"MY LIFE AS A SPY: INVESTIGATIONS IN A SECRET POLICE FILE by Katherine VerderyDuke University Press Books, 344 pp., $27.95"

Eric Raymond reviews Coding Freedom by Gabriella Coleman

"AGAINST THE GRAIN: A DEEP HISTORY OF THE EARLIEST STATES by James C. ScottYale University Press, 336 pp., $26.00"

"In this paper we study the differences in historical worldview between Western and Eastern cultures, represented through the English, Chinese, Japanese, and German Wikipedia. In particular, we analyze the historical networks of the World's leaders since the beginning of written history, comparing them in the four different Wikipedias. "

Sound artist at the Harvard Sensor Ethnography Lab.

"Human Organization is the journal of the Society for Applied Anthropology and the leading peer reviewed outlet for scholarship in the applied social sciences. The journal advances SfAA's mission through publishing articles that advance, synthesize, and interpret the application of anthropological method and theory to the analysis and solution of practical problems in the contemporary world. Human Organization publishes articles dealing with all areas of applied social science. In addition to those reporting on original research, the journal publishes articles detailing innovative methodological and engaged research practices."

Discussion of controversy on Alice Goffman book.

"Time is divided by geologists according to marked shifts in Earth’s state. Recent global environmental changes suggest that Earth may have entered a new human-dominated geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Here we review the historical genesis of the idea and assess anthropogenic signatures in the geological record against the formal requirements for the recognition of a new epoch. The evidence suggests that of the various proposed dates two do appear to conform to the criteria to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene: 1610 and 1964. The formal establishment of an Anthropocene Epoch would mark a fundamental change in the relationship between humans and the Earth system."

"In the latest twist in an unusually public academic dispute, one of the world’s most influential and highly regarded anthropologists resigned in protest from the prestigious National Academy of Sciences in late February. In quitting the academy, Marshall Sahlins took aim in part at the work of fellow anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, whose contentious memoir, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—The Yanamamö and the Anthropologists, was recently published by Simon & Schuster. But his action is also a skirmish in a much longer and very important debate over what it means to be human—a debate with consequences for the broader public discussion."

"Margaret Mead saw in Samoa the possibility of loosening social strictures on sexuality -- something she suggested could lead to more pleasure, and less pain and suffering. She and her work were attacked and discredited, but nearly a century later, questions of the motives and integrity of her dissenters remain relevant."

"With “The World Until Yesterday,” polymath and best-selling writer Jared Diamond is back with a sweeping and potentially controversial new work that aims to show readers what is missing from modern life."

"T. M. Luhrmann tries to explain in her new book, “When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God” (Knopf). "

Introduction to a journal issue on finance and anthropology.

Discussion of Debt by Graeber.

Review of Debt: The first 5000 years by David Graeber Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/debt-the-first-500-pages/

"There are two competing hypotheses for the origin of the Indo-European language family. The conventional view places the homeland in the Pontic steppes about 6000 years ago. An alternative hypothesis claims that the languages spread from Anatolia with the expansion of farming 8000 to 9500 years ago. We used Bayesian phylogeographic approaches, together with basic vocabulary data from 103 ancient and contemporary Indo-European languages, to explicitly model the expansion of the family and test these hypotheses. We found decisive support for an Anatolian origin over a steppe origin. Both the inferred timing and root location of the Indo-European language trees fit with an agricultural expansion from Anatolia beginning 8000 to 9500 years ago. These results highlight the critical role that phylogeographic inference can play in resolving debates about human prehistory."

"Recent studies have shown strong temporal correlations between past climate changes and societal crises. However, the specific causal mechanisms underlying this relation have not been addressed. We explored quantitative responses of 14 fine-grained agro-ecological, socioeconomic, and demographic variables to climate fluctuations from A.D. 1500–1800 in Europe."

"Historical collapse of ancient states poses intriguing social-ecological questions, as well as potential applications to global change and contemporary strategies for sustainability. Five Old World case studies are developed to identify interactive inputs, triggers, and feedbacks in devolution. Collapse is multicausal and rarely abrupt."

"Well, it’s not too complicated: My Life As A Night Elf Priest by Bonnie Nardi is the best ethnography of World of Warcraft out there. And that’s not likely to change soon." Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http://savageminds.org/2012/07/19/my-life-as-a-night-elf-priest/

"Getting back to ideology, then, Geertz supposed that it was a template for understanding and action at times when existing templates had failed, “where institutionalized guides for behavior, thought, or feeling are weak or absent” (63). It could certainly be negative and pathological, but it might also be inevitable, and, indeed, positive in times of social and political uncertainty."

"Geertz divided diagnostic accounts of ideology into the “interest” theory and the “strain” theory"

"And yet: human beings (not just economists), when called upon to explain how society works, have a strange tendency to reach first for efficient market hypotheses, and to hold on like grim death. Natural or even cosmic orders of orderly payback. That’s the ticket. We are ‘in debt’ to the gods, or our parents, or society. Graeber is quick to point out the inadequacies of these metaphors." Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http://crookedtimber.org/2012/03/03/belated-debt-post-ancient-efficient-markets-hypotheses

"We hypothesize, therefore, that the spread of socioeconomic stratification may have been a result of cultural change via demic diffusion. In other words, socioeconomic stratification may have spread across the globe over the past several thousand years, not because it provided apparent advantages that led to its adoption by egalitarian cultures, but simply because it altered demographic outcomes in ways that produced an increase in frequency of stratified populations, through population expansion or the outward migration of populations in search of additional territory and resources."

David Graeber talked about the history of debt and its impact in the world over thousands of years. During this event from Melville House Bookstore in Brooklyn, New York, Professor Graeber was interviewed by Doug Henwood, author of Wall Street and After the New Economy. Professor Graeber also responded to questions from members of the audience.

"What does it mean that people are inclined to think of the federal budget in the subjunctive, as if it were like the budget of a typical household? What “work” does it do for the people who espouse it?"

"The notion of interpreter is equally straightforward: in an era of increasing specialization, the world needs generalists who can connect increasingly isolated spheres of research in order to make sure they can talk to one another. Philosophy’s ability to synthesize and generalize about different strands of work enable it, Habermas claims, to help connect the arts and the sciences, literature and biology, logic and experimentalism.

How would anthropology work as stand-in and interpreter? "

"Still, I wonder why there isn’t more of a conversation between anthropologists and economists. Especially considering our overlapping interests. So why is there such a chasm between the two disciplines? Is it because our ways of thinking about and analyzing human nature are soooooo different that there is no room for dialog, or what?"

"In “The Place of the Internet in Anthropology” (in the March 2011 issue of Anthropology News), UCLA PhD student Adam Fish addresses the popular myth of the internet as both intangible and globally unifying."

"My research focuses on disasters. I have conducted in –depth research on several major disasters including Love Canal, the Exxon-Valdez oil spill, the 1993 Mississippi Flood, the Hanta Virus outbreak of 1993, ground water contamination in Woburn, MA, and Hurricane Katrina. I am presently conducting research on the TVA ash spill in Kingston, TN. My research on disasters has focused on several different aspects of these events: environmental health, scientific uncertainty, disaster mitigation response and preparedness, disaster policy, long-term recovery, clean-up efforts, human rights, environmental justice, displacement, economic dislocation, crisis communication in extreme events, public health, bioterrorism, community response efforts, and the dichotomy between lay and expert opinion. I am currently finishing a book on unnatural disasters. My courses include: disasters, environmental health, bioterrorism

Comments discuss the place of Marx in anthropology and social sciences.

"Rather than tracing the paths of particular forms (messaging to wikis and blogging to tag-clouds and aggregators), or looking at convergence and transmediation, or the popular proliferation of geek culture, as I do elsewhere, I want to talk more generally about three trends in “social media” that were significant in my mid-1990s fieldwork and have only become more pronounced since."... 3 components - short form, configurability/control, and presence casting.

@JohnPostill (Twitter)

I am an anthropologist (PhD UCL) specialising in the study of media. Currently I am Senior Lecturer in Media at Sheffield Hallam University and a Fellow of the Digital Anthropology Programme, University College London (UCL).

"Gentlemen and Amazons traces the nineteenth-century genesis and development of an important contemporary myth about human origins: that of an original prehistoric matriarchy. Cynthia Eller explores the intellectual history of the myth, which arose from male scholars who mostly wanted to vindicate the patriarchal family model as a higher stage of human development. Eller tells the stories these men told, analyzes the gendered assumptions they made, and provides the necessary context for understanding how feminists of the 1970s and 1980s embraced as historical “fact” a discredited nineteenth-century idea."

"The Zodiac of Paris tells the story of this incredible archeological find and its unlikely role in the fierce disputes over science and faith in Napoleonic and Restoration France.

The book unfolds against the turbulence of the French Revolution, Napoleon's breathtaking rise and fall, and the restoration of the Bourbons to the throne. Drawing on newspapers, journals, diaries, pamphlets, and other documentary evidence, Jed Buchwald and Diane Greco Josefowicz show how scientists and intellectuals seized upon the zodiac to discredit Christianity, and how this drew furious responses from conservatives and sparked debates about the merits of scientific calculation as a source of knowledge about the past. "

"Throughout his career — for instance in his classic short piece ‘The Study of Geography’ — Boas made a distinction between not between the ‘natural sciences’ and the ‘interpretive sciences’ but rather between generalizing sciences (which study things that happen over and over again, like gravity) and the ‘historical sciences’ (which study things which happen just once in history, like the Battle of Hastings). "

The most recent edition of Behavioral and Brain Sciences carries a remarkable review article by Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan, ‘The weirdest people in the world?’ The article outlines two central propositions; first, that most behavioural science theory is built upon research that examines intensely a narrow sample of human variation (disproportionately US university undergraduates who are, as the authors write, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, or ‘WEIRD’).

More controversially, the authors go on to argue that, where there is robust cross-cultural research, WEIRD subjects tend to be outliers on a range of measurable traits that do vary, including visual perception, sense of fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, and a host of other basic psychological traits. They don’t ignore universals – discussing them in several places – but they do highlight human variation and its implications for psychological theory.

Cultural transmission arguably plays an important role in the determination of many fundamental preference traits (e.g., discounting, risk aversion and altruism) and most cultural traits, social norms, and ideological tenets ( e.g., attitudes towards family and fertility practices, and attitudes in the job market). It is, however, the pervasive evidence of the resilience of ethnic and religious traits across generations that motivates a large fraction of the theoretical and empirical literature on cultural transmission. This article reviews the main contributions of models of cultural transmission, from theoretical and empirical perspectives. It presents their implications regarding the long-run population dynamics of cultural traits and cultural heterogeneity, the world's geographical fragmentation by ethic and religious traits, at any given time.

Now it’s done so well every day that we don’t even think about it. But modern sanitation systems are actually really well thought-out, complex structures. When it’s not done -- say, when sanitation workers miss a pick-up even for one day -- it’s unusual enough that people get really upset, as they should. But it’s like that Buddhist saying about housework -- it’s invisible because you only notice when it’s not done. So I’m not saying san men should be called heroes, necessarily, but it wouldn’t hurt to appreciate them a little more.

How do people think about time? Here we describe representations of time in Pormpuraaw, a remote Australian Aboriginal community. Pormpuraawans’ representations of time differ strikingly from all others documented to date. Previously, people have been shown to represent time spatially from left to right or right to left, or from front to back or back to front. All of these representations are with respect to the body. Pormpuraawans instead arrange time according to cardinal directions: east to west. That is, time flows from left to right when one is facing south, from right to left when one is facing north, toward the body when one is facing east, and away from the body when one is facing west. These findings reveal a qualitatively different set of representations of time, with time organized in a coordinate frame that is independent from others reported previously. The results demonstrate that conceptions of even such fundamental domains as time can differ dramatically across cultures