Is anthropology more important than ever?
New books in 2021 plug Anthro-Vision. But is anthropology more important than ever? After decades of teaching, we need to ask: What happened?
culture
Nacirema Thinking
Although Horace Miner’s “Body Ritual among the Nacirema” has been assigned for thousands of anthropology courses, we need to think before using it uncritically.
Anthropology on Immigration
Anthropology has studied immigration and stands with immigrants against mass human rights violations.
Anthropology for a Safer World
Open Anthropology highlights anthropological research for understanding and teaching about gun violence & the #MarchForOurLives for gun reform
What is Anthropology?
To the question of “What is Anthropology?”: Anthropology is a generous comparative inquiry into the conditions & potentials of human life.
Relevant Teaching for the 21st Century
4-5 February 2016 at University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill: “Defending Anthropology 101 and the Mega-Class: Relevant Teaching for the 21st Century.”
Bring Sanity to Gun Violence
As gun violence continues in the United States, this gun control podcast reflects on how anthropology can bring sanity and contribute to political debate.
Culture, Culture, Everywhere
With anthropologists saying many things about culture, is it any wonder the students and the public are confused?
How Did Anthropology Begin?
Early episodes of European colonialism, plantation slavery in the Caribbean, and Darwin in Tierra del Fuego are crucial to “How Did Anthropology Begin?”
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?
The Other Side of Participant Observation
Resources and thoughts on Teaching Cultural Anthropology for fall 2014: “Teaching is the other side of participant observation” (Tim Ingold, Making 2013:13)
Margaret Mead & Jared Diamond
What makes Jared Diamond possible? Discussant commentary for the panel “Margaret Mead and Jared Diamond: Past Publics, Current Engagements.”
Entangling the Biological
An Introduction to Anthropology course for 2014, with emphasis on “entangling the biological” and the relevance of anthropology for important dialogue.
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.
Fetishizing Fieldwork on the Road to Essentialism
Fieldwork and the ethnographic monograph invited closure around cultural wholes. Anthropology can defend the concept of culture while jettisoning the word.
Fieldwork & Kinshipology
Laura Bohannan’s Return to Laughter is a great book to discuss institutionalized fieldwork in anthropology and how kinshipology trumped messier discoveries.
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?
Globalization Stories
Contemporary stories of globalization erase centuries of contact and encounter: Exploring the North Atlantic fiction of modernity as a seductive universal.
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.
The Concept of Culture
Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture translated Boasian Anthropology & its concept of culture to a mass audience. Plus cultural relativism & cultural wholes.
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)
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.
Epigenetics & Human Nature
Could epigenetics finally re-write the script about human nature? Maybe, but first we have to go over The Edge’s promotional tribute to Napoleon Chagnon.
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.
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?