Best of media/anthropology 2008
Daniel Lende over at Neuroanthropology has launched a Best of Anthropology Blogging 2008 Call for Submissions and kindly asked me to submit the most popular media/anthropology post as well as my own selection for best entry. So here are my two submissions:
The most popular post has been “Tim Ingold: ‘Anthropology is not Ethnography’“. Why this particular post? asks Daniel in his call for submissions. I don’t know, but possibly because (a) this is a topic with broad appeal beyond the specialist confines of media anthropology, (b) it was picked up by the widely read collective blog Savage Minds and then spread to other anthropology blogs faster than you can say ‘festive season’, (c) Tim Ingold is a household name to many in the anthropological world, and (d) the heading reads like a journalistic exclusive (although, as someone pointed out, the post referred to a British Academy lecture delivered by Ingold quite some time previously).
My own favourite post? That’s a trickier one as this choice doesn’t rely on the hard figures supplied by Worpress.com. I suppose it would have to be my paper proposal “The limits of networked individualism” because the swift response by Barry Wellman (a few hours after I posted it) actually got me thinking about this working paper. This led to a change in its title and focus, away from its original focus on networked individualism and towards what I hope is an original contribution that extends the theory of practice to new terrain, namely the question of digital media and local-level leadership around the globe, an issue about which we still know surprisingly little.
