I have noticed that the least studied in Anthropology are the abstract feelings of humans that can be observed through their culture-specific actions and behaviors.  Feelings such as hate, fear, regret, boredom are interesting and important to study as they are the basics or cores of bigger problems such as violence, rape, addiction, divorce, suicide, mental illness, etc.  It is boredom that has tickled my brain lately.  Three incidences have made me think that there is a need to study human…

Contemporary media allow digital milieus to function as transnational classrooms, a multidimensional public sphere accessible to people with Internet connection. This generates ethical dilemmas, including the right to represent groups with incomplete civic rights and restricted access to representational centres. James Cameron’s Avatar (2009)-Amazon Watch (2011) marriage responds to this phenomenon, through its uses of digital communication as both profitable enterprise and activist…

[Cross-Posted from Dead Voles]

As we think about the human economy or whether there is life outside of academia, we might consider looking more closely at some of the people around us. The events described below took place during the last two days.

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Italian-American, male, age 53, married, five children. Lives in northern Virginia, USA, a few blocks from where he was born and grew up. Raised Catholic. Independent who leans Republican.

Stop for moment.…

The Critical Anthropology for Global Health working group on Global Health Insurance Reform is happy to announce that a preliminary SMA "Takes a Stand" statement on health insurance reform is now publicly available for comment on the SMA website.



The statement's primary focus is analyzing health insurance reform in the US through the lessons learned from transformations of health care systems worldwide. We situate this analysis within the context of broader theoretical questions…

Let me skip the Hegelian Speculation and the Aristotelian Reasoning.  I am more interested in Speculative Logic or Logical Speculation as a tool for studying culture, considering culture as a reality where there are parts of it that are immaterial, abstract, and unobservable.  I think we can still study a whole house even if we only see its front porch.

The latest news back home has been the ongoing public impeachment trial of the Chief Justice of the Philippine Supreme Court.…

The question arises: Why did the Great Recession happen?  My answer is poleconomic i.e., that it was due to…

Okay, I'm in a career crisis.  Lately, I have been wanting to really involve myself in professional anthropology.  By professional, I mean academics  and scholarship.  I feel it would be regretful in my part if I would not try.  I'm done with my being a copyleftist (not a slave  to copyrights) and literary anarchist (not believing in conventions in academic writing).  I've done it, and it has brought me nothing and to nowhere.  Maybe it's time to humble myself and…

This blog is a pointer to a discussion on Savage Minds initiated by Alex Golub in response to the online publication of Vol. 1.1 of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. The HAU project has enlisted some of the biggest names in contemporary anthropology, including, for example, OAC founder Keith Hart, and the…

México, Distrito

Federal a 09 de enero de 2012







A LOS MEDIOS DE COMUNICACIÓN



A LAS ORGANIZACIONES DE DERECHOS HUMANOS



A LA CIUDADANÍA EN GENERAL







Por este medio, queremos dar a conocer los siguientes acontecimientos:



El día 11 de diciembre de 2011, nuestra compañera y amiga, la antropóloga Irene Méndez Graf fue sometida a un proceso de investigación y arraigada en las instalaciones de la SADAI (Subprocuraduría de Atención de…

n the most recent edition (38.3) of American Ethnologist, which I’m just getting around to reading, I see this very interesting notion of the state as a metonym for the self.

It is worth considering the subjectivity that informs an understanding of one’s actions as heroic. I believe it is best described by what Gayatri Spivak (2004) calls the ability to “metonymize” the self, to imagine the self in an active relationship with the state, the opposite of…