On May 21, 2013, in Tel Aviv, I'm going to be awarded the Heart at East lifetime achievement plaque for my feminist-of-color activism, community leadership and academic scholarship. Heart at East is a coalition of 20 or so NGOs that aims to remedy the near complete lack of cultural rights and representation for Israel's majority citizenry, the Mizrahim.



The Heart at East lifetime achievement plaque was created as an…

Nate Roberts posted a link on Facebook to a recent piece by Paul Krugman essentially saying that he once thought Naomi Klein's views on neoliberalism were extreme, but now he thinks she could be right. This led me to look up an Anthropology Today editorial I published in…

For my current project, which automates an approach to understanding decision making processes of elites, first developed by Robert Axelrod in the 1970s, I make use of two newly developed computational linguistic tools (see my github profile).

Rather than discussing the specifics of my current project, which you can read about here, I…

Marx's "XI"th Thesis on Feuerbach is Not Explicit Enough.…

Reading this review of a new book about the "anti-utopian reformer with keen eye for detail" Albert Hirschman, I found myself thinking of OAC founder Keith Hart. I wonder what Hart will think of being seen as resembling Hirschman, in a complimentary way.

More on the idea of the informal economy: My earlier post (14 April) was a work-in-progress report on a study of 'the idea of the informal economy', with particular reference to Melanesia (and specifically to pre-modern Papua New Guinea). In time it will be extended to the modern (colonial and post-colonial) period.

That earlier post provided links to three papers which had appeared to that point. A fourth paper, titled "Preconditions for an informal economy: ‘trucking and bartering’…

Los procesos de gentrificación están siendo estudiados desde hace ya más de setenta años. Desde las primeras aproximaciones relevantes al tema en el Lóndres de los años sesenta, pasando por la eterna discusión en torno a los factores que los inducen, esto es producto vs. consumo, pasando por la introducción de diferentes elementos para explicar y aplicar conceptos culturales y sociales a los procesos de gentrificación, o su interacción con fenómenos actuales como el Programa Erasmus (Malet,…

Can local banknotes help? ¿Billetes municipales y regionales? "Regiogeld", civl war notes, cupons and social aid.

www.billetesmunicipales.com

First off, power scares and sickens me.  I don't associate myself with people who relish and strive for it. Power-trippers make my blood boil and turn me into a confrontational savage.

I was a victim of departmental politics years ago, and it was an experience I would not wish on the worst of my enemies.  It was the first time I got disillusioned with anthropology as my chosen career.  Anthropology, from studying to publishing, is a matter of numbers like politics, where the…

I'm working on a series of studies concerned with the intellectual history of the 'informal economy', and its relevance to current concerns in Papua New Guinea (PNG; the eastern half of the island of New Guinea). I hope, eventually, to 'join up' these studies in an extended monograph.…

Whether we like it or not, our trash defines us.

So stop filling in complicated personality tests and take a quick look inside your own bin : the rest will follow.

I've been walking around with this feeling for several days now; this need for something we haven't yet been provided with by facebook.

From the depths of my emotional self there springs a neccesity to make use of a nonexistant facebook- button. After all, we can like and unlike things, but where can we fulfill our impusle to like that somebody else liked what we posted? A like that is a direct reaction to another like? A double-like, if you…

Help is at hand. Check out Gene Bellinger's Insight Maker. It's Web-based, it's free, you can play with it by yourself or with friends or colleagues.Think of it as a mind map where the pieces interact.If you are a programming Ninja, you may find the models too simple. But it's plenty sophisticated enough to provide instructive entertainment for the rest of us. 

Life in Locker: The State of the Rohingyas in Bangladesh

Description of the book:

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This is a book about the "Rohingya", a group of religious, ethnic and linguistic minority people of Myanmar but now large number of whom live in Bangladesh as refugees and illegal migrants. They became stateless people when the Government of Myanmar enacted "Myanmar Citizenship Law" in 1982 which constitutionally excluded them as the citizens…

With a tip of the hat to Ryan Anderson, who posted the following on Savage Minds.

Check out this interview with Sarah Kendzior about life after the PhD. A lot to think about. And a lot that many people do not want to talk about. Here’s my favorite quote: What I realized during my year on the job market is that having a traditional academic career is not as important to…

A tweet from Biella Coleman, led me to Limor Shifman, Memes in a Digital World: Reconciling with a Conceptual Troublemaker.  I must say that I like the way Shifman thinks, asking how we could sort this [memes] out in a useful way. Instead, that is, haggling over definitions and why memes aren't genes (no, duh).

The best thing here at OAC is that anyone can write a blog post or a comment or a discussion topic about anything as long as there's a discernible anthropology in it.  Other anthropology sites are too academic and formal; thus the posts and the comments seemed restrained, awfully familiar, and vanilla--that's not out of the box.  It makes me wonder if anthropologists in those sites are really sharing their best or if they are being careful not to sound unprofessional or come out unacademic.…

Anthropologist sees the world  as a world of extreme complexity or as a series of Big Data ( NP hard ) problems , hence, some field complexities could be described as“ botanic rarities of the most exotic kind “ by literary forms , whereas another complexities are ready for scientific computational analysis.

As is known the first attempts to introduce systematic scientific analysis of culture as “ a set of mechanical devices “ ( Malinowski ) or  as a  sort of “computer…

From the frontlines of the battle for a human economy, some interesting noise, via the Nation. Our times are indeed crying out for new kinds of associations and coalitions. "Small Business Owner," the sacred cow of American politics has become a contested brand, a classic David v. Goliath.

The corporate bureaucracy resembles Nike, circa early 1990s, and its attempt to indirectly own the whole category of sports.  It almost worked for a while and then it didn't. Now, an outfit who…

I've mentioned Alison Redmayne a number of times in my East African Notes and Records blog and will again, I hope. We first met at her house in north Oxford in…