~ a group blog on a variety of topics related to anthropology, sociology, and ordinary people ~
This week in Ethnography, Heather E. Young-Leslie, Ph.D. describes how best to teach ethnography in the post entitled Sand in My Syllabus; Teaching Anthropology ‘Way Off Campus.
The anthropologist professor is not replaceable, not redundant. But the style of teaching anthropology that we have had since WWII… well, that is replaceable.
I start with the above quotation from the conclusion to give you a taste of the power of this piece. …
Three things on this holiday week:
1) In Slate there was a wonderful photo essay on sworn virgins in the Balkans. Also, here is a BBC interview with Antonia Young, the author of Women Who Become Men.
2) What would a holiday week be without a minor donnybrook over race and genes? This week brings us a useful discussion at the NYRB between Richard C. Lewontin and Nadia Abu El-Haj on the topic “Is There a Jewish Gene?”…
As frequent readers of Ethnography.com (if there is such a thing) know, our esteemed founder Mark Dawson has disappeared from these pages after last posting on April 1, 2012. Amazingly, he has even disappeared from the internet. But as exclusively reported , AAA has hired him, and he is on a top-secret mission to save anthropology from the Mayan Apocalypse which is scheduled for–tomorrow, December 21, 2012.
As interim editor of ethnography.com,…
Can getting a master’s degree help your career outlook? Or is it more of a drain on your mental outlook? These are the questions education analyst Bree Hernandez explores in the next article.
Today’s university students have more to balance than ever before, and Bree’s blog profiles many of the competing pulls. Still, the mental health and psychological well-being of students is not often addressed in enough detail. Bree’s piece seeks to spark discussion on this important topic.…
What is the relationships between the subsistence farmers and the bureaucrats of the World Bank, USAID, DFID, JICA, and the host of government-sponsored development aid projects? Such projects are sponsored by clever, well-educated, powerful, and wealthy people. And yet they often fail—and the clever powerful people turn around and blame the subsistence farmer.
But I do not think that this is the whole story. The broader question is how do the impoverished farmers manage to frustrate the smart rich people who have degrees so consistently? …
I think that there is a difference between the nature of policing and the military rooted in the nature of legitimacy and emotions, specifically the emotion of fear.
But does the US government in fighting in Afghanistan really understand this too? See the discussion at CurrentIntelligence.net, where I posted “Differentiating Between Police and Military Action.” Find out what terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, the DC sniper, and the Unabomber all have in common.…
Ever worry about how those Cs you had as a sophomore would look on a grad school application? Or maybe a D?
Worried because every grad school says “we only take the best,” or some such nonsense (look, no one can take the “best,” even if there is such a thing).
Ever wonder how long those bad grades can follow you through an otherwise fascinating and enriching career in “the real world.” …
A guy sets alone out here at night, maybe readin’ books or thinkin’ or stuff like that. Sometimes he gets thinkin’, an’ he got nothing to tell him what’s so an’ what ain’t so. Maybe if he sees somethin’, he don’t know whether it’s right or not. He can’t turn to some other guy and ast him if he sees it too. He can’t tell. He got nothing to measure by – Of Mice and Men
Last month a drama unfolded within the span of 24 hours as the Minnesota Legislature moved first to ban, then to allow the website Coursera to operate, within its state limits.…
Jill Koyama from Educational Anthropolicy, a website created by Jill P. Koyama of SUNY Buffalo. Like many anthropologists, she is pushing into educational issues here in the United States, and around the world. She is a sociocultural anthropologist committed to providing a public platform in which anthropologists, educators, and students can engage.…
In yet another case of the university library exploring the digital landscape, The University of Iowa Library has launched what is, to my limited knowledge, the first attempt to use crowdsourcing in their cataloging efforts. As explained on their website:
…About the project
DIY History lets you do it yourself to help make historic artifacts easier to use. Our digital library holds hundreds of thousands of items — much more than library staff could ever catalog alone, so we’re appealing to the public to help out by attaching text in the form of transcriptions, tags, and comments.
Yet another installment of news stories and blog posts which accidentally have an anthropological angle. The loose theme for today is the café; in both literal and metaphoric form. Three things. First, the trend of freelance work has led to an elaboration of the office romance: the coffice romance Second, a wonderful photo tour of café interiors in Seoul. Finally, in Egypt a startup scene is blooming.…
It is a commonplace to direct someone interested in computer programming to one of the wondrous websites devoted to learning to code or, even better, directly to the source code for a favorite program. In that spirit, I will take you on a brief tour of my favorite anthropological resources on the interwebs. I make no promise that what follows is in anyway a comprehensive or objective view, only that I have found these things useful.…