Empire of Signs: Ted Swedenburg on Hawgblawg takes a look at the Rhianna music video “Hard” and its glorification of U.S. militarism. Swedenburg cites the Rhianna video as an example of American hip hop’s embrace of U.S. neo-colonialism, which he sees as a shift away from an earlier tradition of hip hop artists’ critique of the state.

Reports and Rumors: Lorenz at antropologi.info has the blogosphere roundup of what people are saying about AAAs this year.

That Other Meeting in Philly: InsideHigherEd.com reports from the Modern Language Association (MLA) annual meeting this week. This article describes how foreign language departments are trying to rebrand themselves as secondary majors for science, business, and engineering students. In order to boost enrollment, many language departments are now promoting “world languages and cultures” programs for those students to get international experience.

‘Tis Better to Give: I listened to the Planet Money podcast by the economist who claimed that gift-giving was a wasteful economic enterprise with a mix of skepticism and sarcasm that didn’t smudge nicely into one word (skepticasm, if only). But I was happy to see Grant McCracken articulate some of the problems I had with this concept of wasteful gifting. Mostly that some gifts are supposed to be wasteful.

Beyond Access: danah boyd posted a draft of a new article she is writing on racial and economic diversity on facebook and myspace. In the post, she mentions new data facebook released on the racial composition of its members, and she argues that membership on the site (or access) doesn’t tell the whole story. Instead, she makes the sensible point that researchers need to look at the diverse (and often unequal) ways people participate in social networking sites.

And Finally, Joshua David Stein at the New York Times Magazine Blog reviewed what is bound to enter into pop-Americana lore. Of course, I’m talking about “Jersey Shore,” which Stein described as

resembles nothing more than American Kabuki theater, a refreshingly solipsistic aesthetic world, a temporary coastal community that’s a bulwark against normative American youth style. In short, it’s regionalism at its best.

Of course, the show has gotten a lot of criticism for what many call a disparaging portrayal of Italian Americans. According to Stein, these kids have reappropriated the ethnic epithet guido ‘Judith Butler style.’ (Thanks and congrats to Alex for sending this along).

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.

I’m always down for recognizing the invisible labor of academics, but even better is doing something about it. Jason Baird Jackson’s post, “Getting Yourself Out of the Business in Five Easy Steps,” identifies the problem:

If you have (1) done peer-reviews for, (2) submitted an article to, (3) written a book or media review for, or (4) taken on the editorship of a scholarly journal published by giant firms such as Springer, Reed Elisevier, or Wiley, then you belong to a very large group of very well-educated people whose unpaid labor has helped make these firms very profitable.

Read on for his proactive suggestions.

Let’s Get Digital..Digital: Lorenz at antropologi.info blogged on the Digital Anthropology 2009 Report, which divided British technology users interviewed into six tribes (although the non-appropriate term I think they were looking for should be ‘archetype.’) Most popular tribe in UK? E-ager Beavers. hmmm…let’s leave that one alone.

Hack So Good: On Material World, Gabriella Coleman gave a brief preview of her manuscript project on hackers. Coleman describes how the pleasures of hacking produce an ambivalent relationship between hackers and liberal ideals. Hackers embrace ideologies of free speech and expression while holding more communal ideals around property and ownership.

Hair raising Structural Adjustment: Okay, not the best title. But still better than “E-ager Beaver.” If you haven’t seen the preview for Chris Rock’s new comedy-documentary “Good Hair,” you should check it out. I thought it was pretty interesting that the movie is going to touch on the transnational production of black hair products largely consumed in the U.S. On the global consumption side, Pamthropologist at Teaching Anthropology recounts her experience with IMF restructuring, opening markets, and changing standards of beauty in Tanzania.

Post Market Economics? While most people have noted that political scientist Elinor Ostrom is the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for economics, Jim Johnson over at (Notes on) Politics, Photography, and Theory remarks on a different potential game changer.  Ostrom’s work challenges the market as the sole arbiter of economic human relations.

Peripheral Crises: Massimiliano Mollona examines the role thinking about the ‘global financial crisis’ plays in the small steel town in the interior of Brazil, where he does his fieldwork. In his analysis of the Brazilian state’s response to the problems of the market and in individual reactions to the abstractions of global capital, Mollona questions the sense in using the ‘crisis’ language outside of the centers of global finance.

Left Out, and it Feels Good– Here in Chicago, a lot of us are happy the 2016 Olympics didn’t come here. LL Wynn’s report that no anthropologists were awarded funds under the Minerva Initiative might offer a similar silver lining in being left out.

Faces Around Campus– The Columbia University student paper featured a piece on Audra Simpson. Meanwhile, Brown’s paper wrote about Matthew Gutmann in his new position as the university’s vice president of international affairs.

Sign Pollution: I couldn’t find the blog that originally linked to this (if you’re reading this, thanks!  Take credit in the comments). Online bulletin Semiotix ponders the ecological consequences of signs. No really.

There is no free ride for semiosis. Signs have a cost and a carbon footprint. Sign processes, in any form we can observe them, consume energy and produce heat. Expectedly, too much heat causes communication crashes and semiotic meltdowns.

Such a Thing as a Free Lunch (Well maybe not): Grant McCracken at This Blog Sits…. considers gift economies and one friend’s interesting take on the business lunch.

For Your Gazing Pleasure: Finally, a picture essay on Vietnam from the New York Times Travel Section. Nothing much here, except that I swore it said “Orientalism” the first four times I looked at it. Maybe it’s the font.

Did I miss something? More than likely this week. Just post it in the comments or email me.

Cultural Studies at the Crossroads: Michael Bérubé writes a very convincing analysis of the challenges facing cultural studies, from both structural/institutional and theoretical standpoints. Perhaps the best moment (or my favorite, since I’m a bit snarky) is Bérubé’s quote of Stuart Hall: “I really cannot read another cultural-studies analysis of Madonna or The Sopranos.”

Everywhere are Signs: Over at Material World, Poltical Science PhD candidate Jeremy Menchik posted a photoessay on the signs of pluralism at an Indonesian political rally.

Conspicuous Data Collection: Maximilian Forte at Open Anthropology posted a paper given last year on the publicity that HTS generates and how “it was created above all for domestic consumption, as part of a domestic propaganda effort and a public relations war conducted through the mainstream media.”

Situated Television Knowledges: For your viewing pleasure… Robert D. Kaplan writes a short but punchy plug for watching Al Jazeera’s international channel. Forget Lehrer, Kaplan writes, Al Jazeera “is what the internationally minded elite class really yearns for.” Kaplan describes Al Jazeera’s slant on international politics as having a forgivable bias towards the disempowered, but one that might well represent the middle-of-the-road view from developing nations.

What to Say to that Someone Who Knows Everything: Have a problem with your dissertation advisor? Kristen Hoggatt at the Smart Set shows how to turn your dissatisfaction into a poem.

We’re All Abnormal: Christopher Lane at Slate reports on how some psychiatrists see deviance as a growth industry.  The American Psychiatric Association is busy editing the DSM-V, which looks like it will provide diagnoses for internet addiction, mathematics disorder, and sibling relational problem.  But some sober critics are warning that the DSM-V might pathologize us all.

Methods for Methods: LL Wynn posted a fantastic piece at Culture Matters about her experience designing a graduate student methods course.  Wynn’s idea for the course was ambitious: design, implement and write up a project in one semester, and then submit write-ups for publication.  Most of Wynn’s challenges stemmed from the human subjects approval process, which held up her students from doing completing a project in one term.  But Wynn came up with a creative solution …

Stepping Out, Dressing Down: Samantha Gross from the Associated Press reported on the changing consumer habits of low-income youth, who are losing their desire to spend large sums of money on designer fashion items.  Gross’s report includes observations from Shirley Brice Heath as well.

This Just in…Language is Complex: It seems like pop-theories on language are in vogue, or is it me?  Check out Newsweek’s short piece on their Whorfian take on language and thought.  NY Times Magazine also posted an interesting little history of gendered pronouns in English.  [NY Times website requires you sign in with a free login to see this article.  Or should I say requires readers that ‘they’ sign in.]

Some Questions Endure (Still): Historian Timothy Burke posted a response to an article on last week’s SM around the web on angry philosophers, upset at the NEH for trying to poach on their disciplinary territory.  Burke begins by relating to the philosophers, suggesting that he wouldn’t be pleased by a grant asking promoting pre-disciplinary approaches to “time and the past.”  But, Burke asks, what might be the benefits of being exposed to unorthodox approaches.

Time Magazine interviewed Karen Ho on her ethnographic research on Wall Street.  Explaining the attitudes she encountered on Wall Street in the late 90s early 00s, Ho says:

Wall Street bankers understand that they are liquid people. It’s part of their culture. I had bankers telling me, “I might not be at my job next year so I’m going to make sure to get the biggest bonus possible.” I had bankers who advised the AOL–Time Warner merger saying, “Oh, gosh, this might not work out, but I probably won’t be here when it doesn’t work out.” I looked at them like, “What?” Their temporality is truncated.

Material Knowledge: Barbara Kirschenblatt Gimblett posted a piece on Material World about the work of the Museum of Polish Jews reconstructing the past.  At the heart of Gimblett’s discussion is a question what kind of past object should museums (re)produce.  The Museum of Polish Jews, for example, decided not to hire a set design company to reconstruct an 18th century Polish synagogue.  Instead, they hope to recover the knowledge of building woodhouse synagogs by actually building one.

Have something you want included?  Reply in the comments, or email for future editions.

The Chemistry Behind Homo-Blind-Daticus: New York Times technology reporter Alina Tugend reports on the growing number of websites who are turning to science-y approaches to matchmaking. As Tugend reports, one of the latest, chemistry.com, is guided by bio anthropologist Helen Fischer. Fischer’s system, adopted by the site, uses a questionnaire to discover the brain chemistry ‘type’ of each dater. Asked if it works, Fischer commented, ‘nobody knows for sure.’

Disciplinary ill Communication: Inside Higher Ed reported on the new NEH initiative that is making philosophers pull their disheveled hair out. The Enduring Questions grant encourages scholars from various disciplines to consider key ‘pre-disciplinary questions’ like ‘What is Happiness?’ or ‘Is There a Human Nature?’ Angry philosophers’ response? That’s our gig.

Sorry to Burst Your Bubble: Oh yes! The Economist talks ish on economics. The Economist writes on how the current world financial crisis has humbled ‘an arrogant profession’ [economics], at least in public opinion. While the rest of the article disappoints, turning a pointed critique to a how-to plan for building up better financial models, the concluding line reads: “For in the end economists are social scientists, trying to understand the real world. And the financial crisis has changed that world.” True that.

Conceiving the Right Object in Time: Material World posted some of Webb Keane’s thoughts on the possibilities of worlds of radically different ontologies and whether a temporality of objects can make sense with such ontological distinctions. Did I just write that? No, it was past me. Whoa.

From Eagleton, with Love: Sociologist Laurie Taylor interviews Terry Eagleton on his new book Reason, Faith and Revolution, and his continuing public debate with Richard Dawkins over religion. One particularly interesting point, Eagleton describes his humanist differences with Dawkins’s humanism:

“Dawkins deeply believes in the flourishing of the free human spirit which makes him a liberal humanist rather than a tragic humanist. He believes that if only those terrible guys out there would stop stifling and shackling us, then our creative capacities would flourish. I don’t believe that. As a Marxist I reject that simple liberationism. I’m not again humanism. I’m for a humanism which recognises the price of liberation. And that’s what I call tragic humanism

Know Thyself: Maximilian Forte at Open Anthropology asks a simple, provocative question. If cross-cultural understanding promotes peace (as HTS state as their raison d’etre), then why not apply the increase the cross-cultural understanding of the American public itself?
Have something else you want included? Write about it. In the comments or email about including something in future posts.

Whatever the Future Brings: Check out Wired’s post on Michael Wesch‘s presentation at the Personal Democracy Forum (a social networking media conference). According to the oracles of all things electronic, Wesch’s talk on how to get people’s attention in an age of mass distraction got a standing ovation at the conference.

The Forest Has Eyes (and Possibly Land Claims): Rory Carrol at the Guardian wrote a provocative article at the Guardian UK about the Peruvian government’s claims that there are no ‘uncontacted’ tribes in their section of the Amazon, the indigenous groups and activists who are claiming that there are, and the anthropologists who are hedging their bets.

A Reductionist’s Guide To Life Choices: For those of you who don’t listen to the NPR podcast called “Planet Money,” here’s some advice. Do listen. The hosts often have non-traditional perspectives on the U.S. economy, society and the current fiscal crisis. This Friday was an amusing exception. The podcast invited Tim Harford, an economist who offered humorous rational choice models to help his blog readers figure out if their spouse is cheating or whether a couple should enter an open relationship. All in all a comical point of entry into how economists think. But if you’re thinking about following his advice, don’t.

In Memoriam: I ran across two very well-done obituaries this week. The first was an article in the Boston Globe recalling the career Helen Codere, an ethnographer of the U.S. Pacific Northwest who elaborated on the potlach and edited a selection of Boas’s work called simply Kwakiutl Ethnography. On her experience as a female ethnographer in the 1940s-1960s, the Boston Globe wrote:

Dr. Codere, who never married, pointed out that in the field, “Single women lack some of the freedom and mobility of single men; they are objects of even greater curiosity and scrutiny in a world in which going two by two is projected.’’

The Guardian UK wrote also wrote an obituary of medical anthropologist Cecil Helman.  A brief exerpt:

Cecil’s work with traditional healers, especially in Brazil and South Africa, allied to 27 years’ experience as a GP in the NHS and a period as a ship’s doctor, helped him to develop an original and illuminating approach to the complexities of healthcare provision in multicultural populations.