All Blog Posts Tagged 'social' (5)

Foreign Perfume and Other Fetishes, Part III

It’s interesting in light of this to compare David Graeber’s and Peter Pel’s (1998) work on the fetish. Although both Graeber and Pels acknowledge all the same features that distinguish the fetish, they seem to reach strikingly different conclusions. In Graeber’s discussion, the fetish illustrates the tendency of human groups to treat their own social creations as somehow having power them rather than the other way around. His main point about the circulation of objects of “alien” or foreign…

Continue

Added by Ken Routon on March 31, 2011 at 4:05pm — 18 Comments

The schizophrenic discourse on The Gift

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

Added by Toby Austin Locke on January 25, 2011 at 10:00pm — 48 Comments

The Journal of Humanities, a new online journal from Tanzania

The first issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Humanities, a new open access journal, edited by Ahmad Kipacha in the University of Dodoma, Tanzania, is now online (click on the journal title). A second issue of this trilingual journal is currently in preparation and it is hoped will be ready before the end of the year.

Contents of Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009:

A Note on a… Continue

Added by Martin Walsh on November 29, 2009 at 1:31pm — No Comments

International InterCultural Communications - What would be your Seminar Proposals?

Cultural Anthropolgy studies the central social character of culture and civilizations - both past and present. Yet in the area of human connectiveness which is essential to the development of human society the present contemporary aspect of International InterCultural Communication [ I.I.C. ] in the present advances in social sciences are now causing younger - who are aware of this I.I.C. Process - professional Anthropologist to redeveloped their historic thinking of cultural… Continue

Added by Roger M. Christian on November 14, 2009 at 1:00am — No Comments

Twitter, social media, social hype?

This is just a quick blog post getting my thoughts out on the current events going on with Iran. Social scientists have come down hard in the blogosphere, over the hype about twitter. They've made sound arguments, particularly of how hype spreads like wildfire (Twitter revolution! and all of that). And I believe they are right. Twitter was not instrumental in the Iranian revolution, but at the same time, the revolution made Twitter instrumental for us to learn about it. In other words, I'm… Continue

Added by Jeremy Johnson on June 21, 2009 at 9:35pm — 8 Comments