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 or so while The Melanesian is much more recent and (in its two posts so far) has been the place where debates about the Frieda mine have spilled out of The National and onto the Internet, which is great. So check it/them out.
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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/.
“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.
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 you have a mine, you have to have a road. And when you build a road into a roadless area, lots of people come in . . . then you’re going to have disease that comes in . . . people are going to have access to alcohol, to guns, to all sorts of things.” This is not actually true, technically — if I remember correctly, the Tolukuma mine has no road going into it and all supplies are flown in and out. I know little about the prospect that Paige mentions, but given its likely size and location it’s not inconceivable that this would work for Maimafu. Of course not having a road hasn’t really spared Tolukuma from having guns and people coming in — but it certainly has blunted what could have otherwise been quite a nasty impact. Of course the flip side of delivering all of your supplies via helicopter means things like accidentally spilling cyanide over bits of Gulf Province. So I guess you win some and you loose some.
Paige works on environmentalish related stuff in PNG, so maybe this is also a good post to mention “Forest Trend’s”:http://www.forest-trends.org new report on “logging in PNG”:http://www.forest-trends.org/documents/publications/PNG2006/png.php which actually got PNG a nod on “CNN”:http://www.cnn.com/2006/BUSINESS/02/27/png.logging/.
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 “reccomendation”:http://savageminds.org/2006/01/06/the-year-in-review/ of Lorenz’s “year in anthropology roundup”:http://antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/index.php?p=1587&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1. It’s not only a great over view of what happened, but it’s also a reminder of all of the amazing thing that happened in the anthropological noosphere. It’s just crazy, daisy.
Although Lorenz intended the post to make the point that “2005 can be characterized as the year anthropology finally became visible on the internet” I hope he decides to make it an annual feture of his blog, that we will read more of them for many years to come, and that all of them are full of as many signs of collaboration and community as this current one.
Now: when are we going to get around to the year characterized by a sudden and uncontrollable growth of interest in gradcore Jedi fan fiction?
“John Norvell”:http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~norvell/ has thrown his hat into the ring with “anthroblogs.org”:http://www.anthroblogs.org/, an MT install with a few blogs on them, including “his own”:http://www.anthroblogs.org/norvell/ and a “group blog”:http://www.anthroblogs.org/anthroblogblog of which he seems so far to be the only contributor. There is also a “wiki”:http://www.anthrowiki.org/ on anthropology which at the moment is more or less empty. This last project, like the wiki over at “anthropology.net”:http://anthropology.net/ seems to me like it may end up languishing. His “list of academics who blog”:http://www.anthrowiki.org/wiki/index.php?title=Blogging_in_Academia doesn’t seem to include any other anthropologists, which makes me feel like chopped liver or maybe John’s just a little newer to the game than most. It also doesn’t include the two dozen or so academics who I read regularly. I mean — maybe Juan Cole or Crooked Timber should be on that list? But I suppose no one has a right to complain about a wiki when they haven’t taken the time to edit it. I must say, though, that the idea that the best way to locate content on the internet is by composing one super huge static (albeit world-writeable) list of academics who blog is really _very_ 1997, even if you host the list on the Latest Hippest Knoweldge Platform. A list of academics who blog? It would have literally thousands of entries! That’s why god made Web 2.0, dude.
At any rate, the blogs on the site seem to have a fair amount of excitement going forward and I’m looking forward to seeing how they develop. The site has the affiliation with one of anthropology’s hottest brand at the moment, Rob Borofsky’s “Public Anthropology”:http://www.publicanthropology.org/ series (the other, as far as I can tell, being Princeton’s “in-formation”:http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/catalogs/series/if.html series), and his blog looks genuinely good, so I’m hoping he’ll become a member of the (polite cough) already existing anthropology noosphere which has (polite cough) already written a lot about anthropology on that “other, larger wiki”:http://en.wikipedia.org/ (disclosure: Rob is the senior member of my department).
So John — welcome aboard! I look froward to reading more of your blog!