AABA Statement supporting Trans Lives

AABA Statement supporting Trans Lives

The AABA, along with several other organizations, has just released a statement in support of trans lives. Here’s an excerpt: The American Association of Biological Anthropologists, the American Association of Anthropological Genetics, the Dental Anthropology Association, the Paleopathology Association, The PaleoAnthropology Society, the Biological Anthropology Section of the American Anthropological Association, and the Human Biology Association stand together against the escalating legislation and governance in the United States and across the globe that attacks the existence of transgender, non-binary, and gender-diverse {+}

Anthropology after Twitter and the power of old things in new hands

Anthropology after Twitter and the power of old things in new hands

I’m sitting here at Toronto Pearson International Airport after this year’s AAA meetings. The first time I went to the AAA’s was back in 2008, in San Francisco. I was a grad student back then, all worried and nervous about presenting at a professional conference. My first shock was just basic economics. The room at the conference hotel was $250, and it wasn’t particularly luxurious. It was tiny. And the sink was inside the room. As a grad student I {+}

Dehumanization, 9/11, and anthropology

Dehumanization, 9/11, and anthropology

There are a few different things that brought me to anthropology. One of them was 9/11. More specifically, it was how many people in the US responded to 9/11, including people I knew well. There was a moment, right after 9/11 happened and all of our TVs were full of images of loss, sadness, and fear, when it felt like things could go one way or another. Alongside all that loss were images of hope, help, understanding, and community. It {+}

Summer anthropologies #2: Leslie White goes to a baseball game (Part 3)

Summer anthropologies #2: Leslie White goes to a baseball game (Part 3)

In the last post of this installment of the summer anthropologies series, I ended with the point that major league baseball (MLB) is an annual demonstration of autocratic corporate power. If that’s the case, I asked, why would anyone go? Well, humans are complicated. Take my case. I grew up playing baseball since I was about four or five years old. I played it all the time, went to MLB games when I had the chance, collected baseball cards, played {+}

Summer anthropologies #2: Leslie White goes to a baseball game (Part 2)

Summer anthropologies #2: Leslie White goes to a baseball game (Part 2)

In part one of this installment, I mentioned Leslie White’s call to expand the purview of anthropology and take a closer look at things like baseball. I agree. White’s preliminary theory was that baseball, as a cultural institution, promoted national solidarity and unity: “No matter who you are, what you are, or where you are, if you are a fan you ‘belong.’” Nope. If you look at the history of baseball at that time, and before, White’s argument about the {+}

Summer anthropologies #2: Leslie White goes to a baseball game (Part 1)

Summer anthropologies #2: Leslie White goes to a baseball game (Part 1)

A couple months ago, just after the 2023 baseball season started, I was sitting in the upper deck behind home plate at Oracle Park in San Francisco, California. It is a great view. I was there to watch the Giants play against the Los Angeles Dodgers with about 30,000 or so other people. This was the first MLB game I’d been to in about three decades. It was nice being back after so long. Things that I’d forgotten about all {+}

Salvaging what is good

Salvaging what is good

This post is more practical than nostalgic. Yes, sometimes I like to look back and think about how ‘things were better’ with our various online anthro communities, but that’s not the goal here. It’s clear that the online communities our discipline had are not what they once were, whether on Facebook, Twitter, etc. And those communities did–and still do–matter. Twitter just keeps coming apart at the seams and people seem to be leaving in droves. As they should. For a {+}

Summer anthropologies #1: The Nameless Summer

Summer anthropologies #1: The Nameless Summer

Bruce Brown’s mid 1960’s surf epic The Endless Summer is one of the key elements that sparked the global surf tourism industry. It’s a film that set the pattern for how surf tourists have envisioned and engaged with the people and places they travel to and through in search of waves. In The Endless Summer, the non-western world exists as a kind of empty, ahistorical, and naive paradise that awaits the enlightenment of western discovery.  The film has been taken {+}

Summer anthropologies: beaches and baseball

Summer anthropologies: beaches and baseball

All the grades are in, summer is here, and we can all start ‘relaxing’ by lining up a bunch of unrealistic work expectations. Finally. One of my goals is to get back to short form writing that is not owned, controlled, moderated, or in any way beneficial to or complicit with the once functional platform known as Twitter. Recently, someone on that platform said something along the lines of ‘If you start writing more than a few lines here, write {+}

My Academic Career Has Been Characterized by Efforts to Prohibit Dialogue on Palestine and with Palestinians. For this Reason, I am Voting “Yes” in the AAA Vote to Boycott Israeli Academic Institutions

My Academic Career Has Been Characterized by Efforts to Prohibit Dialogue on Palestine and with Palestinians. For this Reason, I am Voting “Yes” in the AAA Vote to Boycott Israeli Academic Institutions

By Kyle B. Craig I entered academia with a certain level of naivete. During my undergraduate studies in Anthropology, I became energized by a discipline I felt was dedicated to knowledge production not for its own sake but as a project of building more just and liberated societies. Universities, by extension, seemed to be bastions of critical dialogue and action in pursuit of these goals. Over time, I realized this was not always true, as my experience in US academia {+}