Around the Web Digest: Week of December 6

The blog harvest was rich again this week at the Savage Minds ranch. Help me find more blogs by sending me links at rebecca.nelson.jacobs@gmail.com.

HuffPost featured this article in which an anthropologist argues that isolating babies in cribs and sleeping 8 continuous hours a night are Western constructions: My Conversation with Co-Sleeping Expert James McKenna

In this National Geographic post, Jason De León discusses some of the findings in his book, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. He argues that migrant deaths at the border have been deliberately caused and normalized in national media: An Anthropologist Unravels the Mysteries of Mexican Migration

In this episode of the Craft podcast, anthropologist Jeffrey Cohen describes some moments of adaptation in his fieldwork in Mexico: Eating Soup (and Grasshoppers) Without a Spoon with Jeffrey Cohen. The interviewer actually asks how to avoid “changing their civilization.”

NPR’s The Salt also looked at eating behaviors in “Eat Up”: How Cultural Messages Can Lead to Eating Disorders. Women of color are often told to consume large amounts of food while conforming to normative slenderness (whether internal or external to their communities), and doctors are less likely to diagnose them with eating disorders than white women.

According to Aeon, the “toxic disinhibition” exhibited by Internet commenters has a forecursor in masking behaviors from around the world: Possessed by a Mask

The Conversation featured this post with a self-explanatory title: Six Tools That are Revolutionizing Archaeology by Helping Us Find Sites Without Digging. It profiles tools like drones, LIDAR and Google Earth.

In this post on the AAA Ethics blog, the disconnect between the assumptions embedded in IRB review and the experience of doing precarious fieldwork among activists in Kyiv actually enraged the author: Fieldwork Safety and IRB Detachment

Imaginative Ethnography features this post that works through questions about humanitarian giving in Greece in cartoon format: At the Food Bank: A Graphic Commentary

The NY Times showcased this short cartoon biography of a renowned paleoanthropologist: Animated Life: Mary Leakey

This Aidnography post points out that, despite its issues, Academia.edu is one of the most accessible sources of scholarly materials for people outside of traditional institutions: Why I Prefer Academia_edu over Academia_eu

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).

5 thoughts on “Around the Web Digest: Week of December 6

  1. I’m amazed that nothing about the passing of Benedict Anderson made this list given his incredible impact on the field of anthropology…

  2. Brendan, good point. I didn’t see anything on the anthroblogosphere remembering his contributions to the field. The one thing I saw circulating around my social media was an obituary that described him as a “Southeast Asia scholar,” which hardly seemed to do justice to his importance. Do you have a particular link in mind?

  3. SW China Ethnicity/Nationality/Minzu Studies folk have a soft spot for Anderson, right Brendan? Plus its just cool to imagine what Christmas dinner must be like with the Anderson clan ;-p Happy Holidays BTW

    Here’s a nice collection of links:
    http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2393-benedict-anderson-1936-2015

    http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2394-in-memory-of-benedict-anderson-an-extract-from-imagined-communities

    http://crookedtimber.org/2015/12/13/benedict-anderson-has-died/

    I would be curious if anyone at SM wants to take a stab at answering Corey Robin’s question:
    http://coreyrobin.com/2015/12/13/another-question-raised-by-benedict-anderson-what-makes-an-idea-exciting-for-you/

  4. Hi Eddie, thanks for the links! I like the question about what makes a particular theoretical perspective or question meaningful – I suspect the answer would be very personal for each scholar. Maybe one of us will tackle it in a post for 2016.

  5. Hi Eddie, thanks, I’d seen some of these but not all of them! I think we do have a sweet spot for Anderson, I mean he was even born in Kunming! Happy Holidays!

Comments are closed.