Global Stats: Who is Reading Savage Minds?

Anthropologists like to say that we cover the whole world, the entirety of human experience in all places and times. But that doesn’t always translate into global conversations about anthropology and its findings. Questions of access to published research often get in the way, as do language barriers. As we close 2013, we take an inside look at who is reading Savage Minds—this U.S.-based, English-language group anthropology blog.

Our #1 audience is in the U.S.A. While this is no surprise, the global list of readers does include some surprises, and offers a particularly situated view into who is reading anthropology around the world—from Argentina (#35 on our list) to Zambia (#113).

Savage Minds’ Top Ten readership by country:

  1. the U.S.A.
  2. the U.K.
  3. Canada
  4. Australia
  5. Brazil
  6. Germany
  7. Japan
  8. Spain
  9. France
  10. the Netherlands. This list—which includes countries in North America, Europe, South America, and Asia—is somewhat similar to the next ten countries:
  11. Norway
  12. India
  13. Sweden
  14. Taiwan
  15. Finland
  16. Peru
  17. New Zealand
  18. Denmark
  19. Italy
  20. Hong Kong

The next cluster #21-25 includes the first countries in Africa on the list: the Republic of Korea, Mexico, the Philippines, South Africa, and Israel. All of these countries have in the thousands of visits to the Savage Minds site over the past year, and some in the tens or hundreds of thousands. But what about those countries sending visitors in the hundreds or the dozens? Or even in single digits?

Indonesia (787) and Belgium (780) sent roughly the same number of readers, as did Pakistan (343) and Serbia (330), Chile (226) and Croatia (227), and Bhutan (89) and Guatemala (88). Kyrgyzstan and Jamaica each had 36 visits, Mongolia and Nicaragua both had 35, while Uzbekistan and Martinique each sent 3 readers to Savage Minds.

Following South Africa and Israel, readership throughout Africa was high to low as follows: Egypt, Morocco, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Malawi, Senegal, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Benin, Zambia, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Liberia, Algeria, Rwanda, Sudan, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Lesotho, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Cape Verde, and Niger. Libya, Gabon, and Gambia each had one check-in on the Savage Minds site

The Occupied Palestinian Territories, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Venezuela, and Qatar all had 51 readers which tied them for the #90 spot. Right behind them was the trio of Myanmar/Burma, Kuwait, and Iraq, each with 48 visits.

Cuba had no visits registered, nor did North Korea. Vietnam had several hundred readers, but the People’s Republic of China registered only eighteen visitors, the same number as from Nambia and Panama. Given the cyber-gymnastics readers in China have to do to get around the Great Firewall, it is impossible to know many actual readers of Savage Minds there are in China.

While the U.S.A. is our top ranking audience, our current site host WordPress conveniently provides separate statistics for U.S. imperial territories: Puerto Rico had 112 visits to the site (ranking #79), the Virgin Islands had thirteen visits, Guam had twelve, the Northern Mariana Islands had two, and U.S. Samoa had one.

Finally, Papua New Guinea, one of the most iconic sites of anthropology, had forty-four visits to the Savage Minds website.

To our readers from around the world, thanks for visiting and here’s to 2014!

Carole McGranahan

I am an anthropologist and historian of Tibet, and a professor at the University of Colorado. I conduct research, write, lecture, and teach. At any given time, I am probably working on one of the following projects: Tibet, British empire, and the Pangdatsang family; the CIA as an ethnographic subject; contemporary US empire; the ongoing self-immolations in Tibet; the Chushi Gangdrug resistance army; refugee citizenship in the Tibetan diaspora (Canada, India, Nepal, USA); and, anthropology as theoretical storytelling.

3 thoughts on “Global Stats: Who is Reading Savage Minds?

  1. One thing is from where it’s read, yet by whom it’s read is still quite another. I am conducting field work in Papua New Guinea since early 2013 and reading Savage Minds somewhere between regularly and occasionally from the field. I suspect a major proportion of visits from Papua New Guinea is on me – as a European anthropology PhD student. Just a cautious note in relation to the presentation of stats above.

  2. Yes, absolutely, no presumptions about who is reading from each country (i.e., whether they are residents or guests, or even anthropologists or not), or how many are unique visitors versus the same person(s) coming back to read. Lots of questions we can ask from this bare bones data without being able to give the answers.

  3. Indeed a very “particularly situated view into who is reading anthropology around the world”, since not all anthropology is written in English nor are all anthropologists able to read in this language. (Not to mention those who are able to read it and might show no interested in blogs by North American scholars).

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