Category: General Anthropology

Rex over at Savage Minds has another editorial about the need for Open Access in academic publishing. This is a movement across academic landscape, in which publishers are asking how they can produce well-edited articles which maintain a legitimacy within academia. As Kerim points out, the standard responses of the conservative old-time academic journals is, well, conservative. Meaning, that they do not want to take the financial risks associated with moving on-line.…

The New York Times this morning had a nice story “How Not to Drown in Numbers” about big and small data written by social scientists who’ve worked for Google and Facebook, respectively. The article is good news for both qualitative and quantitative social scientists, and all of us in-between. Numbers are indeed important, but they are not everything. Interpreting data is still about the capacity to reason and interpret data—it is just that there is a lot more of it out there than before the internet age.…

(Adapted from Tony Waters, When Killing is a Crime, Lynne Rienner Publishers 2007).

By Essau Magugudi in Kigoma
NOVEMBER 27, 1997, is deeply etched in the memories of Shunga villagers. It was on this day that they took law into their own hands and hacked to death three bandits who they suspected of carrying out acts of robbery in villages surrounding refugee settlements of Mutabira and Muyovozi.
Such retribution was unprecedented…”

I found the above article story while cruising the internet in1999, after typing in the keyword “Shunga” on a lark.…

(Extract from When Killing is a Crime by Tony Waters (2007).  Lynne Rienner Publisher).

The Hatfield and McCoy feud is legendary in the United States, having become the subject of film and television drama. However, the events do have a root in a real feud, which took place across the Tug River, which forms the boundary between West Virginia and Kentucky in the latter half of the 19^th century. The origins of the feud are vague.…

By Guest Writer: Eric Chisler

I just got the most profound sense of grief upon reading this. I’m tearful and shaken. I think I just realized the moment that I stopped living in my body, the moment I became convinced that I was defined by what goes on in my head.

I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was 7 or 8 years old. The same year I went to Chuck-E-Cheese’s for my birthday party and then my first trip to Disneyland the following summer, I was taking 20mg of Ritalin.…

(Extract from When Killing is a Crime (2007) by Tony Waters.  Lynne Rienner Publishers)

During the early 20^th century, the small Balkan country of Albania was a remote corner of the Ottoman Empire, a principality ruled by a warlord king after World War I, and occupied by Italy during World War II. For most of the century it was a reclusive Stalinist state sealed off from the rest of the world, and ruled by one of the most severe, controlling, and totalitarian governments.…