ethnopoetics.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

"The comments often made by the culture-of-poverty theorists on the fatalism and resignation of the poor are strangely out of step with middle-class complaints about the impropriety of the means the black poor are using to express their anger with their situation and their demands for redress"

submitted 8 hours ago • 0 comments

You have to imagine that Kenneth Burke was quite proud of his daughter Eleanor Burke Leacock, a fine anthropologist who also saw anthropology as vital to contemporary issues, whether it was critiquing the spurious culture of poverty or E.O. Wilson's pseudoscience sociobiology

submitted 8 hours ago • 0 comments

Napoleon chagnon's Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes– The Yanomamö and the Anthropologists, often recommended by the "smart people" who write for the Atlantic, it's a lousy book, over the top, angry and paranoid, you learn very little about either anthropology or Yanomami

submitted 17 hours ago • 3 comments

Happy birthday Ishmael Reed, his Mumbo Jumbo is a brilliant novel; he was also the guiding force behind the creation of the American Book Awards; in 2022, a book I was involved in, The Diné Reader, was a winner of an American Book Award

submitted 17 hours ago • 0 comments

Morning reading, long title, but this is a wonderful article by Paul Kroskrity on the importance of lingual life histories to the understanding of changing language ideological assemblages, but also for the intimate human scale of much ethnography escholarship.org/uc/item/80p1...

submitted 18 hours ago • 0 comments

In honor of my late colleague Jonathan Hill, I'm revisiting his very fine ethnography of ritual chanting

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

Musee des Beaux Arts W. H. Auden About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

anyone here in Tucson, at #UniversityOfArizona for #InternationalMotherLanguageDay today? Come say 'hi' (but in your #language). Wherever you are, happy #IMLD2025 to you and yours

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

I read this book when I was young, I had largely forgotten about it, but was reminded of it when I saw that Richard Emerick had been a student of Loren Eisley's, and was reminded that there was an introduction to the book by Auden. Happy Birthday Mr Auden

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

Today in National Parks News The pushback from the idiotic firing of thousands of National Parks employees is having an effect. Keep calling Keep the pressure on 202 224 3121 www.latimes.com/california/s...

submitted 1 day ago • 41 comments

Happy world anthropology day! Read an ethnography (this is a pretty good one)

submitted 373 days ago • 0 comments

Apparently, I recommended Keith Basso's Wisdom Sits in Places last year on Anthropology Day, so today, instead, I'd recommend Julie Cruikshank's Life Lived Like a Story, a book that puts the voices of Yukon Native Elders at the forefront, and has some good stories too

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

I'd suspected this for years www.theguardian.com/environment/...

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Happy Anthropology Day to those who celebrate The first anthropology class I ever took was with Richard Emerick at UMaine, he brought a humanistic perspective to anthropology and that influence has long stayed with me

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

"Let us leave a king all alone to reflect on himself quite at leisure, without any gratification of the senses, without any care in his mind, without society; and we will see that a king without diversion is a man full of wretchedness."--Blaine Pascal, Pensées

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

We are going to need more poetry "The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient...I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive"--W.H Auden

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Tomorrow, I am told, is Anthropology Day, so in honor of such a day, here are two novels by Barbara Pym, Excellent Women and Less Than Angels, that are rather entertaining examinations of the doings of anthropologists

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Evening reading, the festschrift in honor of David Aberle, with chapters by Kathleen Gough and Joseph Jorgensen

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

"The old men say their fathers told them soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike."--Richard Jefferies, After London

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

"Such paralysis seems to afflict many anthropologists today in the presence of fascist threats...if, fortunately, it does not afflict all of them, that is because wherever fascism exists and reaction prevails, anthropologists are suspect"--Paul Radin

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

Meanwhile on Twitter, this guy is a dishonest grifter. He has no evidence that "100%" of academic anthropologists are "social activists" nor that they are all "pushing a strictly Marxist curriculum." He's an outrage merchant, and like all such merchants of hate and fear, he is dishonest.

submitted 5 days ago • 2 comments

At least one Navajo I know would say, no kidding. "Contact between Tanoan, and especially Tewa, with Apachean (Navajo, Apache varieties) suggests a much earlier arrival in the American Southwest of Apacheans (Athapaskan language family)."--David Leedom Shaul

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

Two things you don't see much of in Austin, snow and pine trees

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

One last hike before we hit the road

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

I have heard of Keith Basso and Ellen Basso, I've even heard of Hamilton Basso. I've never heard of this guy

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

My lantern has a fire setting and it may be the most pleasant setting of all

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

"Pro tip"

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

Yas (or zas)

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

I, like millions of kayakers, envy this man and the story he now has. Makes my story about the time a fish jumped in my kayak seem rather mundane. www.bbc.com/news/article...

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

Nothing highlights the anti-intellectualism of the pseudoscience evolutionary psychology quite so much as its dopey forays into "the Humanities." And pinker has never struck me as someone who reads anything interesting

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

It probably shouldn't seem surprising that there is and has been a long history of anti-intellectualism in this country. Recent attacks repeat older waves of fear mongering, they sometimes put it in new terms, sometimes not (Marxism seems still a potent slur).

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

Readings from my grad school days "The acculturation framework often presents native peoples as essentially passive, or at best unsuccessful; change is viewed not as resulting from resourceful and creative acts or choices but as capitulation to pressures from the wider society"--Loretta Fowler

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

Seems a good reason to skip AAA next year

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

Evening reading

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

"Comanches like Haddon Nauni, however, have not forgotten that the maintenance of a traditional community depends on people, not on a fixed set of behaviors, syntactic structures, or food sources"--Morris Foster

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Luckily there are anthropologists to point out that this is a false claim about "societies." People are far more complicated than this

submitted 8 days ago • 2 comments

"Western social science is permeated with ethnocentric and racist formulations that place responsibility for the problems of Third World nations on their own supposed backward 'traditionalism.'"--Eleanor Burke Leacock

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

"There appears to be a tendency for some anthropologists to assume that culture persistence is in some way natural or normal for many non-Western, 'tribal,' or 'traditional' societies...culture persistence is taken for granted"--Scott Rushforth and Chisholm, Cultural Persistence

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments