Anthropology – Understanding – Possibility
Reconsidering the purpose of Living Anthropologically and adjusting to global convulsions. We need to document history, interconnection, & power. We need to care for others as we attempt to build a world together
Anthropology condemns the revival of biological race. Some join against racist calls to police black people. But what about race & racism within anthropology?
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?
In historical perspective, what seem like lived events become identifiable as processes. However, recent rumblings indicate a US collapse could be swift.
Contemporary Anthropological Theory is a course meant to change how we think. Teaching Trouillot as “Burning Questions” provides relevance for anthropology.
What Would Sid Do? Reflections on the Sidney Mintz legacy in anthropology. Teaching Introduction to Anthropology as Global History & Interconnection.
In November 2018, we can assemble the “coalition of the diverse” that almost came together in 2016: A racially mixed crowd in the November Rain.
The BDS Movement merits support, but an anthropology boycott of Israeli academic institutions by the AAA is a too easy “take a stand” moment from academe.
With anthropologists saying many things about culture, is it any wonder the students and the public are confused?
Early episodes of European colonialism, plantation slavery in the Caribbean, and Darwin in Tierra del Fuego are crucial to “How Did Anthropology Begin?”
With President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan, President Barack Obama of the US, and World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, Anthropology is taking over the world.
“The first anthropological emotion is hope” (Carole McGranahan) and also via Ingold, Trouillot, Lennon & Ono “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)”
Anthropology and Storytelling – Stories that must be told to transform the anthropocene. And yet: Can anthropology spell out relevance for a wider audience?
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?
Resources and thoughts on Teaching Cultural Anthropology for fall 2014: “Teaching is the other side of participant observation” (Tim Ingold, Making 2013:13)
What makes Jared Diamond possible? Discussant commentary for the panel “Margaret Mead and Jared Diamond: Past Publics, Current Engagements.”
Globalization was supposed to render the national state irrelevant. Such claims had already been disproved by an anthropology of the state.
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.
Pairing “Advertising Missionaries” with “A Fragmented Globality” to ask “What, if anything, is truly new about our times?” (Trouillot 2003:47)
Fieldwork and the ethnographic monograph invited closure around cultural wholes. Anthropology can defend the concept of culture while jettisoning the word.
Are there ways to counter the notion of “gang culture” without promoting myths of individualism? Can we usefully bring anthropology to the courtroom?
Contemporary stories of globalization erase centuries of contact and encounter: Exploring the North Atlantic fiction of modernity as a seductive universal.
Anthropology saw culture as anti-race, yet descriptions of Dobu in Patterns of Culture, show culture reified–and looking a lot like race.
Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture translated Boasian Anthropology and its concept of culture to a mass audience. Plus problematic cultural wholes.
Thinking about the purpose of anthropology: “Ultimately, anthropology will only matter… if it evokes a purpose outside of itself” (Trouillot 2003, 5)