Made in China: Notes from the CIA Gift Shop
What might an anthropology of the covert look like? I think of the covert as a particular type of secret, one grounded in deception and shadows, and populated by individuals pretending—in part—to be...
View ArticleRead James Scott's review of Jared Diamond
James Scott’s work drives me nuts, but there is no doubt about it: his review of Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday is one of the best is one of the best that has been written, and deserves a...
View ArticleOntology as the Major Theme of AAA 2013
Most attendees of the annual meetings in Chicago are, as one wag put it, exhAAAusted from all our conference going, and the dust is only now settling. As we look back on the conference, however, it is...
View ArticleAnthropology After No Future
“The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and...
View ArticleCulture in the Melting-Pot: SMOPS 6
This week’s Savage Minds Occasional Paper (SMOPS) is Edward Sapir’s “Culture in the Melting-Pot”. In this brief piece, Sapir asks: What would it mean to have a uniquely, authentically American culture?...
View ArticleDon’t blame Elsevier for exercising the rights you gave them
There has been a lot of talk around the Internet recently about Elsevier taking down PDFs of articles on academia.edu and what it says about scholarly publishing (my favorite analysis is here). As an...
View ArticleAre you there Internets? It’s me NAD*
*North American Dialogue; with apologies in advance for acronym abundance Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Lindsay A. Bell I recently became the Associate Editor of North American Dialogue (NAD)....
View ArticleLawrence of Arabia as anthropologist
To be honest, I was surprised how much attention Peter O’Toole’s recent passing received. We all knew he was famous, but we also learned this week how deeply he was loved. Many people loved him because...
View ArticleAnthropology and the Humanities: SMOPS 7
This number of the Savage Minds Occasional Paper Series features Ruth Benedict’s “anthropology and the humanities.” This piece is the published version of the lecture Benedict delivered for her...
View ArticleAnthropology, Empathy and the Other Regarding Emotions
Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger LINDSAY A BELL In the last few weeks, social work scholar turned pop-psychology web superstar Brené Brown came out with a short animated video summarizing much of...
View ArticleGlobal Stats: Who is Reading Savage Minds?
Anthropologists like to say that we cover the whole world, the entirety of human experience in all places and times. But that doesn’t always translate into global conversations about anthropology and...
View ArticleEmpathy, Obligation and Ethnographic Writing
Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger LINDSAY A BELL I am not a specialist in the anthropology of emotions, nor am I a psychological anthropologist. Yet, for some time I have been preoccupied by the...
View ArticleWho’s an archaeologist, and what do we do? A few reflections on Identities...
[Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Jane Eva Baxter] This past year, I had two conference experiences that offered me a chance to reflect on what it means to be an anthropologist/archaeologist in the...
View ArticleFootprints, Families, and Fallacies
[Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger, Jane Eva Baxter] Yesterday, the media widely reported the discovery of 850,000 (or so) year old footprints at the British seaside village of Happisburgh. This...
View ArticleMore thoughts from the Archaeology Division of the AAA- Publications,...
This post is the latest in the November guest blog series by the Archaeology Division of the AAA. This post is by Lynne Goldstein. Lynne Goldstein is a Professor of Anthropology and the Director of the...
View Article