I recall the excitement and democratizing promise of the Internet of the 1990s. I got my first email address in college during that decade. I remember coming home for Winter break and my mother warily asking if I was certain that Hotmail didn’t have a connection to the sex industry. I rolled my eyes at her naiveté. I learned how to download free songs using Napster and to join chat rooms to speak to strangers about topics I had never heard of. Accessing new ideas felt free and frictionless.
These “Thin Partitions:” Bridging the Growing Divide Between Cultural Anthropology and Archaeology co-edited by Joshua D. Englehardt and Ivy A. Rieger seeks to reexamine if and to what extent the sub-disciplines of Anthropology have become disjunctured. Specifically, Englehardt and Rieger sought to evaluate the historical, contemporary, and future relationship between cultural anthropologists and archaeologists. The […]
Here is the annual list of Evolutionary Anthropology Society (EAS) sessions at the American Anthropological Association (AAA) Annual Meeting (2018 San José, California). Select sessions and events from other sections that may be of interest are also included.
If you review the headlines of magazines such as the Atlantic, Forbes and the Economist, you will discover an obsession with the future of work. Will labor become automated, even beyond manufacturing? Will bots replace white-collar human resources workers? Will vehicles need drivers?
Knowledge Exchange > Let’s Talk Gender Everyday Anthropology AnthroCyberism Anthropology in the Public Sector Chinese Dream Biocultural Systematics Who Cares Anthropology from the Border Middle East Muddle Endangered Cultural Artifacts and Sites Pearls á la Turca Buffalo’s Revival Name Those Bones Soldiers, Civilians and an Anthropologist The World is Curved Archaeology in […]
Editor Natalie Konopinski [email protected] Assistant Editor Alexandra Vieux Frankel [email protected] Design Print: Moon Design Web: Mike Snyder Editorial Advisory Board Jane Eva-Baxter, DePaul University Agustín Fuentes, University of Notre Dame Sallie Han, SUNY Oneonta Natalie Hanson, ZS Associates Jonathan Rosa, Stanford University Paul Stoller, West Chester University Gina Athena Ulysse, Wesleyan University Bianca Williams, University […]
I could not have imagined when I entered the PhD program in anthropology at the University of California, Davis in 1973 that I would spend my career working as an anthropologist in Silicon Valley. I have always liked technology and did well in math and science, but to work alongside physicists, chemists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers for the better part of 40 years—really!
Kings of Disaster: Dualism, Centralism and the Scapegoat King in Southern Sudan (Michigan State & Fountain) is a remarkable ethnography of people whose sense of commonality is produced by their common opposition to their kings. The book brings together an impressive body of archival sources and excellent ethnographic research but has remained underappreciated outside a […]
Intertextuality and the propagation of disinformation Propaganda typically refers to manipulative techniques and misleading messages used to gain public acquiescence for a political cause, especially during times of war. Over the past century, George Orwell, Harold Lasswell, Jacques Ellul, and Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, among others, have written or theorized about propaganda. But […]
“Clean data—well-collected raw numbers—contain within them thousands of stories,” Crystal Biruk writes in Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World (Duke, 2018), an excellent new ethnography of quantitative data production in Malawi. Whether it is a matter of guidelines, questionnaires, or statistics, producing “clean data” is partly a process of scrubbing away […]
