It’s been a while since I posted something. ‘Sorry’ to those who like the roundup, ‘you’re welcome’ to those who don’t.
File it Under, should have written about a while ago: the ASA Globalog has had a series of great posts about the culture of high finance and the global economic crisis. At the beginning of November, Karen Ho started with a theory of the executive bonus as both directly-proportional indicator of market instability and encapsulation of business’ faith in the rationality of money. Gillian Tett continues with posts on economics’ finance’s cultural turn and where the ethnographic action is for studying the culture of finance. And Keith Hart has continued to post new things throughout the month.
Undercover Research: A curious pair of articles about technology and investigating our everyday interactions. First, Slate published a history of researching interpersonal interaction on subways. The subway, according to the article, has been considered by some to be the social laboratory par excellence, offering insight to how people from different backgrounds respond to similar stimuli. Also, Scientific American is reporting on a new study involving people in Pennsylvania who are using Smart Phones to report their emotions, reactions, and experiences to quantitative psychologists in real time.
Not So Evolved: National Geographic asked experts from different disciplines to think out loud about the future of human evolution. The cyborg and space travel fantasies not-withstanding, the argument that human societies and globalization have done away with the historical conditions for classic Darwinian evolution are interesting.
Final Frontiers: Tessa Vallo at antropologi.info reviews the new anthology, Multi-Sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Research. Discussing four contributions to the book, Vallo calls the work Generation 2.0 for multisited ethnography.
Reason Under Review: In case you haven’t seen, Maximillian Forte has reorganized his site, Zero Anthropology (formerly Open Anthropology). Recently, he posted on the history of the production of scientific reason in Anthropology, its colonializing effects, and its carryover into how we think about the discipline today.
“The Most Interesting Periodical You Probably Never Heard Of” Scott McLemee from InsideHigherEd.com wrote a piece on the potentials and potential challenges of digitization of out-of-print publications that makes some savvy points. But the most interesting part may be this librarian’s librarian periodical, Against the Grain, which seems to be a no-nonsense look at the practices of scholarly publication and book collection. Not all of it is online, but there are places to poke around.