Anthropology roundup: ” ?neo-Tardian revival? …

Gabriel Tarde
Gabriel Tarde (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gabriel Tarde: Been there, done that.

In the last decade or so (earlier, if you speak French) there has been a ?neo-Tardian revival? as people organize conferences, write books, and otherwise advocate for Gabriel  Tarde, an otherwise-forgotten thinker of France?s Third Republic. Most anthropologists think of Tarde, if they think of him at all, as one of the many guys that Durkheim defeated on his climb to the top of France?s academic heap. Today, people are interested in Tarde because he is part of the intellectual genealogy of people like Deleuze and Latour. This work is interesting and important because it moves beyond a vision of society as composed of static, coherent, superorganic social wholes to one which more adequately theorizes human conduct as a dynamic, emergent system with multiple determinants and outcomes. Except I will say one thing:

 

Imaginary museum of Marshall Islands Fine Mats

From the Pacific Islands Report:

The museum is an imaginary place designed to showcase the historic and contemporary mats of the Marshalls. In this wondrous world, you can ?stroll? through rooms full of historic mats in Britain or Germany, relax in the cinema as you watch a ?Majuro Productions? show, or go shopping in the museum store.

 

Harvard Anthropologist Honored by Japanese Cultural Affairs Agency

The Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University recently announced that it current Director, Theodore C. Bestor, received the Commissioner of Cultural Affairs Award for the Promotion of Japanese Culture from the Agency of Cultural Affairs in Japan.  The Agency of Cultural Affairs is a special body of the of the Japanese Ministry of Education, established in 1968 to promote Japanese arts and culture. Dr. Bestor is the twelfth person to receive the honor.

The Tender Soldier’ Tells Story Of Anthropologist Killed In Afghanistan

Here And Now

It, Gezari also tells the history of anthropology and war, from Lawrence of Arabia and Margaret Mead to Montgomery McFate. McFate was the child of San Francisco house boat hippies who asked, ?Why can’tanthropologists study war?? She helped to start .

 

An anthropology of ourselves: This Is Your Photo at the Photographers’ Gallery

New Statesman

In the late 1930s, a small group of artists and left-wing intellectuals wrote that Britain required and deserved an ?anthropology? of its own people ? a ?democratic science? to record the small, unacknowledged rituals that provided the texture of lived

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