Humanity’s Surprising Variety of Approaches to Toilet Training SAPIENS by Alma Gottlieb [no-caption] David D/Flickr This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. Are 2-year-olds too young to start toilet training? Sun Ra > Black Panther anthro{dendum} The Black Panther movie has been out for a little bit now, and posts both pro and … Read more
How Ursula Le Guin’s Writing Was Shaped by Anthropology SAPIENS by Philip W. Scher In creating other worlds, Ursula Le Guin showed the power inherent in constructions of culture and new realities.Marian Wood Kolisch/Flickr This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. Ursula K. Le Guin, Interplanetary Anthropologist anthro{dendum} by Guest Contributor By Anand … Read more
A Digital Bermuda Triangle: The Perils of Doing Ethnography on Darknet Drug Markets anthro{dendum} by Crystal Abidin anthro{dendum} welcomes guest blogger Alexia Maddox, contributing the first post in the Private Messages from the Field series edited by Crystal Abidin and Gabriele de Seta. * A Digital Bermuda Triangle: The Perils of Doing Ethnography on Darknet Drug Markets by Alexia … Read more
Anthropology’s Top Findings of 2017 SAPIENS by Aaron Brooks “Fossil scout” Pedro Boshoff inside the Rising Star cave system in South Africa, where Homo naledi fossils were found. Wits University This year’s anthropological findings brought us fascinating insights from across the globe, upending long-held assumptions about the evolutionary timeline, human dispersal, and more. There were almost too many great … Read more
Bonobos, Nicest Primates on the Planet, Make Humans Look Like Monsters Inverse mong the countless shitty things humans have done in the past year, we’ve revived Nazism, attempted to cover up egregious sexual abuse, and resurrected the threat of nuclear war — hardly behavior befitting of the Most Highly Evolved Species on the planet. That title, scientists recently … Read more
Learning to Trust Machines That Learn SAPIENS by Matthew Gwynfryn Thomas and Djuke Veldhuis Imagine lying on a hospital bed. Doctors with grave expressions hover. One leans down to tell you that you are terribly sick and says they recommend a risky procedure as your best hope. You ask them to explain what’s going on. They cannot. … Read more
Three weeks have already passed. But there are many weeks to go and if any one is interested in joining reading discussions online (we are on Week 4), here is the code to join MED 521 course: km26m5 at classroom.google.com MED 521 – Syllabus for Fall 2017 Digital Anthropology for Media Studies Mondays 19:00-22:00- santral E2-102 … Read more
Iceland’s Forgotten Fisherwomen SAPIENS by Roberta Kwok Fisherwomen have played a significant role in Iceland’s history, and yet their contribution has been, for the most part, overlooked. Michelle Jones/SAPIENS Explaining Ethnography in the Field: A Conversation between Pasang Yangjee Sherpa and Carole McGranahan Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog by Carole McGranahan What is ethnography? … Read more
Great anthropologists who fought fascism Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology Some of you who — unlike me — have not had family members murdered by nazis or had every synagogue in their home town firebombed in the same night may now be learning about antifa for the first time. But although it’s making waves in the media now, … Read more
Perspectives: An Open Access Intro Anthro Textbook Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology (This guest post by Nina Brown, Thomas McIlwraith, and Laura Tubelle de González announces the launch of what I believe is the first open access textbook for an introduction to cultural anthropology course. I’ve blogged about this textbook before so I’m very excited that it is now … Read more
Hacker and Drone Training as Ethnographic Fieldwork Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog by Adam Fish Recently, I enrolled in two multi-day training workshops in the United Kingdom with the pretense of gathering ethnographic data about emergent cultures of practice surrounding new technologies. The first was an ethical hacking workshop in Manchester–where … Read more
Oldest Known Homo Sapiens Fossils Found SAPIENS by Nicola Jones At the site of an old Moroccan mine, paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin points to one of the oldest Homo sapiens skulls yet found. Philipp Gunz/MPI EVA Leipzig The oldest bones yet of our species have been found, surprisingly, in an old Moroccan mine. At about 300,000 years … Read more
Anthropology in an Age of ‘Dangerous Nonsense’ (Part 1) Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology In the waning moments of 2016, one man, armed with an AR-15 and “information” about a conspiracy related to Hilary Clinton, walked into a DC pizza parlor hell bent on finding truth. After a quick look around and a shot … Read more
Argonauts of the Internet: Anthropology and Community Management – What’s anthropology good for? A lot, actually. blog.reddit — what’s new on reddit by Staff Christine Moellenberndt Anthropologist / Community Manager This blog post was adapted from “The Digital and the Applied: Digital Anthropology and Business,” a paper presented at the 2017 Southwestern Anthropological Association Conference. As … Read more
A necessary complication: towards a richer understanding of affordances media/anthropology by John Postill A comment on Elisabetta Costa “Social Media as Practices: an Ethnographic Critique of ‘Affordances’ and ‘Context Collapse’.” EASA Media Anthropology Network’s 60th e-Seminar, 9-23 May 2017 by Christian Pentzold Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research University of Bremen In order to capture … Read more