• Survey: Favorite #Anthropology Blogs announces a top dozen /KF
• For Pinker, the two world wars are “horrifically unlucky samples from a statistical distribution” /KF
• In Memoriam of #AAA President Elizabeth Brumfiel /KF
• C of William and Mary had slaves. They harvested crops to raise scholarship money, among other things. //MT
• Wikileaks revealed US espionage of Indigenous People in US, Canada, Peru & elsewhere. /KF
• Andaman Islands tribe threatened by lure of mass tourism—brace yourself before you read. /KF
• Police Demographics Unit Casts Shadows From Past /KF
• Wallerstein: “2011 was a good year for the world left” //MT
• American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year award goes to (drum roll) “Occupy” //MT
• Color photographs from the Great Depression. From rural America to industrial landscapes. //MT
• Paul Stoller: “One way to confront the spread of corporate culture on our campuses is to organize” /KF
• Orin Starn describes use of online message boards in ethnographic methodology for new book on race and sports. //MT
• American Behavioral Scientist Special Issue on the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. /RM
• Interview with anthropologist Catherine Lutz on the costs of war. /KF
• Does the AAA Support or Oppose the Res Works Act? /KF
• New Pew research: “Mormons in America”. //MT
• On Mitt Romney’s Mexican heritage: one Chicano author wrestles with definitions of identity. //MT
• The long, slow sexual revolution (part 1)— in which @GregDowney1 takes on Evolutionary Psych /KF
• MotherJones: Roundup of our favorite “Shit [insert race, gender, sexual orientation] Say” videos /KF
• Johannes Fabian—Cultural Anthropology and the Question of Knowledge, 2011 Huxley Memorial Lecture (audio) /KF
• Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” removed from classrooms under AZ ethnic-studies ban. /KF
• Academic publishers have become the enemies of science /KF
• Specimens from Darwin’s voyage on the HMS Beagle rediscovered. //MT
• Sydel Silverman and Her Quest to Preserve Anthropological Records – The Atlantic /KF
• Susan Blum on China’s (postponed) plans to educate Tibetans in Mandarin instead of Tibetan /KF
• Harry Walker on anarchist anthropology in the latest Anthropology Of This Century is worth a read. /RM
• All statistical biases are pretty much irrelevant. They are all dwarfed by publication bias. /KF
• Massive student loan debt is like taxing people for not living up to their potential. //MT
• New UC tuition idea: 5% tax on your income for 20 years. //MT
• The Australian, non-suck solution to student loan debt /RM
• Society for Cultural Anthropology officially opposes the Research Works Act! Huzzah! /RM
• Ancient Popcorn Found—Made 2,000 Years Earlier Than Thought in Peru /KF
• No, @cshirky, @zephoria is not the first ‘native anthropologist’. Otherwise a nice enough @nytimes piece. /KF
• The obscene profits of commercial scholarly publishers /KF
• OUP treats authors as “work for hire” whereby copyright is theirs from the start!? /KF
• In the context of SOPA/ PIPA: it almost came to be that taping TV with a VCR was copyright infringement. //MT
• Language Log tackles the venerable history of “just sayin”. //MT
• On the high fertility of Republican Presidential candidates. //MT
• Anthroworks likes to read dissertation abstracts. Here’s 40 that caught their eye in 2011. //MT
• On the popularity of American Indian stereotypes and playing Indian in South Korea. //MT
• “I have tried to mix and match ethnic and cultural traits in creating my imaginary fantasy peoples”—George RR Martin /KF
• On seeing a book on your dissertation topic . . . by someone else. /KF
• The Exploiting Africa Academy Award nominations /KF
• Sacheen Littlefeather representing Marlon Brando when he won (and rejected) the Oscar for The Godfather /KF
• Citizen philosophers: a 2008 law mandates philosophy courses for high school students. //MT
• Let’s make teaching skeletal anatomy to elementary schoolers fun! //MT
• Gillian Tett “Anthropology is like salt with food… it is a powerful dynamic to bring to the table.” /KF
• Zotero 3.0 is here! Now runs outside of Firefox and integrates with Chrome and Safari. /KF
• Say hello to ZotPad, the first iPad client for Zotero. /KF
• Time to dust off the #aaafail hashtag: @AmericanAnthro opposes federal open access in public comment to White House /RA
• Superman’s underwear advertized as cure for impotence, STD’s in Malaysia. //MT
• American Anthropological Association Takes Public Stand against Open Access #aaafail /KF
• The Digital Return: Digital Repatriation & Indigenous Knowledge /KF

• The five stages of grading. #timewaster //MT
• RE: library costs – Ebooks are fine for pleasure reading but for serious study “We don’t read that way.” //MT
• Auction houses as a site for the social construction of value. //MT
• “Children of the Jungle” racist British colonial film about Bhils and Gonds (1939). #adivasi /KF
• Student Loan Fury in the Occupy Movement » Is anthropology a dead end? /KF
• Read this: Vincente Diaz shows us what indigenous anthro looks like in 8 open access pages /RM
• HAU is launched! Brand new, open access Journal of Ethnographic Theory /KF
• Yay! New RSAnimate, “The Divided Brain.” //MT
• Military Assc of Atheists & Freethinkers wants the military to provide chaplains for estimated 40,000 atheists //MT
• “Economics is lost” for it is little concerned with living a good life. //MT
• Conference notes on the neuroanthropology of ritual and play. //MT
• Graduate School Barbie (TM) /KF
• NSF: How do cultures, values, and beliefs of scientists play a positive role in innovation? //MT
• Anthropology well represented in Scientific American list of best science writing for 2011 /KF
• Critical Inquiry’s latest number has an extended section on The Wire /RM
• Anthropology in Practice gets a nod for best science blogging 2012 from SciAm. Kudos! //MT
• Did this cottage belong to some witch of Pendle forest? [And more here] //MT
• “Could be worse!” Prisoners sentenced to life without parole eke out some dignity in CA. //MT
• Anthropology Report connects people searching for anthropology to real anthropology and real anthropologists. /KF
• Forensic anthropologist CT scans for the Smithsonian. And not just bones, either. //MT
• The linguistic anthropology of LOLspeak (Says linguistics but most citations are ling-anth folks.) /KF
• Iraq: Images of a war and its toll – photographic retrospective from eight years of war. //MT
• Student disabilities centers seeing a rise in mental illness, depression, anxiety. //MT
• Attack of the “theory boys” #gradschoolisforever /KF
• Networking, Scholarship and Service: The Place of Science Blogging in Academia /KF
• Zora Neale Hurston 1955 letter to editor against Brown v Board is interesting, controversial. /KF
• iPhone apps: Guess my Race & Who Am I? /KF
• Review of Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader /KF
• Fascinating blog post on how female body “mutilation” is perceived in Senegal vs the US /KF
• The Anthropocene: Science is recognising humans as a geological force to be reckoned with. /KF
• Annotated list of Anthropology Blogs by @JasonAntrosio /KF
• AAA’s Proposed Revised Code of Ethics for Public Review /KF
• Nancy Scheper-Hughes on the privatization of public universities. //MT
• 102-year-old psychologist and psychoanalyst still practicing. //MT
• Damn illegal immigrants: 1,100-year-old Mayan ruins found … in northern Georgia. /KF
• No. Nobody found Mayan ruins in Georgia. /KF
• Neanderthals had high pitched voices, were annoying. //MT
• Primatology, anthropology, genetics. And fishing for a critique of Nicholas Wade. /KF
• “The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure” //MT
• India Files Biopiracy Lawsuit Against Monsanto. /KF
• DRM = Pepper Spray Cop at Shelf Check, public librarian webcomic. //MT
• The neuroscience of “middle childhood”: there’s plenty happening between the toddler and teen years. //MT
• Living Anthropologically’s Ten Most Viewed Posts of 2011 /by @JasonAntrosio /KF
• Collection of #Anthropology Reflections on 2011 – let me know of others /KF

The following Brilliant Anthropological Insight™ comes to you courtesy of Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski (cont’d)…
 
“Two human beings of different sex who are engaged in the business of reproduction…cannot be separated by a great distance in space.”

For those of you not being bombarded by our extraordinary insights and clever #timewasters here’s your chance to catch up on what we were reading in the month of November. Note that last month was the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association and so I chose to be selective in which conference related tweets got preserved in the digest. If you’ve seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community, email me MDTHOMPS @ ODU.EDU.

• Thesis Eleven has a special issue in memory of Friedrich Kittler /RM
• War Stories from Academic Job Interviews: A full professor shares his experiences /RM
• RT @WB_Anthropology: Free access to key articles from JRAI /KF
• LSA Resolution for U.S. Gvt. Action to Support Preservation & Revitalization of Native American Languages /KF
• Female coach leads boys football team to championship / Girls flag football fastest growing varsity sport.
• Digital Anthropology: Projects & Platforms. Great online anthro projects featured at #aaa2011 /KF
• Who Has Been A Successful Public Intellectual? Randall Collins explains it all for us.
• The syllabi of David Foster Wallace: not exactly mind blowing, but pretty damn interesting. //MT
• How would Anthro departments fare if the US adopted China’s 60% employment requirement? /KF
• RT @AnthroJustPeace: AAA 2011: A Review of Some Presentations on Military, Security, and Intelligence Topics /KF
• RT @zunguzungu: On bibliography-dumping. /KF
• RT @JasonAntrosio: Anthropology’s Challenge: We can be better. /KF
• Must-read evolutionary anth for culturals: Konnor on Hrdy in NYRB. /RM
• RT @daniel_lende: The Montreal Anthropology Meetings – Recap of AAA Coverage On #AAA2011 /KF
• xkcd’s Massive chart on money, a tour de force. //MT
• Digging a backyard pool in the French Quarter yields 15 coffins. //MT
• Don’t get distracted! Write Or Die app punishes you if you stop typing. //MT
• Some thoughts about Steven Pinker’s new book from @swarthmoreburke /KF
• UC Davis students confront Chancellor on the way to her car. //MT
• Prof. gives heart-stopping play by play of UC Davis protest, calls for Chancellor’s resignation. //MT
• MTF denied driver’s license as woman, takes her shirt off and gets arrested for exposure. //MT
• xkcd on where citations come from. //MT
• Journalist undergoes circumcision to secure interview of rebel leaders in PNG. //MT
• Brutal repression of W.Papua activists ahead of US visit in Indonesia. //MT
• RT @daniel_lende: Going to the AAAs: Anticipating Anthropology Highlights in Montreal /KF
• RT @JasonAntrosio: AAA Montreal 2011: #AAA2011 and Political Economy /KF
• I’m one of the lucky ones: Hope, Despair, and the Rhetoric of Luck among the 99 Percent /KF
• Oxford U Press to launch online anthropology encyclopedia in ’12, slowly grow the entries over years to come. //MT
• “Foucault Across the Disciplines” special issue of History of the Human Sciences, in precis. //MT
• Crowdfunded archaeology to sequence ancient Roman DNA. //MT
• Anthropology and Government Planning. /KF
• Important petition: Support Anthropology in Florida, put together by @supportanthro /KF
• This is a VW Beetle,covered in Huichol beads. //MT
• History of zoonosis and HIV traces the origins of the disease back to the 1920s. //MT
• Artist with viral encephalitis offers insight into brain function as she recovers and creates new works. //MT
• Inequality, Health Disparities, & Obesity /KF
• Genres Leak, Being a Reflection on Michael E. Smith’s Essay on Semi-, Quasi- and Psuedo- Journals /KF
• The grave of the future? #timewaster //MT
• Boy rejected from Girl Scouts, now accepted. //MT
• Terms that have different meanings for scientists and the public. //MT
• Anthropology Course Explores the Life Cycle of, Say, Your Pen /KF
• Amer Anthro Assoc renews journal publishing deal w/ Wiley Blackwell thru 2017. No open access for next 6 years. /KF
• Academic fraud: 30+ peer-reviewed social psych/cognition papers will be withdrawn for fabricated data. //MT
• Lots of people start anthro blogs, not so many follow through, but we love the name of this one! /KF
• Susan Harding: “thinking about the act of ethnography as a spiritual practice?” /KF
• If Humans Evolved To Be Social Creatures, Then Why Didn’t Anyone Come To My Party? /KF
• Hope you’re not busy: Linguist Llama meme. #timewaster //MT
• danah boyd’s latest on parents helping their preteens circumvent facebook’s age restriction. //MT
• When did girls start wearing pink? – a history of of children’s clothing in America. //MT

• RT @David_Dobbs: Paying for job market advice @johnhawks on someone bold enough to call academic work work… /KF
• Searching for authentic Tahrir Square revolutionaries? Arab intellectuals annoyed with western leftists. //MT
• John Hawks grabs his boomstick, takes on zombies. Metaphorically speaking. Okay, that’s not true at all.//MT
• Optical unconscious: digital artist morphs every Playboy centerfold into SFW abstractions. What do you see?//MT
• RT @BiellaColeman: Newly designed science/med and anthro blog is newly designed and really really nice/KF
• In Montreal, keep an eye out for the recently evolved Homo Quebecois.//MT
• Cryptozoology gets real: International Center of Hominology in Moscow goes yeti hunting in West Siberia.//MT
• Derrick Bell, pioneer of legal scholarship, antiracist activist, author of critical race theory, dead at 80. //MT
• UC journal Reclamations — Generation of Debt: The University in Default and the Undoing of Campus Life.//MT
• Anthropologist Eben Kirksey calls for site specific art installations at Occupy events around the country.//MT
• Fossilized footprints found in remote mountains of Chihuahua, Mexico, 4.5k-25k years old. //MT
• For National Coming Out Day: John Waters on coming out.//MT
• Archaeo-astronomists will be excited for this Celtic calendar construction found in the Black Forrest.//MT
• In wake of Fukushima the Japan Tourism Agency will offer 10,000 free trips for foreigners. Anthros assemble!//MT
• Journal special issue: Ian Hacking, James Ferguson, etc on Foucault//RM
• 100,000 year old artist’s palette found in South Africa.//MT
• Lots of charts and data on unemployment, income inequality, and the growth of the financial sector.//MT
• Haiti doesn’t need your old t-shirt.//MT
• Archaeologist studies material culture in Silicon Valley.//MT
• Women of a remote village in Columbia have since June vowed no sex until a road to their town is completed.//MT
• Ask anyone on the job market. Rick Scott is right about anthropology.//MT
• Chris Kelty and @BiellaColeman have an editorial about tech pioneer, Dennis Ritchie in @AlJazeera/KF
• Sign the petition! Big RT @change #Florida Gov threatens to cut liberal arts funding; #Anthropology major fights back!
• This is as good a modern day Ambrose Bierce: Lemony Snicket addresses the 1%//MT
• Elouise Cobell, Native legal activist won $3.4 billion settlement from the federal govt, dies at 65.//MT
• Herman Cain doesnt believe in racism. Is this internalized antiblack racism or simply class interests?//MT
• David Graeber’s Madagascar ethnography gets a nod as an intellectual root of the Occupy movement.//MT
• The revolution will be crowdsourced. //MT
• Mind Hacks reviews http://bit.ly/nbZLnR Pinker’s latest on violence//MT
• Somatosphere covers Stanford conf: “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Mind” Part I and Part II. //MT
• Pentagon cultural analyst helped with interrogations/KF
• Anthropology, Moral Optimism, and Capitalism: A Four-Field Manifesto/KF
• More anthropologists on Wall Street please | The Economist /via @Martijn5155 /KF
• The ‘Jerry Lewis’ of anthro—French Ministry of Culture to honor Sahlins for contributions /via @GregDowney1 /KF
• Anthropology, Dialog, and “Intellectual reconstruction”: Over at the “Democracy in America” blog at The Economis…
• Immigrant labor disappears, Ala. farmers worried as few among state’s unemployed want to work the fields. //MT
• The peer review process. #timewaster //MT
• Frank Dikötter: “Forging National Unity: Ideas of Race in China” /KF
• Korean “kkita” (fit tightly) and “nehta” (loosely in or around) cross-cuts English “in/on” distinction #whorf /KF
• MyMicrobes, a social network for intestinal bacteria. //MT
• Decolonize Wall St: Occupy Albuquerque renames itself. //MT
• Can the Subaltern Draw?: The Spectre of Orientalism in Craig Thompson’s Habibi /via @ChapatiMystery /KF
• Royal Society journal archive made permanently free to access (because copyright has expired) /KF
• “Civilisation’s going to pieces” Pankaj Mishra reviews Niall Ferguson /via @sepoy /KF
• Awful/ Awkward/ Awesome – the word detective explains. //MT
• “This Is Anthropology”: Students at USF respond to Gov. Scott with Prezi. //MT
• Dinosaurs in flight: the movie /KF
• Richardson & Kroeber’s “Three Centuries of Women’s Dress Fashions: A Quantitative Analysis” /KF

• Archaeologists find Acheulian and Oldowan tools together, two traditions were sometimes contemporaneous. //MT
• First grade checklist, 1979: Can your six year old walk 4-8 blocks alone? //MT
• Military translator mostly reads paperbacks while in Iraq, never touches language related tasks. //MT
• Last week’s Nova “Becoming Human Pt.II: Birth of Humanity” //MT
• Here’s the political editorial everyone is sharing – a real barn burner. //MT
• Modern philosophy timeline #timewaster //MT
• RT @jasonjackson2: How Enclosed by Large For-Profit Publishers is the Anthropology Journal Literature? /KF
• New evidence in the 97 year old case of labor legend and folk hero, Joe Hill //MT
• 10 great things courtesy of labor unions. //MT
• Ruins of Roman gladiator school found in Austria. //MT
• Fox News poll on evolution, via the National Center for Science Education. //MT
• Nature will no longer be accepting submissions from humans. The machines want to be first author. #timewaster //MT
• Check out the fossilized hand on this A. Sediba! Tattersall: this opens “the question of what a human is” //MT
• Book reviews at FoodAnthropology- urbanism, biotech, Brazil, history, politics and more. //MT
• Why don’t Americans say ‘mate’ for friend? //MT
• UW garbage project analyzes undocumented immigration across the US/Mexico border in refuse. //MT
• Roots of Love: Exploring Hair in the Sikh Community. Winner SVA best student film award. /KF
• The Stitches Speak is an animated documentary about Kutch artisans. Winner SVA best short film. /KF
• RT @kevinkarpiak: Somatosphere: “Keywords” in Current Anthropology /KF
• Made to Be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual Anthropology Edited by Marcus Banks & Jay Ruby /KF
• “You write too well,” for the prose is solid but the argument frail. //MT
• 2000-year-old document, unearthed from a Han Dynasty tomb, led to development of new Malaria drug. /KF
• Peru’s President signs law requiring indigenous peoples be consulted b/f industrial use of traditional lands. //MT
• Page Proofs ? Post-Prints; Websites ? Repositories by @jasonjackson2 /KF
• RT @yvessmith: David Graeber: On the Invention of Money /KF
• special issue on ‘Imagined Communities in the 21st Century’ /RM
• Stuart Hall on the contemporary scene. //MT
• As income inequality rises, so has the gap b/w rich and poor colleges and universities. //MT
• Cherokees’ Explusion of Blacks Draws Rebuke /KF
• Dutch anthropologist to study City of London bankers /KF
• The species-level trap: variation between individuals is central to scientific understanding of animal behavior. /KF
• Worldwise Development, about which @kerim blogged a year ago, has officially launched: @worldwise_tweet /KF
• Music is a ritual, not black dots on a sheet of staff. Cultural musicologist Christopher Small dies at 84. //MT
• Not quite the Wild Boy of Aveyron, but this is still pretty weird… //MT
• The anthropology of slum life: a round up of links to new research on life in extreme poverty. //MT
• New Disney resort in Hawaii will have a native culture theme. Irony ensues. //MT
• Piled Higher and Deeper now a feature film, limited engagement at a student union near you. //MT
• Duke U marks 25 years since the publication of “Writing Culture”. //MT
• Roy Boney’s Special Graphic Feature: “How the Cherokee Syllabary Went from Parchment to iPad” /KF
• How long before every course needs its own video trailer? /KF
• “The Third World debt crisis has come home to us” – David Graeber on ‘Occupy Wall Street’ /KF
• Charley the Australopithecine hunts and gathers his way through the Great Recession. //MT
• Cathy Lutz talks to anthropologyworks about Brown U’s “The Costs of War” report. //MT
• College admissions officers increasingly interested in admitting students who pay full price. //MT
• I can haz Masters? London School of Economics grad writes thesis on LOLcats. //MT
• Jane Goodall on “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”. //MT
• Loic Wacquant on neoliberalism and the prison industrial complex. //MT
• Neoliberalism as self-licking ice cream cone. //MT
• Racializing Discourses: A special issue of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (free) /KF
• Using aerial drones for archaeological survey. //MT
• Update on culturomics the quant. study of words in publishing — Psst, here’s my old post //MT
• Princeton U. will prevent researchers from giving the copyright of scholarly articles to journal publishers /KF
• Anthropology looks kinda marginalized in graphic mapping interdisciplinary citations. //MT
• RT @sramsay: Academics should stop doing peer review for non-open access journals. /KF
• Prehistoric children painted in caves too. //MT
• Museum of Children’s Art backs out of exhibit of works by Palestinian children. //MT
• The evolution of too big to fail: a graphic history of bank mergers. //MT

• Cool maps made from geolocation tags in Flickr and Twitter posts. //MT
• Pamthropologist gets grouchy over mandatory teacher training. //MT
• J. Edgar Hoover kept close tabs on commie-jew, Claude Levi-Strauss. //MT
• The next financial bubble: student loans. //MT
• James Gleick: How Google Dominates Us (round up of several new books) //RM
• Self-publish your thesis! /KF
• “The thing about Chinese people is that they are always telling you what the thing about Chinese people is.” //MT
• Linguistic Moments in the Movies, Part VII /KF
• The Endangered Alphabets Project /KF
• Living Anthropologicaly on the future of cultural relativism, defends NYT op-ed about DSK and immigrants in US. //MT
• Won’t somebody please think of the children! A Facebook-is-making-kids-self-obsessed parody via Mind Hacks. //MT
• Drought in FLA uncovers 100 ancient dugout canoes. //MT
• Alternative methods of citation on Wikipedia for less-documented languages. /via @zunguzungu /KF
• Buddhist monks mark Wheel Turning Day, purchase 600lbs of live Maine lobsters & release them into the Atlantic. //MT
• Zunguzungu has compiled a very handy digest of analysis and reporting about the credit downgrade. //MT
• How does the US credit downgrade compare to other nations credit? This map shows S&P ratings around the world. //MT
• Romancing the PhD: when men feel threatened by smart women with credentials. //MT
• Somatosphere weighs in on the Horn of Africa famine with analysis and links. //MT
• ‘Hobbit’ just a deformed human? /KF
• Drug Dealers May Have Wiped Out “Uncontacted” Amazon Tribe /KF
• New study reverses a decade of research claiming chimpanzee selfishness /KF
• Anthropology of Facebook is an antidote to moral panic and trend peices — more here. //MT
• Children are learning indigenous language and culture in the heart of Bogota, Columbia. //MT
• Russell Brand’s op-ed on the UK riots is, perhaps unexpectedly, intelligent and acerbic. //MT
• The annotated apocalypse: Anthropologists tackle 2012 /KF
• Special issue of Qualitative Sociology: Ethics Beyond the IRB /RM
• Cosmetic surgery’s moral imperative in Brazil prompts reconsideration of the market’s relation to citizenship //MT
• RT @kmlawson: The Digital Humanities Are Already on Kickstarter /KF
• A revealing and somewhat unsettling photo essay “Where Children Sleep” //MT
• Early success using facial recognition software on photos of chimps. //MT
• RT @jonahlehrer: Why Are Scientific Retractions Increasing? /KF
• Meet the exorcist schoolgirls who travel the world casting out demons. //MT
• David Graeber on Doug Henwood’s radio show: Behind the News. /KF
• Study finds positive statistical association between austerity measures and unrest. /KF
• Law&Disorder: Frontline, ProPublica, Times-Picayune collaborative investigation on police Katrina shootings //MT
• Article about G. Bateson & art in the Guardian /via @danlatorre /KF
• Marshall Sahlins on Iraq: The State-of-Nature Effect. An OA article from Anth Today /RM
• The 400 richest families could buy everyone in the US (fill in the blank) //MT
• Bid to rename Homo Sapiens called unwise. //MT
• White supremacy keeps growing in Montana. Anyone want to slip them some subversive art? //MT
• “unacceptable” – Association of Black Women Historians critical of The Help. //MT
• The camera that supposedly changed the world /KF
• Education and the Structural Crisis of Capital /KF
• Psychologist discovers that the rich are generally more selfish than others. //MT
• Poynter: witty tweets get people to click on links, tweets that read like headlines generate more retweets. //MT
• A theory of junk drawers – book reviews at Material World: “Paraphernalia” and “Islands of Privacy”. //MT
• Paul Gilroy on the UK riots: militarized state, information flows, comparisons to 1981, immigration, &more. //MT
• RT @CliftonWiens: Homo erectus as sailors? /KF
• Its like “I (heart) Huckabees” in real life: philosophical counseling. A use for degrees in applied philosophy //MT
• Roman wreck full of wine jars found off the coast of Albania. //MT
• Exhibit showcases the influence of Japanese woodcut tradition on Inuit artists. //MT
• Mothers and whores: ex-pornstar turns to performance art, is shamed for nursing her infant dressed as Marilyn. //MT
• RT @Ememqut01: Berenstain Bears will soon be speaking Lakota /KF
• Afrika/Afrique/Africa – tribal art showcase in Vienna. //MT
• Bird intelligence and problem solving compares favorably with primates in some instances. //MT
• George Monbiot: Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist /KF
• RT @acorsin “unpaid non-cash costs of peer review… by academics is £1.9 bn globally each year” [PDF] p.19 /KF

If you’re not the tweeting type, the twitter feed is reproduced on our Facebook page, which you can join by ‘liking’ Savage Minds. And both the Twitter and Facebook accounts automatically post when a new article shows up here on Savage Minds. For those of you who do neither… you’ve got a lot of nerve. Here’s a digest version of what we were reading in the month of July:

• AAA Abstracts Revisited, Being a Instance of Advocacy for Using the HathiTrust /KF
• The new Princeton Review rankings are out, including the cheeky ones. Where’s your alma mater on the “Reefer Madness” scale? (#9) //MT
• Pamthropologist gets grouchy over mandatory teacher training. //MT
• Cool maps made from geolocation tags in Flickr and Twitter posts. //MT
• Getting old changes your sense of the consequences of your actions, but dont let that become a judgement passed //MT
• Obama “has been moderately conservative to exactly the same degree that Nixon was moderately liberal” //MT
• Bangladesh: Indigenous or Not Indigenous, That Is The Question /KF
• Nisha Sondhe’s photos from Mumbai and New York compare and contrast life in the two cities. /KF
• DOJ report: local and county jails are 61% occupied by those awaiting trail. Only 39% of inmates convicted. //MT
• Google+ runs afoul of Aborigines over naming system. Is the mandatory first name and surname rule Eurocentric?
• Apparently there’s a lot more history and cultural context to cheerleading than I had assumed. //MT
• Not unusual for Sociological Images posts to critique advertising. But this one goes from Goffman to Charcot! //MT
• The Textile Museum grows through its association with George Washington University. //MT
• Community service and the transformation of the modern history and art museum. //MT
• A quick tour of the world’s best privately owned art museums. //MT
• Eagle Scout founds summer camp for kid atheists. //MT
• Language Log has some hilarious and subversive design you’ve got see. Wonder what the rest of the story is… //MT
• MALDEF sues school: teacher harassed child for wearing a Mexico futbol jersey. //MT
• The anthropology of debt: we’ve been borrowing longer than you think. //MT
• Two chefs enter the NMAI but only one leaves victorious in a climactic battle to serve beans, corn, and squash. //MT
• Muscogee tourists visit Washington, DC, and reflect on their ambivalent relationship to US history. //MT
• Check out the trailer for Cronenberg’s upcoming pic on Freud and Jung! //MT
• Conversation on Diane Rehm Show follows the latest on contraceptives, women’s health, and health care debate. //MT
• 34% of single birth deliveries in the US are C-section (2009), an all time high. WHO thinks 15% is adequate. //MT
• Commentary from Salon on Bebe Gloton, the breast feeding baby doll. Fox News isn’t ready for play lactation. //MT
• The future of race in America: more like Brazil? //MT
• Latina moms: next in line for the Oprah treatment? Cha-ching! //MT
• Thousands of immigrant children picking the fields in CA. Think of that next time you’re in the produce aisle. //MT
• Hispanics are increasingly comfortable calling themselves Indians. //MT
• On the view of Ciudad Juarez from El Paso: the fear of violence is the strongest fence. //MT
• Duke medical neurobiologist: Coke addiction relies on the same genes as natural salt craving. //MT
• Partners In Health needs skilled tradespeople in Haiti, ASAP. Expenses paid. Sound like someone you know? //MT
• Multispecies Salon exhibit explores our tangled relationship with other species at CUNY in midtown Manhattan. //MT
• Gillian Tett on Ireland financial crisis. //MT
• Don’t just sit there watching TED talks. Apply for one of 20 TED fellowships and finally give one! //MT
• The Nation: Clinton Foundation’s shoddy shelters in Haiti have turned toxic like FEMA trailers. //MT
• Shenanigans? Video of PNG tribe’s first contact with the outside world roundly decried as fake. //MT
• The quipu: barcode of the Inca. A quick overview from Slate with updates on current research. //MT
• “Beautiful Data: The Art of Science Fieldnotes” /RG
• Archaeologists on pipeline from Chad to Cameroon crank out 472 new sites, 100k years of history over 1000 km. //MT
• Paul Farmer on NPR’s Fresh Air. //MT
• Before you start that online social network research on Facebook or forums, better get an IRB. //MT
• Center for Public Anthropology gets a nonsuch website, announces contest winders. RG
• Behold! The mother f**king elements of style. //MT
• Latino war vet shot 60 times by Arizona SWAT in home invasion. //MT
• Icelanders take to the streets to bring bankers to justice. //MT
• PeopleMove.in visualizes the world’s migration patterns /KF
• Anthropologist Marc Moskowitz interviewed on Taiwan’s Electric Flower Car and funeral strippers. //MT
• First person account of masturbating inside an MRI (for science). Fun fact – MRI’s are not sexy in the least. //MT
• David Price’s new book, Weaponizing Anthropology. /KF
• PressForward, an open source, grey matter publishing platform fom GMU (the folks behind Zotero and Omeka). /KF
• Fascinating archaelogist/anthropologist/media critic Edmund Carpenter dies /KF
• Bioanth Kate Clancy blogs for Sci-American, calls for reframing how we talk about the body and menstruation. //MT
• Give a camera to a monkey and what do you get? Self-portraits. //MT
• Surgical bomb implants – a new front in the War on Terror? //MT
• The Primate Diaries Has Moved to Scientific American /KF
• Sit in on Michigan State Egyptian archaeology class, for free. /KF
• Anthropologist Nandini Sundar wins landmark case before Indian Supreme Court. /KF
• Alabama teen faces life in prison for miscarriage. //MT
• Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory /KF

PS. If you’ve found something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community, just email me mdthomps AT odu.edu. Sorry, we don’t do CFP’s.

See you in the Twitterverse!

• Psychology Prof. John Michael Bailey organized a optional outside of class lecture for his Human Sexuality class that concluded with a live sex act using a toy to demonstrate female ejaculation. This generated a bit of media attention, both the NYT and the BBC picked it up, prompting bloggers to leave first hand accounts of what really took place. The President of Northwestern was embarrassed. Prof. Bailey stood by the educational value of the demonstration but also apologized and said he would never do it again.

Women and Islam

• Max Forte starts off this post critiquing the Western imaginary of non-Western women, in particular “the liberation of women” discourse that has circulated around the current American wars, with a brilliant quote by anthropologists Cathy Lutz and Jane Collins. More links follow about representations of Muslim women in popular culture, sexual assault in Tahrir Square, and the culture of rape in the U.S. military.

Marriage in India and the United States

• The payment of dowries was banned in 1961 but remains a commonplace practice in contemporary India. The Independent reports that the dowry is at the heart of what in the U.S. would be termed “culture wars” as the Indian government contemplates amending the legislation.
• According to a recent Time/ Pew poll, marriage has become a prestige commodity, “the relationship equivalent of a luxury yacht” and thus an unrealistic goal for many people. A savvy post at Brainstrom matched links from the mainstream media reacting to the poll – many read it as a about the “decline” of marriage – with commentary that recognizes the massive and ongoing structural change that has reshaped how Americans do work and friendship.

It Gets Better

• Dan Savage made a name for himself with his kinky, political, and frequently hilarious sex advice column, Savage Love, which has spawned a bevvy of internet memes and catchy acronyms like GGG, DTMFA, and, of course, Santorum. Now there is the “It Gets Better Project” which has quickly evolved into something of a movement in which adults address video messages to queer youth that the struggles of growing up can be overcome! Dan and his husband-in-Canada/ boyfriend-in-the-United-States Terry Miller gave a fantastic interview on NPR’s Fresh Air promoting “It Gets Better,” which has now come out as a book.
• Also on the LGBT front, Two Spirits, is a PBS documentary about the hate-crime death of Navajo teen Fred Martinez.
• Enjoy this absolutely incredible performance from Thailand’s Got Talent (I love the big hug at the end):

Beauty

• Meet Sandra Dubose-Gibson, Mrs. Black North Carolina who, diagnosed with alopecia from age 25, is totally bald. Hat tip to Racialicious, from whom I steal links all the time.
• Book review – Pretty Modern, an ethnography of beauty, race, and plastic surgery in Brazil.
• Oprah talks to Lea T, a transgender supermodel for Givenchy who has appeared in French Vogue and is becoming one of the most sought after models in the industry.

Sex and Performance

• In Quebec an administrative assistant at a local high school was suspended when it was discovered (by a male student) that she was also a porn star. A harsher fate for a psych professor who was fired for appearing in burlesque act. Thank you Gawker, this is why you exist!
• A contributor to the Ms. Magazine blog remembers a short-lived career stripping on Bourbon Street. The transformative experience wasn’t shaving her legs or wearing pasties, it coming off the stage to serve drinks to the customers.
• The NYT reports that on the popularity of Japanese porn stars in Indonesian domestic films. Even though the performers leave their clothes on their very presence in the country brings negative attention from Islamists and production companies must operate under secrecy or else be subject to protest or vigilante action.

Representing Women in Popular Culture

• Sociological Images links to a short video critiquing female characters in video games. Another one presents an awesome music video, “Do it like a Dude”, that plays around with gender imagery and language.

Violence

• Another from Sociological Images:

Seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Email me at mdthomps AT odu.edu.

BRAAAAIINSS!!!

• The phenomenon of Alien Hand Syndrome: after doctors cut her corpus callosum to treat her epilepsy a patient finds that her left hand often acts against her will. “I’d light a cigarette, balance it on an ashtray, and then my left hand would reach forward and stub it out.” She was featured in the BBC series, The Brain: A Secret History.
• Anthropology in Practice takes a pinch of folklore mixes a little evolutionary psychology and stirs in a heaping helping of Disney World.

 
“Come to my senses sometimes”

• Book review – Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Pain and Experience in Yap, an in-depth ethnographic study of the experience of physical pain.
• Metaphor shapes our perception of reality – portraying crime as a virus plaguing a city leads people to call for social reform, describing it as a beast preying on the city leads people to call for tougher law enforcement.
• Philosopher Alva Noe favors a view of consciousness as embodied cognition. “Consciousness is not something that happens in us. It is something we do.”
• Book review – High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture.

 
Artificial Intelligence

• NYT on the Jeapordy trouncing computer Watson. Mind Hacks has the run down.
• In the Atlantic linguist Ben Zimmer, for one, welcomes out new computer overlords. More links here.

 
Politics of Language

• Language Log writes on the deliberate affectation of a Southern accent in Republican Presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty. There’s a follow up here.
• In my General Anthropology class I used selections from this PBS series, “Do you speak American?”. I might write up a full review on it at a later date.

 
An Evolutionary Perspective

• Primatology. net on the Vervet Monkey, which is known to produce predator-specific alarm calls. Here’s the second part of that entry.

 
Wor(l)d History

• Does Language Log even know what they are talking about? Contemporary use of the word “even” reflects 16th Century origins.
• BBC on the spread of “OK” as documented by Allan Metcalf in OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word. Incidentally I had a professor in grad school who held that the word “okay” was African in origin.

 
Language on the Internet

• A cross-cultural investigation of Smileys – not all emoticons are the same.
• Check out the new online magazine, Popular Linguistics.
• How much do you use your office phone? Dean Dad wonders whether they’ll go the way of the typewriter.

 
“This year Halloween fell on a weekend”
 

Seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds communtiy? Email your links to mdthomps AT odu.edu

Best of Media/Anthropology:

• John Postill has a lot to say about social networks. Like why Twitter is best as a human-mediated RSS feed.
• He’s also thrown together an annotated bibliography on researching social networks.
• Could it be that the anthropology of the internet is the second coming of culture-at-a-distance?

The digital family

• Material World explores the intertwining of family relationships and digital practices.
• Apophenia is a great blog about social media, youth and parenting.

Social media and social change

• We’ve heard about the role of Twitter and Facebook in the Middle East rebellions, has anyone seen anything connecting social media to the disaster in Japan?
• Indigenous youths in Taiwanare using social media to make their voices heard.
• Anthropology in Practice reports on tweeting from the homeless. And gamer site Kotaku reports on a video game designed to teach you about living in poverty.

The internet and religion

• Pope Benedict weighs in on social networking. In related news, the Church has approved an iPhone confession app.
• NYT reports on live-streaming of funerals for far flung families unable to travel.

Cultural diversity online

• Researchers at Carneige Mellon find that regional variation in American English is manifest in tweets.

Whither anthropology in the digital age?

• Daniel Lende, in a wide ranging post about the “science” debate in anthropology and the recent response, published in Nature, from Adam Kuper and Johnathan Marks offers up a vision of anthropology: major changes to traditions of the dissemination of knowledge – open access and blogging.
• Ethnografix has an appreciation of Lende’s post and offers an interesting idea too: how about a online anthropology publication modeled after literary magazine The Sun?
• Another model might be First Monday, a peer-reviewed online journal about the internet (h/t Material World).
• For more interesting ideas check out this recent Wednesday Round Up from Neuroanthropology which has a neat section heading on online anthropology.

Seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Email your links to mdthomps AT odu.edu.

The writing process

• Lifehacker explains why you learn more effectively by writing longhand than typing.

Teaching writing

• A neat little exercise to get your students to write a tight, concise precis.
• Directed writing can improve every student’s performance. Even in physics!

Words of affirmation

• A little coaching from the Chronicle’s Brainstorm blog lifted my spirits. It’s a quickly little ditty on what you really need to write. All the time I tell myself I need childcare to write or at least peace and quiet, but look I’m writing this while my third child lies next to me on the couch smashing her foot into my face, demanding “Can I ha’ more?”
• Got writer’s block? You’re closer to creativty than you think! Read: How to have ideas.

Publishing

• Science-fiction blog io9 forsees a publishing world of 2021 where e-books have taken over and book retailers are doomed. I wonder where this will leave textbooks in ten years?
• More io9: How to publish your book on Amazon Kindle. Your work can be available for sale on Amazon in 24-48 hours. Why do we need academic presses again? Oh yeah, peer review.
• The blog Anthropologi considers the possibility of combining publishing formats: conventional book and web download.

Writing for a broad audience

• John Hawks on good science writing and the beneficial role it plays in the production of new knowledge.
• Ever want to start your own anthropology blog? Here are some tips.

In memoriam

• Alison Snow Jones who blogged as Maxine Udall, girl economist, recently passed away. Ethnografix has an appreciation that is, dare I say, right on the money.

Got some tips on why a raven is like a writing desk? Send ‘em to me at mdthomps AT odu.edu.

Working and productivity

• For those of you on the job market, Dean Dad has some sage advice on how to read salary ranges. “Published salary ranges bear almost no relationship to what a new hire can actually expect to get.”
• If you’re like me and easily distracted by bright, shiny objects check out this Google Chrome App for managing your access to the internet while you’re working.

Public or popular anthropology?

• One thing I’ve been considering lately is how the recent calls for “public” anthropology can over lap with the “popular.” Anthropology.net talks to Jane Goodall about what makes good, popular science writing.

“Science,” again

• BBC World Service covers the increasingly prominent role of litigation and libel in scientific and medical discourse and the potential threat it poses to the criticism of scientific papers necessary to the scientific method.
• Peter Peregrine of the Society for Anthropological Sciences and Hugh Gusterson of the AAA Executive Board take to the airwaves to discuss the role of science in anthropology in light of the ongoing debate over the changes to the AAA long-range plan in this radio broadcast.
• Fear not! “science” will undoubtedly return to the AAA’s long-range plan. So says Hugh Gusterson in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. So that’s all settled then. Right?

Urban Geography

• Detroit’s Mayor David Bing announces that the city is on track to successfully demolish 3,000 homes in one year. Bing’s goal is to remove 10,000 homes by 2013.
• A Gaurdian photo gallary of “Detroit in Ruins.”
• Multispecies ethnography: A review of the new book “Pigeon Trouble: Bestiary Biopolitics in a Deindustrialized America” by anthropologist Hoon Song.

Maps

• Check out this cool map based on 1860 census data on slave populations. By shading the southern counties to represent the proportion of the population that is enslaved (a new technique at the time, we are told) the reader can identify some clear patterns on slave population density.
• Also from Sociological Images, a national map of U.S. accents based on research collected in the Atlas of North American English. Not represented on this map: Black Vernacular English.
• Slate also ran a stunning map on “food deserts” in the United States, identifying communities without easy access to grocery stores. However, due to the fact that this map is on a national scale inner city food deserts are obscured.

Huckleberry Finn

• Earlier this month there was a scuffle over the publication of a new edition of Huckleberry Finn with the word “nigger” replaced with “slave”, “Injun” replaced with “Indian”, and “half-breed” with “half-blood.” It provoked considerable debate over the value of the editor’s motives – to make Twain’s classic more accessible – as opposed to the whitewashing of history. Racialicious collects links and quotes on the controversy here.
• Also this month the new Congress was sworn in and the 2011 legislative season begun. The new House majority marked the occasion with a ceremonial reading of the Constitution, but leaving out references to slavery and other passages superseded by amendments. A practice Slate directly related to the new edition of Huckleberry Finn.

Language

• Mind Hacks provides a digest of links on the Pirahã language, a subject of contentious debate among linguists.

Human Terrain System

• One out of work anthropologist gives his perspective on working for the HTS. In this extended field report the author gives a first hand account of completing the HTS training.
• HTS gets the Supernormal treatment

Economics and corporate ethnography

• Dean Dad reflects on “mature industries” and the potential for growth in the academic market when most new jobs today are being created by start-ups.
• Maxine Udall starts this blog post off with an must-read historical quote from an 8 year old girl on working in the coal mines.
• A long post on Ethnography.com on the recalcitrance of peasants to enter into global capitalism and the insufficiency of economic models to understand their self-sufficiency.
• The link above goes hand in hand with this new edited volume, The Human Economy.
• An anthropologist reflects on his five years at Intel and his reasons for leaving the company.

Seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Send an email to mdthomps AT odu.edu.

Twins!

• The International Culture and Cognition blog reports on ultrasonography research which argues that, in utereo, twins show actions directed at their co-twin, furthering debate on whether human tendencies towards social interaction are present even before birth.
• The Hero Twins: Against the Lords of Death, a comic book based on Mayan mythology

Kids say the darndest things

• Society for Linguistic Anthropology links to two NYT artices, one on the latest research on baby babbling the other testing whether very young children can understand irony.
• Language Log responds to a NYT piece on linguist Deborah Tannen’s current research on why having a sister makes you happy.

Early development

• Time reports on recent psychological research that shows a direct relationship between affection given to very young children and the display of kindness by those chidlren later in life.
• Slate emplores you to make sure those kiddie get plenty of playtime on their tummies. “A growing body of evidence now suggests that the timing of the motor-skill milestones that precede walking is crucial and can even factor into long-term health and cognitive ability.”

Youth education

• Sociological Images questions whether boys receive less sex education than girls.
• Here’s a program that seems ripe for anthropological study: bringing babies into the classroom to teach teens compassion.

Health

• Somatosphere reviews the latest issue of Transcultural Psychiatry a special issue on “Child and community mental health in cultural perspective.”
• Mind Hacks reveals that a major textbook for doctors on treating mental illness in children authored by two prominent psychologists was, in fact, ghost written. By a drug company.

Parenting

• A new documentary, “No Woman, No Cry”, focuses on the difficulties pregnant women face in acquiring quality health-care in Tanzania, Bangladesh, Guatemala, and the United States.
• Anthropologist Bambi Chapin has co-edited a special issue of the journal Ethos on “Mothering as everyday practice”

Seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Email me at mdthomps AT odu.edu

• Full coverage of the wording of the AAA mission statement and the place of “science” in anthropology can be found at Neuroanthropology where Daniel Lende has collected fifteen links (and growing) on the subject alongside his own opinions. He’s been doing a good job of updating the link list as more blogs respond to the AAA’s actions, so if its been a while since you checked his page check again.

Don’t forget the ethics code!

• While a lot of blogging energy has gone into the “science” kerfluffle, comparatively little posting has been done on the revision of the ethics code outside of the AAA’s own blog. Inside Higher Ed, while leading with a ridiculous example, did at least muster some coverage of this important issue.

Teaching ethnography

• If you’re an adjunct like me you might be pigeonholed into a limited repetoir of textbook focused intro courses in a sociology department. I’d like to get my students reading more about other cultures rather than just giving them what Haviland or Kottak say culture is. This means getting them to read ethnography, something they don’t already know how to do. Here’s some helpful tips I found on teaching reading.

Whither the future of citations?

• Ethnografix blogs here on the perception by some that citing sources is a rather stuffy, old fashioned practice. It seems that at least once a year I bust a student for plagiarism and its been argued that young people, schooled in the conventions of sampling, pop culture references, and mash-up culture, experience a kind of cognitive dissonance at the very notion of giving proper credit. As the recent Cook’s Source row has shown, even some more mature writers see the contemporary internet scene as an environment where anything goes.

Republicans have feelings too

• In this short essay, an anonymous author and self described conservative cynically recounts his attempt to improve his teaching evaluations when his liberal colleagues conspire to fire him after tenure based on the scores. There’s a lot of moving parts here and the author seems to relish being an asshole, but the upshot of the whole thing is a purported direct relationship between grade inflation and evaluation inflation. There’s probably some truth to that.

Ain’t got nothin’ but love, babe

• Who couldn’t use an extra day in the week? It always seems that I don’t have the time to get done what I need to get done, but then I’m like the opposite of a Type A personality. Prof. Hacker, in this review of “168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think,” suggests you can find the time to get things done by keeping a time diary. So, in the interest of efficiency you might just read the review instead of the book.

Can adjuncts move up?

• Academia has the distinction of being a field where starting at the bottom, working hard, doing a good job, and being a amiable colleague will get you nowhere. Does a part-timer have a better chance over the competition to move up to a full-time position at the same school? Not necessarily, writes Dean Dad.

On making it outside academe

• Susan Basalla May, co-author of “So what are you going to do with that?” a quite helpful book on leaving the academy, interviewed anthropologist John Fox on his zigzagging career path. Fox, “Much as I’d like to pretend it’s been the unfolding of some great master plan, the truth is, it’s come about through a combination of pursuing interests, seizing opportunities, and being pragmatic about making a living.”
• Another Chronicle piece on anthropologists, focusing on the changes nonacademic professionals are bringing to the AAA. This one’s behind the pay wall so if you don’t subscribe you’ll have to go through your library’s website.

For profits

• We’ve been kicking the for profit schools around quite a bit here on Around the Web. Muckraker and gossipmonger blog Gawker finds that even though these schools have been accused of fraud, subjected to increased scrutiny from the Feds, and might lose their access to federal loan programs if Obama has his way, the National Security Administration still gives its employees paid time off to attend them.

Timewaster

• The loneliness of the long-distance exoplanet anthropologist.

Seen something around the web you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Email your links to mdthomps AT odu.edu.