In an old New York Times essay a journalist commemorated the Japanese elevator girl’s voice as being especially piercing and high pitched. Other Americans have similarly made fun of this feminized service occupation, describing it as a particularly extraneous and vacuous job. Japan’s first elevator girls appeared in 1929, when the newly reopened Ueno branch [...]The Open Anthropology Cooperative (OAC) is a great source for open access content, especially through its publishing arm, the OAC Press. To me, this is one of the most promising efforts in Open Access anthropology out there–and I think more people need to take note of what’s going on over there. There is tremendous potential [...]At a regional Asian Studies conference recently there was a roundtable event held to highlight a documentary film on L. Keith Brown, professor of anthropology emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh. The film, produced and directed by David Plath, is “Can’t Go Native?” Keith was there on hand to answer questions about his long engagement with [...]In the 1990s when I shifted my research focus away from business interactions in Japan to the beauty industry, I was criticized by some anthropology colleagues, especially male ones and the archeologists and biological anthropologists. In Japan, older people I met said my decision was a waste—all those years of studying the Japanese language just [...]I tried an open thread here on SM a while back, and it worked out pretty well. Time for another one? Let’s give it a go. So…a couple of readers have posted new comments (here and here) about the content here on SM. They argue that there has been a bit too much coverage of [...]Are we preparing the next crop of anthropology PhDs who enter American academe to deal with the great shift in educational culture? With some states trying to pass laws that will enable students to excuse themselves from learning scientific concepts, what sort of undergraduates will populate US universities in the future? How is this going [...]The “new” Anthrosource came out in January of 2009, and made Chris Kelty cry. In three and a half years it still hasn’t been fixed. Why not? Do the following experiment. Pick a keyword and search for it on Anthrosource. Done? How many hits did you get? OK, now go to Wiley and search just [...]What if we don’t like our fieldwork site? I’m not only talking about “failed research” or the problems of doing fieldwork discussed by Amy Pollard. Her study of graduate students doing their first research projects revealed that many felt lonely, fearful, frustrated, depressed, trapped, and paranoid. I have in mind an additional issue: I don’t [...]This is a brief post to keep the conversation about adjuncts, anthropology, and academia going. Check out this piece over at Anthropology News* about the “Challenges to Organizing Academic Labor.” Here is one choice selection to think about: Eli Thorkelson (U Chicago) and Ryan Cook (Saint Xavier U) observed that accepting the culture of academia [...]