wikipedia on cyberanthropology

Call it vanity, utilitarian pragmatism, idealism, or anything in-between—the full spectrum is ready to be used for your judgement. Via the ↑Anthropological fields and subfields section of ↑Wikipedia’s article on anthropology I stumbled over the article ↑Cyber anthropology, which then only consisted of one sentence: “Cyber Anthropology is supposedly a field of Anthropology dealing primarily with computers in human society.”—but the article already had a horrific history of revisions and changes. Once it read: “Cyber Anthropology is different from the other fields of Anthropology because it has to do with the finding and searching of information using computers, rather than … Continue reading

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truck-canoe hybrids

  One of the key moments along my path ‘through’ sociocultural anthropology was when several years ago I listened to ↑Kurt Beck‘s presentation on the cultural appropriation of the diesel-engine in the Sudan (meanwhile published as ↵Beck 2001). Diesel-powered pumps finally replaced the saqiya, an ox-driven pump used for irrigating the fields located on the banks of river Nile. Later on followed ↵bedford’s metamorphosis: hotbeds of creativity—the appropriation of the truck in Sudan (↵Beck 2004), which inspired Gabriel Kläger’s website ↑Africars—the latter includes an ↑online version of the hotbeds of creativity featuring a ton of insightful pictures illustrating the inventions … Continue reading

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