I’d like to briefly mention three initiatives aimed at making anthropology more accessible:
The first is a wonderful new—what to call it? blog? journal? blogurnal?—anthropology blog/journal “anthropologies” aimed at exploring “contemporary anthropology through essays, short articles, and opinion pieces written from diverse perspectives.” Their first issue explores the question “What is Anthropology?”
The second is the “Working Papers” series being published by the Open Anthropology Cooperative. These remind me a little of Prickly Paradigm Press, but focused more on anthropology, and free. (Prickly Paradigm should really consider publishing on Kindle’s new “Kindle Singles” program.)
Finally, something I put together myself after some discussion with Jason Baird Jackson, who told me about Open Access Tracking Project. I had been looking for a way to make Open Access anthropology publications more visible, but I realized that I didn’t want a large, uncurated, list of articles. So I came up with “Share Anthropology.” The idea is that anyone can submit a link to a blog post, discussion, or review of an Open Access anthropology publication. The emphasis being on discussion. If, for instance, someone were to blog about Chris Kelty’s book, which is available via Open Access, then that we’d link to that blog post on the Share Anthropology. This is an ongoing experiment – if you’d like to help out please let me know, or just submit some links!
could we just link to full-content PDFs — for instance websites where profs free up their articles? Might be a good way to highlight personal webpages that exemplify how to self-archive. And to point people to cool free stuff.
The way this would work right now is that you could write a Savage Minds post about that personal webpage and then link the blog post. I find this preferable to simply linking to the page. However, I do see adding links to entire sites as a possibility in the future. Mostly I don’t want to have and endless list of links to every OA article which comes out. Also, I worry about making the instructions for what is/isn’t allowed too complicated. But these problems could be worked out with some thought.
One of the aspects of learning anthropology I find missing is adio/video of introductory or intermediate classes on the web. Yale has a nice series of recorded classes focusing on the social sciences (read, psychology) and the sciences, but, alas, no anthropology. The dissemination of such video classes would, Ibelieve, go a long way in influencing others of the value of anthropology.
I’ll eagerly look at “anthropologies” and see if this satisfies, but I do think a video component would be complementary advantage. As an aside, I found David Harvey’s “Reading Marx’s Kapital” as a series of video lectures. It’s a great way of approaching something that would seem so daunting.
Thanks for mentioning the new project, Kerim! Also, I like the thinking behind the Share Anthropology site you’re working on, especially the idea to link posts/content to OA articles. That’s a good way to get the discussions of these pieces linked up. Nice.
Fred
I have thoroughly enjoyed the anthropology classes that are available through iTunesU. UC Berkeley has several semesters of anthro classes that can be downloaded and listened to.
My favorite was History of Anthropological Thought taught by Rosemary Joyce. I am actually listening to the lectures a second time I liked them so much!
Kerim,
I did not take any anthropology classes in school, but I am devouring as much of it as I can on my own. I appreciate all of the efforts lately to make anthropology accessible.