December 19, 2014
Transformational Storytelling Anthropology
Anthropology and Storytelling - Stories that must be told to transform the anthropocene. And yet: Can anthropology spell out relevance for a wider audience?
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November 13, 2014
Humans Just Like Us?
Is the time gone for reaffirming that the Bongobongo are “humans just like us"? And does Open Access anthropology spell out the stakes for a wider public?
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July 21, 2014
Margaret Mead & Jared Diamond
What makes Jared Diamond possible? Discussant commentary for the panel "Margaret Mead and Jared Diamond: Past Publics, Current Engagements."
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November 7, 2013
Is the State Relevant?
Globalization was supposed to render the national state irrelevant. Such claims had already been disproved by an anthropology of the state.
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October 29, 2013
Purchasing Power / Buying & Believing
A double review from 2003 of Elizabeth Chin's Purchasing Power and Steven Kemper's Buying and Believing. A review that went poof! from American Ethnologist.
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October 22, 2013
Irony, Paradox, Uncertainty
Pairing "Advertising Missionaries" with "A Fragmented Globality" to ask "What, if anything, is truly new about our times?" (Trouillot 2003:47)
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October 15, 2013
Trouillot: Adieu Culture
Fieldwork and the ethnographic monograph invited closure around cultural wholes. Anthropology can defend the concept of culture while jettisoning the word.
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October 8, 2013
Return to Laughter Laura Bohannan
Laura Bohannan's Return to Laughter is a great book to discuss institutionalized fieldwork in anthropology and how kinshipology trumped messier discoveries.
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September 26, 2013
How do we get out from culture?
Are there ways to counter the notion of "gang culture" without promoting myths of individualism? Can we usefully bring anthropology to the courtroom?
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September 23, 2013
Erased Histories of Globalization
Contemporary stories of globalization erase centuries of contact and encounter: Exploring the North Atlantic fiction of modernity as a seductive universal.
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September 16, 2013
When Culture Looks like Race
Anthropology saw culture as anti-race, yet descriptions of Dobu in Patterns of Culture, show culture reified--and looking a lot like race.
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September 9, 2013
Ruth Benedict’s Influence on Cultural Anthropology
How Patterns of Culture shaped views of human diversity worldwide and Ruth Benedict's influence on cultural anthropology.
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September 4, 2013
anthropology will only matter if it evokes a purpose outside of itself
Thinking about the purpose of anthropology: "Ultimately, anthropology will only matter... if it evokes a purpose outside of itself" (Trouillot 2003, 5)
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August 16, 2013
Pinker Scientism Response: Anthropology Is Your Ally
An impassioned plea to lower the arrogance decibels. In the wake of Steven Pinker's "Science Is Not Your Enemy" assessing humanities & science together.
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July 25, 2013
White-Race Problems
Don't worry White people! White Hispanics and our White Black President will save us! Geraldo Rivera's Fox News fact-twisting shows race retrenchment.
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July 11, 2013
We Cannot Abandon Humanity
When Bill Gates recommends Jared Diamond & Steven Pinker, reiterate anthropology's calling: "the fate of no human group can be irrelevant to humankind" (Trouillot).
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May 21, 2013
Power & the Culture of Greed
Brooks uses culture to bypass power, inequality, economics, politics, and history. That's the real cultural problem--and a problem anthropology must tackle.
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April 18, 2013
Links to the Highly Improbable
An anthropologist caught between "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" and "Marginal Revolution: Small Steps Toward a Much Better World."
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March 16, 2013
Party Like It’s 1999… with Napoleon Chagnon!
If "anthropology's future depends largely on its ability to contest the Savage slot" (Trouillot) then what about Napoleon Chagnon?
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March 5, 2013
Cultural Perspectives on Gun Control
Anthropology debunks simplistic ideas about human nature and violence. We need nuanced, research-based cultural perspectives on gun control.
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February 21, 2013
Living with Darwin & Evolution-Creation Controversy
"Teaching Theories: The Evolution-Creation Controversy" (1982) has long been part of the Applying Anthropology reader. Time for a Living with Darwin update?
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February 12, 2013
War, Peace, & Human Nature
Wonderful recent volume shows how views of human nature as inherently warlike stem not from the facts but from cultural views embedded in Western thinking.
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February 6, 2013
Jared Diamond, Science, Violence & the Facts
The Ax Fight shows how Yanomami used steel axes long before anthropologists arrive. The Jared Diamond violence calculations must consider interconnection.
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February 1, 2013
Indigenous Allies & Politics of Empire
The indigenous allies in Matthew Restall's Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest point to contingent histories, not the inevitability of guns, germs & steel.
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January 26, 2013
Geography, States, Empires
Eric Wolf's Europe and the People Without History attempts to answer Yali's Question - Why Europe? It's time to rediscover the history of Eric Wolf.
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