Category Archives: anthropology

this is anthropology

Posted on by October 27, 2011
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During a radio interview on ↑The Marc Bernier Show on 10 October 2011 Rick Scott, the governor of Florida (his ↑daughter has a degree in anthropology—and ↑doesn’t like her father’s stance), voiced the following: We don’t need a lot more anthropologists in the state. It’s a great degree if people want to get it, but we don’t need them here. I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, and math degrees. That’s what our kids need to focus all their time and attention on, those types of degrees, so when they get out of school, they can … Continue reading →

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gods and robots

Posted on by October 25, 2011
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Somehow this one has escaped my attention till today—unfortunately some paywall, moving wall, system bug, or whatyouhave bars my access to it, although my university has subscribed to that publication and pays for the access. Anyhow, it goes together well with ↵the new gods. Here’s the abstract of Vidal’s article: Since the 1980s, a new area of research entitled HRI (Human-Robot Interaction) has been emerging in the field of robotic studies. It focuses on the empirical study of the relationship between robots and human beings. This article aims to contrast the findings of roboticists concerning the interaction between humans and … Continue reading →

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paris calling

Posted on by October 27, 2011
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The ↑12th EASA Biennial Conference will take place in Nanterre, France (near Paris) from 10th through 13th July 2012. The overall theme is “↑Uncertainty and disquiet.” The ↑list of workshops is set and the ↑call for papers open—the latter will be closed on 28th November 2011. You can only give one presentation, so you have to skim through the vast list and make up your mind to which workshop you want to submit a paper. If this one submission is rejected, you save a lot of money, ’cause it’s of no use to journey to a conference without presenting something … Continue reading →

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anthropology meets technology

Posted on by October 27, 2011
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The BBC carries a short piece by ↑Genevieve Bell, corporate anthropologist at Intel, on what a corporate anthropologist does: ↑Viewpoint: Anthropology meets technology. And ↑anthropologies has the essay ↑Anthropology in High Tech by John Sherry, yet another anthropologist at Intel. from ↑John Postill via medianthro list—tnx … Continue reading →

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far village

Posted on by October 24, 2011
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  Over at the ↑Ethno::log the issue of the ↑Dogon in particular and Africa in general—respectively how they are represented by the traditional mass media—recently has crept up three times in short sequence. First the entry ↑Afrika by mawingu triggered some discussion. Three days later an ↑entry on ↑an article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung again triggered a discussion, mainly circling around the topic of stereotypes used in representing Africa, the Dogon in particular here. Finally yesterday ↑the Dogon returned because of ↑an article on them in Die Zeit.     To the wider public the Dogon mainly are renowned … Continue reading →

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occupation—transformation

Posted on by October 24, 2011
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During the upcoming winter term it is me who has to deliver the ‘Introduction to social and cultural anthropology’ lecture (anthro 101) at ↑my institute—I guess as a starter for the session on ↑economic anthropology I will use the 12 September entry ↑Why? posted at ↑OccupyWallStreet: Contemporary society is commodified society, where the economic transaction has become the dominant way of relating to the culture and artifacts of human civilization, over and above all other means of understanding, with any exceptions being considered merely a temporary holdout as the market swiftly works on ways to monetize those few things which … Continue reading →

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talking cyberanthropology

Posted on by October 10, 2011
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Several weeks before this year’s conference of the German Anthropological Association (GAA/DGV) took place (14-17 September in Vienna, Austria), Thomas Lohninger contacted me via e-mail. He is the founder of, and force behind ↑Talking Anthropology which went live in July 2009. Since then he has produced and brought online 39 podcasts, 16 of them in English. The idea of Talking Anthropology is to bring topics, notions, and ideas from social and cultural anthropology to a broader public. The podcast seems to be a fitting format for that endeavour. The download numbers, for some of his productions in the thousands, confirm … Continue reading →

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delineation

Posted on by September 28, 2011
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Some weeks ago I once again had a conversation on the distinctions between social/cultural anthropology and neighbouring or kin disciplines. On the very same day a bookseller sent me an e-mail advertising the (quite costly) “Encyclopaedia of Social Anthropology” by Indian sociologist Henna Tabassum (2011). The book’s ↑product overview gives a quite comprehensive description, which very much is in synch with my convictions: Social anthropology is distinguished from subjects such as economics or political science by its holistic range and the attention it gives to the diversity of culture and society across the world and the capacity this gives the … Continue reading →

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1945-1998

Posted on by November 4, 2011
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Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project’s “Trinity” test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan’s nuclear tests in May of 1998. This leaves out North Korea’s two alleged nuclear tests in this past decade (the legitimacy of both of which is not 100% clear). Isao Hashimoto himself on his ‘1945-1998’: This piece of work is a bird’s eye view of the history by scaling down a month length of time into one second. No letter is … Continue reading →

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tie rendering

Posted on by September 20, 2011
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It seems like I can’t resist the gravity of the vast ↵moc- and afol-scene. And thick participation means, among other things, sharing practices. So I followed the comprehensive tutorial ↑Converting LDR Files to POV Files for Rendering by Jeroen de Haan and Jake McKee and then ran my rendition of a ↑TIE Interceptor (which I built first in the flesh, and then with the ↑LDraw-based ↑MLCad) through ↑POVRay. All that reminded me very much of ye olde days of game modding. Here’s how my model (every single part of it stems from the 1970s!) looks in meatspace:  … Continue reading →

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