An intervention by John Hawks on Savage Minds suggests that, while seminars are a common format for advanced undergraduate and graduate education, 

Seminar courses are often very poorly taught and professors routinely overrate the value of their sessions for students. 

I found myself agreeing with him. But putting that aside, what, I wonder,…

This interview with Carlo Rotella, Director of American Studies and Professor of English at Boston College, is a must-read for anthropologists who imagine themselves writing engaging ethnography. The following is a brief sample.

I’m allergic to abstraction. Especially in my first two books, I was telling the story of the transformation of urban America,…

The following is a slightly edited cross-posting from anthrodesign.

As I read this thread, I find myself wondering if some of the critical remarks about big data aren't a bit behind the curve. I am thinking in particular of Sam's remark that, 

The following comment is extracted from a conversation started by Mary Alice Scott's post "Paolo Freire, Critical Knowledge and Anthropological Mentoring" on Savage Minds. 

In Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism, the philosopher Stanley Cavell observes that conventional models of…

Cross posted from the Anthropology group on LinkedIn.

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One way to look at anthropology starts with the question, What would a science of humanity look like? It would, I am pretty sure, look a lot more like field geology as described by John McPhee in Annals of the Former World than classical mechanics. 



Another way to look at anthropology starts with the question, What have anthropologists…

Daniel Little's Understanding Society blog is a must for those with a serious interest in political, economic and sociological theory. His piece Rawls on a property-owning democracy should be of particular interest to those involved with Keith Hart's Human Economy project. 

This Guardian review of Michael Sandel's What Money Can't Buy:The Moral Limits of Markets should be of interest to economic anthropologists, especially those involved with Keith Hart's Human Economy project.

The following remarks are an edited version of something I just wrote on Savage Minds. The topic is method or, from my perspective, the lack thereof in interpretive anthropology.

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@Rex

I’ve never thought this was a problem related to cultural data or to anthropology’s method of interpreting it.

In this respect you are, I suspect, typical. You are quite correct to point to a

whole cottage industry in anthropology that worries…