How To Interview A Plant | The Multispecies Salon. When: Monday August 18th, 2014 , 7-8pm ESTWhere: CUNY Graduate Center, Science Studies Suite, Room 5307, 365 Fifth Ave, New York, NYSpeakers: John Hartigan (University of Texas at Austin) and Erica Seccombe (Australian National University)Host: Eben Kirksey (Environmental Humanities @ UNSW) Ethnographers and artists will come together to discuss new insights from the field of critical plant studies.
Plants are sessile organisms that emerge amidst the alchemy of soil and sun. Sometimes they veer away from botanical representational conventions, taxonomic enterprises aimed at classifying and understanding species and genera. John Hartigan, a cultural anthropologist who has conducted research among plants in Spain and Latin America, situates his ethnographic practice in relation to biological studies of plant sensoria and sociality. Erica Seccombe, a visual artist, uses 4D Micro-CT technology to interrogate the world of plants as they grow from embryos encapsulated in seeds (see below). » Dominic Boyer on the Anthropology of Infrastructure blog.castac.org. Lately, anthropologists have been doing a lot of thinking about infrastructure. Although there have been anthropologists working on the large technical systems subtending modern sociality since at least the early 1970s, infrastructure today appears to be coming of age not only as a robust area of ethnographic engagement, but as a sturdy analytic in its own right, part of widespread resurgence of materialist thought across the humanities.
As Brian Larkin puts it in his recent piece for the Annual Review of Anthropology, contemporary work in the anthropology of infrastructure attempts to understand how underlying material structures function to “generate the ambient environment of everyday life.” In so doing, the conceptual ambit of the term has been expanded beyond sewers, roads, and telecommunication systems to include everything from modes of sociality to economic instruments. Dominic: My path to answering that question is a little idiosyncratic. Dominic: I think so. Three Types of Pluralism | Knowledge Ecology. Over the past few weeks there has been extensive discussion over the so-called “ontological turn” in anthropology. Many of these commentaries were written either in direct response to a recent meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), or were aimed at the rising tide of “ontology” in anthropology more generally. I first came to learn of the AAA’s shift to ontology through friend and colleague Jeremy Trombley (see here and here).
Like so many “turns” this one has inspired seemingly equal parts enthusiasm and dismay, and that’s not surprising. Initiating any kind of “turn” within any discipline is always problematic. Closer to home many of Jeremy’s initial posts — and the discussion and links surrounding them — have initiated several rounds of responses from a philosophical perspective. 1. 2. 3. Reducing materiality to the concept of matter is also a problem Bruno Latour has argued against in the past. Like this: Like Loading... Anthropology News. In discussing experiential learning, one must note that it is possible and prudent to add service learning to anthropology curriculum, even within exclusively online courses.
Educators might cite any of the following reasons excluding service learning from online courses: (1) geographic distance between students and instructors; (2) difficulty of organizing multiple comparable sites for students to choose from; (3) overall challenges implementing service learning projects on-campus in the past; and (4) limitations of technology for assisting in a complex project. However, it is possible to construct and implement self-contained (embedded) service learning units within online anthropology courses, avoiding all of the perceived obstacles while reaping all of the benefits of service learning. Service learning is an experiential way of using what the students are learning to help others, ultimately learning more from the experience.
Fractal Image. Introduction to Anthropology - 2014 - Entangling the Biological. “Think Like an Anthropologist” – A Conversation with Laura Nader | Allegra. The anthropology and environmental history of the Anthropocene (5+3) The Graduate School, Arts, Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University, in collaboration with the project Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene, invites applications for a 3-year PhD scholarship within anthropology/environmental history that studies emergent environments on a human-disturbed earth.
Candidates who are awarded the scholarship commence their PhD programme on 1 September 2014. Financed by the Faculty of Arts and Danish National Research Foundation, the PhD scholarship is advertised within the field of emergent anthropological and cross-disciplinary interests in the Anthropocene, particularly fieldwork-based studies of co-species landscapes and the emergent environments on a human-disturbed earth. The PhD scholar will work at AURA (Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene). AURA is a transdisciplinary project to study emergent environments in a human-disturbed earth. Description of the graduate school’s PhD programme: Interesting links: November and December 2013 | 50shadesofevidence. A visit last night by a virtual connection turned real friend inspired me (without any conversation about blogging per se) to book time this weekend to finish some of the half-done postings I have worked on over the December holidays.
So, I’ll start with the numerous links I saved over November and December – such links posted on this blog serves as bookmarking of sources and ideas for those working on this project; hopefully others will also find them useful. On climate change Towards the end of November 2013, the IPCC released it Fifth Assessment Report on physical sciences; see the whole report in 19 illustrated haiku - clear and to the point. The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and Globaia produced a video visualising and summarising the findings of the 5ht IPCC physical sciences report – see Climate change and and the state of the science.
(Source: On systematic review methodology and evidence-based policy Ontology. Ontological Turns Inside-Out. A Reader’s Guide to the Ontological Turn – Addendum. Somatosphere’s recently shared two posts (part 1 and part 2) of reader’s guides to the ontological turn, which are extremely useful and full of interesting books/articles/etc. that I hadn’t encountered before. However, there are some noteworthy exceptions, and so I feel compelled to add my own list of influential works in my ontological education. I don’t have tons of time at the moment, so I’ll just write it up as a list and hopefully you can click through and decide which are important to you. Here goes: Blogs Academic blogging has been a central feature of the ontological turn over the last several years, so I think it’s unfortunate that these have been left out of the recent reading lists.
Larval Subjects by Levi Bryant Synthetic_Zero by Michael, Arran, and DMF Archive Fire by Michael Attempts at Living by Arran James Knowledge Ecology by Adam Robbert Immanence by Adrian Ivakhiv Circling Squares by Phillip Formal Publications (books/articles/etc.) The Cybernetic Brain by Andrew Pickering. Anthropologists on writing: introductory holiday reads. Anthropologists often worry about writing. It’s the sheer presumption – of making meaning of other people’s lives and then putting those understandings into a written or multimedia form – that bothers them. A lot. They’ve long fretted about it, and generated a habit of writing about their writing as a result.
Those who write about academic writing haven’t, until recently, strongly connected with this anthropological thinking. If you are doing a doctorate in a field other than anthropology or a related social science, then you may not yet have come across this body of work. However, I think the anthropological work is pretty interesting and relevant well beyond the discipline. If you want to go further into writing and anthropology, here are three texts to get you started.
Geertz, Clifford (1988) Works and lives. Clifford J and Marcus, G (1986) Eds. Waterson A. and Vesperi. You might also check out:Cultural Anthropology journal webpage on Literature, Writing and Anthropology Savage Minds. Anthropology and the Humanities: SMOPS 7. This number of the Savage Minds Occasional Paper Series features Ruth Benedict’s “anthropology and the humanities.”
This piece is the published version of the lecture Benedict delivered for her presidential address at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological association in 1947. In this piece, one of the last she wrote before she passed away, she argues that anthropologists can benefit from drawing on the methods of the humanities in addition to scientific methods. Benedict’s argument is worth examining in its own terms, but it is also worth reading between the lines of her essay. In making her case for the humanities, Benedict implicitly describes anthropology’s core values. This piece is valuable, then, not only for its argument about the humanities, but because it gives us a summary of what one of our foundational figures considered the essence of anthropology to be. Like this: Like Loading... Anthropologists debate which of their subgroups need help with communicating with others. In 2010, when the word "science" was left out of a plan for the American Anthropological Association, many in the discipline's biological wing fumed that their work was being treated as second class by the cultural anthropologists in the field.
Association leaders later affirmed that science was indeed part of their mission and the discipline's -- and various meetings have attempted to find common ground among the diverse wings of anthropology. Now some biological anthropologists are again upset -- this time over a letter suggesting that they needed to do a better job of explaining their work. Some of these biologists charge that it's the cultural anthropologists who are hard to understand. The controversy concerns a portion of a letter in an anthropology newsletter by Michael Chibnik, a University of Iowa professor who is editor in chief of American Anthropologist, the discipline's flagship journal, which some biological anthropologists have said does not seem interested in their work.
The Australian Journal of Anthropology - Volume 24, Issue 3 - Anthropological Theologies: Engagements and Encounters. Discovery of oldest human DNA in Spanish cave sheds light on evolution | Science. Researchers have read strands of ancient DNA teased from the thigh bone of an early human who died 400,000 years ago in what is now northern Spain. The genetic material was pieced together from a clutch of cells found in bone fragments – the oldest human remains ever to yield their genetic code. The work deepens understanding of the genetics of human evolution by about 200,000 years, raising hopes that researchers can build a clearer picture of the earliest branches of the human family tree by studying the genetic make-up of fossilised remains dug up elsewhere.
"This is proof of principle that it can be done," said Matthias Meyer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. "We are now very eager to explore other sites of a similar age. " The thigh bone was among the remains of at least 28 early human ancestors found at the bottom of a vertical shaft in a cave complex in the Atapuerca mountains in northern Spain.
Table of Contents — December 2013, 13 (4) Why is anthropology not a public science? Anthropologists have given up on speculating about the unity of humanity and simply chronicle the diversity (as Lévi-Strauss put it in his UNESCO paper on race). Everywhere we look these days, the question arises of why anthropology has so weak a public profile. This is my answer, some parts tongue in cheek, others less so. My case study is the one I know best.Between the wars British social anthropology had a coherent object, theory and method.
The object was primitive societies (as a sort of metaphor for complex societies), the theory was functionalism (whatever they do adds up to something) and the method was fieldwork-based ethnography. So you lived in exotic places and observed what they did there. Since then we have dropped both the object and the theory, retaining only the method which leads to short-sighted localism. Foucault has an interesting observation towards the end of The Order of Things. It was only when I met an old West Indian revolutionary, C.L.R. This Is Anthropology | Anthropological Skills. James C. Scott reviews ‘The World until Yesterday’ by Jared Diamond · LRB 21 November 2013. It’s a good bet a culture is in trouble when its best-known intellectuals start ransacking the cultural inventory of its ancestors and its contemporary inferiors for tips on how to live.
The malaise is all the more remarkable when the culture in question is the modern American variant of Enlightenment rationalism and progress, a creed not known for self-doubt or failures of nerve. The deeper the trouble, the more we are seen to have lost our way, the further we must go spatially and temporally to find the cultural models that will help us. In the stronger versions of this quest, there is either a place – a Shangri-la – or a time, a Golden Age, that promises to reset our compass to true north.
Anthropology and history implicitly promise to provide such models. Anthropology can show us radically different and satisfying forms of human affiliation and co-operation that do not depend on the nuclear family or inherited wealth. Here, Diamond, as evolutionary biologist, has two choices. Anthropology News. The contemporary scholarly ambitions of anthropology have become more explicit about the need for an integrated approach to its methods and goals. This means we need a greater coherence between anthropology’s methodological protocols and tools, and the concrete work with participants in different contexts. In this sense, collaborative research (CR), participatory and reciprocal ethnography, as well as applied and public anthropology have made efforts to acknowledge the impact of the research process on its differently positioned agents (respective statuses and know-hows, cultural and linguistic references, subjectivities).
I explore these issues of the construction of relevant anthropological knowledge and practices, in the context of migration studies. Abstract art image. Image courtesy Mitchfeatherston and wikicommons We show that CR remains a theoretical, practical and civic challenge. Collaboration as Active Participation in Social Change Kurt Lewin coined this term in 1940.
Numbers. This is a post about numbers. 1. The other day I was thinking about conferences. Let’s say you’re in a panel with 10 people, and each person pays a total of $500 dollars to get there. This includes conference fees, airfare, hotel, and so on. So that’s a grand total of $5000 dollars so everyone can write a paper, fly across the country, walk into a room, present their paper for 12-15 minutes and maybe have a group conversation for another 20 minutes or so. It’s a lot of money. Granted, conferences are about a lot more than just going to present. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Like this: Like Loading... Skull of Homo erectus throws story of human evolution into disarray | Science. Trouillot on rethinking “culture” (via Living Anthropologically) A forest of fortune. – Time for a radically interdisciplinary global anthropology - Department of Social Anthropology.
What Anthropologists Can Do About Climate. Anthropology News. Ethnographic writing: The Studs Terkel model or what? | Savage Minds Backup. Emerging researcher: violence against women | Special Reports. Gcobani Qambela | 200 young South Africans. Anthropology and Ontological Politics. Anthropologists Engaging with Media | Savage Minds Backup. Doing Anthropological Research: A Practical Guide. Interesting links: May and June 2013 | 50shadesofevidence. The Predatory Pedagogy of On-Line Education. Open Thread: Who owns anthropology? Environmental Anthropology: Future Directions. Magubane death a loss - Zuma. Anthropology Blogosphere 2013-Ecology of Online Anthropology. Toilet Issue: Anthropologists Uncover All the Ways We’ve Wiped. Anthropology News. Public Ethnography | ethnography • media • arts • culture.
Anthropology on Noble Savages, Napoleon Chagnon. The Destruction of Conscience in the National Academy of Sciences. The limits of Karl Polanyi’s anti-market approach in the struggle for economic democracy. Andrew Mathews on forestry, bureaucracy, and engaged scholarship | Anthropology and Environment Society. Jared Diamond: what the tribes of New Guinea have to teach us. UC Berkeley taps Columbia anthropologist Nicholas Dirks as chancellor. Amazon. Wiley Blackwell. Free Anthropology Year in Review and Teaching Update. Messy Data, Ordered Questions - Hauser - 2012 - American Anthropologist. What is Anthropology? - The Ultimate Answer! “Multispecies Ethnography": a special issue of Cultural Anthropology. DIFFERENTIATING DEVELOPMENT. Ernstson%20ANT4D%20Re-translating%20Nature%20135%20LSE. Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Anthropology and Climate Change. Development, Reform, Revolution--and the Bridge. New Issue of Anthropologies: Occupy and Open Access.
Survey: Favorite Anthropology Blogs. Organic intellectuals, crossing scales, and the emergence of social movements with respect to AIDS in South Africa. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Anthropology in Practice. Worldometers - real time world statistics. Writing an anthropological detective story - Interview with Nancy Scheper-Hughes Part 3/3. An Anthropologist Goes Techno - techantropology.blogspot.com (HTTP) Open Access Anthropology — Promoting Open Access in Anthropology - blog.openaccessanthropology.org (HTTP) Culture Matters - culturematters.wordpress.com (HTTP) Savage Minds | Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog - savageminds.org (HTTP) Mapping Stereotypes Project by alphadesigner.
Tips for Critical Reading | Hacktivism - Software Freedom - Feminism. Zero Anthropology Project. Savage Minds | Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog - savageminds.org (HTTP) Anthropology, Moral Optimism, and Capitalism: A Four-Field Manifesto.