So this is a kind of branding success. It might represent a kind of scholarly success, but the jury will be out for a while, obviously. Regardless, it’s a success that interests me precisely because I spend a lot of time teaching students and trying to convince colleagues that anthropology is an empirical philosophy, one that professional philosophers would never attempt precisely because it requires all kind of commitments to the real world that are verboten in most mainstream philosophy departments.
By this I and my fellow “empirical philosopher” anthropologists mean that anthropology might begin with the lingering questions of philosophers, but tests them amongst the people and (more precisely) collectivities of people for whom intuition, reason and logic are operative—people in the world. Ethnographic fieldwork is experiment, in this sense, even if it is methodologically distinct from the statistical model of survey and questionnaire represented by the experimental philosophers.
it’s not just that philosophy is willfully ignorant of other sciences, only that it is slowly and deliberately working out ways to engage, incorporate and argue with results in those fields, precisely because of their power to convince, and hopefully to open up new questions and new avenues for critique that may or may not require more experiment.
the implicit argument behind conducting experiment in philosophy—and a particular kind of experiment common in psychology, cognitive science—is that it will render the reasoning of philosophers more authoritative.
Experiments don’t settle questions, they only render some answers unlikely.
Is X-phi an ettempt to make philosophy more authoritative through experiment, or an attempt to make experimental work more philosophically rigorous?
Whatever anthropology’s problems are, they do not arise because the discipline is not yet scientific, but because of having tried so hard to become scientific, that it has come out the other side, with its ambitions unfulfilled, and a serious tradition of doubt that “becoming scientific” can necssarily be the pinnacle of achievement. For that pinnacle, many in the discipline still look towards philosophy, and so it makes it all the more disorienting to see that discipline suddenly wandering up the path behind us.

Ben Kraal

Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » Don’t be afraid of the Wiki!

Go on, edit Wikipedia.

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saved by Ben Kraal on 2005-10-30

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Mark Walker 3Expand

The Myth of Cultural Miscommunication

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saved by Mark Walker on 2008-07-01

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Daniel Andrlik

Savage Minds: Warcraft and the Craftsman: Grinding, Crafting, and Craft.

A fascinating article providing an anthropological take on virtual worlds like Second Life and games like World of Warcraft. It's well worth a read.

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saved by Daniel Andrlik on 2008-06-24

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Mark Tracy

Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » The myth of the “untouched” Amazon

The misguided understanding of culture as progressing, unidirectional, from simple to complex

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saved by Mark Tracy on 2008-06-18

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Rudy Garns

More on Coming of Age in Second Life

"If you only read one book about virtual worlds, read Julian Dibbell’s My Tiny Life. If you are only going to read two, read Tom Boellstorff’s Coming of Age in Second Life." (Savage Minds)

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saved by Rudy Garns on 2008-06-16

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Lisa Spiro

Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » Resource: Digital Research Tools Wiki

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saved by Lisa Spiro on 2008-06-16

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Lisa Spiro

Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » It’s a book! Two Bits

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saved by 2 people, first byJeremy Price on 2008-06-16, last byLisa Spiro on 2008-06-17

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Rudy Garns

The Presentation of Self in Virtual Life

"While the title of Tom Boellstorff’s book draws analogies with Margaret Mead, I think the book would have been better titled The Presentation of Self in Virtual Life. Having expressed some of my concerns with the book in a previous post, I’d like to take a moment to talk more about what I liked most about the book: the way in which he presents the kinds of discourse and self-presentation strategies Goffman so famously analyzed in “everyday life.” By thinking about the differences/similarities between the two we can learn something important about what it means to function as a virtual human." (Savage Minds)

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saved by 2 people, first byJeremy Price on 2008-06-16, last byRudy Garns on 2008-06-16

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Rudy Garns

Ethnography of the Virtual

"I just finished reading Tom Boellstorff’s ethnography, Coming of Age in Second Life, which I first learned about on Anthropologi.info last year. I have to admit coming to this book with a certain degree of antipathy towards its subject. It always seemed to me that playing Second Life was much more cumbersome, time consuming, and less entertaining than reading the real estate or personals sections on Craig’s List. Indeed, Boellstoroff’s book confirms my conviction that Second Life is mostly about real estate, with a little relationship stuff thrown in for good measure." (Savage Minds)

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saved by 2 people, first byJeremy Price on 2008-06-16, last byRudy Garns on 2008-06-16

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