6,182 research outputs found

    Legality, race, and inequality: An interview with Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz

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    Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz is an assistant professor of anthropology at Loyola UniversityChicago. Her 2011 book, Labor and Legality, explores the work and social lives ofundocumented busboys in Chicago. Since 2011, Gomberg-Muñoz has been conductingethnographic research with mixed status couples as they go through the process oflegalization; a book manuscript based on that research is in the works

    Savage Minds Interview: Sarah Kendzior

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    Sarah Kendzior is a writer for Al Jazeera English. She has a PhD in cultural anthropology from Washington University and researches the political effects of digital media in the former USSR. You can find her work at sarahkendzior.com,and on Twitter: @sarahkendzio

    Opening Anthropology: An Interview with Keith Hart at Savage Minds

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    This interview is part of an ongoing series about open access (OA), publishing,communication, and anthropology. The first interview in this series was with Jason Baird Jackson. The second interview was with Tom Boellstorff. The third installment of this OA series is with Keith Hart (See Part 1, Part 2,and Part 3on Savage Minds). Full text also posted onThe Memory Bank

    Anthropology & Open Access: An Interview with Jason Baird Jackson

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    During the last few weeks I had the chance to conduct an email based interview with Jason Baird Jackson about Open Access (OA), academic publishing, and anthropology..

    Publishing without Perishing: Sharing Ideas & Challenging the Closed System of Academic Anthropology

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    Why do we publish anthropology? Do we publish to communicate our ideas, or to move up the ranks of academia? We all know the basic narrative: In order to land a job and move up the socio-economic ladder of academicanthropology, we all need to publish. As the saying goes: publish or perish. So everyone — from graduate students onward — joins in and perpetuates this particular academic habitus. But is the current system working? We may all be publishing (or working toward it), but that does not mean that we have really avoided the “perish” part of the equation. The problem, as Harry Wolcott pointed out almost two decades ago, is that we are stuck in an insular, closed system. Our current publication regime is primarily geared toward internal conversations and our own political economies. We are, in essence, talking to ourselves. We keep our conversations separated from wider audiences through habit, and also via a slew of self-imposed barriers (journal articles closed off through pay walls, writing style, overall use of media). This paper is about rethinking not only why we publish, but also how we publish. The goal is not to dismiss the importance of traditional venues for publication (books, journal articles, edited volumes), but instead to explore how we can start opening up and sharing our anthropological conversations with wider audiences through the creative use of a range of media-based tools and platforms

    Islands within an almost island: History, myth, and aislamiento in Baja California, Mexico

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    This paper examines the persistent histories and lasting effects of the Baja California peninsula\u27s status as an almost island. The peninsula is almost an island in so many ways. Its reputation as an island-like entity has also ben strengthened by a longstanding myth that it was, in fact, an actual island. In many senses it was an island - isolated, remote, difficult to envision, understand, and control. Geography and climate played a vital role in all of this, but so, too, did human imagination. The author uses the concept of shima, along with discussions about the dual meanings of the Spanish word aislamiento as a way to explore these issues. Aislamiento can refer more concretely to the effects of being on a landform surrounded by water, on the one hand, or the deep social and psychological effects of isolation. Ultimately, the author argues that it is this sense of isolation that works to produce, regardless of geographic and cartographic reality, a powerful sense of islandness

    Sustainability, ideology, and the politics of development in Cabo Pulmo, Baja California Sur, Mexico

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    Based upon twelve months of anthropological fieldwork in Cabo Pulmo, Baja California Sur, Mexico, this article uses political ecology and theoretical work on ideology to examine how local residents use the concept of sustainability to advocate for alternative visions of development. Conceptually, the idea of sustainability has a long, often conflicted history. As political ecologists have pointed out, sustainability can be everything from a tool of dominance and pacification to a strident defense of environment, place, and local rights. Between 2010 and 2012, the residents of Cabo Pulmo waged a campaign against a large-scale tourism development that was perceived as a threat to local livelihoods and environmental health. They deployed the concept of sustainability during this campaign, and afterwards, as a way to build local solidarity in the face of increasing development pressures. Sustainability works as a temporary ideological tool that transcends internal disputes during intense conflicts over the meaning of development

    Anthropology and Open Access

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    While still largely ignored by many anthropologists, open access (OA) has been a confusing and volatile center around which a wide range of contentious debates and vexing leadership dilemmas orbit. Despite widespread misunderstandings and honest differences of perspective on how and why to move forward, OA frameworks for scholarly communication are now part of the publishing ecology in which all active anthropologists work. Cultural Anthropology is unambiguously a leading journal in the field. The move to transition it toward a gold OA model represents a milestone for the iterative transformation of how cultural anthropologists, along with diverse fellow travelers, communicate more ethically and sustainably with global and diverse publics. On the occasion of this significant shift, we build on the history of OA debates, position statements, and experiments taking place during the past decade to do three things. Using an interview format, we will offer a primer on OA practices in general and in cultural anthropology in particular. In doing so, we aim to highlight some of the special considerations that have animated arguments for OA in cultural anthropology and in neighboring fields built around ethnographic methods and representations. We then argue briefly for a critical anthropology of scholarly communication (including scholarly publishing), one that brings the kinds of engaged analysis for which Cultural Anthropology is particularly well known to bear on this vital aspect of knowledge production, circulation, and valuation. Our field’s distinctive knowledge of social, cultural, political, and economic phenomena should also—but often has not—inform our choices as both global actors and publishing scholars

    Savage Minds Interview: Kristina Killgrove

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    Kristina Killgrove is a biological anthropologist at the University of West Florida. Her research focuses on theorizing migration in antiquity and on understanding urban development and collapse through the analysis of human skeletal remains. She works primarily in the classical world, attempting to learn about the daily lives of the lower classes in Imperial Rome through osteological and biochemical analyses, but she has also worked on questions of population interaction in the contact-period southeastern U.S.and in Medieval Germany. A strong commitment to interdisciplinary research and teaching help her bridge the sometimes large divide between classics and anthropology.For more about Killgrove\u27s work, check out her website or blog ,email her ([email protected]), or follow her on twitter (@DrKillgrove)

    Opening our anthropological conversations: An Interview with Tom Boellstorff

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    I had the chance to conduct an email-based interview with Tom Boellstorff during this past month to explore some of his views about Open Access (hereafter OA) publishing in anthropology. Ryan Anderson: First of all, thanks for taking the time to do this interview, Tom. Here at Savage Minds we write about Open Access (OA) a lot, and many of our contributors seem to be in agreement about the need to look into alternative publishing options. But not everyone knows about OA or is in agreement with the push to head in that direction, and this includes many people who are well established in anthropology. So, what‘s your opinion about OA? Is this an issue that should matter for anthropologists who are already successful within the current publishing regime, for example
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