Have you been in an anthropology class / course with more men then women? I haven’t. In both Norway, Germany and Switzerland (pluss many other places incl South Africa, I heard), the gender balance between men and women is around 25-75. Eli Thorkelson, graduate student in cultural anthropology in Chicago, gives us some statistics from American universities that present a similar picture. But as he shows, it hasn’t always been like this. And according to him, we witness both an increasing feminization of anthropology and an ongoing masculine bias.

Here are some of his comments:

- The number of doctorates awarded to women has been greater than the number of doctorates awarded to men since 1992. Males were demographically dominant in the production of doctorates until 1984, after which there were eight years of approximate equality followed by divergence.

- The number of men enrolled has been falling slightly since 1995, while the number of women enrolled has continued to increase.

- While men are no longer demographically dominant, and are even a minority (remarkably so at the undergraduate level, where women receive nearly 70% of anthropology degrees), there are still gendered principles of selection at work in the field.

Nevertheless, the most demographically striking thing here is in his opinion the overall population growth of anthropology, hundreds of percent over the decades.

>> more in Eli Thorkelson’s post “Gender imbalance in anthropology”

There are by the way many other interesting posts in his blog about academic culture and on the anthropology of anthropology!

SEE ALSO:

India is not USA : The Scientific Gender Gap Should Be Understood Comparatively

(Links updated 9.9.2019) It was around four months ago, I received the message of my friend’s sudden death. “Nobody knows", I was told, “why she stepped in front of a train". Afterwards I often wondered if her life could have been saved if we as a society had known and talked more about so-called mental health issues.

For these topics are still taboo. I was shocked to hear the stories from friends and colleagues who I told about what had happened: Many of them suddenly started telling about people they knew who have tried to end his/her life or who have committed suicide. They even mentioned people I know. Worldwide, more people die by suicide than by criminal acts or war - around one million per year. And up to 20 million people try to take their life every year. Europe and Asia have the highest suicide rates.

But this topic is hardly discussed. Neither in media (it was banned in Norwegian media until one year ago) nor in social sciences. The World Suicide Prevention Day that is held today (10.9.) wants to “improve education about suicide, disseminate information, decrease stigmatization and, most importantly, raise awareness that suicide is preventable".

What is going on in a person’s mind who has decided to step in front of a train? Many people - around one in ten - have contemplated suicide, but only a minority of them made an attempt. Why did they take this step? What has happened in their life? How could the worsening of their situation have been prevented? Are there warning signs? Would psychological treatment have helped? But after all those horrible stories about mental health clinics - can we trust such institutions? Might they even increase the risk of suicide? And is suicide always committed by people who are ill? Maybe their decision to end their life is rather rational and should be respected? Will it therefore be wrong - and selfish - to force people to continue living?

After lots of discussions with friends and googling the same terms again and again, I learned that there are no simple answers.

I also found out that literature about suicide is dominated by psychology and biomedical sciences. Committing suicide is presented as an individual issue. People who commit suicide seem to be people who for some reason no longer were able to cope with their life. There was something “wrong” with them. But maybe there is also something wrong with society or with specific developments? According to Eugenia Tsao, there many reasons why anthropologists should politicize mental illness.

Maria Cecília de Souza Minayo, Fátima Gonçalves Cavalcante and Edinilsa Ramos de Souza write in their paper Methodological proposal for studying suicide as a complex phenomenon in the journal Cadernos de Saúde Pública that “few studies have simultaneously examined the individual, social, anthropological, and epidemiological aspects of suicide". The micro and macro dimensions “remain dissociated in polarities that prioritize either the individual or society.”

They present an interdisciplinary approach to suicide that also includes an ethnographic study in a mining town. They show how the increase in suicide rates can be explained by a mix of factors, like radical structural changes that preceded and followed privatization of the mining company and also personal life histories of the workers.

But there seems to be an growing awareness also among researchers in biomedical sciences that their approach is reductionistic.

In a book review in the journal Jama - Journal of the American Medical Association, Antolin C. Trinidad explains that “suicide is best approached by getting out of the confines of biomedical sciences and into the domains of anthropology, sociology, and disciplines in the humanities":

It is not a surprise that physicians spend the lion’s share of whatever interest they have in suicide studying its prevention, treatment, and the sundry clinical bullets that are potentially deployable in the clinics, rather than its history or the vicissitudes of individual despair and anguished self-awareness of pain that breed self-destruction. This is exactly what John C. Weaver, author of A Sadly Troubled History: The Meanings of Suicide in the Modern Age, calls “meta-pain.”

And also Diego De Leo calls in his editorial Why are we not getting any closer to preventing suicide? in the British Journal of Psychiatry for “multi-disciplinary teams to set up more integrated approaches for large- scale, long-term and thoroughly evaluated projects". But “multi-disciplinary approaches to the prevention and investigation of suicide are often flagged up but virtually never practised".

Anthropologists have been almost completely silent concerning the problem of suicide, writes Stefan Ecks in the abstract of his paper “Suicide: reflexions on Medical Anthropology research of suffering". For hardly any other topic presents such great methodical and ethical difficulties for Medical Anthropology research:

Many methods that normally are standard for Medical Anthropology studies have to be radically re-evaluated when researching suicide: What role, for instance, does “participant observation” play in the context of extreme “tabooisation” on the part of the relatives? When is it acceptable to talk with relatives, how much time must have gone by? Also the ethical aspects of such research are enormous: Trauma, shame and speechlessness turn direct interviews into an ethically questionable method. How can suffering caused by suicide be examined as phenomenon in social context?

But Falk Blask who has taught suicide in his anthropology classes in Berlin, soon found out that it is a topic that attracts students. He prepared the course for 15 students, but 90 showed up according to today’s Mitteldeutsche Zeitung (updated link). Blask isn’t interested in suicide for no reason: Three years ago, one of his best friends took his life.

In his paper Urug. An Anthropological Investigation on Suicide in Palawan, Philippines (published in the journal Southeastasian Studies in 2003), Charles J. H MacDonald gives an overview over anthropology and suicide.

Also MacDonald states that anthropologists have dealt with suicide and suicidal behavior “much less frequently than their colleagues in the other social sciences". He didn’t travel to the Philippines to study suicide either. But ever since he set foot on that place, he heard constant references to self-inflicted death. Figures show that the suicide rates are probably the highest or second highest in the world:

Why? Why would suicide, in such staggering numbers, affect those people whose society and culture is in no basic way different from other Palawan people, their immediate and non-suicidal neighbors in the hills and mountains of Southern Palawan? Why would such happy-looking and comparatively well-off people, going about their lives in orderly fashion, fall victims to despair? So far I have found no clear answer. The phenomenon remains mysterious and a complete puzzle.

Suicides, I want to conclude, are not primarily a sign of “that there was something wrong with a person", but also that something might be wrong with society as a whole. Suicide prevention does not only or necessarily mean preventing people from committing suicide but also working towards a society where there are no reasons to take one’s life.

Unfortunately, these larger societal factors are totally missing in the current campaign for the World Suicide Prevention Day. Suicide prevention is also a political question. But the International Association for Suicide Prevention focuses on individual or so-called cultural factors ("People who are alienated from their country and culture of origin are vulnerable to various stresses, mental health problems, loneliness and suicidal behaviour.").

I would like to leave you with maybe the best article about suicide that i found in the section mental illness at neuranthropology . It is A Journey through Darkness by Daphne Merkin. It actually answers all my questions that I asked in the beginning. Merkin’s beautifully written text also shows that there are no final answers.

I found also this article with facts about suicide and depression and how to help very helpful

SEE ALSO:

Why anthropologists should politicize mental illnesses

Shanghai: Study says 1 in 4 youths thinks about taking own life

Financial expert jumped in front of train after predicting recession

Vandana Shiva: The Suicide Economy Of Corporate Globalisation

UPDATE 9.9.2019: It seems a lot has happend since I wrote this post ten years ago. Just search anthropology AND suicide, f.ex. the section on suicide in the Anthropological Perspectives on Death blog or the post about Special Issue: Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, “Ethnographies of Suicide” at Somatosphere or Situating Suicide as an Anthropological Problem: Ethnographic Approaches to Understanding Self-Harm and Self-Inflicted Death by James Staples and Tom Widger

Wow! Overwhelming! The British Library has made more than 23 000 sound recordings from all over the world freely available to everyone at http://sounds.bl.uk

“World and traditional music", “oral history", “accents and dialects", “environment and nature” are some of the categories on the websites. Right now I’m listening to Sunna Saora in India with his two-stringed Sora fiddle. Sunna went from house to house, asking for some rice grains and playing his songs.

“One of the difficulties, working as an archivist, is people’s perception that things are given to libraries and then are never seen again – we want these recordings to be accessible", Janet Topp Fargion, the library’s curator of world and traditional music, says in the Guardian.

To say the sounds are diverse may be understatement, according to the presentation in the Guardian:

There are Geordies banging spoons, Tawang lamas blowing conch shell trumpets and Tongan tribesman playing nose flutes. And then there is the Assamese woodworm feasting on a window frame in the dead of night. (…) The recordings go back more than 100 years, with the earliest recordings being the wax cylinders on which British anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon recorded Aboriginal singing on his trip to the Torres Strait islands off Australia in 1898

>> more in the Guardian (incl selected sound files)

The sound archive website has even a project blog where selected recordings are presented.

Unfortunately, the website is optimised for Windows users and the people behind the website don’t seem to have much knowledge about other operating systems. For example, they advise Mac users to download “software such as Winamp or Windows Media Player” - which are Windows applications (VLC works fine). Their statement “Some features are unavailable in some web browser/operating system configurations” is not very helpful either.

SEE ALSO:

How to save Tibetan folk songs? Put them online!

Multimedia Music Ethnography of Yodelling and Alphorn Blowing

Smithsonian Folkways to Open MP3 Music Store

“A new approach to the collection of traditional Aboriginal music”

Acoustic Environments in Change - a multi-disciplinary project

(LINKS UPDATED 26.5.2020) What is happening within Christianity today? This is a question that is exciting to study, but which has received little attention among anthropologists, says Norwegian anthropologist Edle Lerang Nes.

For hundreds of years, Christianity has been the most important religion in Europe and some other places on this planet. But while everybody is studying Islam, Christianity seems to be ignored.

As Edle Lerang Nes tells in an interview with me, parts of Christian culture actually is “endangered culture” and therefore a field for “urgent anthropology".

Nes studied “chapel culture” - part of Revival Christianity - which broke out in Norway at the end of the 18th century. It was a layman’s movement in opposition to church authorities. A personal relationship to God was important, combined with a sober and hardworking lifestyle without dance, merriment, music, or card-playing ( >> overview Christianity in Norway). How is Christian life developping on this island? Nes conducted fieldwork on the small island if Finnøy, in Southwestern Norway where there are no pubs or restaurants, but the approximately 1,700 inhabitants can choose between five different chapels and a church.

Her research also reminds us of how important religion is for many people in rural areas that are often ignored by researchers and the mainstream press.

>> read the interview (website of the research project Culcom, University of Oslo)

There is not much material on anthropology and christianity online, but Ingie Hovland (from Anthropology Matters) has a large section of posts on her blog about the anthropology of christianity - part of her two book projects - where she also reviews several books and papers.

I found an interesting blog post about being Christian and anthropologist. Being a Christian anthropologist raises difficult questions, Katherine Cooper writes, among others because of the tenet of cultural relativism:

All practices and beliefs, whether shocking to a Westerner or not, are said to ‘make sense’ within the society that they are located. Such views cause problems for Christians. Christianity is an ultimate truth claim with an absolute framework for morality located in the character and commands of a personal God. How do we square our belief in such a claim with studying a subject that inherently denies the validity of such claims?

She also links to the paper by Dean E. Arnold Why Are There So Few Christian Anthropologists? Reflections on the Tensions between Christianity and Anthropology

Last year, anthropologist Gabriele Marranci wrote an interesting blog post called Terrorism in the name of Jesus? Everybody ignore. The Italian Christian anti-Islamic terrorist movement called Fronte Combattente Cristiano or ‘Fighting Christian Front’ has been responsible for several bomb attacks against Islamic centres and mosques:

I thought that news about the first Christian anti-Muslim terrorist group would have attracted international attention and fostered new debates. (…) But the news about a self-defined Christian terrorist and a Christian (mainly Catholic) terrorist organization has attracted virtually no attention.

SEE ALSO:

Researches neo-paganism in an overwhelmingly Catholic society

The Journals of Knud Rasmussen: The impact of Christianity among the Inuit

Explores how indigenous peoples interprete Christianity

How far have we come since anthropologists began to think about magic & religion?

Maurice Bloch: Religion is a Figment of Human Imagination

(via AAA-blog) He was both president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and editor of the journal American Anthropologist. Now Walter Goldschmidt, born in 1913, is joing the growing anthropological blogging community at http://waltergoldschmidt.wordpress.com/

He writes:

Electronic communication, and these things called “blogs,” represent a medium I am singularly unready for. My amanuensis has suggested that I use it to place various of my essays and monographs for public use, and I do find this appeals to me, and invite you to make what use of them you may. Among these, I shall offer presentation of a book of memoirs that I have long intended to write but am only now getting around to.

During the recent weeks and months, many other anthropologists have started blogging as well. Among others, there are two new group blog projects: Anthropoliteia - a blog about police, policing and security from an anthropological perspective and Anthropologyworks - a more general anthro blog that also provides overviews over “anthropology in the news". It is a project of the Culture in Global Affairs (CIGA) research and policy program at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.. Then there is the blog Economics in Cultural Perspective that also looks very interesting. I’m very glad to see that two anthropologists from Scandinavia have joined us: Daniel Winfree Papuga with his blog Recontextual - Expressive culture in new formations and Johanna Sommansson who is blogging about her fieldwork in India at Anthromodernity.

Not all of them can be found on the blog overview at http://www.antropologi.info/blog/ I’ll update it later today tomorrow.

SEE ALSO:

“Blogging sharpens the attention”

Paper by Erkan Saka: Blogging as a Research Tool for Ethnographic Fieldwork

Professor lets students blog their field experiences: More than 20 new blogs online!

Anthropology blogs more interesting than journals?

5 years antropologi.info

(Links updated 8.9.2019) How to deal with “mental illness"? Are people who are labelled ill actually ill? Is it ok that psychologists call “adolescent rebellion” for “Oppositional Defiant Disorder”? What is anthropologists’ role here? Eugenia Tsao discusses these questions in an article in Counterpunch and in a paper in the open access anthropology journal Alterities.

The extent to which our lives and livelihoods have been “colonized by the reductive logic of pharmaceutical intervention” is breathtaking, she writes. Drugs are touted with increasing regularity as a treatment of choice for entirely natural responses to conditions of unnatural stress - although medical textbooks and even drug advertisements have admitted uncertainties in psychiatric research (“While the cause [of depression] is unknown, Zoloft can help”):

How have we been persuaded to equate such things as recalcitrant despair (“Dysthymic Disorder,” DSM-IV-TR 300.4), adolescent rebellion (“Oppositional Defiant Disorder,” DSM-IV-TR 313.81) and social apathy (“Schizoid Personality Disorder,” DSM-IV-TR 301.20) with aberrant brain chemistry and innate genetic susceptibilities rather than with the societal circumstances in which they arise? What does it mean when increasing numbers of people feel as though they have no choice but to self-medicate with dubious chemical substances in order to stay in school, stay motivated, stay employed, and stay financially solvent?
(…)
As Laurence Kirmayer of McGill University has suggested, the millennial rise of a “cosmetic” psychopharmaceutical industry, wherein drugs are “applied like make-up to make us look and feel good, while our existential predicaments go unanswered,” raises disturbing questions about the consequences of our willingness to use chemicals to treat forms of distress that would seem to signal not biological but social maladies.

When psychiatrists lament that over half of depressed people are “treatment-resistant,” Tsao stresses, they do not consider that it is a strenuous aversion to being told that one’s existential grievances are irrational, a mere result of a pathological neurochemical imbalance, that discourages many people from seeking medical help.

Anthropologists have an important role to play here, Tsao explains:

(A)nthropologists who seek to honor their informants’ narratives and confute clinical meta-narratives may find it useful to illuminate the perils of overliteralization: to explain why it is that those who are sick and suffering will so often thumb their noses at those who presume to offer help; to highlight the tragicomedy in the seemingly bottomless capacity of highly educated MDs and PhDs to overlook simple things like the anaesthetizing comforts to be found in a bottle or at the edge of a razor blade, or why a person might choose to act out of anguish rather than economic rationalism.
(…)
I ultimately argue that an efficacious anthropology of psychiatry must adopt as its point of departure the candidly transformative objective of repoliticizing mental illnesses as historical rather than congenital events. Anthropologists must, in short, develop ethnographic, historiographic, and rhetorical strategies for destabilizing the biological with the biographic.
(…)
(A)nthropologists should pay careful attention to regional histories, local processes of identity formation, and other kinds of social transactions paradigmatically excluded from biomedical narratives in order to distinguish necessary etiological agents from sufficient ones. While certain congenital factors may precondition an individual’s susceptibility to, for example, schizophrenia, the cultural factors that activate the disorder will in most cases determine whether or not an individual ultimately develops the condition – as corroborated by numerous studies on identical twins (Levy 1992:215-216).

Tsao presents theories by Robert Levy, Hans A. Baer, Merrill Singer, Ida Susser, and Nick Crossley. From them, she extracts “four fundamental methodological criteria that a robust anthropology of psychiatry must be equipped to meet":

• An adequate means of distinguishing proximate and ultimate causes of specific mental illnesses.
• An explicit aim of recontextualizing, repoliticizing, and rehistoricizing mental health issues through elucidations of pathogenic conditions.
• Methods for critiquing the specific ways in which hegemonic texts (e.g. the DSM, clinical scripts, standardized questionnaires) systematically delegitimize and obscure social etiologies.
• Methods for reinserting alternative etiological narratives into mainstream medical conversations and, ultimately, into lay discourse.

Anthropologists challenge is according Tsao twofold: (1) to sharpen our interdisciplinary literacy with biomedicine and its cognates, but in a critical rather than deferential manner; and, in so doing (2) to elucidate the emergent, rather than immanent, character of illness experiences.

>> Eugenia Tsao: Inside the DSM. The Drug Barons’ Campaign to Make Us All Crazy (Counterpunch 20.8.09)

>> Eugenia Tsao: Primum Non Nocere. Evaluating and Amalgamating Competing Blueprints for a New Anthropology of Psychiatry (Alterities 1/2009)

For more articles by Eugenia Tsao, see her website

The blog Neuroanthropology has more information on anthropology and mental illness.

SEE ALSO:

Medicine as power: “Creates new categories of sick people”

Shanghai: Study says 1 in 4 youths thinks about taking own life

Poverty and health policies: Listening to the poor in Bangladesh

“Ethnographic perspectives needed in discussion on public health care system”

How do you study wrestling as an anthropologist? By becoming a wrestler yourself! Heather Levi’s book The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National Identity is featured in the new issue of American Ethnography on Lucha libre - Mexican wrestling.

A long excerpt from the second chapter can be read there - an example of good anthropological writing and according to Martin Høyem, editor of American Ethnography, the best ethnography of 2008.

I found some reviews of the book. According to the Los Angeles Times the book is actually “entertaining". And it places wrestling in a political context:

“The success of figures like Superbarrio lay in the capacity of lucha libre to invoke a series of connections between sometimes contradictory domains: rural and urban, tradition and modernity, ritual and parody, machismo and feminism, politics and spectacle,” she writes. And in that tight sentence, Levi nails the appeal lucha libre has had among working-class Mexicans for decades. The various intersections she describes – class, sexuality, gender, xenophobia – are frequently lost on American audiences but make the sport so enjoyable.

“The World of Lucha Libre is one of the most interesting cultural studies of a key pastime in Mexico for many years” according to the Latin American Review of Books, while the Seattle newspaper The Stranger insists that “the first few chapters are pretty dry". But this is to be expected: “Most anthropological writing simply isn’t for general audiences".

But the academic nature of the text is something to be overcome:

Levi lays the entire world of lucha libre at the reader’s feet, from the adulation of the crowd to the metallic smell of blood in the ring, and the act of creativity, installing the personal narrative, is the reader’s job. This is excellent reportage on an endlessly fascinating subject, and Levi should be commended for standing back and letting the luchadores take center stage.

As in previous issues, American Ethnography is really interdisciplinary: It includes images from the Bolivian Lucha Libre scene, a review of a book by photographer Lourdes Grobet on the Mexican wrestling scene and a glimpse into American wrestling magazines from the 1970’s on “apartment wrestling", where women - according to the magazine Sports Review Wrestling in 1978 “clash with the fury of primitive savages fighting for their gods!”

SEE ALSO:

New e-zine: American Ethnography

It’s hard to believe that I have been running this blog already for around five years. It was in June 2004, I bought the domain antropologi.info and on the 7th of July 2004, the English blog was launched by anthropologist Simon Roberts from Ideas Bazaar who was the first one who found antropologi.info and blogged about it (see screenshot or the webarchive) - three weeks before I launched it officially in Norway (he is still blogging by the way).

There were only very few anthropology blogs at that time. So the news about a new anthropology blog spread fast. The same day, Dina Mehta, located in India, and Mónica Pinheiro in Portugal, blogged about it. Dina Mehta is still blogging, too, and was recently interviewed about her early blogging. And four days later, antropologi.info was mentioned on maybe the oldest anthropology blog, the ethno:log in Munich.

Blogging in 2004 (or even in 2005) was totally different from today. We were a very small anthroblog-community. There was no Savage Minds or Culture Matters. It was easy to stay up to date. People generally didn’t know what blogging was and rather looked upon it with suspicion. There was no web 2.0. Few used internet in their research and only few scholars published electronically. In 2004 there was no spam! I started with a simple blog script without any spam protection (see the old blog here)

My plan was creating an anthropology portal with both a news section, a calendar, link directory, forum, chat and some kind of magazine section - both in Scandinavian languages, in German and English. I found there is so much interesting research that should be wider known. I wanted to make anthropology more accessible - both to people outside and inside the university.

So I started scanning the news: But I also blogged about interesting posts by other bloggers. In the beginning, I wrote about every thesis that was posted online because this happened so rarely. I interviewed lots of people and also wrote some book reviews. I had lots of time as I just had quit my job. I missed my discipline. I tried to get up to date again, created this website and prepared possible phd-projects (that were never realised).

My first interview was with Eduardo Archetti (in Norwegian only) who died less than one year later. He had just returned from the largest European anthropology conference and I thought it must be exciting to know what knowlege was exchanged when so many anthropologists from all over Europe come together. Usually, this knowledge would remain unknown to the wider public.

I also tried to get anthropologists online, start blogging, publishing online (but only with limited success). I also offered free blogs on antropologi.info - one of the anthropologists is still blogging - Cicilie Fagerlid.

I interviewed some of the first anthrobloggers in 2005 about anthropology and the internet.

Things are very different now. Much has changed in a very short time. We have become a huge community. It is an amazing development! Many anthropologists have started blogging. In addition to pioneering sites like Savage Minds and anthropology.net, we now have several impressive group blog projects like Culture Matters, Material World, Neuroanthropology, Cognition and Culture, Somatosphere and more.

Blogging has become mainstream and blogs a central space for scholary communication.

One of the most impressive developments might be that mainstream organisations like the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA) have started blogging. Today the AAA has one of the most active anthropology blogs. There are new posts nearly every day. Who would have thought that only one year ago?

Then, more and more papers and theses are published online, and the list of Open Access journals is growing. Some have started podcasting like the Society of Applied Anthropology (SfAA) or most recently The Informal Ethnographer (Alexandre Enkerli). German EVIFA has created an impressive anthropology online library (German / English).

Recently, Facebook has become a new arena for communication. Anthropologists are extremly active on twitter and the new Open Anthropology Cooperative has more than 1400 members.

I was once asked if the large number of blogs leads to competition. I answered that for me there are no competitors or rivals. Blogging is fun because there are so many other bloggers. It is because of the anthropology community (and the many friends I made via blogging), that I enjoy blogging and still do blog. Blogging in Norwegian for example is less fun than blogging in English. There is no Scandinavian anthrosphere online, and there is little interaction on the Norwegian blog.

So a big thank you to you who read these lines! Thanks also to everybody who sent papers and theses and contributed with book reviews, guest posts, articles and comments!

Nevertheless, the growing number of anthropological content online has also changed the content of this blog. Too much is happening, it is no longer possible to follow up and cover everything. But this overview feature is still available - on the “antropologi.info Newspaper site” http://www.antropologi.info/blog/ and http://www.antropologi.info/feeds/anthropology/

Feedback face to face, via email, links via other websites etc tell me that the website has been useful for anthropologists. But antropologi.info is not only visited by loyal readers. Most websites get the most traffic from occasional readers - via search engines like Google. I think it is funny to know that for example people who google something like “most primitive people” or “naked tribes” (happens several times a day) are directed to posts where I criticize the idea that there are primitive people. A few days ago, a Norwegian googled after a Norwegian doctor in Arguineguin (place in Spain where many Norwegians live) and then was directed to a blogpost about Norwegians in Spain not willing to integrate.

News travel fast. It was fascinating to see that few hours after I had published the news Anthropology in China: IUAES-conference boycott due to Uyghur massacre, the post was reposted on several Uyghur websites and even translated into Chinese. They weren’t regular readers. They either googled or used aggregators that notify them when new articles about Uyghur issues appeared online. Something similar (in much larger extend, though) might have happened to Maximilan Forte at Open Anthropology. His blog post on America’s Iranian Twitter Revolution received much attention. It was translated into Arabic and Farsi and even published by Al Jazeera. He was also interviewed by Egypt’s Al-Ahram Weekly.

Although it sometimes takes a week or more before a new blog post appears, I have no plans of stopping blogging. It might be necessary to stress that antropologi.info is a one-man project without any financial support. I say that because I often get emails that treat antropologi.info as an institution or organisation. I was for example asked if it was possible to visit antropologi.info’s office and an anthropologist in India even sent me a job application.

UPDATE: Thanks for congratulations and mentioning this post Savage Minds, Neuroanthropology, Erkan Saka, Kulturwissenschaftliche Technikforschung and somatosphere!