What are the connections between climate change, global capitalism, xenophobia and white supremacy? Marc Schuller does in his new book something rather unusual: He asks big questions. Humanity's Last Stand. Confronting Global Catastrophe is the name of the book that not only analyzes the state of the world but also offers advice about what to do according to an interview on the Northern Illinois University website.

There is a virtual book launch tomorrow 15.1.2021.

It is refreshing to see that Schuller - in contrast to the majority of social scientists - is not afraid of making bold statements.

Asked about the "apocalyptic" title of his book, if "humanity is truly headed toward extinction?" he answers:

Seen from an anthropological view, as a species, the warning signs are clear. This is the mandate of the Anthropocene: Ever more species are becoming extinct, including our closest relatives, primates. As the creators of this catastrophe, we can turn this around but only by taking deadly seriously the existential threats of climate change, proliferating warfare, xenophobia and racism.

Asked about the interconnections between climate change, global capitalism, xenophobia and white supremacy, he explains:

Capitalism was founded on plantation slavery, following Indigenous genocide. Capitalism requires growth at all costs; global capitalism entails colonial expropriation. Resources are taken from colonized peoples to enrich an increasingly small group, which builds literal walls, as well as walls of racism and nationalism, protecting its privilege. Following abolition, fossil fuels replaced slaves’ blood, sweat and tears, heating up the planet.

But there is hope according to him, as "in humanity’s ugliest hours, we have demonstrated our capacity for love, solidarity and justice".

He suggests cultivating "an anthropological imagination", which means highlighting the "connections we already have, despite the fog of ideology that keeps us feeling isolated":

We need to see the human beings behind our food, shelter, electricity and consumer goods. That’s the first step in building a bottom-up platform for making necessary global changes. We will never muster the courage or will while we continue to dehumanize other people and their problems and ignore the consequences of our unsustainable consumption.

>> continue reading the whole interview

In the introduction he explains this concept further:

Before we can act, we need the ability to see how issues such as the Syrian refugee crisis, the mass shootings in Parkland and El Paso, and the rising tide of ultra-right nationalism across Europe and the United States are all connected. Seeing how these global issues are lived and confronted by real, living human beings and how they are connected to other issues and people can be called an “anthropological imagination.”

An anthropological imagination also underscores that these issues are products of human action, and therefore changeable: they are particular local manifestations of the inhumanity of our global political and economic system based on in equality and private profit seeking at the expense of the collective good.

It is clearly an activist book. I am not sure if I like the activist language in some parts of the introduction, though. While I agree with his general message, there is - for my taste - too much "black and white" thinking about who is good and who is bad and too much labelling of people (although he aims for the opposite). But have a look yourself! There is also a useful website about the book with summaries of all chapters including explanations of core concepts, a very good idea!

Schuller has also his own website at http://www.anthropolitics.org/ . He has worked alot within disaster anthropology, especially in Haiti and received the Anthropology in Media Award in 2016:

Schuller embodies the best attributes of the contemporary engaged and activist anthropologist. Last year, he was the recipient of the Margaret Mead Award, presented by the AAA and SfAA. The Anthropology in Media Award similarly honors a scholar who effectively communicates anthropological ideas and research to broad audiences beyond the academy.

His recent project reminds me of an earlier research project by Thomas Hylland Eriksen at the University of Oslo, that I have been involved in as a journalist until 2016: Overheating. The three crises of globalisation: An anthropological history of the early 21st century that explores exactly the same questions. You can read many interviews with the researchers in the News section.

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"Discuss politics!" - How anthropologists in Indonesia engage with the public

"We have a huge responsibility to give back to the places we study from"

The Five Major Challenges for Anthropology

Criticizes "scholarly and political indifference toward the workers’ lives"

Anthropological activism in Pakistan with lullabies

Why was anthropologist Miguel Ángel Gutiérrez Ávila beaten to death?

Iran jails anthropologist for "subversive research", "seeking cultural changes" and "promoting homosexuality"

When Twitter announced that it had suspended Donald Trump's account, Twitter also censored the voice of Alexandra Elbakyan, the 32 year old creator of the probably most cherished website in the global scientific community: Sci-hub.

This website, as most of you will know, provides free access to paywalled scientific knowledge to anybody - both rich and poor, old or young, man or woman - regardless where on earth they live. The journal Nature listed Elbakyan among top 10 people that mattered in Science in 2016.

But such a person gets - in a world as ours - powerful enemies. For there are lots of men and women who have become richer and richer by selling articles, that scientists write for free, at highest possible prices. They have formed gangs with names as Elsevier or Wiley. Over time, a huge publishing mafia came into existence that threatens university libraries - their main victims - all over the world. For years they have chased the Sci-Hub funder from Kazakhstan, but she has been smarter than all of them.

A few days before Christmas this mafia has launched a new attack, this time with the help from an old buddy, the American Chemical Society that also opposes the idea of free access to science. And they thought: Maybe we will be luckier in a different location, India for example? Wouldn't it be cool, if we could control the whole subcontinent, prevent the whole country from accessing Sci-Hub? And that's what happened. The gangs field a lawsuit with the Delhi High Court, asking Indian internet service providers to block Sci-Hub and similar site Libgen.

Will the publishing mafia succeed this time? It does not seem so - although they have found a new buddy: Twitter. Right after Alexandra Elbakyan posted on Twitter about the danger of being blocked in India and lots of Indian scientists revolted against Elsevier & Co, Twitter suspended her account.

The court, though, listened to the concerns of scientists and rejected pleas for the sites to blocked immediately and instead ordered pleadings to be completed within the next six weeks.

The scientists wrote in their intervention application:

“Unfortunately, scientific publication is controlled by an oligopoly of publishers who charge exorbitant fees and practice anti-competitive business models that seriously hamper the ability of the scientific community to access and share research.”

The Delhi Science Forum and the Society for Knowledge Commons argued that Indian law does not allow the commercialisation of and profiting from scientific knowledge which is a “public resource”.

Indian tech site Medianama also mentions a statement released on December 29 by the All India People’s Science Network (AIPSN) where they explain that this in reality is a case against all Indian research scholars:

The case filed by the copyright holders in Delhi High Court asking for a blanket ban of the sites is not against Sci-Hub and Libgen; it is against the research scholars in this country. Most of whose research would come to a halt if this case by the robber barons of the publishing industry succeeds. It is the future of research in India that is at stake, not Alexandra Elbakyan or Sci-Hub's future. AIPSN demands that the monopolistic model of access to knowledge be given up and the process of free access to knowledge by the public accepted.

2,000 researchers, scientists and students from across the country have signed a petition Sites as LibGen and Sci-Hub do not violate any norm of ethics or intellectual property rights, as the research papers are actually intellectual products of the authors and the institutions, they stressed:

“Those who produce this knowledge – the authors and reviewers of research papers – are not paid, and yet these publishers make windfall profit of billions of dollars by selling subscriptions to libraries worldwide at exorbitantly inflated rates, which most institutional libraries in India, and even developed countries, cannot afford. Without a subscription, a researcher has to pay between $30 and $50 to download each paper, which most individual Indian researchers cannot afford. Instead of facilitating the flow of research information, these companies are throttling it,”

Anyway, as scholar James Heathers wrote four years ago, regardless of what anyone thinks, Sci-Hub is going to win. After he explained that academics always had to circumvent the current system he suggests to make the The Garbage Strike Test:

Let’s say all large publishers suddenly refused anyone any access to any of their copyrighted materials at 9am tomorrow morning — what would they be replaced with?

The answer is a system which differs in almost every respect from the status quo, and one which would start seamlessly and immediately. (...)

My bold prediction is in about two days, the whole thing would be strongly framed as an opportunity, and various calls for assistance in sticking back together our entire library of knowledge would travel over the whole planet.

In a fortnight, we would have quasi-formal channels of storing, disseminating, reviewing and publishing information.

In three months, they would be established, and serious steps would be taken to make sure these channels were never corporatised or exploited ever again.

Also check this Twitter thread:

https://twitter.com/DRMacIver/status/1347630121625280512

Sci-hub's website is still available, there are lots of mirrors, working addresses can always be found at Sci-hub's Wikipedia page and on Reddit where also a new uncensorable Sci-Hub site is discussed.

SEE ALSO:

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Why can we spend hours playing video games while many of us get exhausted by much shorter video-conferences?

That is without doubt no bad question that the magazine Inverse asks. They turn to an anthropologist who has researched our relation to the internet for at least 15 years: Tom Boellstorff. In 2007 I wrote about his fieldwork in Second Life about the "virtually human": "Second Life is their only chance to participate in religious rituals".

Now he is part of the research project Virtual Cultures in Pandemic Times that explores "how COVID-19 is reshaping online interaction" according to the project website:

As many have noted, what we call “social distancing” is really physical distancing. Due to the pandemic, an unprecedented number of people have been socializing online, in new ways. Better understanding these new digital cultures will have consequences for COVID prevention: successful physical distancing will rely on new forms of social closeness online. It will also have consequences for everything from work and education to climate change.

Zoom and other video conference solutions (including open source alternatives as Jitsi Meet or Bigbluebutton) let us constantly stare at many faces that in turn also stare at us. This never happens in real-life conferences and causes what is now coined "Zoom fatigue".

The anthropologist says in the Inverse-interview:

"Whether it's a conference or a class... so much of what happens [socially] in these environments has to do with talking in the halls on the way to the bathroom [or] grabbing a cup of coffee. Zoom is almost like a phone call in that sense, where you miss all this other activity, and that's part of what can make it exhausting for people."

Boellstorff thinks that there's much to be learned from video games like World of Warcraft or Animal Crossing where you are constantly interacting with others in a "more emotionally and psychologically fruitful" way. Game-like video conference platforms, he thinks, are likely to become more popular.

Boellstorff himself has started teaching his courses in Second Life, as Wired explained in an earlier article:

Boellstorff custom-built Anteater [Island] to include an office, spaces for lectures and group projects, areas to hang out, and even a roller coaster. He uses the island in tandem with Zoom for classes, partially because Second Life doesn’t run well on older computers and can’t be accessed from a smartphone. So far, the setup is working well. Being in the same virtual space “does seem to have supported interactions that would not have happened if only using Zoom or a similar conference call program,” he says.

In an interview with University of California, Irvine News website he says:

“We need to get away from talking about the physical world as the real world. Online sociality is a set of cultures that can be just as real as what’s in the physical world.”

Both Wired and Inverse present some video conference solutions that already incorporate elements from video games: Kumospace and Gather Town that is based on Online Town.

How can we better understand the world we live in? Not only here in Europe, but also in many Arab countries, many people don't know what anthropology is and how it can provide them with new perspectives. What to do? In the beginning, there were blogs. Now other kind of media have become popular: podcasts, video channels and shows.

MadaMasr, my favorite Egyptian news site and magazin, interviews anthropologist Mai Amer, who has created of a new show titled Tuk Tuk (El Tok Tok in Arabic). Her aim is to make anthropological concepts more accessible for a wider Arabic speaking audience. The show is published on Facebook and produced by Al-Nahda Scientific and Cultural Association.

Three episodes are so far available: a short introduction to anthropology, discussions about the issue of women’s bodies and how culture defines the standards of femininity (including what women should or shouldn’t wear) and a episode about men’s bodies (particularly the use of Viagra and Tramadol). The next episodes will be about social media, popular religious imaginary and mahraganat - popular Egyptian dance music which is Mai Amer's special field: She wrote her master’s thesis about Mahraganat songs.

The idea sounds brilliant. She explains in this interview:

This season, I hope the show does exactly what the tuk tuk does: you get on and from your seat you watch everything going on outside in that neighborhood you don’t know, while the driver knows everyone and keeps greeting people he passes by. And you’re discovering all this from the perspective of your seat in the tuk tuk — not your car or an Uber with the windows rolled up. The tuk tuk means you’re part of the street.

I also like her definition and view about anthropology. Its role is for her to help us understand “where we stand in life: who exploits us, who we exploit, when we are performing and who we are performing to, and when other people are performing for us.” She wants us to "reflect on and critiquing certain things they think, say or do by posing questions or opening up ideas for discussion":

We usually go through life with pre-made judgments, deeply rooted biases and values instilled by the social class in which we were raised. We’re unaware of our privileges, unaware of others’ privileges, and we’re oblivious to our prejudices and how they affect our everyday behavior.

We don’t realize we are prisoners of ourselves and of our class. So as members of the middle class for instance, we are convinced that rich people are corrupt, the poor are kind, and those who live in the slums are criminals, and so on. We don’t stop to think how the thoughts that were planted in our subconscious so long ago affect our behavior and our whole perspective of life.

What anthropology does is it reveals all of this to us; how such processes take place. It helps us figure out where we stand in life: who exploits us, who we exploit, when we are performing and who we are performing to, and when other people are performing for us.

In this interview with Mada Masr journalist Mostafa Mohie she also mentions other initiatives that inspired her, among others Qira2at — by Amr Khairy who publishes Arabic translations of important texts in the humanities and social sciences, and another show on Facebook called Anthropology in Arabic by by Farah Halaba.

Mai Amer is currently working on her PhD on gender in pop songs

>> read the whole interview at Mada Masr

>> visit Tuk Tuk on Facebook

PS: My Arabic is too poor to understand anything serious, so I am just referring to the Mada Masr interview here.

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Why anthropology fails to arouse interest among the public - Engaging Anthropology (2)

Nancy Scheper-Hughes: Public anthropology through collaboration with journalists

Anthropology and the challenges of sharing knowledge online: Interview with Owen Wiltshire

Keith Hart and Thomas Hylland Eriksen: This is 21st century anthropology

When we are online we are constantly being watched and tracked. A huge industry has evolved to build profiles about us so that they can predict and influence our behavior - to make us buy products or vote for a specific politician. Our personal behavioural data is the new oil. We are living in an age of surveillance capitalism, as scholar Shoshana Zuboff explains in her famous and very disturbing book from 2018 (that I am currently listening).

The good news is that more and more people have become aware of this threat to privacy and democracy and try to move away from companies and services that operate within this surveillance economy (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Zoom etc) and never browse the web without an ad- and tracking blocker.

It is also good news that anthropology has become engaged in this struggle. Anthropologist Veronica Barassi for example has published a book a few weeks ago about how even small children and babies are tracked, how their personal information is collected, archived, sold, and aggregated into unique profiles that can follow them across a lifetime. It is called Child Data Citizen. How Tech Companies Are Profiling Us from before Birth.

Her goal was not only to understand but "to empower parents to seek legal change", she writes in the introduction:

I wrote this book for my daughters, my family, and all the parents and families I met in this life-changing and personal research journey. I owe them everything. Their stories, their thoughts, and their everyday experiences have shaped my understanding of the injustice of surveillance capitalism. They made this book possible; they inspired me, questioned me, surprised me, and reminded me of why we need publicly engaged ethnographic research.
(...)

Governments must step up and recognize that our data rights are tightly interconnected with our civil rights; as parents we need to start working together as collectives, organizations, and institutions to demand a political change.

The anthropologist is mother of two young girls. The idea for this book (and three year research project) came to her, when she realized that there are "vast—almost unimaginable—amounts of data traces that are being produced and collected about children":

Not only my fellow peers (and myself included) were recording important medical data on mobile apps, but we were extensively sharing photos of our children online through public and private social media platforms. (...)

Hence I started wondering: How were children’s data traces produced? How were parents negotiating with online privacy, data mining, and digital profiling? What type of data were companies collecting? Were companies profiling children from before birth?

After staring my project, I became pregnant with my second daughter (A) and Google knew I was pregnant before my family did!

Positive as well: The anthropologist made a very informative website that also include some of her research findings and useful background information and a blog. (I could not find any practical tips and information about tools and alternatives, though, I hope she will add them in future posts. Personally I learned a lot by visiting Reddit's subreddits Privacytoolsio and selfhosted).

She received some media attention, see among others the first review of the book An anthropologist investigates how data surveillance intersects with the 21st-century family (Kate Eichhorn, ScienceMag 16.12.2020), Call for smart home devices to bake in privacy safeguards for kids (Techcrunch 19.9.2018) and Children ‘need protection’ from AI home devices that collect and share their data (Telegraph 19.9.2018) about her earlier report Home Life Data and Children’s Privacy.

There are several open access articles by her, and below you will find an 11 minute-Ted Talk, and she is active on Twitter.

SEE ALSO:

Ethnographic Study: Social Websites Important For Childhood Development (antropologi,info 24.11.2008 - from old times before the age of surveillance capitalism)

14 years ago I wrote about his website: Visual ethnography and Kurdish anthropology by Kameel Ahmady and Photography as research tool: More engaged Kurdish anthropology. I also remember we had a short email exchange. Now I am shocked to read the BBC headline: Kameel Ahmady: British FGM academic 'jailed in Iran'.

Ahmady has researched child marriage, female genital mutilation (FGM) and sexuality in Iran. In 2015, the BBC reminds us, he published a study suggesting that tens of thousands of Iranian women had undergone female genital mutilation. Until then, Iran had not been widely recognised as a country affected by FGM.

BBC refers to to the Tasnim news agency that is "linked to Iran's hardliners". Ahmady had been sentenced to nine years in jail and fined €600,000 ($730,000; £545,000) for "accumulating wealth through unlawful means from institutes seeking to overthrow the Iranian regime".

The news agency also said that the anthropologist was also accused of seeking "cultural changes" related to women and children, and that he had allegedly been in contact with foreign media and with the embassies of European countries with the aim of "promoting homosexuality" in Iran.

>> continue reading at BBC News

Kurdistan based journalist Wladimir van Wilgenburg writes on his blog that Kameel Ahmady accused on social media the Iranian judicial authorities of targeting him and trying to stop his research.

According to him, Ahmady wrote:

“The main judicial point of accusations against my research is about the most harmful traditions against the children in the least privileged regions (minority areas of Iran) but the main goal is to accuse my researches’ relation with the cultural influence of 2030 document and halting my activities and research regarding minorities.”

With the "2030 document" he means UNESCO's education agenda that Iran refused to implement. The goal of the global Education 2030 agenda is to "guarantee access to education for all people, irrespective of age, sex and religion".

The journalist mentions Ahmady's documentary "In the name of tradition" about FGM in Iran that I am embedding below. Ahmady travels with his colleagues in rural areas in west and south of Iran and talks with women about circumcision of girls: Are girls circumcised here? Why do you do it? Who does it? The film concludes with statements by a doctor and a cleric who condemn this tradition.

Ahmady has recently redesigned his website with a large amount of articles and several documentaries.

Kameel Ahmady, who grew up - as he writes - in a "bi-cultural town with Kurds and Turks" and spoke Kurdish at home, Turkish with his neighbourhood friends and Farsi at school, left after the 1979 Revolution home to study in the UK. In Europe, people from Iran (and many other so-called non-Western countries) might face other issues, see my post from 2006 Censorship of research in the USA: Iranians not allowed to publish papers and from 2010: The "illegal" anthropologist: Shahram Khosravi's Auto-Ethnography of Borders about everyday racism and global apartheid.

I remember having read about several anthropologists that have been detained in Iran, among others French-Iranian Fariba Adelkhah earlier last year and Homa Hoodfar four years ago.

UPDATE 3.1.2020

Kameel Ahmady contacted me to inform that one of the charges against him was a university visit to Ramallah university in Palestine through the occupied territories. According to Iranian law vising Israel is not allowed and carries prison sentence. The evidence of his travel is the article on his website Hijacked nations; Ethnography of Palestine and Israel (2005)

UPDATE 7.1.2021:

British filmmaker and scholar John Chua, who has worked together with Kameel Ahmady, calls in The Independent for help from the UK: Helping the British academic imprisoned in Iran is Boris Johnson’s chance to redeem himself

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Engaged research = Terrorism: Germany arrests social scientists

Engaged anthropologists beaten by the Mexican police

A few hours ago I was shocked to read that David Graeber has died. He was only 59 years old. Graeber was one the most known and most original anthropologists in the world. He was one of the leading figures of the Occupy movement and got famous among the general public with his books on Debt and Bullshit Jobs.

There is still no official information about what happened besides from that he died in a hospital, according to his wife who tweeted:

https://twitter.com/nikadubrovsky/status/1301504647769792512

David Graeber has always been one of my favorite anthropologists. I liked the way he combined anthropology with activism and search for alternatives to capitalism and other oppressive ideologies and systems. One of the first pieces I read by him was Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Everytime there was something in the news about him, I was eager to write about it (while I was still active blogging).

My first encounter with him was here on antropologi.info. He commented om some reviews about his Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology that I linked to and criticized some of his points. Two years later, we met at a conference about anthropology and cosmopolitanism in Britain and chatted a bit about anthropology and the internet and probably also about conference culture. I stíll remember very well that his presentation was one of the highlights, not only because of its content ("Democracy is no Western invention"), but also because of his presentation style. In contrast to most other paper givers, he was actually able to communicate with the audience and use normal language to express complex ideas.

Three years after the conference, in 2009, we ended up in a little fight here on this blog. He had just just signed a petition calling for boycotting Israel and I had blogged about it, using his name in the headline. He did not like this exposure. On the one hand his reaction was surprising, on the other hand it was somehow understandable: His activism had caused him lots of trouble already. A few years before this blog post he was fired from Yale, most likely because of his activism.

The most recent publication by him that I enjoyed is the audio book of his bestseller Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. I listened to it on long walks last summer. "Such a wise book", I often thought while listening. "You learn so much more than just about the book's topic. I definitely should blog about it."

Many more substantial texts have been written about David Graeber's death already, see among others David Graeber: 1961-2020 by Greg Downey at Neuroanthropology who links to a long post with many videos on the website heavy.com: David Graeber Dead: Anthropologist & Anti-Capitalist Thinker Behind ‘We Are the 99%’ Slogan Dies at 59. Interestingly, all major news sites write about him, see Deutsche Welle: Anthropologist and Occupy activist David Graeber dies or New York Times: David Graeber, Caustic Critic of Inequality, Is Dead at 59 and last time I checked David Graeber, anthropologist and author of Bullshit Jobs, dies aged 59 has been the most read news story on The Guardian.

UPDATES:

Tribute by his friend and anthropologist Vito Laterza on facebook:

Two books stand out from his impressive intellectual production:
- "Debt: the first 5000 years" - a masterly history of debt and how it has been leveraged against people and communities in historical and contemporary perspective.
- "Bullshit jobs: a theory" - a wide-ranging critique of the current system of worth and valuation of jobs that would make you think very differently about the "virtues" of the uncontrolled growth of managerialism and digitalisation in today's companies and organisations. This work is particularly important to understand the current moment. As David noted in a recent Politico op-ed, the pandemic has clearly shown that those who perform the most important jobs are paid the least.

Anarchist dissident and historian Andrej Grubacic: In loving memory of our friend, comrade, and mentor…David Graeber Including the introduction from the forthcoming Mutual Aid: An Illuminated Factor of Evolution by David Graeber and Andrej Grubačić:

When he died, David had just completed his most recent book, one on which he worked for several years. He teamed up with British archeologist David Wengrow to challenge some of the more stubborn assumptions of mainstream social science. This was one of the most ambitious projects David embarked upon, and it should be published in 2021.

In Memoriam David Graeber by focaalblog with comments by several anthropologists, among others Don Kalb, University of Bergen:

David was the most important anthropologist of his generation and by far its most brilliant and effective public intellectual. He reached wider audiences than anyone of us, possibly even larger than Margaret Mead in anthropology’s heydays. His message was as revolutionary as hers, if not more so. It announced nothing less than an anthropology that would research, critique, and go beyond capitalism.

Or by Alpa Shah, London School of Economics:

I often thought of David Graeber as a genius. But of the many things that David taught me, it was that there is in fact a genius in each of us. We can’t see this because we don’t have the collective structures to realise the brilliance within us, because we live in a world that violently excludes the many, that reserves the acquisition of individual heroism for the few, a world today driven by finance capital.
For David, anthropology was important for it was a means to resurrect other possible more beautiful worlds, imagine societies other than our own exclusive one, figure out the larger implications, and then offer those ideas back to the world for an anti-capitalist politics.

David Graeber’s Strength - beautiful tribute by Olivier Coulaux at the footnotes blog:

In your intellectual life, you can sometimes get lucky, and be pulled into writings that give you the wonderful feeling of being released from your intellectual routines and shackles. Numerous people have seen this rupture as the necessary condition to engage in reflexive work. I remember experiencing this feeling more than a few times during my initiation into anthropology, and Graeber’s oeuvre never failed to make me feel that way.
(...)
What is about Graeber’s work that makes you look at your everyday routine, and that makes you feel like re-discovering it for the first time? And what is it that makes that perspective so important?

How do you stay up to date with the most recent journal articles in anthropology? How do you navigate the growing amount of texts? How do you find something interesting? While most academics might have their own personal routine, there is as far as I know no public overview online.

The overview over Anthropology Open Access Journals is one of the most visited pages on antropologi.info. I recently updated the list and and then used it to create The Anthropology Journal Ticker. This new site displays the most recent articles from more than 80 anthropology open access journals.

.

Currently it features articles from Mana, Cultural Anthropology, the Journal of Extreme Anthropology, the New Florida Journal of Anthropology, and Anuac on the front page.

Unfortunately I was not able to include all journals. The reason is that the only automated way to create such an overview works via RSS feeds. In the same way I created a few years ago The Anthropology Newspaper that displays the most recent blog posts. While all blogs publish RSS-feeds by default, this is not the case with journals. I found out that around one in three journals lack RSS feeds. But there are ways to create feeds for websites without feeds and I am exploring the options. With the Feed Creator by Fivefilters I was able to add the journals Cultural Anthropology andf Asian Ethnology to the list. RSS Bridge is another tool.

Categorizing the journals is no easy task. So far I only categorized them by language. Many journals are multilingual, though, they post articles in both English and Spanish for example. Selecting the category English will therefore also display posts in Spanish. I will have to find a better solution. As additionaly only very few journals tag their entries, I was looking for other ways to browse the content of this site. A good solution seems to be the Random Posts page. Each time you visit or refresh this page three random articles are displayed. Have a try!

Visit The Anthropology Journal Ticker at https://journals.antropologi.info

This site is work in progress. Let me know if there are journals to add and how to make the site more useful. Thanks!

Thanks to the Corona slowdown, I had time to do some work with antropologi.info - some updates behind the scenes, correcting dead links, working with the layout etc, I hope it stays like that!

SEE ALSO:

Do we (still) need journals?