~ a group blog on a variety of topics related to anthropology, sociology, and ordinary people ~
We are just chock full of new bloggers this week. The latest addition to the ranks is Donna Lanclos. Donna currently lives in North Carolina. While she is a cultural anthropologist and folklorist by graduate training, she claims to be part archaeologist by marriage. She is the author of the book At Play in Belfast: Children’s Folklore and Identities in Northern Ireland (2003 Rutgers University Press).
Check out her first post The Sentimental Anthropologist.…
For my first post, I thought I’d present something I wrote quite a while ago, but still feels like a very current take on my feelings about anthropology. It was originally written (and delivered) as a commencement speech, in the spring of 2000:
I did my fieldwork in Northern Ireland, and I worked mostly with primary school kids. These were working-class kids, who lived in the neighborhoods hardest hit by the violence and poverty engendered by and at least partly responsible for the Troubles, the Protestant/Catholic divide. …
Tony Waters has just uploaded his first blog post to Ethnography.com, “Is There A Point To Learning Another Language?” Check it out. Tony comes to us from the Sociology department at California State University at Chico where he is a professor, though he is currently teaching in Germany. His books include: Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan (2001), The Persistence of Subsistence Agriculture: Life Beneath of the Marketplace (2007), When Killing is a Crime (2007)
Welcome Tony!…
I am teaching at a German University which trains people to work internationally. This means that classes are held in both German and English, students do internships abroad, and all students are assumed to be fluent in both English and German. Last night, one of the students who did an internship in the UK last summer, indicated that she had heard a British manager indicate that it was not necessary for English speakers to learn a second language, as everyone else is learning English.…
People that have known me for a long time know that I often use circus skills as a metaphor for life and business. When I was learning how to rope walk, my instructor at the time was fond of quoting his instructor (imitating his indeterminate accent) that would always yell at him: “Never jump off the rope! The rope is life!” What he was referring to is a bad and dangerous habit that young rope walkers can develop.…
An old performing friend of mine, Steve Russell will be making his New York City Opera debut at
I think I have mentioned before how much I enjoy the pseudo- science claptrap on Discovery, The Learning Channel and Animal “If its alive, it wants to kill you” Planet. Hell, I WANT to be one of the talking heads spouting the claptrap. Casting Agents can contact me via this website. There are a number of programs that I really enjoy: Mythbusters, Dirty Jobs, and um…. okay, its a small number.…
Yesterday morning my four year old daughter begged me to watch a tv program she had seen advertised earlier this week on Nickelodeon, entitled, Tak and the Power of Juju. For better or for worse, I was popular culture savvy enough to know that the characters and setting of this cartoon are based on a popular set of video games.
Here is my understanding of the show, cobbled together from my one episode and a little reading on their website: Tak (voiced by Hal Sparks of Talk Soup fame) is a teenager of indeterminate age who lives as part of the Pupununu tribe in a jungle setting including at least one volcano (“lava rock” was referred to multiple times in the episode I saw).…
Back in the mid or late 80’s, I remember reading articles asking how PC’s could break the age barrier. At the time there was increasing uptake among a certain part of 20 to 25 year olds and then after that segment, purchasing trends fell off like a cliff. Then a few years later, the marketers and industry analysts were thrilled to note that PC’s had cracked the age gap and more 30 to 35 year olds were buying PC’s!…
Not only am I not arguing what you say I am, I’m arguing some of the things you say I’m not.
Your title, “circling the wagons,” implies the exact opposite of what I was suggesting. This metaphor suggests insularity and defensiveness, at best. In fact, my essay could easily be interpreted as a call to anthropologists to come out of the closet and start insisting on their relevance not only to the academy, but to the world.…
Tony Waters of CSU Chico has kindly posted a response to “Circling the Wagons is not the solution.” Thanks for adding to the conversation Tony!
Mark, Mark, Mark! I think you miss Cindy’s point which is that culture [editor note: Cindy thinks this is a typo and Tony means Anthropology has a special role and made me add this… shes mean to me.] has a special role as the parent of culture.…
About 10 months ago I joined www.kiva.org for my first experiment with a micro-loan. If you have not encountered this yet, micro-loans are a growing industry in developing nations all over the world. The idea is quite simple, these are very small loans many less than a few hundred dollars to help someone start or expand a business. They have a remarkably low default rate and 100% of your loan goes to the person in question.…