Ethnography.com

I like pitchmen, well the good ones and Billy Mays was that.  He was one of the best known pitchmen of the last decade.

You have to understand, for nearly I decade I performed in the streets, festivals and fairs in the U.S. and Canada, and encountered the pitchmen, talkers, hawkers and shills of all manner.  Billy was the logical evolution.  Were the things he pitched sometimes crap? Of course.  Caveat Emptor has been the motto of all performers, not just the pitchman, since people started to barter. …

As many of you know from earlier posts,  I am the mother of a 15 year old.  Although I have certainly been aware of the need for constant email, phone, and camera usage everywhere she and her friends congregate, it came to me this spring that although she embraces this practice enthusiastically, it seems to place an unnatural burden on her I am only too glad I did not have in my teenage years.…

The American Anthropological Association is expanding its resources, services, and professional networks to anthropologists practicing outside academia. A key step toward achieving this goal is to conduct a survey aimed at understanding the careers of MA anthropologists.

Each year there are at least 1,000 anthropology Masters degrees granted in North America . Based on anecdotal information, we know that many MAs pursue careers at the types of companies associated with AnthroDesign(editors note, this is a yahoo newsgroup).…

On Tuesday, May 26th, the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8, a voter initiative that declared that marriage could only exist between a man and a woman.  Subsequent media reports were quick to point out that unions between same-sex couples would still be recognized, and that essentially this ruling “merely” stripped gay spouses of the word marriage.

However, since from June 2008 until November 2008 same-sex marriages were legal in the state of California, the approximately 18,000 gay and lesbian couples who got married during that window of time are still married. …