Talking Anthropology on the Open Anthropology Cooperative (ning--this website) has been a lot of fun, but all good things come to an end and this will be my last post. The reasons are entirely practical, though not impersonal. OAC here (there is another highly successful and vibrant OAC group on Facebook), has come to the end of what it can reasonably achieve. This website is full up with interesting, but chaotically ordered content and points of contact. It is really a massive hammer to…

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This is a version of an entry I wrote for the W.E.B. Dubois institute's Dictionary of Afro-Latin American Biography.

Dizzy, Ras (1932-2008), painter, poet and itinerant Rastafarian activist, was probably born in Kingston, the capital of Jamaica on 19…

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If you work as I do on the anthropology of the Caribbean, then Marcus Garvey and Garveyism cast a long shadow. By any standards Garvey's legacy is worthy of reflection. Reading Colin Grant's fine biography gave me pause for thought regarding Garvey and also the excuse to put those thoughts into a review for the OAC. Garvey was the leader of the largest black internationalist movement that has ever existed, but a movement of a unique kind. Most of the internationalisms of the Twentieth…

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I came across this demographic today. People in the Mid-West and the North West of the United States drink 'pop'. People who live in the South drink 'coke' and people on the West and East coasts drink 'soda'. Never having spent much time in the U.S. myself I wondered what this might mean. Of course, we have Tocqueville's…

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b01dvw70

This BBC radio documentary explores the narcocorrido (drug smuggling ballad) as a popular genre among Mexicans in the U.S. Denselow, the journalist points to the ambivalence of the the border in the Mexican imagination. He traces the background to 1848 when the U.S. effectively annexed half of the landmass of Mexico including California. Ballads of…

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During November PhD student Laura Obermuller witnessed events unfold at the Durban climate change talks.

This is cross-posted…

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A few days ago I read an article in the Observer saying that Britain's right wing prime minister, David Cameron, had based one of his core ideas - 'The Big Society' - on Ernst Shumacher's book Small is Beautiful (truthfully nobody knows if the BS is an 'idea' or even what it means). The newsmedia also informs us that the government is trying to change the academic research…

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There is a lot of snow in St Andrews today as there has been for more than a week. There is also an unusual level of commotion. The University of St Andrews is a very conservative institution. It was (arguably) established by a papal bull of the last 'Babylonian' Pope, Benedict XIII, in 1413. There is no train line to St Andrews: the town with its ruined cathedral sits on the tip of a peninsula of the Eastern Scottish coast; perched on a cliff looking out over the North Sea. The heir to the… Continue

04-11-10

Here in Kingston everyone is waiting for tropical storm Tomas, the supposedly softer gentler brother of Nicole, to blow in today and tomorrow. As I write, in the University of the West Indies library, staff are beginning to secure the computers from water damage. As if it hadn't had enough it looks like Haiti will take the brunt of the weather: people in relocation camps - tents hardly equipped for the expected deluge.



My fieldwork site covers two sides of a valley… Continue

'Extraterritoriality' has legal usage as the state of being exempt from local law. Some years ago I used 'extraterritoriality' to describe another, imaginative, state of exemption - how ordinary Jamaicans told adventure stories about personal transport out of social-political conditions on the island. Those stories were shaped by the actual movements of friends and relatives to, especially, New York, London and Toronto. However, Jamaican social scientist Obika Gray has used the word in a…

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Consummatum est; it is done, finished, ended, consumed. The significance of endings and beginnings is old in anthropology. Van Gennep marshaled the logic adding to it an all important image – sure enough there can be no 'self' without beginnings and endings (or vice versa) - and the primary metaphor of end and initiation is a doorway or threshold (limen…

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We are offering fee waiver scholarships in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews.



These 3-year scholarships will be awarded in late April 2010 to PhD applicants

with outstanding research potential, to enable them to begin their research in

Social Anthropology at St Andrews from September 2010. We especially invite

applicants whose area of interest relates to… Continue