profession – ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY

Encounters and conflicts within and between disciplines: Experimental philosophy and ethnography (1.3)

An interesting discussion has been taking place on Savage Minds titled, “Philosophers discover lost tribe in jungles of free will” by Chris Kelty. The discussion and debate that ensues there centres on the development of what some call “experimental philosophy” (with a digest available here). This movement, shortened to X-Phi, involves using quantitative research, especially […]

Paths Ahead, 2: Questions about “Academic Colonialism”

The notion of academic colonialism that is used to refer to the extraction of information from one place, which is then repackaged, reconstructed, and published in another (often at a cost that proves prohibitive for buyers in the place from which the information was extracted) is something I have found to be both useful and problematic as […]

The Ethnographer’s “Job” Makes a Little Boy Laugh

In 1999, while doing “fieldwork” in Arima, Trinidad. I am taking a smoke break alone, and a four year old child from the Carib Community comes to keep me company. He asks: “What work do you do?” I answer him, kindly: “This is the work that I do.” He asks again, now with a confused […]