My discipline, anthropology, is not seen as a “growth" discipline, and departments are being closed down. But the world needs Anthropology and Anthropologists now more than ever!
Here are my 8 reasons for this:
POSSIBILITIES
At a time of polycrisis, when the destructive fallouts of capitalist modernity are ever more apparent, anthropology highlights that there are myriad alternative ways of thinking and living; that there is so much to learn from other peoples in the world. 1/n
EMPOWERMENT
The skills, knowledge, critical thinking, intellectual flexibility and values you gain by studying anthropology empower students to become the kind of change makers the world needs now.
Please, do share, and please do direct anyone you know who is thinking of going to university and might be interested in Anthropology to me! I am happy to answer any questions. #Anthropology@academicchatter
We are looking for an experienced researcher to lead "Health, Migration, Climate Change: Human Stories in Complex Systems" - a project inspired by #ClimateDiary and one which I am hoping to build up together with whoever gets this post.
Please share widely and feel free to contact me with any questions
A solar developer sent a state lands archaeologist a string of urgent text messages, which we obtained through a public records request, insisting that she keep her findings private and not share them with tribes.
But when his texts reached the state lands archaeologist, she was already at Badger Mountain --- showing her findings to a tribal representative.
Half thinking of starting an #AcademicVenting hashtag here, about the dire, dire state of UK (global?) higher education. Sharing nuggets of senior management decisions, neoliberal language, and overall slow collapse.
Won’t work of course because most of us can’t risk honesty, but honestly: the everyday reality of what is happening deserves recording in all its depressing and damning detail. #Universities#AcademicChatter#neoliberalism
#AcademicVenting this is not venting, just crying. Things are bad enough at Goldsmiths but Kent announcing it is closing 9 humanities and social science departments - including #Philosophy and #Anthropology , and focusing instead on business and law as areas of growth, is just 💔💔💔
Here is a petition you can sign and share to try and save the anthropology department. Please do.
I really do think that anthropology has so much to offer for navigating our way out of the polycrisis. The world needs so much more anthroplogy, not less.
Hello! Just wanted to do a quick #ShoutOut here for a brilliant MA at Goldsmiths run by Anthropology and Social and Therapeutic Studies (STACS) at Goldsmiths. It is a unique programme combining theory and practice, academic with professional qualifications. There are three pathways:
MAs in Applied Anthroplogy and Community Youth Work; Community Development; and Community Arts
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
(a thread of threads, quotes, and links)
This is a collection of writings and research concerned with how we got where we are today, which is in fact the story of what has been done to us, and what has been taken from us.
By "us" we're talking about "the 99%", "workers", "wage slaves", all non-owners of private property, "the poor", unhoused people, indigenous people, even plenty of people who swear by capitalism and identify as "capitalist" yet have no capital of their own and no serious hope of ever having any worth speaking of. In other words almost everyone except for the very few who have had the power to exploit us and shape our lives to serve their agenda. We're going to examine institutions and concepts that have deeply altered our world at all levels, both our external and internal realities.
By "here" we are talking about climate crisis and myriad other environmental catastrophes resulting from hyper-excessive extraction, consumption and waste; a world of rampant inequality and exploitation, hunger and starvation; a world of fences, walls, tollbooths, prisons, police, bullshit jobs and criminalized poverty; a world overrun with cars and preventable diseases; a world of vanishing biodiversity and blooming fascism; a world where "democracy" results in being led by some of the worst of humanity; a world ruled by an imaginary but all-powerful and single-minded god: Capital.
Our inspiration and structural framework for this survey is this quote from "The Prehistory of Private Property", an important work from political philosopher Karl Widerquist and anthropologist Grant S. McCall:
"After hundreds of millennia in which all humans had direct access to the commons, it took only a few centuries for enclosure, colonialism, capitalism, and industrialization to cut off the vast majority of people on Earth from direct access to the means of economic production and therefore to rob them of the power to say no. It took only a few generations to convince most people that this situation was natural and inevitable. That false lesson needs to be unlearned."
Hello Mastodon World #Introduction! I'm Josh, a Prof of Anthropology & Social Informatics at Indiana University South Bend, principal investigator w/Digital Index of North American Archaeology (DINAA). I work at intersections of people, heritage, tech, & research, love to help folks use data systems more humanely, openly, & equitably
Oh my goodness. This blows my mind. I love it. Please read it. Here are some things I just learned from this text:
"Everybody had just taken this man-the-#hunter hypothesis for granted. So no one really decided to evaluate it," says Haas. "It wasn't really a question on a lot of people's minds."
In 79% of societies, women did hunt.
And my favourite:
The best hunters were grandmothers.
Not sure I can bring myself to watch this, with major redundancies at my university and others, and whole departments being closed down, because there are not enough students. The whole sector is breaking apart. I hope the series will consider this too.
Yes, your son should go, and even better if he chooses a subject like #Anthropology which is shrinking just as the world needs it more than ever #university#UK#TheCrumble
Nice piece by @parismarx about the importance of physical media. and the right to control, for equitable access. The cloud is by definition somebody else’s property and this has real repercussions beyond mere entertainment. Too many in #heritage#opengov and lots of other sectors think that putting something online alone makes it findable and reusable.
OPEN . CONTEXT H Open Context @opencontext Open Context (opencontext.org) reviews, edits, annotates, publishes and archives research data and digital documentation for archaeology and related fields. Through advocacy, education, research, and wider collaborations we work to promote ethical data management in support of teaching and understanding. This account is managed by multiple colleagues at our organization (see: alexandriaarchive.org/about/pe...) JOINED Aug 14, 2023 SERVICES scholarly communications DISCIPLINE archaeology CONTENT open data COMMUNITY digital humanities
“The blueprint for modern digital computing was codesigned by Charles Babbage, a vocal champion for the … industrial capitalist class who condemned organized workers and viewed democracy and capitalism as incompatible … His influential theories on how “enterprising capitalists” could best subjugate workers are well documented in conventional labor scholarship.”
One more posthumous book by #DavidGraeber. Is he the Tupak of nonfiction?
"As questions of decolonisation rub up against the legacy of Enlightenment thinking in the West, anthropologist David Graeber argues in his posthumous book Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia (to be published early next year) that Enlightenment ideas themselves are not intrinsically European and were indeed shaped by non-European sources."
Time for an #Introduction We are a large research group, working and teaching at the IT University of Copenhagen. We are interdisciplinary, and work to examine digital technologies critically. Read about us and our work on https://tip.itu.dk/ - plan to use this account much as we did the bird site - to share academic events, publications, conferences, PhD graduations, and general academic life in #STS#anthropology#HCI and #CSCW
Anybody out there know if there's scientific work that's been done on human disease-seeking behavior? At this point, I feel drawn to describe the over-culture's attitude towards Covid and public health in general as not just a failure to take precautions, but disease-seeking. Maybe there are discoverable insights into how human disease-seeking behavior works? Maybe that knowledge might help us turn things around? #covid#CovidIsNotOver#Politics#Science#anthropology#history#COVIDisAirborne
Scottish social anthropologist and folklorist James George Frazer died #OTD in 1941.
He is best known for his influential work "The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion," which explores the similarities among magical and religious beliefs across diverse cultures. Frazer proposed that human belief progressed through three stages: primitive magic, replaced by religion, and finally replaced by science.
Polynesians steering by the stars met Native Americans long before Europeans arrived (www.science.org)
Study of modern DNA shakes up ideas of when and where contact happened.