The Anthropology blogosphere (including Ethnography.com, SavageMinds.org, anthropologyreport.com and even National Public Radio) has recently lit up with critiques of Jared Diamond’s new book The World Until Yesterday. Jared Diamonditis seems to be a regular affliction of anthropology, re-emerging every time that the esteemed Professor of Geography (and Physiology) publishes a new tome of big picture history. The manner that Diamond does this is something that anthros really don’t seem to like. …
Search Results for: Nigel Barley
Something about Homecomings and The Innocent Anthropologist by Nigel Barley
One of my favorite anthropology books is The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut by Nigel Barley. It is a memorably written story of Barley’s experience doing fieldwork in rural Cameroon. The strength of the book is that it includes the personal problems that emerge out of the frustrations, boredom, tribulations, and mis-interpretations that emerge in the context of “doing ethnography.” In this sense it is much different than the dispassionate, theoretical, and scientific ethnography typically assigned undergraduates in which the ethnographer somehow always ends up being always erudite, and insightful. …
Life as an Insect Inside a Glass Jar: Language Learning Through Immersion
Life as an Insect Inside a Glass Jar:
Language Learning Through Immersion
(Sic Semper, Malinowski and the Tropical Beach…)
What does it feel like to live as an insect inside a glass jar? The praying mantis was removed from its environment suddenly, and plopped into a clean, bright glass vessel, along with other things that resembled its original home– a few sticks, pebbles, and an ant to nibble on. I think people who struggle to learn a language through immersion in a very different culture know best what it might feel like to be the praying mantis you captured when you were a child, or to become that child again.…
Ethnography.com is reborn for 2019!
Well, it looks like Ethnography.com is going through a third or fourth re-design! Christina Quigley is taking over the web-master duties and getting the blog ready for 2019! This comes after a 1-2 year hiatus when little new content was posted. This will hopefully change, as both Christina and I begin to post ethnographic observations from around the world. In Christina’s case, this will be some combination of Chico, California, and Tanzania. …
Ethnography as a Contact Sport: the Mla Bri and the Long Family of Phrae, Thailand
Ethnographers and a Lack of Common Sense
How many ethnographers are crazy? This question came up for me in a Facebook post recently by Gene Long, a missionary/linguist/ethnographer who has lived with the Mla Bri (Yellow Leaf) hunter-gatherers of Thailand since 1981. In other words, he and his wife Mary Long have 34 years of participant observation data about people who have the rare habit of hunting and gathering for subsistence—an anthropological rarity.…
Nicholas Wade Writes Again—And Again Anthropology Pays Attention
Nicholas Wade has a new book out, and the Anthropologists are sharpening their indignation—complaining because he treads on their private territory. Sorry, anthro, you are not medicine or law, and do not have a monopoly over who practices what you preach. Let it go. Sometimes I think that the entire discipline is beset by a big-time inferiority complex
The solution? Simply do good anthropology, and more importantly, promote good anthropology. …
Anthropologists as Academic Cannibals: Grad Students for Breakfast, and Academic Grandparents for Dinner?
Anthropology is going through yet another bout of self-flagellation as Marshall Sahlins, Napoleon Chagnon, and others refight battles going back to the 1970s, gleefully aided and abetted by the New York Times.
This follows quickly on the heels of an attempt to kick Jared Diamond off of the anthropological island he never was on, and stretching back another, oh perhaps 3 or 4 weeks, savage minds.org took a run at banishing James Scott for his book about the highlands of Southeast Asia.…
Here’s Why Jared Diamond is Irrelevant to Anthropology
As I discussed in a previous post, the blogosphere is atwitter (pun intended) about Jared Diamond’s new book The World before Yesterday. It seems his press agent got him some good publicity on NPR and National Geographic, both outlets which Anthropology PhDs apparently pay attention to. And guess what: Anthropologists don’t like The World Before Yesterday; check out the comment streams at SavageMinds.Org, anthropologyreport.com, or any number of other anthropology blogs. …
About Ethnography.com
Mission Statement of Ethnography.com
We seek to change the way the world thinks about the Social Sciences in general, and Ethnography in particular.
We believe that telling good stories as social commentary is at the heart of what social science should do. We also think that social sciences don’t always do this, which is why we need this blog.
Good stories mean that what is posted here will be accessible to ordinary people, not just those with a PhD. …