July 2010 Blog Posts (11)

Project Announcement: Open Folklore (A Library+Society Partnership)

The American Folklore Society and the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries have recently announced a new scholarly communications project called Open Folklore. As described in the announcement:

The vision for this open-access online portal for folklore studies is to make a greater number…

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Added by Jason Baird Jackson on July 30, 2010 at 8:52pm — No Comments

CFN: Anthropology and Mobility

Call for a new boundary-crossing network

Anthropology and Mobility

Convenor: Noel B. Salazar

Mobility, as a concept-metaphor, captures the common impression that people’s life-worlds are in constant flux, with not only persons (including anthropologists), but also cultures, objects, capital, businesses, services, diseases, media, images, information, and ideas circulating across (and… Continue

Added by Noel B. Salazar on July 30, 2010 at 5:30pm — No Comments

Legos Atlanis, Praxis for Children, and the Ideology of Manifest Destiny

Recently, my niece turned the magical age of 5. As one of her birthday presents, she received a Typhoon Turbo Sub, a Lego set from the Atlantis line, and a rather cool looking piece of submarine machinery, at that; shiny, red, and sporting large propellers.

It also came with a anthropomorphic shark figure with…

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Added by Joel M. Wright on July 26, 2010 at 10:19pm — No Comments

Bureacracy and Complicity

Some years ago, I read Franz Kafka's The Trial, or at least the English translation of it. The story stuck in my mind and made quite an impression on me.

Particularly, I was struck by the chapter in which Herr K visits Herr Huld, encounters the similarly duped Block and is confronted with Leni, Huld's promiscuous nurse. From the point of that chapter on, I started to form a synthesis on what Kafka was getting at, which I can only describe as the interactional…

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Added by Joel M. Wright on July 21, 2010 at 11:12pm — 13 Comments

john@oac

Ouch! Will you laugh? Or will you cry?

A friend encountered elsewhere on the Net has pointed me to…

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Added by John McCreery on July 19, 2010 at 4:27pm — No Comments

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Psychologists' generalizations are WEIRD.

Writing on his neuroanthropology blog,…

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Added by John McCreery on July 18, 2010 at 4:30am — No Comments

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Creativity Declining?

U.S. news magazine Newsweek…

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Added by John McCreery on July 12, 2010 at 3:00am — 2 Comments

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Quant, Qual and Team Size

There is no question about it, quantitative analysis requires that we count. But counting requires a sharp focus, a clear definition of whatever it is that we count. Proponents of qualitative analysis are then able to point to this or that anomaly or neglected part of the background and smugly assert, "See! There's something you just don't get." The annoying thing is that they're right. To which proponents of quantitative analysis,…

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Added by John McCreery on July 9, 2010 at 3:30pm — No Comments

Water

Anthropologist Gene Anderson has a thoroughly fascinating blog post on water management, environmental justice, religion, technology, and the impending global water crisis. The post is based on a talk given at Sharlot Hall Museum, Prescott, AZ, in 2008. Definitely worth reading.

Added by Jacob Lee on July 8, 2010 at 12:23am — No Comments

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Profound Contributions

In my previous post I wrote,

The major difference between Sunbelt and OAC is, of course, that most of the participants in the former are…

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Added by John McCreery on July 7, 2010 at 4:07pm — 4 Comments

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Reflections on Sunbelt XXX

I spent last week in Riva del Garda, a spectacularly beautiful Italian resort town that lies in what used to be part of the southern Tyrol, i.e., part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until it was ceded to Italy in 1918, at the end of WWI. I was there for the 30th annual Sunbelt conference, the annual meeting of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA), to present the latest findings from my ongoing research on…

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Added by John McCreery on July 5, 2010 at 6:23pm — No Comments