I’m currently on a committee which has been tasked with developing a set of ethical guidelines for visual ethnography in Taiwan. While I agreed to take part in this process because ‘image ethics’ are something I take very seriously, I am also very skeptical about the application of a medical ethics model to anthropology. For this reason I was happy to come across a paper by Bill Simpson entitled “Ethical moments: future directions for ethical review and ethnography” which is a free (if not “ope...  show all text

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Ok, a little less politics on this blog and a little more anthropology. Hopefully some of you have looked at the introduction to HAU and want to start talking about it. The title of the piece is “the return of ethnographic theory” but I’ve titled my post the ‘opening of ethnographic theory’, and for good reason. A quick look at the bios of the contributors and editors to HAU will reveal that it is in many ways a Chicago-Oxbridge production, but with a continental twist. In many ways, HAU repre...  show all text

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Preface In the wake of the SOPA/PIPA protests, debate over the Research Works Act, the growing boycott of Elsevier by scholars in many fields, and more local discussions of the ways that various scholarly societies in my own fields of interest (anthropology, folklore studies) responded to the recent call by the [U.S.] White House Office of Science and Technology Policy for comment on public access to federally funded research, there is a great deal of additional attention being given to the cha...  show all text

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The AAA’s role is to be vigilant when it comes to proposed legislation that aims to limit dissemination of research, and that may disproportionately protect private over public interests. At the same time, AAA’s role is to protect the sustainability of our publications program, for anthropology as a whole and for individual authors.  We continue to investigate models that both support broad dissemination of knowledge and a sustainable publishing program. To this end, the Executive Board has ado...  show all text

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Back in November, the US government's Office of Science and Technology Policy solicited comments on potential policy surrounding public access to scholarly work.  All comments were accepted through January 12 and were recently released. The statement released by the American Anthropological Association can be read here, and the Archaeological Institute of America statement is here.  In short, both statements insist that there is no problem with public access to scholarly output. The anthro-Tw...  show all text

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One of the problems plaguing anthropology today is its state of perpetual indecision. This is probably not a new problem, but it does have serious consequences for how we write and publish. What is the center of sociocultural anthropology today? Where is the discipline going? What standards can we use to assess the work of young scholars? No one has the answer to these questions, or at least not enough people have the same answer. We are resistant to rely on quantitative measures of citations b...  show all text

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Millions of children take drugs to help them pay attention — but do they really help?

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Before the global meltdown, financial news was strictly for geeks and struggled to get on the news. Now, financial correspondents have become celebrities Last year, there was an unexpected knock on the front door of Robert Peston's home in Muswell Hill, north London. When he answered, Peston, who has been the BBC's business editor since 2005, was confronted by a reporter from a local news agency. "He asked me a question about whether I dyed my hair," Peston recalls. "Apparently there was some F...  show all text

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I don’t often write about gender and science, but I have been thinking and reading about it lately. If you were hoping for my typical aloof lecturing, or overblown (yet intellectual) ranting, just wait a few days (or you could … Continue reading →

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The annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Montreal 2011 set an attendance record, on top of a previous attendance record at the AAA meetings in New Orleans 2010. Almost all anthropologists have gripes with the AAA and the AAA meetings, but let’s pause for a moment and agree there must be something positive going on in anthropology. For the presidential address, outgoing AAA president Virginia Dominguez did celebrate these signs of growth, but she deliberately framed her...  show all text

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Twin City Derby Girls, lining up at the start of a jam to support their jammer. My other posse. Photo courtesy of Alex Wild. The women ...

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Over at his blog, Jason Jackson wonder whether that AAA supports HR 3699 or not. It’s a good question, but I think there is an even better one to ask: can the AAA support (or oppose) HR 3699? In other words, is there some sort of institutional structure and decision making system at work within the AAA that is actually capable deciding something in the name of the organization and then publishing it? Because frankly, even having the competence to decide to oppose HR 3699 in a timely fashion wou...  show all text

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Yesterday important swaths of the Internet were blacked out to protest SOPA, PIPA, and the RWA. We would have blacked out our site as well but… uh… we sort of didn’t get around to it. One site that did, however, was Wikipedia. This lead to a certain amount of chortling and self-staisfied rubbing of hands from conservative academics as they enjoyed imagining what life is like for undergraduates without Wikipedia. I’ve been rethinking the now-ancient war between Wikipedia and its paper forebearers  show all text

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Defend the Anthropology Library! Occupy Cal is calling for a ‘Study-In’ encampment inside the Anthropology library, Kroeber Hall, for Thursday, January 19 at 3pm. The Anthropology library is a recent victim of harsh service cuts caused directly by the university’s mis-management of funds and privatization. The hours are being cut from the previous, already slim, 9am-6pm hours to the current—12pm-5pm hours. This is part of the story of how university administrators are failing the educational m...  show all text

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Since I first saw a post by Jesse Bering, responding to a question by a “Deep Thinking Hebephile”, I have wished to write a response of my own, covering more of the literature on the subject, and clarifying some points. It’s taken a while to gather my sources. For starters, I do not think that Jesse intended to, explicitly or implicitly, condone hebephilia. But this is where taking risks in scientific writing can lead to unintended consequences, and where choosing the wrong words, failing to ad...  show all text

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"For anthropology, the unpublished records of the past are of more than historical interest.... They constitute primary data of all research."

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I get to advise on global user experience (UX) stuff for Oracle applications, so I am always on the lookout for research opportunities in local markets and for information that might lead us there. The Everyone Speaks Text Message article in the New York Times (a surprisingly great source of articles on translation, language and cultural issues, by the way) is very revealing about the importance of knowing local users and how they use their technology in work and everyday life: their user exper...  show all text

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Kate Clancy of Context and Variation and I are super excited for our upcoming Science Online 2012 panel: Sex, gender and controversy: writing to educate, writing ...

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Heather Ford spoke with Stuart Geiger, PhD student at the UC Berkeley School of Information, about his emerging ideas about the ethnography of robots. “Not the ethnography of robotics (e.g. examining the humans who design, build, program, and otherwise interact with robots, which I and others have been doing),” wrote Geiger, “but the ways in which bots themselves relate to the world”. Geiger believes that constructing and relating an emic account of the non-human should be the ultimate challenge  show all text

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“All is flux.” – Heraclitus … “Before criticizing someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when do you criticize them, you are a mile away… and you have their shoes.”      –Jack Handey … Stop motion photo of a girl jumping rope. A few moments of an individual life. (Photo by Harold Edgerton). My advisor in graduate school, Mike Little, once shared with the class that he fantasized about a machine that would provide instantaneous data just by having a person walk through it. As  show all text

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Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s lawyer, Henri Leclerc: At these parties, people were not necessarily dressed, and I defy you to tell the difference between a naked prostitute and any other naked woman. Gayle Rubin, in her famous essay “The Traffic in Women” Marx once asked: “What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is as good as the other. A Negro is a Negro. He only becomes a slave in certain relations. A cotton spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It becomes ca...  show all text

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Nicholas Negroponte famously insisted that the dotcom boomers, “Move bits, not atoms.” Ignorant of the atom heavy human bodies, neuron dense brains, and physical hardware needed to make and move those little bits, Negroponte’s ideal did become real in the industrial sectors dependent upon communication and economic transaction. In the communication sector, atomic newspapers have been replaced by bitly news stories. In the transactional sector, coins are a nuisance, few carry dollars, and I just...  show all text

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In prepping for my new gender studies course this spring I’m rereading Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Mother Nature for the first time in about ten years. Well, aside from looking at the pictures and glancing over my underlines that is. So it came as somewhat of a surprise to find that Hrdy, twelve years out from publication, had something to say about now top-tier presidential candidate, Rick Santorum. The story she’s referencing has already been trotted out by websites like Jezebel, about how late in h...  show all text

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