Ethnography.com – Page 24 – ~ a group blog on a variety of topics related to anthropology, sociology, and ordinary people ~

Ethnography.com Reset, 2.0! Welcome Julie Garza-Withers

Posted on October 27, 2014 by Tony Waters

As promised last month, Ethnography.com is having a reset. Not only will we post more, we will have more people doing it. Most importantly, we will have Julie Garza-Withers posting and editing to her heart’s content.

As you can see from her biography (already posted), Julie comes to us via working class rural southern California. She somehow avoided the career track at Del Taco (a California fast-food joint), or a full career waitressing at a diner, before landing in Barnes and Noble in Chico, California, where she developed further her affinity for books.…

Fatuous, Naïve, or Bold? The Wonderful World of Peer Review

Posted on October 7, 2014October 29, 2014 by Tony Waters

Fair warning from an anonymous peer reviewer of one of my academic articles…

The author is hampered by an inaccurate, naïve, and highly simplistic understanding of the basic principles…which leads him to make ludicrous statements like the following…

Yes, that’s me: inaccurate, naïve, and highly simplistic! And so forth. If you share that sentiment, do not read further.

I posted a blog about peer review for the first time in July 2008 after being pummeled in the peer review process.…

Ethnography.com Reset!

Posted on September 30, 2014 by Tony Waters

Ok, my book mss Is off to the publisher, academic article on the “forthcoming” list, summer travels done, and new class launched. In other words, no more excuses for ignoring Ethnography.com! So here are some of the plans.

–I’m going to go more aggressively after the field of anthropology. I became involved with Ethnography.com in the first place by whining how anthropology had abandoned the subject of culture back in 2007 or so.…

Nicholas Wade, Jared Diamond and Anthropology

Posted on May 7, 2014October 29, 2014 by Tony Waters

Ok, Anthropology, one day after my post on Nicholas Wade, and that post gets more hits than the last five or six posts here put together. I get it, you like Nicholas Wade, and especially complaining about him. You don’t like biological reductionism, and think that such studies are used to reinforce racist ideologies. For what it is worth, I more or less agree.

But for some reason you don’t want to read stuff that critiques biological reductionism on its own terms, and opt for those presented by the anthropology’s favorite bogeymen, which from recent activity in the blogosphere seem to include Nicholas Wade, Jared Diamond, and Razib Khan.…

Nicholas Wade Writes Again—And Again Anthropology Pays Attention

Posted on May 6, 2014May 6, 2014 by Tony Waters

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. …

Mirror Neurons and the Looking Glass Self: The Neural Sciences meet Sociology

Posted on April 30, 2014May 25, 2014 by Tony Waters

Why do neural scientists need expensive MRI machines to “see” what classical sociologists Charles Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead saw by simply looking into the eyes of children? This is the subject of my recent article “Of Mirror Neurons and the Looking Glass Self” published in Perspectives on Science.

The Mirror Neuron is a hot thing today in the neural sciences. The Mirror Neuron hypothesis postulates that a person watching another person do something, imagines that the other person is doing. …

To Disrupt or Preserve The University

Posted on March 29, 2014November 4, 2014 by Michael Scroggins

Lately there has been a lot of heat around the idea of disrupting higher education. In fact, the search phrase “disrupting higher education” currently yields almost 2 million results via Google.

Like everything else disrupted in the recent past, the impetus here is the application of digital technology to a new domain in order to lower costs and increase efficiency. This HASTAC article has a nice breakdown of the current state of play in higher education.…

Call For Papers: AAA 2014

Posted on March 15, 2014November 4, 2014 by Michael Scroggins

CFP AAA 2014: Producing Anthropology, Producing Science: Citizen Science and Emerging Problematics

Many of the challenges facing anthropology today have their parallels in the emerging citizen science sphere. Anthropologists have long conceptualized, and re-conceptualized, the permeable boundaries of knowledge production, but new challenges emergent within citizen science mark a changing landscape where new forms of knowledge production and dissemination are reworking scientific boundaries long considered stable. Professional scientists are addressing new audiences in new contexts, including in new economies of knowledge production, moving beyond binary distinctions between internal and external discourses, and engaging new modes (open access) and media (online scholarly publishing, blogging, and micro-blogging) to disseminate knowledge.…

Professors Need to Write Clearly, but Columnists also Need to Read Carefully

Posted on February 15, 2014October 29, 2014 by Tony Waters

Nicholas Kristof has written an op-ed “Professors we need you,” in the New York Times. His point is that that professors like me need to write and express ourselves more clearly so all our presumed smartness is accessible to people like Kristof. Partly I agree. But partly I don’t. I also think that people like Kristof and the policy-makers he advocates for need to read more carefully.

This is a sore point with me, especially since I was lectured a couple of times by policy-making types about writing in op-ed length of about 750 words chunks—that is the sort of thing that Kristof is really good at writing.…

Happy #anthrovalentineS Day

Posted on February 14, 2014November 4, 2014 by Michael Scroggins

I will leave it to the historians of wikipedia to sort out the history of Valentine’s Day. And I will leave the critique to the Huffington Post .

Today I want to publicly thank @DonnaLanclos , an anthropologist who works in a library, for storifying the results of the twitter hashtag #anthrovalentines .

My favorite tweet, and a savvy nod to the intersection of public and private interest in fieldwork, is this one:

@EthnoGraffiti I would do anything for love, but I won’t do multi-sited ethnography #anthrovalentines

And thank you everyone who contributed to the hashtag.…

In praise of Stephen Jay Gould and The Mismeasure of Man

Posted on February 12, 2014October 29, 2014 by Tony Waters

Last March, Michael Scroggins posted about “Gene Promoters: On Chagnon and Diamond,” pointing out that the connection between race, genetics, and social deterimination was rearing its head again. He was writing in response to a blog in Discovery Magazine by Razib Khan “Against the Cultural Anthropologists” in which Khan wished that cultural anthropology could be voted off the academic island.

The result was a spirited back and forth between supporters of Razib, and Michael over the month or so in which by and large I took the side of Michael. …

Human Terrain System, Again

Posted on February 5, 2014October 29, 2014 by Tony Waters

The Human Terrain System is under critique again, and this time not from the AAA, but from a pro-military Congressman who finds that the program was rife with waste, fraud, and abuse. As the Army Times reports, Congressman Duncan Hunter reports “It’s shocking that this program, with its controversy and highly questionable need, could be extended.” Apparently Human Terrain contractors burned through $726 million in the name of providing actionable social science to the military.…