My wife said that the Bad Bunny halftime show was very good, and she's always had excellent taste

"As Nature was hardly invented at this early point of the century, Bob's Matilda could not say much about the glamour of the hills, or the shimmering of the foliage, or the wealth of glory in the distant sea, as she would doubtless have done had she lived later on"--Thomas Hardy

I miss Johannes Fabian

I've said it before, but the influence reading Chomsky had on me when I was young was to encourage me not to go into linguistics, which seemed dehumanizing and boring, but rather to follow the more interesting and humane path of linguistic anthropology--honestly, Chomsky or Keith Basso?

And now anyone who has a computer can type without having to change the paper, just like Jack Kerouac

Putting Américo Paredes and Dennis Tedlock in conversation next week in my graduate intro to linguistic anthropology seminar, both take the ethnography of speaking as informing the doing of ethnography, and both raise questions about anthropological claims

If you're interested in reading something very different than robert trivers, something that is rather good, I'd recommend beginning with Eleanor Burke Leacock's Myths of Male Dominance (she was not a fan of trivers)

It's interesting (heartening) to see all the negativity towards Robert Trivers, and to be honest, I've never been a fan, but for those who are interested in trivers role in the pseudoscience evolutionary psychology and its precursor sociobiology, these two books by Erika Milam are very good

This edited volume by Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban was another important book published in 1996, Michael's chapter, The Secret Life of Texts, on Edward Sapir and Pete McGuff is still quite useful

‘On a knife edge’: can England’s red squirrel population be saved?

They make a good point

Another very good book from 1996, Tony Woodbury recommended it to me

Another brilliant anthropology book turning 30 this year, Janis Nuckolls's Sounds like Life was a important influence on me, on poetics, on ideophony, on iconicity

Epstein was the major funder of sociobiologist Robert Triver's research. But it seems much worse than that according to this FBI report in 2019. Trivers's name is mentioned nearly a thousand times in the Epstein files. www.justice.gov/epstein/file...

Since a lot of people (no one) have asked my view on the Helen of Troy "controversy," I'm not going to watch the movie, but then I was never going to watch the movie, I don't have the attention span to sit through a movie without pulling out a book and trying to get a few pages read

Looking through my ongoing bibliography, it seems that 1996 had a number of very good books published, books that left a lasting impression on me. This book honoring Bob Young and focused on Athabaskan languages was particularly important to me

This book by Johannes Fabian is also 30 years old this year, it had an important influence on how I thought about doing ethnography; to me, it is a far more interesting book than anything Chomsky ever published (and Fabian was no fan of Chomsky)

"As native speakers of English, we can scarcely be expected to find anything funny about our rising intonation in questions or our aspiration of "p," "t," and "k"...We cannot truly participate with the native Zuni in his feeling that there is something...absurd about these speech habits"--S. Newman

It's rather surprising to realize that Keith Basso's Wisdom Sits in Places is turning 30 years old this year. I first read the book as a manuscript, pre-publication, and it has had a lasting influence on my thinking, about anthropology and about language

But endless stories in mankind quarterly, I mean quillette, about napoleon chagnon never get boring

And:

"Perhaps the future of Sloth will lie in sinning against what now seems to increasingly to define us--technology. Persisting in Luddite sorrow, despite technology's good intentions, there we'll sit with our heads in virtual reality, glumly refusing to be absorbed"--Thomas Pynchon

"Behind the abstract talk of liberties and freedoms in much of 21st century neoliberal and libertarian discourse lies a much grubbier story of hunting and gathering, primordial beginnings, & adamantine differences. Only by understanding this can we understand the mystique of evolutionary psychology"

Just a reminder that pinker has been peddling racist pseudoscience for years. It seems clear that much evolutionary psychology was the hand maiden of white supremacy Harvard author Steven Pinker appears on podcast linked to scientific racism www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

The Atlantic was founded in 1857, the New York Times in 1851. So it's a bit surprising that David Brooks is leaving the Times for the Atlantic, given that the Atlantic is only six years younger.

"Unless we are able to deal with statements such as 'a white person is black' in ways other than rejecting them as contradictory, there is no point in doing anthropology"--Johannes Fabian

"It was a cheerful, careless, unpremeditated half-hour, which returned like the scent of a flower to the memories of some of those who enjoyed it, even at a distance of many years after, when they lay wounded and weak in foreign lands."--Thomas Hardy, The Trumpet-Major

I was delighted to block the Atlantic on bluesky

Evening reading, Mary Swift's paper on the ethnopoetics of a Kashaya gambling narrative

As an anthropologist, I prefer empirical evidence instead of sweeping claims. There is no empirical evidence that "hunter-gatherers" existed in "stagnation" for "200,000." This is the same nonsense that allowed people to look at contemporary people as "living relics"(of course it's by Nicholas Wade)

Working on my lecture for tomorrow, using examples from these two articles (one by O'Connor and one by Rushforth), on speaking of and to relatives in Northern Pomo and Bearlake Athapaskan

"He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, And snow disfigured the public statues; The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day."--W.H. Auden

When you’ve lost Sepp Blatter.

Laurel, IN, now known for something more than where the last wild passenger pigeon was killed

I couldn't last three pages of this book

No classes today

Winter wonderland

dibé naakai léi’ tsin ałnáosdzid hanii eegai nisin --Rex Lee Jim

The obituary for Clark Wissler in the Richmond, IN newspaper begins with a discussion of James Mooney, also from Wayne County. Mooney was easily the better anthropologist Dr. Clark Wissler, Wayne Native, Dies; 26 Aug 1947; Palladium-Item www.newspapers.com/article/pall...

“Poetics of Living breathes new life into both ethnopoetics and the poetics of interaction and, ultimately, creates something intellectually rather exciting. Kuniyoshi Kataoka, Makiko Takekuro and Takeshi Enomoto have put together a book worth reading” ―Anthony K. Webster

Evening reading, waiting for the winter event

A German soccer federation executive committee member says it's time to consider a World Cup boycott because of the actions of U.S. President Donald Trump.

The Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) is preparing southern Illinois motorists for winter weather expected this weekend.

In honor of IU winning, I'm reading this article by IU alum Paul Kroskrity and published in the IU founded journal Anthropological Linguistics

I hope this national championship for iu means they will be able to find some money to support all the programs they are cutting

Reminded of that time Johannes Fabian published in Anthropological Linguistics Scratching the Surface: Observations on the Poetics of Lexical Borrowing in Shaba Swahili

"'Ethnoscience' like 'fuck' is an unmentionable; a deceased ancestor's name that can no longer be mentioned in polite company"--akw

Today at SALSA XXX, I give my talk on Keith Basso, Western Apache Language and Culture, and the fate of ethnoscience

"Thus it happens that each language, from the point of view of another language, may be arbitrary in its classification; that what appears as a single idea in one language may be characterized by a distinct phonetic group in another"--Franz Boas

Congratulations to Laura Tohe for being named Poet Laureate of Arizona! azgovernor.gov/office-arizo...