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Commentary: Keywords as a literacy practice in the history of anthropological theory
Author(s) -
AHEARN LAURA M.
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1111/amet.12001
Subject(s) - trace (psycholinguistics) , literacy , selection (genetic algorithm) , sociology , race (biology) , class (philosophy) , politics , epistemology , social science , history , linguistics , gender studies , philosophy , computer science , political science , pedagogy , law , artificial intelligence
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.