Around the Web Digest: Week of March 29

If you observe it, happy Easter! The theme for this week seems to be “navel-gazing,” with a variety of blogs across the anthroblogosphere focusing on anthropology itself and academia as a whole. Don’t go anywhere, though: these are interesting posts. Please send any cool blog posts my way at rebecca.nelson.jacobs@gmail.com… particularly if you wrote them!

I can sympathize with this topical post on the Scientific American anthropology blog, which takes a jaundiced historical view of childish April Fool’s Day pranks like the one we featured on here… Then and Now: April Fools’ Day—How Did We Get Here?

Moving from one holiday post to another, DigVentures has some lovely visuals in this post on ancient egg decorating: How to Decorate Your Easter Egg Like It’s 60,000 BC

For those of us still smarting from when Forbes declared anthropology the #1 worst major, Living Anthropologically points out that important people sometimes study and discuss anthropology:  Anthropology is Taking Over the World

This two-part series on Ethnography suggests that universities are becoming reorganized following the principles of corporatization, such as efficiency and predictability, and explores the ramifications of these changes in dehumanizing university workers. It begins with Corporatocracy and the McDonaldization of Work in Higher Education and continues with Classism in Academia

The Times Higher Education blog also picks up this thread in this piece on how the imperative for universities to make money is structuring academic thought: Fred Inglis On the Way We Think Now 

This post on the CASTAC blog explores the idea that, surrounded by these trends towards audit culture and rapid data gathering within universities, anthropologists can present a different kind of data and an “untimely” way of thinking: Think about the University: Anthropology, Data Science, and the Function of Critique

Is it a stereotype that anthropologists love “ethnic” food? Based on my informal observations of a tiny non-random sample, I would say it’s a valid one. This post on Food Anthropology points out why it might be problematic for us to ask for a recommendation for the most “authentic” ethnic restaurant in town: Interrogating the “Authentic” Local Ethnic Restaurant 

The HuffPost AAA blog notes a certain hypocrisy in the fact that there was no uproar from the scientific community about the need to study Richard III’s remains before reburying them, as there might have been had he been a Native American: Rest for the King, No Rest for Native Americans

The Anthropocene Myth in Jacobin Magazine argues that attributing human-induced climate change to all humans shifts attention away from the true culprits: capitalist elites. What do you think?

Catch you next week, pansies!

Around the Web, Blog post
Rebecca Nelson

Rebecca Nelson is the executive director of América Solidaria U.S. She recently graduated with a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on volunteer tourism in Guatemala and how it is opening up new avenues for tourists and hosts to develop more cosmopolitan understandings of the world (as well as opening up new forms of friction over the circulation of knowledge).

One thought on “Around the Web Digest: Week of March 29”

  1. I really enjoyed Fred Inglis’ piece. Especially the following,

    In a dazzling parade of the thinkers of the day, Geertz summoned the harlequin dress of dozens – “ideological arguments cast as historiographical inquiries” (Edward Said), “epistemology constructed as political tract” (Paul Feyerabend) – and, asking “what is Foucault, what Thomas Kuhn?”, concluded that the whole exhilarating dance of the metaphors served the new purpose of abandoning the search for hard facts and looking out instead for interpretative analogies.

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