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Things to read
I am putting links to specific papers or lectures here. Some of these are longer versions of published papers; some of them are simply accessible versions of chapters or papers that are hard to find; some are papers which have not yet been published; some are videos of presentations. Where a paper has been published in an easily accessible open-source venue I just link to that version, as I would rather the journal (or whatever) gets the visits it deserves.
Towards A Buddhist Social Anthropology
This paper has, I think, not received the attention it deserves. One reviewer said something to the effect of 'I cannot find any evidence that you are wrong, but the conclusions are startling'. My colleague Richard Payne gave it a friendly pre-publication review. I am grateful to the Ñanasaṁvara Centre for publishing this paper as I suspect if it had been published in anything other that a spotlessly Buddhist journal, the challenge that it presents to modernist, secularizing Buddhism would have been weakened. In any case, this paper forms part of a longer project on rethinking what anthropology could be. It will be clear from the argument and conclusions that I do not subscribe to any form of humanism or liberal cosmopolitanism, but I do think anthropology as the comparative study of social relations has a key role to play in rescuing all living things from the awful mess we are presently in. Towards a Buddhist Social Anthropology, 2018.
Autism and Anthropology
There's more and more work around the anthropology of autism these days, and a very few pieces written by openly autistic anthropologists. I haven't yet published anything peer-reviewed in which I position myself as an autistic anthropologist and I'm not sure I ever will. However, I put together this poster for the ITAKOM conference organised by Sue Fletcher-Watson and Sophie Dow as a way of trying to make sense of theorising participant observation as an autistic anthropologist. Maybe it will become a paper or a methods chapter someday, but for now, it's a start. 'Revisiting the "Anthropologist on Mars": Questioning the assumptions that support participant observation from the perspective of an autistic anthropologist' - ITAKOM 2022.