What should you do?
We seem to be living through a process of declining US hegemony. However, if the United States collapses as an event rather than a process, what’s the plan?
fieldwork
Volunteer Tourism
Readings and suggestions on Volunteer Tourism for an undergraduate anthropology student doing qualitative research in Costa Rica.
CIA & Anthropology
Sponsored by the Hardy Chair Lecture Series, a public lecture by Dr. David H. Price: “Tracing Funding, Tracing Impacts: The CIA and Anthropology.”
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)
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.
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.
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 and its concept of culture to a mass audience. Plus problematic cultural wholes.
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.
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?
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.
Patterns of Culture (1934) wins Jared Diamond (2012)
Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture wins Jared Diamond for conceptual clarity, writing style, ethnographic example, and impact. Pretty good for 1934.
Sidney Mintz, Franz Boas, Anthropology – A Celebration
At the 2012 American Anthropological Association, Sidney Mintz received the Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service to Anthropology and papers in honor.