New Bones on the Block: I am a cultural anthropologist with an abiding love for evolution but as a non-specialist I often have to rely on the popular press to keep me up to speed on the latest fossil finds. That’s why it’s handy to have John Hawks’ Weblog around, check out this excellent rundown of the Australopithecus Sediba find in South Africa which links to beautiful National Geographic images of the bones. There has also been a discovery of a new species of Homo at Denisova Cave in Russia’s Altai mountains (that’s where Russia, China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan come together). This fossil is dated at 40,000 years old, making it coeval with Neanderthal and Sapiens, but according to mitochondrial DNA evidence it is neither. Tuva-Online offers an insider’s perspective on the dig. Who knew that Tuva had an English language web presence? Richard Feynman would be proud.

No dinero in the desert: Everyone knows times are tough, especially at the state and local level where decreased revenue has led to drastic cuts in even ordinary governmental services. Now the state of Arizona is making good on its threat to shutter its state parks, but as NPR reports many fear that will put Hopi ruins at risk of looting. In the bad old days looters would ransack these and other historical sites for pottery and artifacts. I wonder if the budget crisis continues for long enough will the Arizona state government show willingness to recognize Hopi sovereignty over archaeological sites on public lands? Or perhaps seek to acquire operating funds by privatizing public lands and letting tribes have the option to buy? Where one state recedes another might expand.

No dinero in the academy, either: And while we’re on the subject of states’ budget crisis, the New York Times corroborates what everyone already knows — that across the nation salaries for professors are stagnating. Course if you’re lucky enough to have a job don’t let them catch you complaining about that 1.2% raise in the face of 2.7% inflation. And that paltry sum doesn’t even reflect the how inhospitable the economic climate is for adjuncts or the furloughs that many full-timers are experiencing. No doubt the defunding of higher education will pinch graduate students too, as the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that even the grading of essay assignments can now be outsourced to India. The Cranky Linguist shares the tale of a friend of his in Louisiana who taught a class and wasn’t paid, until he raised enough of a stink.

Dean Ex Machina: Elsewhere in Louisiana, a truly bizarre case of a dean removing a tenured professor mid-semester and raising all of the students’ grades. The justification for this radical action? Among the students enrolled in one class 90% were making a D or worse. I am wholly sympathetic towards the professor in question who has fallen victim to a complete breakdown in leadership on the part of the LSU administration. Like many academics I worry about the creeping consumer culture in higher ed where the professor merely delivers a product that the student has paid for. At the same time if it’s mid-semester and 90% of your kids are making a D or worse than you are not successfully communicating to your audience and need to make major adjustments in your methods.

Pretty pictures: Want to see some really small projectile points? Of course you do!

The work of visual anthropology in the age of digital reproduction: Periodically I receive junk mail in my campus mailbox promoting ethnographic documentaries that look interesting and while I enjoy flipping through the brochures they always wind up in the recycle bin. Two reasons for this: they are expensive to adopt and I would have to wait who knows how long just to preview them. Instead I rely on my library’s media collection and Netflix, which has programs like Nova but none of these anthropological features. I’ve been pondering John Jackson’s recent blog post on the influence of capitalist culture on ethnographic filmmaking and the hypermarketization of academia. Parenthetically he suggests we need to rethink distribution too, but he doesn’t run with the idea or flesh out how changes in distribution might affect content and form. What would he think of Michael Wesch’s now classic “An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube”, which as of this writing has more than 1,358,000 views? Seems like he’s getting his message across to a very broad audience and making it for cheap for the consumer. Milena Popova, an economist by training, complements this argument claiming that content is a public good. This is not to say that content must always be free, but I do think that we ought to rethink ethnography as something other than the production of commodities like books and films.

The Function of Farmville: First a disclaimer. I am not a Farmville player, okay? I will admit to wasting a ridiculous amount of time on Facebook, but I just do not enjoy playing SuperheroMafiaZoo or whatever. That said I am intrigued by the notion that all those Facebook games really “do” something for the people who are playing them. I’m not completely convinced by Tricia Wang’s argument (yet) that it helps to perpetuate less-meaningful social ties, but I do think she’s done some important ground clearing simply by identifying the issue. I mean, there are more people on Farmville than Twitter? Just, wow.

Timewaster: And finally, if you think the tragically ludicrous and the ludicrously tragic is more than just when a clown dies, check out Foreign Policy’s photo essay on the world’s ugliest monuments and memorials. I really like the 131-foot tall stainless steel statue of Genghis Khan.

For Your Consideration: The Harvard students’ newspaper interviewed anthropology professor Kimberly Theidon about the Academy Award nominated documentary “The Milk of Sorrow” that is inspired by Theidon’s 2004 book Entre Prójimos.  The twist?  Theidon did not know at first that her book on sexual violence against women in Peru was the inspiration for the film.

For Your Listening Pleasure: BBC Radio is streaming an audio report chronicling the story of Malinowski and the invention of field work.  Some things will make you raise your eyebrow, while other comments will make you roll your eyes.  Features interviews with Adam Kuper amongst others.

Anthropologists Do it Better: Tony Waters (a sociologist by training) from ethnography.com writes on why the International Studies Association (ISA) just doesn’t do it for him, and how AAA’s is where it’s at.  The best part of the story is when Waters is pulled into a meeting with a bunch of government bureaucrats on providing humanitarian aid to Nigeria.  He describes it this way:

The other NGO guy and I were the only ones there not in suit and tie.  We were also the only ones not dropping names of White House contacts, or mumbling about how we had such-and-such a security clearance from the US government but didn’t know what was happening in Nigeria.

Yeah, I’d stick to AAAs too.

‘Merck’y Transactions: On Somatosphere, guest contributor Ari Samsky posted a piece on the multinational pharamaceutical companies’ donations of medicine to the global south and the formulation of a ‘scientific sovereignty’ that results.

Sound Off: Hendrik Hertzberg wrote a brief piece for the New Yorker online on Rush Limbaugh’s race-baiting insinuation that Barack Obama turns African American English on and off in order to appeal to different constituencies.  (Limbaugh went as far as accusing the president of reading ‘aks’ off the teleprompter.)  For a further analysis, see this piece on Language Log (and thanks to the Log for originally linking to the Henzberg piece).

Morning Cup of Evolutionary Psychology (Now with slightly less of that eugenic aftertaste):  You might disagree with the reasoning, results, and even the premise of this Time Article linking liberalism, atheism, and monogamy to a higher IQ in men.  But, at least some readers will also get a sense of self-satisfaction.

Want to share something with SM readers?  Post in comments below, or email.

Third Quarter Review: Hortense at jezebel.com took time out from the cheese balls and the nacho dip to file a report on the Superbowl 2010 commercials. Complete with embedded clips, Hortense shows that this year’s batch is dedicated to selling emasculated men products that will help them win back their manhood.

Haiti in Fragments: I just got tipped off about the blog on Social Text’s website. Check out the collection of essays written last month by various scholars on (re)considering Haiti, its exceptional history, and its place in a world system.

Development of Memory: English Professor Anne Trubek wrote a piece in the American Prospect on efforts to restore the adolescent home of Langston Hughes as both a memorial to the author and an opportunity for redevelopment in a struggling Cleveland neighborhood. But Trubek’s hesitancy, centered equally upon the difficulties of urban renewal and the politics of memory, propel her to look for other options.

Holding Immigration Suspect: Tony at ethnography.com questions some new research making the rounds of the popular media and that argues that immigrants are more likely to engage in criminal activity than native-born people. There is, he argues, a negative correlation and a much more complicated relationship between immigration and crime.

Modern Trickery: Ok, there’s just too much good stuff on Social Text’s blog, and I need to get it out of my system. Gabriella Coleman wrote a piece considering whether internet hackers could fulfill an archetypal position of the trickster. Check it out.

Call to Unite: Michelle Thomas wrote in with the suggestion that anthropology grad students in programs across the U.S. (and beyond?) should have a central forum to write about funding. She writes:

I recently noticed that our discipline (anthropology) lacks a centralized site for grad students to discuss and commiserate over their experiences with funding. I thought perhaps you could at least draw attention to places where such conversations are happening, in the hopes that more information can be shared (and perhaps someone will even create such a centralized site for gathering information about grants and the review process in future years). In the meantime, here are the sites that I know of, and which I hope you will share with other anthropology grad students:

http://forum.thegradcafe.com/forum/17-the-bank/ http://academicjobs.wikia.com/wiki/Humanities/Social_Sciences_Dissertation_Fellowships_2010-11 http://academicjobs.wikia.com/wiki/Dissertation_fellowships http://www.poliscijobrumors.com/ –> see: http://www.poliscijobrumors.com/topic.php?id=874

Do you have something you want to include from around the web? Write in the comments or email.

Bookmark this one…Greg Downey’s post at Culture Matters (crossposted at neuroanthropology) tells you everything you ever need to know about how to throw a middle-sized conference. Really…this is impressive. From division of labor to theme (don’t have one) to food (have a lot) to keynote speaker. This post covers it all.

In a Hot Mess- AFP issued a news brief on how Starbucks is in a venti cup worth of trouble with the Mexican government for its unauthorized use of Aztec images in a company promotion. Also, Richard Greenwald at In These Times reviews a new book from UC Press on Starbucks and the American Middle Class.

Novel Ideas: Tony Waters at ethnography.com gave a unique reading suggestion–the 1952 British novel The Deceivers by John Masters. The novel tells the tale of a British colonial official who has lived in India for two decades and must devise a culturally-appropriate method for law and order when a gang of native mercenaries terrorizing the administrative unit he governs. (Hint: Waters is hoping that this might serve as an allegory for some current events).

Unteachable Moments: Pamthropologist at Teaching Anthropology explains why anthropology courses are really about unteaching all the crap with which students are inundated before getting to the classroom.

Prize Patrol: Eugene Raihkel at Somatosphere linked to Ian Hacking’s Holberg Prize Symposium. The Holberg Prize has previously been awarded to scholars like Julia Kristeva, Jurgen Habermas, and Frederic Jameson, and its website has the talks given in honor of Hacking, and Hacking’s response. Links to the videos are listed individually on the somatosphere post.

A Fighting Shame: Gabriella Coleman is collecting stories for an Academic Hall of Shame, which will catalog how many post-docs are denied health insurance and other basic benefits of employment. You can go to her blog to comment.

Mc Illin’: Ethan Watters, writing for the New York Times Magazine, does a pretty bang-up job in this piece on “The Americanization of Mental Illness.” Watters explains both the culturally embedded character of mental illness (i.e., no two societies have defined mental illness similarly) and the globalization of Western concepts of mind and self that are coming to dominate medical models around the world.

For your viewing dis/pleasure: Filip Spagnoli at the PAP-Human Rights Blog posted the Southern Poverty Law Center’s new (or latest?) pop up map of Hate Groups in the U.S. Fun map, scary thoughts.

Did I miss something? Feel free to continue posting things in the comments or email me for the next edition.

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.