Sauer on the Seashore

One of my current projects is a look into humanity’s histories along the edge of the sea. Much of my recent work has been about contemporary coastal issues, but I’m also interested in the coastal question from a longer-term perspective. Which is why it’s been nice to be working with some of my colleagues in archaeology lately. I just got back from a short research trip to the Cape Region of Baja California Sur for a coastal archaeology and anthropology project there—more on that soon.

Regarding the long-term coastal question, these days it’s a lot more common—and acceptable—to think about coasts and shorelines as important dimensions of early human migrations and dispersals. But that wasn’t always the case.

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Grant Jun Otsuki on "Reconstructing the Anthro Blogosphere with RSS"

Thanks to Lorena Gibson (who blogs over at AnthroPod) for pointing me toward Grant Jun Otsuki’s post about the anthro blogosphere and RSS. Here’s a selection from Grant’s post, which I highly recommend reading in full:

To start, let me pour one out for Anthrodendum, the anthropology blog that may not have started it all, but which was for many the one pre-social media hub for anthropology online. When I was a graduate student, it was invaluable for me as a resource for keeping in tune with the conversations taking place in American anthropology, and played no small part in my decision to do a PhD in anthropology. It also inspired the work that a scrappy group of then graduate students did to imagine what the Society for Cultural Anthropology could do online. Thanks to all involved.

Be sure to read the rest of the post here. It’s worth it. If you don’t know what RSS is, this is the post for you. There’s a lot of older tech out there that still works very well and, as Grant explains, RSS feeds can be a valuable tool for rebuilding the online anthro community we’ve lost in recent years. Grant also shares a downloadable OPML file that will allow you to follow 90 plus anthro blogs via NetNewsWire. Thank you for all your work on this Grant!

Anthro Blog Resurvey: The Blogroll

In the interest of sharing, archiving, and a bit of redundancy, here’s the list of anthro blogs and other resources that I have compiled over on Anthrodendum:

SITES FROM THE 2017 LIST THAT ARE STILL ACTIVE (77/188):

Aidnography. From the About page: “My name is Tobias Denskus and I am an Associate Professor in Development Studies in the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University in Sweden. I am co-coordinating our MA in Communication for Development, an online blended learning program that for more than 20 years has brought together hundreds of students from all over the world in our Glocal Classroom.”

All Tomorrow’s Cultures. A site run by Samuel G. Collins: “I’m a professor of anthropology at a mid-sized, state university in Maryland, USA. You can see my homepage here.”

Allegra Lab. From the About page: “Allegra began in 2013 as a small group of renegade anthropologists creating a voice for themselves in the margins of the neoliberal academy. Today, it has become a  veritable movement emboldening a large number of anthropologists and other academics to enliven the “dead space” between standard academic publication and fast moving public debates. Allegra maintains that this space is where intellectual innovation happens at its best. No great thinkers ever emerged from the quarantined space of academic disciplines where the polished aesthetic of writing for one’s colleagues (and national frameworks to evaluate excellency) takes priority over the viscerality of the issue at hand. Instead, from Rigoberta Menchù to Marx, bell hooks to Arendt, Fanon to Foucault and many others, intellectuals targeted their thinking directly at the conflicts and injustices they saw around them.”

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Repeat photography & coastal change: From notes and ideas to research method

You never know when or how new research will begin. Let alone how you're going to do it. That's why it's always good to take notes...and photographs.

In March 2012, when I was in the middle of my doctoral work in Cabo Pulmo, I just happened to map the coastal profile of a nearby beach (known as "Los Frailes"). It's a long, sandy stretch of beach that curves around a small bay. I walked along the edge of the waterline with a small hand-held GPS unit and mapped the profile. I'm still not sure why I did it; I just decided to map it. By chance, the very next week, a huge section of that same beach collapsed into the ocean. As it turns out, there's a deep underwater canyon that runs right up to the shore. That morning I heard several reports about the beach collapse, so I raced over to check it out with a few friends. About 120 meters of the beach--the same place where I'd walked and mapped the week before--had just fallen into the ocean. I re-mapped the coast, took some photographs, and archived it in my memory bank as something to keep in mind…

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Sustainability is everything (and nothing)

November 2012.  I’m at a community meeting in Cabo Pulmo, Baja California Sur, Mexico.  It’s a gathering that includes members of the community of Cabo Pulmo, scientists, economists, planners, representatives from national and international NGOs, residents from surrounding communities, and development experts.  The subject: the future of Cabo Pulmo and the East Cape.  The problem: mass tourism development is slowly encroaching on the region.  While the East Cape remains relatively undeveloped at present, this won’t last for long.  Development is coming.

Only a few months before, Cabo Pulmo and its allies celebrated when “Cabo Cortes,” a massive tourism development project that was proposed for the region, was cancelled by former president Felipe Calderon (on national TV no less).  Calderon cited environmental concerns as one of the primary reasons why he 86-ed the project (and left the presidency with a nice “green” feather in his cap to boot).  The project plans for Cabo Cortes included approximately 30,000 rooms, a marina, residential units, multiple hotels, a separate community for workers, and multiple golf courses.  It was, effectively, a plan to build a new tourism city in a region where the largest population is approximately 5,000 people.  Cabo Cortes was the epitome of the kind of development that has dominated in Mexico for decades: big, fast, and profitable, with a long tail of problems that nobody wants to deal with over the long haul.  Places like Cancun and Los Cabos exemplify this type of rapid, mass-tourism development that looks wonderful from the national level and often disastrous at the local community level (see, for example, M. Bianet Castellanos’s book Return to Servitude).

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