It has been a very good year for Savage Minds. We are blessed with a vibrant community of readers and commentators.

Here is a roundup of some of 2006’s most noteworthy posts to take you into the new year:

• Anthropology of the Spirit: “everybody’s got a body, and it is surprising and interesting to learn about how the taken-for-grantedness of that body is historically/socially/culturally constructed. But not everybody has a spirit.”
• What is good anthropological writing?: “Which were the texts that made an indelible impression on you, and why? Any answer to this question has to be biographical.”
• The Invention of the World: Islam in the West: “the importance of Muslim scholarship to Columbus’ voyage cannot be overestimated”
• Found Mag meets Savage Minds: “Sometimes it’s better to have a hand-scratched, seat-of-the-pants expression of deep knowledge over a real-time, social software, scale-free, really simple, ajax-enhanced, web 2.0 instant access to scholarship.”
• World Simulation: Part One: Constructing the World: “In my last post, I described my ‘anti-teaching’ philosophy that led me to experiment with different ways of teaching cultural anthropology in very large introductory classes. So far, the most radical and intensive experiment I have tried is the ‘World Simulation.'”
• Technology in the Classroom: PowerPoint Alternatives: “Power corrupts: PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”
• Reading circle: let’s do Friction: This page archives all of our posts from this summer’s discussion of Tsing’s popular experimental ethnography, Friction.
• The American Anthropological Association’s lobbying against open acess is so, so misguided: “In other words, in order for publishers to argue that it will become unprofitable for them to run a journal because of competition from open access repositories, they must argue that they provide very little value to a journal as a product.”
• 30 Days of Cinétrance: “Despite the fact that one of the prime motivations for producing reality TV is saving costs on writers and actors, it does seem to draw heavily from the social sciences.”
• In the Flesh in the Museum: “From the first European contact with the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere onward, Indians had been exhibited in royal courts, traveling shows, circuses, and world fairs and expositions.”
• Junking the Nature/Culture Divide: “Pharmaceutical projects and products redefine the horizons of possible human being.”
• Places and Frames: Reading Bruno Latour on Holiday: “Latour proposes that there is nothing intrinsically contextual about place, that place is simply a staging or framing for traces and associations, near and distant, past and present. Context as such does not exist as a factor which explains or accounts for a place.”
• Conspiracy Theory and Social Theory: “in many ways conspiracy theories are like social theory”
• Is motherhood natural?: “Many introductory kinship texts begin by pointing out that while fatherhood is frequently non-obvious, motherhood never is.”
• Book Review: The Politics of the Governed, Part 1: “‘Political society’ is the politics of subjects who wish to have the same rights as citizens, but are excluded (by dint of their very marginalization) from civil society.”
• You Only Link Twice: Spying 2.0: “an article about the US and defense intelligence agencies’ attempts to generate as much useful information as the blogosphere and wikipedia.”