Thanks for the Introduction

Hi! My name is Maia Green , a UK based anthropologist and, for the next two weeks, a temporary mind. I’d like to thank the Savage Minds team for responding so generously and so quickly to my impromptu offer to join them.

I have never blogged before, although I have often thought about it. When I first began exploring anthropology blogs a couple of years ago there did not seem to be any sites which offered the opportunity for the kind of informed engagement that Savage Minds offers today. Some sites were listlike aggregations of material thought to appeal to anthropologists; others were interesting but very general. If they made use of anthropology they used it to provide a perspective on the worlds they wrote about. They did not apply the same kind of critical reflexivity to anthropology.

My interest in blogging derives not so much from an interest in technology or the new communication possibilities of the web, although these are important. It seems to me that the blog format and blog community of ongoing interactive engagement provides a unique space in which people with an interest in anthropology can engage in debates about issues which are not only problematic for ourselves as members of a discipline, but which are rarely discussed in the public domains of our publications or on our webpages. Different propositions can be explored as moments in a web conversation or thought process than can be articulated in formal submissions to academic journals or associated correspondence.

I think we see the benefits of this new disciplinary freedom in the kinds of debates ongoing within the Savage Minds community; the concerns with issues of engagement, matters of ethics and the public role of anthropology within and outside a rapidly changing academia. As an anthropologist within a university who is also engaged in worlds outside it these are very much my concerns. I welcome the opportunity to share these concerns with others. Please bear with me while I get used to the technology of inputting. Watch this space.

Maia Green teaches anthropology at the University of Manchester. Her original fieldwork was on the impacts of Catholic Christianity in Southern Tanzania. She’s continued working in Tanzania, but now explores a wider range of institutions and processes, including health sector reform, transformations in anti-witchcraft practices and the practice and culture of international development. Her work also has an ‘applied’ dimension, since she has combined academic anthropology with work as a policy analyst and as an adviser to international development agencies.