Category: Blog Post

Adventures in chatGPT #2: A conversation with Nick Seaver

By Ryan | March 28, 2023

After writing my last post about chatGPT, I got in touch with Nick Seaver to see what he had to say about some of these issues. Here’s our conversation: Ryan Anderson: So, I just signed up for chatGPT and started messing around with it, and I’m concerned. Are you concerned? “Nick Seaver”: Yes, I am concerned about chatGPT. It is a powerful tool and can be used for malicious purposes. It is important to be aware of the potential risks and {+}

Adventures in chatGPT: Meet David Wilkie, anthropologist

By Ryan | February 23, 2023

So curiosity finally got the best of me and I started looking into this whole chatGPT thing that is poised to bring about the ruin of society. I decided to see what kind of information it would spit out about anthropological work in Cabo Pulmo, Mexico, which is where I did all my doctoral work. Here’s what I asked chatGPT: “Please write a 1000 word summary of the anthropological work on Cabo Pulmo, Mexico.” And here’s what it gave me: {+}

In 2023, Question Everything

By Kerim | January 1, 2023

Here’s a New Year’s Resolution for everyone for 2023: Question everything about how we teach, do research, and select students or job applicants. – Question grades – Question letters of recommendation – Question peer review What else should we question about academia this year? (Sorry for the paywalled links, I usually try to avoid them, but couldn’t find an alternative just now.) KerimP. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa {+}

from here to there

By zoetodd | December 29, 2022

2 years and 11 months ago, I posted my last entry on this website: https://anthrodendum.org/2020/01/27/an-answer/ What I didn’t know then, on January 27, 2020, was that I had caught the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus before it was officially detected in Ottawa. I still remember standing at my dresser, typing the post into my laptop resting precariously in front of me, editing my thoughts in a haze, thinking I simply had a ‘flu’ that was kicking my butt a bit harder than {+}

Holding our anthropological spaces

By Ryan | December 18, 2022

I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point the anthropological community that used to be online shifted mostly to Twitter and other platforms. Maybe this was around 2015-2017 or so? I shifted there as well but always wondered how it would all play out. Twitter was good in many ways, because it opened things up and gave more people a chance to speak for themselves through their own micro platform. But I feel like it also resulted in {+}

What makes a job ad “terrible”?

By Kerim | December 13, 2022

On September 18, 2021, Dada Docot launched what she called “Search for 2021 Worst Anthro Job Ads.” Taking place on Twitter, this “contest” brought public attention to conversations that often happen in private between friends and colleagues who may bemoan the state of the job market and the endlessly multiplying requirements of job ads but feel relatively powerless to do much about these things. This eventually resulted in the open access article: The Worst of Anthro Job Ads for 2021 {+}

What Taking IB Social and Cultural Anthropology Higher Level is Like, from the Student Perspective

By Guest Contributor | October 26, 2022

[Anthro{dendum} welcomes invited blogger Mckenna Bullard, a student of Lausanne Collegiate School.] Introduction to IB Social and Cultural Anthropology The International Baccalaureate Diploma Program includes, among its many courses, a course called Social and Cultural Anthropology. Our school offers this course at both Standard Level and Higher Level and is consistently popular with upper school students. The IBDP Anthropology HL course is taught over two years, assessed with two examination papers and an internal assessment fieldwork project. Another part of {+}

See You Later, Thick Data – Part 4

By DISTRACT | October 5, 2022

This blogpost is part of the methodological series “See You Later, Thick Data – How we experimented with doing collaborative fieldwork as part of an interdisciplinary research project”. In this series, we, a group of anthropologically trained junior scholars, discuss some of the opportunities and challenges we faced when collecting ethnographic data in a week-long, interdisciplinary case study of the Danish democratic festival “The People’s Meeting”. We took on a somewhat different approach to the classic anthropological fieldwork, and in {+}

Being History

By Anthropologists and Aging | October 3, 2022

by Robert Launay I have taught the history of anthropology since 1978, give or take a year (who’s counting?). At the beginning and the end of my career, I have had to cope with the same question: why should students have to study the history of the discipline? The rationale underlying such a question has shifted radically, though. The 1980s were the heyday of positivism, the conviction that social “sciences” like anthropology should actually be scientific, that is to say {+}