August 2012 – Ethnography.com

The “Applied” Regrets of Conrad Arensberg

Posted on August 27, 2012November 4, 2014 by Michael Scroggins

At the end of his 1980 AAA presidential address, Arensberg paused to lament bequeathing the term “applied anthropology” to the Society for Applied Anthropology, which he and Eliot Chapple helped found in 1941:

“In Ireland, for peasants in their demography and their farm inheritances on the one hand, and in America for people in industries and slums and reservations on the other, the generation of the New Deal years – as my friends and I were – moved on to follow such personal involvements in the fates that overcame our subjects in formal and informal organization under institutional pressures and in political and economic trends.…

Chico Rocks, and Berkeley…

Posted on August 26, 2012 by Tony Waters

I was back on the Chico State campus last week, and the new first year students are here, parents hovering nearby as they prepare to cast them out to wilds of Chico State. The newly minted frosh are of course relishing this—they realize that Chico Rocks, and that they have finally managed to land where they are meant to be, if only they can finally ditch their parents, and seek out what the college president insists are that elusive “Chico Experience.”…

TWIE: Liverpool-Keele Ethnography Symposium

Posted on August 23, 2012November 4, 2014 by James

This week in Ethnography, the 7th Annual Symposium on Current Developments in Ethnographic Research in the Social and Management Sciences will be held in University of Liverpool Management School, Liverpool, United Kingdom. This conference is sponsored by the University of Liverpool Management School and Keele University, Institute for Public Policy and Management in association with the Journal of Organizational Ethnography.

This year’s theme: Ethnographic Horizons in Times of Turbulence

This is interesting for a few reasons. …

Immigration Trials and Tribulations

Posted on August 18, 2012August 21, 2012 by Tony Waters

I came across a review “Green Card Stories: A Visual Catalog of Immigrants Trials and Tribulations” of a new book photo book. The review is by a writer for The Atlantic, Maria Popova, and focused on the role that determination, sacrifice, and stamina play in navigating the complicated immigration in the United States. As the book (and reviewer) note, it takes grit and determination to satisfy immigration law, and many end up spending years, and hundreds (or thousands) of dollars on application fees, lawyer fees, and so forth. …

Tools and Toolchains

Posted on August 14, 2012November 4, 2014 by Michael Scroggins

In software development the phrase toolchain refers to a set of discrete tools linked in such a way that the output of one tool becomes the input for another tool. As wikipedia notes “A simple software development toolchain consists of a text editor for editing source code, a compiler and linker to transform the source code into an executable program, libraries to provide interfaces to the operating system, and a debugger.” …

This Week in Ethnography: All Tomorrow’s Cultures: Tagging Anthropology

Posted on August 13, 2012October 29, 2014 by James

This Week in Ethnography, I have thought about Public Anthropology. Samuel Gerald Collins of All Tomorrow’s Cultures posted a great piece on the subject this week entitled Tagging Anthropology. Public Anthropology is not a new subject by any means. A Google search on the subject will show over 600,000 results and limiting your search to Savage Minds will still give you more than a week’s worth of reading. In fact, this subject is so mature that the The 9th Annual Public Anthropology Conference is just around the corner (not the first or second, but the 9th!) …

The PhD as an Existential Question???

Posted on August 11, 2012November 4, 2014 by Tony Waters

To PhD or not to PhD, that is that a question for you? Well, at Ethnography.com we have years of unsolicited advice to those of wondering if all the uncertainties of grad school are for you or not.

For example those of you have lousy grades for any number of reasons, and question not your own capacity, but that of your chosen profession to give your application a second look, check out “Can Bad Grades and Graduate School Go Together?…

Culture Rears its Head in the US Presidential Campaign

Posted on August 10, 2012November 4, 2014 by Tony Waters

There is a good editorial about that classic anthropological question “What is Culture?” in the New York Times today by Ta-Nehisi Coates. This is salient because presidential candidate Mitt Romney recently made assertions about the nature of culture and its relationships to economic activity while he was in Israel recently. His statements, made in the heat of a political campaign, have meant that the Culture Question will at least briefly (and probably ephemerally) push itself again into the national consciousness. …

The Internet Archive

Posted on August 9, 2012November 4, 2014 by Michael Scroggins

As of this morning, The Internet Archive is now offering content via the BitTorrent P2P networking protocol: Internet Archive Torrents

There is a nice (if unorganized) collection of early anthropology among the 1.2 million books in the archive. As you might expect, there is a large assortment of early journals and classic works. But, there is also a surprising amount of grey literature: lectures, occasional papers, and so forth.

Michael Scroggins

…

This Week in Ethnography: Writing Live Fieldnotes With Social Media: Towards a More Open Ethnography | Ethnography Matters

Posted on August 6, 2012 by James

This Week in Ethnography, the big news was Mitt Romney “using” the word culture but that news is already very well described by Jason Antrosio.

So I found another hidden gem that came out this week: a great post on “Writing Live Fieldnotes“. It describes a technique that could solve a challenge I am facing in a research project where I will be tracking the behavior of a group of high school students.…

Anthropological Field Research in the Internet Age

Posted on August 5, 2012November 4, 2014 by Tony Waters

Another classic question in the age of the internet: How do indigenous peoples feel about anthropology graduate students doing fieldwork? Mark Dawson first reported his research about this subject in a classic post here at Ethnography.com on April 1, 2007.

Tony Waters

Tony Waters is czar and editor of Ethnography.com. He came to us from the Sociology department at California State University at Chico where he has been a professor since 1996.

…

The Ecological Annum

Posted on August 3, 2012November 4, 2014 by Michael Scroggins

I have to admit I laughed at the phrase “ecological annum” when James used it as a foil for his post on the duration of fieldwork. The phrase (real or invented) dates from a period when anthropologists primarily studied agriculturists and hunter-gatherers with long trips to the field and little concern for budgets. At first glance it is exactly the kind of old fashioned advice that seems at odds with the realities of conducting fieldwork in the early 21st century.…