From time to time Savage Mind hosts guests bloggers. Archives of their entries can be found here:
Fred Errington and Deborah Gewertz
Deborah Gewertz is the G. Henry Whitcomb Professor of Anthropology at Amherst College and Frederick Errington is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Together they are a husband and wife team with a distinguished career in anthropology with an ethnographic focus on Papua New Guinea. In addition to solo efforts, they have produced five books together: Cultural Alternatives and a Feminist Anthropology: An Analysis of Culturally Constructed Gender Interests in Papua New Guinea (Cambridge University Press); Twisted Histories, Altered Contexts: Representing the Chambri in a World System (a favorite of mine, also published by Cambridge); Articulating Change in the “Last Unknown” (Westview); Emerging Class in Papua New Guinea: The Telling of Difference (Cambridge); and, most recently, Yali’s Question: Sugar, Culture, and History (University of Chicago Press). Their latest book, Yali’s Question, is a response to Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel. In their posts of September 2005 Deborah and Fred focused on their response to Diamond, providing us some insights from the argument of their book as well as some ethnographic background on Papua New Guinea, ‘cargo cults’, and Yali more generally.
Posts by Fred and Deborah
Maia Green
Maia now a full time member of Savage Minds. Her posts can be read here. Her “about” page is here.
Tad McIlwraith
Tad is a cultural anthropologist working and researching in British Columbia, Canada. My topical interests are in the areas of linguistic anthropology and environmental anthropology, particularly with First Nations communities. He is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, NM, USA. During his posts in November 2005 Tad discussed traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), the distinctiveness of Canadian anthropology, and the national traditions in anthropology more generally.
Posts by Tad | Tad’s blog
Mike Wesch
Wesch’s primary research focuses on social and cultural change in Melanesia. Living in the Nekalimin region of New Guinea for a total of 18 months from 1999-2003, he examined the ways local cultural practices intersect with Western institutions such as formal education, Christianity, biomedicine, and statecraft – all of which were introduced just in the past 25 years. In particular, he explores how local beliefs and practices associated with witchcraft and witchcraft accusations are being transformed and negotiated in the new cultural environments created by their encompassment within a broader system of state governance.
Posts by Mike
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Thomas is now a full time member of Savage Minds. His posts can be read here. His “about” page is here.
Michael F. Brown
Michael F. Brown is the Lambert Professor of Anthropology & Latin American Studies at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA, where he has taught since 1980. Brown in the author of five books, most recently Who Owns Native Culture? (2003) and The Channeling Zone: American Spirituality in an Anxious Age (1997). Brown has published occasional essays and reviews in Smithsonian, Natural History, The Progressive, the New York Times Book Review, and Sciences Humaines,. His professional interests include indigenous Amazonia, magic and religion, medical anthropology, and intellectual/cultural property. Avocationally, he is interested in jazz, wine, horology, and increasingly, for reasons that mystify his wife and friends, dry stone walls.
