Category: Blog Post

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

By Ryan | August 16, 2023

In part one of this installment, I mentioned Leslie White’s call to expand the purview of anthropology and take a closer look at things like baseball. I agree. White’s preliminary theory was that baseball, as a cultural institution, promoted national solidarity and unity: “No matter who you are, what you are, or where you are, if you are a fan you ‘belong.’” Nope. If you look at the history of baseball at that time, and before, White’s argument about the {+}

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 {+}

My Academic Career Has Been Characterized by Efforts to Prohibit Dialogue on Palestine and with Palestinians. For this Reason, I am Voting “Yes” in the AAA Vote to Boycott Israeli Academic Institutions

By Guest Contributor | June 25, 2023

By Kyle B. Craig I entered academia with a certain level of naivete. During my undergraduate studies in Anthropology, I became energized by a discipline I felt was dedicated to knowledge production not for its own sake but as a project of building more just and liberated societies. Universities, by extension, seemed to be bastions of critical dialogue and action in pursuit of these goals. Over time, I realized this was not always true, as my experience in US academia {+}

Anthro Boycott 2.0

By Kerim | April 9, 2023

Responding to the petition members submitted on March 3, the American Anthropological Association has scheduled a vote on the boycott of Israeli academic institutions from June 15-30. Make sure your AAA membership is active and watch your email for information about how to vote. In 2015 a similar resolution “narrowly missed adoption in the subsequent full membership vote by a margin of only 39 votes (2,384 in favor and 2,423 opposed; 49.6% – 50.4%).” This one will be close again. {+}

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: {+}

In 2023, Question Everything

By Kerim | January 1, 2023

Here’s a New Year’s Resolution for everyone for 2023: Question everything about how we teach, do research, and select students or job applicants. – Question grades – Question letters of recommendation – Question peer review What else should we question about academia this year? (Sorry for the paywalled links, I usually try to avoid them, but couldn’t find an alternative just now.) KerimP. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa {+}