It is really a pleasure to be called “bright, engaged and [especially these days] young”. SM has been maturing over time and I think the unstable salad mix of career goals that created the blog has slowly separated out into the oil of a career outside the academy and the vinegar of life inside the ivory tower. Increasingly for many of us Savage Minds has become ’something we are guilty we do not spend time on now that we have a career’. We are looking to take a producer’s credit on this one — if you’d like to do Public Anthropology in this space… let us know!

I’m glad that we are getting some recognition but I feel a little leery about being labeled ‘public anthropology’ since I think public anthropology is an activity that a) a small group of people have always been doing and b) a thing a much larger group of people constantly talk about doing but never get around to doing –as if just talking about it were enough. I’m hoping my Warcraft book will be ‘public’ — even ‘popular’ — but I can’t really claim to have done a lot of actual anthropology in public, although I do spend a lot of time going on about it.

If you care, however, let me state some theses, or better, hypotheses, about what public anthropology could and should be based on my experience at Savage Minds:

We are the bar at the conference, not the conference

It is the informal discussion that makes conferences interesting, not the presentations. We aim to be that informal conversation.

Public Anthropology is not simplified anthropology, it is good anthropology

I’ve often heard it said that anthropologists must learn to reduce, simplify, water-down, etc. their work if they want outsiders to read it. The assumption seems to be that 1) you know what the public wants and 2) you have a pretty low opinion of them (or alternately, a good dose of self-hatred at the obfuscation inherent in your discipline).

SM has always operated on an opposite set of principles. We’ve argued that

1) we do what we want to do for ourselves and for the work. This seems to be working ok for us so far.

2) People want the real thing. Just because you’re not a professor of anthropology doesn’t mean that you aren’t interested in anthropology like the real deal anthropology, not some fake-o anthropology. It’s insulting to tell readers we will give them simplified snippets of our work but hide the real thing behind a pay-for-content firewall. People tune in because they want to be dealt in. Public anthropology gives them a place at the table, not a view of the game from the back of the room.

3) Anthropologists like well-written pieces that are insightful and to the point just the same way that normal people do. I hear people often complain that they must write obtuse, jargon-laden prose to be successful as an academic. Really? Which one have you read more often, “Balinese Cockfight” or Kinship in Bali? Is it really the quantitative analysis or the sterling prose that drives people to read “The original affluent society”? Where is the jargon-laden theoretical prose in In Search of Respect? I admit there are authors like Foucault and Appadurai whose prose seems stylish to anthropologists and occult to others. But let’s face it, anthropologists  don’t need to write differently for a public audience, they need to write better for all of their audiences.

In sum, I think what non-anthropologists want to read is good anthropology. Is that really that surprising?

Recovering from Darcy syndrome

For years anthropologists have been caught in a dilemma: our work is so relevant, so important to today’s world and yet so few people want to read it. How can we make them see the truth? This sort of attitude reminds me of certain evangelical Christians who think that the reason Jews haven’t joined the one true church is that somehow over the past nineteen centuries we’ve somehow just never heard about Jesus. Let’s call this ‘Darcy syndrome’  — the idea that we are the most perfect companion to the public’s Elizabeth Bennett and they just haven’t realized it yet because they’ve been swept off their feet by the twin Wickhams of rational choice theory and sociobiology.

But are we Darcy, or Wiggins? Anthropologists need to take a step back and start assuming that the public knows something about us that we don’t.  We must not turn popularizing anthropology into a merely technical problem, the literary equivalent of those scary “how to seduce women through hypnosis” books that Amazon tells you you are interested in because you’ve also purchased some Foucault. Real relationship, healthy relationships, involve listening.

What if we stopped assuming that people needed to know what we wanted to tell them and attempted to disprove our hypothesis: if we recast the narrative of public anthropology as one in which we were totally superfluous, how much violence would this reading do to the ethnographic facts before us?

I’ve gone on for a while, but I think you get the point: in my opinion (which is just my opinion) public anthropology is good anthropology which is sensitive to its audience. It is something we ourselves would like to read, and something we can recognize as our own. And above all, it is something that we need to stop talking about and start doing. Good luck!

If the field wants more attention from the press, here are some ideas:

1) Hire good science writers to write and distribute press releases. Believe me, there are plenty of quality science writers looking for work. Journals could easily pay a few of them to write press releases on the top two or three papers per issue. Current Anthropology does this and I’m grateful for the service. Not many journalists (probably almost zero) read the primary anthro journals, let alone secondary journals in the field. We need to be led to the fountain.

* “good science writers” might include all those anthropology MAs and PhDs who didn’t end up going into academia for whatever reason. There are a lot of people on this blog alone who just enjoy keeping up with anthropology and who might have the skills to do just this. unfortunately, the part about hiring them seems pretty unlikely. Editors of AAA journals aren’t even paid, to say nothing of science writers. So this task falls to us (see #4 below) and if I were editor of a journal, I would make it a priority to find people willing to do this task on a volunteer basis–or maybe for a free subscription if they happen to be unaffiliated? If Current Anthropology can do it, why can’t the AAA?

2) Post those press releases on Eurekalert.org, which is run by AAAS, and on other services science reporters scan for news, such as Newswise.

* this seems like a no-brainer. But upon looking, the only alerts are from Current Anthropology. In order to post an alert you need to be a “public information officer” for an organization of some kind. Does the AAA even have a “Public Information Officer”? A subscription to Eurekalert? I might be willing to renew my membership to the AAA if I knew some of the money went to hiring science writers to promote our research on sites like Eurekalert.

3) When preparing press releases, try to relate the work to current events. Make it relevant.

* I would return here again to my point about temporality. Anthropologists work slowly, but that can be an advantage. It means that a longer term sense of what counts as “relevant” and how to connect current problems that seem new to long-standing structural and cultural transformations is a great way to do exactly what Brian suggests. Just because our work analyzes a time and period that is now outside of the current news-cycle attention span does not mean that it cannot be made relevant to what’s going on today. Figuring out how to stake this claim is intellectually challenging work, not just publicity pandering.

4) If you have the aptitude and inclination to write for a popular audience, DO. Write and submit opinion pieces for national newspapers, Nature, Scientific American, and Science. We read these. New Scientist and Scientific American and Scientific American Mind run articles written by researchers (usually they are heavily edited). It’s cheap labor for magazines to do this, and more and more of them are probably heading in that direction.

* I’m not sure I fully agree with this one. On the one hand, those who can and want to should, and will. On the other hand, maybe it only means talking with someone who does like to write for a popular audience about current research, or sending alerts to those who do like to write such things. If I got an email box full of eurekalerts about recent research in cultural anthro, I might read some and write about some on SM. As it stands, I just have an email box full of requests to review such research, which means I can’t write about it, even if it’s interesting. I’d be happy to trade in half my peer review requests for “publicize it” requests. The fact that very few of the leading lights of cultural anthropology deign to do exactly such a thing cannot be good for our business.

– Prepare for some disappointment. Yes, some journalists will get it wrong. Sometimes you won’t like our pithy language or our need to strip away the caveats and get to the heart of the issue. Well, that’s the price of admission.

* well said, sir brian. Indeed, if obscurity and widespread public ignorance of anthropology is what we want, we’ve already got that in spades, so we can feel free to ignore these suggestions and happily avoid any disappointment.

– Let me say it again. FIND WAYS TO MAKE YOUR WORK RELEVANT. What does it tell us about something happening now that’s important to large groups of people? What currency does the work have? I once wrote about some studies of infanticide in baboons – and the researcher was willing to draw inferences about human behavior from his work. That made the work newsworthy and interesting.

* and let me say it again: cultural anthropology has a different temporality than journalism, even though they often cover very similar topics. So the art of “making it relevant” is also the art of seeing cultural change and significance at different scales, connecting the just-forgotten with the all-too-present. A lot of what cultural anthropology has to offer is the re-framing of persistently polarized debates. Ours is not a logic of discovery, but one of assertion and reorientation.

Increased productivity
Although we both have very different careers – Pál being a full-time university professor and Joana being a „free-lance anthropolgist“ and running an internet start-up – we have (in addition to many single-authored works) over the last 10 years written dozens of articles and three books together, as well as devised e-learning courses and workshops. One of the reasons for our large output has been that we were able to cover very different audiences in a few strokes. Not only has nearly all our writing been published in both German and English, we also wrote up different versions, one academic, the other targeting a general audience.

With different audiences in mind and living in different social spheres we had access to a large pool of research ideas, thus Pál made us study the lifeworlds of Soviet theoretical physicists and Chinese migrants in Eastern Europe and Italy, whereas Joana got us into the comparative study of mass tourism and pushed our exploration of the pervasive uses of culture outside of anthropology, which would eventually lead to Maxikulti and Seeing Culture Everywhere. Pál was sceptical at first – is this academic enough? Is this interesting enough? – but never regretted having been persuaded. Not all of our ventures ended up in serious research or writing – trips to a monastery in Serbia and to a Mennonite farm in Belize yielded only titbits and a trip to the Turkish coast to study Russian tourists, only a car accident. But they were all fun.

Reaching a larger audience
With access to different networks, we published in academic journals such as Current Anthropology and  Development and Change, as well as in mainstream German newspapers and magazines, such as business monthly brand eins, Geo and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Writing together also counterbalances our weaknesses: Pál‘s tendency to write too densely and Joana‘s inclination to overgeneralize.

How do you write a book together?
Many people ask: „How does writing together actually work?“ Except for a short while, when Pál was at the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin, we have never lived in the same city. Instead we have met in dozens of different countries. When Pál is doing fieldwork, Joana might join him for a few days to get the feel for the place necessary to write about it. We also travelled to many places together, from Central America via Eastern Europe to Russia and China, doing „fieldwork light“ along the way.

When our writing is not based on detailed fieldwork by Pál, we usually devise an outline together. Then it is Joana’s task to collect and aggregate the relevant theses and case studies, as she – as a generalist — has a better overview of relevant anthropological material. After this we meet (in Budapest, Sydney, Nice,  Berlin or Luang Prabang to name just a few of the places) for two or three weeks of intensive writing, both sitting in front of one laptop, with Joana often proposing a general structure of the argument and Pál argueing against or refining it and coming up with the final formulations. Back in our respective homes Joana starts the first revision, sending it back to Pál for a final edit. Thus it is a real joint venture and we feel that very few, if any of our output could have been written by one of us a alone.

And last but not least, one of the main rewards for co-authorship is the fun and inspiration we get from working together.

But one thing I don’t hear people say is that we need more “Anthropology Journalism.” I mean that primarily on analogy with (or as a subset of) science journalism. It is a very rare experience to open up the Tuesday NY Times and see an article about recent research in anthropology–to say nothing of rags like scientific american, Wired, Discover or the New Scientist. Of all the “news alerts” I get, or the RSS feeds I browse from journalistic outlets, few to none ever report new findings, controversies, or questions coming out of the discipline. And I get more news alerts and RSS feeds than I could possibly read in ten lifetimes.

Two qualifiers: first, I mean linguistic and cultural anthropology specifically. Archaeology gets some love, though usually only when the findings are narrativized in a story of human origins or change, or when something truly rare is discovered. Biological anthropology gets perhaps a bit less love than archaeology, though certainly more than cultural or linguistic, and only when it is clearly identified with another discipline (evolutionary psychology, behavioral ecology, evolutionary theory, etc). Jared Diamond, it appears, gets the rest of the attention.

Second, it’s not a total lack. A few weeks back the NY Times magazine ran a story about the Americanization of global mental illness. That article had everything good and bad about science journalism going for it: it reported on recent research, digested it and used to to paint a compelling picture, but it also took liberties with the subtlety of the claims to make an overly broad argument in order to be provocative, and to sell more copies of the journalist’s book. A few years back, Dan Everett got a full profile in the New Yorker. Tracy Kidder recently devoted a whole book to Paul Farmer (though interestingly the publicity only refers to him as a doctor, not an anthropologist). And speaking of Haiti, I’ve heard more anthropologists interviewed in the last two weeks than in the whole of 2009. But basically there is no anthropology journalism to speak of. Why not?

There are a few arguments that are always used to explain why there may be science journalism but no anthropology journalism. The harshest of these is that there is simply no interesting (or objective, or reliable, or novel) anthropology to report on. The argument has a Glenn Beck feel to it, suggesting as it does the decline of western civilization and values and the destruction of all that is Good and Right by the scourge of French philosophy, postmodernism and dissolute tenured radicals. Whatever.

Slightly less annoying is the frequent argument that our writing is inaccessible, jargon-laden, pretentious, or needlessly over-written. This argument fails on the simple grounds that most scientific papers are totally inaccessible to a general audience. Science journalism by journalists trained in science is absolutely essential to communicating what the vast majority of things scientists and engineers are up to today. I won’t defend the wealth of bad writing in anthropology, but nor will I defend it in psychology or chemistry or engineering. Have you read a conference paper in computer science lately? Not only is it likely to be totally inscrutable to you non-computer scientists, but it is also very likely to be extremely poorly written, badly punctuated, and generally abusive of the English language–though very prettily formatted using LaTeX

So let me propose three reasons that people don’t usually seem to offer for why there is no anthropology journalism:

1) because there isn’t as much anthropology as there is science to report on.

This strikes me as a basic difference. The simple volume of papers and reports published in most natural science and engineering disciplines absolutely dwarfs the number in anthropology. Each year at the annual neuroscience conference in san diego there are over 20,000 posters and papers. There are less than 8K anthropologists in the AAA total. It seems entirely likely to me that anthropology is being swamped by other information. However, the proportion in science reporting doesn’t seem to mirror the distribution of disciplines in universities, nor the number of students working on PhDs. Certainly it reflects the relative wealth and prestige of some sciences over others. And compared against the humanities generally, instead of the sciences, the argument makes somewhat less sense. There isn’t much “humanities” journalism (Chronicle of Higher Ed notwithstanding) either, but the amount of reporting on the arts, history, literature or music that draws on scholarly work also dwarfs the reporting that draws on anthropology to explain culture.

2) because journalists already do what anthropologists do, only better.

How many of us have not had the experience of reading a really quality piece of investigative journalism in which the journalist has done her homework, traveled to the right places, talked to the right people, and basically explained a phenomenon in terms that suggest there is nothing much more to say? All kinds of things that graduate applicants write in their statements of purpose are likely to appear the following month or year in a magazine or newspaper, artfully done and reaching a far larger audience. Kudos to the journalists who pull this off. But that’s never the end of the story. Three weeks later, anthropologists are still puzzling over the significance of the phenomena reported on, and 5 years later are publishing articles that I think generally do a better job of explaining, rather than reporting, the causes, effects and long historical twists and turns of cultural phenomena. Journalists tend to move on. The temporality of anthropological research far from matches that of journalists, just as it is far slower than many of our colleagues in the natural sciences and engineering. Changing that temporality might require a different approach.. and this, I think, is the third reason for a lack of anthropology journalism:

3) because anthropologists do not report on their research.

Cultural anthropologists have no tradition of publishing articles that simply describe their ongoing or recent research in brief but detailed, relatively standardized forms. Instead, the journal article in cultural anthropology is a mini-book, replete with complex forms of argument and narrative, rich, detailed description and a complete list of references in the literature. Whereas many scientists write a synthetic review article of research in their field once every couple of years, sub-fields of anthropology get one per decade, if that. Whereas a brief article reporting some results in science looks like “findings,” a brief article by an anthropologist describing a bit or recent fieldwork looks paltry and insubstantial.

One result of this is that I honestly have no idea what the vast majority of my colleagues in anthropology are working on until well after they are done doing it, and this is a real failure when it comes to making anthropological research appear fresh. If I were king, or Bill Davis, I would require every researching anthropologist to publish a paragraph describing ongoing research in a AAA publication at least once a year. Such a resource, if done correctly and made freely available would of its own accord change the dynamics of attention to the discipline by outsiders.

3a) because anthropologists’ scholarly societies do not report on their research

A corollary to this reason is that the AAA leadership, editors of journals, and staff of the AAA have done little to innovate these forms of scholarly communication in the last 100 years, to say nothing of the last 10, when they have done nothing more than resist such innovation, sometimes on principle (preserving a tradition of scholarly production focused on monographs, books and critical distance, I suppose), sometimes out of fear and anxiety about the very sustainability of the scholarly enterprise. Contrast this with the aggressive (and to be sure, questionable) shift in the sciences towards models of open access, publicity hounding, interaction with journalists, and repackaging of research in a range of scholarly forms (think Freakonomics). Perhaps in the long run, the traditionalism of the AAA will defend us against the craven onslaught of pecuniary interest and cozy complicity with neo-liberal capitalism. But it will be a lonely 21st century.

The most poignant part of the lack of an anthropology journalism for me is that there are lots of things anthropologists know and understand about the world that few others know. I never feel like I understand what’s happening in the world when I listen to NPR, however good their reporting. Sometimes I feel a bit more informed by a New Yorker or Atlantic article. But I always walk away from quality anthropology with a sense that my brain has been rewired and that I now know better why things are happening the way they are… surely journalism can amplify that effect rather than dampen it?

By Dai Cooper.
Lyrics after the jump.

UPDATE: Lorenz interviews Dai Cooper

Hey Mom & Dad, I’ve got to come out and say,
I’ve got to tell you, it’s the only way
Something I’ve learned about myself since I was away (at college)
I really think that I might be a little bit — of an Anthropologist

Mom & Dad, I’ve been led astray,
I’ve been experimenting with archaeolog(a)y
On an excavation, tried C-14 dating
And ground penetrating radar for the first time — (if you know what I mean)

I see the visions in your head of me digging up dino bones
Or do I study insects in a laboratory all alone?
But I’m just looking for the story of our people as a whole
Wanting to learn about and understand all cultures as our own …

[Chorus]
The World seems to increasingly need, Anthropology
Now we’re exploring, asking Who Why and How we be People
The difference between us, is not so much
Tell me your story, your piece of what is Humanity.

Mom & Dad, I think you should know,
I do fieldwork, everywhere I go
I want to travel, see Peru and Vietnam
My heroes are Margaret Mead and Barack Obama’s mom
– (did you know she was an Anthropologist?)

If you think of natives on an island painted up singing war songs
It’s misleading though historically you’re not totally wrong
But you can do Anthropology reading graffitied bathroom stalls
Or in a war zone … or a December shopping mall.

Then there’s Linguistics — I think that’s how we use our tongues;
Physical Anthro says what body parts we all have in common,
You can even study monkeys, I hear that part’s really fun
All these fields tell us part of what it means to be human …

[Chorus]

Hey Mom & Dad, it wasn’t how you raised me.
Anthro professors, they’re all kinda crazy
Got their agendas, trying to recruit our P-O-Vs
Deep down inside they’re all in love with — Malinowski

At the same time, I think it’s what my heart has always known
Do you remember Hallowe’en when I was Indiana Jones?
The other kids they stopped coming around, I had to play alone
I guess they didn’t like my kinship charts, of all their homes.

Some cross-cultural connexions might just help us all relate
Misunderstanding’s at the root of so much global hate
How many wars, metaphors or literally,
Could be avoided if the world was “us”, instead of “you” and “me”?

[Chorus] x2

Why Janice Harper? Largely, I think, because she is a woman who happened to believe in real gender equality in an especially backward university setting. But, Lesley Sharp also implicitly predicted what would happen when she wrote, in her review, that “Harper pulls no punches.” The critical research that Janice has done on unpopular subjects is the hallmark of her intellectual integrity, of what we need most from academics.

Read the whole thing at The Porcupine – and while you’re there, check out the rest of the material on offer from Eric and his stable of radical-leaning writers.

Wendy Doniger, Paul Courtright and David White have also been among those academics who have been targeted by the Hindu right because of their intellectual work on the religion. Doniger, a senior scholar of the Hindu tradition, regularly receives death threats; a letter-writing campaign tried to prevent another young scholar’s tenure at Rice University.

Certainly India needs to do more to preserve academic freedom, including ensuring that “that other actors [besides the state and the university], including the media, political parties and the citizenry do not by their actions undermine academic freedom.” And, as the example from Rice University shows, this issue is not confined to India. The US needs to protect academics from coordinated attacks of the sort William I. Robinson is facing from the ADL.

I am pleased to see that there has been such quick and interested reaction to the launch of Anthropology Now. I wanted to write with a brief history of the long effort that has brought us here. I am speaking from my (spotty) memory here, and some details may be missing. We began as a committee of the AES in 1998 when I was president, Susan Harding was president elect, and Ida Susser was Councillor. The AES has kept us as an active committee ever since, which explains how we were included in the AAA program this year.

Our efforts to find a publisher stretched over 10 years. Ida Susser, Susan Harding and I organized approaches to (among others) Duke University Press, the University of California Press, the University of Chicago Press, Blackwells, Sage, and Palgrave. In each case we asked an anthropologist who had an existing (and positive) relationship with the press to make the pitch. All these presses turned us down except Palgrave. We got close with Palgrave only to be stymied by a change in administration and journal publication policies. We stayed in close touch with the AAA through successive presidents and the committee on scientific communication, but we never imagined that the AAA could fund this venture. They have consistently promised (and followed through on) in kind contributions and exchanges.

The very first year of our existence, Dean Birkenkamp, in a former professional capacity, found us and expressed his support and commitment. Thereafter he attended just about every annual meeting we had at the AAA meetings. He shared advice, kept up our morale, and pledged every possible effort to help us, for which we remain immensely grateful. It was only after he founded Paradigm Publishers and made it a commercial success that it became realistic for him to become our publisher. Given the depth and consistency of his interest and support, I do hope Paradigm makes some profit from Anthropology Now. Giving away 1000 copies (maybe more) of the first issue and mailing out countless full color brochures is an investment we hope the press will be able to recover. They are accepting the reality of years of losses on this venture, a move for which we are extremely grateful.

During the years before we had a publisher, our strategy was first to form an Editorial Board (much as you see it today) and second to post a “sample issue” on the web, which predates and only partially overlaps with what you see today. We owe the contributors to that sample issue and of course the additional contributors to the current issue a vote of thanks.

We also made efforts to raise grant support. When Leslie Aiello became president of Wenner-Gren, one of her mandates was to raise the public awareness of anthropology as a discipline: what is it that we do and what can we contribute to public debate and understanding? She agreed with our assessment of the need for a print magazine and a web presence. The financial support we have from Wenner-Gren will be crucial in the continued growth of the project.

We look forward to taking the web site to the next level and hope to continue to get good suggestions (and participation) from the readers of Savage Minds. For the moment, feel free to join us on the open Facebook group for Anthropology Now.

I will be there with a bell and a whistle, or some other noise maker like a cute little girl, to draw attention to my stupid antics, at which point I will announcingly annouce the nominees and winners in three categories:

1) Most Excellent Anthropology Blog (Vote Here)
2) Most Excellent Open Access Journal in Anthropology(Vote Here)
3) Most Excellent Uncategorizable Digital Thing-a-ma-job for Anthropology (Vote Here)

As you will have noticed, the category I wanted to award something to–that of best OA article is gone. I will instead recite an impromtu Eulogy for the absense of Open Access research in our discipline. Or maybe not.

Prizes will range from signed and numbered copies of print-outs of Savage Minds posts (suitable for Framing!) to cases of Artic Man Deoderant to valuable caches of cowrie shells and dried beans.

A NOTE on the voting: I decided to use Mako Hill’s awesome Selectricity Tool. It allows you to calculate the vote in all kinds of ways so we can conceivably have many winners depending on how we count ! What better way to encourage cultural relativism! Go and Vote! Tell your friends.

The Nominees are:

Most Excellent Blog

1. Owen Wiltshire’s “Another Anthro Blog”
2. Lorenz Khazaleh’s “Antropologi.info“
3. “Material World” (Haidy Geismar, Daniel Miller, Graeme Were, Patrick Laviolette)
4. Erkan Saka, “Erkan’s Field Diary”
5. Alexandere Enkerli’s Linguistic Anthropology
6. Maximilian Forte’sOpen Anthropology
7. Culture Matters

(Greg Downey, Joana Breidenbach, Nursel Guzeldeniz, Jovan Maud, Pal Nyiri, Stephen Cox, Lisa Wynn)

Most Excellent Uncategorizable Digital Thing-a-ma-job for Anthropology

1. The Center for History and New Media’s Syllabus Finder (Dan Cohen, Producer)
2. Digital Ethnography, (Mike Wesch, Producer)
3. Open Context, Eric Kansa, Producer
4. Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive :: An Indigenous Archive Tool (Kim Christen and Craig Dietrich, Producers)
5. Neuroanthropology (Which was also nominated for Best Blog, but I’m spreading the love unilaterally)
6. Alan MacFarlane’s gloriously heterogenous collection of Anthro Stuff

Most Excellent Gold OA Journal (Which is also the de facto best Category Not Listed in the original post)

1. Ethnobotany Research and Applications
2. Ecological and Environmental Anthropology
3. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine
4. Anthropology Matters
5. Oral Tradition
6. Cultural Analysis
7. Asian Ethnology

Despite the fact that a foreign policy organization chaired by Mr. McCain gave more than $850,000 to Khalidi’s Center for Palestine Research and Studies. Despite the fact that Khalidi is himself a semite, born in NY, with a “moral commitment to peace and justice in the Middle East.” Despite all this, the McCain campaign seems intent on pursuing this new McCarthyism.

For this reason I am endorsing supporting an idea I read about on Crooked Timber: that academics should show their support of Khalidi by buying his book, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. As Henry Farrell says:

It doesn’t take much in the way of prophetic insight to predict that we are going to be seeing a lot more of this kind of innuendo from disgusting slime-purveyors like Daniel Pipes if Obama wins – one of the lessons of the Clinton years is that when the nastier elements of the right are losing elections, they start trying to turn the culture war back up to 11. It would be nice to get a head start on the pushback.

Now if only I can get Mike Goldfarb to call me an anti-semite to sell my book! (Hmmm, I guess I need to write a book first …)

The second show, “Pacific Clues”:http://wetserver.net/teleschool/pages/programs/program_home.jsp?programid=16&programpageid=30&programpagetype=programpages discusses the archaeology of the Pacific, with a special focus on Polynesia. The “first episode”:http://www.teleschool.k12.hi.us/tlc/IR_CR_PC_1.html features Terry Hunt discussing the destruction of Rapa Nui’s (Easter Island) environment, and his own interpretation of what led to its downfall. Terry’s objections to authors such as Jared Diamond’s interpretation of Rapa Nui’s history is well known, and now you can watch the man explain it in person.

All of these shows are available for free, as a series of 20 minute web episodes — so far only a few episodes are up, but as the season progresses more will be available. They’re meant for kids, so they are a great opportunity for you and your little ones to curl up together in front of a glowing LCD screen. But of course they’re great for people of all ages — especially people who want to know more about what the experts _really_ think about the Pacific, but don’t want to read a bunch of scholarly articles.

Ergo, I am hereby inaugurating an independent awards show to be performed at the AAA. I’m willing to organize it this year, if others are willing to help out (please!?). Nothing too extravagant or long, I’m thinking a guerrilla ceremony in the lobby. I’ll need people to hold the signs, act as paparazzi, maybe a little musical act before and after… and especially: NOMINATIONS. Post them here, or email me (ckelty at ucla etc ). I’m not sure what the prizes will be yet, but they will be good, I promise.

These are the categories I’ve come up with so far:

1. most excellent (and second most excellent) open access article in anthropology or associated disciplines, 2007-8. open access = green, gold, self-archived or institutional repository.

2. most excellent open access teaching materials 2007-8. Syllabus, teaching materials, assessment ideas, technologies or tools, ideas for teaching.

3. most excellent idea for making anthropology public.

4. most (or least?) excellent new theoretical fad.

5. most excellent anthropology blog (SM recuses itself, naturally).

6. most excellent business plan idea for the AAA.

7. most excellent award category not listed here.

And then there is “Bella Ellwood-Clayton, sexual anthropologist”:http://www.drbella.com.au/. Ellwood-Clayton got written up “some time ago at Antropologi.info”:http://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/anthropology.php?p=2836&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1 because her work is open access. But I think the site, and her career, might take the prize as the most public, applied anthropologist that I’ve seen in quite some time.

She “treks through mud and sleeps with pigs to discover traditional tattooing practices in the jungle”:http://www.drbella.com.au/film.html. She “writes poetry”:http://www.drbella.com.au/poems.html. She is “multiply-orgasmic”:http://www.drbella.com.au/Articles/25AUG06ThebigO.pdf (link to PDF of a relationship column — sfw). And of course she also “publishes about cell phones”:http://www.drbella.com.au/anthro.html.

I am not quite sure what I think of Ellwood-Clayton’s website, or the way that she is spinning her career. But I have to admit that in an era when anthropologists spend more time arguing about what they can do to become relevant than becoming relevant, it is sort of refreshing to see someone hanging out their shingle in a highly… shall we say… unambivalent way. Carrie Bradshaw, move over.