Day: July 12, 2008

If Lists Are Your Thing

All right, here are some different rankings out there in the blogosphere.

First up, Online University Reviews gives us the Top 100 Liberal Arts Professor Blogs. They’ve split it up by topic, going from Art to Theology. (Yes, starting with art means that anthropology didn’t make it… grrr.) And it’s rather English heavy. But it’s a list!

Wikio: News in Your Way provides lots of ways to rank things, so to complement the liberal arts side, here is their ranking of the Top Science Blogs. Some familiar friends there, some blogs I didn’t know. Just one note, it looks like you have to submit your blog to even make it onto the list.

Technorati just gives us the Top 100 Blogs, and since they spend their time trying to track all blogs, it’s a powerhouse list. So these are the big players, covering the full gamut of topics out there—politics, technology, gossip. Didn’t I just say that we need to cultivate cultural and emotional ways of being? Here’s the ethnographic data on our present interests. It’s so depressing maybe I’ll go have a behavioral health problem to give me something to do. Wait, I already do. Excessive surfing and blogging. Damn, technology already got me.

And one more. The Nature Blog Network covers the “very best nature blogs on the net.”

Laura’s Weight Loss

Laura over at her psychology blog discusses her own successful weight loss (plus a big on-going study). She also linked back to an April post on successful weight loss I had when my med anthro class and I were examining obesity (for more posts, check our food and eating category). She highlights one of my main points with that essay, the American fixation on self-control and will-power as both pragmatically and philosophically problematic for going about weight loss.

As I put it, “So ‘willpower’ is not the answer, at least as conceived as an intrinsic and internal property of the individual.”

But obviously behavior does matter, linking internal and external dynamics together: “our behavior takes place within specific contexts, relationships, and symbolic meanings. It is also linked to subjective experience, available opportunities, bodily function, and the ongoing interpretation of our memories.”

Laura gives a great example of this (and congratulations too, on what you’ve accomplished): “What I have found useful is to take the decision-making out of my hands. I follow the Jenny Craig maintenance program, and that’s it. No variations, except for special occasions, like Mr. F’s chocolate cheesecake, and that happens no more than once a week.”

We humans are cultural creatures, much more than we are free will creatures. We are also emotional creatures, so major life events can provoke major change (a major health problem is frequently a main factor in successful weight loss, in reframing everyday life so doing “what it takes” suddenly makes sense). And of course we are decision making creatures, with conscious awareness and all that.

But I wonder, if our society put as much effort into developing our cultural and emotional ways of being, and not just our conscious and technological ways of being, would we have so many behavioral health problems in the first place?