As a researcher, I organize my thoughts through spontaneous, messy, fast, and private writing. Writing I don’t want to share at first, but that I find necessary to wrap my head around what it is I am trying to say. What it is I am doing. I believe that one aspect of anthropological writing, offline and online, is this: To understand what we do, we write and read about it.

Eugene Raikhel eloquently described in his recent review of Somatosphere in 2013: “Much has changed in the world of scholarly publication and communication — not to mention in the anthropology or STS blogosphere — since Somatosphere was launched in 2008. “ The writing outlets are changing. The topics and audiences and also we as producers of said writing are changing. What does not change is that writing is done at all. In light of current events, big and small research questions, new worlds whose magnitudes we would like to understand and to explain, let us think more about the digital anthropological writing and its content and what is not yet covered. Let us read in 2014 and comment and collaborate and discuss and appreciate but also dare to confront uncomfortable, difficult and maybe gruesome stories.

Below you will find a few recent blog posts worth looking at. Begin. (And feel free to comment and suggest!)

 

A written tribute: Carole McGranahan re-reads Gerald Berreman (who died 2013) on Savage Minds.

Also on Savage Minds, Rex interviews the two founders and legal anthropologists of Allegra, a collaborative website aimed at creating a space for European academic anthropology blogging.

Wendy Hsu finishes her four-part series on digital ethnography with “Ethnography Beyond Text and Print: How the digital can transform ethnographic expressions.”

In Psychocultural Cinema’s field note section, Seinenu Thein covers “Burma’s 88 generation and the legacy of Mandela,” and Robert Lemelson writes about his reasons for creating ethnographic films instead of writing books.

Hailing from Europe, Caro Bonink also conducts visual anthropology and films her brother, diagnosed with autism at age 42.

While we’re talking about visual anthropology, why not look at the work done at the University of Kent in the UK at UKVisualAnthropology?

Attending a conference with a child or children? Dr. Lorena Gibson did, at the AAAs 2013.

More on what anthropologists do in Anthropologizing’s series on anthropologists in practice outside academia.

And finally, the anthropologyworks blog provides a handy summary of more recent news.