**Nap Lajoie, 2015.** **Library of Congress. Lajoie hit .426 in 1901.**

Revisiting Gould on the death of .400 hitting

August 1, 2024

Last summer I wrote a series on Anthrodendum about beaches and baseball. I plan to do a bit more of the same this summer. Considering everything that’s going on in the world these days, this may be a retreat into escapism, and I’ll own that. Of course, baseball isn’t immune to the politics, inequalities, and complexities of humanity by any means (see this recent series by the journalist Jerry Brewer, for starters), but it’s still possible to find moments of respite here and there.

Baseball is good like that, at least for me. But what’s funny is that I often end up ‘taking a break’ by watching or going to baseball games–and then end up thinking through all kinds of things by thinking about baseball. What a total social scientist move. So much for the break!

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

December 26, 2023

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

December 26, 2023

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.”