Virtual Issue: The Anthropology of Knowledges

[pls check below for more anthro news]

In advance of the American Anthropological Association Annual Conference, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute is pleased to announce the Virtual Issue on “The Anthropology of Knowledges”. The articles are available online without any charge.

To know or not to know? Practices of knowledge and ignorance among Bidayuhs in an “impurely” Christian world
Liana Chua

Doubt, faith and knowledge: the reconfiguration of the intellectual field in post-Nasserist Cairo
Hatsuki Aishima & Armando Salvatore

Muslim politics in postcolonial Kenya: negotiating knowledge on the double-periphery
Kai Kresse

Affective spaces, melancholic objects: ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge
Yael Navaro-Yashin

Knowledge and discipline – knowledge as discipline: aspects of the oral history of Irish sexuality
Carles Salazar

Meeting of minds: how do we share our appreciation of traditional environmental knowledge?
Eugene Hunn

The interplay of ethnographic and archaeological knowledge in the study of past human subsistence in the tropics
David R. Harris

A community of critics? Thoughts on new knowledge
Marilyn Strathern

Property as Legal Knowledge: Means and Ends
Annelise Riles

Not Animal, Not Not-Animal: Hunting, Imitation and Empathetic Knowledge Among the Siberian Yukaghirs
Rane Willerslev

Evolution and devolution of knowledge: a tale of two biologies
Scott Atran, Douglas Medin & Norbert Ross

Knowing human moral knowledge to be true: an essay on intellectual conviction
David P. Crandall

From Secrets of Life to the Life of Secrets: Tracing Genetic Knowledge as Genealogical Ethics in Biomedical Britain
Monica Konrad

The bones affair: indigenous knowledge practices in contact situations seen from an Amazonian case
Carlos Fausto

Anthropological and accounting knowledge in Islamic banking and finance: rethinking critical accounts
Bill Maurer

Dell Hymes (1927-2009)

I woke up this morning to receive the following notice in my inbox:

Last Friday our distinguished colleague Dell Hymes passed away peacefully in his sleep.

It hasn?t yet been reported in the newspapers, but Jason Baird Jackson has a post speaking to Hymes? contribution in the fields of anthropology and folklore:

Thoughts on anthropology and social media activism

A few loose thoughts on how existing anthropological scholarship on the Internet and related phenomena may be recruited to the study of social media activism:

Talal Asad and the Anthropology of Islam

Last Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion I had the privilege of serving in a ?responding? role on one of the first panels on the program. This was a session entitled ?Talal Asad and the Anthropology of Islam,? organized by Jens Kreinath (Wichita State University), presided over by Refika Sarionder (University of Bielefeld) and with presentations by Jocelyne Cesari (Harvard University), Nadia Fadil (Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven), Jens Kreinath and Bruce B. Lawrence (Duke University). [Abstracts of the panel and papers are posted at the bottom of my comments.]

The Internet in everyday life: three approaches

Bakardjieva (2009) distinguishes three main approaches to the study of the Internet in everyday life.

Taking Anthropology Online: AAA Workshop

The annual American Anthropological Association meeting will take place in Philadelphia from December 2nd ? Dec 6th. I will put on a workshop entitled ?Taking Anthropology Online: Strategies for Teaching and Scholarship? on Thursday Dec 3 from 12:00 noon to 2PM. Here?s the description:

Informants, students, communities, culture, inequality, data ? all increasingly have a life online. This workshop will cover the basics of anthropology online, with a focus on content production, scholarship and teaching. Specific areas covered include: blogging, social networking, online video, podcasts and wikis.

?The great economic revolutions are monetary in nature? (Mauss)

Keith Hart Open Anthropology Cooperative

For Marcel Mauss, the years 1920-25 were packed and fruitful. His political party and the Left in general had a real shot at winning power in France and did so in 1924. Two-thirds of his Écrits politiques were written in this period. He was able to relaunch his group?s journal, Année sociologique, by the period?s end, contributing to it his most famous essay, on The Gift. He suffered some reverses at this time, including a serious illness, but remained optimistic for both political and intellectual regeneration on a social scale that was increasingly international in scope. He began serious work on a book dealing with the main political currents of the day, nationalism and socialism. His interest in the American ?potlatch? was expanded by the publication of Malinowski?s Argonauts of the Western Pacific in 1922, confirming his belief that competitive gift-exchange was endemic in Melanesia and Polynesia, as well as elsewhere. And the Institut d?ethnologie was formed in 1925 with Rivet, Lévy-Bruhl and Mauss himself in charge.

Where shamans understand colonialism as sickness

?I am here to save the people, to cure the people. In the city they are all sick, they are all domesticated. The shaman has to go together with disease.?

Anthropologist Anders Burman talks to Don Carlos, an Aymara shaman in Bolivia. According to Don Carlos, people are ill from Colonialism and in need of a cure.

How Does it Matter?

Reviewed by Ian Wedde

Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Approaches. 2009, edited by Phillip Vannini, New York: Peter Lang Publishers. 256pp. ISBN 978-1-4331-0301-8.

One way to write a review of this book is to treat it as a material object suitable for ethnographic study within the social field of Material Culture and Technology Studies in Everyday Life ? where, for our convenience, ?everyday life? here encompasses the daily practices, social constructions, actor networks, epistemologies, semiotics and narratives of those whose profession is the academic study of material culture and technology.

?The limits of naivety in social anthropology? (Gluckman)

Keith Hart   The Memory Bank

What would happen if anthropologists, for some limited purposes, abolished the division between academic writing and journalism that Mauss himself observed and that has prevented us from grasping how they fed into each other at a key moment in his life? The dominant presence of his uncle, Émile Durkheim, before the war obviously contributed to this compartmentalization, as Mauss?s sexuality possibly did too. He was, after all, one person not several; and, in The Gift, he lays out a method of approaching individuals, groups, institutions and events as ?total social facts?, so he was certainly aware of the problem.

Unearthing mysteries of Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’
CNN International
Ana has her sister’s remains today because of the efforts of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team — known by its Spanish acronym as EAAF

Looking back at 10 years Public Anthropology online

What is public anthropology? Already in 1999, when he had started his Ph.D project, Martijn de Koning has made his first anthropology website. In a very interesting blog post with many links, he is looking back at 10 years public anthropology online: