Profoundly Meaningless (Yes Yes Yes):  Mother Jones blog reports on the closing of the last keffiyeh factory in Palestine.  According to Mama J, hipsters have underwritten the boom of cheaper keffiyeh production in China.  [Thanks to hawgblawg for finding this story].

Zombeconomics:  Worried about the shrinking global economy and the over population of over qualified professionals?  Overthinkingit.com has the solution.  One major outbreak of zombie attacks would both thin out the world population, and, once controlled with biotechnology, become a cheap source of labor.  Makes sense to me.

The Public Anthropology Public: Daniel Lende wrote two posts on neuroanthropology this week on public anthropology.  The first purports to be a review of Rob Borofosky’s explanation of Public Anthropology, but it is much more.  The post assembles various perspectives and multimedia interviews and examples of public anthropology.  In the second post, Lende compiles a list of further resources for people interested in deeper exploration.

Hey, Hey, Hey, I’ve Got It (World Cup Fever): Well, actually, I was gay-vaccinated against the fever before first going to Brazil in 2002.  (They won that year, and I hid from the hours of fireworks).  But others have the fever.  Material World posted on Lynn Jarvis’s Homeless World Cup, and Language Log explores the reported origins of the vuvuzela, a South African horn played at soccer matches.  (yes, i said it, soccer).

Sugar and Spice: Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily posted a very just critique of a recent article from the Archives of Sexual Behavior, claiming that infant girls were more attracted to pictures of dolls while infant boys were drawn to pictures of toy trucks.  Perhaps the post should have been titled, ‘babies socialized into gender roles really f’in early.’

Ok, I promised myself that this week would be MJ free, but this post at Language Log reached down and tapped my inner-child-ethnomusicologist.  Benjamin Zimmer tells a compelling tale about the Cameroonian origins of Jackson’s line ‘ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa,’ and in the process the globalization and transnational consumption of popular music.  Wanna be startin’ somethin’ indeed.

Is there an Anthropologist in the House? Daniel Goldberg at Medical Humanities Blog, posted his plea for more medical anthropologists in clinical settings. Self-professedly a fan but not practitioner of anthropology, Goldberg suggests that medical anthropologists would be a valuable addition (if not replacement?) for clinical medical ethicists. He writes:

I have often wondered how different my local world would be if it were anthropologists in charge of designing, implementing, and teaching cultural humility, instead of the relatively thin but conventionally dominant and poorly named “cultural competence.

Reform at a Distance: In A recent New York Times Op-Ed , contributor Nassrine Azimi on suggests that Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is an oldie-but-goodie model for people to think holistically about demographic and educational challenges currently facing Japan.

You Can’t Say That in Science! Language Log has a plea for action regarding a libel lawsuit against British science journalist Simon Singh. Singh is currently fighting a lawsuit brought from the the British Chiropractic Association, claiming that Singh’s challenges to the validity of certain claims of chiropractics lack demonstrable evidence constitute intent to defame the Association. Perhaps more interesting than the case itself has been the response from various public interest groups claiming that free speech is necessary to scholarly practices of critique. The comments to this post also raise some interesting views.

Biopower at the Limits: Thanks to Somatosphere for linking to a new blog post by Paul Rabinow discussing his research collective’s conceptual work on synthetic anthropos–an emergent constellation of effects and propositions borne out over the struggle between the figures of biopower and human dignity. Or something to that effect. Eugene Raikhel’s somatosphere post has some interesting views on this as well.

In Memoriam [Updated 6/16/09]: Stephen Christomalis at Glossographia has a great tribute to Willard Walker, recently deceased linguistic anthropologist and expert in (the admittedly specific field of) Cherokee numerals indigenous literacy in the Americas, most specifically the Cherokee syllabary.  In all cases, a really interesting description of one scholar’s life’s work.

As always, feel free to write in or post any other news.

This week’s roundup is a choose-your-own adventure.  About half of the things I found interesting this week seemed to be about online communication, and a there was lot on facebook.  So, those of you who get bored with all the techno-modern exoticism can just skip to the second half, which is all about established scholars making news.  And, of course, you can leave comments or email me with other stories for next week.  

“I Can Log Off Any Time.”   Daniel Lende at neuroanthropology has been posting his students’ final projects for a class he taught on the anthropology of substance abuse.  One of the projects on Internet addiction is a pretty interesting synthesis of how increasing online use is changing behaviors as well as normative attitudes towards internet use (like the potential inclusion of Internet addiction in the upcoming DSM V).  In other news, Jon Witt at Sociocultural Images wrote a small piece on the Oregon extension, a one-semester college sequence where students and faculty form an unwired intellectual community.  (But that doesn’t mean it can’t have a facebook page).  

Gifts in Our Times: Claudia Dreifus at the  New York Times interviewed Pauline Wiessner about her 30-year research relationship with !Kung communities and the changing patterns of !Kung social networks in a globalizing world. When asked if she saw any contemporary analogues to !Kung storytelling and gift exchange, Weissner answered, “Facebook.”  She continues:

One constantly hears stories of people finding jobs and business opportunities through these sites. Hey, and what does a blogger do? Tell stories! The videos and snapshots that people post echo the exchange gifts of the !Kung. They are a kind of token that says, “I’ve kept you in my heart.” 

Voice from Nowhere: Over at Language Log, Eric Bakovic wrote on the ways users adapt to changing syntax structure of the facebook user status update.  Bakovic notes that, while some users communicated and mobilized around changing the format of the update, other users simply ignored the conventions of the genre and used the status update as a quotation rather than a declarative sentence.  

New at the Institute:  Eugene Raikhel at Somatosphere commented on Didier Fassin’s appointment at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.  Raikhel ponders whether this will encourage more of Fassin’s work to be translated into English, and if this appointment and Ian Hacking’s election to the College de France marks the beginning of a new intellectual cosmopolitanism.

New Works: Lorenz at anthropologi.info found this recent online interview with Benedict Anderson on Anderson’s recent work on the forgotten body of work of Chinese-Indonesian journalist Kwee Thiam Tjing, the uneveness of power, cosmopolitanism from below, and the value of theory.  

To me, theorizing is like watching a drop of water: you can see the water and that’s all it is, a drop of water. But the minute you actually bring a microscope in, it’s completely different. Theory is really good at a sort of long-distance framing, but how people live their lives is something else, and I’m personally more interested in that than abstract theorizing.

New Collective on the Block:  Anthropologi.info and Teaching Anthropology have both linked to Keith Hart’s new venture, Open Anthropology Cooperative, hosted by Ning, allows for online fora, blog posts, etc.

We’re All Sick…of hearing doomsday reports on the H1N1 virus (well, I suppose there enough of us who enjoy bad theater). Luckily, the folks at both Somatosphere and Medical Humanities Blog have given us good synopses why all we all need to get a grip. Daniel Goldberg at MHB reminds us of the political dangers and the basic ineffectiveness of trying to identify a “patient zero.” Meanwhile Erin Koch (somatosphere) discusses the systemic problems in agroindustry that created the conditions for a massive outbreak. And in a followup, Erin wrote a brief piece on the various ways organizations and individuals have started to track the spread of the virus.

May Day, Marx, and Economic Mayhem: On the subject of futile searches for patient zero, Leo Panitch wrote an article imagining what Marx would say about the current global economic crisis. Panitch concludes by reminding us that Marx would not try to pinpoint specific causes of a crisis, but the inherent inequalities within capitalism.

Privacy and the Public Justice: Seems like U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia just can’t get enough of his own medicine. Who could forget in 2005 when an NYU lawstudent (and my highschool classmate) asked Scalia if he practiced sodomy with his wife? This past month, Fordham law professor Joel Reidenberg put Scalia’s out of hand dismissal of the need to protect private information to the test–he assigned his students to find all the private information on Scalia. Scalia, a bit miffed, called Reidenberg’s assignment legal but irresponsible. You can read a partial response by Reidenberg at Feminist Law Professors blog. Too bad Reidenberg isn’t on Slate’s reader poll on who should join Scalia on the bench. Write in campaign?

Science’s New Hope: Barack Obama’s address to the National Academy of Sciences have left the bloggers at Discover Magazine’s Cosmic Variance speechless. You can see the president’s speech on the Academy’s website.

Altruism On Wheels: Pamthropologist first linked to this student art project in New York on tweenbots–simple robots that rely on human interaction to navegate (and narrate) the city. Tweenbots creator Kacie Kinzer writes:

In New York, we are very occupied with getting from one place to another. I wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? More importantly, how could our actions be seen within a larger context of human connection that emerges from the complexity of the city itself? To answer these questions, I built robots.

See some of the preliminary results:

Methods and Ethics: L.L. Wynn over at Culture Matters posted a fabulous description of the work she’s done creating an anthropology ethics training website at her home university. Like most anthropologists, Wynn is concerned with getting beyond the biomedical model of patient consent, and her comments on sex in the field, working with violent criminals, and protecting information sound more like conversations (or at least calls for conversations) than either normative or transgressive pronouncements. The Site itself is licensed under Creative Commons, and Wynn encourages readers to take, tweak and cite her training models. Also see a review of the site at the Institutional Review Blog.

The Other Side of Ethics: Christopher Beam at Slate explores the ethics of another cousin to ethnography…journalism. Beam writes on the father of the Slumdog Millionaire child star who reportedly offer to sell his child to a journalist posing as a rich sheik. But Beam focuses his scrutiny on the journalist, asking just what reporters are allowed to conceal about their identity to the people they investigate.

What Comes After ‘No.’ Wendy Laura Belcher at insidehighered.com offers advice on resubmitting articles after they’ve been rejected from the first, second, or tenth journal. Belcher outlines different strategies and suggests that hearing ‘no’ (or interpreting the different shades of no), can help scholars rewrite or retune their work. Or one can just forgo closed journals altogether and go…

Open Access…All the Time: As Lorenz at antropologi.info first noticed, there are two proposals for upcoming open access anthro blogging days. Sara at Sara Anthro Blog has run a series of posts calling for an open access May Day. And, on his other site, Open Anthropology, Kerim announced the expansion of last years Open Access Day to Open Access Week in October. Of course, no harm in celebrating them both, since every day (and week) should be an open access one.

Failed States, Failed Stories: Maximillian Forte at Open Anthropology writes on the collapse of the NATO master narrative in Afghanistan. Forte takes to task NATO officials as well as member governments for their blind praise of democratizing Afghanistan and anxieties over a Shia marriage law about which they rely upon vague descriptions to form their arguments.

This Week In Weird: Ashton Kutcher, twitter, mosquito nets in Africa.

Queer Search Patterns Afoot on Amazon.com:  Buzz is that Amazon.com has implemented an algorithm to remove ‘adult’ books from its sales rankings.  Apparently, Amazon has categorized many books with ‘sex’ in the title or keywords to be ‘adult,’ garnering the ire of the Erotic Writer’s association, and also adversely affecting gender, sexuality and LGBT categorized books. According to Publisher’s Weekly, Amazon has described the pattern as a ‘glitch,’ and declared that there is ‘no adult policy.’  Other authors have reported that Amazon employees told them their books had been tagged, or that Amazon employees were caught by surprise by this new (non?) policy.  People are also beginning to organize against Amazon.  

Protests at University of Vermont:  UVM students, faculty, and staff are become increasingly agitated over the administrations proposed budget cuts, which include one hundred and seven lectureship contracts that will not be renewed for the 2009-2010 school year.  

Time for Money: Commenting on recent rumblings that U.S. federal funding agencies like NSF will begin to evaluate how to make their funding more conducive to qualitative research in the social sciences, danah boyd at apophenia questions just what money qualitative researchers actually need.  boyd suggests that the obsession with getting grants to prove your merit does not always improve scholarship and takes away from other activities like teaching.  

Body of Literature:  Euguene Raikhel at Somatosphere collected a number of resources and created a list of recommendations for Teaching Anthropology of the Body.  

In Memoriam: Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, author of Epistemology of the Closet (which currently doesn’t have a sales ranking at Amazon) passed away last night.  She is already missed.  (Also see Duke U Press’s press release).

That’s why they call it the Heartland: Shortly after the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of same sex marriage, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom triumphantly proclaimed, “As goes California, so goes the nation.” Considering more recent events, let’s hope not. The Iowa Supreme Court’s unanimous overturning of the state’s ban on same-sex marriage has everyone singing a new tune, “If it can happen here…” Katherine Franke at Gender and Sexuality Law Blog commented on the distinctly midwest character of Iowa court’s ruling, eschewing language of dignity and civil rights for plain old U.S. midwestern populism.  Also, for all us cynics out there, UPI just ran a story on how Iowa is gonna make bank. 

Grad school, check: Stephen Chrisomalis at Glossographia responds on Thomas Benson’s Chronicle polemic, “Just Don’t Go” [to grad school]. Chrisomalis takes a look at the rising PhDs and the academic market and how to reconcile the two.

Hope you’ve been following Tad McIlwraith’s series of posts on the British Columbia provincial government’s legislation on First Nations Recognition.  He’s followed the story pretty closely here, here, here, and here. 

Fooled by April: LL Wynn at Culture Matters wrote on an April Fools joke on at AAA that was never meant to be.

Unfortunately, it seems like it wasn’t a deliberate joke. The AAA website said clearly in several places that the call for papers would end April 1st, 5pm EST. But when I went to put in my abstract at about 2am on April 1st, it got rejected saying that the call for papers had closed at midnight! Even though the very same page that was telling me that the call for papers had closed also said that the deadline was 5pm. I called the number listed at the bottom of the page and a very annoyed-sounding call service guy (who basically just takes messages all night long for the AAA — I was rather surprised that they had something like this!) said, “No ma’am, this is not a joke. I do not have time for jokes.”

Luckily, AAA extended the deadline for abstracts.

Would a sentence of any greater length be Twittish?  Ryan Bigge at the Smart Set considers the prevelant social attitude that technoculture (like twitter) is dumbing us down, encouraging shorter communications, and turns the opinion on its head.  Brevity is the soul of wit, after all.

Science Fiction’s Second Coming: Apropos of the recent end of Battlestar Galactica, (agnostic SciFi?), Benjamin Plotinsky at the City Journal wrote a piece on the the overlap between recent Science Fiction and Christian allegory.

In Front of the Crowd: Lorenz at antropologi.info reported on the The Radical Anthropology Group, who is organizing the protests against the G20 summit meeting in London. Lorenz goes through the news articles and the University of East London’s statements on the summit that two of their faculty, Camilla Power and Chris Knight, are organizing against.

Surf is Down: The Chronicle of Higher Ed ran a piece on laptops in the classroom and the distractions they cause. Some professors interviews believe that the chronic laptop users have poorer grade performance. The article suggests many solutions from outright banning of laptops to documenting correlations between laptop use and grades and convincing students that laptop use (and checking email) in the classroom will cause them to do worse. Of course, that may also lead students to believe that as long as they get good grades, they should be able to do whatever they want in the classroom? (Thanks to Sociological Images for commenting on this story first. Here is there reaction.)

(More) Barthes on Barthes: Benjamin Ivry writes at the Chronicle writes on two unearthed personal diaries of Roland Barthes and mixed attitudes about publishing them.

The Theory that Moveth My Soul: This was a curious letter to the editor of the smart set.

I am a Ph.D. student in a political science program, and I’ve been getting more and more annoyed. Most of the major voices in the field want to pin human behavior down to a series of standardized, quantifiable measures. Not only is this approach terribly boring to read, but it totally ignores the complexity of the individual or society. Is there any way I can use poetry in my work in order to fight these trends

Kristen Hogatt from the Smart Set responds by offering some poetry by Tasmila Nasrin, Andrew Kaufman, and Kay Ryan. Sounds like, if you can’t beat em…

Lolinguisits: Eric Bacovic at Language Log takes on all the haters of LoLCats (did I spell that right? Wait, does it matter?) Oddly enough, the person he takes issue with is an American TIME magazine reporter who finds American English-language version annoying and stupid, but the American imitation of the Russian lolcats to be hilarious? Looks like a little mistranslation can be a good thing.

Who Stole m’ Syllabus? Arggh: So what breaking news in anthropology has everybody talking, from the Chicago Tribune to the Wall Street Journal? (He says in his best page six voice. Does page six have a voice?) It’s Shannon Lee Dawdy’s class on pirates at the University of Chicago. The course, which covers intellectual piracy as well as those traditional seafarers has been picked up several papers. Get your joke in now, because the last laugh is saved for Dawdy, who is quoted as saying: “It is almost too fun for the University of Chicago, so I will make sure they read a bit of theory every week.”

Latour on the Restructuring of French Universities: Pal Nyiri at Culture Matters explains the current strike of French faculty in protest over proposed reforms (or dismantling, take your pick) of the national university system.  Nyiri  also relays recent criticisms Bruno Latour has made against the proposed reforms and French government about the situation in Le Monde.  [Update: Thanks, ponocrates, for your comment.  My poor (or rather non-existent) French prohibits me from commenting on what Latour has said.]

Have Spiel, Will Travel: Mark Dawson has an offer for you.  After participating with HTS for nine months in Iraq, he is leaving over poor management of the program.  Now back in North America, Dawson has decided to tour the States and Canada coming to whatever college classroom will invite him to talk about his time with HTS.  Read more about Dawson’s measured enthusiasm for HTS and his classroom tour here.

Go, Go Gadget Recording Pen Paper Piano: Michael Wesch from Digital Ethnography blogged on the new smart pen from livescribe.  The pen records audio as you take notes and can play back the audio when you put its infared sensor over a particular line in text.  Wesch uses his students to test out the classroom uses of the pen, but it could be a fun fieldwork gizmo too.

Warning Signs: Kalman Applbaum at Somatosphere posted a fantastic and in-depth post on the difficulties of policing pharmaceutical claims and holding companies responsible for their products.  Applbaum’s description of Merck’s drug Vioxx shows the dangerous connections between the marketing and experimenting of new pharmaceuticals.

Preparedness In case of Ethnography…Lorenz over at antropologi.info reads the work of recent University of Bergen (Norway) MA Uy Ngoc Bui and her work on a disaster relief case in Vietnam.  This leads Lorenz to conclude that we need an anthropology of disasters that would address: the role of the state in emergency measures, globalization and relief NGOs, and the role of global warming in local climates.

Well, it’s the end of the term this week, and so I know I didn’t have time to include more stories that could be talked about.  Feel free to leave comments with links to other posts or email me with content for future installments.