"Media anthropology, 15 years on
"Tribal wives" - Pseudo-anthropology by BBC?
The BBC has sent six British women to be “second wives” to so-called “tribesmen” in - according to the BBC “some of the world’s most remote communities". “Any anthropologist feels pleased when the hidden peoples of the world get a chance to appear on television, but the BBC series Tribal Wives is misleading", anthropologist Michael Stewart comments in The Guardian.
Media anthropology, 15 years on (3)
In this series of posts I’m thinking aloud about where the anthropology of media may (or should) be heading in the coming 15 years, in view of the rapid growth of this subfield since Debra Spitulnik’s often cited review published 15 years ago. I am hoping to be able to recruit guest bloggers for this endeavour once I get some time off in the coming months so we can make this a more dialogical session, but for now I’ll simply limit myself to some cursory opening remarks. (As always, comments and questions are very welcome, but do please bear with me if I’m slow in responding).
Motorola anthropologists develop social TV
Some years ago, the researchers observed how people talked on the phone while watching the same TV show. Now Motorola-anthropologist Crysta Metcalf and her team are designing a Social TV, the Chicago Tribune reports.
Margaret Mead and the Arapesh
Despite the decades that have passed, Margaret Mead remains the Anthropologist You Are Most Likely To Be Asked About By The Person Sitting Next To You On The Plane. Her legacy is, to put it mildly, mixed. Many view her as the last really good ‘public anthropologist’ and an exemplar for female scientists everywhere. Others are much more critical—Michaeala di Leonardo (whose name I can never spell right) works hard to debunk the image of Mead as a proto leftist-feminist in Exotics at Home, for instance, and many anthropologists have taken issue with her fieldwork. The most obvious here is Derek Freeman, who spent much of his career launching extremely critical work on the fieldwork that resulted in Mead’s classic Coming of Age in Samoa.
Anthropology, Mathematics, Kinship: A Tribute to the Anthropologist Per Hage and His Work with the Mathematician Frank Harary
Over a long and productive career, Per Hage produced a diverse and influential body of work. He conceptualized and solved a range of anthropological problems, often with the aid of mathematical models from graph theory. In three books and many research articles, Hage, and his mathematician collaborator Frank Harary, developed innovative analyses of exchange relations, including marriage, ceremonial, and resource exchange. They advanced network models for the study of communication, language evolution, kinship and classification. And they demonstrated that graph theory provides an analytical framework that is both subtle enough to preserve culturally specific relations and abstract enough to allow for genuine cross-cultural comparison. With graph theory, two common analytical problems in anthropology can be avoided: the problem of hiding cultural phenomena with weak cross-cultural generalizations, and the problem of making misleading comparisons based on incomparable levels of abstraction. This paper provides an overview of Hage's work in an attempt to place it in the broader context of anthropology in the latetwentieth and early-twenty first centuries.Researchers make noises of pre-Columbian society
By JULIE WATSON, Associated Press WriterScientists were fascinated by the ghostly find: a human skeleton buried in an Aztec temple with a clay, skull-shaped whistle in each bony hand.
But no one blew into the noisemakers for nearly 15 years. When someone finally did, the shrill, windy screech made the spine tingle.
The Psycho-Pathology of Imperialism: McFated to McFailure
Kerim Friedman posted what I thought was a mild-mannered piece on “The Myth of Cultural Miscommunication,” on the Savage Minds blog. I do not think it should have provoked much fury. The post simply expressed certain doubts and questions, and provided a very interesting video that certainly does cast into doubt, to say the least, the extent to which U.S. occupation forces even want to hear “local knowledge” when killing the enemy is their top priority. But these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have proven to be good business for a range of corporations and individuals, ranging from Halliburton to Blackwater to BAE Systems and Montgomery McFate, and those of her kind who wish to personally profit from taxpayer funded adventures in untenable occupations. They have a vested interest in the prolongation of these occupations, with the promise of $300,000 salaries.
Ardevol et al (forthcoming) Playful media practices
Ardevol, E., A. Roig, G. San Cornelio, R. Pages and P. Alsina (forthcoming) Playful media practices: theorising ‘new media’ cultural production. In Bräuchler, B. and J. Postill (eds) Theorising Media and Practice. Oxford and New York : Berghahn.
Chicks dig jerks?: Evolutionary psych on sex #1
In our continuing exploration of facile examples of ‘evolutionary’ explanations for human behavior (usually described instead as ‘human nature’), I have another couple of exhibits: Do Jerks Get Laid More?, a great attack on recent research by Jill Filopovic at Feministe (h/t: Alternet); and Science Daily’s story, Women Have Not Adapted To Casual Sex, Research Shows (which I’ll discuss in the next posts). Daniel already discussed some of the recent research on homosexuality in The Gay Brain: On Love and Science, but this piece, the first of two, is dedicated to recent ‘evolutionary’ work on male-female relations, especially arguments about what is ‘natural’ in sexuality including that all-important question, ‘What do women want?’
Migrant visions
By Ruben Andersson
In a migrant shelter run by a feisty Italian priest outside the muggy border town of Tapachula in southern Mexico, I was once put up in a room with two east African refugees, whose case was pending approval; they had been stuck there for months. When heading back towards Mexico after a trip to Guatemala a week later, the highway police entered our bus at night and beckoned me outside, their torchlight flickering over the pages of my passport. At the border, I was asked whether I was Polish – at this time, a trickle of eastern Europeans were said to be moving through, alongside the central Americans heading north towards the United States.
Ethnography in San Francisco
I am in SF doing ethnographic interviews and Saturday night I was briefly swarmed by 8 or 10 young women who were, apparently, gay, punk and drunk as a skunk
Anthropology and Social Design Round Up
John Sherry is an anthropologist who is also chair of the Department of Marketing at Notre Dame’s Mendoza School of Business. I had coffee the other day with John, and was struck by how similar some of our approaches are. What unites us is an interest in behavior, for me behavioral health and for John consumer behavior, and a belief that anthropology can help unite interdisciplinary understandings of behavior and experience.
Are there ‘uncontacted tribes’? The short answer: No.
As some of you know, one of my areas of expertise is first contact in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, and in the course of my fieldwork I was lucky enough to speak with a few of the people who remembered the first couple of Australian patrols into the area where I worked in Papua New Guinea. So although I am critical of exoticised stories of ‘first contact’ I do think in certain situations using the term ‘uncontacted’ or ‘first contact’ is appropriate.
