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I’m sitting here at Toronto Pearson International Airport after this year’s AAA meetings. The first time I went to the AAA’s was back in 2008, in San Francisco. I was a grad student back then, all worried and nervous about presenting at a professional conference. My first shock was just basic economics. The room at …
+ Read More Anthropology after Twitter and the power of old things in new hands
There are a few different things that brought me to anthropology. One of them was 9/11. More specifically, it was how many people in the US responded to 9/11, including people I knew well. There was a moment, right after 9/11 happened and all of our TVs were full of images of loss, sadness, and …
In the last post of this installment of the summer anthropologies series, I ended with the point that major league baseball (MLB) is an annual demonstration of autocratic corporate power. If that’s the case, I asked, why would anyone go? Well, humans are complicated. Take my case. I grew up playing baseball since I was …
+ Read More Summer anthropologies #2: Leslie White goes to a baseball game (Part 3)
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, …
+ Read More Summer anthropologies #2: Leslie White goes to a baseball game (Part 2)
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 …
+ Read More Summer anthropologies #2: Leslie White goes to a baseball game (Part 1)
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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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 …