Advices for response.

I am honoured you’ve asked me to comment, but really, it is up to you to work out your own style for public engagement – polemic, polote, polite but sly, ruthless criticism of everything that exists, and any other number of performative routines. Whatever the case, late night advice may need a spoonful of salt if you really [...]

Alpa Shah talk at LSE 17.5.2012

The Malinowski Memorial Lecture this year is by Goldsmiths own Alpa Shah. Title: ‘The Muck of the Past’: Revolution, Social Transformation and the Maoists in India Date: Thursday 17 May 2012, 6.00-7.00pm Venue: Old Theatre, LSE The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception. Dr Alpa Shah teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. [...]

Avatar Trinkets

For those of you who like your anthropologists in cryo, in an incubator (online ethnography anyone), or fighting off the mining industry – as already oft-mentioned on this blog (more links below), this little cherub should set you off with oohs and ahhs. As soon as you look closely at the picture though, it will [...]

Red Tape discussion on Culture for RCA design students

Red Tape #2 Local/ Global from deshna mehta on Vimeo. my bit is from 20:10 mins to 41:00, then the discussion. The Red Tape site is here: http://redtape.rca.ac.uk/2012_02.html All thanks to Deshna Mehta and the fine people that make up the Red Tape gang.

Taussig 27.1.12

Michael Taussig 27.1.2012

Excelente Zona Social Anthropologist Michael Taussig talks about the relationship between writing, culture and time. “I began began doing fieldwork in 1969. I have returned every year” says Mick Taussig. His writing has spanned a wide range of issues ranging from the commercialization of peasant agriculture to a study of exciting substance loaded with seduction [...]

White Charity

Critique of photogenic poverty catching on – check out this film from Germany: http://www.whitecharity.de/index_files/Page518.htm White Charity Blackness & whiteness on charity ad posters Billboards of charitable organisations such as ‘Brot für die Welt’, ‘Welthungerhilfe’, ‘Kindernothilfe’ or ‘Care’ are omnipresent in streets, on squares, in train and metro stations in Germany. They have a large impact [...]

New Taussig

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo11637787.html

Anthropologies of Tourism

Issue 2 Anthropologies of Tourism April 2011 Tourists at Cobá, Quintana Roo, Mexico 2008 – Photo by Ryan Anderson ~ Contents ~ Introduction to this issue  Ryan Anderson Tourism: Trinketization and the Manufacture of the Exotic John Hutnyk Arrivals, perceived and actual Sarah Taylor A San Diego Cultural Narrative  Conor Muirhead Tourism Research as “Global [...]

From the 6th floor of New Arts to here.

Dr Peter Phipps, Prof Klaus Peter Koepping and I, in some sort of three amigos mode, discuss the good ol days of trouble-making at the University of Melbourne.

Great Wild Life Documentary from UfSO http://universityforstrategicoptimism.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/the-free-free-market-market-3/

Methods and Ethnography

OK, asked for references twice in two days on the same thing, so started thinking what I might reread if I was going to think about methods and ethnography now: Mitchell Duneier, “Sidewalk” – a thoughtful study of magazine vendors in New York. A bit too worthy and street, but some good stuff on doubt. [...]

Avatar and Bougainville??

Avatar and Bougainville: A Parallel History? « Tubuans. http://www.criticaltimes.com.au/news/international/avatars-secret-history-lesson-on-our-doorstep/ http://www.face21cn.cn/renleixue/anthropology/article-Avatar-pop-culture-anthropology-ethic.html http://savageminds.org/2009/12/24/avatar/ http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2010/02/23/james-cameron-the-oscars-and-the-real-life-avatar/

requiem for ethnography

In the past I have called for a moratorium, but today wanted to list the things I thought were still useful, interesting or important in anthropology and ethnography now, even if contradictory: – a refusal to simply sit alone and panic at the complexity of the world – often trinketising, but can be more (contextualisation, attention [...]

Avatar Anthropology (at War)

And there I was thinking a sweet little love story between a couple of blue pixies on the Ewok planet might not be yet another Star Wares space parable of the pervasive militant fascism we cannot ever admit to having here… Of course not.. David Price makes the salient points: Fans of Avatar are understandably being [...]

December 2009 in Kolkata

I am lucky enough to have been invited to go to Kolkata in December for a symposium on the “Cultural Politics of Preservation”, organised by Gayatri Spivak. Was asked today what I would present on. Gulp. I have no idea yet. How about this: To work among the masses – co-research, institutionalization or vanguard intervention? [...]

“funny how the ‘trickle-down’ is so much more effective when it’s the redistribution of loss” -IT

Eating hot soup in my Taipei room at 5am, aircon and airlines contrived to make this visit feel like a crash landing, but the paper went well – I think, and I’m told – even if Andrew Strathern’s response spun off into the anthropological-inevitable, ritual, Victor Turner, Rene Girard, Gregory Bateson and other similarly bongo [...]

Bakun and other damn floods

My friends at Suaram have been vigilant where no-one else has. I wrote on Bakun dam, resettlement and anthropological complicity in the journal Left Curve years ago (see link at the end of this post), and I remain interested in the politics of dams in general (from Aswan to Narmada to the Snowy Mountains). That [...]

First Human Terrain Team casualty

As anyone who might have looked at my writing in ‘Jungle Studies’ (here) or ‘Clifford’s Ethnographica’ (in Critique of Anthropology and reprinted in Bad Marxism) knows, I am not much of a fan of the close embrace that anthropology has with imperialism. Having argued that the old ‘Anthro as Handmaiden of Colonialism’ argument needs to [...]

ASA – From Post-Imperial Anthropology to Post-Anthropological Empire?

A cross post from the Association of Social Anthropology site, filed here (awaiting moderation), but check the original if interested. As I cannot face reading the papers with War Hero Harry splattered (in the wrong way) across the front today, I visited the site of the Royal Anthropological Institute looking for comment, then landed on [...]