On Facebook that is.

Eventually we might get around to adding “like” box to the website, but for now you can just go here. Liking us will allow you to keep up with both new posts and twitter posts via your Facebook account.

Ryan Anderson is currently a third year cultural anthropology graduate student at the University of Kentucky. His dissertation research focuses on the politics and conflicts that pervade tourism development in Baja California Sur. Before anthropology, Ryan spent several years studying and practicing photography and working toward a career in the fine art world. Then he came to his senses and took up anthropology. After his initial training in archaeology (which is still ingrained in his thinking to this day), Ryan eventually found his way to cultural anthropology.

Ryan bloggs at Ethnografix and is behond the wonderful Anthropologies project.

For his guest posts on Savage Minds Ryan will focus on some of the relationships between anthropology and photography–methodological, political, theoretical, and otherwise. He writes:

I started off studying photography before I eventually gravitated to anthropology, and I am constantly looking for ways to bring the two together. In fact, that’s the long term plan. For my posts I would like to explore some of the issues with using photography in anthropological contexts.

Welcome Ryan!

I’d like to extend a warm welcome to our new guest blogger, Julian Brash. Julian’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of anthropology, geography, and urban studies. His recent book, “Bloomberg’s New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City,” focuses on how Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s corporate and technocratic approach to urban governance fared in the contentious arena of New York City development politics. Julian is an assistant professor of Anthropology at Montclair State University.

While guest blogging at Savage Minds, Julian will discuss some or all of the following topics: his book, urban governance in the United States, urban imaginaries, the cultural politics of class, New York City, “studying up,” what the super-rich are up to when they become involved in politics and government, professionals and politics, interdisciplinarity, and what it means for a project to be “anthropological” (or not).

Back-to-back guest blogging goodness here at Savage Minds this month. I’d like to tank Michael Powell for sparking lots of interesting discussion and, in the same breath, welcome our new guest blogger: Simone Abram.

Simone Abram is currently doing participant observation on employment practices in UK universities, but she’s not planning to write it up just now. She’d rather be thinking about houses, of various kinds, how they’re planned, built, occupied, decorated, heated, left vacant, shared, sold or inherited.

She has two books due for publication in 2011, a monograph currently called Culture and Planning and an volume edited with Gisa Weszkalnys called Elusive Promises: Planning in the Contemporary World.

She will be writing about houses, policies and governments, mostly in the UK but possibly elsewhere too. And about Anthropology, of course.

Please don’t e-mail us or post a comment letting us know that one of your comments is in moderation. At least not right away. We try to check the moderation queue as often as is humanely possible, and if it is there we will see it. Occasionally, something goes to the SPAM queue instead of the moderation queue, in which case we will miss it, but most of the time that’s not the case. Most of the time it is in the moderation queue and will be pushed to the blog as soon as we get around to checking it. Sending us unnecessary e-mail and comments only slows us down…

After considerable discussion amongst ourselves, here is the deal about commenting on the blog:

We used to say that Savage Minds is not ‘an academic conference’ but rather the ‘bar at the conference’ — not formal and staid, but vigorous and lively while still being (perhaps being even more) substantive than the conference itself. We realize now that this metaphor no longer works for us. Savage Minds is not the bar at an academic conference. It is the party in the hotel room at 2 in the morning.

For those of you not familiar with this metaphor, let me explain: a major part of the American Anthropological Association annual meeting is not actually the papers, or the bar afterwards, but the parties that get held in the conference rooms of participants in the evening. Sometimes these parties are organized by department — someone from Columbia throws ‘the Columbia party’, someone from UCLA volunteers the ‘UCLA Party’ — but at other times it might be a particular association or special interest group.

To outsiders these parties seem like sad attempts of middle-aged people to recreate the uninspiring bacchanalia of their youth, but to sad, middle-aged academics they are riproaring fun: dozens of people crammed into small hotel rooms, bathtubs filled with ice filled with bottles of booze, animated talk, people jumping up and down on the bed. In fact things can get quite lively at times — I remember one party where a department chair, numbed into resigned silence, actually rented a second hotel room so he wouldn’t have to sleep in the same place where he hosted his department party.

We think that Savage Minds has now become a hotel room party. Just to make the metaphor perfectly clear this means:

This is our party: This blog is a private place. We have to clean it up and sleep in it afterwards, and the guys who rent us the server will make us pay if you break the furniture and steal the towels. If you are an angry drunk, or start hitting on people, or otherwise behave badly, we will ask you leave. If you don’t like it, get your own room/blog or stand on the street shouting, where you have a constitutional right (in the US at least!) to do so.

We’re Taking Responsibility: One of the things that shocked us about the comments on this blog were how many people described us as ‘moderators’ of the comments. We had never thought of ourselves as ‘moderators’ — we thought of ourselves as ‘authors’. We thought our guests could be moderate by themselves and at any rate we weren’t their mothers — or their super-egos. But apparently people want/need/already-consider us to be moderators. So we will be more involved in moderating comments.

Community Standards are Getting Thicker: One reason we did not feel right ‘moderating’ comments in the past was that we did not feel we should tell people what this blog should be. Many of the early comments on our site challenged what we wrote about and how we wrote about it: we were too male, too white, too privileged, too academic. Bleeding-heart liberals that we were, we welcomed a community that actively challenged who we — and anthropology — might be.

That has changed. You don’t need an invitation to a hotel room party, but you do need someone to tell you the room number. This blog has a more defined set of community standards now and we will moderate as a result of a thicker set of norms because we have a more definite sense of who we are.

To a certain extent, this decision is a post-facto recognition of the trend this blog has taken towards a more academic, less ‘public’ tone. Earlier minds like Oneman/Dustin who were big on writing articles about having great sex or whatever have fallen by the wayside, while the rest of us are five years on to academic careers where academic topics matter more and more and take more and more of our mental space. I think this is a great loss to the blog and would die to have, say a female indigenous anthropologist who does native title come on the blog, write three posts a day, and kick our asses. If you’re out there — let us know!

That said, you will be dismayed to hear that we pretty much have no hard and fast rules about what it takes to get moderated, or even what steps we are Ultimately Prepared To Take. Perhaps over time we’ll manage to make our expectations explicit. But now that we are officially enforcing our academic habitus we are assuming this stuff goes without saying because it comes without saying.

In the future, thought, if you find us asking you politely to moderate your tone, or quietly suggesting that you’re shouting, please consider becoming more ‘moderate’.

We’re Not Voting Anyone Off The Island. Yet. : Several commentors suggested that we more actively ban people from the website — and a few even had a short list they wanted us to take a look at. We thought long and hard about this, but ultimately decided to take the high road.

The Panic Button Works, We Promise: We have installed a plugin that allows users to flag comments that they believe are Pure Concentrated Evil. Please note: the button works, but it doesn’t currently tell you that it worked. Trust us, it does. This is really meant to be used in cases where you think something absolutely needs our attention. Please don’t use it to express mild concern with someone or as a secret way to send us little messages — we won’t reply to feedback through the panic button. We will only reply to panic through the panic button. Please refrain from using it unless you are sure you are facing Pure Concentrated Evil.

I think that’s all: More involvement, and active but by-degrees-arbitrary enforcement. We got a nice, quiet little beach community here, and we aim to keep it nice and quiet. So… let’s get this party started, play safe, and have fun. Thanks!

Over the last five years numerous people have written for Savage Minds, either as full time members of our blog, or as guest or occasional bloggers. As a result it has sometimes been hard to figure out just who, exactly, is Savage Minds? We’ve liked to keep things ambiguous in the hopes that former bloggers would come back and write for us again, but this summer we had a better idea: Why not turn our roster of former bloggers into an ad hoc “advisory board,” like what you’d find on an academic journal, to which we could turn for advice, recommendation for new bloggers, etc.? We asked our former guest bloggers and alumni, and many of them happily signed up. As a result, if you now click on the Savage Minds “authors” page, you will see a list of our esteemed advisory board members. Thanks to all of them for participating in this experiment!

You will also see that where we used to have separate pages for “guest bloggers” and “Savage Minds alumni” we’ve now simply added a list of all Savage Minds authors to the foot of the page. This is a full list of everyone who has posted at least one blog post on Savage Minds. Clicking their name will bring up an archive page for their posts. (You can do the same by clicking on the name of the author when reading an individual blog post.) In some cases we post on behalf of a contributor who does not wish to create their own account. These “occasional contributions” have their own archive page.

Finally, in response to your feedback on how we handle comments, we’ve added a “report comment” button on every comment. This will allow users to flag particularly offensive comments directly, alerting the Savage Minds moderators of the violation. Hopefully this will help us more proactively respond to some of the worst abuses.

As always, if you don’t see all the changes immediately, be patient. We use some page-caching technology to ease our server load and sometimes it takes a while for site-changes to appear.

UPDATE: Initial tests show that the comment reporting feature is working. However, it does not properly let you know that the report has been sent successfully. We are looking into that, but our technical skills are limited, so please be assured that it is working even though it doesn’t display a confirmation message.

We Minds wanted to take a pause for a bit and request some feedback from readers about a quandry we’ve been facing lately, so please read this and leave some comments below, or email us or me personally We are concerned that the comments sections of our posts have changed in ways that we are not entirely comfortable with. The two big issues as we see it are 1) churlishness and 2) kudzu.

The issue of churlishness raises its head in posts that tackle political issues, particularly HTS and race. Its not surprising really — churlishness is a regular feature of the blogosphere these days, and of course some of this wider attitude will begin seeping into Savage Minds, and of course we understand that many of the topics that we discuss mean a lot to people, and thus evoke strong emotions. However, please remember that we imagine this blog to be the bar at the academic conference — a place of convivial companionship. And, as people who have been blogging for a decade (!) we remember a more cordial time in the blogosphere, and we are looking to get back to that day. In sum, we think there are lots of topics that reasonable people can disagree on, and we’d like to make sure that SM stays a place where that kind of measured disagreement can occur, both out of anthropological and academic impulses to relativism, tolerance, and civility.

The second issue is what we’ve come to call kudzu: the spread of comment threads from a small number of commenters that are dozens of entries in length and thousands of words long. We are glad to have a such a lively community and we appreciate the time that people take to read and think about our posts, however, we fear kudzu for two reasons.

First, kudzu has a chilling effect on conversation, and keeps a wide range of people from participating in the comments. Sure, its technically true that people can still log on and leave comments on threads no matter who has been talking. But in practice it turns people off — and the goal of SM is to turn people on.

Second, the goal if SM is to turn people on — one of the reasons that we started the site was to promote discussion of anthropology across the Internet, up to and including creating new sites. While we’re happy for people to think of SM as a living room they can stroll into and sit down a spell, we don’t want it to be so attractive that people never start their own blogs and websites because ours is so comfy. If people find they have 5,000 words to say on a topic then they should start their own blog!  We feel like if we’ve inspired people to write but have not inspired them to do it on their own, then we have failed as bloggers.

Now, we don’t want to blame any particular people for the state of the comments section — except perhaps ourselves. Between travel and personal lives, we have not had a lot of time to do more than produce posts. Additionally, we have a tendency to scroll around comment threads that don’t interest us. However, we know from feedback we’ve received that not everyone feels that way. So we think the first way we can get our community humming is for us to reengage with the comments on this blog.

The second thing to do is… well, there are several options. After mulling over a large number of possible changes we decided a good first step was just to share with you all what we have been thinking. Perhaps this will encourage people who are too talkative on this blog to consider giving a bit of space to others, and help those who are ready to flame to take a step back and consider chilling out.

We’ve been considering a number of technical changes to the forums: for instance, a way for people to flag posts that they consider inflammatory. We might also install a system where people can vote parts of comment threads up and down in popularity, making some more visible than others and letting people go to town in the less visible threads where they are not intruding on anyone. We might also limit the length of posts, or close comments on a post after a particular period of time, or even make people register as users before they post on the blog. We might be more active yanking comments, or fudding people who behave churlishly.

There are lots of options. We welcome feedback about any of these options — and we’d be especially interested to hear more general comments about the state of SM’s commenting community. So… let us know what you think and… thanks!

Lately we’ve been getting a few complaints about the comments. We don’t censor or ban users unless there is a clear violation of our comments policy. And even then we prefer to err on the side of allowing free discourse, rather than risk censoring talk simply because we, or some of our users, find it disagreeable. (Of course, anything outright offensive will be removed and repeat violators will be banned.)

Please understand that some people live to provoke. If you engage such people in any way you make their day. They don’t care about winning an argument as much as getting your goat. So if you would rather not see comments by such people, the best strategy is to ignore them. The chances that you are going to change their views are slim-to-none, and the low-level of the resulting debate is unlikely to be edifying for the other readers.

Also, with regard to monitoring the site, most of our energy goes into making sure our users aren’t subject to overwhelming amounts of SPAM. We get hundreds of SPAM comments a day, most of which gets caught by our automatic filters. Unfortunately some legitimate comments get caught there as well. We try to go through the queue as often as possible, unblocking the false-positives, but we do this on our spare time and so we ask for your patience. It might take as much as a 24 hours for one of us to see your blocked post. Whatever you do, don’t re-post as that simply convinces the filter that you are a bot!

Having said all that, we highly value the community which has developed here over the past five years and the high level of discourse which has generally prevailed on this site. The best way to preserve that is to only reward those comments you feel are deserving of your attention with a reply, ignoring the rest. Thank you.

Matthew Durington is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice at Towson University.  His research interests include visual and urban anthropology with a focus on housing and land rights in Botswana, South Africa and the United States.  He was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the University of KwaZulu Natal in Durban, South Africa from 2003-2004 where he primarily conducted research on gated communities, fear and suburbanization.  His 2008 ethnographic film ‘Record Store’  is distributed by Berkeley Media.  He has played soccer his entire life and has analyzed the build up to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa over the past 6 years.  This has also included some ill-advised soccer based participant-observation in the Kalahari.   Matthew will be blogging on anthropology and the World Cup with posts on why anthropologists should pay attention to the World Cup and different themes related to globalization, ethnicity via the Comaroffs, South African politics, marketing and media coverage of the event.

Welcome Matthew!

For months — perhaps even years — John McCreery and MTBradley have been sounding off in the comments about how damn hard it is to learn textile format, the only way SM accepts to format comments. It turns out he wasn’t the only one. Textile — a beloved markup language I learned back in the days of the University of Blogaria — was bringing our site to its knees with its inefficient and moribund addon. Since I was the only one using it, the community didn’t like it, and it crippled the site, we’ve disabled it. Textile is dead, long live HTML — huzzah!

The downside of this is that since it took me like a month to make the change it will probably take even longer for me to go back and clean up the entries I’ve written that have textile markup in them. So for a while — indeed, let’s face it, possibly forever — these pieces will look weird. Sorry — its just hard to find time to do website maintenance while also applying for tenure. And any rate that stuff is old news, right?