I’m changing the format of Around the Web. I’ve had some difficulty keeping the feature regular, especially during busy times of the semester. It’s not for want of links – I have pages of them to share! By moving to Twitter I hope to get the links to our readers in a more timely manner. If you aren’t already following Savage Minds on Twitter consider this your invitation.

See you in the Twitterverse!

This week Around the Web is all about language and the mind. Let’s kick things off with another of those clever RSA Animate features, this time starring Steven Pinker as he discusses what language can tell us about social relationships.
 

BRAAAAIINSS!!!

• The phenomenon of Alien Hand Syndrome: after doctors cut her corpus callosum to treat her epilepsy a patient finds that her left hand often acts against her will. “I’d light a cigarette, balance it on an ashtray, and then my left hand would reach forward and stub it out.” She was featured in the BBC series, The Brain: A Secret History.
• Anthropology in Practice takes a pinch of folklore mixes a little evolutionary psychology and stirs in a heaping helping of Disney World.

 
“Come to my senses sometimes”

• Book review – Suffering and Sentiment: Exploring the Vicissitudes of Pain and Experience in Yap, an in-depth ethnographic study of the experience of physical pain.
• Metaphor shapes our perception of reality – portraying crime as a virus plaguing a city leads people to call for social reform, describing it as a beast preying on the city leads people to call for tougher law enforcement.
• Philosopher Alva Noe favors a view of consciousness as embodied cognition. “Consciousness is not something that happens in us. It is something we do.”
• Book review – High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture.

 
Artificial Intelligence

• NYT on the Jeapordy trouncing computer Watson. Mind Hacks has the run down.
• In the Atlantic linguist Ben Zimmer, for one, welcomes out new computer overlords. More links here.

 
Politics of Language

• Language Log writes on the deliberate affectation of a Southern accent in Republican Presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty. There’s a follow up here.
• In my General Anthropology class I used selections from this PBS series, “Do you speak American?”. I might write up a full review on it at a later date.

 
An Evolutionary Perspective

• Primatology. net on the Vervet Monkey, which is known to produce predator-specific alarm calls. Here’s the second part of that entry.

 
Wor(l)d History

• Does Language Log even know what they are talking about? Contemporary use of the word “even” reflects 16th Century origins.
• BBC on the spread of “OK” as documented by Allan Metcalf in OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word. Incidentally I had a professor in grad school who held that the word “okay” was African in origin.

 
Language on the Internet

• A cross-cultural investigation of Smileys – not all emoticons are the same.
• Check out the new online magazine, Popular Linguistics.
• How much do you use your office phone? Dean Dad wonders whether they’ll go the way of the typewriter.

 
“This year Halloween fell on a weekend”
 

Seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds communtiy? Email your links to mdthomps AT odu.edu

I gave up Facebook for Lent, but perhaps a more fitting penance would have been to actually write a column a week for Savage Minds. Though I haven’t done a good job of staying on top of Around the Web, I have been saving links for weeks now. This week its all about the interwebs. To the linx!

Best of Media/Anthropology:

• John Postill has a lot to say about social networks. Like why Twitter is best as a human-mediated RSS feed.
• He’s also thrown together an annotated bibliography on researching social networks.
• Could it be that the anthropology of the internet is the second coming of culture-at-a-distance?

The digital family

• Material World explores the intertwining of family relationships and digital practices.
• Apophenia is a great blog about social media, youth and parenting.

Social media and social change

• We’ve heard about the role of Twitter and Facebook in the Middle East rebellions, has anyone seen anything connecting social media to the disaster in Japan?
• Indigenous youths in Taiwanare using social media to make their voices heard.
• Anthropology in Practice reports on tweeting from the homeless. And gamer site Kotaku reports on a video game designed to teach you about living in poverty.

The internet and religion

• Pope Benedict weighs in on social networking. In related news, the Church has approved an iPhone confession app.
• NYT reports on live-streaming of funerals for far flung families unable to travel.

Cultural diversity online

• Researchers at Carneige Mellon find that regional variation in American English is manifest in tweets.

Whither anthropology in the digital age?

• Daniel Lende, in a wide ranging post about the “science” debate in anthropology and the recent response, published in Nature, from Adam Kuper and Johnathan Marks offers up a vision of anthropology: major changes to traditions of the dissemination of knowledge – open access and blogging.
• Ethnografix has an appreciation of Lende’s post and offers an interesting idea too: how about a online anthropology publication modeled after literary magazine The Sun?
• Another model might be First Monday, a peer-reviewed online journal about the internet (h/t Material World).
• For more interesting ideas check out this recent Wednesday Round Up from Neuroanthropology which has a neat section heading on online anthropology.

Seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Email your links to mdthomps AT odu.edu.

Around the Web is back and, with a nod to one of the most writerly of anthropological writers, this week’s column is dedicated to putting pen to paper. To the links!

The writing process

• Lifehacker explains why you learn more effectively by writing longhand than typing.

Teaching writing

• A neat little exercise to get your students to write a tight, concise precis.
• Directed writing can improve every student’s performance. Even in physics!

Words of affirmation

• A little coaching from the Chronicle’s Brainstorm blog lifted my spirits. It’s a quickly little ditty on what you really need to write. All the time I tell myself I need childcare to write or at least peace and quiet, but look I’m writing this while my third child lies next to me on the couch smashing her foot into my face, demanding “Can I ha’ more?”
• Got writer’s block? You’re closer to creativty than you think! Read: How to have ideas.

Publishing

• Science-fiction blog io9 forsees a publishing world of 2021 where e-books have taken over and book retailers are doomed. I wonder where this will leave textbooks in ten years?
• More io9: How to publish your book on Amazon Kindle. Your work can be available for sale on Amazon in 24-48 hours. Why do we need academic presses again? Oh yeah, peer review.
• The blog Anthropologi considers the possibility of combining publishing formats: conventional book and web download.

Writing for a broad audience

• John Hawks on good science writing and the beneficial role it plays in the production of new knowledge.
• Ever want to start your own anthropology blog? Here are some tips.

In memoriam

• Alison Snow Jones who blogged as Maxine Udall, girl economist, recently passed away. Ethnografix has an appreciation that is, dare I say, right on the money.

Got some tips on why a raven is like a writing desk? Send ’em to me at mdthomps AT odu.edu.

Welcome to the first web round up of 2011, let’s hit the links!

Working and productivity

• For those of you on the job market, Dean Dad has some sage advice on how to read salary ranges. “Published salary ranges bear almost no relationship to what a new hire can actually expect to get.”
• If you’re like me and easily distracted by bright, shiny objects check out this Google Chrome App for managing your access to the internet while you’re working.

Public or popular anthropology?

• One thing I’ve been considering lately is how the recent calls for “public” anthropology can over lap with the “popular.” Anthropology.net talks to Jane Goodall about what makes good, popular science writing.

“Science,” again

• BBC World Service covers the increasingly prominent role of litigation and libel in scientific and medical discourse and the potential threat it poses to the criticism of scientific papers necessary to the scientific method.
• Peter Peregrine of the Society for Anthropological Sciences and Hugh Gusterson of the AAA Executive Board take to the airwaves to discuss the role of science in anthropology in light of the ongoing debate over the changes to the AAA long-range plan in this radio broadcast.
• Fear not! “science” will undoubtedly return to the AAA’s long-range plan. So says Hugh Gusterson in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. So that’s all settled then. Right?

Urban Geography

• Detroit’s Mayor David Bing announces that the city is on track to successfully demolish 3,000 homes in one year. Bing’s goal is to remove 10,000 homes by 2013.
• A Gaurdian photo gallary of “Detroit in Ruins.”
• Multispecies ethnography: A review of the new book “Pigeon Trouble: Bestiary Biopolitics in a Deindustrialized America” by anthropologist Hoon Song.

Maps

• Check out this cool map based on 1860 census data on slave populations. By shading the southern counties to represent the proportion of the population that is enslaved (a new technique at the time, we are told) the reader can identify some clear patterns on slave population density.
• Also from Sociological Images, a national map of U.S. accents based on research collected in the Atlas of North American English. Not represented on this map: Black Vernacular English.
• Slate also ran a stunning map on “food deserts” in the United States, identifying communities without easy access to grocery stores. However, due to the fact that this map is on a national scale inner city food deserts are obscured.

Huckleberry Finn

• Earlier this month there was a scuffle over the publication of a new edition of Huckleberry Finn with the word “nigger” replaced with “slave”, “Injun” replaced with “Indian”, and “half-breed” with “half-blood.” It provoked considerable debate over the value of the editor’s motives – to make Twain’s classic more accessible – as opposed to the whitewashing of history. Racialicious collects links and quotes on the controversy here.
• Also this month the new Congress was sworn in and the 2011 legislative season begun. The new House majority marked the occasion with a ceremonial reading of the Constitution, but leaving out references to slavery and other passages superseded by amendments. A practice Slate directly related to the new edition of Huckleberry Finn.

Language

• Mind Hacks provides a digest of links on the Pirahã language, a subject of contentious debate among linguists.

Human Terrain System

• One out of work anthropologist gives his perspective on working for the HTS. In this extended field report the author gives a first hand account of completing the HTS training.
• HTS gets the Supernormal treatment

Economics and corporate ethnography

• Dean Dad reflects on “mature industries” and the potential for growth in the academic market when most new jobs today are being created by start-ups.
• Maxine Udall starts this blog post off with an must-read historical quote from an 8 year old girl on working in the coal mines.
• A long post on Ethnography.com on the recalcitrance of peasants to enter into global capitalism and the insufficiency of economic models to understand their self-sufficiency.
• The link above goes hand in hand with this new edited volume, The Human Economy.
• An anthropologist reflects on his five years at Intel and his reasons for leaving the company.

Seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Send an email to mdthomps AT odu.edu.

Around the Web has to sit at the kids’ table this holiday. And to mark the occasion here’s a special Christmas song from my family to yours. As I head home to Texas I reflect on how kinship is an amazing thing. Let’s just say kids, through their own magic, give holidays a new meaning.

Twins!

• The International Culture and Cognition blog reports on ultrasonography research which argues that, in utereo, twins show actions directed at their co-twin, furthering debate on whether human tendencies towards social interaction are present even before birth.
• The Hero Twins: Against the Lords of Death, a comic book based on Mayan mythology

Kids say the darndest things

• Society for Linguistic Anthropology links to two NYT artices, one on the latest research on baby babbling the other testing whether very young children can understand irony.
• Language Log responds to a NYT piece on linguist Deborah Tannen’s current research on why having a sister makes you happy.

Early development

• Time reports on recent psychological research that shows a direct relationship between affection given to very young children and the display of kindness by those chidlren later in life.
• Slate emplores you to make sure those kiddie get plenty of playtime on their tummies. “A growing body of evidence now suggests that the timing of the motor-skill milestones that precede walking is crucial and can even factor into long-term health and cognitive ability.”

Youth education

• Sociological Images questions whether boys receive less sex education than girls.
• Here’s a program that seems ripe for anthropological study: bringing babies into the classroom to teach teens compassion.

Health

• Somatosphere reviews the latest issue of Transcultural Psychiatry a special issue on “Child and community mental health in cultural perspective.”
• Mind Hacks reveals that a major textbook for doctors on treating mental illness in children authored by two prominent psychologists was, in fact, ghost written. By a drug company.

Parenting

• A new documentary, “No Woman, No Cry”, focuses on the difficulties pregnant women face in acquiring quality health-care in Tanzania, Bangladesh, Guatemala, and the United States.
• Anthropologist Bambi Chapin has co-edited a special issue of the journal Ethos on “Mothering as everyday practice”

Seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Email me at mdthomps AT odu.edu

Science shit-storm

• Full coverage of the wording of the AAA mission statement and the place of “science” in anthropology can be found at Neuroanthropology where Daniel Lende has collected fifteen links (and growing) on the subject alongside his own opinions. He’s been doing a good job of updating the link list as more blogs respond to the AAA’s actions, so if its been a while since you checked his page check again.

Don’t forget the ethics code!

• While a lot of blogging energy has gone into the “science” kerfluffle, comparatively little posting has been done on the revision of the ethics code outside of the AAA’s own blog. Inside Higher Ed, while leading with a ridiculous example, did at least muster some coverage of this important issue.

Teaching ethnography

• If you’re an adjunct like me you might be pigeonholed into a limited repetoir of textbook focused intro courses in a sociology department. I’d like to get my students reading more about other cultures rather than just giving them what Haviland or Kottak say culture is. This means getting them to read ethnography, something they don’t already know how to do. Here’s some helpful tips I found on teaching reading.

Whither the future of citations?

• Ethnografix blogs here on the perception by some that citing sources is a rather stuffy, old fashioned practice. It seems that at least once a year I bust a student for plagiarism and its been argued that young people, schooled in the conventions of sampling, pop culture references, and mash-up culture, experience a kind of cognitive dissonance at the very notion of giving proper credit. As the recent Cook’s Source row has shown, even some more mature writers see the contemporary internet scene as an environment where anything goes.

Republicans have feelings too

• In this short essay, an anonymous author and self described conservative cynically recounts his attempt to improve his teaching evaluations when his liberal colleagues conspire to fire him after tenure based on the scores. There’s a lot of moving parts here and the author seems to relish being an asshole, but the upshot of the whole thing is a purported direct relationship between grade inflation and evaluation inflation. There’s probably some truth to that.

Ain’t got nothin’ but love, babe

• Who couldn’t use an extra day in the week? It always seems that I don’t have the time to get done what I need to get done, but then I’m like the opposite of a Type A personality. Prof. Hacker, in this review of “168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think,” suggests you can find the time to get things done by keeping a time diary. So, in the interest of efficiency you might just read the review instead of the book.

Can adjuncts move up?

• Academia has the distinction of being a field where starting at the bottom, working hard, doing a good job, and being a amiable colleague will get you nowhere. Does a part-timer have a better chance over the competition to move up to a full-time position at the same school? Not necessarily, writes Dean Dad.

On making it outside academe

• Susan Basalla May, co-author of “So what are you going to do with that?” a quite helpful book on leaving the academy, interviewed anthropologist John Fox on his zigzagging career path. Fox, “Much as I’d like to pretend it’s been the unfolding of some great master plan, the truth is, it’s come about through a combination of pursuing interests, seizing opportunities, and being pragmatic about making a living.”
• Another Chronicle piece on anthropologists, focusing on the changes nonacademic professionals are bringing to the AAA. This one’s behind the pay wall so if you don’t subscribe you’ll have to go through your library’s website.

For profits

• We’ve been kicking the for profit schools around quite a bit here on Around the Web. Muckraker and gossipmonger blog Gawker finds that even though these schools have been accused of fraud, subjected to increased scrutiny from the Feds, and might lose their access to federal loan programs if Obama has his way, the National Security Administration still gives its employees paid time off to attend them.

Timewaster

• The loneliness of the long-distance exoplanet anthropologist.

Seen something around the web you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Email your links to mdthomps AT odu.edu.

I’ve fallen behind in my blogging lately, so apologies if you sent me a link that is not published in this post. There’s some on for-profit higher ed and AAA ethics that I’m not getting to this week, but still have on the back burner for the next post. If I forgot yours don’t be shy about resending it. Thanks to everyone for supplying so much good stuff!

The People of Wal-Mart

• Usually content with tabloid coverage of celebrity scandals and news of the weird type pieces, Gawker ran an illuminating one, two, three part series on working at Wal-Mart. However the best part of these articles is not their stand-alone content, but the comments section where readers tell their own stories. I know there are plenty of books out there about the nation’s largest private employer, I just don’t know of any using ethnographic methodology or engaging current theoretical debates. (I take that back, wasn’t there a chapter in Nickle and Dimed about it? Somebody must have done this at length, right?) By itself this series makes the case for the ubiquity the retailer in the everyday lives of a great diversity of Americans.

Culture of Poverty, Again

• This should follow Wal-Mart nicely: “cultural” studies of the causes of poverty are in vogue again. The NYT starts it off, finger wagging at the “overwhelmingly liberal ranks of academic sociology and anthropology” for long ignoring that “attitudes and behavior patterns” keep people poor, as if this were merely a case of political correctness run amuck. Then noting that this “surge” of research comes as the percentage of Americans living in poverty reaches a 15-year high. So that must be because peoples’ attitudes and behavior patterns have changed all of a sudden, right? *note: this is sarcasm -ed.
• Neuroanthropology jumped on it ahead of the MSM (this is why blogging is cool, you get to scoop the big boys). Daniel Lende takes the time to read the scholarship behind the NYT piece and provide the link. He reserves his criticism for the popular understanding of the culture of poverty where the “wrong ideas about ‘culture’ are used to heap blame and twist policy.” He observes, “Culture has been turned into beliefs and perceptions, which Americans view as something highly individual.”
• Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic followed up with a introspective piece about nearly coming to blows when confronted by the target of one his journalistic critiques. Coates blames his willingness to participate in such a display of machismo on lessons he learned as a youth on the streets of Baltimore. After all, “It defies logic to think that any group, in a generationaly entrenched position, would not develop codes and mores for how to survive in that position.” The problem, as Coates sees it, is the willingness for many Americans to read those values or their embrace as uniquely Black without examining why anyone would adopt such values as a matter of survival.
• Salon brought the most critical look at the “culture of poverty” calling it a “myth” and arguing that it is not that “we shouldn’t talk about the interplay of class and culture, but… the culture of poverty framework limits our ability to do it.” Poverty needs to be understood primarily as the result of structural forces. The poor serve an important function in a capitalist economy as their labor produces wealth for others.

The Africa Desk

• Here’s an interesting cut and paste project filling in Africa’s geography with world economic powers. Kinda puts things in perspective.
• Archaeologists uncover a 15th Century Chinese coin in Kenya, marked as belonging to an envoy of the emperor, almost 100 years earlier than Europeans reached east Africa.
• With the very rich and the very poor of Africa capturing the Western imagination, the African middle class can easily slip from view for a mainstream American audience. Classes Moyennes Afrique seeks to correct that image.

Kashmir Resources

• Kashmir Lit is a clearinghouse of interviews, book reviews, poetry, and news by Kashmiri and Kashmir diaspora writers.
• Kashmir Solidarity Network is a blog that collects news and opinion about Kashmir from the western media, international sources, and blogs.

The Profoundly Superficial in Japan

• Cosmetic Cosmologies, a full length essay at Open Anthropology Collective, where our intrepid anthropologist, with the aid of James Bond and Roland Barthes, struggles to find a surface to stand on. But the signifiers without signifieds just keep slipping. “If the Japanese practices we have been considering here appear to be much less cosmic than cosmetic – if, that is, they strike us as superficial – then, I suggest, that is because the cosmological in Japan is so often constituted at the cosmetic level.” Here’s a separate introduction to the same piece. It’s a very good read, highly recommended

Viva OA

• Now that you’ve read that awesome OAC post, check out the latest research on why open access is awesome.

NAGPRA turns 20

• The legislation creating the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act begins its third decade on November 16. The journal Museum Anthropology marks the anniversary by collecting all its previously published articles on repatriation in an virtual issue as a prelude to this current themed issue which explores the topic in depth.
• Museum Anthropology’s blog has a collection of links for more perspectives on observing NAGRPA’s anniversary.
• Coverage in the journal Science was not only solid, but is being made available for free to non-subscribers.

Tis the Season for Political Ads

• Sociological Images ran this digest of political ads that, in the vein of G.H.W. Bush’s notorious Willie Horton ad, seek political gain by stoking racial fears.
• Unmentioned by SI (at least in the link above) is the irony of two different candidates, in different parts of the country using the same image of “scary” Mexicans. Or are they “Asians”? I can’t tell.
• Here in Hampton Roads there’s a candidate running for Congress in Virginia Beach who has been painting his opponent as a sniveling politician, making himself out to be wholesome and good, promising this and that. Fairly typical commercial fodder and, so far, nothing to write home about. Only I’ve been wanting to blog about one of his ads where he claims to be an upstanding citizen by virtue of owning a car dealership, which, you know, employees people with jobs and stuff. But this one where he conflates the nation and the (male) bodies of himself, his father, and his son is even better. Because, you see, Scott Rigell has Patriotic DNA (apparently carried on the Y-chromosome).

Have you seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Do you want to know how to measure patriotism through genetics? Email me at mdthomps AT odu.edu and all your questions will be answered.

What the present will have been

• In an op-ed in the WaPo, philosopher Anthony Kwame Appiah looks to the past and observes that whereas certain practices such as slavery were considered acceptable, today they seem reprehensible. And past critiques of social behavior such as prohibition can be interpreted in the present as misguided. Which of our own contemporary practices then will be condemned by those in the future?

U.S. economy and housing: Routes and roots

• Folks living out of cars and RV’s along Venice Beach are being turned out of their parking spots by LAPD. To the claim that a bohemian homeless crowd is drawn to Venice because its cool to live out of your car, UCLA law professor Gary Blasi says, “The idea of carefree vagabonds is statistically false. More often, these are people who lived in apartments in Venice before they lived in R.V.’s. The reason for losing housing is usually the loss of a job or some health care crisis.”
• Debate continues on the root causes of the ongoing U.S. housing crisis with complex financial instruments, regulatory incompetence and corruption, political ideology, and good old fashioned greed all offering themselves as potential culprits. Add to that now institutional racism, according to new study put out by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs, which finds that “residential segregation created a niche of minority clients who were marketed risky subprime loans.”

Race and demography

• If you haven’t already seen this Flickr set of maps of major U.S. cities illustrating residential segregation as recorded by census data take a long break and flip through them. There’s 103 to view, so if you want to get the main points in digest form check out Gawker or Sociological Images.

Criminal justice

• A report from the NYU law school reveals that of the 15 states with the largest inmate populations, 13 of them charge the poor for use of public defenders. Such fees are considered an important source of revenue for cash strapped state justice systems and are on the rise. “In Michigan, the report says, the National Legal Aid and Defender Association found the ‘threat’ of having to pay the full cost of assigned counsel caused misdemeanor defendants to waive their right to attorneys 95% of the time.”
• Retired Justice John Paul Stevens said in interview with NPR that the “one vote I would change” was the 1976 vote he cast to restore the death penalty.

Hey, hey! We’re the monkeys!

• At the Commonwealth Games, held this year in New Delhi, India, langur monkeys are being used by event security at several venues to keep other, smaller primates in check.
• Remember “Ida”? While the media hype over the Darwinius fossil has subsided, the debate over its taxonomy continues. Laelaps, the evolution blog at Wired, provides a synopsis and links to Zinjanthropus for a second opinion.
• Greg Graffin, of Bad Religion now a lecturer at UCLA, on evolution and punk rock.

Ground Zero mosque will look totally trippy

• Try this experiment. If you type the word “Ground” into Google the third suggested search is Ground Zero Mosque (right behind Ground Beef Recipe). I originally did this because I couldn’t think of what the proper name of the place is, GZM having been seared into my brain the mass media. The proper name is, thank you Wikipedia, Park51. It will be amazing to behold.

Teaching resources

• Suggestions for addressing common classroom problems in a choose-your-own-adventure format for tailored results, via Carnegie Mellon.
• Short tip sheets for help with basic tasks like grading and leading discussion, via Harvard.

Timewasters

• NYT does a Mad Magazine fold-in retrospective.
• Scientific American has a comic feature on the Neanderthal genome.

Seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Drop me an email at mdthomps AT odu.edu.

Welcome to a special web video edition of Around the Web. Its better than vitamin fortified coffee!

Comics! Games! Anthropology! turned up a treasure trove of cool Flash animations available on the YouTube channel QualiaSoup. I’m envious over the enticing flow of words and pictures in these videos and plan on emailing my Gen Anth class this video on evolution today, though this one bellow which C!G!A! picked out is pretty sweet too.

Have you jumped on the NextMedia bandwagon yet? The CGI generated Taiwanese tabloid was profiled in Wired for what they appropriately label “cartooning the news.” Part of the appeal for an American audience is the cartoony, surreal imagery juxtaposed with what “we” might consider ordinary current events. Whatever your politics you probably didn’t imagine Sarah Palin with a bare midriff standing on top of a moving train shooting a machine gun into the air. Or maybe you did? Keep your eyes peeled for visual puns (choking the chicken, bellow) or in this clip about the WSJ/ NYT feud, post-modern pop culture references to West Side Story.

This next video is brought to you by An Anthropologist Goes Techno. It should be said that the author of this video is hewing much closer to what an anthropologist would consider to be popular culture and mass media, especially as our discipline disposed of the “culture is an organism” and “culture is the collective subconscious” line of thinking several decades ago. But setting that aside I find it absolutely fascinating that a English teacher in Canada is hard at work putting images to words and throwing it up onto to YouTube. I applaud the spirit of wrestling with theoretical issues in public. So an “A for effort” to you, RusticChivalry1985.

My favorite blog of the moment has to be Sociological Images which never disappoints when it comes to turning up observations on the visual field, especially as it relates to gender and sexuality. (Two of my favorites are here and here.) The blog is updated rather frequently so by now this performance of Ben Fold’s subversive cover of Dr.Dre by a Columbia University a capella group qualifies as an older post. Just gotta say it again: I love this blog!

Here’s a little ditty that some of my theater friends found online, Up and Over It: Irish Dance for the Post-pop Generation. They certainly have a bold tagline, “Acclaimed Irish Dancers Suzanne Cleary & Peter Harding blow the brains out of the Irish Dance show genre in a multi-media extravaganza.” Hopefully these guys will blow my brains out live someday. This looks incredible. Enjoy!

People aren’t sending me links this week. Now I must resort to frowny face emoticons : ( Do you want to make my emoticon cry? Share your web finds with the Savage Mind’s community by emailing me at mdthomps AT odu.edu.

Obama’s Kenyan behavior

• What’s it called when you ascribe a person’s thoughts and behavior to biological origins? Oh yeah, that’s scientific racism and the Boasians debunked it like 100 years ago. Mayhaps Newt Gingrich is a little slow on the uptake as he was quoted saying, “What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?” Got that? Obama’s difference, his otherness if you will, is best explained by the fact that he’s part Kenyan (biology) and not because of the way he was raised by his white grandparents in Kansas (culture).
• Gingrich is championing a recent Forbes piece by Dinesh D’Souza who holds that Obama Jr got his “anti-colonial ideology” from the father he met only once.

Anthropology Rocks:

• My favorite lecture to give in General Anthropology is the Upper Paleolithic because (1) the sudden burst of human creativity in the archaeological record is mysterious which grabs students’ attention and (2) the cave art makes for a great Power Point presentation which students seem to crave from professors, but which I seldom do. You can be sure I’ll be sharing these two links:
• “Inside Lascaux” is a Time-Life produced slide show of rare and previously unpublished cave art images from that famous cave.
• The Sydney Morning Herald provides a web video about Aboriginal rock art in northwestern Arnhem Land that documents native encounters with colonizers.

The culture of “Cultural Policy”

• The blog Cultural Property writes in hopes of altering the way those in power conceive of so-called traditional culture or folklore. Here folklorist Dorry Noyes wrestles with key assumptions she terms “too simple.” In their place she offers “better” evidence based treatments though they are less tidy than the common sense she seeks to critique. For example replacing: “Cultural diversity is a scarce resource, so all traditional culture should be preserved,” with “Cultural invention and differentiation are ongoing, and forgetting is as necessary as remembering for life to go forward… AND the poor lack the freedom of choice possessed by the rich as to maintaining their traditions. This is a problem of inequality, not of cultural difference.”

Amazon Basin shows signs of life

• Various archaeologists, who do not appear to be working in concert, are developing complementary historical reconstructions of a pre-Columbian Amazonia that features complex societies with massive cities and agriculture. I was not aware that these amount to “controversial” claims, but then I am not an archaeologist. This beautifully written piece comes from Juan Forero, who covers Columbia and Venezuela for the Washington Post.

Virtual girlfriends, real vacations

• Developing romantic relationships with video-game girlfriends is a popular past time in Japan. Now the software developer behind the best selling sim-dating game is offering gamers a chance to stay immersed in that fantasy world at a vacation resort outside of Tokyo. Simply scan a bar code with your smart phone at select attractions and you can have a bystander take you and your girlfriend’s picture “together.”

“Learning styles”: Threat or menace?

• A much circulated NYT article about improving study habits reports findings that debunk many popular education theories such as the importance of teaching styles or whether a student is a “visual learner” or “left brained,” etc. Recommendations include alternating study environments rather than always studying in the same place, mixing content rather than focusing on one thing, spacing study sessions, and self-testing.
• Neuroanthropology has an appreciation for the piece.
• Just the other day I spent the evening helping my 2nd graders through a homework assignment: writing a letter to George Washington. It took forever! Mostly I think they are rusty, coming off summer vacation they haven’t switched into school mode just yet. However, a significant part of the problem seemed to lie in the fact that they don’t really know what a “letter” is.

The American middle-class — it was fun while it lasted

• The Great Divergence is a investigative series on Slate.com and actually quite grounded in scholarly economics. It seeks to uncover the cause to growing income inequality in the U.S. Timothy Noah surveys a diverse field of economic experts and finds, “few of these experts have much idea how to reverse the trend. That’s because almost no one can agree about what’s causing it.” The attached slide show gives a broad overview of piece, making the case for the existence of growing inequality and the explanatory insufficiency of the “usual suspects” such as race and gender inequalities or the political party in power and the tax policies they set. Part Six on the decline of organized labor gives a sense of where Noah is taking this argument.
• Celebrity liberal Michael Moore wishes everyone “Happy Fuckin’ Labor Day”, especially Rahm Emanuel. “Did you know that back when I was a kid if you had a parent making a union wage, only one parent had to work?! And they were home by 3 or 4pm, 5:30 at the latest! We had dinner together!” Uhm… now that you mention it, that sounds pretty good actually…
• Timewaster: The Onion usually sticks to parody, but occasionally they serve up satire worthy of Swift. Enjoy!

Garbage In = Garbage Out

• If I had more time at the moment (it being the start of the semester and all) I would devote an entire blog post to deconstructing this highly amusing yet deeply flawed “statistical” study about personal preferences broken down by race and gender using self-reported data from 526,000 users of a popular online dating service. The results, which are occasionally hilarious and provocative, went viral last week so apologies if you’ve already seen it. I’ll have to be content to let SM readers blast this piece and find the best jokes themselves.

One courageous woman, two men convicted for their beliefs

• Kudos to the Lebanese editor of an Arab language erotica journal for continuing to publish in the face of death threats and for articulating a congruence between the subjugation of women in Christianity and Islam.
• Amnesty International calls for the King of Saudi Arabia to commute the death sentences of two men accused of “sorcery”.

Evolution of religion/ Religion as selective pressure

• Here’s an NPR story on how religion may have been evolutionarily advantageous for the human species. I think this is a valuable undertaking though I’ll admit to being prejudiced against evolutionary psychology, I don’t trust it any farther than I could throw it. Behavioral ecology is one thing, but I’m simply not convinced that “belief” can be reduced to “behavior”. Neither do I see them as equivalent to tacit and explicit culture, nor do I follow any neat relationship between religion and altruism. The role of evolution in contemporary human behavior is a field where anthropology ought to be a leader but it seems psychology carries more of a public voice.
• Less contentious (for science anyway) is religion as a means by which humans interact with their natural environment. In this report, evolutionary ecologists conducting research in southern Mexico documented a indigenous ritual where locals use a root toxin to stun cave fish for harvest. The ecologists then showed that the population in the cave where the ritual took place were more resistant to the toxin than the same species in caves where the ritual is not practiced.

Famadihana

• NYT Video presents this short piece on the Malagasy funerary rite, Famadihana, wherein crypts are opened and the corpses of ancestors are carefully lifted out for dancing and celebration.

In memoriam

• Allen Dale June, 91, was one of the original developers of the Navajo Code Talkers. A much celebrated system of communication that was subsequently used by several hundred Navajos to send thousands of messages in the Pacific Theater during the Second World War.

Seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Email me at mdthomps AT odu.edu

Around the web in 80 links. Well, no… not exactly 80, but you get the picture.

Advertising

• Sociological Images turned up this ad campaign usurping human rights discourse to sell deodorant. Reminds me somewhat of Verizon’s “Rule the Air” commercials where earnest young women hail the inherent equality of cell phone communication.

Human Terrain

• Montgomery McFate has resigned her position as HTS Senior Social Scientist, Zero Anthropology reports. This following the resignation of HTS Program Manager Steve Fondacaro earlier this summer. The leadership of McFate and Fondacaro was instrumental in establishing the HTS program.
• I’m interested in seeing this documentary “Human Terrain” which Savage Minds readers have clued me into, but unfortunately it seems to still be in a very limited release. C’mon Brown University! Let this pony run.

Criminal Justice

• El Blog del Narco is a Spanish language blog (with built-in online translators) about drug trafficking, gangs, and violence in Mexico and beyond. The author of the blog seems to imagine this work as a kind of unfiltered communication and antidote to what he believes to be the insufficient and sanitized communication of the Mexican government.
• The Drug Enforcement Administration ran a job ad for nine “Ebonics” translators. Gawker has the picture. Ebonics? That’s so nineties! What’s next the return of “politically correct”?
• A jail in Los Angeles is now the proud owner of an invisible pain beam that authorities say can be used to break up fights among inmates by causing an “intolerable heating sensation”. It may not be cruel but its certainly unusual.
• And in Arizona, two years after being cited for the “dumping of waste” in an imperiled wildlife sanctuary, Daniel Millis of NoMoreDeaths.org has had his littering conviction overturned by a federal appeals court. Millis and other activists leave gallon jugs of water for immigrants crossing the desert through Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge in hopes of averting death by dehydration.

Prestige and cultural capital in academia

• Here’s an agreably ornery blog post about the disciplinary values attached to conference papers and journal articles versus what they might actually be worth anywhere else but in academia. “So much of what goes on in conferences is so obviously kabuki theatre: many panels are ill-attended – even the high-status ones like invited and regular sessions – because the audience is the least important part of the system of value-creation.” I LOL’d repeatedly. I really have to work on my snide one-liners. This guy’s got me beat by a mile.
• Its time for those damn college rankings again. These things are for entertainment value only friends, so Ethnography.com is right to poke fun at UCLA for getting beaten by USC. But where is Chico State? “I think because the big kids thought that they would lose if it came to any measure of undergraduate education.” Ouch! Well it turns out that this year US News does have a Best Undergraduate Teaching ranking (I think it may be a new feature).
• Around my homestead the US News Rankings are something of a parlor game as my wife and I jokingly compare our undergrad alma maters (this year she’s #38 and I’m #99, damnit!). But the Princeton Review rankings for “Birkenstock-wearing, tree-hugging, clove-smoking, vegetarians” is so much more colorful (where she’s #1 and I’m #4, still can’t win!). *props up filthy bare feet and lights Bidi*

Making nature into culture

• In one of those fads that seem to be generated just so anthropologists can study them, some Chinese pet owners have taken to dying their dogs’ coats so that they look like tigers and pandas. On one level its a kind of amazing to see the groomers’ artistry, the animals look absolutely beautiful. I’m reminded of the Japanese bento creations where riceballs and vegetables are sculpted into all sorts of fantastic objects. On another level, like what the hell? This is totally freaky!
• Earlier this summer, Around the Web directed you to this Primatology.net think piece: Do animals keep pets? Well check out this photo gallery from the Telegraph of a macaque keeping a kitten in Monkey Forest Park, Bali. Unfortunately no additional context is provided.

Recent archaeology finds

• At the site of the largest earthwork in northern Europe, near the North Sea/ Baltic Sea Canal in Germany, archaeologists have uncovered what they say is a gate in a massive masonry wall built by Vikings in the 7th Century.
• Archaeologists in South Africa have dated arrowheads to 64,000 years old, a discovery that pushes back the earliest date for archery by 20,000 years.

Now museums, now you don’t

• The WSJ ran a piece on how museums are using ethnographic observation of visitors’ behaviors to redesign exhibits, rather than leaving exhibits’ layouts to the curator’s discretion.
• But apparently that one creationist museum in Kentucky is doing bang-up business. They’ve welcomed more than 1.2 million visitors since 2007. So much for the recession! You just have to give deep discounts to homeschoolers.

Charles Darwin, terra-former

• This one is all ecology and not about humans, but its so cool I had to share it. A seldom told story from Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle that has the young scientist on the remote South Atlantic island of Ascenion. Towards the end of his voyage as the crew headed north to England, Darwin found Ascenion Isle to be barren with little water. Working in concert with the botanist Josheph Hooker the two men succesfully transplanted vegetation to hold water in the soil and today the island is a lush forrest.

Around the Web needs your links! Have you seen something that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Email me your links at mdthomps AT odu.edu.