As 2014 comes to a close, I thought I’d take up the annual task of rounding up the best of Savage Minds and the anthroblogosphere. First, some fellow Savage Minds authors will share their favorite posts from the year. As the Around the Web curator, I’ll list the posts (from SM and elsewhere) that stood out for me. Then, I’ll show some of the submissions that we received from our readers. Finally, we’ll review some of the best blogs and articles that have provided an anthropological perspective on the 2014’s current events.
Let’s go!
Savage Minds Authors:
Carole:
Ferguson: Anthropologists Speak Out
Matt:
The Soul of Anime [Book Review]
Ryan:
No funding? Don’t do it! (on getting a PhD in anthropology)
What Comes After the Public University?
Anthropology: It’s still a white public space – An interview with Karen Brodkin (Part 1)
Kerim:
The Ethnographic “Shooting Ratio”
Economy Such Complex, Culture Much Simple
Guest Bloggers:
Matthew Timothy Bradley: Linguistics, Anthropological Linguistics, and Linguistic Anthropology
Nick Seaver: Computers and Sociocultural Anthropology
Isaiah Silver: Anthropologists Should Embrace BDS
Uzma Z. Rizvi: Thinking about Michael Brown and the African Burial Ground
Sara Perry: What Archaeologists Do
Irma McClaurin: Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) and Anthropology
My picks from Savage Minds and Around the Web:
11 Cutting-Edge Thinkers that Anthropologists should be Paying Attention to Right Now!
Alexei Yurchak: Little Green Men: Russia, Ukraine, and Post-Soviet Sovereignty (Anthropoliteia)
Sarah Kendzior: The Peril of Hipster Economics (Al Jazeera)
Sarah Kendzior: The Minimum Wage Worker Strikes Back (Medium)
Reader Submissions:
Alex Posecznick: Anthropologists as Scholarly Hipsters (Savage Minds)
Sean Mitchell: The Politics of Violence and Brazil’s World Cup (Anthropoliteia)
Emma Louise Backe: The History Behind “American Horror Story: Freak Show” (The Geek Anthropologist)
Marie-Pierre Renaud: The (Fake) Geek Girl Project (The Geek Anthropologist)
Robert Martin: Got Milk, Got Unwanted Hormones? (Psychology Today: How We Do It)
Agustin Fuentes: The Real Reason Sexual Violence is so Widespread (Psychology Today: Busting Myths About Human Nature)
Alex Golub: The History of Mana: How an Austronesian Concept Became a Video Game Mechanic (The Appendix)
Emma Louise Backe: Fantasy and the Female Body (The Geek Anthropologist)
Paul Stoller: The Scholar’s Obligations (Huffington Post)
Carole McGranahan: “I Love Polyandry, Yo”: Tibetan Refugee Citizenship and the Politics of Culture (Allegra)
Daniel M. Goldstein: Illegality: Provocation (Cultural Anthropology)
Jemima Diki Sherpa: Three Springs (whathasgood)
Current Events:
Ninno Koskenalho: What is going on?! #Ukraine Crisis Timeline (Allegra)
Jon Marks: The Genes Made Us Do It (In These Times)
Politics of Ontology (Cultural Anthropology)
Ebola in Perspective (Cultural Anthropology)
#SAFE13 (PLoS One)
Sarah Kendzior: The Telegenically Dead (Al Jazeera)
To cap it all off, I save the best for last. There were some very cool projects to come out of the anthroblogosphere this year – collaborations, ongoing series, curated collections, writing groups – but in my opinion the very best is the Commonplaces collection featured on Somatosphere. While it was technically launched in late 2013, it was in 2014 that we watched it take shape, delivering on the promise to “itemize the technological present” in the form of essays, ideas, musings, and thinkpieces by leading scholars in medical anthropology, as well as science and technology studies. Very well done, and I look forward to seeing how it further develops.
So, I know that there is a lot more out there, e.g. Piketty, Sochi, the World Cup, Scottish independence referendum, Cuba, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, #BringBackOurGirls, and #BlackLivesMatter all come to mind. Let me know in the comments below what articles stood out for you in 2014, whether they relate anthropological perspectives on current events, new developments in anthropology, or even just musings about old ideas. What did I miss?
Thank you all for a great year! Happy holidays and have a wonderful new year!