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

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

Online Gaming Can Make a Better World: Jane McGonigal

With personal feelings put aside and sociological theoretical depictions brought to the forefront, it is interesting to compare some of Jane\u27s ideas with that of both Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. The theorist who stood out right away, being exemplified through Jane\u27s positive attitude claims on a much larger, macro-level scale, was Emile Durkheim. Jane\u27s ideas about transcending human\u27s as a resource through the social fabrics of gaming into something that might solve world hunger, poverty, and global warming was nothing short of functionalism at it\u27s best. Jane\u27s platform for social structure and maintaining positive social order is the online world, and online gaming is the vehicle for change

Savage Minds Interview: Sarah Kendzior

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

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

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..

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

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

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

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

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