Low points in anthropology: THE AWAKENING

In a post a “little while ago”:/2006/05/05/so-true/ we noted the dearth of good anthropological theory readers, and more “recently”:/2006/05/22/anthro-classics-online-shakespeare-in-the-bush/ Kerim has tried to make the site more accessible to students by pointing out some key texts online.
This got me thinking: could you construct a ‘history of anthropological theory’ course using ONLY articles available on the most popular digital repositories, such as JSTOR? If so, it might be possible to come up with a reader in anthropological theory that was entirely digital and widely available to students who wanted to get a foot up?

In the world of print, theory readers were very important, because they collected a wide variety of papers from all over the place and put them in one physically accessible text. But one of the great things about the digitization of library holdings is that it allows us to go ‘back to the sources’ — indeed, since many journals now have a ‘moving wall’ between us and the most recent issues of their work, it is the older stuff that is most accessible. So for instance, “all”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0803292961&id=TrY31PHYiHsC&pg=PR7&lpg=PR5&printsec=4&dq=american+anthropology+nebraska+press&sig=6z3IXhgU0-aGEkMlmbswN7wpAP0 “three”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN080328280X&id=XIFX-sSYURwC&pg=PP8&lpg=PP7&printsec=4&dq=american+anthropology+nebraska+press&sig=vKdyNLFeZ9JC_O89hvj6ja-An3Q “volumes”:http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN0803266359&id=UbQTsZnWY4AC&pg=PP9&lpg=PP7&printsec=4&dq=university+nebraska+press+anthropologist&sig=N43uownwCvD6_HDUZDaqxZLeHPE of Nebraska’s “greatest hits of American Anthropologist” series are available for all JSTOR participants and AAA members willing to track them down (although the editors’ introductions, which are some serious ‘value-added’ are not).

To this end I’d like to announce LOW POINTS IN ANTHROPOLOGY: THE AWAKENING. The goal is for us to collaboratively construct our own electronic reader(s) in anthropological theory. I think another Kerim-introduced piece of technology, the Berkman Center’s “H20 Teaching Lists”:http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu/ would be a perfect way to do this. Trying to come up with a history of anthropological theory using JUST articles is sort of an intriguing idea.

Here’s “my low points list”:http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu/88459, which I have to admit is somewhat thrown together. I’ve also created another example of how we might want to use these lists — “Low points in the work of Robert Lowie”:http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu/89249 to show another example of how we might use the site — to present ‘potted history’ articles (these were chosen by Robert Murphy, not me) of the ‘if I had to read one article by Julian Steward, what should it be?’ kind of thing. I’d be eternally grateful if someone H2O’d those three AAA ‘best of’ volumes, for instance. You could also go through anthologies of works by an author (as I have for Lowie) find which ones were available on JSTOR and then H2O them up.

The H20 beta has some kinks (hopefully if we use it enough someone will fix them) but it has a lot of cool features as well — you can copy articles from a list to your library, remix my lists, tag them, share them, and so forth. It’s sort of a meta version of CiteULike (but without the bookmarklet). I have no idea if this project will take off but H2O looks like a great (and simple) way to create a community sharing reading suggestions — all you need to do is add a ‘lowpoints’ tag to your play list so we know its part of the project.

So for all students reading this blog: skip your classes. Ignore your professors. Follow the Savage Minds reading list and you will Be Enlightened. We are number one! Everyone else is number two or lower!

Rex

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His book Leviathans at The Gold Mine has been published by Duke University Press. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org

5 thoughts on “Low points in anthropology: THE AWAKENING

  1. This is great. I’ve created a playlist for the Anthro Classics Online series. I discovered that URLs can be added in the “description” field, so I’ve linked back to the SM post there.

    Another way to do this could be to use my Wiki. That might be better in that people could edit the SAME list instead of creating new ones all the time. I’ve created a page we can use here if anyone wants to use that…

  2. Sounds like a great idea! I came across this site a week ago and bookmarked it – CiteULike – it might be useful for setting up a list of articles etc. Here is the blurb from the site:

    CiteULike is a free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there’s no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser. There’s no need to install any special software…

  3. I’m really excited about this project, having a less-than-comprehensive formal education in anthropology myself. I just spent an hour and a half figuring out the ridiculously arcane process of accessing JSTOR from off campus.

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