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…
Tag: Language
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…
Your accent is we-ahd
I grew up a Navy brat, bouncing from coast to coast in the U.S. until the 11th grade, when I hunkered down in the South for more than…
Chasing their tails
Unpacking a local cultural meme on political corruption There’s a cultural meme circulating locally about the upcoming election. It’s on the radio and TV, in newspapers, and th…
Chasing their tails
Unpacking a local cultural meme on political corruption There’s a cultural meme circulating locally about the upcoming election. It’s on the radio and TV, in newspapers, and th…
Chasing their tails
Unpacking a local cultural meme on political corruption There’s a cultural meme circulating locally about the upcoming election. It’s on the radio and TV, in newspapers, and th…
Why I Like Ancient History
It would be fair to say that, of all the things in the world, I am most interested in the human lives that were lived before about…
Educating ‘bilingual’ children in Spain and Denmark
Educating ‘bilingual’ children in Spain and Denmark: childhood bilingualism as opportunity or constraint by Kenn Nakata Steffensen University College Cork/University of Tokyo See PDF This article exa…
White + word Gap = wrong
With Netta Avineri and Eric J. Johnson, I’ve addressed a report in the Washington Post on the many contextual factors affecting children in poverty. The well-intentioned plans to teach…
The Sexual Lives of Others
The sexual lives of others. It may seem a new and tantalizing topic for an ethnography, yet this particular genre has a long history in anthropology. In the…
A brief descriptive note on types or ‘kinds of relations’ in Yolŋu matha
Burrut’tji by Djambawa Marawili I was thinking about categories of types of people/relations’ the other day, as in English we have family, friends, colleagues, team-mates etc.…
A brief descriptive note on types or ‘kinds of relations’ in Yolŋu matha
Burrut’tji by Djambawa Marawili I was thinking about categories of types of people/relations’ the other day, as in English we have family, friends, colleagues, team-mates etc.…
An Anthropology of X
One of the things most guaranteed to raise my considerable ire is the bizarre and frequently incomprehensible jargon of modern social/cultural/socio-cultural anthropology. I'm not a fan of the…
From the Archives: Asifa Majid on language and olfaction
When I first ran across Asifa Majid’s article with Ewelina Wnuk in Cognition, about how speakers of Maniq, a language indigenous to southern Thailand, have a vocabulary for…
“The Language Gap”: Liberal Guilt Creates Another Not-So-Magic Bullet
Why are people poor? Why do children of the poor not thrive? The latest explanation for why children coming from disadvantaged households do not rise in this land…
Anthropology Blogs 2014
Update 2015: This is the archive page for 2014 Anthropology Blogs. Click Anthropology Blogs 2015 for a current list and see also the Anthropology Blogs 2013 and 2012…