Lorenz’ sum of the AAA 2010 meeting: 6000 anthropologists, much tweeting, some blogging, no press coverage

New Orleans: 6000 anthropologists, much tweeting, some blogging, no press coverage

It has been one of the best attended conferences ever. More than 6000 anthropologists went to the 109th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Society (AAA) in New Orleans.

But as usual, it?s hard to find any press coverage. There are some blog posts about the conference, though, and more than 1000 tweets. ?This year was a breakout year for the use of Twitter at the AAA”, Kerim Friedman writes at Savage Minds. The tweets – mostly internal conversations – aren?t of much value for us who haven?t been there, though.

Blogger and Online Publication Session at the SBL Annual Meeting

The recent Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) Annual Meeting in Atlanta had a new Blogger and Online Publication session (November 22, 2010). It was actually one of the best attended sessions! The academic biblical blogosphere and online world, even though they are more the domain of linguists and historians than archaeologists, provide interesting comparative material and ideas. Here are the titles, web links, and audio (on the Targuman blog):

Breast-cancer causing mutation in Ashkenazi Jews came from Europeans

The interesting question is: why did this become frequent in AJ? If this mutation did indeed enter the AJ gene pool half a millennium ago, then it may be within the reach of genealogists and historians to uncover its origins.

Digital Free Labor? Amazon?s Mechanical Turk and YouTube

This is the second provocation on the theme of digital labor from me and Ramesh Srinivasan.To warm up, check out Saskia Sassen at last year?s Internet as Playground and Factory as she warns us about how financial logicians uses networked technologies to  manipulate human ingenuity:

Anthropology, Science, and Public Understanding
PLoS Blogs (blog)
By daniel.lende During November’s annual meeting of the American Anthropology Association, the AAA executive committee made significant changes to it

U.S. Army Human Terrain System News: Hamilton Deserves Credit, CG TRADOC in Trouble, Training Woes

Clearly, program reorganization and redirection are the key elements of Colonel Sharon Hamilton?s mission as program manager of the HTS. Sources speculate that she has questioned some in the chain-of-command about the ?many millions of dollars wasted on a program that cannot produce any product.? Whether that is true or not, one thing is certain: Colonel Hamilton was dropped into a U.S. Army program that was allowed by senior TRADOC management to carve its own self-destructive path. Meaningful oversight of the HTS program was non-existent.

The Human Terrain System: Global Counterinsurgency, Global Espionage, Global Occupation

Max Forte: The article that follows was written by John Allison, a former member of the U.S. Army?s Human Terrain System. It was posted earlier as a comment on a report (Revealing the Human Terrain System in Wikileaks? Afghan War Diary) that the media actively chose to ignore (specifically, Joanne Kimberlin of The Virginian Pilot). Instead, the active focus was on any possible concoction of ?good news? about the ?good guys? (Human Terrain System in Wikileaks? Afghan War Diary: Searching for Evidence of the Positive). What John Allison does is to offer further corroboration and depth of detail to the work of the Human Terrain System in intelligence-gathering, global surveillance, and global counterinsurgency?where we are all the enemy.

Visual anthro: new film on mothering

A new short video is now online featuring UMBC anthropologist Bambi Chapin tackling the question of what makes a good mother.

Democratic Publishing = Web + Paper

Maximilian Forte is out with a new book on anthropology, military and imperialism. Yes, you can order it the usual way. But you can also download it as pdf file, for free!

On his blog he explains how he combined web and paper, how he set up his own publishing entity, Alert Press including print on demand by Lulu.com. The book consists of 14 papers, written by his students.

Mothering as Everyday Practice

Dr. Bambi Chapin, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, UMBC

?What makes a good mother? Bambi Chapin has co-edited (with Kathleen Barlow) a new special issue of the journal Ethos on ?Mothering as Everyday Practice.? The articles explore not just what mothers say about parenting, but what they actually do, and how they understand what defines a good mother. These ideas are far from natural or universal. Instead, they are informed by a diversity of value systems, social structures, traditions, habits and life circumstances.

Pop anthropology’
Elk Grove Citizen
She calls her colorful pop art style of work ?pop anthropology.? ?It’s not simply a statement of pop culture,? she said. It also tells a story and has many

Why anthropology is ?true? even if it is not ?science?

A recent article in Inside Higher Ed documented the latest ?issue? in anthropology making its way around the Internet: anger amongst ?scientific? anthropologists that the executive board of the American Anthropological Association has rewritten the mission statement of the association and removed language which describes anthropology as a science. Now, I have no intention to defend the executive board of the AAA, and I have no objection to labeling myself a social scientist. However, I am concerned that objections to the new statement 1) do a bad job of understanding what ?science? is and 2) fail to understand that the knowledge anthropology produces can still be ?true? even if it is not ?scientific?.

Political Subjectivity / Subjectivity beyond the Subject

I have come across an interesting talk by Caroline Williams which would be of interest and relevance to those following the topic of subjectivity, and political subjectivity in specific.

Professor Williams teaches at the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London, and her main focus is on political theory, and as you will hear in this talk, the notion of political subjectivity.