[Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Garrison Doreck.] Whenever I mention that one of my primary areas of anthropological research is media, the question I come across on a recurring basis is the following: How will you be able to pursue that through ethnographic fieldwork of everyday activities? My sense is that such a response comes [...]This post is an attempt at a formal-ish sounding mission statement for our collective of anthropologists engaged, in many different ways, with digital concerns be they methodlogical or topical. If folks want to leave feedback in the comments section that’s always appreciated! You will notice that this statement says nothing about our organizational structure. We [...][This is a guest post by Garrison Doreck. He is a graduate student in Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine.] I stumbled upon the sideways issue in some of the readings I will discuss below. Initially, I read laterality and sideways discussions to be the equivalent of the keystone anthropological activity of cutting across [...]If I’ve been quiet lately it is because most of my free time has been devoted to trying to learn Amis (also known as Pangcah) one of the Austronesian languages still spoken in Taiwan. I’ve been reluctant to write about it because I’m at that initial stage where I am completely tongue tied and unable [...]In the comments section to one of my recent posts about Jared Diamond, SM reader Michael asks: Could anyone recommend some accessible anthropology literature? What would be 5 (or so) good books a generally educated person could read? I think this is a great question. I actually asked a similar question last August in this [...]Being enthralled with the joy of grading papers over spring break, I’ve shirked my duty to collect our tweets from the month of February in digest form. We share anthropology news, blogs, politics, and world events via @savageminds on a semi-daily basis. There might be some memes comin’ across the wires too. Okay, so it [...]I don’t normally shill for publishers, but I did notice something the other day that I thought would be worth mentioning on the blog: University of Chicago Press has dropped the prices on much of its digital catalog to right around USD$5. In particular, many of the titles in their “Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, [...]Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Carole McGranahan. “Political economy?” “Symbolic analyses?” Post-whatism?” Semester after semester, my advanced anthropology students told me they couldn’t remember the theories they had learned in their introductory anthropology course (even, they sheepishly confessed, if I had been their professor for that course). In response, I built a review of general [...]
It’s been an exciting month on Savage Minds, from a great new open access and digital anthropology effort to a reading of foundational texts to a discussion of contemporary scholarship, with a lot of stuff in between. And all the while a glance at the right-hand column opens onto a window of often fiery comment [...]And now for some news on the archaeology and stupid-TV-show-ideas front. Total #NationalGeographicFAIL and #SpikeTVFail at the same time. A double whammy of bad ideas. Several of my archaeology colleagues at the University of Kentucky have been talking about the recent news that Spike TV and National Geographic are planning two new shows that basically [...]