Lately, I’ve been reading a book called “The Tao is Silent”. It is a series of reflections on tao and taoism by Raymond Smullyan, a mathematician, musician, magician, philosopher and all-round trickster figure.
Long-time readers of this blog may remember that I blogged about Smullyan’s text “Is God a taoist” ages ago. The whole book [...]
Posts under ‘Literature’
On utopias
Online Ethnography
There was an interesting attempt at a discussion on the Anthrodesign mailing list recently as to what online ethnography actually entails. But the discussion never really seemed to get off the ground, and effectively had died by the time I posted my comment. So I thought I put it up here with a few adjustments:
Online [...]
Bit by bit – a review of “Two Bits”
I finally found the time to read Christopher Kelty’s book Two Bits – The cultural Significance of Free Software. Kelty is one of the few other anthropologists studying Free Software in general, and his work has been a huge inspiration in my thesis work on Ubuntu, so naturally, my expectations were high.
As Kelty argues, we’ve [...]
Internet tribes
Recently, I read Seth Godin’s new book Tribes. It is a short clever book full of insights on what it means to build and lead a tribe. Godin’s main argument is borrowed from one of Hugh McLeod’s one-liners:
Or, as Woody Guthrie put it: “Basically, man is a hoping machine.”
As a marketing guru, Godin’s spin on [...]
Humble idiots
Not too long ago, I went to see Lars and the Real Girl at my local art cinema. It’s both a fun and a sad film but what sums it up best is that it’s so human.
The film revolves around the unlikely situation where a introvert but sympathetic young man buys a life size [...]
Romantic love as perversion
A funny sidenote to my recent review of Bitterfittan: Recently, I read Michael Moorcock’s “Behold the Man“, which contained the following exchange, which offers a rather different perspective on relationships:
“Your trouble, Karl,” said Gerard as they walked along the High towards the Mitre where Gerard had decided to buy Karl lunch, “is that you’re hung [...]
Bitter genitalia
This summer I’ve had time to read a few books. And though feminist fiction is not something I usually seek out, I felt compelled to read the recently published Danish translation of Swedish journalist Maria Sveland’s novel Bitterfittan, which translates as “The Bittercunt.”
A weirdly fascinating title which refers to the book’s main character, 30-year Sara, [...]
Le scaphandre et le papillon
I suspect you think that this is an awfully pompous title for a blog post, or a film, or a book. And in a way it is. It is French, and means “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”. And it is the title of both a book and a film. And their subject matter are [...]
Does design equal quality ?
Following the INDEX conference, I got to thinking a bit more about how the designers posited design as an unquestionable good to be used to solve the many problems of the 21st century.
But what is good design? How do you know when you’ve found it?
Well, this summer I read Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the [...]
Robert Pirsig’s critique of anthropology
In Robert Pirsig’s book, Lila (1991), the main character – a thinly veiled author alter ego named Phædrus – tries to write a book about the influence of native American values on broad American culture. Inspired by an anthropologist colleague at the university in Montana where he used to teach, Phædrus seeks to frame the [...]
I'm an anthropologist working as an 
