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 have the opportunity to un-volunteer themselves from a service position, and these days as I hit my mid-career stride I face serious demands on my {+}
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 anthropology than there ever have been before. With the arrival of Sapiens in 2016 anthropology has a full-time high-quality popular journalism presence, and last year saw {+}
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 a form of applied work. Indigenous people and others have criticized anthropology as itself inherently a form of unethical surveillance which aids colonialism. It turns {+}
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 as well as any entry in Marvel’s massive movie franchise. I guess it’s not surprising that Black Panther’s hero ends up endorsing an Obama-like liberal {+}
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 continue to disappear. And, even more importantly, yesterday was the 164 birthday of George Hunt, the First Nations anthropologist who helped found modern American anthropology {+}
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 and write. The production and circulation of these letters has gotten out of control, people: out of control. We need to go back to letters {+}
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 special relationship to Le Guin because she was the daughter of Alfred Kroeber, the founder of Berkeley anthropology and the first person to take 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 with the books was obvious, and at the end of the class she said “There, now you can say you’ve read something by Margaret Mead”. {+}
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 honor of the new twitter account for my history of anthropology tumblr, Highly Accurate Pictures of Anthropologists, I tracked down the original picture. As some {+}
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 ignorance. Anthropologists often have little sense of what the discipline has achieved (or not achieved) in the past, and famously reinvent the fundamental insights of {+}