Anthropology of/in Circulation: The Future of Open Access and Scholarly Societies

In a conversation format, seven anthropologists with extensive expertise in new digital technologies, intellectual property, and journal publishing discuss issues related to open access, the anthropology of information circulation, and the future of scholarly societies. Among the topics discussed are current anthropological research on open source and open access; the effects of open access on traditional anthropological topics; the creation of community archives and new networking tools; potentially transformative uses of field notes and materials in new digital ecologies; the American Anthropological Association’s recent history with these issues, from the development of AnthroSource to its new publishing arrangement with Wiley-Blackwell; and the political economies of knowledge circulation more generally

From West Indies to East Indies: Archipelagic Interchanges

In this paper, I work to rethink notions of comparison and area studies by viewing my ethnographic work in Indonesia through the lens of theories developed by anthropologists working in the Caribbean region. In bringing 'East Indies' and 'West Indies' together in this way, I explore the possibility of reconfigured networks of citation, collaboration and interchange that might help anthropology respond in new ways to contemporary dynamics of globalisation. © 2006 Copyright Discipline of Anthropology and Sociology, The University of Western Australia

Digital methods for ethnography: analytical concepts for ethnographers exploring social media environments

The aim of this article is to introduce some analytical concepts suitable for ethnographers dealing with social media environments. As a result of the growth of social media, the Internet structure has become a very complex, fluid, and fragmented space. Within this space, it is not always possible to consider the 'classical' online community as the privileged field site for the ethnographer, in which s/he immerses him/herself. Differently, taking inspiration from some methodological principles of the Digital Methods paradigm, I suggest that the main task for the ethnographer moving across social media environments should not be exclusively that of identifying an online community to delve into but of mapping the practices through which Internet users and digital devices structure social formations around a focal object (e.g., a brand). In order to support the ethnographer in the mapping of social formations within social media environments, I propose five analytical concepts: community, public, crowd, self-presentation as a tool, and user as a device

Queer Asian Subjects: Transgressive Sexualities and Heteronormative Meanings

This special issue of Asian Studies Review explores comparatively the production and transformation of gender and sexual subjectivities across and beyond South and Southeast Asia. More specifically, papers in this special issue disclose the complex intersections of ethnicity, race, class, gender, religion and nationality through which sexual subjectivities are formed and subject positions inhabited within and across these regions. By tracing the transnational movement of people and the circulation of images and ideas, their appropriations and effects, the papers in this volume reveal mutable and multiple sexual subjectivities that are no longer fixed in place, even as state discourses, hegemonic meanings and individual actors work to attach specific meanings to particular bodies. In this special issue we ask, what are the effects of migration, forced and chosen, on forms and formulations of gender and sexuality for people's embodied and discursive entanglements? How do spatial and temporal, as well as religious, economic and political changes alter and foreclose some kinds of intimacies and subjectivities even as they open and enable others? What are the social and cultural processes through which heteronormativity is articulated, enforced, transgressed and challenged