Last December, I was asked an interesting question on Twitter: “How much poop is on the moon?” After a quick, panicky, existential reevaluation centered on whether my mountain of student loan...
https://savageminds.org/2017/07/13/shitting-in-space-engagements-with-cosmic-taboo/
Sometimes you think that a topic would be interesting to research, but don’t have time to do it yourself. I figure that this is exactly what blogs were invented for. So, without further ado, he...
One of the things a good book does is to show you patterns which you start seeing everywhere. David Graeber’s Debt is one of those books. Right now I’m enjoying listing to the Moby Dick Big R...
https://savageminds.org/2012/10/30/moby-debt-thoughts-on-debt/
I was living in the Kansai area of Japan a year after the release of Sen Masao’s 1977 enka ballad Kitaguni no Haru, “Spring in the North Country.” It blasted through speakers in shōtengai ...
https://savageminds.org/2012/09/17/that-old-hometown-motif-might-be-a-real-place/
In the 1990s when I shifted my research focus away from business interactions in Japan to the beauty industry, I was criticized by some anthropology colleagues, especially male ones and the arche...
https://savageminds.org/2012/09/17/trivializing-the-girl-stuff/
Chinese is a hard language to learn, and I’m the first to admit that I have a long way still to go. But for the past six years I’ve been teaching in Chinese and so I’ve achieved a certain d...
https://savageminds.org/2012/09/03/seven-ways-to-talk-to-a-white-man/
Ever since it opened in 2006, I’ve wanted to visit the Musée du quai Branly (MQB) in Paris, which “contains the collections of the now-closed Musée national des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océ...
https://savageminds.org/2012/07/01/les-maitres-du-desordre-vs-les-maitres-fous/
Rex’s last post reminds me that I’ve been meaning to write about one of the most fascinating science fiction worlds I’ve come across in a long time. I’m talking about The Culture novels o...
https://savageminds.org/2012/05/14/special-circumstances-vs-the-dorthraki/
I was watching Star Trek the other day (Enterprise season 4) when the crew of the Enterprise met yet another highly advanced alien species. Not just ‘faster warp drives’ or ‘bigger weapons�...
https://savageminds.org/2012/05/14/highly-advanced-alien-species/
I want to begin by applauding the New York Times and Danny Hakim for devoting considerable energies to their … Continue reading Valuing Life, Death, and Disability: Sorting People in the New Y...
I keep returning to the public sphere as Habermas originally described it as I think about progressive political movements of today: Occupy Wall Street and its global dimensions, Anonymous and it...
https://savageminds.org/2011/10/30/the-public-sphere-of-occupy-wall-street/
Here in Taiwan it’s time for the annual Dragon Boat Festival (Duānwǔ Jié 端午節), which also happens to be a school holiday. The traditional story of this festival is well summarized by W...
Regular readers of my twitter stream probably know that I am the father of twin boys who are now crawling all over me and everything I own. I don’t generally blog about my family since I feel i...
https://savageminds.org/2011/01/23/children-as-animals-in-american-culture/
The dust storm kicked up over the dropping of the word “science” from the introduction to an internal long-range planning document reminded us that there are still a lot of anthropologists wh...
Here is a guest blog by Ashley Mears, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston University: Why Thin is Still In In her new documentary, Picture Me, Columbia University student Sara Ziff chron...