Seeing Culture Like a State
At this year’s Taiwan’s annual anthropology conference, the Taiwan group anthropology blog Guava Anthropology hosted a public event where blog members were invited to give five minute R…
Tag: Language
A historical view of a long heated debate: what could be more menacing than the singular "they"?
The use of ‘they’ as a replacement for ‘he or she’ pronouns has been gaining momentum not only because it lets one slip around those steadfast predefined gender…
Can an iPhone App Help Save an Endangered Language?
About half of the world’s languages are expected to disappear by 2100 if nothing is done to stop their decline. To counteract this trend, some tribes are using…
Language, Power, and Pot: Speaking of Cannabis as Medicine
By: Elisa (EJ) Sobo The US cannabis landscape is shifting quickly, and so is the way we talk about the plant and its uses. The push to end…
Con-Men: Understanding the Gendered Language of the Comic Book Convention
By Steven Dashiell Featured image based on an Creative Commons image by GabboT. I can clearly remember my first time ever going to a comic book convention. It…
The power of language in historical narratives
Representation — the images and language we use to describe our social worlds — matters. “Discovery, settlement or invasion? The power of language in historical narratives” (2016, The Conversat…
Aboot the Canadian "about"
Canadians — like the authors of anthro everywhere! — are pretty used to hearing English-speakers from the US and elsewhere in the world poke fun at our accents,…
Language learning
Although more and more anthropology students choose to research in sites ‘at home’ where they are already familiar with the language, it has been a long tradition in…
Food Anthropology, A Tribute to Sidney W. Mintz
What are your essential articles for teaching a Food Anthropology course? What most distinguishes Food Anthropology from other ways of studying food? What are the most important insights…
Avoiding gendered bias… for instructors
Writing a reference letter for a student? The Feminist Philosophers blog has shared a handy infographic from the University of Arizona that will help instructors write great reference letters…
Curating Gathering Voices
An Exhibition at the American Philosophical Society On April 15th the American Philosophical Society (APS) opened the third in a series of exhibitions on Thomas Jefferson—a member and…
(Video) Games as Motivation for Japanese High School Students
By Andrew Ross Sushi served on conveyor belts. Robot restaurants and robot theater. Toilets that automatically open themselves upon room entry. For visitors of Tokyo (and to an…
How ‘Maintainers,’ Not ‘Innovators,’ Make the World Turn
I have been hearing a lot about ‘disrupters’ and ‘innovators’ in tech and marketing industries lately, and something about that language has always irked me. Lee Vinsel (an…
The state of indigenous language and culture in Canada
The Canadian government’s program of cultural genocide in residential schools included the erasure of aboriginal languages. In Undoing Linguicide (an hour long audio documentary for CBC Radio’s Ideas…
Trump’s Tactics and Republican Speechlessness
The most astounding thing about the rise of Donald Trump is not his willingness to use racist hatred as a central theme in his presidential campaign—it’s the unwillingness…
Unmanning Space Language
Language matters, as demonstrated by the recent discussion following the discovery of example sentences using sexist stereotypes in the Oxford Dictionary of English. Language about who goes into…
Talking Hands
Talking with our hands is one of the most human things we do. While commonly used to add emotional emphasis to spoken language, hands have the unique ability…
Sexism in the Oxford Dictionary of English
Why does the Oxford Dictionary of English portray women as “rabid feminists” with mysterious “psyches” speaking in “shrill voices” who can’t do research or hold a PhD but…
Biting the hand that feeds
Misogyny at the Trinidad Guardian… Maybe I am a prude, but is it ok for a national newspaper to regularly publish a column whose language, imagery and content…
Biting the hand that feeds
Misogyny at the Trinidad Guardian… Maybe I am a prude, but is it ok for a national newspaper to regularly publish a column whose language, imagery and content…
Biting the hand that feeds
my last column for the Guardian under their current editor, who i think fired me for calling out his star columnist for being a sexist… Maybe I am…
Jennifer Jackson’s Wonderful Description of Linguistic Anthropology
Jennifer Jackson passed away in May of this year at the young age of 39. Here is an excerpt from the obituary that ran on Anthropology News: We…
The way value inheres: Yolŋu riŋgitj and its relationship to Malay ‘ringgit’
Munggurrawuy Yunupingu, Port of Macassar, 1947. There are many loan words from Malay and other Austronesian languages in the Yolŋu languages of east Arnhem Land (see…
The way value inheres: Yolŋu riŋgitj and its relationship to Malay ‘ringgit’
Munggurrawuy Yunupingu, Port of Macassar, 1947. There are many loan words from Malay and other Austronesian languages in the Yolŋu languages of east Arnhem Land (see…