Are blogs more interesting than journals? Lorenz at antropologi.info poses this question in response to Owen Wiltshire’s post, “Why Do Anthropologists Blog?” (You can download the longer paper from the blog post.) Owen’s paper makes several references to SM, including Kerim’s recent survey of SM readers.

And talking about the youngins: Lorenz also commented on this article from The Editors Weblog, reporting the upcoming results of an AP-commissioned anthropological study of young media users.

New Directions: Nina Glick Schiller wrote a piece on ASA Globalog calling for new perspectives in the anthropology of migration, and writing a critique of my new favorite phrase, methodological nationalism:

Methodological nationalism is an ideological orientation that approaches the study of social and historical processes as if they were contained within the borders of individual nation-states.

Instead of methodological nationalism, Schiller calls for a “global power perspective” (my new new favorite phrase).

The New Archive: Over at iCommons.org, Sarah Kansa wrote a piece on Preserving the Digital Archive, and draws a lot on digital archaelogy projects like her own Alexandria Archive Institute. (Thanks to Kim Christen’s commentary for pointing out this post.) Also, check out FieldNotes’s unveiling of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs’ Digital Collection.

Susan Sontag’s Pain: Sontag’s son, David Rieff, has written a book about the cultural critic’s fight with cancer and eventual death. In an advance article written for the Guardian, Rieff gives a fascinating illumination on how the author of Illness as Metaphor and Regarding the Pain of Others viewed her own struggles with cancer. [via Arts and Letters Daily]

Cultural Values/Values of Culture: This pithy post at In Harmonium takes issue with the utilitarian underpinnings of many current (broad? public?) discussions on the value of culture.

So Easy Even an Ape Could do it: Michael Tomasello from the Max Planck Institute gave a bunch of intelligence tests to chimps and 2 year-old human children. The chimps beat the kids, and Tomasello wrote about it in the New York Times. Don’t you love science?