Spooky Nonsense on Domestication
I subscribe to an anthropology blog called Savage Minds – you can find it in my sidebar, I've been reading it for years, and I quite like…
Tag: Blog
Local Contexts – Licensing and Labelling Traditional Knowledge
I went to a fascinating lunchtime talk last Thursday given by Dr Jane Anderson, a legal anthropologist at NYU who specialises in investigating the relationship between intellectual…
Why reading minds is not like reading words
Written by Brent Strickland and Pierre Jacob In a recent review paper in Science (2014. 344-6190) entitled “The cultural evolution of mind reading,” Cecilia Heyes and Chris Frith argue…
Culture: A scientific idea “ready for retirement”?
Every year the website edge.org asks their panel a general question on science and/or society. The 2014 question was: “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?“ I did not read…
Another look at the two-systems model of mindreading
Apperly and Butterfill (2009) and Butterfill and Apperly (2013) have proposed a two-systems model of mindreading. According to this model, humans make use of two distinct psychological syste…
Worlds Collide
(Gosh, that was all getting a bit emo there for a minute wasn’t it? Like a fleeting return to my early naughties LiveJournal days. What’s needed here is…
The field and The Field: An Addendum
On Monday, I return to The Field. Now, since this basically involves me moving my books and computer equipment back to an office just over the road from…
The field and The Field – Adventures in Multi-sited Ethnography
“Fieldwork is not what it used to be”, to quote the title of Faubion and Marcus’ 2009 edited volume on the changing nature of social/cultural anthropology in the…
Alberto Acerbi on cultural evolution
Alberto Acerbi’s excellent blog hosts a noteworthy discussion of Claidière, Scott-Phillips and Sperber’s recent PTRS paper on cultural attraction. Alex Mesoudi, Thom Scott-Phillips and Dan Speber join…
Orpheus – the most haunting love story ever told
Modern re-imaginings of Greek myths are a popular storytelling trope – my favourite of recent years being Anais Mitchell’s excellent folk opera Hadestown, which sets the story of…
Kinship, theology and deep grammar
One of the most salient paradoxes in the study of kinship systems is their sheer analytical complexity, from the point of view of an external observer, and simultaneously…
Relationship Thinking
Nick Enfield — ethnolinguist at the Max Planck institute for psycholinguistics (and contributor to ICCI) — has published a new book, Relationship Thinking. Here’s the blurb from Oxford…
This year’s Edge question
The new The Edge annual question, and the answers, are now online. The question was: “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?” Here are some answers that could…
Film “Entwicklungshilflos ?”
Ab heute findet ihr hier den von mir mitgestalteten Film “Entwicklungshilflos ?”, der Meinungen von acht Vertreter_innen des EZ-Diskurses in 30 Minuten präsentiert. Interviewt wurden u.a. …
Travels in the Congo: First Things First
So, I’ve been travelling and working in the Congo for about a month now and I already have an awful lot to write about – both the awesome…
Newspapers
So, after a long hiatus brought on partly by my web-host deleting my website and not keeping any back-ups (!), and partly by me being busy with work…
Africa Needs You!
I was disappointed to find, in a rare moment when I found myself watching live television the other day, this advertising campaign from VSO: Yes, that’s right viewer.…
Cracks in Everything
Philosophy is dead. At least, it is according to renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, who believes the discipline hasn’t kept up with modern developments in science to the extent…