Could Distributed Peer Review Better Decide Grant Funding?
The landscape of academic grant funding is notoriously competitive and plagued by lengthy, bureaucratic processes, exacerbated by difficulties in finding willing reviewers. Distributed […]
Book Review: Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange: A Financial History of Victorian Science
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.
Book Review: Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, The Pentagon and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology
“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.
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 […]
