The May 4, 2012, issue of the journal Science includes three briefs from the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, one of which has a few choice words about telomere...
This week Savage Minds turns seven years old. It’s been a great, tumultuous seven years. Although regular readers may not know it, behind the scenes we at Savage Minds have contemplated closin...
We can do the research, write the articles, publish the journals, and peer review the contributions. But there is still one thing publishers can do that open access anthropology can’t do: copyed...
Something called a “silo” kept cropping up in my field research with media reform broadcasters throughout 2012. At the National Conference of Media Reform in 2011 I attended a panel, “Getting Ou...
It seems universities everywhere are looking to cut down the amount of time it takes to earn a graduate degree. A story in Inside Higher Ed reports on the latest effort: [Russell Berman] and five othe...
Rex’s last post reminds me that I’ve been meaning to write about one of the most fascinating science fiction worlds I’ve come across in a long time. I’m talking about The Cultu...
I was watching Star Trek the other day (Enterprise season 4) when the crew of the Enterprise met yet another highly advanced alien species. Not just ‘faster warp drives’ or ‘bigger w...
Anthropology is “determined to commit suicide” said David Graeber. To salvage the discipline Graeber encourages you to abandon building theory from Western philosophy. He provokes you to draw theo...
In honor of Mother’s Day this year I’m sharing notes from a lecture I give in my Introduction to Anthropology course. Kinship, I tell them, is the kernel of the discipline. Families are at...
Facebook, Academia.edu, OpenAnthropology.org, ResearchGate — in a world full of social networking sites for social scientists, what is the point of registering for one more? In the past month or...
Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Carole McGranahan. Who is the audience for academic knowledge? When does that audience include not just fellow academics, but also the public? These questions are h...
I had the pleasure of interviewing Charles Stafford, Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, about his new anthropology journal Anthropology of this Century. Click below to read t...
And Mexicans are the new Irish. Growing up in Texas I always had trouble keeping Cinco de Mayo and Diez y Seis straight. To my mind the former was in commemoration of a colonial event, the defeat of S...
In a new book, anthropologist Christopher Boehm traces the steps our species went through to attain a conscience...
This one is a shout out to David Weinberger, who I stole the title from. Is Obama inappropriately receiving credit for killing Osama bin Laden? Given the upcoming presidential election it is a questio...
Is it just me or were our tweets a little anemic in the month of April? It seems we here at Savage Minds were pretty busy with end of the semester madness. Nonetheless here in handy digest form is eve...
Another update from the trenches of fieldwork. This one is brought to you by the sweet, streaming, wireless connection of an internet cafe that’s about 45 minutes from my fieldsite. It’...
[This is the 6th installment in an ongoing series on learning an endangered language. This post also fits in our "Tools We Use" series.] As described in my last post, listening to lots of audio in the...
Most of the way that we talk about doing ‘literature reviews” is widely misleading. We talk about ‘how to find sources’ creating ‘topic maps’ and defining ‘ar...
In the thick of grading papers here and I’m busy. Treading water busy and not drowning busy, still there’s a lot to do. My Intro students have just turned in their last short essay so I...
[This is the 5th installment in an ongoing series.] I am not this guy: Or this guy: Then he dived into Russian, Italian, Persian, Swahili, Indonesian, Hindi, Ojibwe, Pashto, Turkish, Hausa, Kurdish, Y...
Be it ever so humble, it's more than just a place. It’s also an idea—one where the heart is...
There are many reasons contemporary American anthropology feels fragmented and lost, without direction: the discipline has grown in size, there is no clear theoretical paradigm, etc. But beyond these...
This is bad. The Archaeological Institute of America has published a statement in its popular magazine opposing open access. And by opposing, I mean totally hating on the concept. We at the Archaeolog...
Psyche: #lfmf bro! Ha! Just kidding. The 30 March 2012 issue of the journal Science includes a news piece “Psychology’s Bold Initiative” on a possible moment of introspection for the...
Every month we collect our semi-daily tweets from @savageminds in an easy to swallow pill. Was there one you missed? If you see something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage...
Since I first reviewed my favorite reference manager on this blog a number of readers have started to use it… and started to notice that it doesn’t have a built-in bibliography format for Amer...
Michel Foucault asks “Can the market really have the power of formalization for both the state and society?” (Foucault 2008: 117). Rep. Paul Ryan is convinced it can. He outlines it in the the 201...
Anthropology report is running a round-up piece on empathy in anthropology and its centrality to our discipline. It’s a timely subject, given the recent edited volume on the topic. In this post...
Fact checking is all the craze these days. This American Life ran an episode-length retraction of Mike Daisey’s Apple story. Sites like Politifact regularly check politicians on their Truth-o-Meter.
[Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Garrison Doreck.] Whenever I mention that one of my primary areas of anthropological research is media, the question I come across on a recurring basis is the foll...
The history of womankind is a broken record as the same damn things keeping happening over and over again. At least that seems to be a major theme in Sita Sings the Blues, an incomparably unique anima...
I’ve never been one for visual anthropology, and I’m totally uninterested in pushing the boundaries of what constitutes ‘ethnography’. As a fieldworker, I’m fascinated by...
This post is an attempt at a formal-ish sounding mission statement for our collective of anthropologists engaged, in many different ways, with digital concerns be they methodlogical or topical. If fol...
In the wake of the financial crisis, New York's financial district is getting something new: full-time residents...
The eminent biologist argues in a controversial new book that our Stone Age emotions are still at war with our high-tech sophistication...
Carl Zimmer asks the evolutionary biologist about the theories in his high-profile new book...
For the last three weeks I’ve been grading papers and other assignments nonstop. The way I figure it, one more week and I should be caught up! Some anthropologists identify primarily as research...
I recently applied for “academic promotion” from Assistant to Associate Professor. I’m still awaiting the results, but I wanted to share part of that process with you: the ubiquitous...
How to Become the Engineers of Our Own Evolution...
[This is a guest post by Garrison Doreck. He is a graduate student in Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine.] I stumbled upon the sideways issue in some of the readings I will discuss b...
If I’ve been quite lately it is because most of my free time has been devoted to trying to learn Amis (also known as Pangcah) one of the Austronesian languages still spoken in Taiwan. I’ve...
In the comments section to one of my recent posts about Jared Diamond, SM reader Michael asks: Could anyone recommend some accessible anthropology literature? What would be 5 (or so) good books a gene...
Being enthralled with the joy of grading papers over spring break, I’ve shirked my duty to collect our tweets from the month of February in digest form. We share anthropology news, blogs, politi...
I don’t normally shill for publishers, but I did notice something the other day that I thought would be worth mentioning on the blog: University of Chicago Press has dropped the prices on much o...
Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Carole McGranahan. “Political economy?” “Symbolic analyses?” Post-whatism?” Semester after semester, my advanced anthropology students told me they couldn...
It’s been an exciting month on Savage Minds, from a great new open access and digital anthropology effort to a reading of foundational texts to a discussion of contemporary scholarship, with a l...
And now for some news on the archaeology and stupid-TV-show-ideas front. Total #NationalGeographicFAIL and #SpikeTVFail at the same time. A double whammy of bad ideas. Several of my archaeology...
In this post I’d like to invite readers to contribute to a statement of purpose for our proposed “Digital Anthropology” group. The statement should be simple and concise, broad enoug...
Monday morning I conversed with staff at the AAA about the procedures for organizing an interest group. They were very helpful and it seems that getting our new organization off the ground will be fai...
This is the kind of investigative journalism that I find extremely relevant. Have you ever bought books or anything else from online distributors? Ever stopped to really think about how that produ...
Let’s call this an update from the field. I would like to call it a dispatch, but that doesn’t sound right. I have wireless, so that probably doesn’t count. Can a blog post rea...
I’ve decided to move this reading circle to Monday, post the reading and my comments on it immediately, and then let discussion run the whole week. I think this will be a bit better because it i...
Stop being an anthropologist. Some of my mentors, none of which are in anthropology departments, prefer to say “trained as an anthropologist, so and so, investigates…” as opposed to “so an...
Yes, scientists say, your airborne compounds send signals about your moods, your sexual orientation and even your genetic makeup...
The renowned author of A Natural History of the Senses visits Florida's Morikami Japanese Gardens to examine the astonishing wealth of human perception...
Following on the heels of Bill Davis’ letter to the White House that has been hashed out here and elsewhere it became apparent that many of us are concerned about the future of Open Access princ...
The piece for discussion this week (actually, it should have been last week, but I got caught behind a couple of different eight balls) is Vincente Diaz’s “Voyaging for Anti-Colonial Recov...
Peter Schmidt over at the Chronicle of Higher Ed has a new article that takes a long look at Charles Murray’s new book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Murray is one...
It’s 8 am, and already bright. I’m out for an early morning walk because it’s a good way to see what ‘s going on around this community–to see what people are up to, and...