Author: Ryan

Summer anthropologies #2: Leslie White goes to a baseball game (Part 1)

By Ryan | August 4, 2023

A couple months ago, just after the 2023 baseball season started, I was sitting in the upper deck behind home plate at Oracle Park in San Francisco, California. It is a great view. I was there to watch the Giants play against the Los Angeles Dodgers with about 30,000 or so other people. This was the first MLB game I’d been to in about three decades. It was nice being back after so long. Things that I’d forgotten about all {+}

Salvaging what is good

By Ryan | July 2, 2023

This post is more practical than nostalgic. Yes, sometimes I like to look back and think about how ‘things were better’ with our various online anthro communities, but that’s not the goal here. It’s clear that the online communities our discipline had are not what they once were, whether on Facebook, Twitter, etc. And those communities did–and still do–matter. Twitter just keeps coming apart at the seams and people seem to be leaving in droves. As they should. For a {+}

Summer anthropologies #1: The Nameless Summer

By Ryan | June 28, 2023

Bruce Brown’s mid 1960’s surf epic The Endless Summer is one of the key elements that sparked the global surf tourism industry. It’s a film that set the pattern for how surf tourists have envisioned and engaged with the people and places they travel to and through in search of waves. In The Endless Summer, the non-western world exists as a kind of empty, ahistorical, and naive paradise that awaits the enlightenment of western discovery. The film has been taken {+}

Summer anthropologies: beaches and baseball

By Ryan | June 26, 2023

All the grades are in, summer is here, and we can all start ‘relaxing’ by lining up a bunch of unrealistic work expectations. Finally. One of my goals is to get back to short form writing that is not owned, controlled, moderated, or in any way beneficial to or complicit with the once functional platform known as Twitter. Recently, someone on that platform said something along the lines of ‘If you start writing more than a few lines here, write {+}

Adventures in chatGPT #2: A conversation with Nick Seaver

By Ryan | March 28, 2023

After writing my last post about chatGPT, I got in touch with Nick Seaver to see what he had to say about some of these issues. Here’s our conversation: Ryan Anderson: So, I just signed up for chatGPT and started messing around with it, and I’m concerned. Are you concerned? “Nick Seaver”: Yes, I am concerned about chatGPT. It is a powerful tool and can be used for malicious purposes. It is important to be aware of the potential risks and {+}

Adventures in chatGPT: Meet David Wilkie, anthropologist

By Ryan | February 23, 2023

So curiosity finally got the best of me and I started looking into this whole chatGPT thing that is poised to bring about the ruin of society. I decided to see what kind of information it would spit out about anthropological work in Cabo Pulmo, Mexico, which is where I did all my doctoral work. Here’s what I asked chatGPT: “Please write a 1000 word summary of the anthropological work on Cabo Pulmo, Mexico.” And here’s what it gave me: {+}

Holding our anthropological spaces

By Ryan | December 18, 2022

I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point the anthropological community that used to be online shifted mostly to Twitter and other platforms. Maybe this was around 2015-2017 or so? I shifted there as well but always wondered how it would all play out. Twitter was good in many ways, because it opened things up and gave more people a chance to speak for themselves through their own micro platform. But I feel like it also resulted in {+}

No Open Access Today, Anthropology: On the latest AAA-Wiley Announcement

By Ryan | June 15, 2022

Last November, it looked like some good things were on the horizon for Open Access and the American Anthropological Association’s publishing portfolio: At this morning’s #AAA2021Baltimore roundtable on #OpenAccess publishing at @AmericanAnthro, Director of Publishing Janine McKenna announced plans to transition to #OpenAccess beginning in 2023. AND EVERYONE CHEERED. — Dr. Z (@leah_zani) November 18, 2021 Everyone cheered, including me. After years of back and forth, it seemed that the AAA was finally going to make the shift to Open {+}

The search for the worst anthro job ad: An interview with Dada Docot

By Ryan | March 8, 2022

In September 2021, Dada Docot sent out a half-serious tweet about finding the Worse Anthro Job Ad for 2021. The post got attention, and the search took off. The two threads of the search (for gathering nominations and announcement of results) registered about 173,536 impressions as of February 2022. The search received a total of $129 from 24 supporters (4 postdocs, 3 researchers, 4 asst profs, 3 assoc profs, 3 PhD students, 2 VAPs, 2 full profs, and 2 alt-ACs). {+}

Fragments of Reparation & Recognition in the Golden State

By Ryan | October 8, 2021

On September 30, California Governor Gavin Newsome signed Senate Bill 796 into law, which authorized the return of Bruce’s Beach to the descendants of the Black landowners who were dispossessed of the property in the early 20th century. Los Angeles Times reporter Rosanna Xia has covered this story as it has developed over the past year. Her reporting builds upon the work of historian Alison Rose Jefferson, whose book “Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites During the Jim {+}