This is my first blog post to my OAC blog, and I am very excited and curious about it. I am still learning a lot about the website, about the community, and how this entire system works. I don't know if my blog remains on my page, if the post goes to a larger blog, or if it is a personal blog that anyone can read. For that reason, I feel both a little anxious and very enthusiastic about introducing myself in this…

It's Saturday, a bright, clear, cold day in Yokohama. At The Word Works, we are clearing our inboxes of left-over bits of business. Down at the station the halls in the underground malls are filled with booths selling Christmas cakes, white or chocolate layer cakes decorated with strawberries. KFC has specials on buckets of fried chicken. Couples are planning romantic evenings. Christians, a tiny minority here, will be headed to churches for services this evening.

The service…

During November PhD student Laura Obermuller witnessed events unfold at the Durban climate change talks.…

Adam Fish has posted an interview with Dutch anthropologist Dorien Zandbergen on Savage Minds. The topic is "New Edge," a Californian fusion of…

Adam Fish has posted an interview with Dutch anthropologist Dorien Zandbergen on Savage Minds. The topic is "New Edge," a Californian fusion of…

In Japan 'tis the season for bonenkai (忘年会, "forget the year parties"). Clubs, companies, volunteer groups, all sorts of organizations hold parties at which food, drink and frivolity mark, in a carnivalesque mode, the approaching end of the current year. There are similarities to "office parties" elsewhere. I wonder about differences. 

The Japanese name for these parties is, to this American-born gaijin striking. Why should the year be forgotten? Does forgotten equal…

“Chomsky & Folklore???”

I have just posted a review of two remarkable attempts to humanize statistics.  The books are 

Andrew Vickers (2010) What is a p-Value Anyway? 34 Stories to Help You Actually Understand Statistics. New York: Addison-Wesley, and

David Salsburg (2001) The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the…

http://anthrojustpeace.blogspot.com/2011/12/in-news-militarized-academia-human.htmlPosted: 08 Dec 2011 Anthropologists for Justice and Peace

Índice (Nov. 2011)

I knew Hiroshi Tamura as one of the organizers of the Ethnographic Praxis in Corporations (EPIC) conference in 2010. I assumed that he is an anthropologist. I was wrong. He tells me that his academic background was in computer science and engineering. The now-dated bio to which the link I've attached to his name says that he was hired as an account executive by Hakuhodo, Japan's second-largest advertising agency, in 1994. He is…

There is a particular violence in Frantz Fanon’s polemic on race and decolonisation.

Both ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ (1952) and ‘The Wretched Earth’ (1961) controversially deliberated the inferiority complex of blackness in a white world, examining the psyche of colonisation and pugnaciously advocating a cleansing violence. The thoughts in this post were largely inspired by this paradox of black skins and white masks that marks how race is perceived by both the self and the other.…

“Reflections on Wolf’s Negative Procreative Right: By Choice Childless Couples.”

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2019146

This paper is a supplement to Wolf’s proposal for the institutionalization of Negative…