Ethnography.com

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. …

There is a nice article in the New York Times about the repatriation of Kenya’s Vigango funerary statues from a museum in Denver here.…

The latest hottest whine on the internet is this essay  “The End of the College Essay” in Slate.  The complaint is that students hate writing papers, and professors hate grading them.  Both statements are true perhaps, but sometimes unpleasant things are also good for you in the long run.  Things like writing papers, and grading them, perhaps?…

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote about the longing modern people have for “a leader but the right kind of leader” recently.  In describing this kind of leader, he was writing about the human longing for a someone they can follow who breaks conventions, and is able to satisfy the craving for “genuine leadership” and “moral authority,” rather than (presumably) the leadership that resorts to police violence, craven manipulation, bureaucratic smallness, and deceit. …

By Merrily McCarthy

This series discusses linguistic experience in one specific work example, The Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park in California, USA.  A National Historic Building built in 1927, The Ahwahnee, whose halls echo the sounds of many languages has for 86 years invited the voices and languages of many global cultures to gather within its stone walls.  Over the next month or so I will blog about ethnographic observations from there in a series of posts as I explore linguistic interactions in a real live working environment.…

The Journal of the Siam Society just published an article about suicide among the Mlabri of Northern Thailand by Gene and Mary Long, who are missionary linguists who have worked with the Mlabri for over thirty years, and myself.  The Mlabri (or Mla Bri) have a attracted a great deal of attention from anthropology over the last 50 years because they subsisted as hunter-gatherers on the fringes of highland societies until recently. …