Reader Poll: What’s your anthropology background?

This poll is completely unscientific, but I hope it will give us some sense of our readership. (A lot more people visit the site than leave comments.)

Select the phrase which best describes your background in anthropology. The results will appear immediately upon selecting an answer.

UPDATE: I stupidly forgot to include a category for current grad students. [Duh!] So please chose the MA in anthropology option (even if you are just working towards your MA) and ignore the part about doing something else afterwards. (I’m afraid it is too late to change the questions.) And again, sorry about that…

15 thoughts on “Reader Poll: What’s your anthropology background?

  1. how about a category for current graduate students in anthropology? I realize your categories are all in the past tense (bar the last), but none of them quite capture what I am (and what i imagine a good number of your readers are), which is an MA in anthropology who is now pursuing a PhD in the discipline.

  2. [Sound of Kerim smacking his skull.]

    Sorry about that! Stupid me. Don’t want to change it after 20 responses already. Please just select “MA in anthropology” if you are currently a graduate student of any sort.

  3. sokay Kerim. I stupidly though, “hey is this clickable?” and clicked on “never studied anthropology” to find out, thereby skewing your poll (I’m a PhD student).

  4. I considered punching “graduate degree in related discipline,” but then I realized that English isn’t a related discipline (or is only arguably so). I’m surprised that you have so few readers outside the field.

  5. You left out…. “currently majoring in anthropology”, finished after this term independent project,but grad schools plans are – international affairs and public policy.

  6. After spending the last six months immersing myself in the Writing Culture lit, I would have to say that studying English, and its attendant focus on language and literary criticism, is more related than many might realize. I myself am a trained urban planner. Like English, the connection to anthropology might at first appear to be tenuous, but from my own experience, planners often rely upon ethnographic methods, even if they are rarely taught in urban planning graduate programs. I was happy to see that there are quite a few in related disciplines that are reading the insights from the crew at SM. Keep up the good work.

  7. Hmm. I think it tracks your IP. If you login from the same computer it should continue to show the results. But no worries, never expected this to be particularly accurate.

    We’ve had 145 responses from the more than 1100 unique visitors to the site since I put the poll up on Sunday. About 30% have no graduate training in Anthropology, 40% have some graduate training (in anthropology or a related field), and a little over 20% are Ph.D.s, although many of those work outside the field.

    I assume that the stats are tilted in favor of our regular readers (because they were motivated to actually take the poll – maybe even multiple times to see the results), as opposed to the many people who come to the site via Google. (Google Analytics tells us that about 37% of our readers are regulars, which is quite a lot.)

Comments are closed.