“She likes it in here,” he said. “Sometimes I have to catch the eggs so they don’t roll onto the floor.”
Author: Ian Pollock
Ep #46 Reconfigurable: Elanor Huntington talks engineering, anthropology, & how we’re making our world
“Not only do we need engineers working alongside anthropologists to do good quality engineering, I also think that we need to do an anthropology of engineers… Engineers are making our world, right? And, the way that we, as engineers, think collectively, behave collectively, what we consider to be important... I think somebody should be watching … Continue reading Ep #46 Reconfigurable: Elanor Huntington talks engineering, anthropology, & how we’re making our world
Ep. #30 Bringing your heart home: Tiffany Cain talks Tihosuco identity and heritage projects
"Especially when you’re dealing with questions of representation of the past, politics around the past, especially when you’re dealing with not just the past, but a violent past, right, it’s ethically irresponsible to not recognise your own position in that conversation, in that space. And that doesn’t mean that you necessarily take sides, but I … Continue reading Ep. #30 Bringing your heart home: Tiffany Cain talks Tihosuco identity and heritage projects
Participant Observation from a First-Timer at the AAA Conference 2018, San Jose
This first experience of a really big conference makes me want to go to smaller conferences, where it would be easier to find the people who share my own interests. But it also makes me want to engage with AAA more as an institution. Why isn’t there an interest group for anthropology communications?
Anthrocasts: some things I learned starting an anthropology podcast
If you can, cultivate relationships with some people who will give you honest feedback, always make it clear to your listeners that you welcome their point of view, and try to guess before you publish something what the worst criticisms of it might be.
When the world invades “the field:” emotion, introspection, and ethnography
It’s been years since anthropology set aside the fantasy of “the field” -- a bounded research site, where the locals, and the researcher studying them, are insulated from events in the wider world. But assumptions about “the field,” and what doing fieldwork will be like, are hard to shake. I knew full well, when I … Continue reading When the world invades “the field:” emotion, introspection, and ethnography
How academic culture gives us permission not to know
Every way of knowing is also a way of not knowing. Privileging one point of view, or one form of evidence, requires the erasure of other ways of perceiving and understanding the world. What do our cultures give us permission not to know? By what means are we permitted to blinker ourselves? And do our cultures ever encourage us to see those truths again?
Single Shot: War Games
In this case, I caught a brief moment of anticipation: a troop of men walking single file through the forest, carrying fresh-cut throwing staves called bhole, preparing to raid the villages of their friends and neighbors and steal away their chickens and produce.
Ep. #15 Designing agency: Vijayendra Rao talks development, anthropology, and making social change
Vijayendra Rao, the lead economist at the World Bank in the research department, talks to our own Ian Pollock about the role that anthropology and ethnography could play in helping poor or disempowered people engage with powerful institutions.
Saying No to the CIA… and Other Anth Fantasies
It doesn’t go without saying, so I’ll say it: I’ve never worked for the CIA, or done any intelligence or security work of any kind, nor would I. But all through my years living abroad, in Indonesia and Australia, I harbored a secret fantasy, that maybe, one day, I would be tapped.
The Familiar Strange 