Notes on violence, human rights, social movements, open data, and anthropology

Author

Carwil Bjork-James

Posts

Breaking “Margaret Mead” out of a Wikipedia Rut

A reflection on revising a legacy Wikipedia biography.

Carwil Bjork-James
Jan 12, 2026

Wikipedia Redirect Generator
This page is an experiment with using Quarto and R to generate text for Wikipedia. The goal is to create a reproducible workflow that can help in generating content for…
Jan 2, 2026

The Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia, and Artificial Intelligence

Keeping track of how the Wikimedia community is planning around generative AI

Carwil Bjork-James
Jan 2, 2026

What you should know about Artificial Intelligence

An evolving list of smart, often skeptical takes on Generative AI

Carwil Bjork-James
Dec 26, 2025

The Palestine Archipelago

Julien Bousac’s visualization of territorial fragmentation under Oslo

Carwil Bjork-James
Dec 9, 2025

Metal boxes resembling coffins hang in the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery, Alabama

Panel on Researching Violence for AAA 2025

A call for panel participants for the American Anthropological Association meeting in November 2025

Carwil Bjork-James and Jennifer Burrell
Apr 11, 2025
 
Welcome

The first draft of my welcome post for this website

Carwil Bjork-James
Oct 13, 2024

Palestinian fatalities surpass 40,000 in under 11 months

The scale and disparity of death continue to grow at a staggering pace.

Carwil Bjork-James
Sep 5, 2024

A bar chart showing individual deaths per presidency in Bolivia since 2001

Conflict deaths in Bolivia, 2023–24

Recent political violence in Bolivia is happening between social movements, not against them

Carwil Bjork-James
Aug 30, 2024

Conflict deaths in Bolivia, 2022

Fifteen Bolivians were killed in social movement conflicts in 2022

Carwil Bjork-James
Jan 8, 2023

Anthropology students on avoiding sexual assault

What do you do to avoid sexual assault?

A text-only data visualization

Carwil Bjork-James
Oct 10, 2018
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Teaching Notes

Anthropological grounds for a “revolution in kinship”

Situating Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women” for Week 14 of the History of Anthropological Theory

Carwil Bjork-James
Nov 24, 2025

Gifts, Boundaries, and Taboos

Situating readings for Week 12 of the History of Anthropological Theory

Carwil Bjork-James
Nov 4, 2025

Landmarks in conceptualizing the ethnographic field by Malinowski and Gluckman

Situating readings for Week 10 of the History of Anthropological Theory

Carwil Bjork-James
Oct 26, 2025

Margaret Mead

Situating readings for Week 11 of the History of Anthropological Theory

Carwil Bjork-James
Oct 26, 2025

A table of numbers with the ethnic names, Bobemians, Poles, Hungarians, Slovacs, Hebrews, Sicilians, Neapolitans

Boas, Rivet, and the End of the Craniometry of Race

New empirical approaches gradually undermined “race science,” but the process took decades

Carwil Bjork-James
Oct 14, 2025

Nineteenth-century North American ethnography by Mooney and Morgan

Briefly situating readings for Week 5 of the History of Anthropological Theory

Carwil Bjork-James
Sep 19, 2025

Ninetenth-Century Evolutionary Anthropology

Situating readings for Week 4 of the History of Anthropological Theory

Carwil Bjork-James
Sep 12, 2025

Anthropology and the Enlightenment

Situating readings for Week 3 of the History of Anthropological Theory

Carwil Bjork-James
Sep 11, 2025

When did anthropology begin in the Western Hemisphere?

Situating readings for Week 2 of the History of Anthropological Theory

Carwil Bjork-James
Aug 28, 2025

“Life and Debt” Follow-up: Jamaica and Structural Adjustment
Nick Dearden writing in The Guardian (London) offers an overall update on Jamaica, debt and development,1 which continues to be heavily shaped by the neoliberal policies…
Nov 19, 2014

Some updates on the Three Gorges Dam
Since Manufactured Landscapes was released in 2006, the Three Gorges Dam (Wikipedia entry) in China has been completed and made operational. Several of you mentioned its…
Carwil Bjork-James
Nov 10, 2014

Filmmaker Stephanie Black on “Life and Debt”
These pieces about Stephanie Black’s 2001 film provide more context about the director, the film, and her artistic and political intentions.
Carwil Bjork-James
Nov 6, 2014
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Invocation

A quote engraved in white text on nearly black marble: '… AND O MY PEOPLE, OUT YONDER, HEAR ME, THEY DO NOT LOVE YOUR NECK UNNOOSED AND STRAIGHT. SO LOVE YOUR NECK; PUT A HAND ON IT, GRACE IT, STROKE IT AND HOLD IT UP. AND ALL YOUR INSIDE PART'S THAT THEY'D JUST AS SOON SLOP FOR HOGS YOU GOT TO LOVE THEM. THE DARK, DARK LIVER - LOVE IT, LOVE IT, AND THE BEAT AND BEATING HEART, LOVE THAT TOO. MORE THAN EYES OR FEET. MORE THAN LUNGS THAT HAVE YET TO DRAW FREE AIR. MORE THAN YOUR LIFE-HOLDING WOMB AND YOUR LIFE-GIVING PRIVATE PARTS, HEAR ME NOW, LOVE YOUR HEART. FOR THIS IS THE PRIZE.' - Toni Morrison