"Chris Kelty on academic practices and the blogosphere

Money for Money and the study thereof.

By ckelty on Briefly Noted

Bill Maurer, of Mutual Life, Limited fame will lead a new institute at University of California, Irvine called the The Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion which has been funded in part by a $1.7 million grant from the Gates foundation. A recent workshop launched the whole thing, with lots of interesting looking panels, and some papers and pointers to more resources. For those interested in the anthropology of money,

Marc Quinn: SIREN 2008 (detail)

Statuephilia: Exhibition by Contemporary Sculptors Opens Today at the British Museum

Marc Quinn’s Golden Fetish

Marc Quinn’s golden sculpture of Kate Moss has finally been made public at the British Museum as part of its Statuefilia exhibition. As expected, Quinn’s statue of Moss is in a similar pose as his bronze sculpture of the British model titled Sphinx. Apparently the golden version of Kate Moss was to be titled Siren, but has been renamed Aphrodite. According to the museum the piece is the largest gold sculpture to be made since the days of ancient Egypt. Quinn created the sculpture with over two millions dollars worth of gold. It has been suggested that the piece will earn six times that once sold.

Anthropology in/of Circulation

By ckelty on experiments

It was never announced officially here, in part deliberately, in part just because my life got the better of me… but let this be official: we (Me, Rex, Jason B. Jackson, Kimberly Christen, Tom Boellstorff, Michael F. Brown and Michael M.J. Fischer) published a Really Great Interview about Open Access in Cultural Anthropology. For those who subscribe, the paper copies have now arrived, for those who don’t it is an Open Access article available to everyone (even in AnthroSource!). It is also hosted at the CA website for your commentary and discussion using the CommentPress software of which I am so fond.

The fact that I am announcing this “too late” is also related to a discussion we started earlier in the month, regarding the issue of attention to and care for various new kinds of internetty and webliche zweipunktnullische projects. In particular, the difficulty academics have of devoting time and attention to such new projects, and the way in which what Rex called the “field of care” structures how academics take up and run with certain projects. There are a lot of really great points in that thread… and I think it’s worth continuing the discussion here, and hopefully, over at Cultural Anthropology as well.

What spun the discussion off in interesting directions, I think, were two points:

Selling our independence? The perils of Pentagon funding for anthropology
Catherine Lutz
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/121420135/ABSTRACT

Partnership for mutual benefit: A reply from the Pentagon
T. G. Mahnken
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/121420131/ABSTRACT

US militarization in Africa: What anthropologists should know about AFRICOM
Jeremy Keenan
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/121420126/ABSTRACT

Open Video Project: a shared digital video collection
There are also some collections of ethnographic Anthropology related films including materials from the Digital Himalaya project. Each item has a catalogue record with bibliographic details, technical and copyright information

Arizona State University doctoral student Scott Ortman, a rising star in the field of Southwest archaeology, is helping to close the gap between theory and data with his training in quantitative and qualitative work and his skillful way of linking the two. 

“A perennial problem in archaeology is that we have many interesting theoretical ideas—for example, how humans perpetuate material traditions—but we often do not know how to apply that theory to our data, such as counts of potsherds,” states archaeologist Michelle Hegmon, a professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences’ School of Human Evolution and Social Change and chair of Ortman’s committee. 

Chris Kelty on academic practices and the blogosphere

By John Postill

Chris Kelty has posted a very thoughtful piece on the collective blog Savage Minds about academic life – especially anthropology – and the blogosphere. I think this piece will stick and we’ll be revisiting it for a while. As readers of media/anthropology will know, I have done some work on practice theory and field theory lately (not only Bourdieu’s version, I hasten to add) and Kelty’s remarks about “field of care” structures and different paces of Web life resonate strongly with my own findings and experiences.

Network fantasies

By John Postill on social networks

In an earlier blog entry I suggested that it may be useful to distinguish between two main kinds of recent anthropological efforts at rekindling the study of networks within this discipline. First, we have those anthropologists who ‘found’ networks in the field, e.g. when working with political activists or social technology advocates. Second, there are those anthropologists who wish to rethink networks even though their research participants may not be particularly interested in this notion (e.g. see post on Amit’s 2007 article on occupational networks).

Anthropologist Rose From Outcast to Academic
UCLA International Institute – Los Angeles,CA,USA
Now a professor of anthropology and co-director of Chinese studies at UCLA, Yan has returned many times to northeastern China to conduct fieldwork in Xiajia

The Anthropology of Crime and Criminalization
By EmmaB
One strand, the anthropology of criminalization, explores how state authorities, media, and citizen discourse define particular groups and practices as criminal, with prejudicial consequences. Examples are drawn from research on peasant