Greetings everyone. I'm sort of new here, so let me introduce myself. I started out many years ago as an ethnomusicologist, but decided at some point to become part of the problem rather than part of the solution, so for many years after that I was what you might call "one of the natives," aka "wild man of Borneo," aka "creative artist," aka avant garde filmmaker, composer, poet, etc., you name it. A few years ago, however, after reading about recent developments in population genetics and…

The picture you see here is the front page of the China Daily Asia Weekly for the week February 18-24, 2011. The lead…

Cross-posted from my blog

I've been reading a lot of poetry lately.  I have sensed different geographies in the odes of Neruda-- those of bodies, minds, lands, and landscapes.  Even the emotional confessions of Anne Sexton illustrate geographies of body, mind, suffering, and pain.  As I believe where there is a geography, real or imagined, there is a culture waiting to be understood and studied.  Thus, poetry, in itself, is ethnography poetically done.

A Monk's Journey

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For almost a year now, I have been working on an economic theory/formula/model that centers on space and time as economic resources and agents/factors/variables for maximizing the utilization of other resources.  I believe time and space are two important aspects/components of development that still need to be studied in depth.  Our basic understanding of supply and demand excludes the roles of time (seasonality) and space (geography), which I think are important.

At this…

Ideology that works is overlooked in many diverse realms and most apparent in the whole of everyday societal regularities in which most have been made accustomed. It seems as though most individuals world-wide have been steam-rolled in to this capitalist form of living without collectivity of thought, it is this thought process or thinking in which leads this blog. Anthropologists, philosophers, scientists,…

I'm looking for the name of a particular anthropologist who developed a unique approach for making his / her way into an indigenous culture.  He / she would go to what they could determine was the outermost edge of the culture, set up camp and just wait.  They would wait for as long as it took for someone from the culture to come out and meet them.  In the meeting there would be an "exchange of gifts" and then possibly they would be invited in a little closer into the territory of the…

 Click here for detailed TOC: http://businessanthropology.blogspot.com/

Business Anthropologists in the Business World:  Our Troops and Our Future (Editorial Commentary)

Anthropology is a discipline that, over the last hundred or so years, has developed a wide array of qualitative techniques for understanding people and their behavior.  For many…

The question is a metaphorical one, inspired by Heesun Hwang's remark that she is attracted by "an engineering approach." Now what could that mean? 

I instantly thought of Henry Petroski's classic To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design. There, right at the beginning of chapter 4 "Engineering as Hypothesis" (1985:40), I found what I was looking for. Try substituting "anthropologist" for "engineer" in the following…

This evening I was doing The Great Learning seminar. Last week we had a big traditional holiday so today was the week four. We are accelerating the speed of reading and only the last chapter (chapter 10) is left. Maybe in the week six we will try a different material. I enjoy reading this book. After reading the chapters through 7 to 9, my mind got "tranquil" and I started to reflect on myself in many ways. Maybe, after reading this book up, I would try to learn this book by heart.…

A friend of mine has just written to me asking what is happening in the "city of fatigue.” He thinks I was the one who suggested this name for Cairo.  Regardless of how the name came about, it was relevant before the 25^th of January. That day Phoenix happened to be Egyptian too! Why not? Isn't Cairo um el-dunia (the mother of this world)?

I am thrilled by what is happening despite all the signs that suggest I should feel differently.…

Cross posted from my blog.

I'm currently in preproduction for my latest short film, Lwa. I'm also in fundraising mode. Please take a moment to view my Kickstarter video and consider pledging and sharing the link in support of my film.

http://kck.st/es1sEy

"The spirits talk with the faithful. They hug them, hold them, feed them, chastise them. Group and individual problems are aired through interaction with the spirits. Strife is healed and…

Self-introspection is the only thing I'm sure I'm good at.  My folks reared me in it early on.  We had our own timeout for kids that might seem abusive in the eyes of most Westerners, but it was really to teach naughty kids how to self-introspect.  In my childhood days, our timeout involved unhusked rice, mongo beans, and dried corn depending on the gravity of our offense and  the number of times we had done it.  We knelt on them as punishment.  Rice grains were itchy.  Mongo beans rolled. …

Michel Foucault asks in an interview, "Couldn't everyone's life become a work of art?" even though



1) Foucault had already acknowledged that only a select subset of citizens was empowered to actually undertake an aesthetics of existence.



2) Foucault treats the bios as a non-Kantian work of art, emphasizing that because absoluteness and regularity of structure comes a priori with harmony and social ideal -- only "irregularity, dissymmetry and nonreciprocity"…

Interesting. Today, here in Korea, a few online media have reported the ongoing research on facial cognition carried out online by the researchers in Aberdeen (http://www.faceresearch.org). The picture cited in the reports can be seen here. The news is spreading throughout some major portals and twitter, and lots of comments and opinions are being posted here and there. But it…

A recording of the 2011 Huxley Memorial Lecture by Professor Johannes Fabian (University of Amsterdam) – Cultural Anthropology and the Question of Knowledge is now available as a podcast at the following URL:…

Alice C. Linsley

The Bible has been used to support racism throughout history.  One such text is the “curse of Ham” in Genesis, a gloss that comes from the rabbis.  This gloss is not consistent with the older tradition, as is evident in analysis of the kinship pattern of Abraham’s Horite people.  For example, the men listed in Genesis 4 and 5 are rulers whose lines intermarried exclusively.  The same is true for the lines of Ham and Shem, Noah's sons. This means that Abraham…