Dear alma mater, if you are going to send a fundraising letter that appears to have been AI generated, then, as a stature victorious human person--,; I'm not going to be sending you any money, or himself

When students ask me for recommendations for anthropology books, especially if they are just getting interested in the topic, these are two of the books I still recommend

Arrived today, looking forward to reading Luis Cárcamo-Huechante's new book

My thoughts on Ong from a few years ago (open access) Keeping the Word: On Orality and Literacy (With a Sideways Glance at Navajo) Anthony K. Webster muse.jhu.edu/article/2160...

Three books on a theme

One of my favorite Keith Basso papers is his rather critical review of Jack Goody's the domestication of the savage mind in Language in Society (1980)

Tell me you've read no linguistic anthropology in the last 50 years "Oral culture is, again, aggregative instead of analytical, dispositionally traditionalist, and homeostatic, with no objective distance. Repetition, cliché, and formulas are essential."

Linguistic anthropologist Marcyliena Morgan, Founder of Harvard’s Hip-Hop Archive, Dies at 75 www.nytimes.com/2025/11/01/a...

"A species cannot fill its living space to absurd excess in number; and still so exalt excess, the extreme, non-mediocrity, in the individual. When excess becomes synonymous with success, a society is doomed, and by far more than Christ."--John Fowles, A Maggot

The tree

Imagine wanting to read anything by snovian public intellectuals pinker or murray, let alone reading a debate between them

I'd forgotten that Alessandro Duranti also weighed in on the Mead Freeman controversy, and, like many others, he found Freeman's description of Samoan society wanting

Among the pines

You often read about Andrew Lang in discussions of the history of anthropology, especially Victorian anthropology, but you never get a real sense of just how abysmal his taste in literature was (he reviewed much literature during his heyday); Rider Haggard over Thomas Hardy!

AI strikes me as the perfect combination of two great traditions in the US: 1) what Leo Marx might call the ethos of carelessness (see his discussion of The Great Gatsby) and 2) what Richard Hofstadter would call anti-intellectualism in American life

The lake below

www.statesman.com/news/educati... Gift article. Contact COLA and the Ptovost to oppose this backward move!

"Empirical research clearly indicates that there is not a simple set of features that uniquely characterize oral discourse, in spite of the recent flurry of pseudoempirical theorizing on this topic"--Joel Sherzer

Cypress

Light

Bald eagle

One of the interesting things about Koasati women's and men's speech as described by Mary Haas is that it is men's speech that is marked and women's speech that is unmarked or more basic (Silverstein gets this backwards in his shifers paper), this contrasts with, for example, Yana

Guest lectured in this guy's class today

I can't say that I take bill gates's pronouncements particularly seriously, after all, this is the same guy who praised pinker's enlightenment now

Late October

In the creek

At the lodge

"The settler-colonial twist is that now communities need to get permissions for copying and reproducing their own languages from researchers"--Jane Anderson and James Francis

Lightly floating on the creek

The old bridge

Hiking in the rain

Very much looking forward to my friend Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante's book Acoustic Colonialism: Acts of Mapuche Interference

Alto Pass

Giant City in the rain

Among the rocks

Waiting on the rain

At the falls

Before he wrote about literacy practices, Brian Street wrote about the image of the savage in popular Victorian literature

Book talk at UT Austin on Bye Bye I Love You @michaelerard.bsky.social

"Verbal disclosure of the identity of one's own spirit-power(s) is permitted only on one's deathbed, and such disclosures constitute the Wasco stereotype of what 'last words' are all about."--Robert Moore

As a practical matter, as an alum of UT Austin, I lost all interest in their sporting programs when they joined the SEC

The bluffs of southern Illinois

Boiler Up

Palladium, unsurprisingly, seems to publish a great deal of dreck. This is just nonsense

This is why I ignore all the meaningless work being done by the pseudoscience evolutionary psychology

The Paramount before the show

That time Dell Hymes cut Stephen Tyler's "review" of Charles Frake's book Language and Cultural Description, italicized what was the central point of the 5 page review, recommended a review from another journal, can't find a reviewer for Tyler's book, and disagreed with Tyler's use of textualization