Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
What Does an Anthropologist Actually Do?
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?
Janet Carsten on the Kinship of Anthropology
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.
This Book About an Anthropologist Ought to Win the Man Booker
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.
Trevor Marchand on Craft
It’s an unusual approach for an academic: a hands-on approach. Literally a hands-on approach. Trevor Marchand is an anthropologist interested in how information about crafts is transferred from expert to novice. This has led him to Nigeria, Yemen, Mali, and East London …
Ebola: The Human Cost of Neglecting the Social Sciences
There is a genuine cost from ignoring lessons from social science in the fight against Ebola. What’s even sadder — these lessons were taught in blood three decades ago in the fights against AIDS. Are we ready for the next malady?
What is the “Global Brain”?
Just what is the “Global Brain”? In his article “Global Brain and the Future of Human Society,” Cadell Last defines the Global […]
We need more mainstream social science, not less.
A recent New York Times op-ed has provoked a great deal of debate over the relevance and reinvigoration of the social sciences. Alex Golub welcomes some of the criticism levied at the social sciences as a whole but finds the lack of evidence supporting many of the sweeping claims on why social science is stagnating to be unreconcilable given massive funding differentials and the history of social and natural sciences. But social scientists must continue to work to ensure mainstream social science is communicated in more accessible ways.
Science, Advocacy and Anthropology
Contrary to some loudly voiced claims, both advocacy and science are (and long have been) at the core of our discipline.
