Tag Archives: Websites

Race to the bottom: anthropology websites in comparative perspective

In comments on my “recent piece”:/2006/09/11/cultanthorg-skulking-about-the-anthropological-noosphere/ on “cultanth.org”:http://culanth.org some people have pointed out the website’s many problems. I personally think some of the problems with this site have to do with issues that plague all attempts to build community like this: if you built it, they may not come. That is to say, when building things like forums or group blog sites it may simply be the case that all the enthusiasm that people have for ‘making anthropology public’ or ‘exploring new forms of community’ deflate pretty quickly when it comes time to actually write something. We’ve certainly seen this at Savage Minds, where currently have 8 Minds and 478 posts by them — 354 of these are by Kerim and I alone, and my own contributions more than exceed the total posted by every other current Mind combined. Other sites with a ‘hard core’ of contributors — “anthropology.net”:http://anthropology.net/ and “ye olde LiveJournal community”:http://community.livejournal.com/anthropologist/ come to mine — demonstrate that it takes not just enthusiasm, but persistence and commitment, to build an anthropological noosphere.

Even SM’s struggles to keep postings regular — which we should all feel proud about, by the way — compare favorably to other failed attempts to start group blog sites such as “anthroblogs.org”:http://anthroblogs.org and the “anthrocommons.org”:http://www.anthrocommons.org/ which failed to achieve critical mass for a variety of reasons. I would hasten to add that I lay none of these at the door of the personalities of the people involves, who I am sure are all very nice. It is a strange mix of chance and design that lets some online communities flourish. Why Worlds of Warcraft and MySpace instead of EverQuest and Friendster? There are many reasons, but I think at some level these things are random.

But then there are other reasons that sites fail to draw serious traffic. In the case of our official AAA websites that reason is, to my mind, lousy design plain and simple. The current AAA website is truly amateurish (although a new one is supposedly in the works which will hopefully be better). AnthroSource’s search function is so lousy the wider community created work-around solutions like “greasemonkey scripts”:/2006/06/23/a-greased-up-platypus-for-anthrosource-google-synergy/ and “browser plugins”:http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html?name=anthrosource.net&sherlock=yes&opensearch=&submitform=Search. I feel like one of us should get up at the next AAA meetings and pull a Steve Ballmer on them: “Developers developers developers.”

I think the race to the bottom has been won, however by the new “searchable catalog of 2006 AAA meeting sessions”:http://www.aaanet.org/mtgs/search/search.cfm, which will not actually tell you the date and time for sessions. I know — it seems incredible. Take a look at the “session I will be giving a paper at”:http://www.aaanet.org/mtgs/search/showSessionInfo.cfm?proposal_type=non_invited_session&type=s&id=2147 — anyone interested in the session can find such earth-shattering information as the fact that we will have a slide machine in the room with us and that the panel will be 1.75 hours long. But which 1.75 hours in particular? It’s true that you can find this information in the ‘preliminary search results’ (which are unlinkable and hence unshareable because of a lack of a static URL). Why not include the date and time in the session info? After all, you can figure out the length of a session is you know the date and time, but not the other way around. The mind simply boggles. I’ve emailed AAA’s IT Director about this problem, and he told me they decided that “only the fields that were felt to be most important” came up on this page. Am I completely off-base here is assuming that the vast majority of people searching for sessions are less interested in the AV needs of the people giving papers than they are in trying to figure out when the damn thing is supposed to actually occur? If you agree with me please say so in the comments and perhaps we can explore some sort of letter or something to get this changed.

So in sum, cultanth.org is walking a gauntlet that many have walked before. Given the AAA’s consistent ability to provide rock-bottom performance in the Internet space, I don’t think cultanth is really capable of sinking to the bottom of the barrel. But triggering ‘take-off’ (as if websites were New Nations) is an occult art that few anthropology websites have managed. There is not a lot of middle in the anthropological noosphere yet so perhaps cultanth, with its mix of user-created content and editorial-created information can break new ground.

teh crispz0r

It has been a little while since antropologi.info “pointed out”:http://www.antropologi.info/blog/anthropology/anthropology.php?p=2082&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1 the open access journal “anthropology of food”:http://edition.cens.cnrs.fr/revue/aofood/ but it is just now that I had the time to look through the journal. It is very French in that unique way that makes French people bad at rock and roll but able to turn the concept of “milk”:http://edition.cens.cnrs.fr/revue/aofood/2003/v/n2/ into a charming idea for a theme issue of a journal. My favorite is the special theme issue “crispy, crunchy… a dream of consistency”:http://edition.cens.cnrs.fr/revue/aofood/2003/v/n1/ which is even more mellifluous in French. Who can’t love an anthropology which raises crispiness to the status of a universal concept?

RSS on AnthroSource

I’m not sure if anyone’s mentioned this, but in June AnthroSource added RSS feeds to each of their journals, piping tables of contents to you when each new journal comes out. This seems pretty neat, although the feeds are wacky — each post includes the title and the bibliographic details (a handful include snippets from the front of the article, though I can’t figure out why those rare few are selected for special treatment). This could be useful to some folks, I suppose, but… If your reader is set up to open the page directly, though, it becomes more useful — you go to the citation page in AnthroSource, where there’s an abstract if available and links to the PDF or into JStor. A bit kludgy — here’s what it looks like for me: FeedReader displays feed, I select post, Feedreader displays post I click headline, FeedReader displays citation page, I click PDF link, FeedReader opens login page in Opera, I log in, pdf opens in Opera. The feed I tested doesn’t link to J-Stor, but you can guess for yourself what extra steps that would take.

I’d like to see full-text, or at least full abstracts, in the feed itself, along with a deep link to the PDF. That would be useful. It can’t be all that hard to add validation to the feeds — my RSS reader allows me to add a username and password, so it must be possible within the standard. I’d also like to see RSS-ized searches — that would be awesome! (For that matter, I’d like to see Google add RSS to searches outside of their blogsearch ghetto — I guess that’s a bit off-topic, but in case they’re reading this….) AnthroSource isn’t serving up ads, so they have no interest in keeping me (or you) coming back to their site — the site should be a framework for serving up information (on demand, just in time… where have I heard this before?).

I kvetch ’cause I love, though — RSS is a good step for AnthroSource.

Boas and the Popular Museum

I discovered a neat, fairly new blog dedicated to museums today, S.J. Redman’s Museum Madness. Redman’s most recent post addresses an interesting and (for me, anyway) new aspect of Boas’ museum work, his populism.

Most of us are familiar with the relationship between Boas and museums — the ethnographic exhibits at the Columbian Expo in 1893, his early curating work at the Field Museum, his move to the American Museum of Natural History and his involvement with the Jessup Expedition to the Pacific Northwest and Arctic coast that stocked much of the AMNH’s collection. Along with his 1889 article On Alternating Sounds (AnthroSource link), Boas’ critique of exhibition schemas that reflected the prevalent evolutionary beliefs of the time were a crucial early step towards his later cultural relativism, as was his insistence on supplementing material artifacts (shields, pots, spearheads, matates, etc.) with folklore, songs, and other non-material “artificats” (recipes, instructions, game rules, etc.) in order to create a fuller understanding of a culture “from the native’s point of view” (rather than as a pitstop on the march towards us-ness).

Redman focuses here on Boas’ role as a museum professional, though — not as an anthropologist. Continue reading →

The Digital Himalaya project

I’ve been busy lately preparing for a two-week research trip to England. We hope to find some kind of archival footage we can use for our film. In the process I stumbled upon this excellent web site.

The Digital Himalaya project was conceived of by Professor Alan Macfarlane and Mark Turin as a strategy for archiving and making available valuable ethnographic materials from the Himalayan region. Based jointly at the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University and the Anthropology Department at Cornell University, the project began in December 2000.

Of particular interest to Savage Minders is the Fürer-Haimendorf Film Collection:

Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf lived and worked as an anthropologist throughout the Himalayas from the 1930s through the 1980s. Fürer-Haimendorf’s specific interests included the Naga ethnic groups of the North Eastern Frontier Area of India and the Sherpa ethnic group of north-eastern Nepal. However, he travelled far and wide throughout the entire region, taking over 100 hours of film throughout his career. Extraordinary in both its breadth and its depth, the Fürer-Haimendorf collection is one of the finest extant ethnographic film collections that document Himalayan cultures. The collection includes both archival footage from Fürer-Haimendorf’s lengthy research career in the Himalayas, as well as interviews with the Professor himself recorded on video. Samples of both appear below. The Fürer-Haimendorf film collection is currently located in the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University. DART (Digital Anthropology Resources for Teaching) has compiled a selected set of Haimendorf’s fieldwork notes on the Sherpas of Nepal which will appeal to scholars interested in his ethnographic field techniques.

The DART web site has this short biography of Haimendorf:

Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf was born on June 22, 1909, in Vienna, Austria. He studied anthropology in Vienna under the tutelage of scholars of the Kulturkreis school. He was a prolific fieldworker, amassing an impressive archive of material on South Asian groups, with a particular focus on Nepal and northeastern India.

While conducting postdoctoral research at the London School of Economics, Fürer-Haimendorf became well acquainted with many of the leading lights of British anthropology, including Bronislaw Malinowski, Raymond Firth, Meyer Fortes, and Audrey Richards. World War II broke out while he was on his second field trip in India, and like Malinowski before him, Fürer-Haimendorf was arrested as an enemy alien. Confined to Hyderabad State for the duration of the war, he undertook extensive fieldwork among the inhabitants of that region. Upon returning to Europe in 1949, he began his fruitful tenure at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, where he served as chair of a growing anthropology department between 1950 and 1975. After a long and influential career, Fürer-Haimendorf died on June 11, 1995.

Did you mean “matrilineal”?

I was recently proofreading a paper for a Taiwanese colleague and since I don’t trust my own spelling I ran it through the spell checker. Word underlined every instance of “patrilineal” in red and helpfully suggested “matrilineal” … Hey, at least its a kinship term. I’ve seen worse.

Still, it reminded me of a project I’ve been meaning to start for a while: I’d like to compile a list of common words used in the social sciences which aren’t in the default MS Word dictionary. Everyone could then download this list and add it as a custom dictionary. Many of you probably have your own existing custom dictionaries (I lost mine somewhere along the line), and you might be able to help us get started by uploading that to the new wiki page I’ve set up for this project: the Anthropology Word List.

Don’t feel a need to limit yourself to kinship terms, all the latest isms and post-structuralist jargon should be added to the list. If we are going to have to use words like “hybridities” at least we should spell them correctly!

Berkeley anthropology emeritus lecture series

I’ve been thinking about the Manchester school lately. My mantra for the fall is: Have We Really Thought Enough About Max Gluckman? (I am not the only person who thinks the answer is “no”:http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=EvensManchester)

In the course of thinking about this I ran across Berkeley’s “anthropology emeritus lecture series”:http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Anthro/index.html, which has a ton of of great stuff available about prominent anthropologists. The entry on “Elizabeth Colson”:http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Anthro/colson/index.html is particularly good.

Race and human variation website is up

A few weeks ago I got an email from the AAA announcing that the fancy new website of the Race and Human Variation Project (tied with AnthroSource and a couple of other things as being a central focus of AAA planning these days) was up. When I visited the site I got a blank page that said “check back here soon.” This sort of exemplifies the emails AAA sends out. Did anyone else get the one whose subject line was “A massage from AAA”? /me sighs. Well at any rate the “Race project’s website really is live”:http://raceproject.aaanet.org/. It already has a pretty nice collection of papers and I’m really looking forward to watching it take of.

Traditional Knowledge Digital Library

India’s anti bio-piracy initiative has garnered a lot of press recently. Here is the BBC:

In a quiet government office in the Indian capital, Delhi, some 100 doctors are hunched over computers poring over ancient medical texts and keying in information.

… The ambitious $2m project, christened Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, will roll out an encyclopaedia of the country’s traditional medicine in five languages – English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish – in an effort to stop people from claiming them as their own and patenting them.

You can access a demo of the TKDL here, but I think you need to work at a patent office to register. The concept of bio-piracy is explained in detail on this page, along with several examples. Here is the BBC’s summary:
Continue reading →

But We’re at War…

The Association of Social Anthropologists has kicked off their new Ethics blog with a sharp critique of PRISP, the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program, backed by anthropologist and unreformed cold warrior Felix Moos. PRISP offers funding to students in the social sciences, on the condition that they do summer internships and other activities with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, essentially serving as a recruitment tool for US intelligence services. I have posted about PRISP here before, voicing concern about the loss of autonomy this cozying up to the state may engender in the long run, and these concerns are shared by John Gledhill at the ASA:

Many anthropologists and people with anthropology training working for NGOs and government sponsored agencies in places and situations deemed relevant to security concerns are now likely to experience new levels of state intrusion on their working lives and ethics. Sometimes, they will face serious risks as individuals if they chose to follow the path of conscience rather than acquiescence to these demands and restraints.

Gledhill is also concerned with the issue of secrecy. PRISP-funded stsudents remain unknown to either their professors and their fellow students, and if the goals of PRISP are fulfilled, their research once they enter the field will remain hidden behind the security agencies’ firewalls. Anthropologists have a long history of distrust and dislike for secret research, especially research which touches on wide-ranging human issues like security — while we I think rightly feel that we are better-informed about the people we study than the everyday military strategist or intelligence operative, as scientists we are humble enough to remain sceptical about the accuracy and thoroughness of our representations. Open research allows — nay, invites — scrutiny by our peers, scrutiny that, it is hoped, leads to better research. The last 5 years have been nothing if not a demonstration of the dangers that a lack of such healthy scepticism can subject us to — especially the willful non-scepticism that has shaped America’s national security policies. As Gledhill notes, this lack of scepticism is inherent in the project of policy-driven strategising:

It is far from clear to me… whether closed debates within security agencies are more effective than the use of published sources and the more open kinds of dialogues between academics and national security professionals that would allow more sceptical thinking to flourish. The problem is that more public debate allows too much scope for worrying about moral impediments to decisive geopolitical action (such as mass civilian “collateral damage”), opens more space for discussion about how far expert knowledge can actually reliably predict, let alone direct, the future course of events, and empowers dissenting minorities within the security apparatus itself. Secrecy is an effective way of covering up ignorance and doubt…. More open debates tend to expose to greater critical scrutiny the possible premises of national states’ global strategies and the role of different political, commercial and military backstage interests in shaping the behaviour of democratic governments.

Taking a step back, I want to say how thrilled I was to come across the ASA’s Ethics Blog — what a great idea. Done well, this has the potential to far outstrip the AAAs weak online Ethical Currents Case Studies, by providing both an immediate outlet for issues as they arise and, through the use of comments and links (alas, they’re on blogger, so no trackbacks), an excellent forum for debate. I’d like to see more initiative of this sort in our own AAA…

Cool interactive aboriginal map

I’ve blurbed about the long-handled “Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies”:http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/ (AIATSIS to its friends) and their extremely prolific “Aboriginal Studies Press”:http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/aboriginal_studies_press in the past. One thing well worth checking out on their site is a cool “interactive map of aboriginal ethnic groups”:http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/aboriginal_studies_press/aboriginal_wall_map/map_page.

Most of my research is about how problematic maps which divide aboriginal identities and territorial claims into externally-bounded, internally homogenous “billiard ball” type units a la Eric Wolf can be. But I’m not an aboriginal expert, so what do I know about Australia? Plus also the map is really cool.

AnthroSource RSS Feeds

I can’t tell if this is a new feature or something that has always been there under my (admittedly large) nose, but I just discovered that all the journals listed in AnthroSource have RSS feeds! Just browse to the journal you want and the link for RSS feeds is listed right at the top of the page.

Even Anthropology News has an RSS feed. Now that I’m an international AAA member, I don’t get the paper edition of Anthropology News anymore, but at least I can know via RSS when a new issue comes out. Unlike Rex, I hate paper, and so I’m much happier getting AN this way.

So true

The first review on the Amazon page for the well-known anthology “High Points in Anthropology”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0075539772/qid=1146870656/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-4022260-1224710?s=books&v=glance&n=283155 is entitled “A conspiracy between universities, editors, and the publisher” and then goes on to trash the book in a wonderful and, to my mind, completely accurate fashion. It’s not for nothing that this volume is sometimes called “Low Points in Anthropology”…

Fact Checking via Google

If you publish a controversial scholarly book these days you’d better plan on someone hosting a web site devoted to tearing your book to shreds:

Anyone know of any other web sites devoted to debunking academic books? (Academic books only please.) It seems publishers are less and less interested in being editors or fact checkers, so such web sites will likely play an increasingly important role in keeping authors honest – or exposing sloppy scholarship. It also means that even careful scholars will likely have to have a web page defending themselves from such attacks.

Materials for Teaching the History of Anthropology

A Google search for Ralph Linton (don’t ask) turned up this remarkably useful site from the AAA: “Materials for Teaching the History of Anthropology”:http://www.aaanet.org/gad/history/index.htm which includes a bunch of free PDFs of obituaries of anthropological greats as well as other articles from the AAA. It’s a great collection of articles and free — and totally obscure. Has anyone else heard of this site? Well gratz to the AAA for putting it together even if they have (as far as I can tell) kept their lanthorn under the web’s bushel. These are great resources for Wikipedians.

In other news our site problems should be over soon. That’s also a long story.