Reading for the blog

Although I am new at social media, and I am not sure that I really get it, one thing I do feel like I am starting to get the hang of is using an RSS reader to keep up with more of the good stuff on the internet, while avoiding the not so good stuff. I was sad to hear that Google Reader was going to be phased out, but my wise elders told me that I should give Newsblur a try. So I am going to link every once in a while to the blog that newsblur generates whenever I save a story. The first article is a post by Megan Tracy, a grad school colleague of mine, and a recent celebrity on account of her research having been highlighted in congressional testimony. Have a look and see what you think!

Newspapers and defining what we do

Ty Matejowsky and Beatriz Reyes-Foster, my colleagues at the University of Central Florida, have written a fine column that was picked up by our local newspaper, the Orlando Sentinel [The Sentinel has a paywall, but you can read a few stories a month without having to pay]. Reading this excellent piece makes me think that anthropologists should write for newspapers all the time, on all kinds of topics. Ty and Beatriz are right that anthropologists (especially cultural anthropologists) should get out and help define our own field.

It's a small point, but one of the things I noticed about the Sentinel format was that the paper didn't include links for the sites and topics that were in the column. I didn't know, for example, that the new head of the World Bank was an anthropologist (to be fair, they did link to one of their own stories there), and I haven't read the Living Anthropologically blog, or This is Anthropology. Thanks, Ty and Beatriz!

Up and Down in Moxos

Umberto Lombardo is a postdoc at the Institute of Geography - Bern University, and he has a fantastic blog called Up and Down in Moxos, where he posts about the archaeology of Moxos, providing a lot of detail on the geographic background to that archaeological record. The blog has links to a wide variety of scientific journals and papers, as well as other blogs relevant to Amazonian environments. One of the themes that I am in complete agreement with is that we need more communication and collaboration between scholars who are trained in different disciplines, like geographers, archaeologists and anthropologists.