Museum Fatigue

Last week, while reviewing our class syllabus on the first day, I made a decision to do a little experiment. Rather than make the announcement that mobile phones should be turned off during class, I did the opposite. I told my visual anthropology class that unrestricted use of mobile phones in class would be allowed … Continue reading →

  This past Monday night our First Year Seminar gathered together for a food tasting meal—an event that gave us a chance to taste a wide variety of foods in dialogue with the books we have been reading and discussing so far this semester. In Part One of this post I summarized some of those … Continue reading →

“Yes, people are constructed by their material world, but often they are not themselves the agents behind that material world through which they must live” (Miller 2009: 84). “The apocalyptic describes not just the spilling forth of the unseen, but also of the undifferentiated matter of the possible, of what could have been and was … Continue reading →

On May 20th from 5:30-7:30pm at a local neighborhood venue, the Turf Club, this spring’s Visual Anthropology class premiered their final mini-documentary projects to a packed house of 100-120 people. This was the second such public event (the first was written about here) and the first to actually be pulled off during finals week at the … Continue reading →

As if junk mail spam-bombing college faculty and advertisements stuck up on community bulletin boards everywhere weren’t enough—this morning I awoke to find that the front page of our local community newspaper, The Saint Paul Pioneer Press had an advertisement for Falun Gong’s Shen Yun dance troupe. These guys have some seriously deep pockets and … Continue reading →

Oh, I’m lookin’ for my missin’ piece I’m lookin’ for my missin’ piece Hi-dee-ho, here I go lookin’ for my missin’ piece –The Missing Piece (Shel Silverstein, 1976) This afternoon I was doing some cataloging of images when I came across a folder from a few years back. In it I found a few photos … Continue reading →

There is a lot of Doctor Who going around these days. My teenage self—the closeted geek who stayed up late on Fridays and Saturdays to catch episodes on my local public TV channel—would be very happy to see the show’s resurgent global popularity. I even found an advertisement that used his image on the streets … Continue reading →

Most people around at the dawn of the public Internet might remember the brief period when important webpage addresses circulated by word of mouth, in emails among friends, and were even published in books. Back in 1994, for example, I remember buying a telephone book-sized tome hundreds of pages thick, packed with URLs broken down by type. I’d look in the … Continue reading →

“Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society—not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them.” —Gilles Deleuze “All play means something.” — Johan Huizinga When I was growing up, a boy in the upper midwestern United States in the final decades of … Continue reading →

This summer I have spent a good amount of time reading widely, and even somewhat randomly, books that examine the sociocultural in a poetic or literary way. I have been searching for an ethnographic approach to rethink and rewrite my research on social memory and nostalgia in a way that addresses the contingent, contradictory, emergent … Continue reading →

Roughly the first two weeks of this semester’s anthropology senior seminar we are taking a brief look at photography, perception and representation. My idea was that before we discuss visual anthropology or ethnographic film we should take some time to examine the human eye and the representational power of photography. Since different parts of anthropology … Continue reading →