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…
Tag: Blog post
Affect, Attention, and Ethnographic Research: Thoughts on Mental Health in the Field
This year has seen some encouraging openings in a much-needed conversation on academia and mental health (for example: The Guardian, Chronicle Vitae, The Professor is In). Many of…
Trolling @AmericanAnthro; PLUS: Savage Minds is Seeking Social Media Manager!
Saturday morning, the American Anthropological Association celebrated its 114th birthday. Sort of. That morning, @AmericanAnthro tweeted something along the lines of: “Today is AAA’s 114th birthday! T…
Seeing Revolutionary Info-structure
[extract from keynote at the Mobile Life Centre, University of Stockholm, March 17, 2016] Its the summer of 2015 and I am on a former Naval Air Force…
A Smear in Disguise: Comments on Starrett
Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions is pleased to present Charles Hirschkind‘s powerful rebuttal to Gregory Starrett’s recent essay in Anthropology News that …
Paranoid Reading, Writing, and Research: Secrecy in the Field
In my first Savage Minds guest post, I wanted to write about the encounter that most deeply influenced my time in the field. In the remainder of my…
Israel’s Foreign Policy in Latin America — Another Reason to Take the Call to Boycott Seriously
[Savage Minds is pleased to publish this essay by Les W. Field. Les is professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at U New Mexico. He pursues collaborative…
The Self at Stake: Thinking Fieldwork and Sexual Violence
[Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Alix Johnson] I don’t intend to write about surveillance and suspicion, but then I spend my first five months of fieldwork feeling watched. …
Public Statement on Zika Virus in Puerto Rico
This call to action was written by Adriana Garriga-López, Ph.D. (Kalamazoo College), and Shir Lerman, M.A., M.P.H., PhD Candidate (University of Connecticut), with Jessica Mulligan, Ph.D. (Providence …
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…
Waiting for the Future
Call it what you will: an anecdotal and impressionist narrative, or a set of strung-together fieldnotes, collected over years of living and working with people across class lines…
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…
Political Arrangements
The thing about work that stands out most, reading through enthusiastic future forecasts on the one hand and stories of worker distress after the Sriperumbudur Nokia manufacturing plant…
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 …
An Anthropologist among Future Seekers
[Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Deepa S. Reddy] For a few years now, I’ve been working in the space of future imagining—seeking out trends and rationales by which…
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…
Dialogs before Suicide – An interview
Dialogs before Suicide – An interview In 2011, I made a single-shot feature film – Rati Chakravyuh (2013, 105 minutes) that was a summit of my life long…
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…
Around the Web Digest: Week of January 31
Human life stages are the theme for this roundup, with posts ranging from early childhood to senescence. Send me links to anything you want to see included here…
Paranormalizing the Popular through the Tibetan Tulpa: Or what the next Dalai Lama, the X Files and Affect Theory (might) have in common
What’s the newest and weirdest sub-culture on the Internet, you ask? If you’re Vice Magazine, it’s apparently tulpamancers. Tulpamancers are people who, through extended bouts of con…
Walter Benjamin in Palestine
Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions is pleased to offer this reflection on a Walter Benjamin conference in Palestine by David Lloyd, ally of anthropology and…
Maha Kumbh Journal during the making of “Kalkimanthankatha – Part 2.
Still from Kalkimanthankatha. Saturday, Feb 2, 2013 I think Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” works very well in Kumbh. A post-modern text located in a pre-modern universe. The…
Maha Kumbh Journal during the making of “Kalkimanthankatha – Part 1.
Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Ashish Avikunthak The early months of 2013 saw one of the largest congregations of mankind in the 21st century transpiring at the confluence…
Infrastructure as Iron Cage
Weber’s metaphor of the iron cage is one of the most famous in all of sociology. It’s certainly stuck with me: I keep a bookmark in my copy…