US shutdown: a radical Republican triumph Repeated gerrymandering means most Republicans represent safe seats and their main political rivals come from within their own party Is the government shut down? Quartz will tell you (and drive a little traffic in the process) The shutdown of the federal government will be unfortunate for a lot of … Read more
Breastfeeding in public: what is and what is not ?appropriate? I just read about a discrimination case in the San Diego area in which author/educator Rachel Rainbolt was told by her child?s homeschool teacher that breastfeeding was ?inappropriate? behavior during weekly meetings. Read more about this case on her site. First of all, this sort … Read more
Intel?s Anthropologist Genevieve Bell Questions the Smart Watch Genevieve Bell, director of Intel?s user experience research, says companies building wearable computers haven?t figured out why people might want them. Anthropology: Growth and Relevance, Not Popularity Anthropologists can suffer from Jared Diamond envy. Here in the United States we bemoan when Diamond?s latest book … Read more
Dr. Nancy Scheper-Hughes Named First AAA Public Policy Award Winner The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is pleased to announce that its Committee on Public Policy has selected medical anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes as the first recipient of the new Anthropology in Public Policy Award. Dr. Scheper- Hughes is a nationally-recognized expert on several important health issues, … Read more
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 … Read more
Anthropology Co-Citation Graph Recently Kieran Healy posted a link on Twitter to a co-citation graph he?d made to try to understand what philosophers ?have been talking about for the last two decades?? He also posted a nice poster he made from this data [PDF]. I reposted these and mentioned that it would be great to … Read more
Oxford Biocultural Anthropology Bibliography Oxford Bibliographies has just published my entry Biocultural Anthropology into their excellent series on Anthropology. The bibliographies are expert guides to the literature, with introductions to each section of the bibliography as well as short summaries of each citation. Biocultural Anthropologyopens: Anthropology and Archaeology Resource Network Have you added your gray literature … Read more
Anthropology Under the NSA?s Eyes We now know that living abroad or corresponding with someone outside the US makes you fair game for government surveillance. A few years ago I wrote about the difficulties faced by anthropologists working in places like China, where there can be no expectation of privacy.* We now know (as many … Read more
Professionalization in Anthropology Graduate Programs Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Rachel Newcomb. Many of us find the transition from graduate school to the world of the gainfully employed to be a challenging one. One moment, you?re happily ensconced in a library carrel, surrounded by your beloved field notes and cranking away at your dissertation. The … Read more
George Stocking Jr., ‘Anthropology’s Anthropologist,’ Dies at 84 New York Times George W. Stocking Jr., a historian of science who chronicled the norms, customs and tribal beliefs of modern anthropologists, documenting a history of racial bias and ethnocentrism as well as great insights, died on July 13 in Chicago. He was 84 Anthropologists as Spies This piece … Read more
Savage Minds Interview: Kristina Killgrove Kristina Killgrove is a biological anthropologist at the University of West Florida. Her research focuses on theorizing migration in antiquity and on understanding urban development and collapse through the analysis of human skeletal remains. She works primarily in the classical world, attempting to learn about the daily lives of the … Read more
Trash anthropology in NYC For years, Robin Nagle was anthropologist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation Blood Is Their Argument: anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon During the brief moment that I majored in anthropology in college, I was fascinated by the work of Napoleon A. Chagnon and his seminal 1968 text Yanomamo: The … Read more
Tomorrow’s engineers will learn architecture, anthropology, sociology as well Economic Times Sitting in his office in the German university town of Chemnitz, ArvedHuebler often thinks of the poor in rural India. Huebler is a physicist, a professor at the Chemnitz University of Technology and director of the Institute for Print and Media . Bureaucracies … Read more
Savage Minds Interview: Sarah Kendzior Sarah Kendzior is a writer for Al Jazeera English. She has a PhD in cultural anthropology from Washington University and researches the political effects of digital media in the former USSR. You can find her work at sarahkendzior.com, and on Twitter: @sarahkendzior Ryan Anderson: First of all, thanks for doing … Read more
Labor unrest on Everest is older than you might think from FP Passport by Marya Hannun The thin air and vertiginous slopes that exist at 20,000-plus feet above sea level on Mount Everest may not make for the ideal battleground — but they certainly make for a captivating one. So on April 27, when … Read more