Twitter hashtag #AAA09 for AAA meetings…

Blogging or Tweeting the AAA Annual Meeting?

If you plan on blogging or tweeting the upcoming AAA annual meeting in Philadelphia, please email Brian Estes (bestes AT aaanet DOT org) with your name (optional) and a link to your site or twitter feed. In the interest of providing the most comprehensive meeting coverage possible?particularly for those who are unable to attend?we would be happy to link to your content, including session write-ups, event photos and more.Twitterers can use hashtag #AAA09 when posting meeting related content.

AAA Blog Welcomes Posts from Readers

Thanks to Savage Minds for the recent kudos. AAA staff are pleased to bring our blog readers a diverse range of current news and commentary. If you have information on a new online resource, exhibit, publication, etc. that you?d like to share, please contact us at bestes [at] aaanet.org or dwinnick [at] aaanet.org. You can also post announcements regarding funding opportunities, field schools, award programs and more directly on the searchable AAA bulletin board.

Neuroethics conference podcasts

The Dalhousie University-based Novel Tech Ethics group recently hosted a conference called Brain Matters: New Directions in Neuroethics.  You can read descriptions of the conference at the Dana Foundation’s website and in the neuroethics newsletter.  They’ve also made six plenary talks available as video podcasts.  Here’s the list of speakers along with the titles and abstracts for their talks:

Let?s give it up for the AAA blog

I?d like to think the reason I am so critical of our professional organization is not that I am some sort of curmudgeon, but because it so often fails to get anything right. In the spirit of giving credit where credit is due, therefore, I think it is high time that we give it up for the American Anthropological Association?s ?new? blog: The AAA Blog. After an initial proliferation of blogs?I think the AAA created a separate blog for each post it wanted to make?the new consolidated blog has really gotten off the ground.

Culinary anthropology: Take a deeper look into Thanksgiving tradition
The Durango Herald
Clementine Wilson, left, founder of a weekly potluck in Durango, and her friend Robert Foster come together as they tend to the evening’s

Language and the Media in Fort Hood

Below is an occasional post by Zoë H. Wool. Zoe is a doctoral candidate in socio-cultural and linguistic anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation is titled Emergent Ordinaries at Walter Reed Army Medical Center: An ethnography of extra/ordinary encounter. It focuses on the dialectic of the ordinary and extraordinary in the lives of soldiers who are marked by violence.

There is much to be said, and felt, about the shootings at Ft Hood on November 5th.

Attention Educators: NSF Launches New Online Evolution Report

The National Science Foundation has launched a new special report, ?Evolution of Evolution: 150 years of Darwin?s On the Origin of Species,? available via an interactive website.  The main site includes a helpful timeline on evolution-related developments in anthropology, as well as other fields. The report?s anthropology page highlights video interviews with Susan Anton (NYU) and Ken Weiss (Penn State U). Click here to view an introductory video from the site, with scientists discussing the impacts of On the Origin of Species.

Book review: Presenting 2nd generation Multi-Sited Ethnography

Tessa Valo has read another book for us: Multi-Sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Research, edited by Mark-Anthony Falzon. It consists of 14 articles. Tessa Valo is currently planning a ?multi-sited? fieldwork and has picked four articles that she considered most inspirational.

Multi-Sited Ethnography: Theory, Praxis and Locality in Contemporary Research (ed.) Mark-Anthony Falzon. 2009. Ashgate. ISBN 978-0-7546-7318-7.

Tereza Kuldova (Tessa Valo), PhD fellow, Museum of Cultural History, Oslo

Ethnographic Terminalia

The Icebox Project Space at Crane Arts will feature an innovative group exhibition entitled Ethnographic Terminalia from December 2-20, 2009.

0.178: The Social Production of Science and Anthropology as Knowledge for Domination

The intellectual heritage of European expansion that we inherit as anthropologists ? certainly not without modification and criticism ? is again the subject in this series. If Immanuel Wallerstein explained which agendas became dominant with the institutionalization of the social sciences, with some notes on why they became dominant, Pierre Bourdieu provides some explanation as to how they became dominant.

The commons, and the culture of climate change

While we?re talking about national parks and other common spaces in relationship to migration, I?d like to draw attention to this nice short film on the concept of ?The Commons?.  Using some groovy retro animation and sporting a catchy soundtrack, the film makes an argument for recognising those things that we (should) share as members of societies, including water and government.  The film encourages us to see the value of these shared things and to see the injustice of their exploitation by the few.

Race and white dominance in American anthropology

In demographic terms, anthropology in the United States continues to be dominated by white Americans. Consider this graph of the racial distribution of anthropology doctorates over the last twelve years (incidentally, the NSF had no data for 1999, so there should really be a gap year inserted here, but I trust you can all manage without one).

The Anthropology of Prisons?

A fellow Texan* and journalist, Michael Berryhill, contacted me recently with a query about whether anthropologists had done much on prisons. He?s writing a book that sounds pretty fascinating:

I?m writing a book about Texas prisons during the 1970s and 1980s, when an upheaval occurred through prison civil rights litigation. I?m interested in what anthropologists have written about the culture of prisons, their slang, their social order and the sense in which they are all part of one culture. Most prison officers, I believe, tend to think there are two cultures: the officer culture (?the good guys?) and the prisoner culture (?the bad guys?). But in reality, inmates and officers are quite interdependent. They share the same language, hours, problems, and often the same attitudes about violence.