In Hollywood, caucasian men adopt avatars to become one with indigenous aliens, but that’s not how the racial politics of avatars work in the real world. Rural schools in South Korea are getting robot English teachers and, well, read on: The robots, which display an avatar face of a Caucasian woman, are controlled remotely by [...]I study internet video firms and so participant observation means being stationed for a good amount of time at a firm’s office. Upon a recent request to do just that, a founder of a firm wrote, “the key problem is that we do NOT have a ‘site’… you can come to NYC but half the [...]
antropologi.info social and cultural anthropology in the news Blogroll Nordisk auf Deutsch Journals Bulletin Board Search Guestbook Contact 26 12 10 22:18:28, by Lorenz Categories : culture traditions Us and Them books Northern America anthropology general University Academia How racist is American anthropology Why does anthropology tend to focus on exotic others Why this obsession with Africa How come calls by well-known anthropologists such as Paul Rabinow to anthropologize the West seemed to have not brought forth much fruit How racist is American anthropology Kenyan anthropologist Mwenda Ntarangwi discusses those and other questions in his new book Reversed Gaze . An African Ethnography of American Anthropology Yes , Ntarangwi has conducted an anthropological study of AmericanWorrying about our status as a science is not a new habit for anthropologists — in fact its one of our perennial concerns. Its useful, therefore, to see how our predecessors have worried the same way we have about the same topics since, a lot of the time, they did it better than us. One [...]The dust storm kicked up over the dropping of the word “science” from the introduction to an internal long-range planning document reminded us that there are still a lot of anthropologists who still call themselves scientists. But how many anthropologists still call themselves “poets”? Rereading Recapturing Anthropology I came across a reference to this Pat [...]Around the Web has to sit at the kids’ table this holiday. And to mark the occasion here’s a special Christmas song from my family to yours. As I head home to Texas I reflect on how kinship is an amazing thing. Let’s just say kids, through their own magic, give holidays a new meaning. [...]God bless Neuroanthropology for tracing out the twists and turns of #AAAfail as it unfolded and now, apparently, is more or less ‘over’. In general I concur with Daniel’s analysis of what went wrong. The AAA’s ability to handle its internal processes — and what happens when they go public — reminds me of the [...]Rex elsewhere characterized the discussion around what has unfortunately come to be called #AAAfail as “…between thoughtful people who are aware of the complexities of knowledge production, and those who are for psychological reasons strongly committed to identifying themselves as scientists and everyone else as blasphemers” (emphasis added). He further called for empirical description and [...]Rex recently asked for “anthropology creeds” but for the life of me I can’t write one. So instead I’ll write about why I think the task is impossible. An anti-creed if you like. In short, I think that anthropology, like Christmas, or the island on Lost, is whatever you want it to be. Every discipline [...]Science shit-storm Full coverage of the wording of the AAA mission statement and the place of “science” in anthropology can be found at Neuroanthropology where Daniel Lende has collected fifteen links (and growing) on the subject alongside his own opinions. He’s been doing a good job of updating the link list as more blogs respond [...]