Doing some revamping here in an effort to keep Anthropology Report spare, current, and frequent–lessons learned from Black Swan Anthropology. Will now feature more frequent but more briefly described links to Anthropology Blogs and related material. Will also include a featured anthropology book, something that is discussed in one of the links. This time it’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
Who’s afraid of a MOOC?: on being education-y and course-ish. Always great to hear from Greg Downey: “If we share our teaching materials–lecture notes, slides, assignments, accessible readings, graphics, diagrams–we can work together to stymie the compulsion to refight anachronistic intellectual battles.” See also some Links on MOOCs for more.
The wrong kind of Caucasian. Anthropologist Sarah Kendzior excoriates media coverage: “The men were Caucasian, so the speculation turned away from foreign terror and toward the excuses routinely made for white men who kill: mental illness, anti-government grudges, frustrations at home. The men were white and Caucasian – until the next day, when they became the wrong kind of Caucasian, and suddenly they were not so ‘white’ after all.” Good read, although I still like The Onion headline Study: Majority Of Americans Not Informed Enough To Stereotype Chechens.
Dove Ideology. Anthropologist and Savage Minds blogger Kerim Friedman analyzes the Dove campaign as misrecognition rather than false consciousness: “What is wrong with the Dove ad isn’t that it is selling beauty, but that it is depoliticizing and psychologizing sociological critique in order to do so.” One interesting note in light of the above is Kerim’s use of “Caucasian” (h/t e-mail from Discuss White Privilege).
There’s no need for all this economic sadomasochism says anthropologist David Graeber at The Guardian, analyzing the Reinhart and Rogoff spreadsheet snafu: “the great moral drama of modern times might in fact be nothing more than the product of bad theory and faulty data series.” This article, and a tweet from CommonCapital led me to revisit Anthropology, Moral Optimism, and Capitalism: A Four-Field Manifesto.
The Jobless Trap. Related to the above, Paul Krugman: “We are indeed creating a permanent class of jobless Americans. . . . Our exaggerated fear of debt is, in short, creating a slow-motion catastrophe. It’s ruining many lives, and at the same time making us poorer and weaker in every way. And the longer we persist in this folly, the greater the damage will be.”
The 2013 AAPA Meetings. It was a pleasure to meet Kevin Sheridan at Binghamton University. He has been inspired to re-start his blog, Southern Tier Biohistory which I’m adding to the Anthropology Blogs 2013 list.
Anthro in the news 4/22/13. This week’s lead is about egg freezing and professional women. See also the new Twitter feed for Anthropology and Reproduction and the CAR Facebook Page.
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