Category Archives: Around the Web

Savage Minds Around the Web

That’s why they call it the Heartland: Shortly after the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of same sex marriage, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom triumphantly proclaimed, “As goes California, so goes the nation.” Considering more recent events, let’s hope not. The Iowa Supreme Court’s unanimous overturning of the state’s ban on same-sex marriage has everyone singing a new tune, “If it can happen here…” Katherine Franke at Gender and Sexuality Law Blog commented on the distinctly midwest character of Iowa court’s ruling, eschewing language of dignity and civil rights for plain old U.S. midwestern populism.  Also, for all us cynics out there, UPI just ran a story on how Iowa is gonna make bank. 

Grad school, check: Stephen Chrisomalis at Glossographia responds on Thomas Benson’s Chronicle polemic, “Just Don’t Go” [to grad school]. Chrisomalis takes a look at the rising PhDs and the academic market and how to reconcile the two.

Hope you’ve been following Tad McIlwraith’s series of posts on the British Columbia provincial government’s legislation on First Nations Recognition.  He’s followed the story pretty closely here, here, here, and here. 

Fooled by April: LL Wynn at Culture Matters wrote on an April Fools joke on at AAA that was never meant to be.

Unfortunately, it seems like it wasn’t a deliberate joke. The AAA website said clearly in several places that the call for papers would end April 1st, 5pm EST. But when I went to put in my abstract at about 2am on April 1st, it got rejected saying that the call for papers had closed at midnight! Even though the very same page that was telling me that the call for papers had closed also said that the deadline was 5pm. I called the number listed at the bottom of the page and a very annoyed-sounding call service guy (who basically just takes messages all night long for the AAA — I was rather surprised that they had something like this!) said, “No ma’am, this is not a joke. I do not have time for jokes.”

Luckily, AAA extended the deadline for abstracts.

Would a sentence of any greater length be Twittish?  Ryan Bigge at the Smart Set considers the prevelant social attitude that technoculture (like twitter) is dumbing us down, encouraging shorter communications, and turns the opinion on its head.  Brevity is the soul of wit, after all.

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Update Chris Knight: As Tim linked to in the comments of last week’s post, (BBC article here), University of East London professor of anthropology Chris Knight has been suspended, ostensibly from comments he made around comments made on BBC radio. Here are some more news updates. Herald Sun Australia. Plus the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph on the larger anti-G20 protests.

The Sentimentality of Gordon Brown’s Morals: More on the G20. hatfield girl at angels in marble muses on the upcoming speech that Gordon Brown will make in St. Paul’s Cathedral during the G20 summit. The topic will be morality, and hatfield girl writes on the UK prime minister’s “obsession” with rescuing Adam Smith from the political right.

Simply Put…Arnold Zwicky at Language Log reflects on the 50th anniversary celebration of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. It’s no surprise that a blog on language and social life should be wary of the small volume that imposes “bald assertion[s]” on proper language use. But more interesting is the entry’s brief history on the increasing value of plain-written American English. Zwicky suggests that Strunk may be one of the first to promote “vigor”, “strength”, “directness”, “boldness”, “forcefulness”, “liveliness” as normative values in American writing.

Merits of Creativity: Material World posted a summary of Tomohiro Morisawa’s research on anime. Morisawa’s work uses a discussion of creativity to explore the disjunct between the meticulous process and socially-recognized prestige of production of anime and the imagined uncritical and lazy consumption of it.

New Student Journal: The folks at the new online (and possibly print) “journal/zine” Imponderabilia wrote in to announce their official launch. The first edition has a great collection of short articles and think pieces, and the editors invite future contributions by anyone interested in analyzing culture and society and discussions through the comments section. But see for yourself. Like the Malinowski quote that inspires the journal’s title, Imponderabilia can only be observed in its full actuality.

No Easy Answers: David Isenberg of the U.S. Peace Institute wrote this article assessing the role HTS and cultural expertise more generally played in improving the situation in Iraq. While he accedes that culturally sensitive military engagement is preferable to a lack of sensitivity, Isenberg notes that embedding anthropologists makes a short-term solution permanent and forestalls a more worthy goal of training all (or at least more) military personnel in cross-cultural awareness.

Savage Minds Around the Web

Science Fiction’s Second Coming: Apropos of the recent end of Battlestar Galactica, (agnostic SciFi?), Benjamin Plotinsky at the City Journal wrote a piece on the the overlap between recent Science Fiction and Christian allegory.

In Front of the Crowd: Lorenz at antropologi.info reported on the The Radical Anthropology Group, who is organizing the protests against the G20 summit meeting in London. Lorenz goes through the news articles and the University of East London’s statements on the summit that two of their faculty, Camilla Power and Chris Knight, are organizing against.

Surf is Down: The Chronicle of Higher Ed ran a piece on laptops in the classroom and the distractions they cause. Some professors interviews believe that the chronic laptop users have poorer grade performance. The article suggests many solutions from outright banning of laptops to documenting correlations between laptop use and grades and convincing students that laptop use (and checking email) in the classroom will cause them to do worse. Of course, that may also lead students to believe that as long as they get good grades, they should be able to do whatever they want in the classroom? (Thanks to Sociological Images for commenting on this story first. Here is there reaction.)

(More) Barthes on Barthes: Benjamin Ivry writes at the Chronicle writes on two unearthed personal diaries of Roland Barthes and mixed attitudes about publishing them.

The Theory that Moveth My Soul: This was a curious letter to the editor of the smart set.

I am a Ph.D. student in a political science program, and I’ve been getting more and more annoyed. Most of the major voices in the field want to pin human behavior down to a series of standardized, quantifiable measures. Not only is this approach terribly boring to read, but it totally ignores the complexity of the individual or society. Is there any way I can use poetry in my work in order to fight these trends

Kristen Hogatt from the Smart Set responds by offering some poetry by Tasmila Nasrin, Andrew Kaufman, and Kay Ryan. Sounds like, if you can’t beat em…

Lolinguisits: Eric Bacovic at Language Log takes on all the haters of LoLCats (did I spell that right? Wait, does it matter?) Oddly enough, the person he takes issue with is an American TIME magazine reporter who finds American English-language version annoying and stupid, but the American imitation of the Russian lolcats to be hilarious? Looks like a little mistranslation can be a good thing.

Who Stole m’ Syllabus? Arggh: So what breaking news in anthropology has everybody talking, from the Chicago Tribune to the Wall Street Journal? (He says in his best page six voice. Does page six have a voice?) It’s Shannon Lee Dawdy’s class on pirates at the University of Chicago. The course, which covers intellectual piracy as well as those traditional seafarers has been picked up several papers. Get your joke in now, because the last laugh is saved for Dawdy, who is quoted as saying: “It is almost too fun for the University of Chicago, so I will make sure they read a bit of theory every week.”

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Latour on the Restructuring of French Universities: Pal Nyiri at Culture Matters explains the current strike of French faculty in protest over proposed reforms (or dismantling, take your pick) of the national university system.  Nyiri  also relays recent criticisms Bruno Latour has made against the proposed reforms and French government about the situation in Le Monde.  [Update: Thanks, ponocrates, for your comment.  My poor (or rather non-existent) French prohibits me from commenting on what Latour has said.]

Have Spiel, Will Travel: Mark Dawson has an offer for you.  After participating with HTS for nine months in Iraq, he is leaving over poor management of the program.  Now back in North America, Dawson has decided to tour the States and Canada coming to whatever college classroom will invite him to talk about his time with HTS.  Read more about Dawson’s measured enthusiasm for HTS and his classroom tour here.

Go, Go Gadget Recording Pen Paper Piano: Michael Wesch from Digital Ethnography blogged on the new smart pen from livescribe.  The pen records audio as you take notes and can play back the audio when you put its infared sensor over a particular line in text.  Wesch uses his students to test out the classroom uses of the pen, but it could be a fun fieldwork gizmo too.

Warning Signs: Kalman Applbaum at Somatosphere posted a fantastic and in-depth post on the difficulties of policing pharmaceutical claims and holding companies responsible for their products.  Applbaum’s description of Merck’s drug Vioxx shows the dangerous connections between the marketing and experimenting of new pharmaceuticals.

Preparedness In case of Ethnography…Lorenz over at antropologi.info reads the work of recent University of Bergen (Norway) MA Uy Ngoc Bui and her work on a disaster relief case in Vietnam.  This leads Lorenz to conclude that we need an anthropology of disasters that would address: the role of the state in emergency measures, globalization and relief NGOs, and the role of global warming in local climates.

Well, it’s the end of the term this week, and so I know I didn’t have time to include more stories that could be talked about.  Feel free to leave comments with links to other posts or email me with content for future installments.

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Peer Review Revealed: Inside Higher Ed discussed Michèle Lamont’s new book How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgement. In the research for the book, Lamont sat in on multiple peer review panels and interviewed people making decisions. Her findings: that reviewers reward proposals that reminds them of their latest weekend vacation, dislike proposals that doesn’t speak to their own work, form alliances with other reviewers, read moral judgements into statements of purpose, etc. But in the end, Lamont seems to conclude, it’s the worst system except for every other kind.

Distant Parents: As a lot of you probably know, Material World has fabulous extended posts/photo essays presenting the first results of recent ethnographic research. The latest is by Daniel Miller at UCL who discusses his research of tele-parenting of Filipina parents who work in domestic service abroad. It looks like a great project on intimacy, transnationalism, gender and labor.

Thanks for Your Time (But No Thanks?): NYU Historian Jonathan Zimmerman unveiled his plan in the Christian Science Monitor to save daily newspapers in the U.S. Have academics write them…for free. Zimmerman proposes that such a plan could go hand in hand with universities rewarding writing for the broader public in promotion decisions. Of course, Zimmerman doesn’t discuss what the difference would be between academic news articles that the no one may read and current publications that no one reads.

Changes Coming? The Harvard Crimson reports on Harvard’s plans to ramp up a program for one-year teaching fellowships for young scholars in order to deal with the shortage of faculty and funds in the economic downturn. Many tenured faculty at Harvard worry that the administration is using the university’s financial hardship as a excuse to undermine the tenure process. Indeed.

Generational Lives of Questions: Tad McIlwraith at Fieldnotes commented on some of the reactions of his students in Intro to Anthro and Intro to Religion classes. Among some of the very interesting insights are that students want to hear about grand theories again, and McIlwraith questions if this is the Jared Diamond-ization of pop science culture.

Finally, someone to explain the financial meltdown. The Minnesota Star interviewed Karen Z. Ho on her ethnographic research on New York investment bankers. Ho explains to the interviewer how bankers’ conceptualizations of risk and risk management lead them to make rather irresponsible decisions.

Investment bankers are structured toward the next bonus. They’re compensated on how many deals they can push through, not on the quality of the deals or long-term strategy. Investment bankers have tons of job insecurity; they are a total revolving door. But what’s interesting is that because of their fairly elite biographies and kind of privileged networks they move in, as well as their lavish compensation, the way they experience downsizing is very different from that of the average worker.

A New Site for Archaeologists: A new social-networking site just for archaeologists has been launched, and in its first month gathered 250 participants.

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HTS, a Hostile Work Environment: You can say that again. Maximillian Fortes linked to this article in the comments of the last post, but it bares repeating. Fortes posts an article by John Stanton reporting on the death threats made against former senior HTS member Marilyn Dudley-Flores and the larger campaign by her male former colleagues to discredit and discourage Dudley-Flores and other women from working with Human Terrain. Fortes is also keeping a shame list of self-proclaimed ‘independent’ military blogs who are not reporting on this story.

What Women (almost certainly do not) Want: Sociological Images and The Consumerist posted a promotional video for a video game store, where the narrator, a fictional female anthropologist, explores the dark recesses of the gaming populations to find that segment of the species that eludes most gamers: woman. Hmm…the contrast between the bombastic English talk of the anthropologist character versus the American folksy talk of the salesman and customer is also curious.

A Picture Is Worth a Handful of Words: Thanks to the Ideophone for posting a link to the AAA photo contest winners and finalists (posted on Flicker). I was going to come up with a joke about the ethnographic stereotypes many of these photos elicit, but seeing as I don’t have time, I reserve the right to do so in a later post. (Or better yet, someone else can make a joke and leave it in the comments. Maybe a Savage Minds caption contest?)

The Ritual of Empty Talk: Slate.com contributor Anne Applebaum reflects on Hillary Clinton’s trip to China and the futility of the Human Rights talk, writing the following:

Although I sympathize with these critics (of Clinton’s silence with the Chinese delegates), I find I increasingly don’t care what Clinton says about human rights to China’s leaders. Neither should they. She’s right: These exchanges have become ritualized. I also don’t care what she says about human rights to the leaders of Iran, Zimbabwe, or North Korea if those words will have no meaning in practice, anyway. Grandiloquent human rights speeches that amount to nothing have been a hallmark of U.S. foreign policy since at least 1956, when we didn’t come to the aid of a Hungarian rebellion we helped incite. Fifty years of broken promises are quite enough, and if we’re abandoning that habit now, good riddance.

Picturing American Casualties: Jim Johnson at (Notes on) Politics, Theory, and Photography comments on the Obama administration’s (sort of) reversal of the Bush Administration’s ban on photographing the caskets of American soldiers killed in combat.

International Reputation Slumming: Tunku Varadarajan wrote an opinion piece in the (London) Times Online critizing Indian euphoria over Slum-Dog Millionaires showing at the Academy Awards.
Have something else to announce?  Comment below or email suggestions for future roundups.

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David Price interviewed Roberto González about González’s new book American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2009). In the interview, González walks through the intellectual genealogy of HTS in military theory and the inherent conservative (or retrograde) theoretical approaches of Montgomery McFate and her cohort.

Thinking Sex on My Space: Sometimes its upsetting how relevant Gayle Rubin is. danah boyd at apophenia writes on the recent hype in the U.S. Attorney General’s office on how many sex offenders have been removed from My Space, which boyd rightly identifies as a fear campaign directed at the American public.

Watching one’s Words: Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log surveys the outbursts of British personalities in the news this week. At the top of the list, sportscaster Caroline Thatcher (daughter of Margaret) and her repeated calling of a bi-racial tennis player as a ‘golliwog.‘ Pullum examines how Thatcher’s employment of the term confirms Thatcher’s racist use of the word (i.e. calling the bi-racial player a ‘half golliwog’) and the British public’s reluctance to address the issue.

Material for the Classroom: Haidy L Geismar at Material World searched the internet and put together a list of syllabi on materiality.

Medicine Gone to the Market: Kalman Applbaum over at Somatosphere wrote a piece on the role marketing has played in taking over pharmaceutical design and research. Kalman uses the suggestive term, “colonization,” which begs the question of which markets pharmaceutical companies are targeting.

Oddly enough, I found this student project on one of my old favorite 20-something post-ironic blog philebrity (if you live in philly and want to be coolish, check it out). A group of Temple University students produced this short video on the Philly neighborhood/’language community’ of Fishtown and the potential effects of gentrification and a new casiNO coming (or not, fingers crossed!) to the neighborhood.

Want something included in Around the Web? Email, or post in the comments.

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Googlexandria: Robert Darton wrote a provocative review of what has been happening with Google’s digitalization project and the effects it will have on libraries and literary and scholarly culture. Darton does a good job at connecting all the strings in the political economy of academic publishing:

…the average price of a chemistry journal is $3,490; and the ripple effects have damaged intellectual life throughout the world of learning. Owing to the skyrocketing cost of serials, libraries that used to spend 50 percent of their acquisitions budget on monographs now spend 25 percent or less. University presses, which depend on sales to libraries, cannot cover their costs by publishing monographs. And young scholars who depend on publishing to advance their careers are now in danger of perishing.

Skipping a few steps, Darton goes on to explain the unfolding consequences of a class-action against Google Books Project Gutenberg, and the resultant ITunes-esque system of digital book access Darton foresees. Is Google the ambivalent savior of the digital divide? Or the benevolent monopoly? Only the future will tell.

Ahh, it is Anthropology after all…Ok, so this came out a few weeks ago. But I normally listen to NPR podcasts while I cook dinner, and I have gotten behind while writing and eating take out. I found this January 9 broadcast of an interview with Clay Shirky interesting not just because both Shirky and the interviewer said several times that there need to be more anthropological studies of online social life (oh, what funding proposal gold!). It also is one of the first talk radio discussions of new media technologies that I can recall that emphasizes the social effects on technology and not the other way around.

Calling for New Voices: Jovan at Culture Matters posted a call for non-English language contributions to Anthropology Quarterly. In order to recommend an article be translated and included in “Polyglot Perspectives,” send the editors a 1-2 page proposal of why the article should reach an international (or, em, international English-speaking) audience.

Something to Sing About: Lorenz at antropologi.info reported on Pakistani anthropologist and activist Samar Minallah’s work documenting the destruction of schools for girls and her creation of one of the first Pashtun lullabies dedicated to girls.

Between the Lines One Finds Hope: Ok, let’s not spend too much mental labor on the evaluating rhetoric of Obama’s first few days in office. But Jim Johnson at (Notes on) Politics, Theory and Photography wrote a nice evaluation of Obama’s inaugural address and narrates his reaction to it in real time.

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Rich Guys Do it Better: File it under “Sociobiologists and evolutionary biologists say the wackiest things.” Um, isn’t this file getting a little fat? The Times (London) reported on a new study that argues that women are more attracted to rich men and have better sex with them. Maybe it’s too obvious to make (one of the many possible) jokes about this. I’ll let Jezebel do it for me. Oh yes, and not only can rich men give women better pleasure, apparently they can influence the number of male children they can have with their female partners. Um, have these second researchers ever heard of Henry VIII?

A New Tune comes to Sociology Class: Tony at ethnography.com muses on the role of music in community formation, shared songs as a tool for pedagogy, the decline of music and arts education in the U.S., and the new cultural icons for this generation of undergraduates. It’s all connected, I promise.

Hot off the Web: Internet sociality researcher/open access advocate/voice of the future danah boyd released her freshly minted dissertation on her popular blog apophenia. From its abstract, boyd’s dissertation proposes that social networking sites like facebook and myspace exist in a tension between emerging networked publics of adolescent users and the anxiety of new-media apprehensive parents.

Looking Ahead Stays stuck in the Past: Greg Beato at The Smart Set reports that the only print product not suffering a sales drop in the digital era is the calendar. Ironically…

Newspaper and magazine companies are giving away products that people once paid for, and they can still barely retain an audience. The music business has turned itself into the T-shirt-sales-and-license-your-song-to-Target business because people won’t buy albums anymore. Calendar publishers are charging $13.99 for a product people used to get for free, and consumers can’t get enough of them

Beato suggests that while the availability of leisure and consumer activities become available at all hours and digital time keeping keeps people in a ever-passing present, but “clunky” calendars might be the last line of defense against losing all sense of time.

Some Respect for the Dutch: Third Tone Devil at Culture Matters speculated on why the Dutch media treats anthropologists as public intellectuals and scholars while the Australian press is not particularly interested in anthropologists’ opinions.

It was all a cartoon after all…Slate ran a retrospective slideshow of the best political cartoons of George W. Bush. I am ready for the one of Bush opening the presidential library. Actually, I’m ready for the cartoon of Bush using a library.

Have something to include? Post it in the comments section or email for a later edition.

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Arendt’s Politics and Personal Life: In the context of the resurging interest in Hanna Arendt’s theoretical work, Adam Kirsch writes a phenomenal piece in the The New Yorker on the connections between the political, theoretical and personal perspectives that Arendt tried so hard to separate in her work.

Another HTS casualty: Paula Loyd, 36, who was doused with gasoline and set on fire in Afganistan two months ago, died on account of those injuries. Lorenz at antropologi.info has the announcement and links to different news sources covering it.

Genes the new fashion for Sociologists? Á propos of Chris’s post on Stephen Pinker’s apologia for the fanatics of genetic determinism, Christopher Shea wrote an article on the Chronicle of Higher Ed asking whether sociologists will have to turn to discussing genetics (and genes’ influence on human behavior and health) to stay relevant. In the article, Shea goes just short of supposing that sociologists reticence to talk about genetics comes from their theoretical abuses:

The idea that social theorists must account for genes sounds commonsensical. But those doing the work, of course, labor under some dark shadows. Social science has a history of misguided, or worse, attempts to link genes to crime, or to deviance, or to IQ; racial differences have often been either a subtext of this work or the researchers’ main interest.

The article goes onto discuss some of the new sociological genetics studies. Just goes to show, right when you have someone of the public stature of Pinker cautioning against overvaluing genetic explanations, it sneaks in through the back door in one of the disciplines most opposed to it.

Just What are We Boycotting? Jim Johnson over at (Notes on) Politics, Theory and Photography questions the logic of the various calls for boycott on Israel in response to its incursion into Gaza. At the heart of his critique is not a disagreement with the political sentiments behind a boycott but a questioning of what boycott constitutes and accomplishes as political action. In addition to pointing out the obvious irony–boycotts punish both supporters and dissenters of the Israeli state’s actions–Johnson presents an interesting perspective on consumer politics. He asks, “[d]oes marshaling our purchasing power amplify our voices? Or does it depoliticize and moralize them?”

Tired of the Red Squiggles? MS Word keeps on attempting to correct the spelling of your latest theoretical intervention or in-group neologism? Read Chris Wilson’s Slate article critiquing the huge time lag on spell checking programs and cultural lexicons and join the ranks of the dissaffected.

CNN’s Saheed Ahmed recently contributed a short piece on the killing of witches in rural PNG, and spoke to Bruce Knauft for the story.

Love of Learning in a Time of Melancholia: There may be soon a whole new set of ethical questions for academics participation with the military. The Washington Post ran this article on the creation of schools for U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The school began in November as a joint venture between the U.S. armed forces and the University of Maryland, and has plan to expand to five sites in Iraq.

Something for the next cocktail party…One of the things I run through really quickly while finding things to post is an rss feed of anthropology in the news. About half of it are announcements by community newspapers of anthropology majors made good (and good for them!), and the other about half is one or two stories picked up and distributed by a major news service about some new ‘exciting finding’ (usually about ancient civilizations or human evolution). What is interesting about them is not necessarily their content but the frequency with which they appear, which means that someone out there might ask you about some random thing they’ve read (and that random thing might be this article). This week, word on the internets is about scientists at the Max Plank Institute saying that the possibility of ressurrecting long extinct animals exists. I hope that the link that you pull up still has the huge picture of Ringo Star on the side bar (as mine does now). Discuss.

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Here are my (pretty much made up) resolutions for 2009.

Resolution 1: Make More Lists. Check out dlende’s obnoxiously fantastic post on the best anthropology blogs of 2008. And the last list of 2008, I promise. Posted over at archaeoporn are the top ten pseudo-archaeology topics of 2008. And of course Indy IV tops the list.

Resolution 2: Get more cool gizmos. Technology is awesome (and it could very well be the future!). Michael Wesch at Digital Ethnography wrote on the importance of teaching participatory media literacy in the classroom. Joining the ranks of new media scholars who remind us that young people aren’t inherently (or even mostly) techno-savvy, Wesch states that the majority of his students would prefer less technology in the classroom. Meanwhile, over at HASTAC, Jonathan Tarr posted on his new XO Laptop (from One Laptop Per Child), and his experience becoming accustomed to a machine that was designed for a non-first world audience.

Resolution 3: Get Outraged more often. John L. Jackson has been following the news surrounding the Obama transition team, whereas I have not. Jackson wrote a piece on the disturbing political ‘satire’ CD circulating the ranks of the Republican party including tracks like, “Barack, the Magic Negro,” and “The Star Spanglish Banner.”

Resolution 4: Be Relevant! Pam at Teaching Anthropology has started a multiple-post series on teaching U.S. college students about Africa. Her first post begins with the challenges of teaching about non- or minimal interference during research to her students, many of whom grew up in evangelical families in a post-9/11 society. Interesting stuff.

Resolution 5: Question Taboos. James Johnson at (Notes on) Politics, Theory, and Photography, responds to Richard Posner’s new book, How Judges Think. Johnson argues that social consensus, a reason that judges sometimes cite in making decisions, does not really exist. What passes for social consensus is often the acquiescence of people to already instituted legal statutes or social policies. As an example against social consensus, Johnson references a recent publication that demonstrates the rise of incest laws (prohibiting 1st cousin marriage) in the U.S. was more reflective of prejudicial attitudes towards immigrants and the poor than any widely-held popular belief.

Resolution 6: Be more open. Jason Baird Jackson reports on a large new Open Access Project in India. The National Folklore Support Center, will host fourteen Open Access Journals.

Resolving to tell people about some web happening? Leave a comment below or email for next week’s installment.

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New School Occupation Declares Success: A student occupation of university buildings that came after two weeks of protest and a faculty vote of no-confidence against the university President at the New School ended with the president agreeing to begin moving to Socially Responsible Investing of the endowment, more student representation in administration decisions, and a general amnesty for protesters. Check out the New School in Exile website for updates and NYT coverage as well.

Raiders of the Found Arc: archaeologyknits at Archaeoporn commented on a recent published proposal to allow (and encourage) archaeologists to traffic in (what would otherwise be) looted objects. In the latest edition of Biblical Archaeology Review 34 (6), Hershl Shanks, the proposer of archaeo-looting, suggests that the selling of archaeological objects to museums may fund further research. In addition to questioning these ethics, archaeologykints rightly points out that such a system will force archaeologists to choose sites that may contain objects with greater museum draw.

Memory of Hunger: Paul Mason at Culture Matters published an interview with Alice Corbet, a recent PhD from the Sorbonne, where Mason asked Corbet about her fieldwork in a refugee camp in Morroco, how to live on the U.N. rations, and finding office space to write up in a graveyard.

Home is Where the Horror is: Jessica Crispin at the Smart Set reviewsThe Gentle Art of Domesticity (2008) and Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861) to find out just what is different about the nineteenth-century housewife manifesto and third-wave feminism‘s valorization of the creative arts of the home.

Avedon, Evans and the Photographic Encounter: Over at (Notes On) Politics, Theory and Photography, there have a been a couple posts on the struggle over representation between the photographer and subject in the portrait photography of Walker Evans and Richard Avedon.

Colonial Legacies of Homophobia: As the New York Times reported this week, the first resolution brought to the floor of the United Nations to include sexual orientation and gender identity rights into the UN Declaration of Human Rights was supported by an unprecedented 66 countries, mostly in Europe and Latin America. Other states, like the Vatican, objected that inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity ‘challenges existing human rights norms.’ (File that under, ‘duh.’) While a counter statement read by a delegation led by the Organization of the Islamic Conference highlighted the religious objections to LGBTQ human rights, Human Rights Watch pointed out the legacy of (primarily British) colonialism in instituting a large number of the anti-sodomy laws still in place around the world.

Denim Beneath the Equator: Material World posted a description of Szilvia Simai-Mesquita’s work on Brazilian jeans and the commodification of Rio, Samba, and Brazilian women’s bodies.

Have something to contribute?  Feel free to post below or email me.

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Academic Clearing House: Classics professor Victor Davis Hanson on the decline of the liberal arts in U.S. Higher Education. Hanson is inarguably on the WRONG side of the academic culture wars, and you have to get past a lot of ethnocentrism to read the article. So, roll your eyes, and then continue. Hanson has some interesting things to say about the transformation of universities into vocational schools, not teaching critical thinking, the problems of internet universities, and how the History Channel has supplanted the classical education.

State Enforced Indigineity: Alexei BarroNuevo at the International Herald Tribune reported from Amazonia that two Mariaçu chiefs have asked Brazilian authorities to enter their community and police community youth.

“We want government officials to help us save our children, so they don’t take part in these ruinous practices,” said Oswaldo Honorato Mendes, a deep-voiced Mariacu chief. “Every day the situation gets worse. The younger generation does not obey. They do not show respect for our authority as chiefs. They need to learn respect.”

Arctic Cities of the Future: Sam Fields at Space and Culture reports on the effects Greenland’s separation from Iceland Denmark will have on indigenous governance, arctic urbanization, and the geopolitical landscape of the great white North.  [Update: I am now convinced that both the Islandic and the Danish hate me).

Stories for Our Times: Sam Leith at the UK Telegraph reports on MIT’s Center for the Future of Storytelling and considers what stories might one day be used to explain people living now. Leith wonderfully proposes an equal access to storytelling. He writes:

You don’t have to be a crazed Jungian, a structural anthropologist, or a seven-basic-plots believer to agree that storytelling is something of universal importance in human experience, and something that exhibits deep and suggestive similarities across cultures.

Stem Cell Tourism: Eliza Barclay at National Geographic News submitted this story on Americans going abroad to get stem cell treatments to alleviate symptoms of degenerative diseases. The article is short but provocative, suggesting the role public conception and affective attitudes towards stem cells are influencing this burgeoning cottage industry.

Wikipedia…Crowd or Collaboration? HASTAC is developing an interesting conversation about collaboration on Wikipedia and the wisdom (or lack thereof) of crowds (apparently a Silicon Valley term of which I hadn’t heard). To me, the argument seems to be more about collaboration and conflict, but it has some intriguing thoughts on internet sociality.

Feeling Good/Feeling Bad…Together: Finally, this week was a big one for the social mimesis of emotions, even if given a bio-bent. Science American posted podcasts on the contagion of happiness and the production of pain.

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Savage Minds Around the Web

Bloodlines: Inside Higher Ed published an article on the recently revived lawsuit by the Havasupai tribe against researchers at Arizona State University. The suit alleges that researchers (other than the original investigator who collected the blood) have used blood samples for purposes other than outlined in the IRB protocols. Said one commenter:

“This is a really interesting case because it opens up some questions of the reasonableness of practices that have been flying under the bioethical radar,” said Jonathan Marks, a professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and an expert on informed consent and bioethics. Marks said that while he did not know the specifics of what happened in Arizona, he sees a widespread problem of anthropologists collecting blood for one purpose (with informed consent) and then having other scholars use the blood (without consent). Ethics issues abound, he said, because some of the subsequent research is potentially lucrative and because of the realities that these interactions do not take place on a two-way street.

Building/Burning Bridges: Hanna Fearn wrote for the UK Times Higher Ed Supplement on the divisions between evolutionary and sociocultural anthropology. Sometimes, one is left wondering whether The Great Divide Fearn speaks of is between evolutionary vs. social anthro or between U.S. and British models, as a lot of the British scholars interviewed suggested that the rising tide of evolutionary anthropology is coming from the States. Hmm, if that’s the case, the Chagnon reference might not be the most convincing. (Thanks to Crystal at Travel Scrabble for linking to this).

Addendum: Click here for a response to Fearn’s article by Michael Stewart on Cognition and Culture.

Archeology of Homelessness: Phys.Org reported on the research of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI for the midwesternly challenged) anthropology professor Larry J. Zimmerman and IUPUI student Jessica Welch. The archaeological survey was designed to look at homeless life outside of shelters, where most ethnographies of the homeless take place. Welch, herself formerly homeless, and Zimmerman will be publishing results in Historical Archeology early next year.

Saying Goodbye to ‘the Stranger’: NY Magazine published a fairly lengthy article challenging the isolated individual trope that seems to linger on in urban and online studies (even Louis’s Wirth’s 1938 classic essay “Urbanism as a Way of Life” makes an appearance.) If you can ignore the self-loving parts where the author reminds us how quintessentially urban and wonderful New York is, it’s a pretty good article. (Thanks to Arts and Letters Daily for posting this).

It’s Electrifying! Lorenz at antropologi.info has a great interview with Tanja Winther about her new book, The Impact of Electricity: Development, Desires and Dilemmas.

Ladies and Gents, the punchline: What would a news roundup be without some fun stuff? The first one comes from deathpower.

Cleverest Hegel joke this week: Most Hegel scholars agree there are 3 kinds of people: those who don’t really understand Hegel, and those who never liked arithmetic anyway.

The second is filed under ‘weird toys’ on Visual Anthropology of Japan. Enjoy!