[terms]
Index of posts [term_name]
- about ethnoethnography (February 13, 2025)
I am always viscerally skeptical of fads in anthropology. Often, they disappear after only a few years, or move back into obscurity (“ontology”?) and I can ignore them. Others, like “identity” become mainstream and take over the discipline—as I discovered while playing “session roulette” at the AAA meetings over the…
- powerful representations of a culture (December 6, 2024)
[this was drafted in August 2024 but could not be posted at the time] « Un spectacle extraordinaire, unique au monde et dans l’histoire des Jeux qui, je crois, a rendu nos compatriotes extrêmement fiers. » Emmanuel Macron ne tarit pas d’éloges sur la cérémonie d’ouverture des Jeux olympiques de…
- The ultimate ignorant school master? (November 9, 2024)
[ORIGINALLY POSTED ON FEBRUARY 17, 2024] One of our doctoral students, Ms. Mako Miura, recently challenged me with a question I had never entertained. We were discussing Jean Lave’s model for learning through participation (1991). We were focusing on some of the examples Lave mentions that point to the asymmetry…
- Barbie and their people (November 9, 2024)
[ORIGINALLY POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 3, 2023] I would probably not have gone to see Barbie (the movie) if I had not read so much about it over the past few weeks. So, here is another take, including a take on the takes. In brief, I was entertained by what might…
- Race Consciousness, Racism (and race?): Contradictions with consequences (culture!) (July 28, 2023)
From the time when I played “les coboilles et les indiens,” 70 years ago, in the streets of small Southern village, I have experienced something, that is, precisely, a “thing” that stood in my way, that I could play with, or fear. This was called “America” by French politicians (etc)…
- The end of Corona (May 6, 2023)
I first mused about the end of the Corona epoch (a.k.a “COVID-19") two years ago. I did it again a year ago. In both cases I took into account both my (lived?) experience in the various polities I usually and more or less regularly inhabit (family, church, shops, university), as…
- While crossing Manhattan on 14th Street (February 6, 2023)
Half a century ago, when I searched for a catchy title for the book building on my dissertation (1972), I came up up with Americans Together (1978). I am not sure what I then meant by “Americans”—though I am sure that, from the time when I proposed the research (in…
- on pattern recognition by humans and machines (September 19, 2022)
September 16, 2022 “Pattern recognition”: inevitable though fragile (and necessarily dis-...ing?) productions on which to base some future action---or not. Two recent pieces in the New York Times triggered my anthropological imagination. The first is an enthusiastic review of recent developments in “Artificial Intelligence” (“We Need to Talk About How…
- on the grounds of instruction into grammaticality (July 12, 2022)
... scholars and other shamans might be as puzzled as two senior professors when they read the title of an edited volume by de Oliveira et al. It goes: Multiliteracies in English as an additional language classrooms (2021). As members of the audience addressed by this volume, they wondered whether…
- Experiencing life and constructing a local “next” (June 13, 2022)
If a “lived experience” is one that one has, personally, experienced, then I have never experienced COVID (the virus). I have experienced Corona (the cultural epoch) but, to the extent that I have never been sick from the virus, and have not even ever tested positive (so far?), then the…