The following quotes come from John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez (co-written, supposedly, with Ed Ricketts, but he is not credited on my edition): “… the Mexican sierra has ‘XVII-15-IX’ spines in the dorsal fin. These can easily be counted. But if the sierra strikes hard on the line so that our [...]
The fundamental idea behind ontological constructivism is – as the name suggests – that reality itself is constructed. That is, reality itself is historical and contingent – could always have been and could always be otherwise. This is a key lesson, I think, of emerging evolutionary theory and post-quantum physics, but also of contemporary social [...]
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Recently, I’ve been closely following the discussion on several blogs about whether or not ideas count as things, objects, etc. See Adam’s two-part post (here and here) for an excellent summary of what’s been said so far. After thinking a bit about it, I feel as though I can weigh in with some hopefully useful [...]
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Last week I wrote an exam on the topic of the anthropology of environmental knowledge, broadly defined. This included sections on both traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and scientific knowledge about the environment, and it also involved thinking about ways of reconciling them as they often conflict with one another. I have yet to see my [...]
Today I’m reading the chapter from Helmreich’s Alien Ocean on aquatic invasive species (AIS) in Hawaii. In the chapter, he discusses the politically charged climate in which the issue of invasive species has become entangled in Hawaii. At stake is the definition of “native” versus “alien” in a place where to be “native” carries a [...]
This past weekend, I finished writing and submitted an article for the 2012 Culture and Agriculture Netting Award. The process of writing this article up resulted in a fair amount of self reflection with regard to my theoretical approach. In fact, it went so far as to make me wonder about the purpose of theory [...]
In the comments to my recent post on Techno-Pedagogy, Jenny makes a very good point: The point of Anthropology is to engage with the world, and neglecting the progress of technology and the interest and NEEDS of one’s students, makes an anthropologist–in my opinion–hardly an anthropologist at all. This is something that I’ve written briefly [...]
On the train ride home from Connecticut this weekend, I was finally able to put some time in and finish reading Isabelle Stenger’s Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell. I was going to write a whole synopsis of the book with commentary, but Adam Robbert has posted a link to a review that does that work [...]
I situate myself squarely within what has been characterized by some as an ontological turn in anthropology (though, it’s difficult to say if it deserves the moniker “turn” since few have actually taken it up as of yet). For the past few decades, anthropologists (and philosophers and sociologists, and others) have concerned themselves primarily with [...]
