[terms]
Index of posts
- research as conversation with ancestors and peers (December 1, 2025)
This is a development on a series of blogs on what Ray McDermott once called "reply anthropology" For some years, I have started the required initial course in a doctoral…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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”…
- 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…
- 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…
- Corona as culture (April 8, 2020)
Corona is neither simply juxtaposed to nor simply superposed over COVID-19. In a way, Corona substitutes itself to COVID-19, in another way Corona uses and transforms COVID-19 to realize a…
- on “Hervé Varenne” as object with properties and affordances (January 25, 2020)
This is going to get complex fast, and will take several posts. This is also a development on my last post (1/3/2020) and on earlier others ("On Identity"). It is…
- A warning to apprentice anthropologists: on “identity” in the New York Times (January 3, 2020)
The New York Times is a major adult education institution in the United States. Mostly it educates implicitly but, quite regularly, it gives mini-lectures, in the style of encyclopedia entries.…