Rex from Savage Minds provides tips for applying anthro programs but i guess they are relevant for any social science programs…
Getting into graduate school in anthropology: What we/I look for in applicants
I am serving on the admissions committee of my department again this year, and as usual we are in a position to admit at maximum 20% of the total applicants we receive. I don’t want to reveal the confidential deliberations of the committee, but it has gotten me thinking a lot about how to apply for graduate school, what I look for in an application and how people should prepare theirs. What people look for varies from place to place, and different people will have different priorities than I do, but I offer this to help orient people to an application process that is often confusing and opaque to people who go through it. What, then, do I look for when we admit people to graduate school?………
Ethnography is not an in-home interview
Tesco’s Fresh and Easy grocery stores have been in the US for about 15 months. They are not performing as expected, and the finger pointing has started.
“The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual”: New Book on Anthropology, Militarization, and the Human Terrain System
I am very happy to report that the second of three new volumes about the human terrain system to be published this year has just been released for pre-order. It is The Counter-Counterinsurgency Manual, by the Network of Concerned Anthropologists. It features contributions by Catherine Besteman, Andrew Bickford, Greg Feldman, Roberto J. González, Hugh Gusterson, Kanhong Lin, Catherine Lutz, David Price, and David Vine. It will be released in April of this year.
The anthropology of contemporary culture
The useful anthropology of contemporary culture is a distressingly small library. (I have listed some titles below. This is not an exhaustive list, but neither is it a very partial subset of the complete universe.)
Memory, Virtual Archives and Johannes Fabian
This is a long, drafty, and somewhat less review-y version of a review I am writing about Johannes Fabian’s latest projects.
Johannes Fabian, Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive, Durham, N.C. Duke University Press, 2008. 140p.
Johannes Fabian, Memory Against Culture: Arguments and Reminders, Durham, N.C. Duke University Press, 2007. 192p.
Johannes Fabian’s contributions to anthropology are distinctive. Depending on where you start, he is an Africanist, a linguistic anthropologist, a partisan and critic of the “Writing Culture” moment in American anthropology, a folklorist and student of popular culture, a historian of drug use by colonial anthropologists, a theorist of time, memory and alterity, and now something of a hacker as well. Two books have been published recently which capture some of his heterogeneously distinctive work. The first, Memory against Culture, collects several recent talks and articles, including one called “Ethnography from the Virtual Archive” which is the germ of the second book Ethnography as Commentary, which is both a meditation on creating a “virtual archive” of ethnographic sources and a “late ethnography” of a popular ritual which Fabian experienced in 1974 in Zaire with a healer named Kahenga.
Archaeozoologists Voice Support for MASCA
The International Council for Archaeozoology (ICAZ), a 500+ member organization, has shared a copy of a letter that they sent to the administrators of the University Museum of the University of Pennsylvania regarding the planned dissolution of the Museum’s Applied Science Center for Archaeology (MASCA). The decision to close this major scientific laboratory and lay off 18 researchers, was motivated primarily by financial reasons, and has received strong criticism from parts of the research community about the apparent abruptness of the decision [see the dedicated blog for a history of articles and statements]. So far I haven’t found any public statements from the Penn Museum to justify this action, and when I do, I’ll link to those.
2,500 languages threatened with extinction: UNESCO
by Amer Ouali
PARIS (AFP) – The world has lost Manx in the Isle of Man, Ubykh in Turkey and last year Alaska’s last native speaker of Eyak, Marie Smith Jones, died, taking the aboriginal language with her.
Auton et al. on Global distribution of genomic diversity
The full supplementary materials from this study are not online yet. This seems to be based on a presentation from ASHG 2008. As I explained in that post, because Europe was settled from the east, it is expected that genomic diversity (left) would be higher in SE Europe and lower in SW Europe. However, the opposite is true. This, coupled with the observation of a higher degree of haplotype sharing between SW Europe and the Yoruba HapMap sample, suggests that genomic diversity in the Iberian peninsula has been enriched directly from Africa.
Discover more from Erkan's Field Diary
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
As I said (on Internation Musing), at times, I have reservations about missionaries. Yet, I’m impressed that the Oblates, on James Bay, Ontario, Canada,a long time ago, have preserved the Cree language by writing the alphabet, and a Grammar, and by encouraging the Natives to write their own stories.
I do worry about the extensive use of American English on the internet. Of course, there is a great need for bloggers to reach a large amount of people. But I wish that more blogs would be bilingual and that everyone would give a place of honour to their native language. Le mien est Français et j’en suis bien fière. I fear that the major languages of the world are somehow bowing down to English. Not surprising that smaller languages are becoming extinct.