I had come across in the net a paper of my dear professor: Multi-sited Ethnography: Five or Six Things I Know About It Now By George E. Marcus. For those who are still inspired by the idea of multi-sited ethnography...
I have been in a weird laziness in not following anthropology blogs properly. So I had missed some of discussions already. Still let me try for one at least (!): Lorenz introduces a new book Plausible Prejudice: Everyday Experiences and Social Images of Nation, Culture and Race by Norwegian social anthropologist Marianne Gullestad and Kamriz Kamrani, first agrees M. Gullestad, and later declares that "Anthropology will never succeed until it clearly defines culture". This emphasis on definition is against all I know about social sciences. Not that I am for an all relativistic social science with no substance. But what I know is that an act of defining is part of a power struggle. And anthropology's lack of power in the contemporary political economy of academia does not reside in its definitional problems but somewhere else. In fact I am quiet optimistic about the discipline. Anthropologists are caving out new fields of studies and are challenging more and more other disciplines in that sense. I observe that there are increasing amount of efforts to reach for wider publics and to access for financial sources...
Finally, Lorenz pointed out an excellent issue: How To Present A Paper - or Can Anthropologists Talk? Thanks Lorenz. That's really a problem...
Anyway, here is a round up of some anthro discussions:
* Archaeology's role in nationalism and Iraqi nation building
* Anthropology and the Four Field Approach
* Four-Fields Again: Finding a Way to Make it Work
* Capacity for altruism emerges as early as 18 months in children
* Field musings, Part I: Learning a foreign language
* Anthropology as Identity or Practice?