A World Upside Down: Institutional Connections of Anthropology Bloggers

Posted on 23 September 2008 by


Here is a simple, factual observation [even this opening line is rendered comical by the critical questions and points that followed the publication of this deeply flawed post, maintained here only for the benefit of others who might learn from these mistakes]:

Concordia University ranks first among Canada’s three institutions of higher learning

…if one is speaking only about anthropology blogging.

In the world of anthropology blogging, there are only three Canadian post-secondary institutions: Concordia U. (Montreal), Carleton U. (Ottawa), and Douglas College in British Columbia.

It is an unusual perspective, to take the anthropology blogging “community,” and then treat it as if there were no other anthropological community (no journals, associations, publishers, conferences, etc.), while still retaining certain institutional labels from the offline world. In other words, it is a painted picture, with some details foregrounded, and others left out.

But it is not exactly “wrong” either. In terms of their institutional connections — and I may have easily missed a few here (readers who know better are asked to please post their corrections) — the three institutions listed above are the only ones to have a presence in the world of blogging, at this moment. There is no University of Toronto, no McMaster, no Western Ontario, no McGill, no Simon Fraser, no UBC — they simply do not exist, gone, vanished.

It is already a world upside down then, where the offline institutional elites cease to exist when our focus moves online, and those who are at best intermediate or marginal in the ways they are perceived by the elites suddenly become the top places.

From Concordia, the four anthropology bloggers are, in alphabetical order:

Another Anthro Blog
Disparate
Open Anthropology
Shannanigan’s

If the situation had been one where people could say, “look at how the members of the anthropology department at Harvard all have blogs,” or if one could say, “hey, have you checked out Marilyn Strathern’s blog today, there’s a real sizzler on there,” or if a student put in a footnote, “these comments were collected from a sample of all 20 of U. Chicago’s anthropology blogs,” then I suspect that anthropology blogging would have been the thing to do for all anthropologists. However, incurable elitism that is taught and upheld widely, frowns at the offline non-elite with visibility online, and that possibly reconfirms and reinforces the mainstream, mass elitists’ presumption that blogging is not for anthropologists. I say mainstream mass because the elite in anthropology, however defined, by whatever standards, is a minority — but their values are unquestioningly upheld, reproduced, and put into force by the many without a face or a voice, i.e., the elite’s former students and their students’ students. Ten years from now, it will be all the rage, once someone at Harvard, Princeton, Yale, or Cambridge, or another member of that inbred network suddenly decides to write their first blog post. Then they will all be cool, innovative, cutting edge, and lecturing others about how they could be so retrograde, conservative, and stuffy for not blogging. Those who were doing it first, or earliest, will be forgotten.

If you can list the anthropology blogs arising from your institution, I would love to hear from you and get those links.

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