Search Results for "Clifford "

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (where you probably don’t get WiFi and won’t be reading this), you’ve heard something about the release on Sunday of 92,000 primary documents culled from classified US military field reports from Afghanistan compiled by Wikileaks.org and given in advance to the New York Times , Der Spiegel, and [...]

Everyone acknowledges that the academy is shrinking and that full-time, tenure track job positions in anthropology (and everything else) are getting harder and harder to find. Depending on your point of view, this decline might be a result of the recent recession, a ticking time-bomb set off in the late 70s as higher education’s runaway [...]

(a month or so ago I posted “a longish review”:http://savageminds.org/2008/06/13/more-on-coming-of-age-in-second-life/ of Tom Boellstorff’s book Coming of Age in Second Life. Tom has now whipped up this occasional contribution to expand some of his thoughts on the topic — enjoy! -R) The Setup 1. I have been thinking about writing this essay for some time (in [...]

Edward Said and Clifford Geertz are not normally considered together as theorists as far as I know, and yet rereading both this semester I was struck by the similarities between them. They wrote at more or less the same time. They were both interested in literature. Neither were ashamed to write well. Despite their differences [...]

As the spring semester approaches my fellow hemisphere mates and I, I am putting the final touches on my ‘theory’ syllabus. I’ll share it with SM soon (the initial draft is not very appetizing), but I thought it would be interesting here to blog about something I will _not_ be teaching — the long historical [...]

I’m really enjoying the “Identities” page on WorldCat. As you might remember, back in 2003 the library service opened up its records to the web (previously only those at subscribing libraries could see the results). I never noticed it before, but their Identities service pulls together lots of useful information about well known people, such [...]

In my ethnography of the state class this semester we read both _The Calligraphic State_ and _Colonizing Egypt_ (guess which one I like better). In the course of our seminar we talked a little bit about Geertz and the shadow he casts (or not) over anthropology of the Middle East. Intrigued, I checked out Dale [...]

For those who are interesting in learning more about Geertz or did not get a chance to meet him or see him speak in person, I’d like to recommend Alan Macfarlane’s “video interview”:http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/ancestors/geertz.htm with Geertz. It is part of Macfarlane’s “Interviews With Ancestors”:http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/ancestors/audiovisual.html websire, which I’ve mentioned in the past but which I’ll link to [...]

(UPDATE: the official release is “here from the IAS website”:http://ias.edu/Newsroom/announcements/Uploads/view.php?cmd=view&id=354) (UPDATE UPDATE: here are obituaries from the “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/01/AR2006110103273.html and “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/obituaries/01geertz.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) This from a grad student of mine — I’ve no independent confirmation yet but it seems unlikely to be a hoax. It seems like one of our best-known and best-loved scholars has [...]

It has been a long time since I enjoyed reading anything by Clifford Geertz, so I was gratified last night to discover “A Life In Learning”:http://www.acls.org/op45geer.htm, the biographical reminiscences that Geertz gave the American Council of Learned Socities for their 1999 Charles Homer Haskins lecture (I guess it also appears in _Available Light_ as well). [...]

Representations of Indians in American Natural History Museums Preface: The recent posts on Ota Benga and the popular museum reminded me of an essay I had wanted to post last year when Kerim posted about the Bavarian village in display in Africa. I had prepared it for posting last year, but for some reason never [...]

Perhaps one of the most widely read anthropological essays, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” by Clifford Geertz is available online in standard HTML format, as well as a PDF file. The continued popularity of this piece is due in no small part to Geertz’s fluid prose, sharp observation, and self-depreciating humor. (Self-mockery seems [...]

Blinkx is a media search engine with some academic potential, especially for finding interesting material that might be useful in the classroom. A search for anthropology turned up several videotaped lectures by folks like Clifford Geertz, Marilyn Strathern, and Brian Ferguson, as well as podcasts and, of course, the usual irrelevant material (although not too [...]

I wish I were posting more on this blog, and perhaps my cobloggers feel the same—or maybe my silence is cause for the same celebration it often is amongst my students. In any case, apologies if my posts are missed, and Hello, My Name Is Chris, if you are wondering who the hell I am. [...]

Buried in a comment thread in an entry that scrolled off the main page, John asks: who are you reading now whom you would recommend as a model to emulate? Whose work looks promising—not just in terms of what the individual author might do—but in terms of defining a paradigm that others might want to [...]