In the past two years I’ve had the opportunity to read some really fantastic graphic novels, including a few that will be of interest to anthropologists. As we enter the gift giving season I thought I might share with you the cream of the crop. Who doesn’t love giving books? Its like they don’t even count against your gift budget! Go ahead get a couple for yourself, I won’t tell. If you’d like to know more about a title feel {+}
“There are many reasons why people in our field work remotely,” one data analytics coordinator tells me. We are talking on the phone one afternoon, me from the far East Coast, him from the flat Midwest, having met each other at the Global Climate Action Summit on the West Coast. He continues. For one, it’s more sustainable. Plus it’s 2018, he says, we have the technology, so why not? This allows them to draw from a diverse and well qualified {+}
Anthro{dendum} welcomes guest blogger Adam Fleischmann Early Saturday morning, October 6, 2018, push notifications lit up phones across the eastern half of North America just as the rising sun hit the weekend coast. Messages were coming in from a time zone more than half a day away–from Incheon, South Korea. The 48th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had just come to a close. North American climate civil society organizations—never a cohort accused of respecting normal business {+}
For much of my work, archival records provide important context for interpreting the documents I receive under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). This context takes different forms in different circumstances. These archival documents provide information on the personal or daily lives of individuals of interest, on interactions with other anthropologists, on the larger social context shaping research, or sometimes archives hold parallel unredacted documents complimenting those appearing in FOIA document releases. Like any detective work, by far most of {+}
All anthropologists should consider using archives in their work. When I was in my 20s and working as a contract archaeologist on cultural resource management projects, I used state archives to get information on the land we worked on, and when doing ethnographic fieldwork in Egypt in 1989-90, I combed collections at the Egyptian Ministry of Irrigation, the American Research Center in Egypt, and the Institut d’Égypte. And while tens of thousands of pages of Freedom of Information Act documents {+}
The job of a blogger is to keep blogging. And in the last few months, I’ve really struggled with coming up with anything meaningful or helpful to say. I feel pretty firmly, as many are articulating very powerfully (please see this podcast hosted by Autumn Brown and adrienne marie brown, “How To Survive the End of the World“, passed along to me by my friend and colleague Aadita Chaudhury this weekend*), that we’re facing the end of one order of {+}
It is a joke. I agree that the Sokal Squared project is ambitious in its scope to the point of being mean-spirited. Their findings are easy fodder for alt-right assholes. One wonders about their stated beneficent motivation despite a report somewhere claiming that two of the three authors self-identify as the type of left-wing liberal who in other contexts would celebrate the identity politics challenged by the very project. They are trying for reform–they are from Portland for fucks sake–or {+}
While working through document collections in dozens of university and governmental archives, online FOIA document repositories, and through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, I have amassed a collection of letters from anthropologists and other scholars corresponding with the CIA. Sometimes scholars write asking for reports, maps, or other documents they hope can be released into the public domain, in other instances anthropologists write sharing information relating to their work or that of colleagues, or they write inquiring about employment {+}
I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. John Postill about his new book, The Rise of Nerd Politics (Pluto Press). This new book, The Rise of Nerd Politics (Pluto Press), is analytically rich and wrestles with the problem of defining and categorizing this transnational field of politically-active technologists. You unify your techpol nerds in terms of the acronym “clamp” which includes those interested in the application of computing, law, art, media, politics. I think you go a great job of {+}
At some point during the last quarter century I wandered away from doing ethnographic fieldwork and pursued archival and Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) anthropological research. There were no clear reasons for the shift. I suppose that in hindsight this change of focus appears linked with being a new professor, with then young children who could not easily return to Middle East field research, while stumbling upon a broad research project I could undertake largely by mail. With time, I {+}