At one point in in Kelty’s series of posts entitled “Is An Anthropology of Freedom Possible” (or something like that…) Matt made the remark that it might be more interesting to frame the question of “Anthropology of…” in new terms, of “Anthropology as…” This ingenious idea allows us to imagine our discipline’s potential and values [...]The more I read about political economy and economic anthropology, the more I have wondered about the discipline of economics. What, exactly, are those economists up to, how do they approach their field of study, and why? I have read a good amount about modern economics, and how it differs from anthropology, but I haven’t [...]
Just received news of this experiment at UC Irvine: Ethnocharette. Keith Murphy and George Marcus have documented a process of exploring a text (Robert DesJarlais’ Shelter Blues) through a studio-style design process. The website details the process and the results. It’s always a bit hard to understand exactly how this kind of process works for [...]Kelty’s great series of recent posting on The Anthropology Of Freedom has spurred some great comments from a variety of people, and I wanted to add my own two cents here. As an occasional collaborator with Kelty and others of his ilk such as Biella “Mad Dog” Coleman, I’ve encountered these recent projects on ‘liberalism’, [...]I write a lot about graduate school and graduate student life — mostly because I’m responsible for training graduate students myself, which has forced me to figure out… well… what to tell graduate students to do. As a result, my thinking out loud on the blog has mostly been for my own sake, as I [...]Social science research isn’t on the firmest ground in these days of economic malaise, but it’s not like this news is exactly exploding into the headlines across the nation. Funding cuts, like the recent “trimming” of the Fulbright program,* seem to take place somewhat under the radar. The same can be said of the [...]That curious identity politic that mixes neo-primitive fashion, ecological coolness, spiritual openness, upper middle class ambition, multiculturalism, and conscious consumerism can be coalesced under the moniker eco-chic–an elite contradictory expression of social justice and neoliberalism. It will be explored in the conference Eco-Chic: Connecting Ethical, Sustainable and Elite Consumption, put on by the European Science [...]