More fab extracts in the "Introductory Readings in Anthropology" book I bought just before coming to Australia. Within the "Being Human: Unity and Diversity" section today we have "Organising Social Relations: Kinship and Gender, Engaging with Nature and The Humanity of Things. While I liked "The Semantics of Biology" by Kirsten Hastrup, I was thinking... Continue Reading →
So, I'm reading this while in quarantine, 6 to 8 excerpts at a time of this. Today's section was 'Ways of Thinking and Communicating'. Robin Dunbar (him of the Dunbar number) kicks off with some basics, and then a piece by Terence Deacon that had me wanting to re-watch "Arrival." Claude Levi-Strauss calling it like... Continue Reading →
Another day, another 7 or 8 excerpts from the Introducing Anthropology book. We're on to section 1.2,The Body Simon Underdown isn't messing about "Race is one of the most misunderstood terms in modern science, misused by seasoned scientists and laymen alike. Put simply, there are no human races, just the one species: Homo sapiens The... Continue Reading →
tl:dr - Two academics have written a good "here's how Tony Gramsci can fill in some of the major gaps in the MLP and maybe make it useful" article. On the downside, it's probably only particularly accessible to folks who know their Gramscia and their sustainability transitions stuff. The article is called "Regime resistance and... Continue Reading →
The Planning Fallacy rules my life. And I' [redacted] years of age. I brought this book with me, with the good intention of reading it while in quarantine. I'd bought it (two quid) a couple of weeks previously, at a charity event. Yeah, right. Fortunately, today is day 7 of Quarantine (7 more to go)... Continue Reading →
Here comes another international climate conference. We are very good at them now. Thirty years of practice will do that. I've made reasoned and reasonable arguments (i.e. ranted) at length about their worse-than-uselessness for social movements, and am relieved to be part of a group that is refusing the invitation to lobotomise itself. What has... Continue Reading →
It's time for me, at age [redacted] to come out. I've been living a lie for too long, denying who I AM, to others, to myself. There's been a period of shame, embarrassment stretching back (checks notes)... hours. At about 1030 today, in the central library special collections reading room, I realised that I am... Continue Reading →
I find the whole Malthusian Moment (roughly 1969-1973) fascinating. I guess because I grew up in its aftermath, where it was still resonating, there were aftershocks. (This is partly because I mostly grew up in Australia, which was then even more of a backwater than it is now. I'd see movies from the era (The... Continue Reading →
A while back (as in, I wrote this blog post hot, but didn't post it straight away because I don't want to commit "career" suicide) I attended back-to-back zoom meetings. The first promised to be on a crucial question about how we respond to escalating social, political and environmental crises. All the right theorists got... Continue Reading →
Scholars of socio-technical transitions and transformations were stunned today as entrepreneur and self-appointed “Techno-king” Elon Musk took sides in a long-running academic debate. Speaking from an undisclosed location (rumoured to be somewhere on Earth, but unconfirmed at present), Musk tweeted The tweet has caused equal parts consternation and delight in the sustainability transitions research network,... Continue Reading →
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