Day: April 14, 2008

Open Access Anthropology

There are now a couple blogs on open access in anthropology that I wanted to point out:

Open Access Anthropology

Open Anthropology

Anthropology News also had a recent issue with articles covering open access in anthropology (can download pdfs).

Savage Mind’s Rex provides us some very useful guidelines on how to get the information we need about new articles and books through online alerting in his post, Total Information Awareness (for anthropologists). Especially useful for people not linked into mainstream academia or off doing fieldwork or just interested in staying up to date.

Rex also describes the Mana’o Project, an open access repository for anthropology, and actively encourages people to use it.

If you are interested in more from Savage Minds, they have a whole Open Access Open Source category. CKelty in particular has been posting on a regular basis recently in this area.

Perspectives on Colombia

For those of you interested in Colombia and free trade, I found it striking that such divergent newspapers as The Weekly Standard and The New York Times both came down recently in favor of a free trade pact between the US and Colombia. In The Weekly Standard, Duncan Currie wrote A Strong Case for Colombia. At the Times, it was the editorial board who wrote Time for the Colombian Trade Pact.

What impressed me about both pieces is that they actually addressed what is happening in Colombia. As someone who lived in Colombia for many years, it is rare to find US media that supplies accurate information about Colombia rather than playing to the images we are all familiar with. Going further, they also place this information in the context of the political debates happening in the US.

Continue reading “Perspectives on Colombia”