Touring Ancient Times

(from Silverman 2002:889)

Back in 2002, Helaine Silverman published this article about tourism and archaeology in American Anthropologist, arguing that the local context is where we should concentrate our attention, rather than exclusively on the nation. Her examples were from Peru, with the Inca capital of Cuzco compared to the Nazca lines. I have been thinking that her comparison is not so different from the difference between the monumental city of Tiwanaku, and the earthworks of the Bolivian Amazon. The Nazca lines and Amazonian earthworks are not so easy to appreciate from ground level, especially for the tourist. I am not by any means an expert on tourism, but I am trying to become more of one, because eastern Bolivia is becoming more accessible all the time, and perhaps with the new UNESCO designation for San Ignacio, more tourists will be interested in visiting.

Silverman, Helaine. 2002. Touring Ancient Times: The Present and Presented Past in Contemporary Peru. American Anthropologist 104(3):881-902.

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!

Elinor Ostrom and the commons

Elinor Ostrom's research is well known in many fields, and she achieved a great deal of recognition late in her career, when she received the Nobel prize for economics in 2009. I remember reading her book "Governing the Commons" sometime in the late 90s or early 00s, while thinking about how states and markets relate to what she called common pool resources (perhaps like some raised field landscapes). Something I found very useful about her work was the wide range and large number of people who were using her ideas inside and outside of anthropology. This retrospective, published not long after her death in 2012, puts her research into a broader perspective. The details of her teaching career, which formally began in 1965, should also be an inspiration to young scholars, and to all scholars.