~ a group blog on a variety of topics related to anthropology, sociology, and ordinary people ~
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.…
For me, the short answer to this question is obviously, yes. We want EVERYONE to know and love the concept that we consider to be our finest intellectual creation, the lynchpin of our diverse discipline. And yet, could it be the case that we have shared ourselves out of jobs, or worse yet, allowed our baby to be turned into the “working girl” of the social sciences? This is the undercurrent of Tony Waters’ opinion piece from the December 2006 issue of the AAA Newsletter entitled, “Who Stole Culture From Anthropology?”…
Growing up, my father felt it was important for my brother and me to know about our roots as dirt farmers and coal miners. My mother and father were raised in the coal mining regions on the tri-state border of Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia. It was a cultural conflict for them. On the one hand, they wanted us to learn about our Appalachian heritage, on the other they never wanted us to emulate or be around people that lacked in education or standing to a certain degree.…
Most everyone in the anthropological community is familiar with the controversial human skeletal find known as Kennewick Man. Discovered in 1996 by some hikers on the Columbia River, Washington, Kennewick Man was initially identified as a 19th century Euro-American settler, but closer inspection revealed a projectile point embedded in his pelvis that was common about 9,000 years ago, a date that radiocarbon dating later confirmed. In short, Kennwick Man sparked an epic controversy around two primary topics: 1) who should have legal stewardship of the remains; and 2) what was “Kenne’s” race.…
Ethnography.com Welcomes a new anthropology blogger, Cynthia Van Gilder to the ranks. Cindy is the chair of the anthropology department at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California. Check out her first post, “Kennewick Man Sighted Buying Groceries in Virginia.”
Welcome!…
Yes I have indeed mentioned it before. I like it so much because he starts at a place that anthropologists are trained to not go: the sheer love of the unexpected. We are trained to avoid being Indiana Jones, we are not just globe-trotting dilettantes, we are scientists! Well, that really takes the fun out of it doesn’t it? Boursain makes no claim to be anything more than a chef and writer that really digs food, people and instructional misadventures.…
Making recommendations to clients about what to do next is an important part of the job of the team the anthropologist is working in. In addition to understanding people, anthropologists need to understand markets. What’s up, what’s down, it’s hard to really take part in ideation if you don’t know what is already in the market.
Retail audits or retail surveys are a great way to quickly learn about market place trends.…
Jono is a former colleague of mine at Jump Associates. In a recent e-mail to me I noticed a blog link I had not seen before. The first thing I saw was a nice little post called “Recording ethnographic observations: Five useful frameworks”. It compares different ways people use to chunk out the things they learned in the field, such as activities, environments, artifacts, etc . They are ways to start organizing the chaos of data.…
I found this great link in a Slashdot post that points to a Stanford class on design taught by Michael Shanks. It is by two students, William Choi and Antoine Sindhu, on the design, psychology, economics and social impact of the slot machine.