sey075

What is the scholarly or scientific status of blogs like this one? Is there scholarly value here, or is this just an ephemeral platform to rant and rave occasionally? A blog entry is not a rigorous scholarly work, mainly because it is not peer reviewed. Sometimes I say smart things in a scholarly fashion, and sometimes I say clueless things in a non-scholarly fashion. When I have said particularly dumb things, people sometimes catch me and correct my errors, which is great. Scholarship advances through debate and correcting errors. But many of the points I make have serious scholarly value or context, and I try to emphasize those posts by providing citations and bibliographies. I have just seen a case where one or more of my entries had a positive effect on a reader's scholarship. A few months ago Di Hu , a grad student at Berkeley, emailed me a draft of a paper on ethnogenesis and thanked me for my post on identity , which evidently provided her with some references. It was a good...

I am writing this on the bus between Ann Arbor and East Lansing, Michigan. I gave a lecture at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan on Friday. This was a great experience. The lecture (the “Jeffrey Parsons Lecture”) is run by the archaeology grad students - they are the ones who invited me, and my schedule was set to maximize my interaction with students. Normally when one visits a program, one has individual meetings with the faculty, and then maybe a lunch with a bunch of students. Well, I had lunch with some faculty, but meetings and events all day with grad students (including breakfast and dinner, not to forget Friday afternoon beers, called “007” at Michigan for some reason I can’t recall). This is a great group of students. They are smart and competent and each one I talked to is doing good research. And they are solid empirical scientists who don't have much use for high-level social theory. But several expressed a concern about whether they would be ex...

I’ve just finished reading the new book by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (2012, Harvard University Press, hardcover). The book covers an immense amount of archaeological and ethnographic territory in tracing human social evolution from the Paleolithic to the early empires, emphasizing the nature of inequality in different kinds of societies. This is truly “big history.” The topic is timely and big, the time depth is enormous, the cases reviewed are numerous, and even the endnotes are big (47 pages, out of a total of 631). I learned quite a bit, and I recommend the book to anyone who reads this blog (well, perhaps not the postmodernists, who just aren’t going to like the book, but they probably don’t like the blog, either). With an epigraph of the famous quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau (“Man is born free, and yet we see him everywhere in chains”), who could dislike this book...