For some reason I’ve chosen to put my work on ResearchGate rather than Academia.edu… I’m afraid I don’t have the energy to put everything I write on both sites. But to update you on what I’ve been up to, if you head over there you’ll see I’ve recently uploaded (or linked to) full-texts of the following pieces:
Book Reviews
- 2018a. Review of Laura Nader, Contrarian Anthropology: The Unwritten Rules of Academia. Anthropological Forum https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00664677.2019.1569803
- 2018b. Review of Ian Brown. The School of Oriental and African Studies: Imperial Training and the Expansion of Learning. 346 pp., 27 b/w illus., bibl., index. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. http://histanthro.org/reviews/the-school-of-oriental-and-african-studies/
Journal Articles
- 2018a. Welcoming the New Amateurs: A Future (and Past) for Non-Academic Anthropologists. Commoning Anthropology 1(1):32-44. https://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/ce/article/view/5204
- 2018b. Introduction: The Politics of Order in Contemporary Papua New Guinea. Anthropological Forum 28(4):331-341. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00664677.2018.1545108
In particular I want to showcase my article “Welcoming The New Amateurs”, at the new #openaccess journal Commoning Ethnography. It’s a short piece, but it summarises a lot of my thoughts about the history of our discipline, decolonizing anthropology and how we can use the past, which is always messy and multi stranded, to construct new and useful genealogies for ourselves. My argument is that the history of anthropology in the 1930s in both New Zealand and the United States provides a better model for the more inclusive, less tenure-tracked future of our discipline than the Cold War era does. We need to be aware that a lot of the the things we think of a typical of an academic discipline — tenured positions, research funding, exclusion of amateurs, rigid genre standards, etc. etc. — were part of one phase of our discipline’s history, not a necessary and essential part of our discipline. I don’t think the piece is perfect, but I do hope you’ll give it a read since I worked really hard on it.
The second journal article is an introduction to a special issue on politics in Papua New Guinea. I will (hopefully) blog more about this soon. But if you are interested in this topic, I encourage you to read not just my piece, but the work of authors of this special issue. You can read an open access version of the entire issue at Anthropological Forum’s great website. They do a great job making their content available despite (*cough*) who their publisher is….
Thanks for reading this and, who knows, maybe some of my published work as well!
Alex Golub 