“I have dwelt on Léry and Herodotus because so much in them reminds me of my father. Their naïve curiosity, combined with a highly sophisticated intelligence seeking pleasure in the systematic organization of dispersed empirical data (the more idiosyncratic the better), brings Alfred Kroeber to mind. Once when I was in the Navy I visited [...]
I think I am finally getting old enough to appreciate Richard Rorty. I spent a leisurely morning reading some of the essays in Consequences of Pragmatism and enjoyed them — particularly this long quote from “Method, Social Science, Social Hope”, which cuts through several tangles of anthropological ethics: I said that… it was a mistake [...]
Somehow I’ve become embroiled in Taiwan-as-Austronesia. Here is someone who has written about this: “Christian Alan Anderson”:http://omnivoyage.org/about_chris.htm Includes publications. Note to self, note to self, note to self.
Ther PNG blogosphere is actually pretty active although I have to admit that I don’t follow it as much as I should. Two new recent blogs by anthropologists working on PNG are worth noting, however — “Politics of Nature”:http://politicsofnature.wordpress.com/ by Jamon Halvaksz and “The Melanesian”:http://themelanesian.org/ by Andrew Moutu. Jamon’s has been around for a year [...]
This semester I’m teaching Weber’s essay on objectivity and social policy. It has been years since I read it — I can tell because all of my marginal notes are littered with references to Habermas, Horkheimer and Adorno. One passage stood out to me: “The fate of an epoch that has eaten from teh tree [...]
I’ve thought a lot about locating cultural creativity, and then by chance the other day I found it — its call number is GN453!
I have always known, deep in my heart, that John Burton had the heart and soul of a blogger. But his recent blog, despite the occasional entry that is “incomprehensible”:http://rspas.anu.edu.au/blogs/rmap/2007/10/29/frightenstein-drives-stake-into-sinking-atolls/#more-529 (at least to those of us who are not aging commonwealthers) are “furniture chewing”:http://rspas.anu.edu.au/blogs/rmap/2007/10/26/cross-cultural-misunderstanding-and-4wds/ at “its very best”:http://rspas.anu.edu.au/blogs/rmap/2007/10/31/hacks-move-decimal-point-again/.
Sounds like interesting work — here a potted literature review. “Making Scenes”:http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=978-0-8223-4115-4 — the forthcoming book from Duke “The dissertation”:http://library.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?Search_Arg=baulch%2C+emma&SL=None&Search_Code=NALL&PID=Uc18Fq64z00WiEseC5ZRb8VTD&SEQ=20071025044256&CNT=20&HIST=1 at Monash Uni in Australia “Gesturing elsewhere: the identity politics of the Balinese death/thrash metal scene”:http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessionid=F12901585295FC895B531E67A2479BF0.tomcat1?fromPage=online&aid=163351 “Creating a scene: Balinese punk’s beginnings”:http://ics.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/5/2/153 “The McDonaldisation of Bali”:http://www.sustainability.murdoch.edu.au/casestudies/Case_Studies_Asia/bali_2/csmcdon.htm “‘Post Imperial’ Globalization and Balinese Alternative Music”:http://web.mit.edu/cms/Events/mit2/Abstracts/Baulchpaper.pdf “Alternative music [...]
Here’s “a potential resource for teaching”:http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/55869?fulltext=true — often times when I begin to ask my students about race and genetics one or two in the class will analogize human racial difference to dog breeds. At first I thought this was shocking, but over time I found it was a useful response — most students imagined [...]
If I had to explain briefly what I have been thinking about lately, it is this: how we might subsume a Melanesian emphasis on dynamism, disjuncture, and change under a Benjaminian-Baudelairian notion of ‘modernity’ rather than the older tropes of cargo cult or (more simply) ‘savagery’. I think it took me a little bit to [...]
Behold: “Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations”:http://infosthetics.com/archives/2007/03/even_more_multitouch_screen.html and “Beyond the Body Proper”:http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=3845-1! I just wish we could see the TOCs on these guys…
Out of the blue the other day Savage minds got “a comment from Howard (Eilberg-)Schwartz”:http://savageminds.org/2006/04/28/savage-jews/#comment-53589. I think of him as the Rabbi Who Reads Levi-Strauss, but apparently since then he has become a business executive and now lectures on the intersection of spirituality and corporate social responsibility. He has a “new website”:http://www.freedomandcapitalism.com/ with information about [...]
This semester I am teaching a graduate seminar, and in our session last week we were talking a bit about what it means to be American and what a distinctively ‘American’ take on things is. I’ve never felt particularly ‘American’ in the ‘Anglo-protestant’ sense and my California childhood didn’t prepare me very well for my [...]
A student of mine pointed me to this link on “corporate slogans and cross-cultural misunderstanding”:http://moronland.net/moronia/moron/1064/. It’s a fun little piece that will be great to teach with in the future.
Not much of a post, but I thought I’d break radio silence on this blog to post a link to this “anthropological analysis of companion parrots”:http://www.psyeta.org/sa/sa11.4/anderson.shtml as part of my longstanding (and long dormant!) interest in human-animal interactions which I found via “Tracks”:http://timothyjpmason.com/wordpress/. In other news I’m working my way — slowly — through Rebecca [...]
“Eriberto ‘Fuji’ Lozada”:http://www.davidson.edu/personal/erlozada/ looks like someone doing interesting work in China. But then again thinking about working in China is terrifying since there is no end to the people and writings out there.
The University of California Press tells me that Holly Wardlow’s new book, “Wayward Women”:http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10451.html is finally out. The topic is important and Holly is smart and her previous work has been excellent. And best of all, since _Wayward Women_ will be coming out in paper, it will be SEVENTY DOLLARS LESS than “her other book”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0754643123/sr=8-3/qid=1143051987/ref=sr_1_3/002-5846516-4008032?%5Fencoding=UTF8
I love the short radio program “Earth and Sky”:http://www.earthsky.org/shows/show.php?date=20060422 for many reasons — mostly having to do with the poetic compactness of its title and byline. But now it also features one of my favorite anthropologists — Paige West — talking about gold mining! Go Paige go! One quick note however: Paige says that “When [...]
Some day I want to write a paper emphasizing the personalistic nature of kiap rule during Papua New Guinea’s colonial period, perhaps by discussing it in terms of the ‘heroic’ mode of history Sahlins discusses in Islands of History. Where were PNGians supposed to learn about bureaucratic rationality when they were governed by this sort [...]
You know, people obsessed with their pets have generated an infinite amount of websites about them, and almost none of them are actually very good. Some are, though. Like this picture of “St. Francis of Assisi and a Corgi”:http://www.mycraftshowroom.com/8×10-stfrancis/8×10-StFrancis-Corgi-Pem-new.jpg. “Obeythepurebreed.com”:http://www.obeythepurebreed.com also gets points for effort. Despite being derivative of the mighty Gapersblock web hipster aesthetic, [...]
I normally don’t go out of my way to point out Lorenz Khazaleh’s great “anthropology.info”:http://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/ website because I assume by now that everyone already knows about it and is reading it along with me. Howevever, at the start of the new year I thought I would make an exception in this case and second Oneman’s [...]
Michael Silverstein is one of the only anthropologists that I know of (if you can think of other candidates let me know) who really has a megatheory for what anthropology is and where it’s going. For those who drink the Silverstein Kool Aid the world resolves into a clarity that you forgot you once had [...]
It is one of the ironies of academic publication in the age of the internet that tracking down full citations for one’s bibliography inevitable turns up 12 bintillion more things you should have read before you wrote the damn thing in the first place. Most recently this includes a very nice looking volume entitled “Tunnel [...]
Hard to fire a gun “with flippers”:http://scotlandtoday.scottishtv.co.uk/content/default.asp?page=s1_1_1&newsid=8631.
Gail Margaret Kelly, my undergraduate adviser and the woman responsible for my choice of anthropology as a vocation, passed away yesterday. Readers of the blog might remember that my friend Thomas Strong and I recently organized a conference in honor of Profesor Kelly entitled “Fashioning Anthropology”:http://web.reed.edu/gailkelly/ in which students from across her forty year career [...]
“Trace Elements”:http://tracelements.blogspot.com/ is blogging the Guns Control Summit being held in PNG. For the first time in my ENTIRE LIFE someone is actually blogging a conference I actually want to read about! I hope he’ll keep it up. The information is valuable — he links to a report on “guns in the Southern Highlands”:http://www.smallarmssurvey.org/Special%20Reports/SR%20PNG.pdf (138 [...]
“Bill Maurer”:http://www.anthro.uci.edu/html/People/Fac%20Bios/Maurer.html (“CV”:http://www.anthro.uci.edu/html/People/Fac%20Bios/Fac%20Pubs%20PDFs/MaurerCV-July2004.pdf) has a new book out on “Muslim banking”:http://pup.princeton.edu/titles/7998.html that is well-positioned in several ways.
A quick bibliographic note on the noble savage: “The Myth of the Ecologically Noble Savage”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/102-6229466-0987309 and “Constant Battles”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0312310897/qid=1116374262/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i2_xgl14/102-6229466-0987309?v=glance&s=books&n=507846. The last one might not be NPOV. “Wild in the Woods”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0255364474/qid=1116374262/sr=8-7/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i7_xgl14/102-6229466-0987309?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 is _definitely_ POV. I mention it because it’s cool that you can by it for US$20 from Amazon or “download the PDF”:http://www.iea.org.uk/files/upld-publication46pdf?.pdf from the original scary [...]
I am pleased to announce the launch of a new website entitled “Savage Minds”:http://savageminds.org/. It’s an anthropology group blog which I am a contributor to. I’m excited because the site looks great thanks to Kerim’s hard work (and yes, those _are_ pensée sauvage on the masthead) and the entries — which now number up to [...]