Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His book “Leviathans at the Gold Mine” won the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology book award. He is interested in political anthropology, the anthropology of virtual worlds, the history of anthropology, and public anthropology and open access scholarship.
It is with excitement and regret that I announce today that this will be my last post for Anthrodendum. I’m leaving the blog. It’s hard to leave something you love, especially when you’ve done it a long time. So I feel a certain regret in leaving the blog. But I’m excited too. Academics very rarely …
2Anthropologists — especially American anthropologists — fret endlessly that they are not doing enough to make their work more widely known, their opinions more widely shared, and their impact more deeply felt. In some sense, we have less and less to worry about. Anthropology twitter is rich and active, and there are more websites about …
+ Read More How To Think Like An Anthropologist: An Interview With Matthew Engelke
Is there anything new to say in the never-ending discussion of anthropology and espionage? Most anthropologists think it is unethical to gather intelligence on behalf of the government when they do their fieldwork — but not all of them. Some spies pose as anthropologists. Sometimes people start out as anthropologists and move into espionage as …
The Black Panther movie has been out for a little bit now, and posts both pro and con have been circulating on the Internet (Kerim has a quick roundup in a microblog of his). As a white guy who studies the Pacific, I don’t really have anything to say about Black Panther, which I liked …
It’s Anthropology Day, our discipline’s latest invented tradition! A time for reflection on chocolate mint and the values of our discipline, Anthropology Day 2018 is uniquely placed this year. Earlier this week, Cultural Anthropology ran a powerful and important reflection by David Platzer and Anne Allison on the tenuous situation anthropology is in as tenure track jobs …
+ Read More This Anthropology Day, Let’s Remember George Hunt
If you are an academic who is in a secure, full-time position then , let’s be honest, no one in the precariate wants to listen to you complain about how hard your job is. But if you were to complain, one topic would be the endless rounds of letters of recommendation you are asked to read …
+ Read More Let’s all write shorter letters of recommendation
Ursula K. Le Guin died on Monday at the age of 88. On the Internet and social media, people remembered her as a feminist and poet, defender of culture and integrity against capitalism and commercialism, and exemplar of the depth and sophistication of genres variously described as science fiction, fantasy, and YA. Anthropologists have a …
The first time I read Coming of Age in Samoa was in my Intro to Anthro course. My teacher — and future mentor — was a social anthropologist and a social conservative of the Mary Douglas stripe. As we read the book she carefully pointed out passages where Mead seemed to contradict herself. Her impatience …
Ya’ll know what I’m talking about, right? These pictures get used all the time on the Internet and in class. Memeworthy in extremis, they manage to pay homage to a founder of our discipline while simultaneously to taking him too seriously — an ironic, typically anthropological move. But where do they actually come from? In …
Anthropology has an unhealthy relationship to its past. Approaches range from highly fetishized, almost ritual reading of sacralized texts like The Gift and The Nuer to intense, context-free denunciations of past practitioners based on their race, gender, and emplacement in nineteenth century. In fact, perhaps the most common relationship anthropologists have to their history is …