Kristina Kilgrove’s comments on blogging that I linked to yesterday reminded me of one of the other reasons I have taken up the craft – interactions with colleagues. Biological anthropologists sometime like to refer to themselves as the lone gorilla in anthropological departments as they/we often represent a small minority of the total faculty. I am fortunate to be in a wonderful place with great colleagues, but it is a very small department. When I arrived I was one of three members of the Anthropology Department at Wellesley College, with one cultural anthropologist and one archaeologist as senior colleagues. We have since expanded to a department of ~4.5, but I remain the lone biological anthropologist and likely will remain so for the foreseeable future. I am lucky that my location puts me in close proximity to the large and expanding biological anthropological community of greater New England. This makes it easy, for example, to drive down to University of Connecticut to give a talk as I did last week, participate in a Biological Anthropology Discussions series at Boston University, like I did last spring, or work on projects with other nearby colleagues.
Absent these geographic connections, my daily interactions with other colleagues on topical issues in my field would be limited to direct e-mail exchanges. Blogging broadens my academic circle and makes me a more connected, better biological anthropologist at a small institution. As an example, it is unlikely, absent this blog, I would have had direct contact with the lead author of last week’s Gorilla genome paper in Nature, and yet there were his comments waiting for me this morning when I woke up. In a field as widespread and multidisciplinary as biological anthropology, active conversation within the field is an essential part of the practice. Blogging, more than anything else, makes this possible at a small liberal arts college.
