Category Archives: Site News

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

Thanks to Fred and Deborah

Please join me in thanking Deborah Gewertz and Fred Errington for a very successful stint as guest bloggers. I appreciate their willingness not only to prduce great posts, but to engage so deeply in dialogue with the greater SM community. Thanks to them, for this past fortnight SM was a little less not-suck than it might otherwise have been. Thanks again folks!

Welcome Guest Bloggers Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz!

I’m very pleased and excited to welcome Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington as our first guest bloggers on Savage Minds.

Deborah is the G. Henry Whitcomb Professor of Anthropology at Amherst College and Fred is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Together they are a husband and wife team with a distinguished career in anthropology. Their ethnographic focus is Papua New Guinea, a country where for many years they have done research in locations such as the Sepik and New Britain. Their long history of excellence in scholarship was recognized recently when they were invited to give the super-prestiguous Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures in 2002. I’m sure there are more accolades to heap, but the point is just that for those of us who work in Melanesia Fred and Deborah are considered pillars of the scholarly community with a knack for clear and accessible writing, and many of their essays have become fixtures on syllabi far and wide.

In addition to solo efforts, they have produced five books together: Cultural Alternatives and a Feminist Anthropology: An Analysis of Culturally Constructed Gender Interests in Papua New Guinea (Cambridge University Press); Twisted Histories, Altered Contexts: Representing the Chambri in a World System (a favorite of mine, also published by Cambridge); Articulating Change in the “Last Unknown” (Westview); Emerging Class in Papua New Guinea: The Telling of Difference (Cambridge); and, most recently, Yali’s Question: Sugar, Culture, and History (University of Chicago Press).

Their latest book, Yali’s Question, is a published version of the Morgan lectures, and reflects two recent interests of theirs. First, it is an ethnography of the Ramu Sugar plantation and refining plant, an exemplar of Papua New Guinea’s nationalized, tariff-protected sugar industry. Second, as the title implies, the volume is a response to Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel. The two projects are linked by more than just a common location in Papua New Guinea. In it, Fred and Deborah try in the book to understand complex historical events like the creation of Ramu as the result of the intersection of the projects of personal and institutional actors who live lives which, while influenced by environmental and geographical considersations, are motived by and lived through structures of cultural signifigance.

Here on Savage Minds Deborah and Fred will (I think) focus on their response to Diamond, providing us some insights from the argument of their book as well as some ethnographic background on Papua New Guinea, ‘cargo cults’, and Yali more generally. I’m sure they’ll continue SM’s tradition of public anthropology and constructive dialogue in fine form, and I hope you’ll join me and the rest of the Savage Mind collective in greeting them and making them feel welcome. Deborah and Fred — welcome aboard!

New, improved, comments!

Our comments have been updated and improved with a new comments policy, more informative information about what code can be used (including Textile), and a new live preview of your comments! Unfortunately, the live preview does not render Textile syntax – only HTML, but if you are hip enough to use Textile you probably don’t need no preview anyway.

Feel free to use this thread to test out the new features, give Textile a whirl, offer suggestions, or tell us what you like or don’t like about the new comments policy.

CiteULike and Anthrosource are Friends

I don’t exactly know where I found the time to do this, and something else, like my child or my career, will no doubt suffer, but here it is: you can now Cite What U Like at CiteULike from Anthrosource. Thanks to Alex, Kerim and Bob Offer-Westort for help in putting it together. ( Oh, and Richard Cameron, of CiteULike, of course, who helped clarify obscurities involving whitespace. Which in some departments might get him a PhD .)

So, try it out, my folksonomic researching fiends.

More Indiana Jones

This New York Times article riffs off the Fortune article mentioned by Christopher some time ago. To wit: “In an effort to grow ever closer to its customers, Microsoft has hired numerous social scientists, including anthropologists, to help it understand the natives, who in this case are the small-business owners who use its software.” And because someone at NYTimes obviously reads Savage Minds, the last line is a nod to the Indiana Jones thing: “Maybe Harrison Ford can play Mr. Gates in the movie.”

The Savage Minds Reading List

Although I can’t add links to journal articles that are only listed in AnthroSource, I have been compiling a list of all the books and articles that have been mentioned in Savage Minds over the past month. The list is surprisingly long, considering the short life of this blog! And I don’t even think I got all of them.

Please help maintain the list. If you post something, or read something in Savage Minds that isn’t listed, just bookmark it in CiteULike and add the tag: “savageminds”. (And please don’t use that tag for anything that isn’t mentioned in a blog post – there is also the tag “anthropology” that can be used for non SM anthropology related items.)

Thanks!

Comment moderation

For the next month or so I’ll be moderating comments on SM while Kerim is off doing other things in ‘real life’. We get lots of comments and lots of comment spam, so having someone with more time on their hands to deal with this should alleviate any problems y’all might have noticed. However I do want to say a few quick things about comments:

First, I live in the middle of the Pacific, so most of my moderating will occur during what is ‘late night’ for the mainland. Please keep this in mind and be patient. Thanks.

Second, if your comments do not immediately appear on the site, please do not post them again. Multiple postings of nearly-identical comments is one of the criteria that our spam filter uses to judge spam. Therefore reposting will almost definitely result in your comments being sucked off into a black void from whence they will never return. If you think you have something REALLY important to say that is not getting said quick enough, you can email me to let me know there is a problem. Please don’t tell the filter, or ‘test’ it or anything like that. It will just learn to like you less and less.

In sum, I’ll be tweaking the settings on the filter over the next few days to try to minimize shemale phentermine Teaxas Hold ‘Em comments and maximize disagreement about the relevance of biology for understanding human social life. Please bear with me. Thanks for reading and commenting.

Strange Layout in MSIE?

I apologize to those viewing the site with older versions of Micro$oft Internet Explorer. It seems that there are some layout problems. If you see a black, instead white in the background to the text then the page is not appearing correctly.

If you understand CSS and HTML, please look at my request for support on the Word Press forms. You can also leave suggestions in the comment section. (Note: The two XHTML validation errors are not the problem. I tried removing the code causing those problems and it still does not work. The CSS contains no errors.)

Until I fix this problem you may wish to use Firefox or Safari. Upgrading MSIE should work as well.

Serves me right for getting all cocky about the site design.

UPDATE: I’ve been told that the page loads fine on MSIE 6.0 (although the font sizes may be off). If you are using an older version and are having problems, please leave a comment with your version number and what operating system you are using.

UPDATE: Although it seems that the problem affected less people than I feared, I did figure out how to fix it. It seems that some older browsers weren’t loading the background images because the URL was surrounded with single quotes. Removing these fixes the problem. Please let me know if you notice anything else weird. I don’t have a Windows computer to test on, so if the font sizes look strange to you, please let me know.