The CaMP anthropology blog has been running for 10 years  — our very first post was on September 4^th, 2015.  During this decade, we have celebrated 122 dissertations, and 302 new books. 

The blog started because when Indiana University dissolved the innovative and beloved department of Communication and Culture, five ethnographers moved to IU’s anthropology department.  We joined six other people interested in linguistic anthropology, media anthropology, and the anthropology of music and art.  Eleven people, all in the same department, and yet it was a concentration that seemed likely to fly under everyone’s radar.  We wondered how to let anthropologists know about the department’s new strength, and hit upon the idea of creating a blog devoted to communication, media, and performance.   We were making lemonade out of bureaucratic lemons (ah, the institutional melodrama I am omitting here in this bland account of how a blog came to be).  Susan Seizer was the editor for the first year, and Sarah Mitchell designed the blog, getting the ball rolling.

But blogs are hungry beasts, and we had to figure out ways to feed it content.  So in November 2015, I hit upon interviewing authors of recently published books, honoring the arduous work we pour into these texts.  Honestly, it helped that I was on leave that year, and longing for a bit of legitimate distraction from writing The Book. Aneesh Aneesh was the first author we ever featured.  And then I began to wonder why we weren’t also celebrating dissertations more – these too have taken years and years of challenging intellectual work.  Elizabeth Kickham was the first to turn to page 99 of her dissertation, and discuss how it related to her dissertation as a whole. 

Ten years later, and CaMP anthropology is still chugging along, releasing a post every Monday morning.  This is thanks to all of you – so many have participated over the years, helping this amorphous intellectual community rejoice in what careful and hard-won analysis can reveal about our social worlds.  May the blog celebrate many more books and dissertations in the years to come.