From a short extended essay written by a radical left-wing social thinker one of the great dilemmas of anthropological thought was born. The array of secondary literature which was spawned from Essai sur le don (1925) offers a huge variety of interpretation regarding the nature of the problematic notion of the gift. These attempts to further develop the questions posed, and partially answered, by Marcel Mauss in origin and elucidation become caught in an apparent act of bad-faith,… Continue

 

While very much enjoying the seminar on Martin Holbraad's paper "Can the thing speak?" I have been wishing that we had a bit more ethnographic data to discuss. This link will take you to a set of photographs taken in 1970, during my first fieldwork in Taiwan. In them you will see critical moments in the ritual by which…

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In what I've read about material culture,  the essence of "it" has not been studied thoroughly and properly.  In all cultures that have distinct pronouns for both humans and non-humans, breathing or otherwise, "it' is the marker for objects, materials, things, or stuff.  Not long ago, I carried on a  project in this area of material culture.  I wanted to find out how a material in my culture became one, and how it entered in our lexicon and how my people thought, valued, and assumed it.  I…

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I'm ambivalent to post this under the current seminar.  I guess I don't want to be off-topic or to sound obnoxious.  After the Facebook seminar, I've tried reading what I've gotten hold of that will re-educate me on material culture.  Whoever started material culture studies was a visionary indeed.  The vast published manifestos, books, and papers on material culture are obvious to me that material culture theories will soon dislodge postmodern theories in terms of…

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This evening I was doing a seminar - reading The Great Learning in Chinese, Korean, and in English as well. It was the second time and our plan is to finish it up in six weeks. We are reading the translation by James Legge as the English text. And the Legge's translation can be read here.

It's not easy for…

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Although Buddhism has long been a source of inspiration in psychotherapy, the recent shift of attention in Western clinical psychology from pathology, diagnosis, and treatment towards cultivating positive mental health appears to be accompanied by a growing interest in the connection between Buddhist spirituality, suffering, and well-being in mainstream mental healthcare. This trend is perhaps most apparent in Norway in the explosive growth of training programs and…

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Feature Documentary

Feature Documentaries with a total running time from 61 - 180 minutes. (All films in a language other than English require English subtitles)



Documentary Short

Short Documentaries…

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Why is it that pop science, pop sociology, and pop economics exist (and are so well- received), but not pop anthropology? Why is anthropology so foreign to people when it seeks to understand the latter? Why do people still think it’s something to do with ants or birds or, at best, dinosaurs?

 

Off the top of my head, there are a few answers (which, frankly speaking, are pretty related to each other).

 

Baggage | Anthropology’s troubled past and its…

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This started as a comment on Heesun Hwang’s brilliant blog post ‘What is postmodernism?’ but quickly became far too long, absurd and insubstantial, so I decided it would be better to add as a blog post:



I thought I might add another perspective to the question… Continue

We all are human being and alike other creatures we undergo mitosis division, so change is not a new phenomenon. it is genetic and phenotypic both, so take 1 january as a cultural change on time scale and say Happy New year

It has been three years since I began work on my current research project, Winners' Circles. The PDF attached to this blog post (ZhengZhiUPresentation%20%28OAC%29.pdf) shows where I was a bit over a year ago when I gave a talk about the project at Zhengzhi University in Taipei. Since then I have had a few…

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This is a spin-off post from this discussion. As the original question was about human vs. nonhuman and this response significantly digresses from it, I decided to put this in my blog.



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Thank you Keith, for your thoughtful and enriching… Continue