Good morning everyone. As promised, I’ve changed the discussion settings on our blog. Everyone who wants to post comments will now have to register with the site (you can do this with preexisting credentials, such as twitter or WP). Pseudonyms are fine.  All comments will now be manually approved by me (or, in the future, an intern) before they appear on the site, and they must follow our existing comment policy (which you can find in the header of our site). I expect 90% of the comments submitted will be approved, but please be patient if it takes a little bit — especially if you post during the Hawai‘ian evening. If I feel your comments are in violation of our comment policy, I will do my best to send them back to you to explain how they don’t meet it. That way you can resubmit and have your comments appear. Thanks for your patience, everyone.

As many of you know, our blog title comes from Lévi-Strauss’s book Pensée Sauvage, translated in English as The Savage Mind, but which is a pun on the French word for “wild pansies” (viola tricolor). We are now working on a redesign of our website and I’ve been spending a lot of my time searching Google for good images of wild pansies that we could use for our banner.

The image on the blog sidebar right now is the one that was on the cover of Lévi-Strauss’s book. It is by Pierre-Joseph Redouté. Unfortunately, it seems impossible to find high-resolution scans of this image in the public-domain. I have found some other botanical illustrations that I like, but was still looking when I discovered the work of Count Franz Pocci, who painted this delightful painting, which I just had to share with everyone:

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Since restoring the old site was taking so long, we took the plunge and paid WordPress.com the $100 to be able to use our old domain here, it also gets rid of the ads which were bothering us. (We’ve always been ad-free.) We still haven’t been able to restore our old posts, and we are still working on moving the site to our own self-hosted account, but all that will take much longer than we thought. Till then, we didn’t feel it was necessary to constantly advertise that this was a temporary site. If you have any problems using the site as a result of the changes, please let us know.

Savage Minds is happy to announce that guest blogger Carole McGranahan (Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado) will be joining us as a full time blogger. Please join us in giving her a warm welcome.

This week Savage Minds turns seven years old.

It’s been a great, tumultuous seven years. Although regular readers may not know it, behind the scenes we at Savage Minds have contemplated closing down the blog numerous times, mostly because it is so much trouble to keep posting things to it. But blogging is a habit that’s hard to quit, and so we stumble on.

In this past year the blog has become weirdly hegemonic in anthropology, despite the large number of better things out there being written by other authors. I was talking to someone recently who was afraid they detected a lack of quality in ‘SM’s usual high standards’ and were worried the blog was going down hill. This, to me, indicated that they has not read anything from our first three years! While we soldier on the anthropological noosphere keeps getting bigger and better, filled with more journals, blogs, occasional papers, and social networks. Its gratifying.

Most gratifying for me, however, has been working with the other Minds on this site. I probably lay eyes on Kerim or Celty once every two years, and so I’m always amazed that when we do sit down together we find that we really have become close friends. Even if SM can’t take credit for the development of anthropology’s online community, it definitely has created — no kidding — friendships that are set to last a lifetime. I’m quite happy in our little silo, and I hope regular readers have enjoyed the past year as much as I have.

Just writing to send two quick thanks out to the anthropological blogosphere. First, on behalf of myself and all the other Minds here at SM I wanted to say thanks to all our readers for voting us their favorite anthropology blog for 2011. I understand that 75 votes may not be a totally representative sample of Teh Internetz, but it’s nice to receive the honor. We hope in future years we are totally blown out of the water by some of the other great anthropology blogs that have sprung up on line — it’s great to see the anthropological community grow.

Second, I wanted to thank Jason over at Anthropology Report for running the survey and for the bang-up job he’s been doing keeping us up to date with the goings-on of the blogosphere. No matter how many aggregators and algorithms you have, there is no substitute for a human filter, and anthropology has long needed a blogger who has made our online community his ‘beat’. Various people — us, Neuroanthropology, antropologi.info and so forth — have done this to some extent or another, but it’s never gotten the attention its deserved, so I’m very excited to see someone take this on. What I take to be Jason’s two beats — covering the blogosphere and connecting popular audiences to academic anthropology — are really valuable. He’s on my short list of feeds to read, so maybe he belongs on yours as well?

Once again, thanks everyone and here’s looking forward to a richly anthropological 2012.

It just occurred to me that two amazing things happened in Ryan’s post about Wasting Away In Grantlandia. First, I find it sort of amazing that someone could write a post asking for advice how to apply for grants and then have the readership, which includes people who have actually doled grants out, offer advice. Maybe this happens regularly on other blogs in other fields, but I don’t remember seeing it before — especially in anthropology. Grantsmanship is usually the sort of thing discussed at secretive graduate seminars and even then grad students are given advice about how to apply, rather than being told what it is like to actually judge the damn things. I don’t know — it just struck me that this sort of instant, true feedback on the topic of grants is pretty unusual.

The second amazing thing is the same as the first: a grad student wrote a blog post and then tenured professors left comments in the margins. Usually this goes in reverse order: professors write books, articles, lectures, and so forth, and then the graduate students get to leave some feedback, if they are lucky. On SM, the grad students have a chance to be front and center

There are lots of websites on the Internet that do a better job of building community than Savage Minds, I’m sure, and we still have a long way to go to really do what we want the site to do. I just mention these two things to point out something that suddenly struck me as unusual and valuable about the site.