Category Archives: Site News

Information about updates, outages, design changes, and so forth.

Spam Mathematics

Our spam filters have caught 8,546 spam comments in the last two weeks, but as some of you may have noticed, a dozen or so each day still get through. In an attempt to stem the tide, and to make people more willing to subscribe to our comments RSS feed, we are trying something new. Now, whenever you post a comment you will be asked to solve a very simple math problem, such as the sum of 9 and 4. Hopefully that won’t be too difficult for all the math illiterate anthropologists out there (myself included). I’ve read that this can be quite effective in combating spam. If it isn’t then we’ll try something else …

UPDATE: To avoid silly jokes, I’ve turned off comments on this post.

Site Upgrade

Just updated the site to WP 2.2, as well as updating all the various plugins we use. Let me know in the comments if you see anything strange; but first try refreshing your browser’s cache as that usually does the trick. (Hopefully this will help reduce some of the spam we’ve been having…)

Welcome New Blogger: The Napster

With Oneman gone, we had to look for someone who could fill his shoes. You can imagine our delight when we were contacted by Napoleon Chagnon! His book on the Yanamamo was one of the first texts I ever read in Anthropology, and is one of the most famous ethnographies of the late sixties, early seventies. Now a professor emeritus at UC Santa Barbara, Chagnon has long been a lurker on Savage Minds.

Some Anthropologists still remember the Darkness in El Dorado controversy, and that will certainly be one of the first things that “The Napster” (as he would like to be known online) will be addressing in his posts, so I won’t say anything more about that here.

Please join us in extending a hearty welcome to The Napster!

Please Welcome Guest Blogger Rena Lederman

Savage Minds is very pleased to welcome Rena Lederman as a guest blogger for a spell. Rena has taught at Princeton University for over 20 years. Here is an introductory paragraph:

Lederman has done fieldwork in Papua New Guinea and the US. Her PNG fieldwork resulted in an ethnography, What Gifts Engender: Social Relations and Politics in Mendi, Highland Papua New Guinea, and numerous journal articles and book chapters on the exchange, inequality and leadership, gender roles and ideologies, historical representations, and socio-cultural transformations. More recently, her research has concerned the anthropology of knowledge practices and their ethical underpinnings. She edited and contributed to Anxious Borders between Work and Life in an Era of Bureaucratic Ethics Regulation (American Ethnologist Forum, November 2006)—on the politics of “human subjects” research oversight—and is currently completing a book entitled Anthropology Among the Disciplines that situates ethnography’s peculiar form of expertise comparatively among related kinds of knowledge (like sociology, social psychology, history and journalism). Spinning-off the work on research ethics, she recently designed a new course on The Uses of Deception in Magic and Science. Her other ongoing research concerns the politics of expertise, particularly the challenge of representing science in schools and popular media.

Rena will be initiating a discussion of, among other things, current thinking on the politics of IRB oversight of ethnographic research. This has been a hot topic here at SM on several previous occasions, and I hope that everyone will join me in avidly engaging Rena’s current thinking on this important topic.

I add that Rena was my principal dissertation adviser. I am pleased to be able to welcome her to SM as a trusted mentor, colleague, and friend.

Please welcome guest blogger Michael F. Brown

Please join me in welcoming our latest guest blogger on Savage Minds, “Michael F. Brown”:http://www.williams.edu/AnthSoc/brown.php. Michael is the Lambert Professor of Anthropology and Latin American Studies at “Williams College”:http://www.williams.edu. He has an extensive publication history based on his fieldwork on shamanism in Amazonia, but is perhaps best known to SM readers as the author of “Who Owns Native Culture”:http://www.williams.edu/go/native/, an excellent and widely read book on issues of indigenous rights and intellectual property.

Michael is, as it were, a long time listener and first time caller here at Savage Minds and we are super excited to have such a talented and well-respected scholar guest blogging here at the site. Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for Michael F. Brown!

Sorry for the downtime!

Hello folks. Sorry for the last couple of days when SM was offline. We switched servers from one machine to another and trying to coordinate the old machine (in California) with the new machine (in Illinois) with the guy who had the DNS (in India) and the guy moving the data (in Hawai’i) proved to be a little tricky. But we are now up and running, and while there may be a few small hiccups now and again I think we are back in business.

The Savage Minds Widget

Here is a little treat for all the mac-using Savage Minds fans out there:

A widget which displays the latest posts in your dashboard.

It is my first widget (made using the newly released “Dashcode“) so let me know how it works for you!

2006 Highlights

It has been a very good year for Savage Minds. We are blessed with a vibrant community of readers and commentators.

Here is a roundup of some of 2006’s most noteworthy posts to take you into the new year:

  • Anthropology of the Spirit: “everybody’s got a body, and it is surprising and interesting to learn about how the taken-for-grantedness of that body is historically/socially/culturally constructed. But not everybody has a spirit.”
  • What is good anthropological writing?: “Which were the texts that made an indelible impression on you, and why? Any answer to this question has to be biographical.”
  • The Invention of the World: Islam in the West: “the importance of Muslim scholarship to Columbus’ voyage cannot be overestimated”
  • Found Mag meets Savage Minds: “Sometimes it’s better to have a hand-scratched, seat-of-the-pants expression of deep knowledge over a real-time, social software, scale-free, really simple, ajax-enhanced, web 2.0 instant access to scholarship.”
  • World Simulation: Part One: Constructing the World: “In my last post, I described my ‘anti-teaching’ philosophy that led me to experiment with different ways of teaching cultural anthropology in very large introductory classes. So far, the most radical and intensive experiment I have tried is the ‘World Simulation.'”
  • Technology in the Classroom: PowerPoint Alternatives: “Power corrupts: PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”
  • Reading circle: let’s do Friction: This page archives all of our posts from this summer’s discussion of Tsing’s popular experimental ethnography, Friction.
  • The American Anthropological Association’s lobbying against open acess is so, so misguided: “In other words, in order for publishers to argue that it will become unprofitable for them to run a journal because of competition from open access repositories, they must argue that they provide very little value to a journal as a product.”
  • 30 Days of Cinétrance: “Despite the fact that one of the prime motivations for producing reality TV is saving costs on writers and actors, it does seem to draw heavily from the social sciences.”
  • In the Flesh in the Museum: “From the first European contact with the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere onward, Indians had been exhibited in royal courts, traveling shows, circuses, and world fairs and expositions.”
  • Junking the Nature/Culture Divide: “Pharmaceutical projects and products redefine the horizons of possible human being.”
  • Places and Frames: Reading Bruno Latour on Holiday: “Latour proposes that there is nothing intrinsically contextual about place, that place is simply a staging or framing for traces and associations, near and distant, past and present. Context as such does not exist as a factor which explains or accounts for a place.”
  • Conspiracy Theory and Social Theory: “in many ways conspiracy theories are like social theory”
  • Is motherhood natural?: “Many introductory kinship texts begin by pointing out that while fatherhood is frequently non-obvious, motherhood never is.”
  • Book Review: The Politics of the Governed, Part 1: “‘Political society’ is the politics of subjects who wish to have the same rights as citizens, but are excluded (by dint of their very marginalization) from civil society.”
  • You Only Link Twice: Spying 2.0: “an article about the US and defense intelligence agencies’ attempts to generate as much useful information as the blogosphere and wikipedia.”

Savage Minds at AAA 2006

With the AAA starting in just two weeks, it is time to make a few AAA related announcements:

At least three Savage Minds will be attending this year’s AAA in San Jose, more than enough for our second annual Savage Minds party! The party will start on Friday the 17th and run till the wee hours of the morning. Just track down one of us at the conference to get the final coordinates.

In order of appearance:

Rex will be presenting the paper “Towards an ethnography of Worlds of Warcraft in China,” on the panel “Video Games and Anthropology.” Wednesday the 15th 4:00 PM – 5:45 PM.

Strong will be presenting the paper “Modernity’s Mood? Sorrow and Social Life in Melanesia and Beyond” on the panel “Putting a Construction on Reality: Place, Performance, Reciprocity, and Emotions in the Work of Edward L. Schieffelin.” Thursday the 16th 8:00 AM – 11:45 AM.

I’ll be presenting the paper: “Cosmopolitan Avenues and Folkloric Boulevards: Spelling Hegemony on the Streets of Taipei” on the panel I co-organized with my colleague Hsuta Lin, “Jetset or Native? Cosmpolitanism and Folklore in the Taiwanese Cultural Sphere.” Friday the 17th 4:00 PM – 5:45 PM.

I’m also happy to say that the short documentary I made with Shashwati Talukdar, “Acting Like a Thief” was selected as part of the Society of Visual Anthropology 2006 Film and Video Festival. It will be shown on Saturday November 18th at at 3:00pm. More than my paper, I really hope people can spare a few minutes to come and see the film!

Maia will be around for another conference and might make it to the party if she can sneak away for a few hours.

In another post I will discuss plans (or the lack thereof) to promote Open Access at this year’s AAA.

Finally, we’d love to hear from our readers! If any of you have panels, posters, films, or other activities planned for the AAA, please let us know in the comments. Its great to just show up at the party, but even better if we have a chance to see each other at work!

Reader Poll: What’s your anthropology background?

This poll is completely unscientific, but I hope it will give us some sense of our readership. (A lot more people visit the site than leave comments.)

Select the phrase which best describes your background in anthropology. The results will appear immediately upon selecting an answer.

UPDATE: I stupidly forgot to include a category for current grad students. [Duh!] So please chose the MA in anthropology option (even if you are just working towards your MA) and ignore the part about doing something else afterwards. (I’m afraid it is too late to change the questions.) And again, sorry about that…

A Quick Savage Minds FAQ

I thought I’d post this to underscore Kerim’s “earlier post”:/2006/10/04/reality-check/ and just to serve as a quick reality check after the “Burning Man thread”:/2006/09/27/notes-towards-an-anthropology-of-burning-man/:

Q: Are the people on this blog Real Anthropologists?
A: Yes. By any standard, the contributors to this blog are Real Anthropologists — we all have graduate degrees in anthropology from presitguous and well known universities. We teach at prestigious and well-known universities in four countries. Some Minds are senior scholars. Some are still finishing their Ph.Ds. Most are in between. We are Certified 100% Real Anthropologists. If you haven’t managed to notice this it is your fault, not ours — trust me.

Q: Do you do anthropology on Savage Minds?
A: No. We talk about doing anthropology on Savage Minds. This is just a blog. It is not our careers or our work. See Kerim’s post immediately below this one. This is not the digital equivalent of an AAA session, it is the digital equivalent of the AAA hotel bar after sessions are over for the day.

Q: What counts as ‘being an anthropologist’?
A: Viewed from the ‘outside’, it is not hard to describe ‘ethnographically’ what an anthropologist is — there are a myriad of formal and informal institutions, international and otherwise, that stabilize the discipline of anthropology (see question #1). Viewed from the ‘inside’ in terms of what anthropology should be ‘anthropology’ (to me) means the social science that takes as its object the phenomenon of culture — a sui generis, domain of arbitrary and conventional meaning that is distinctly human. Some anthropologists take issue with the ‘science’ part of that defintion. Some would replace ‘culture’ with ‘society’. Some study how culture interdigitates with our biological constitution as a species, while others focus on the artifacts created by people in the course of their construing their lives as meaningful.

There are, of course, a bunch of other things that people typically think of as ‘anthropological’ which I think are typically associated with anthropology but which are not essential to the discipline. These include the method of research known as ‘participant observation’, a focus on ‘primitive’ people, and a certain populist sensibility. You’ll get a lot of all of that stuff if you hang around here but, like the knife you see on TV that can cut through an aluminum can and still slice tomatos, it is merely a bonus to the all the other fantastic features that come for free with our site.

Savage Minds Challenge Reminder

I’d like to remind everyone about the three programs we are trying to fund on our Savage Minds Challenge:

  • $499 more will buy five “Social Studies Resource Boxes” for students at a rural elementary school.
  • The West Harlem Book Club still needs $632 to buy disadvantaged kids some books.
  • And $1,568 is needed to fully fund a video production club at a public vocational high school in Manhattan.

If these programs don’t get fully funded you will get an option to redirect your money to another program. You can also choose to direct your donation to just one program, or distribute it between all three.