A helpful report on the state of the art on the doctorate from the Carnegie foundation. The book is available from Josey Bass but “the condensed version”:http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/dynamic/publications/elibrary_pdf_678.pdf is available as well.
Here are some links about the First Contact trilogy that I may use later on this semester: “An obituary of Robin Anderson”:http://www.aftrs.edu.au/index.cfm?objectid=D2EB0A32-D0B7-4CD6-F92A1DC2894B1500 “Degrees of Otherness: A Close Reading of First Contact”:http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/var.1994.10.2.55?journalCode=var — from Visual Anthropology Review
I’ve never had a very high opinion of James Watson as a person, but “the current stir about his racist remarks”:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071018/ap_on_re_eu/britain_controversial_scientist crosses the line from merely stupid to down-right teacheable.
I trust “Robert Ulin”:http://www.wmich.edu/anthropology/ulin.html to write good books, and I’m sure “Vintages and Traditions”:http://www.amazon.com/VINTAGES-TRADITIONS-Smithsonian-Ethnographic-Inquiry/dp/156098628X/ref=sr_1_3/105-4927962-4957223?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190419803&sr=1-3 is a good one. I figure if you are going to study ‘the invention of tradition’ grand crus would be the way to go. I’ll teach it someday…
In like two years I am for sure going to teach the first chapter from this book. But I might forget about it before then so here is a link now to it — about how to do fieldwork in France about witchcraft: “Deadly Words”:http://www.amazon.com/Deadly-Words-Witchcraft-Bocage-Msh/dp/0521297877/ref=sr_1_1/103-6905344-2487020?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1187812455&sr=8-1
I always encourage my students (and myself) to write well — beautifully, clearly, and intelligbly. So when I picked up _Dark Light_ by Linda Simon I thought to myself: “that we should all write this well.” Check out the first paragraph of her book: This book is about a particular historical moment: the advent of [...]
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 [...]
Inside Higher Ed is running a “piece on a new study about ratemyprofessor.com”:http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/06/05/rmp. If you want to skip directly to the two papers that they’ve sited, I’ve added some quick links here: “Attractiveness, Easiness, and Other Issues: Student Evaluations of Professors on RateMyProfessors.com”:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=918283 by Felton et. al. “Ratemyprofessor.com versus formal in-class student evaluations of teaching”:http://pareonline.net/pdf/v12n6.pdf [...]
Every so often anthropologists are asked questions about historical linguistics — typically something like “The words X, Y, and Z in these two languages are spoken in different areas of world — proof of alien colonization, perhaps?!?!?” The answer is: of course not — the Mayan sysadmins who first seeded our green world of clocks [...]
It’s made its way around the Internet for some time now, but Kathleen’s recent invocation of “Terry Eagleton’s scathing review of Richard Dawkins’s book”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html finally got me to sit through the whole thing and I must admit it is a fascinating document. As a point of academic bloodspot it is superb, of course, and the [...]
“Yup, They’re Gay”:http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1582336,00.html
3 Quarks Daily has a reasonably long piece on Pinker’s “The Blank Slate”:http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2007/01/a_case_of_the_m_2.html — a book that I am teaching right now in class. Note to self note to self note to self.
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 [...]
Here is a recent, teachable article. Evolutionary psychology as a discipline is bad enough, but reportage of ev psych reports tend to make matters even worse. The head line is “For two thousand years men have written about ladies with small waists”:http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=8516458. “This is not proof,” the article cautions — but don’t worry, it does [...]
IHE is running a cartoon that I will certainly use the next time I assign an essay topic to my students: “While writing your essays, I encourage you to think for yourselves while you express what I’d most agree with”:http://insidehighered.com/var/ihe/storage/images/media/news_images/cartoons/when_writing_essays/1466096-1-eng-US/when_writing_essays.png. It’s a great object lesson of a message I _don’t_ want my students to get [...]
More on unpacking this image when I have time, but I thought I’d dock it here: “Science: It works, bitches”:http://xkcd.com/c54.html
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.