“An archive of interviews with anthropologists

An archive of interviews with anthropologists

Alan Macfarlane interviews Clifford Geertz in 2004.

As a number of anthro blogs have mentioned in the past, Alan Macfarlane, of the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge, has assembled a massive online archive of video materials, including a lot of in-depth interviews with anthropologists.  The interviews, which were conducted over the past thirty years, range from a late-1970s conversation with Rodney Needham filmed by Timothy Asch to a recent chat between our contributor Kalman Applbaum and Jean and John Comaroff.  There are interviews with such formative figures in social and cultural anthropology as Edmund Leach, Clifford Geertz, Mary Douglas, Marilyn Strathern, Sidney Mintz, Sally Falk Moore, Roy Wagner and Paul Rabinow, and also scholars from other disciplines, like historian of science Simon Schaffer and literary critic Gillian Beer.

Andrew Garfield?s Commercial Plea for War Research, and the Reality of Ethics in Human Terrain Teams

Two very different, but related, items have been published online this past week, related to the Human Terrain System and embedding anthropologists/social scientists in counterinsurgency. The first one I mention?unsurprisingly published by the Small Wars ?Journal? ?is written by Andrew Garfield of Glevum Associates, a private defense contractor that we have encountered here many times already in conjunction with the Human Terrain System (for a summary, look for entry #11).

Researching in “non-prestigious areas” – Robert Paine 1926-2010

(via anthropologyworks) British-Canadian anthropologist Robert Paine died at the age of 84. Eveybody who?s interested in the Northern and Polar areas will know his name.

He sent his most recent article for publication just weeks ago. Last year his second volume on the Saami Camps of the Tundra came out. It was nearly 40 years ago he went to Northern Scandinavia for the first time. The Far North was a non-prestigous area in anthropology at that time.

Language extinction ain?t no big thing?

Language diversity around the world is decreasing and Razib Khan of the Discover science blog, Gene Expression, doesn?t think you should care. I was going to let it slide because I don?t like getting in little blog tiffs, but then Khan went and tried to co-opt Neuroanthropology.net into the whole thing, so he forced my hand.