Two important notes about the switch:

Note #1: Our social media links will also change. Check the new site for the updated Facebook and Twitter accounts. And if you are subscribed to receive updates about this site via email or RSS, you will need to re-subscribe on the new site.

Note #2: There will be no new posts here after today, but comments will remain open for another 30 days (or 30 days from the publication date of a post, whichever comes first) so that people have a chance to wrap up any ongoing conversations before we shut things down.

Thank you all for your support over the years, and we look forward to many more years together over at anthro{dendum}!

Since announcing that we would like to change the name, I have heard from a number of Colleagues of Color in anthropology who support our decision. Most frequent among the responses were “It’s about time,” and “You know there’s a reason I never felt comfortable guest blogging for you.” Some of us knew that the name was problematic, and and some of us knew that it held the potential to marginalize these colleagues, but I don’t think we ever knew if it actually did. All the more reason to change it.

I fear that the favor we have won with the gesture of initiating this change has evaporated in the extended length of time that it has taken to deliberate on a new name. (We hope to announce by #AAA2017 in Washington DC.) All I can say is that we have not prioritized what needs to be prioritized in order to arrest the ongoing damage. For that, I am sorry.

Now, with this incident involving TAL, I also fear that it might appear to our Colleagues of Color that someone here at this blog has doubled-down on their belief that the blog title is not problematic. I can assure you that we all recognize the problem with the name. The producers of TAL moved forward with the name unaware that we would like to distance ourselves from it. That we ever thought it would be an appropriate title for our blog speaks to the dehistoricized and institutionalized characteristics of méconnu words that are tangled in a web of esoteric social theory, French-English translational puns, and “post-racial” anthropology, while casually traumatizing and marginalizing those that we (white Euro-American anthropologists) have historically traumatized and marginalized.

For what it’s worth, when we brought this issue to their attention, the producers of TAL changed the series name with lightning speed.

The new name for the podcast series, “These Anthro Minds,” was suggested by Indigenous Scholar and Biological Anthropology PhD Candidate Savannah Martin from Washington University in St. Louis.

In short: We can do better. You deserve better.

I am an anthropological archaeologist specializing in the archaeology of the first cities. I teach anthropology, ancient urbanism, issues in new materialisms, critical heritage studies, memory and war/trauma studies, decolonization/the postcolonial critique, and social practice. My current research work is largely focused on Ancient India and Ancient UAE, both during the 3rd millennium BCE. Beyond these vast umbrellas of interest, I have a few distinct projects that have been occupying my research world of late. These include, but are not limited to, understanding ancient subjectivity and related to that, the idea of an intimate architecture; war and trauma in relationship to the urban fabric; and finally, epistemological critiques of archaeology that have emerged from my earlier work in postcolonial theory.

Welcome Uzma!

We would like to get to know you a little better. Please take 5 min to tell a little about yourself and what you like (or don’t like) about this site. To encourage everyone to participate, we are also offering a number of prizes by Savage Minds authors:

• “Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir” (DVD) an ethnographic film co-directed by Kerim x1
• “The Development State. Aid, Culture and Civil Society in Tanzania” (book) by Maia Green x1
• “Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency” (book) with chapter by Dustin Wax x1
• A print of one of Ryan Anderson’s fieldwork photos (one of three different photos, one each)
• “Leviathans at the Gold Mine: Creating Indigenous and Corporate Actors in Papua New Guinea” (book) by Alex Golub x1
• “Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War Paperback” (book) by Carole McGranahan x1
• A screen-printed “Marksist poster” (think Marx + Jon Marks – one of three) by Dick Powis x1

One entry/prize per person (maximum – there are only a limited number of prizes). There will be instructions on entering the drawing provided upon completion of the survey. Contact information will be kept separate form the individual survey results so as to preserve anonymity.

The data from this survey will be used to write a paper for the upcoming AAA meetings. Summaries of the data and excerpts from individual answers may appear in that paper, as well as on the Savage Minds website. Please note that the results from the survey will be displayed once you submit your answers.

You can fill out the survey here.

Thank you,

Kerim

Rebecca Nelson is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on volunteer tourism in Guatemala and how it is opening up new avenues for tourists and hosts to develop more cosmopolitan understandings of the world (as well as opening up new forms of friction over the circulation of knowledge). One of her claims to fame is that her image appeared in the Quetzaltenango paper El Diario, to her surprise, with the caption “Tourists Disappointed By Lack of WiFi in Parque Central.”

She’s about to submit the first draft of her Ph.D. thesis this week, so she won’t start posting weekly roundups till the 8th, but if you come across anything you’d like to bring to her attention you can email her at Rebecca.nelson.jacobs@gmail.com

With Dick Powis now a full time contributor, Savage Minds is looking for someone to fill his shoes as our Around the Web editor. This position is called an “internship” because we see it as a way to cultivate new talent. (Also because it isn’t paid, but then nobody here is paid.) Doing the weekly roundups is not only a great way to force yourself to pay closer attention to the anthro blogosphere, but it also gives you a seat at the table behind-the-scenes at Savage Minds, helping select guest bloggers and discussing the future of the blog. Interns are encouraged to blog as well – but it isn’t required. Full time contributors like Dick Powis and Matt Thompson started out as Around the Web interns, but there is no requirement to stick around more than a year if you don’t want to. (We hope you do…)

The Around the Web feature always works best when it isn’t just a random list of links but somehow reflects the personality and interests of the person editing it. Dick, Matt, and Jay before them each managed to do this in their own way, and we are looking for someone who can manage this trick as well. We strongly encourage women and minorities to apply.

To apply email me (Kerim) at mail@savageminds.org with the subject line “Around the Web Internship.” The application should contain a cover letter (as the body of your email) with a short biographical statement and an explanation of why you want the position, a sample weekly roundup, and a copy of your CV. If you have a blog and/or a non-academic writing sample (by which I mean writing about academic issues for a general audience), feel free to include that as well, but it isn’t required. Submissions will close on February 18th, and a short list of candidates will be contacted for a phone or Skype interviews before we announce our final decision.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Does the CV have to be anthro-focused?

Because we are looking for early-career anthropologists, we don’t expect you to have a lot of anthro-related experience on your CV. Don’t worry about that and just put down whatever you think is relevant.

Q: How many hours a week will it require?

That really depends a lot on whether you are in the habit of reading anthropology related news and blogs on a daily basis. If you bookmark a few pieces every day then all you need to do at the end of the week is pick your favorites and say a word or two about each one as you write up your post (see previous examples linked above to see what this looks like). However, if you don’t normally read anthropology blogs and you count that as part of the work, then you would want to factor in that extra reading you will be doing.

It’s a real mark of accomplishment that someone has taken the time to preserve the blog in a format that ensures that future generations will be able to read our poorly-spelled, hastily written blog entries. In some small sense — and I mean ‘small’, I’m not getting a swelled head here — SM really has become the blog of record for the sociocultural anthropological internetosphere.

The archive itself is just one part of a process to get SM more fully archived both now and in the future… but I’ll leave out details of our future plans since, frankly, they may never materialize.

SM started with no long-range plan for archiving, or indeed for pretty much anything, and over the years we’ve suffered a variety of data loses, ranging from minor to catastrophic. The lesson for open access week is this: back up your data. But at the same time, if you feel the urge to write, write. Start new projects when you feel you have the energy and opportunity to start them, even if all the pieces aren’t in place yet. Archiving is important, but don’t let scholarly apparatus have a chilling effect on your innovation. If academic life is a trapeze, librarians are the safety net. Thanks to UT Austin, Pat, and the whole crew for doing their job so that we can do ours.

You will notice that some posts, like Carole’s Writer’s Workshop are now grouped together with a special series link that appears at the top. Although we already have category tags that can do this, we hope this will help highlight some of the special series we regularly host on this blog.

You will now see 3 “possibly related posts” linked at the bottom of every post. Having been doing this for a few years now, we have a huge back catalog and we hope posting these will get people to explore the site a little deeper. These are only “possibly” related because the suggestions are made by an algorithm, so don’t blame us if the suggestions are way off!

We’ve also implemented page caching along with image and code optimization. These should hopefully serve up pages faster, with less of a burden on our servers. If you notice anything different other than the fact that pages are loading faster then something is probably wrong. Please let us know.

One thing that is gone is the WordPress “like” button. The way it was implemented was causing some problems. If I can figure out how to bring it back, I will, but for now it is gone. Sorry about that.

I’m not done with all I have planned yet. I’m still working on trying to clean up some layout bugs, especially with the mobile site. Hopefully that will get done in the next few weeks. If anyone out there is a webdesign genius who can help us clean up some of our code to better conform to web standards and further speed up the site, please let me know. We aren’t planning on another redesign anytime soon, just trying to squeeze the most out of what we already have.

Also, we previously posted that people would have to register to leave comments. That is not the case. In fact, we’ve turned off the feature that let people register and deleted most of the new registrations from this week because we were getting hundreds of SPAM users registering for the site. You can use your WordPress.com, Facebook, or Twitter account to leave comments, or simply enter any valid email address. (We will monitor this policy and change it if needed.)

Please let us know if you are having any problems that are making it difficult for you to use the site. Right now we are focused on squashing critical bugs. If you have more general feedback (good or bad) about the design, feel free to leave that as well, but please note that we won’t be making any major revisions to the new design till this summer.

OK, enough with the “we.” Although this is a group site and we make all major decisions (including posting this request) together, this is very personal for me. For the past three months I’ve been working non-stop behind the scenes to move to a new server, restore the archives, and redesign the site. If you paid a professional to do this kind of work it would cost at least $2,000, and maybe as much as four times that. I did it because I care about this site. If you also value this site and the work that goes into it, I’d like to ask you to support an organization that is very important to me: Budhan Theatre.

Budhan Theatre were the subjects of our 2011 ethnographic film, Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir! which documents how they have used street theater to transform their community. Before the film was even finished my wife and co-director Shashwati Talukdar and I, together with our producer Henry Schwarz, founded the 501(c)3 non-profit Vimukta to help support the work of Budhan Theatre. I personally have an anthropologists skepticism towards charity organizations, which is why 100% of the money donated to Vimukta (minus what is taken by PayPal) goes directly to Budhan Theatre, a grassroots movement that has made a real difference, not only in their own community but in other DNT (Denotified and Nomadic Tribal) communities throughout India.

There are thousands of people who read this site regularly. If each of our regular readers gave just $5 to Vimukta we could easily raise $2,000 to support their work running a Children’s Theatre Program:

Declaring that they are “born actors” not “born criminals” Budhan Theatre has been working since 1998 to raise awareness about the many injustices suffered by DNTs. The Children’s Theatre Program not only serves to train the next generation of Budhan Theatre actors, but also gives youth from the Chhara community an important sense of purpose and self-confidence. We are now raising money to ensure the long-term viability of this program, making sure that the kids have regular supervision and professional training.

If you appreciate the work I’ve done on this site, please consider making a one-time donation, or sign up for a yearly subscription.

Thank you.

If you ever wrote anything for Savage Minds under your own account – meaning you had a username and password at some time in the past, we we would like you to login and update your account profile. After a year-long outage we recently re-launched the site with a new design and all our archives restored. Unfortunately, in the process a lot of user data got lost. In many cases it was probably out of date as well. The new design does a better job at highlighting individual authors, with a bio appearing below each post, and at the top of archive pages for each author. Updating your bio will make sure that this information is up-to-date.

A few notes:

1. Your password is probably lost or missing. Please click on the “Lost your password?” link to have a new one sent to your email address. If you don’t know which email address was associated with the account, please email us and we’ll let you know. (Once you login you can change your email address if you like.) You can also reset your account using your username.

2. If you’d like to associate a photo avatar with your account, please create an account at gravatar.com and associate this email with an avatar on that site. (Our site will automatically link with your gravatar image.)

3. If you have a wordpress.com account you can link that to your profile (after you login) and then from then on you can login to Savage Minds simply by clicking on the “Login with WordPress” button.

4. Please keep your bios short – just two sentences should be enough. You can add a URL linking to your webpage, twitter account, academia.edu profile, etc.

Finally, if you blogged for us in the past, maybe you’d like to do so again? We currently are booked for guest bloggers through the end of 2014, but we are already looking for people to blog in 2015. If you yourself aren’t interested, maybe you know someone who would be?

As I mentioned at the beginning of the month, we are getting ready for some big changes around here. To ensure that everything goes smoothly, we will be taking the site offline sometime on Friday evening (Eastern Standard Time). If all goes well, the site should be back up early Saturday morning with the new layout and the restored archives in place. I’ll keep this post active as a place for you to post your reactions (good or bad) to the new site, as well as for catching any bugs in the code.

UPDATE: Welcome to the new/old site! It is new because we have a fresh new look, and it is old because all our archives going back to 2005 have been restored. We are still working on ironing out a few things here and there, so please let us know if anything is broken, not working, or not to your liking. And if you like the new site, please don’t hold back from sharing your praise!

When we put out a call for comment moderators, we expected a half-dozen entries. Instead we got two dozen — all great applicants, from many walks of life. In the end, reading all the apps and doing video interviews with the shortlist ate up so much of our (my) time that we ended up giving the top two people positions in the blog, rather than run a separate and equally time-consuming search for a second position. Apologies to people who were waiting for that second position to be advertised — we just had a choice of either writing for the blog or reading resumes, and decided on the former.

Please welcome our newcomers on board — I hope you will see them around more and more on the site as we continue to grow and expand in 2014.