Having written a post that denigrates a strawman version of cultural studies I thought it time to write a post to infuriate members of my own discipline.

Let’s try this hypothesis: cultural studies is to now what anthropology was twenty or thirty years ago. (more…)

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I’d like to commend the AAA on the creation of its first “policy brief” last September. Although I didn’t hear about it at the time, it deserves mention.

The AAA Committee on Public Policy of is proud to introduce a new informational resource for the public policy community: the AAA Policy Brief. AAA Policy Briefs address policy issues and initiatives from an anthropological perspective, examining the insights that contemporary anthropological research contributes to policy discourse. These theme-focused briefs do not take a position on public policy issues. Instead, they introduce the reader to anthropological knowledge that is necessary for making fully-informed policy decisions.

You can find these policy briefs on the “government relations” page of the AAA website. Currently there is only one such brief, about labor policy, “specifically the right of employees to organize unions as outlined by the Employee Free Choice Act (H.R. 800, S. 1041)” [download PDF]. It reads like an executive summary of an Annual Review article, with a focus on policy implications.

I think it is a great resource to highlight the role that anthropological knowledge can play in the wider public sphere. If you have an idea for a policy brief you’d like to contribute, here is the information on how to do so:

If you are interested in contributing to a future Policy Brief or in suggesting a future topic, please contact Dinah Winnick of the AAA Department of External International & Government Relations at dwinnick@aaanet.org or (703) 528-1902.

I hope that in the future the AAA will do more to draw attention to these policy briefs, posting them to a blog rather than burying them in the website.

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If you are applying for grant money there are two classic “how to” guides you should read and re-read:

• Sydel Silverman’s “Writing Grant Proposals for Anthropological Research“


• Przeworski & Salomon’s “On the Art of Writing Proposals“

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In my neck of the woods ‘cultural studies’ is a term of abuse. In fact it functions a bit like the phrase ‘family values’ but in reverse. ‘Family Values’ is a completely amorphous concept, but being labeled with it means (in certain circles) that You Win, while managing to make the term ‘cultural studies’ stick to what someone else does is—regardless of what this term actually means—means They Loose. (more…)

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I had a very pleasant MLK day reading through Untaming The Frontier in Anthropology, Archaeology, and History. The concept of ‘frontier’ is deep background for my own research, and I try to keep my hand in on the work done in this area. However, it has also been a while since I caught up on the topic, so this edited volume was a lot of fun for me—a lot of interesting papers from all over the place (from the Qing to the Inka) and a helpful bibliography as well as a lot of good contributors. I wasn’t aware of the work of editor Lars Rodseth but it looks quite good and now I am interested learning more about his work.

The other thing I like about this collection is the approach to social science that it espouses—each author combines a love of the details of their individual cases with an interest in comparison and generalization. Its sorta… Weberian in a pleasant sort of way. Anyway I had fun reading it so maybe you will too.

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I’m a Dewey man myself … but all those who prefer the LOC might give this scintillating game a try.

Moving on to something a little more exciting … Last year I wrote about the possibilities of crowdsourcing photo archives, so I was happy to learn that the Library of Congress is giving it a go.

(Hat tip to Why that’s delightful and BoingBoing.)

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Its been nearly 3 years since we started Savage Minds and a lot has changed. For one thing, thanks to all our readers and commentors, the site has been hugely successful. We have 1,678 people subscribed to our RSS feed, around 600 unique visitors, from all over the world, coming to the website each day, and 463 members on our Facebook Group. But much more important for us is the growth of the anthropological blogsphere over that time. When we first started there were a handful of anthropologists blogging about a variety of topics, but almost no blogs dedicated to cultural anthropology. Today there is a thriving ecosystem of top quality anthropology blogs. The downside of this wonderful success is that its gotten hard for us to keep up. So we thought we’d turn to you, our readers, to see if there aren’t some aspiring bloggers who’d like to help out.

If you’re interested, keep reading …

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Spring semester is underway over here in my neck of the woods so I thought I would share my syllabi:

Political Anthropology
This is a ‘anthropology of recognition’ class that combines liberal political theory with studies of social organization and how anthropology makes its object.

Theory in Anthropology
A history of anthropological theory from 1964-2005. Designing this one just about killed me.

Thoughts? Does my college’s insanely obscure URL structure actually lead to a PDF for you people? Let me know.

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LOLinator.com turns any website into a lolcats website. I know it sounds like taking a now-dusty internet meme and applying a vanilla web 2.0 trope to it and yet…..

...It might be worth taking a look

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Last year we Fuji talked about a host of new tools one can use to take fieldnotes, but after listening to a recent podcast of On The Media, I think there are some new technologies on the horizon which are going to take fieldnotes to a whole new level.

Gordon Bell is a computer scientist with an eye for detail – every detail, in fact, that he’s accumulated over the course of his life. A senior researcher for Microsoft, Bell is at the vanguard of a movement called “lifelogging,” digitally storing every letter and photo, every phone call, email and video, every conversation, keystroke and scrap of paper, the entire minutiae of his daily routine, onto a hard drive.

He wears a camera around his neck called a SenseCam that takes snapshots every minute, of whatever may be in his path, including you, if you happen to be standing there.

What’s cool is that Bell and his team have created and deployed new tools, such as FacetMaps, to data mine the archive he’s created. You can see video demos here. Its Microsoft, so the GUI sucks, but the potential is there. Of course, there are ethical implications that still have to be worked out. How do you opt-out of someone’s lifelog?

UPDATE: Minor changes for clarity.

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A big, big congratulations to Comparative Studies in Society and History, who have just turned fifty. CSSH is a great journal with a great run that has produced so many worthwhile pieces. Their latest, anniversary issue is no exception and, best of all, access seems to be free for now. The stand-out article for me is Simon Harrison’s “Skulls and Scientific Collecting in the Victorian Military: Keeping the Enemy Dead in British Frontier Warfare”. Harrison’s book Fractured Resemblances is a favorite of mine and I’m teaching it in my Political Anthropology class this semseter. After having done headhunting amongst the colonized his new project on skull-taking amongst the colonized sounds very interesting.

So again—congratulations to all the people out at CSSH!

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It probably won’t last, but for now we have the spam under control and so those who unsubscribed from the RSS feed for comments should be able to safely resubscribe. Its a nice way to stay on top of all the various discussions.

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Via Ethan Zuckerman, a nice little piece on the problems associated with using the word “tribe” to talk about Africa.

What is a tribe? The Zulu in South Africa, whose name and common identity was forged by the creation of a powerful state less than two centuries ago, and who are a bigger group than French Canadians, are called a tribe. So are the !Kung hunter-gatherers of Botswana and Namibia, who number in the hundreds. The term is applied to Kenya’s Maasai herders and Kikuyu farmers, and to members of these groups in cities and towns when they go there to live and work. Tribe is used for millions of Yoruba in Nigeria and Benin, who share a language but have an eight-hundred year history of multiple and sometimes warring city-states, and of religious diversity even within the same extended families. Tribe is used for Hutu and Tutsi in the central African countries of Rwanda and Burundi. Yet the two societies (and regions within them) have different histories. And in each one, Hutu and Tutsi lived interspersed in the same territory. They spoke the same language, married each other, and shared virtually all aspects of culture. At no point in history could the distinction be defined by distinct territories, one of the key assumptions built into “tribe.”

Tribe is used for groups who trace their heritage to great kingdoms. It is applied to Nigeria’s Igbo and other peoples who organized orderly societies composed of hundreds of local communities and highly developed trade networks without recourse to elaborate states. Tribe is also used for all sorts of smaller units of such larger nations, peoples or ethnic groups. The followers of a particular local leader may be called a tribe. Members of an extended kin-group may be called a tribe. People who live in a particular area may be called a tribe. We find tribes within tribes, and cutting across other tribes. Offering no useful distinctions, tribe obscures many. As a description of a group, tribe means almost anything, so it really means nothing.

Somewhat related is this post by Josh Ruxin about why Kenya Isn’t Rwanda: (more…)

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Edge asked a number of scientists, artists, and intellectuals to answer the question: “What have you changed your mind about?” It is a treasure trove of thought-provoking commentary by some of the leading thinkers of our time. Especially interesting is the large number of scientists who have changed their mind with regard to the very nature of scientific enquiry, although I sensed that the many Evolutionary Psychologists in the survey are noticeably less troubled by the epistemological underpinnings of their research.

Anthropologists are somewhat less well represented here, but there are a few. What caught my eye, however, were two posts about language and the mind. One by Daniel Everett, famed for his research on the Pirahã (see this round-up of discussion over at Language Log), where he discusses his own theory of scientific knowledge. Everett critiques what he calls “homeopathic bias” in science. This is the belief “scientific knowledge is built up bit by little bit as we move cumulatively towards the truth” (discussed in this earlier Savage Minds post). Everett uses the term “bias” because he thinks this incremental view of science biases scholars against non-homeopathic doses of criticism, which they see as “arrogant.” The bias works both ways, both preventing scholars from making big claims for their own research, as well as preventing them from paying attention to research which makes such claims.

Everett says he came to this conclusion because of his own work on the Pirahã: (more…)

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