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Dec 18

Cultures of Piracy

Call for Essays:  Special Issue of Anthropological Quarterly
Cultures of Piracy

Anthropological Quarterly is seeking submissions for a special issue exploring “piracy” defined broadly, from copying CDs to Captain Hook, from biopiracy to the coast of Somalia.  Authors may consider one of the following, making sure that their work draws upon ethnographic research, and/or engages anthropology as a discipline:

  1. How do practices labeled “piracy” differ from other sorts of extraction, expropriation, borrowing, and theft?
  2. How does piracy conflict with or affirm narratives of law and governance?  What, for instance, are piracy’s critical and utopian impulses?
  3. How is piracy mediated through various forms of public culture, and what are the components of its circulation within various publics?
  4. What are the spatial and temporal features of piracy – its histories and geographies?
  5. What are piracy’s economic and political entailments?
  6. What specific localities (the Straits of Malacca, Somalia and the Caribbean) or activities (p2p file-sharing and fishing) are in part constituted by notions of piracy?

Authors have considerable freedom; essays can be short (3,000 words) or long (10,000 words), grounded in ethnographic data, or purely theoretical. One of Anthropological Quarterly’s goals is to give ethnographers a range of possibilities for scholarly writing.

Our deadline for abstracts and titles is August 1st, 2010.
We request the completed work by October 1st, 2010.

Email submissions to aqsubmissions@gmail.com (preferably in .doc file format) and mail two hard copies to:

Alexander S. Dent – Associate Editor
Anthropological Quarterly
The George Washington University
2110 G St. NW
Washington, DC 20052

Email questions to asdent@gwu.edu

Dec 16

European Ethnology Job at Göttingen

A job notice circulated for the good of the anthropology, ethnology and folklore studies community.

The Department of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology within the Philosophical Faculty of Georg-August University in Göttingen, Germany, seeks a

W2 – Professor in Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology
to begin on April 1, 2010.

We are seeking a scholar who knows the subject in its entire breadth and has done exceptional work in research as well as methodology. Expertise in the analysis of local, region and national everyday culture is desirable as well as in the field of cultural exchange and migration in Europe and its regions. In terms of teaching, in depth knowledge and experience are expected in the central methods and theories of the discipline. In addition to the regular teaching duties, the position also requires readiness to carry out empirical projects with students in the masters program.

Applicants should be interested in interdisciplinary work, participate actively also in the Center for Modern Humanities and show openness toward research cooperation in national and international dimensions. An active interest in the work of the Göttingen Max Planck Institute for the study of religious and ethnic diversity is also desirable.

The precondition for application is the ”habilitation“ or equivalent achievements (such as tenure and/or a second monograph) as well as adequate teaching experience. Also desirable is experience with research planning and grant writing.

Getting appointed to a professorship is based on the conditions set out in §25 of the Law for Higher Education of the State of Lower Saxony (NHG). Particulars will be explained upon inquiry.

Further information is available at http://www.uni-goettingen.de/de/119119.html

We explicitly welcome applications from abroad. Women are underrepresented in academic teaching at the University of Göttingen. Applications from women holding the requisite qualifications are thus especially welcome and will be treated favorably within the framework of legal possibilities. Severely handicapped applicants of equal aptitude will be privileged.

Part-time employment can be made possible, depending on the circumstances.

Please send applications including a curriculum vitae, a publications list as well as an accounting of scholarly development including a detailed description of teaching experiences and research plans within 6 weeks of the appearance of this advertisement to:

Dekanin der Philosophischen Fakultät der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen Humboldtallee 17, D-37073 Göttingen, Germany.

Dec 7

Anthropology of East Europe Review Now Gold OA: Joins IUScholarWorks Journals

Congratulations to everyone involved in moving the journal Anthropology of East Europe Review to the IUScholarWorks Journals project. Find the new issue–27(2)–online here:
http://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/aeer/index

Dec 7

2 Comments

Fund for Folk Culture Publications Available Online Through Indiana-AFS Partnership

From an AFS news release on behalf of the Fund for Folk Culture:

The Indiana University Bloomington Libraries and the American Folklore Society, in partnership with The Fund for Folk Culture and the Indiana University Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, are pleased to announce the availability of a series of policy publications created by The Fund for Folk Culture.

The Fund, which was created in 1992 and suspended its programs in early 2009, supports the creation, conservation, innovation, and value of traditional culture and folk arts in community life through grantmaking, convenings, the creation of networks, and research and publications, all focused on issues critical to artists, tradition bearers, and the organizations supporting their work. Its goal is to “create a world in which diverse cultural heritages are honored and all people have the right and resources to exercise preservation of their cultural traditions and to create new traditions for the times.”

The body of Fund for Folk Culture publications now available includes a three-part Issues in Folk Arts and Traditional Culture Working Paper series; reports on three meetings devoted to the examination of issues facing refugee and immigrant communities, and individual folk artists, in the US; a report on the “Folklore’s Futures: Scholarship and Practice” symposium sponsored by the Fund and the American Folklore Society in 2006; and two monographs, Culture and Commerce: Traditional Arts in Economic Development and Envisioning Convergence: Cultural Conservation, Environmental Stewardship and Sustainable Livelihoods. Other Fund publications will be made available in the near future.

These published works are being made available in digital form as part of the IUScholarWorks Repository.  In this form, each published work has a durable URL (web address) that will remain stable, insuring that future citations to this work will lead back to the full source itself.  This published work is fully open access and documents are provided in PDF format.  The IUB Libraries are committing to the migration of these materials to future file formats so as to preserve the availability of these works.  The IUScholarWorks Repository uses standard metadata protocols, insuring that the works included in it are easily findable through such services as Google Scholar and OAIster, the Open Archives Initiative database, a union catalog containing records for millions of digital scholarly resources.

Now available and searchable in IUScholarWorks Repository, the publications of The Fund for Folk Culture join a growing corpus of fully accessible publications in folklore studies, including the full back files of The Folklore and Folk Music Archivist and Folklore Forum.  The IUB Libraries and the American Folklore Society are exploring the possibility of other partnerships to create greater accessibility for important classes of publication in our field that are presently without a long-term digital home.

Find the publications of The Fund for Folk Culture online here:  https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/3850

Dec 4

Museum Anthropology Review Gets a New Look

I am very pleased to report that Museum Anthropology Review, the journal of material culture and museum studies that I edit (with the help of many great colleagues), now boasts a new and improved look and feel. MAR is published using Open Journal Systems by the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries as part of the IUScholarWorks Project. My wonderful library colleagues have done great work on our behalf designing a crisp and appealing new journal style (ie. CSS). The new look is visible on the site now. With the next issue (MAR 4(1)), the new content will appear in a nice matching HTML format.  I hope that everyone finds these enhancements to be a significant improvement on the basic style with which we began.  Thanks to all of the IUScholarWorkers for this wonderful work and thanks to all of the authors, editors, peer-reviewers, media reviewers, and readers who are making MAR a big (free-to-the-world) success.

I am so pleased with this enhancement and I cannot say enough good things about everyone at the IUB Libraries. Their commitment to building up a sensible open access (OA) scholarly communications system is inspirational and contagious.

If you find any bugs in the new style, please let us know by email at museumanthropologyreview (at) gmail (dot) com.

Not a registered reader yet?  Its free, it gets you tables of contents sent by email twice per year, and it helps us demonstrate a growing readership. Please sign up and help the cause of OA journal publishing.

Dec 3

CFP: Contact: The Dynamics of Power and Culture

from the conference organizers:

Contact: The Dynamics of Power and Culture
The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
April 2-3, 2010

We are happy to announce the 2009-2010 collaborative conference between The Ohio State University Folklore Student Association and the Folklore and Ethnomusicology Student Associations at Indiana University. This conference aims to create a space for graduate and undergraduate students to share their research in folklore, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, material culture, performance studies, and related disciplines connected to the study of academic and vernacular interpretation of everyday life.

This year’s conference seeks to explore the following questions:
(1) How should we or could we define, describe, and theorize contact?
(2) What happens when people, ideas, cultures and styles of expression make contact?
(3) In what ways can we explore the boundaries of these categories?
(4) What politics are inherent in and result from contact?
(5) In what ways can we explore the concept of contact in our respective fields?

*Abstracts exploring other themes will also be accepted.

We are seeking papers and posters that engage the following topics/themes as they relate to “Contact”:

Identity
Tradition
Narrative
Culture
Space
History
Performance
Power
Boundary/ies
Memory
Transmission
Diversity

We also welcome submissions of papers and posters on other topics. The conference will have three opportunities for participation: paper presentations, poster sessions, and a discussion forum for all attendees. We will be accepting 250-word abstracts for 20-minute papers and poster presentations. We highly encourage poster submissions, particularly for research projects in progress, as there will be opportunities for active dialogue.

Abstracts must be submitted by January 4, 2010. Please email submissions to osu.iu.2010conference@gmail.com.

Please see the OSU FSA website for details on submissions: http://cfs.osu.edu/fsa/default.cfm or follow us on Facebook (search: OSU Folklore Student Association) and Twitter.
Register for this event for free at http://osuiu2010conference.eventbrite.com/.
For more information on the details of the conference (lodging, location, etc.) visit http://cfs.osu.edu/fsa/studentconference.cfm in the coming months.

Nov 30

Further Evidence of the Instability of the Not-for-Profit/For-Profit Distinction in Scholarly Publishing

Berg Publishers (acquired last year by Bloomsbury) has just announced an agreement through which its Berg Fashion Library (an online resource for dress and fashion studies) will be distributed globally by Oxford University Press. See also Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, now an Rowman and Littlefield partnership.

Nov 23

Dell Hymes Remembered in NYT

At last, a New York Times obituary for Dell Hymes has appeared. Find it here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/23/us/23hymes.html?_r=1

Nov 23

Website Visitation Statistics

Website Usage Stats to November 23, 2009

Nov 22

Information Overload and/or Closet Organizers

Information Overload and/or Closet Organizers

From Indexed. (http://thisisindexed.com/2009/07/information-overload-andor-closet-organizers/)

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