Publicity begins at home

Guest Author: John Postill

The digital world is exhilarating and frustrating in equal measure. On the one hand, the possibilities for socialising with like-minded others, meeting new people, honing old crafts, making digital things, sharing contents and co-producing knowledge are virtually endless. On the other hand, digital technologies can be slow, unreliable, unstable, disorientating and, quite literally, a pain in the neck. My starting premise is that any attempt at sharing anthropological knowledge with non-specialists via digital means must always bear in mind this basic contrast. Once we accept this fact of contemporary life, a whole new world of digital possibilities ? and frustrations ? opens up.

Public anthropology/UC Press book competition

BEST BOOK PROPOSAL = CONTRACT + $5,000

The California Series in Public Anthropology encourages professional scholars from a wide range of disciplines to address important public issues in public ways. To reinforce this effort, the University of California Press in association with the Center for a Public Anthropology is sponsoring an international competition that awards a formal, publishing contract for the best book proposal submitted ? independent of whether the author has completed (or even started) the proposed manuscript. The Series is open to working with authors as they wind their way toward completion. The winner will receive, in addition to a formal book contract from the University of California Press, a five thousand dollar advance.

Learning suicide in Sri Lanka

Durkheim’s sociological study of suicide as a ‘social fact’ was premised, in part, on the idea that only human beings were known to commit suicide. But ethologists tell us that the ability to commit self-injury or to deliberately self-destruct has been found across separate species including other primates and land mammals, dolphins, insects, and even some bacteria.

“Bodily Integrity”: a special issue of Body & Society

The latest Body & Society is a special issue on ?Bodily Integrity? with a number of articles that may interest our readers.  Here are the titles and abstracts:

Cyber Warlords Push Counterinsurgency, Social Science: Human Terrain System as a Cautionary Tale

Anyone familiar with the U.S. Army?s Human Terrain System knew that it wouldn?t be long until the same principles upon which the HTS program were built would be used by the U.S. national security machinery to justify a cyber-surge of the Internet. A similar attempt was made beginning in the mid/late-1990?s by President Bill Clinton but the collective thinking by U.S. government and corporate leaders?ignorance really?was that the Internet might turn out to be an economic and technological bust, a sort of niche application for amusement.

Ethnogenesis: A Radical Constructionist Case

I just finished James Scott?s 2009 book, ??The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, and I thought I?d take a couple of minutes to introduce the book to those not familiar with it. I quite enjoyed his last book, Seeing Like a State, which I wrote about back in 2007, and this book picks up where that book left off. Whereas Seeing Like a State discussed the strategies by which states exert bureaucratic control over unruly populations, The Art of Not Being Governed looks instead at the strategies people adopt to resist centralized state control. [The title of this post comes from one of the chapters in the book.]

Behind The Research: Dr. Sabiyah Prince

November 08, 2010 12:39 PM

?Behind The Research? is a new series that explores the dynamic work of African-American professors around the country.

Being a cultural anthropologist certainly sounds cool and complex. For Dr. Sabiyah Prince, an assistant professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C., working as an anthropologist involves examining the dynamics and relationships between race, class and culture. She received her doctorate from City University New York and is the author of Constructing Belonging: Race, Class and Harlem?s Professional Workers. Prince is currently examining the cultural history of her native Washington DC.