Please indulge us by taking this informal reader poll. The poll will close in 7 days.
UPDATE: Sorry, I posted this when it was still supposed to be an internal draft. If you voted before the “undergrad” category was added, please vote again. And sorry about slighting independent scholars in the previous version!
Alas, our imminent merger with Wiley-Blackwell fell through at the last minute. However, if you are interested, the press release will still be stored “here”:/savage-minds-announces-merger-with-wiley-blackwell/ for all of perpetuity.
We at Savage Minds have been thinking for some time about how to increase dialogue on the site. So far we have done a marvelous job of creating a civil society for anthropology, and have had some great guest bloggers and — of course — lively and informative commenters. However we’ve also been thinking about ways to blur these roles even further and promote more open-ended discussion. For this reason we are happy to announce a new feature at Savage Minds: Occasional contributors.
We’re not sure what we’re going to call them — One Time Minds? The Mindful? Associate Pansies? Whatever the name the idea is pretty straightforward: to get smart, relevant posts from smart, relevant people who want to make an intervention shorter than the traditional ‘guest blog’. We plan to kick off with a piece by Jonathan Marks (Jonathan, consider this your notice that you have been nominated to serve in this regard 🙂 ) and, as Chris says, commentary by people who are working in Tibet.
Soon we’ll be making some changes to our sidebar, and the occasional blogging will begin. Until then, though, any idea what we should call ’em?
The Savage Minds assistant editor position has been filled! I’m happy to announce our new assistant editor: Jay Sosa.
Jay Sosa is a PhD student in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Chicago. In addition to the many non-academic pursuits which make him a well-rounded person, he is broadly interested in Internet Communication Technologies and Queer Studies. He is hoping to research social networking websites and their relations to queer communities and urban space in SĂŁo Paulo. Jay Sosa is a PhD student in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Chicago. In addition to the many non-academic pursuits which make him a well-rounded person, he is broadly interested in Internet Communication Technologies and Queer Studies. He is hoping to research social networking websites and their relations to queer communities and urban space in SĂŁo Paulo.
Welcome aboard!
Its been nearly 3 years since we started Savage Minds and a lot has changed. For one thing, thanks to all our readers and commentors, the site has been hugely successful. We have 1,678 people subscribed to our RSS feed, around 600 unique visitors, from all over the world, coming to the website each day, and 463 members on our Facebook Group. But much more important for us is the growth of the anthropological blogsphere over that time. When we first started there were a handful of anthropologists blogging about a variety of topics, but almost no blogs dedicated to cultural anthropology. Today there is a thriving ecosystem of top quality anthropology blogs. The downside of this wonderful success is that its gotten hard for us to keep up. So we thought we’d turn to you, our readers, to see if there aren’t some aspiring bloggers who’d like to help out.
If you’re interested, keep reading …
It probably won’t last, but for now we have the spam under control and so those who unsubscribed from the RSS feed for comments should be able to safely resubscribe. Its a nice way to stay on top of all the various discussions.
Happy New Year! I’m a bit late with this, but I wanted to take the opportunity to highlight some of our best material from 2007, as I did in 2006.
Open Access
I think 2007 was a great year for the open access movement. The open access anthropology blog is going strong and we have a lot planned for it in the year ahead. Most exciting, and not yet reported here, on December 26th President Bush signed the OA mandate for NIH-funded research into law! And in October Rex announced Mano’a, an OA repository just for anthropologists. Since CKelty offered his own round up of OA news for 2007, just a few weeks ago, I’ll send you over there for the rest of the news.
War and Anthropology
The other big story for 2007 was the AAA executive board’s statement opposing the participation of anthropologists in the US Military’s Human Terrain System (HTS) project. By far the highest traffic post of the year was the letter we posted by Marshall Sahlins on the subject. Equally noteworthy, Strong’s post on “Human Terrain and the IRB Puzzle” was picked up by Inside Higher Ed. And Oneman discussed the process of getting my forthcoming edited volume, Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War published (continued here). The role of anthropologists in war is a topic we’ve been discussing on Savage Minds for over two years. I rounded up our older posts here, and all recent posts are archived in our “anthropology at war” category.
Information Overload
Another popular theme was information overload. There was CKelty’s post on “how to read a good book in one hour,” Strong’s post about “how to attend a conference in a couple of hours,” and my post about how not to read a book at all.
Visual
For those who don’t like reading, Strong gave us some good diagrams to look at: here, here, here, and here. I wrote about Wedding Photography. And former guest blogger Mike Wesch won a Wired Magazine Rave award for his hit YouTube video essay on Web 2.0.
Anthropology and Science
The relationship between anthropology and science also came up a lot. CKelty argued for the importance of science studies for anthropology, I discussed Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, why bad science happens, the future of biological anthropology, and economics, while Rex took on Steven Pinker and neoliberal genetics.
History, Theory and Ethnography
Rex grappled with the nature of anthropology (part II), methodology, the history of anthropological theory, and the use of history as theory. I explored the continued effects of colonial ethnography in India.
Plagiarism
The definition of plagiarism got stretched as we discussed citation plagiarism and accusations of plagiarism in the army’s counter-insurgency manual.
Guest Bloggers
Last, but certainly not least, this year’s guest bloggers included Rena Lederman who wrote about IRB issues, Michael Brown who wrote about intellectual property rights and bureaucratic rationalization, Fuji Lozada who wrote about sports and fieldwork, Laura McNamara who wrote about the anthropology of interrogation, Kimberly Christen who wrote about the relationship between Australian Aborigines and the state as well as her work on indigenous archives (the fallout from Australia’s Little Children are Sacred report deserves its own mention), and Gretchen Pfeil whose excellent posts on modern kinship were wiped out by an unfortunate malicious attack on our site. Hopefully they will be restored soon.
As readers may have noticed, SM was the target of a particularly virulent spam attack which managed to screwz0r our database right in the middle of AAAs. Everything is up and running now — and we have a new, shiny, and hopefully impregnable version of Word Press running now. However we’ve lost about a fortnight worth of entries. I’m working on remporting some of them, but alas there may be some lost content that may have been sucked permanently into the ether. Anyway, we are back to our regularly scheduled programming for now.
As you may have noticed, our website has been running sluggishly lately. We’re moving to a shiny new box at the moment that will hopefully get us back up to speed, but there will be a brief period of strangeness, including a temporary lockdown on comments and posts. So bear with us… will be back soon…
UPDATE: And we’re back. Hopefully we should have quicker load times for y’all now.
Savage Minds is pleased to announce our new guest blogger: Kimberly Christen.
Kim is an Assistant Professor in the Comparative Ethnic Studies Department at Washington State University. Kim received her Ph.D. from the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2004. Her research focuses on contemporary indigenous alliances with governments, industries (such as mining and tourism) and technologies as part of the articulation of local self-determination politics. Specifically, she has worked with Warumungu people in Tennant Creek, a remote town in the Northern Territory of Australia since 1995. Recent projects include: a collaboratively produced community history text and DVD, website and community digital archive.
Many SM readers already know Kim from her blog Long Road, where she writes about Aboriginal issues, digital media, intellectual property and cultural heritage issues and other interesting tidbits.
This week on Savage Minds she will blogging about the Australian government’s “intervention” into Aboriginal communities in the wake of the Little Children are Sacred Report and about the possibilities of “virtual repatriation” of cultural objects to indigenous communities through the use of digital archives.
The Savage Minds Facebook group just reached 200 members! Join us to hook up with other people studying the anthropology of aging, offer suggestions for a course on the Khmer Rouge, and read about a news article too bad to be featured on this blog.
Ladies and Blogeurs, please join me in welcoming our next guest here on Savage Minds, Laura McNamara. Laura is an organizational anthropologist (PhD. 2001, U of New Mexico) who currently works at Sandia Labs, a government lab run by Lockheed Martin. She works on problems of knowledge management and generation in complex organizations, such as issues of modeling and simulation, verification and validation, uncertainty quantification, and decision making. She has worked with the Missile Defense Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the nuclear weapons programs at Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories to identify both the limitations of, and leverage points for, the effective use of modeling and simulation technologies in interdisciplinary research and development projects. I like several things about Laura’s work: she is obviously keen on unusual and provocative collaborations, working with physicists and computer scientists as well as other social scientists; she has a very down to earth (dare I say, ethnographic?) approach to the problems facing governments and their knowledge workers in the post Cold War period, which despite all the rampant theorization of empire and globalization in anthropology, remains strikingly hard to find. Add to that she keeps llamas, lives on a ranch, and will be regaling us with extensive thick description of government documents related to interrogation and torture in the Global War on Terrorism. Please put your caps lock on for Laura McNamara…
We want very quickly to thank Fuji Lozada for his contributions in August to the site. We hope to introduce future guests in the coming weeks.
We Minds hope to keep this site active with fresh ideas and new perspectives. From time to time, we therefore invite anthropologists to join us for a spell as guest bloggers. To that end, please welcome our latest guest blogger, Fuji Lozada.
Eriberto P. “Fuji” Lozada Jr. is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of Asian Studies at Davidson College, North Carolina, USA and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the School for Social Development and Public Policy, Fudan University in Shanghai. He is a sociocultural anthropologist who has conducted fieldwork in both rural and urban China, but his most recent work has been located in Shanghai. Fuji has also taught and lived in Korea and Japan. He has published on a wide array of topics on contemporary issues in Chinese society and Asian-American issues, ranging from religion and politics, popular culture and globalization, sports and society issues, and the cultural impact of science and technology. When not teaching or spending time with his anthropologist wife Rebecca Ruhlen and their two children, Fuji can usually be found either on the sidelines of a men’s lacrosse field (as head coach of the Davidson College Men’s Lacrosse team of the MCLA) or on the field as a NCAA and high school lacrosse referee.
Since it seems all the cool academic blogs have their own Facebook group, I felt Savage Minds need one as well. If you have a Facebook account feel free to become a member and help make this work.
UPDATE: Wow. In less than 24 hours we have 38 members! Now what? Please post your ideas to the group’s discussion page!