Daniel at Neuranthropology has launched a Best of Antropology blogging initiative.  Personally, I think it is an excellent idea, and I really like Alexandre’s  idea of creating an anthology of them.

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The many woes of the HTS, at least the public casting and presentation of them, have been ably collated by my colleague Max Forte at Open Anthropology (e.g. here, here and here amongst many other places).  What truly bothers me, in addition to Pravda being considered as a reputable publisher < rolleyes>, is that the [...]

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For over a month, now I have been wresting with ideas about education, training and ethics.  Last night, I received an email from a student asking me if we could have an extra class added into my course in applied epistemology so that everyone who is presenting could have more time for their presentations.  In [...]

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This past weekend, I was down in Kingston at the biennial IUS Canada conference presenting a paper on the use of ethnographic knowledge in Romano-Byzantine military PME (Professional Military Education) as part of a larger session on “Educating for Cultural Awareness” organized by John Hawkins.  It was an interesting session in a lot of ways, [...]

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Note: This is a very difficult post for me to write.  The difficulty doesn’t lie with the subject area but, rather, in what language I will have to use in order to try and communicate my thoughts on the topic.
One of the axiomatic assumptions that professions, as a group, seem to hold is a taken-for-granted [...]

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One of the nice things about being a pessimistic romantic is that one can still have a sense of wonder about everyday things.  That sense of wonder kicked in again today upon reading a very nice, plain English exposition by Cobalt on why Anthropologists working with the US military can be unethical (actual, “a dick”; [...]

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“The question comes down to how we can as artists make the case to Canadians that the arts deserves healthy vigorous funding,” S. Randy Boyagoda, a novelist and a professor of literature based at Ryerson University, said on Thursday.
Source CBC.ca
Canada seems to have a love-hate relationship with the Arts.  On the one hand, certain arts [...]

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One of the more interesting ethical problems in the Anthropologists cannon is the question of when you are required to lie.  For me, it is not only three particular question of when you must lie but, in reality, the perceptual assumptions that structure that “ethical” injunction.  This wasn’t much of a problem for me in [...]

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One of the things I was trying to do with my Notes towards a Theory of Asymmetric Warfare posts was to broaden the notion of “conflict” to that of “competition”.  I feel that this is important to do for a number of reasons including, but certainly not limited to, the fact that people tend to [...]

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One of the more fascinating things about the way humans seem to work is that we will frequently do pretty much the same thing while changing the labels and conveniently forgetting that we did it before. We seem to have “default” processes for a number of things including myth. For Anthropologists, “myth” doesn’t [...]

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