A space to explore, share and shape the issues facing social scientists
The late South African musician Johnny Clegg was also an anthropologist both formally, as a lecturer on ethnography, and informally as he continued a teaching career from the stage.
Burned out by the hamster-wheel of academe and the regime of metrics, John Postill decided the tonic would be to write a spoof spy thriller about a Spanish nerd with a silly name who moves to London in 1994 and accidentally foils a terrorist plot by an evil anthropologist.
Everyone is supposed to cheer for good guys. We’re supposed to honor heroes, saints and anyone who helps others, and we should only punish the bad guys. But is the expression ‘no good deed goes unpunished’ really accurate? New research shows we often do, in fact, punish those who do good deeds.
When discussing the nexus of computer science and social science, the transaction is usually in one direction – what can computer scientists do for social scientists. But a recent paper from Tufts University anthropologist Nick Seaver reverses that flow, using the tool of ethnography to interrogate the tools of engineering.
A connection can be made in between Ursula Le Guin’s fiction and her father’s groundbreaking work in anthropology. His ideas – which had a profound influence on his daughter’s writing – stemmed from an important development in the discipline of anthropology, one that viewed human culture as something that wasn’t ingrained, and had to be taught and learned.
In this Social Science Bites podcast, anthropologist Scott Atran describes how ‘sacred values’ prove remarkably immune to negotiation and can empower vicious terrorism or victorious revolution.
This Black History Month, remember the trailblazing work of an American anthropologist, Allison Davis, who both studied and was a victim of the nation’s entrenched racism.
In Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange: A Financial History of Victorian Science, Marc Flandreau traces the interwoven development of anthropology, global finance and scientific study, placing all three at the heart of late-19th-century British imperialism.
“Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, The Pentagon and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology” offers a historical account of how the US military industrial complex has had a profound influence on the development of US anthropology during the Cold War and into the present day. Reviewer Joseph Anderson sees the book as a dense but readable outline that confronts how ethnographic research in the field has been shaped by wider political-economic force.
Anthropologists use ethnographic methods designed to facilitate their competency in another culture to understand what people do, think, feel and say that might seem strange to an outsider but are completely familiar to an insider. But what does that mean in practice?
One of the leading exponents of what might be called the second coming of kinship studies, Janet Carsten, a professor of social and cultural anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, has (literally) brought new blood into the field, exploring kinship’s nexus with politics, work and gender.
A corporate anthropologist is told to write a report that will “name what’s taking place right now” and is “the First and Last Word on our age.” And so we set the stage for what in turn David Rudrum argues is itself a zeitgeist-defining work.
