Anthropology is “determined to commit suicide” said David Graeber. To salvage the discipline Graeber encourages you to abandon building theory from Western philosophy. He provokes you to draw theory from your ethnographic experience. He writes: Where once we drew our theoretical terms – “totem,” “taboo,” “mana,” “potlatch” – from ethnography, causing Continental thinkers from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Sigmund Freud and Jean-Paul Sartre to feel the need to weigh in on the resulting debates, we have...  show all text

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Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Carole McGranahan. Who is the audience for academic knowledge? When does that audience include not just fellow academics, but also the public? These questions are harder to answer than they should be. Our courses require enrollment and tuition. Our writings require effort to find and afford and read. Our conferences tend to be closed to outsiders and sometimes even to other scholars. As a profession, we simply do not have spaces where we regularly talk with an  show all text

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If Democrats want to reach more evangelical voters, they should use a political language that evangelicals can hear.

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A mouse that eats yogurt daily, left, is slimmer and shinier than his brother. (Courtesy Susan Erdman) Scientists studying the power of probiotics to fight obesity got more than they bargained for: Not only does yogurt make mice slimmer; it also makes them sexier. Studies in humans suggest eating yogurt may help stave off age-related weight gain. But Massa­chusetts Institute of Technology researchers Eric Alm and Susan Erdman wanted to know why. “Maybe it has to do with the healthy bacteria tha...

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I had the pleasure of interviewing Charles Stafford, Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, about his new anthropology journal Anthropology of this Century. Click below to read the interview. AF: Sherry Ortner sent me a link to her article on neoliberalism that opens the online journal you founded and edit, Anthropology of this Century (AOTC), which debuted in 2011. It’s got an awesome title. There are 88 more years in ‘this century.’ This is different from a journal wi...  show all text

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By now you've undoubtedly heard that Facebook allows people to share their organ donor status. A friend of mine adjusted her information on the day of ...

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And Mexicans are the new Irish. Growing up in Texas I always had trouble keeping Cinco de Mayo and Diez y Seis straight. To my mind the former was in commemoration of a colonial event, the defeat of Spain maybe, and the latter marked the date of the Mexican Revolution. Or maybe I had it backwards? And while Diez y Seis might warrant a baile folklorico demonstration or a performance from the high school mariachi band in the state capital, Cinco de Mayo was marked by the ritual of going out to a  show all text

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Anthropology is an inherently interdisciplinary field. We draw from evolutionary theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, we compare within and between primates, we even manage to ...

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To reject a type of marital arrangement because of its supposed incompatibility with "the traditional definition of marriage" only calls attention to the speaker's ignorance of well-known ethnographic and historic facts.

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The vision of an ethnographer physically going to a place, establishing themselves in the activities of that place, talking to people and developing deeper understandings seems so much simpler than the same activities in multifaceted spaces like Wikipedia. Researching how Wikipedians manage and verify information in rapidly evolving news articles in my latest ethnographic assignment, I sometimes wish I could simply to go the article as I would to a place, sit down and have a chat to the people ...  show all text

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In a bittersweet postscript to the brutal history of eugenics in America, North Carolina aims to become the first state to offer monetary compensation.

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It is the boom area in science – but why? And what's it all about? What is neuroscience? It is the study of the nervous system and, most notably, the brain. There are several areas of interest: neurobiology looks at the chemistry of cells and their interactions; cognitive neuroscience looks at how the brain supports psychological processes; and computational neuroscience aims to create computer models of the brain to test theories. Questions could include anything from why certain proteins appe...  show all text

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Student loans are just a piece of the puzzle of higher education.

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The Resource Development Committee raised funds to support AAA members and anthropologists in sharing their research faster and more efficiently. With donations for the Gray Literature Portal, AAA has partnered with the Social Science Resource Network (SSRN) to create a new tool – the Anthropology and Archaeology Resource Network (AARN). What will the Anthropology and Archaeology Resource Network do? The AARN will give anthropology scholars access to distribute their technical reports, gray li...  show all text

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In March, the C4ISR Journal, a publication of Defense News, ran the cover story U.S. Army’s Human Terrain Experts May Help Defuse Future Conflicts. In the piece, journalist Jim Hodges wrote: The HTS (Human Terrain System) also ran afoul of anthropological organizations that believed their scholars were becoming spies and that their work was being used to undermine the population rather than help it. The anthropologists also said their first ethic — “do no harm” — was being violated by the work ...  show all text

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C4ISR Journal reports that Human Terrain System will be recruiting at this year’s meeting of the American Anthropological Association [“Early Engagement,” March].

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The UN human rights inquiry will focus on the living conditions of the 2.7 million Native Americans living in the US

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An anthropological perspective on how bankers function can help challenge our reliance on discredited neoliberal economics In his recent column, Aditya Chakrabortty observes that the current financial crisis should represent a crisis of legitimacy for the "narrow, straitened form of economics" that both helped to create the meltdown and failed to see it coming. But in contrast to previous crises, other voices have failed to make themselves heard, leaving the field free for the reassertion of ne...  show all text

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I got to spend some time with a friend recently that decided some time ago to restart her PhD work.  She is already ABD, but is starting the dissertation over from scratch.  My question was “Why?” She is a well-respected professional, and within the her field a PhD will likely be of limited benefit professionally compared to the mountain of work ahead of her, not to mention the expense involved. In the course of the conversation I was reflecting on my own choice to not get a PhD and thinking th...  show all text

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Male editors dramatically outnumber female ones on Wikipedia and that could be dramatically influencing the online encyclopedia's content, according to a new study

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Most of the way that we talk about doing ‘literature reviews” is widely misleading. We talk about ‘how to find sources’ creating ‘topic maps’ and defining ‘arguments’. But as anthropologists we know that ultimately, a literature review is about people. It is, in actuality, a map of the personal networks that create the literature. This is particularly true in anthropology, which is a relatively small field compared to, say, biology. Doing a ‘literature’ review, then, basically means creating a ...  show all text

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[This is the 5th installment in an ongoing series.] I am not this guy: Or this guy: Then he dived into Russian, Italian, Persian, Swahili, Indonesian, Hindi, Ojibwe, Pashto, Turkish, Hausa, Kurdish, Yiddish, Dutch, Croatian and German, teaching himself mostly from grammar books and flash card applications on his iPhone. This in addition to a more formal study of French, Latin and Mandarin at the Dalton School, where he is a sophomore. I suspect some people are wired differently, like this Radi...  show all text

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There are many reasons contemporary American anthropology feels fragmented and lost, without direction: the discipline has grown in size, there is no clear theoretical paradigm, etc. But beyond these reasons there is one force, more powerful than all of them put together, that accounts for our current malaise: We don’t have an email list. This was brought home to me recently when a European colleague emailed me and said they had an announcement they wanted widely circulated. Could I tell them t...  show all text

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This is bad. The Archaeological Institute of America has published a statement in its popular magazine opposing open access. And by opposing, I mean totally hating on the concept. We at the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), along with our colleagues at the American Anthropological Association and other learned societies, have taken a stand against open access. Here at the AIA, we particularly object to having such a scheme imposed on us from the outside when, in fact, during the AIA’s ...  show all text

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A U.S. anthropologist has become a sought-after Internet blogger in the wake of the recent upheaval in Mali. A recent post on the "Bridges from Bamako" blog is titled, "Light at The End of the Tunnel?" It analyzes a recent statement by coup leaders on transferring power to civilian rule. The blog's writer, Bruce Whitehouse, a Fulbright scholar from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, offers in-depth analysis, historical background, links and local reaction to events in Mali.  The posting was q...  show all text

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