My review of the tremendously exciting collection of translated South Korean science fiction: Readymade Bodhisattva. It’s the first of its kind in English, and serves as a tremendous…
Samuel Gerald Collins , October 3rd, 2019
The American Anthropological Association/ Canadian Anthropological Society meeting in Vancouver is in November, but the browsable schedule is already out. As in previous years, I have identified…
Samuel Gerald Collins , March 25th, 2019
(A day’s worth of geolocated instagram posts in Baltimore: August 24, 2018) The digital world presupposes a binary logic of connection and disconnection, one that decomposes into haves…
Samuel Gerald Collins , January 30th, 2019
Wired magazine – mostly hagiographies of silicon valley entrepreneurs – capitalist porn – vague reassurances for the future from the uber-wealthy. 500 dollar headphones. The Senior Associa…
Samuel Gerald Collins , December 18th, 2018
Please check out this provocative collection of papers at cultural anthropology. Edited by Ryan Anderson, Emma Louise Backe, Taylor Nelms, Elizabeth Reddy and Jeremy Trombley (and including my…
Samuel Gerald Collins , November 21st, 2018
As I have done over the past few years (2017, 2016), I returned from AAA2018 and ran some Twitter analytics. Here’s the sociograph I came up with (click…
Samuel Gerald Collins , October 20th, 2018
“The future” (however imagined) continues to be a concern for anthropologists, and this year is no different than 2017. But while I was content to just list the…
Samuel Gerald Collins , October 14th, 2018
https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/c28f0b6fab85650562ac54dd5cfa403e/my-seoul-fieldwork/index.htmlOver the course of a year of fieldwork in Seoul (2014-2015), I accumulated tons of photographs (a…
Samuel Gerald Collins , May 30th, 2018
(I participated in a workshop organized by two anthropologists studying SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence): Claire Webb and Michael Oman-Reagan. The topic called for us to think…
Samuel Gerald Collins , April 22nd, 2018
The joint SCA/SVA “Displacements” conference has come to an end (although the archived presentations will remain up until the end of the month). By all accounts, this virtual…
Samuel Gerald Collins , March 21st, 2018
Apophenia—the recognition of patterns within randomness—is, as Hito Steyerl (2016) has argued, a condition of the rapid multiplication of chaotic plumes of data swirling around us, data riven…
Samuel Gerald Collins , January 18th, 2018
One of the ideas I’ve been playing with over the last few years is the idea of latency in the networked age. As we relate, communicate and move…
Samuel Gerald Collins , January 2nd, 2018
On this day devoted (by some) to a genre fiction, my thoughts have turned to dystopia and utopia–these are not, however, co-extensive with SF, but see Fredric Jameson’s…