Commentary: Keywords as literacy practice in the history of anthropological theory
by Laura M. Ahearn
Read ArticleBy Laura M. AhearnFull Article: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.12001/abstract
Word clouds generated from the keywords and titles of articles published in American Ethnologist in the years 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2012 offer a fascinating, though partial, history of anthropological theory over the past several decades. Keyword selection also, I argue, constitutes a type of literacy practice that has been underanalyzed. In this commentary, I explore some of the ways in which the article keyword selection process is imbued with social, intellectual, political, and economic dimensions. I compare the most frequently appearing words in titles versus keywords for each of the above four years and trace the progression of two clusters of keywords: one related to language, the other related to the triumvirate of race, class, and gender. See Word Cloud Gallery: AE Word Clouds by Decade
Word cloud generated from the KEYWORDS of all the research articles published in American Ethnologist in 2012.