“Splendid Isolation, the Big Bend…” is how the National Parks Services introduces Big Bend National Park on its website. My partner and I recently took a several day trip to Big Bend and, I have to say, it was truly splendid. Many of the sights and experiences I had were unlike anything I had experienced…
Tag: creativity
Hummingbirds are Nature’s…
One of my passions is studying multispecies entanglements. As an anthropologist, the ways in which human activities affect the lives of other living organisms are of central interest but the ontological relationships of other organisms goes deep. A few weeks ago I was having a conversation with my partner (who is a gender scholar) and…
Book Review: “How to Think Like an Anthropologist”
After each semester I evaluate what did and didn’t work in my classes. I didn’t teach Introduction to Anthropology for Fall 2018 so I had an extra semester to think about what I wanted to do with the course moving forward. I have decided to move on from using a textbook (despite the fact that…
The Value of Anthropology: My Story
Dr. Agustín Fuentes argues that it is human creativity that is the defining characteristic of our species ( see my review of The Creative Spark here: Book Review- The Creative Spark). I agree with his position and there is no better way to see this than to focus on one of the most stark expressions of our…
Populations, Race, and The Sorites Paradox
The sorites paradox (also called the paradox of the heap) refers to a particular logical contradiction that arises from the analysis of vague terms (Sainsbury, 2009). Terms like ‘heap’, ‘bald’, ‘tall’ all fall into this category. We know a tall or bald person when we see one but what are the necessary and sufficient conditions…
Fall Semester, 2018 Courses
I am very excited to have three new preps for Fall, 2018. Course overviews are below. LBST 2213: Now this is not a new prep as I have been teaching it for two years now. In the catalog it is listed as Science, Technology, and Society. I teach the course as an anthropology of science…
Book Review: You Shall Know Them
You Shall Know Them (1953), or Les animaux dénaturés in the French, is a novel by Jean Marcel Bruller under the pseudonym Vercors. He is most famously known for The Silence of the Sea (1942), which explores the experience of a French family and a German occupying officer who attempts to convince the family of…
Book Review: Krippendorf’s Tribe
Krippendorf’s Tribe (1985), by Frank Parkin (1931-2011), explores the life of a British anthropologist and his experience with raising his family and a contrived research project. Parkin is a sociologist and has published nonfiction on Karl Marx (Middle Class Radicalism 1968, Class Inequality and Political Order 1971, Marxism and Class Theory 1979), Max Weber (Max…
Book Review- The Creative Spark
The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional (2017), the latest book by Dr. Agustín Fuentes, explores the creative nature of humans through time. Fuentes, professor and chair of the anthropology department at the University of Notre Dame, is a pioneer in ethnoprimatology, the study of human-nonhuman primate interaction, and more recently has explored…
Anthropology 365 