"'Lost tribe' not actually lost ...
'Lost tribe' not actually lost
Remember that uncontacted tribe in Brazil? Turns out it was actually discovered in 1910.
Ethan Zuckerman Blogs CK’s Berkman Center Talk
One of my favorite bloggers, Ethan Zuckerman, has a nice write-up of a book talk our own Chris Kelty gave over at the Berkman Center:
The Presentation of Self in Virtual Life
While the title of Tom Boellstorff’s book draws analogies with Margaret Mead, I think the book would have been better titled The Presentation of Self in Virtual Life. Having expressed some of my concerns with the book in a previous post, I’d like to take a moment to talk more about what I liked most about the book: the way in which he presents the kinds of discourse and self-presentation strategies Goffman so famously analyzed in “everyday life.” By thinking about the differences/similarities between the two we can learn something important about what it means to function as a virtual human.
Repossession, Decolonization, and Anthropology: The Return of First Nations Remains
“Members of the Tseycum First Nation from the Saanich Peninsula of southern Vancouver Island arrived home from New York City Thursday morning with some deeply personal cargo that left the island more than a century ago”
Nokia's Cellphone Anthropologist
holy_calamity writes "New Scientist have an interview with a Nokia researcher who uses anthropological methods to study how people use their phones. His work currently focusses on watching how people in emerging markets like Africa use their devices to inform designs. For example, after finding that in Uganda many people use one handset, they shipped a version with multiple separate address books. There's also a slideshow of Chipchase's research images."anthropology coming of age
welcome to the 21st century
Since quite a time ↵I was eagerly awaiting '↑Coming of age in Second Life: An anthropologist explores the virtually human' by ↑Tom Boellstorff—it just arrived with yesterday's snail-mail, so I had not yet the chance to read Tom's book from front to back cover. Until now I only read chapter 1 'Subject and scope,' plus a dozen or so random paragraphs from throughout the book. Hence I am not yet qualified to deliver a review, instead I will jot down just some thoughts.
Ethnography of the Virtual
I just finished reading Tom Boellstorff’s ethnography, Coming of Age in Second Life, which I first learned about on Anthropologi.info last year. I have to admit coming to this book with a certain degree of antipathy towards its subject. It always seemed to me that playing Second Life was much more cumbersome, time consuming, and less entertaining than reading the real estate or personals sections on Craig’s List. Indeed, Boellstoroff’s book confirms my conviction that Second Life is mostly about real estate, with a little relationship stuff thrown in for good measure.
Resource: Digital Research Tools Wiki
My Rice Colleague Lisa Spiro (whose blog on digital scholarship rocks) and others have put together a fantastic wiki of digital research tools, including lots I have yet to try out and many that have been mentioned here, especially in light of the discussion about edupunk…
It’s a book! Two Bits
So I have an announcement: I have written, and published, A Book. I know that Savage Minds readers harbor the suspicion that we are all just doing this gig until someone pulls the curtain back and we have to dust off our barista aprons and work for a living, but I am actually in this for the long haul… The book is called Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, and it is produced by the punkrockingest press ever, Duke University Press. It is now available for purchase, for download and for derivation and remixing.Living with mobile phones in Brazil
Sandra Rubia Silva, PhD student, Department of Anthropology, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil (sandraxrubia@gmail.com)
Is it time to boycott SAGE?
It sounds like a satire on capitalism but reality is often even worse. If you have written an article for SAGE you cannot send your own article to colleagues, you cannot copy nor save it. You can read it on one computer only according to anthropologist and Culture Matters blogger Lisa Wynn.
Wynn had published an article in the Journal of Social Archaeology. Instead of getting a PDF of the published article, which is what she gets from all the other journals, she received this e-mail:
Anthills, cobwebs and Internet Studies
I was recently involved in a brief email exchange with some fellow internet researchers over my 2008 article “Localizing the internet beyond communities and networks”. I thought it might be helpful if I posted here an analogy that may help future readers unfamiliar with social theory get to the gist of my argument and avoid misunderstandings.
