Let’s give it up for the AAA blog
I’d like to think the reason I am so critical of our professional organization is not that I am some sort of curmudgeon, but because it so often fails to get anything right. In the spirit of giving credit where credit is due, therefore, I think it is high time that we give it up for the American Anthropological Association’s ‘new’ blog: The AAA Blog. After an initial proliferation of blogs—I think the AAA created a separate blog for each post it wanted to make—the new consolidated blog has really gotten off the ground. The blog manages to balance  institutional boilerplate with more heartfelt commemoration of even

Language and the Media in Fort Hood
Below is an occasional post by Zoë H. Wool. Zoe is a doctoral candidate in socio-cultural and linguistic anthropology at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation is titled Emergent Ordinaries at Walter Reed Army Medical Center: An ethnography of extra/ordinary encounter. It focuses on the dialectic of the ordinary and extraordinary in the lives of soldiers who are marked by violence. There is much to be said, and felt, about the shootings at Ft Hood on November 5th. As a socio-cultural and linguistic anthropologist whose dissertation fieldwork was on a military base (I worked mostly at Walter Reed wi

House Cleaning
A few links to clean out my inbox: I’ve put together a couple of anthropology 2.0 resources. The first is a Twitter list of anthropologists on Twitter. The second is a .Collected list of anthropology blogs. Sort of a mash-up blog of anthropology blogs. You can suggest additional blogs directly via the .Collected interface. If you want to be added to the list of anthropologists on twitter, let me know by sending a tweet to @kerim. The AAA has discovered the power of having a Twitter backchannel at th

Vale Dell Hymes
As Kerim noted, Dell Hymes passed away. My connection to Hymes is tangential—mostly the odd personal connections that come with the small world of academics—and others will be able to memorialize him better than I. The passing of Hymes and Lévi-Strauss so closely together is sad but also offers a time for us to reflect on these academics, their legacies, and their different personal style. Lévi-Strauss loved culture and, at times, seemed almost traumatized that he was forced to study people in order to get at it. Hymes’s writings are equally scrupulous, but deeply honor human life and are dedicated to finding the beauty and complexity in the ephemeral moments of our s

Dell Hymes (1927-2009)
I woke up this morning to receive the following notice in my inbox: Last Friday our distinguished colleague Dell Hymes passed away peacefully in his sleep. It hasn’t yet been reported in the newspapers, but Jason Baird Jackson has a post speaking to Hymes’ contribution in the fields of anthropology and folklore: Dell Hymes was a amazingly influential folklorist, anthropologist, and linguist who revolutionized the study of language in (/and) culture in general, and of Native American narrative traditions in particular. He made important contributions to