The Rubber Tree People: Mayan or Myth

REVIEW: Aztecs, by Inga Clendinnen

Aztecs: An Interpretation, Inga Clendinnen (Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Hiking Cairns: The Good, the Bad, and the Leave No Trace Approach

Hiking season is upon us! As we hit the trails, it’s a great time to talk about cairns. Did you know there are essentially two types of cairns? They can be broken down into these categories: authorized (directional cairns) and unauthorized (hiker-made cairns). Let’s dive into both.   Image by David Clod  Unauthorized C

Fighting for a Livable Future: Exploring Frontier Climate Interventions with Kelly Erhart

Listen to Fighting for a Livable Future: Exploring Frontier Climate Interventions with Kelly Erhart from The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens wherever you get your podcasts!

The Contracting Circle

Why don't we believe LLMs are people?

The Color of Reason: The Idea of'Race'in Kant's Anthropology

Anthropology and Physical Geography. They were popular lectures attended by people from the general public. The present manual contains my lectures on anthropology. As to Physical Geography, however, it will not be possible, considering my age, to

Tend the System. Know the System.

They didn't wander. That's the first thing to understand. The popular image of the hunter-gatherer is someone moving through an indifferent landscape, taking what they find. It's not wrong about the movement. It's wrong about the indifference — theirs and the land's. What the archaeological and ecological record increasingly shows is

The Depths of Wikipedians—Asterisk

A conversation about yogurt wars, German hymns, tropical cyclones, and the people who make Wikipedia function.

I Do Not Accept Your TOS - Tynan's Leaflets

W is proof that the ecosystem is working

Symbolic Manipulation: an Anthropological Perspective

The aim of this article is to elucidate the anthropological conditions of possibility for computing. I will first show how symbolic manipulation is constitutive of hominization. Secondly, I will ex…

The 1989 CBC Massey Lectures, "The Real World of Technology"

Technology has always been a part of human existence. Today though, says the experimental physicist, Ursula M. Franklin, technology has large-scale effects on culture itself. Ursula Franklin is an experimental physicist, University Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, a former board member of the National Research Council and the Science Council of Canada, and a companion of the Order...

Solidarity Syllabus: Indigenous Peoples, Rematriation, and Resisting AI Data Centers — Solidarity Is

For this Solidarity Syllabus, we are learning alongside Indigenous organizers, leaders, and communities whose work offers important solidarity lessons and invitations for how we might understand land, water, sovereignty, and resistance to data centers.  Indigenous Peoples Day is observed

Governance Archaeology: Research as Ancestry

Abstract. This essay presents the idea of governance archaeology, an approach to learning from the past to inform the politics of the future. By reporting on a prototype historical database, we outline a strategy for co-producing a global commons of collective governance practices that can inspire institutional learning and experimentation, particularly in the face of rapid technological change and vexing global crises. Embedded in our approach is an orientation of ancestry whereby practitioners cultivate relationships of accountability and responsibility to the legacies they learn from, recognizing the harm from past patterns of exploitation. By taking seriously a wide range of historical governance practices, particularly those outside the Western canon, governance archaeology seeks to expand the options available for the design of more moral political economies.

Brazil’s highland forest has been shaped by climate change and Indigenous people for 6,000 years

Prehistoric pollen records show that forest dynamics were driven by more than just broad-scale climatic changes.

If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious

If you're a materialist, you probably think that rabbits are conscious. And you ought to think that. After all, rabbits are a lot like us, biologically and neurophysiologically. If you're a materialist, you probably also think that conscious experience would be present in a wide range of naturally-evolved alien beings behaviorally very similar to us even if they are physiologically very different. And you ought to think that. After all, to deny it seems insupportable Earthly chauvinism. But a materialist who accepts consciousness in weirdly formed aliens ought also to accept consciousness in spatially distributed group entities. If she then also accepts rabbit consciousness, she ought to accept the possibility of consciousness even in rather dumb group entities. Finally, the United States would seem to be a rather dumb group entity of the relevant sort. If we set aside our morphological prejudices against spatially distributed group entities, we can see that the United States has all the types of properties that materialists tend to regard as characteristic of conscious beings.