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.
textbooks
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.
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.
2013 Introduction to Anthropology – Four Fields
Introduction to Anthropology with “What Does it Mean to be Human?”; “Labor and Legality”; and “Applying Anthropology.” Biological, Archaeology, Culture.
Jared Diamond won’t beat Mitt Romney
The really scary part of the Diamond Romney dustup is how Romney recaps Diamond: European imperialism is accidental but societies choose to fail.
Teaching Race
Updated sources for teaching race anthropologically. Race is a social construction, but we need to understand that racism is what makes race salient.
DNA Battles
Research on earliest Americans reveals multiple migrations and complexity. But Nicholas Wade botches the coverage–and the anthropology.
Review: What Does It Mean to Be Human? (2nd edition)
For a four-field introductory course, I reviewed the Anthropology Second Edition: Lavenda & Schultz, What Does It Mean to Be Human?
Sex, Gender, Sexuality
Anthropology insists sex, gender, and sexuality include human activity and imagination–explaining why “gender is a social construction”
Teaching: Latin America & Caribbean 2012
Anthropology of Latin America and the Caribbean is less about “peoples and cultures” and more about processes at work across the Americas.
Metaphors and Evolution
How can we stop trellises from turning into trees? Emphasizing non-directionality and complexity in evolutionary understandings.
Capitalism, Denisovans, Anthropology in Media
Free PowerPoint for “Anthropology and Moral Optimism”; Denisovan admixture update; AAA news and the 2011 Anthropology in Media Award.
Anthropology 101 in 2011
This post on Anthropology 101 in 2011 was a call to action for introductory courses to address the big themes of Human Nature, Race, & Evolution.
Cosmopolitanism & Cultural Relativism
Have the promoters of anthropological cosmopolitanism considered the proximity of Cosmopolitan the magazine? Does cosmopolitanism improve on cultural relativism?
Anthropology Textbooks: Doubling down on culture?
Kottak and Gezon’s Culture uses a magazine-style textbook to double down on culture in anthropology. That’s problematic–culture is already everywhere.