I hope this year turns WAY better than 2011 for you all!

I wish you the best. Seriously.

My head hurts. D:

I will lie if I say this year started good; without any family drama, or dogs with bleeding tumors (it has been like, what, two days?). It's good I'm not superstitious or believe in any of those stuffs.

Via ew_younerd: How racist is American anthropology?

Yes, Ntarangwi has conducted an anthropological study of American anthropology! An important undertaking. He has studied textbooks, ethnographies, coursework, professional meetings, and feedback from colleagues and mentors. He “reverses the gaze", he stresses: Whereas Western anthropologists often study non-Western cultures, he studies “the Western culture of anthropology".

He is especially interested in “the cultural and racial biases that shape anthropological study in general".

In the preface and introduction he writes:

If anthropology truly begins at home as Malinowski states, how come, as I had thus far observed, anthropology tended to focus on the “exotic"? How come only a small percentage of fieldwork and scholarship by Western anthropologists focused on their own cultures, and when they did it was among individuals and communities on the peripheries, their own “exotics” such as those in extreme poverty, in gangs, ad others outside mainstream culture? (…)

This book is a personal journey into the heart of anthropology; representing my own pathways as an African student entering American higher education in the early 1990s that I knew very little about. It is a story about my initial entry into an American academic space very different from my own experience in Kenya, where we followed a British system of education.

It is also a story hemmed within a specific discourse and views about anthropology that can be best represented by remarks from fellow graduate students who wondered what i was doing in a “racist” discipline. (…) Troubled by this label, I consciously embarked on a journey to find more about the discipline.

Fantastic.

And, randomly, I take the opportunity to wish you all a great 2011.

This year was really marked with my pseudo-absence around here, wasn't it? (Because I'm never really absent unless I have exams, just depressed and with energy for nothing.)

Anyway, I really wish for a great 2011 for everyone. Way better than this shit of 2010.