Vale Claude Levi-Strauss

I woke up this morning to read that Claude Levi-Strauss has passed away, aged 100.  As a testament to his stature as a world-shaping thinker, he has received prominent obituaries in newspapers around the world.  This New York Times piece by Edward Rothstein is especially worth a read.
As one wit wrote in the comments to [...]

Teaching through the body (c.f. Mauss)

My little brother just started medical school (golly!  I still remember changing his diaper!) and he has been telling me about some of his most exciting lectures.  I asked him to tell me more about what he thought made for a great lecture, because I’m always trying to figure out how to improve my own [...]

Minerva awards announced – no anthropologists funded

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has just announced the winners of the first round of research funded under the Minerva Initiative.  This was a joint process whereby the National Science Foundation (NSF) and DoD determined funding for research on “Social and Behavioral Dimensions of National Security, Conflict and Cooperation” — i.e. social science research [...]

Design thinking

Since I started  betterplace.org, I have been looking for inspiring ideas in the field of social innovation. Naturally my thinking has been very much shaped by anthropology and thus I have followed with interest anything at the intersection between development and ethnography. Recently one of the useful (and fashionable) concepts has been design thinking.
Design thinking has [...]

2 Sydney anthro events: Traditional Healing and Mining and Sovereignty

2 upcoming Sydney events of interest to anthropologists:

Traditional Healing at the 4th Sydney Latin America Film Festival

Monday 7 September 6:00pm @ Dendy Opera Quays
The film “La Curacion / Healing” (Ecuador, Spanish and Quechua with English subtitles, 56 minutes) by Yoni Goldstein will screen at 6pm.  After the film, Kalpana Ram, Head of the Macquarie Department [...]

The post about the gold penis enlarger

If this post doesn’t attract the spam bots, I don’t know what will…
Recently I saw an article in the Herald’s “Strange but True” section — where I do all my trolling for topical anthropology blog posts — about a Saudi guy who had paid $US50,000 for a solid 18-carat gold, diamond and ruby encrusted, penis [...]

Experiencing ethics oversight

I am starting a new study that aims to understand ethnographers’ subjective experience of ethics oversight – their memories of when and how they first became aware of ethics oversight, what they think and feel about it, whether and how they comply with it, and whether they think it makes ethnographic research more ethical or [...]

Academic Publishing Workshop for grad students and more

Below is the content from an academic publishing workshop that I recently ran for Macquarie’s Anthropology Department. I’ve compiled a set of useful, free resources, and some insights coming out of my own efforts to publish, as well as advice from colleagues.  If you find this useful or if you have publishing insights that I [...]

What is rinding? and other postmodern neologisms

Below is an announcement about an upcoming lecture by Kathleen Stewart in Sydney.  Scroll on down to wonder at the postmodern abstract for her talk.
Transforming Cultures is pleased to announce that this year the TfC Annual Lecture will be presented by:
Professor Kathleen Stewart (Dept. of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin).
Atmospheric Atunements
Thursday 20th August 2009, 6:00-8:00 [...]

Ethics bureaucracies and student research

When I arrived at Macquarie in 2007, I had big plans for my students.  I was scheduled to teach a postgraduate methods class, and I decided that the students were going to learn research methods by undertaking their own research project from start to finish and trying to publish the results.
“Crazy!” one of my colleagues [...]