Around the Web Digest: Week of September 13

The theme of this blog roundup seems to be “our digital selves.” Send me anything you’ve written or found at rebecca.nelson.jacobs@gmail.com!

The Global Social Media Impact Study blog asks What’s Special About Social Media in Small Places? The answer seems to be that, while people feel a certain freedom to explore alternative identities when they’re outside of their small communities, they make sure their online images are socially acceptable and in line with their self-presentation within their communities.

In The Geek Anthropologist, an anthropologist recounts her experience playing Elder Scrolls Online, a massive multi-player online role-playing game, and the unspoken rules that govern it: A Geek Anthropologists’ First Time: A MMORPG Experience 

Alma Gottlieb’s blog asks why searches for religious terms like God, Allah, or Bible might go down during times of crisis: Digital Deities? 

This piece in Allegra Laboratory focuses on the disorientation that takes place after immersive fieldwork, in this case on child punishment in Zanzibar: Life After #Fieldwork: Of Leaving the Field, Entering Liminality and Relocating the Mind #Fieldnotes

Material World describes an exhibition based on the author’s Ph.D. research in a suburb that is creatively remaking itself and giving itself a history, allowing space for silliness in both everyday life and research: The Story of Seething & Being a Little Bit Stupid 

Fieldnotes and Footnotes features this excerpt from a book about NSFW creation narratives from Papua New Guinea that explain where women’s menstrual blood comes from: Quotations of Note: Henrietta Moore on Gimi Creation Narratives 

Teaching Culture features this two-part series on innovative low-tech games and game design for the classroom. For example, getting students involved in game construction could be a fun alternative to a final essay: Teaching Anthropology of/through Games Part 1Part 2

This post on Ethnography.com, Civility is Why Administrators Are Paid the Big Bucks!, instantly made me think of the calls for “civility” above all at my graduate institution, unsurprising given that the president’s academic research had actually focused on civility in public discourse.

DigVentures briefly describes the sudden revelation of a 1,000 year-old body with signs of violence when a tree fell over during a storm: Medieval Body Found Dangling From the Roots of an Upturned Tree

See you next week!

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).