• Investment banking works for her
Insider Higher Ed carried an article about Gillian Tett’s presentation at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in which she described her use of anthropological training when she entered the world of investment banking (she has a doctorate in social anthropology from Cambridge University). Tett is the US managing editor and an assistant editor of the Financial Times. For her coverage of world financial markets, she was named Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards in March 2009. She is the author of the prize-winning book, Fool’s Gold. During her AAA talk, she urged cultural anthropologists to move out of their comfort zone and to get engaged in new arenas.

• Shaping the new philanthropy
The new philanthropists want to do more than make a donation: they want to make a difference and they choose a DIY approach. A connection at a dinner party with Paul Farmer, medical anthropologist and co-founder of Partners in Health, informed one such philanthropist of how to connect to an ongoing health care program run by Partners in Health in Rwanda. She dined, she met, she gave.

• Anthro of humanitarianism
A new series of the Times of Trenton, called Profiles in Knowledge, profiled Didier Fassin, the James Wolfensohn Professor at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. A cultural anthropologist and sociologist, Fassin has done fieldwork in Senegal, South Africa, Ecuador, and France. He studies the ethics and power relationships in humanitarian intervention.

• Thumbs up for home brew in India
Felix Padel, the great-great grandson of Charles Darwin, is quoted in the Times of India as favoring a local alcoholic beverage, mahua, over scotch: “it is not only good for health but also economical and great to taste.” Padel has been active in anti-mining movements in India and was in India to look at the economics of coal mining in Jharkhand. Drinkers beware: adulteration is a problem in some local brews.

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 11/29/10” →

• Haiti in the time of cholera
Foreign Policy magazine quoted medical anthropologist Paul Farmer as saying that it is important to seek the source of cholera in Haiti and that the reluctance of international organization to investigate further is politically motivated. Farmer, a co-founder of Partners in Health, is a public health advocate and UN deputy special envoy to Haiti.

• Water security in Haiti
Paul Farmer appears again in the media, this time pointing to the need for water security in Haiti to ensure people’s health though clean water for drinking, food preparation, and bathing.

• Anthro major is Rhodes Scholar
Tracy Yang, a senior majoring in anthropology and focusing on health disparities at the University of Georgia, is one of 31 Rhodes Scholars.  She plans to study for a master’s in global health sciences while at Oxford.

• Foraging for a Thanksgiving meal
NPR carried an article about American Indian foods in the Maryland area including a discussion with archaeologist Bill Schindler of Washington College.

• Stonehenge makeover to “restore the dignity”
The famous site topped a recent list of Britain’s most disappointing tourist attractions. Major new funding will address such 20th century indignities as a car park, gift shop, and the A344 and its constant traffic and fumes.

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 11/22/10” →

• Floods, drones and misery
Saadia Toor, assistant professor of anthropology and social work at the College of Staten Island and member of Action for a Progressive Pakistan, talks about the relief efforts, the role of the Pakistani military in the crisis, and the escalating use of drones by the US and NATO.

• Spotlight on Sabiyah Prince
The Atlanta Post launched a new series exploring the work of African-American professors around the US. An interview with Sabiyah Prince, assistant professor of cultural anthropology at American University in Washington, DC, offers insights about her use of history and cultural anthropology to explore changing patterns of racism in Harlem, Washington, DC, and elsewhere.

• Get down and dirty
Students at universities in China are being required to spend time in villages for a period of time as part of community service and learning how others live. The Guardian quotes Zhou Daming, professor and dean of anthropology at Sun Yat-sen University: “It is good for them to go and learn about another kind of life.”

• Ourselves, our wars, our woes
Roy Richard Grinker, professor of cultural anthropology at George Washington University in Washington, DC, comments on the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) and notes the effect of war on changes in categories and labels.

• Australian Indigenous runners in New York Marathon
A group of Australian Indigenous runners competed in the New York Marathon, among whom, Central Australian Charlie Maher crossed the finish line first and is believed to be the first Australian Indigenous runner to finish the New York Marathon.

• Sleeping around in Amazonia
Robert Walker, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri, in collaboration with two other biological anthropologists, Mark Flinn of Northwestern University and Kim Hill of the University of Utah, has found that sexual promiscuity was the norm in “traditional” Amazonian societies. It was also acceptable for a child to have several fathers. Findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 11/15/10” →

• UN troops as the source of cholera in Haiti?
Paul Farmer, medical anthropologist at Harvard University and co-founder of Partners in Health, told the Washington Post that it is important to find out what caused the recent outbreak of cholera in Haiti. His comment is in response to a statement from the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that it is not possible to pinpoint the source and further investigations detract from fighting the disease. Farmer said, “That sounds like politics to me, not science.”

• Anthro of suicide bombers
A book review in The Sunday Times (London) discusses Scott Atran’s book, Talking to the Enemy: Violent Extremism, Sacred Values, and What It Means to Be Human. Atran, a cultural anthropologist, is Director of Research, ARTIS Research and Risk Modeling, and Research Director in Anthropology at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. He is also Visiting Professor of Psychology and Public Policy at the University of Michigan and Residential Scholar in Sociology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York City. Atran’s book is based on research carried out around the world. One of his arguments is that the power of commitment to one’s buddies spurs suicide bombers rather than religious fanaticism. According to the review, the book also “tells us that we are not winning and why.”

• Organized crime and government in Mexico
The Christian Science Monitor carried an article on the links between organized drug criminals and politics. It quotes Alberto Aziz Nassif, a specialist in democracy and civil society at the Center for Research and Higher Education in Social Anthropology in Mexico City: “Organized crime has not just penetrated police bodies but [also] government space at all levels…It is one of the biggest problems complicating the fight against drug trafficking…There are no clear boundaries. The boundaries have been erased by corruption and impunity.”

• It’s my thong and I’ll wear it if I want to
Baseball rituals may include wearing a thong. In an article on baseball players’ seemingly bizarre behavior, The Montreal Gazette interviewed cultural anthropologist George Gmelch, professor of anthropology at the University of California at San Francisco, former first-baseman for the Detroit Tigers, and author of a classic article called “Baseball Magic” which discusses players’ fetishes and magical practices. Back to the thong: it’s about San Francisco Giants first-baseman Aubrey Huff and his habit of wearing a red thong under his uniform. Gmelch says, “It may appear wacky to the fans, but it serves a basic human need for stability in uncertain circumstances.” In his article, Gmelch argues that baseball players who are positions involving the most uncertainty are the most likely to use magical practices.

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 11/08/10” →

• Sex work: beyond the Swedish model
At a symposium in Adelaide, experts discussed different models for regulating prostitution including the Swedish model  in which selling sex is decriminalized but procuring sex is illegal. Swedish social anthropologist Petra Ostergren said that the Swedish model is not pragmatic, treats sex workers like children, and has driven sex work underground. Catherine Healy, national coordinator of the New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective, reported that a five-year review of decriminalization there found that it was a success with laws working to protect sex workers’ health and safety.

• Anthro of zombies
NPR covers an anthropology class on zombies and their cultural importance that anthropology professor Jeffrey Mantz teaches at George Mason University. Key lessons include: they are everywhere, they will eat you if you get too close, and a zombie attack is probably not the worst thing that will happen to you.

• Anthro of spooky
The Chronicle for Higher Education carried an article about the research of cultural anthropology professor Misty Bastian, of Franklin & Marshall College, on the paranormal research industry and people who believe in the paranormal. The article includes a link to a video clip of Bastian and her student, Jessica Garber, discussing their work.

• It takes a student
Thomas Prince is a student of anthropology and economics at Concordia University. In 2009 he spent time in Uganda building homes with other Concordia students. While there, he visited jewelry stores to find gifts to take home for family, friends, and his girlfriend, Laura Schnurr, an international business student at Concordia. Now, both Thomas and Laura have founded Beads of Awareness, a small business to help sell Ugandan jewelry and spread awareness in the West, and, with its profits, to support community initiatives in Uganda.

• An Oxford first
Two students attending Oxford University are the first Australian Aboriginals to do so. Paul Gray and Christian Bumbarra Thompson are both recipients of a Charles Perkins scholarship which is named after a trailblazing Aboriginal soccer player. Thompson is pursuing doctoral study on the anthropology collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Gray is examining the effects of early experiences of abuse and neglect on children in foster care.

• Paleo push back (a regular mini-feature of anthro-in-the-news): stone tool making
A method of making stone weapons called pressure flaking was previously thought to have emerged first in Europe. Evidence from Blombos Cave in South Africa shows that pressure flaking was being done there 55,000 years earlier than evidence from France and Spain. Africa News quotes Paola Villa, a curator at the University of Colorado of Natural History and co-author of the paper in Science describing the find: “It’s a very skilful and advanced technique that no one expected to occur at such an early age in SA.”

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 11/01/10” →

• How often do you think about…
The weather: Anthropologist of popular British culture, Kate Fox, finds that British people talk about the weather once every six hours and that 70 percent check the weather forecast at least once a day. Weather talk, she finds, is a way to facilitate conversation. She also learned that men are more optimistic about the weather than women.

• Chagos update
Cultural anthropologist Sean Carey published an article in the New Statesman about a recent meeting about the Chagos right of return that included Olivier Bancoult (leader of the Chagos Refugees Group in Mauritius), Roch Evenor (chair of the UK Chagos Support Association), and Henry Bellingham (Foreign and Commonwealth Officer for Africa and the Overseas Territories). Interestingly, no lawyers from either side attended the meeting. The two sides agreed to meet again in November. Carey notes that Bellingham may need to update his information sources rather than relying on Bush administration statements from 2004.

• Dead Sea Scrolls go digital
The 2,000 year-old Dead Sea Scrolls will go online next year. They will then become available to more than one billion internet users.  If their writers could only imagine…

• Paleo bread rising
Stone tools in Italy, Russia, and the Czech Republic indicate that human ancestors 30,000 years ago ground plants into flour from which they perhaps made bread-like products to supplement their largely meat-based diet. These findings throw into question the prevailing model of the Paleo diet as excluding processed food.

• When writing began
In Chicago, the Oriental Institute has mounted a new show, “Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond.” It includes a Sumerian clay object with impressed designs referred to as proto-cuneiform. The exhibit provides examples from Sumerian, Egyptian, Chinese, and Mayan writing in order “to present and describe four times in history when writing was invented from scratch,” said Christopher Woods, associate professor of Sumerology at the University of Chicago and curator of the show.

• Oldest hospital in Britain
Archaeologists have found the site of what may be Britain’s earliest known hospital. It is located in Winchester underneath a medieval infirmary and is dated to before the Norman conquest. Simon Roffey from the University of Winchester notes the importance of the pre-conquest date.

• Oldest door in Europe
Swiss archaeologists have found a 5,000 year-old door in Zurich which may be the oldest known so far in Europe. Several villages from the period have been found at the site where a car park is planned.

• The call of the Yeti
Reports of Yeti sightings in Russia’s rugged Kemerevo region, in Siberia, are attracting record numbers of tourists to the area. Moscow News quotes Sergei Vasiliev, anthropology department head of the Moscow Ethnology and Anthropology Institute as saying that there is no scientific evidence of the Yeti, or Bigfoot. Nonetheless, the region joins Loch Ness in Scotland as an important site of a form of tourism that is still in search of a name. Fictional tourism doesn’t seem to capture it. Readers: please send in suggestions.

• This law is our law
The New York Times carried an article about customary law in Bali, including severe ostracism via the process of kapsepekang. The article quotes Balinese anthropologist Degung Santikarma who says that Balinese society “appears to be orderly, but it’s really coercive…In Bali, culture is to control people.”

• Getting it straight on Hezbollah
William Beeman, professor and chair of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, published a letter to the editor of the New York Times in which he addresses Joe Klein’s review of a book by Thanassis Cambanis. Beeman, contra Klein, supports how Cambanis presents the role of Hezbollah in Iran.

• Count down: a last tribe under state gaze
Please keep your fingers crossed that the Indian state will not crush the life from the Andaman Island group called the Jarawa (with apologies: this group name is likely to be inappropriate, since it is what other groups have named them and not what they name themselves). A recent population count put their number at 365 which is 125 more than the previous census estimate of 2001. An article in The Telegraph (Calcutta) quotes V. S. Sahay, professor and head of the department of anthropology at Allahabad University, explaining that previous population counts were only estimates because the Jarawa have long resisted “contact” from outsiders. Sahay says, “much of the confusion” about Jarawa demographics has been clarified since “The Jarawas…are now in direct contact with us.” Blogger’s note: “contact with us” does not sound like a good thing, at all, for the Jarawa. I have been watching the Andaman situation for over a decade, and the Indian state continues to justify its unwanted presence among the “uncontacted” tribes on the grounds that they need to count them, for the state’s decadal census, and they want to deliver health care and other aspects of modern life to them. Recommended reading: James Scott’s, Seeing Like a State. 

• One of the new tribes: global digital workers
Sean Carey, cultural anthropologist and research fellow at the University of Roehampton, interviewed Tom Jordan, a “new breed” digital entrepreneur about his business in the Greater Shoreditch area of London. During the interview, Carey asks Jordan if smaller international players, such as Mauritius, can be part of the global digital work.

• Enough to make you sick
Catherine Trundle, lecturer in cultural anthropology at Victoria University (New Zealand) has received a research grant to study the effects of nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s at Christmas Island in the Pacific on British and New Zealand servicemen. About 1000 surviving veterans are seeking millions of pounds in compensation for themselves and their families.

• Anthro and an acting career
Jesse Eisenberg who plays the role of Mark Zuckerberg in the new movie, The Social Network, studied anthropology in college. This background will do him well in getting into, and presenting, Generation X culture. At the age of 27 years, he is already outside that world.

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 10/18/10” →

• Hunger in a rich land
According to a recent poll, Philadelphia is one of the poorest–and hungriest–10 cities in the United States. There is intergenerational hunger, hunger exacerbated by the cut-back in federal eligibility for welfare, and hunger because of the recent and continuing economic recession. Cultural anthropologist Mariana Chilton, an assistant professor at Drexel University’s School of Public Health, says that “hunger is ugly” because of its negative effects on children and on urban life. Nutritional deprivation affects brain development, she says, as well as student classroom engagement. Chilton is a national figure in hunger policy/programs, and she is also working with Sesame Street to help figure out how it can talk about hunger in America.

• Teen drinking culture
The Century Council has funded a research project at George Mason University to understand underage drinking in the U.S. in order to promote responsible decision making. The study is looking at the dynamics of teen drinking, the age at which teens start drinking, where they get the alcohol, how dangerously they drink, and how some teens manage not to drink. Cultural anthropology professor Hugh Gusterson of George Mason Univserity is co-directing the study.

• Mammography screening and culture
Medical anthropologist Galen Joseph published an article about the different perceptions of, need for, and use of mammography screening among Latino and Filipino academics and social service providers in the San Francisco area. Joseph is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine of the University of California at San Francisco. The findings, which have relevance to interventions, are published in the journal Health Education and Behavior.

• Food anthropologist career option
Mehmet Gur’s high-end Istanbul restaurant, Mikla, employs an anthropologist with a doctorate in food cultures whose mission is to provide insights for the restaurant’s menu about non-processed food and rare ingredients of Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

• Unknown (to us) language discovered
A previously unknown language (to outsiders) has been discovered in northeastern India. The language is called Koro and is spoken by 800-1,200 people. It is in danger of extinction. The researchers are K. David Harrison of Swarthmore College and Gregory D. S. Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. They worked with Indian researcher Ganesh Murmu. Their findings will be published in Indian Linguistics.

• Just like us: compassionate Neanderthals
In addition to their recent rebranding as creative tool makers, Neanderthals now are likely to be compassionate caregivers of sick individuals–another form of behavior long associated with modern humans. The findings are from a study led by Penny Spikins, lecturer in the Department of Archaeology of the University of York and are published in Time and Mind.

• In memoriam
Joan Miller, professor of anthropology at San Diego State University, died on September 28. She was a biological anthropologist who also taught a cultural film class. She was an active member of the Save the Chimps foundation.

• On caregiving and love
PBS carried an interview with Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University medical anthropologist and psychiatrist. Kleinman describes his family life since his wife developed Alzheimer’s disease in 2003. The disease brought her dementia and blindness, and Kleinman became her primary caregiver. He comments that last year’s health care debates in the U.S. paid almost zero attention to caregiving: “And yet this is what families are going to face in the future.”

• LGTB rights on campus
Students taking the class “Sexuality and Eroticism,” taught at Rutgers University by anthropology instructor Robert O’Brien, were inspired to organize a protest against harassment of LGBT students.

• On interethnic relations in Russia
The popular Russian talkshow, “Matter of Principles,” included Valery Tishkov, director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, along with three other panelists. He emphasized access to power or resources as the basis for conflict and hatred.

• Angolan youths’ role in the independence movement
Speaking at the 4th International Meeting of Angolan History, Angolan cultural anthropologist Carlos Serrano described the importance of young nationalists in Angola’s struggle for independence from the Portuguese in the 1940s.

• Farewell to bullfighting
Starting in 2012, bullfighting will be banned in Catalonia. The Financial Post quotes Carrie Douglass, professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Virginia, who sees the ban as a statement of separateness from Spain.

• The boy with the amber necklace
The skeleton of a teenage boy has been found near Stonehenge. He was wearing and amber necklace and hailed from the Mediterranean region according to analysis of some tooth enamel.

• Also a long way from home
A skull with the features of an Aboriginal Australian has been found in a cave in Brazil and dated at 11,000 years ago. Professor Walter Neves, in PLoS One, argues that the finding means there were two waves of migration to the New World including one from Southeast Asia. Maciej Henneberg, an anthropologist at the University of Adelaide posits that more than just one or two waves, people probably arrived through many, continuous flows.

• Kudos
Shannon Lee Dawdy of the University of Chicago was named a 2010 MacArthur Fellow. An assistant Professor of Anthropology, she is a historical anthropologist and archaeologist concentrating on the Atlantic World after 1450. Her recent fieldwork on garden and hospitality sites in New Orleans informs her current book project, Patina: An Archaeology of Everyday Aesthetics, which seeks to understand the connections between aesthetics and social life.

• Hacker culture
Gabriella Coleman published an article in the Atlantic Monthly on the anthropology of hackers. A cultural anthropologist, she is assistant professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University in its School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. The article is based on her undergraduate class on computer hackers and walks the reader through the 13 weeks of the class with a concluding note on what’s missing.

• Fighting for survival
The Kalinago people of Dominica are considering options for tribal survival including intermarriage policy, becoming a living museum, and ethnobotany projects. Dominican anthropologist Lennox Honychurch expressed a negative opinion about the living museum idea to Discovery News: “…Dominica has already been through colonization…This is not a living museum or zoo.” Jonathan Marks, a biological anthropologist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte commented on the difficulty of preserving a culture through marriage and ancestry alone. The Kalinago say that they want to prosper in their own land in ways that are self-sustaining economically and culturally. But they could use some government help to do so.

• Listen to the music
Music Rising, founded in 2005 by U2’s the Edge, has formed a new partnership with Tulane University for a study of New Orleans and Gulf Coast music. Tulane anthropology professor Nick Spitzer is developing the curriculum which will be adapted for elementary and high schools. Spitzer is also the founder of the American Public Media radio program American Routes.

• She who makes engineers think differently
The only anthropologist working with Intel, Genevieve Bell, continues to get media coverage including, this past week, in Fortune magazine. Intel’s research head comments on how the company relies on her insights when they look at emerging markets. She’s serious, as you can see from this quotation from Bell: “If you do it right, if you make the thing in such a way that people love it, it will be part of everything…It sounds macabre, but it has to be so important that you bury people with it.”

• This land is my land
Ian Barber, senior lecturer in anthropology at Otago University, offers a new interpretation of the first Maori-white contact which was violent. Instead of Maori fear of strangers, Barber links the violence to Maori interests in protecting their food sources since the Dutch ship anchored near an important area of cultivation during the harvest season. Barber admits that the fact that the crew were not even allowed to land is puzzling. Blogger’s note: the only remaining “uncontacted” people who live on North Sentinel Island in the Andamans also violently resist attempts by outsiders to land on their island. Very smart people.

• Neanderthal techies
The joy of science is all about overturning previous perceptions. One of the biggies is that the Neanderthals were, well, losers. Now archaeologists and paleoanthropologists are gaining ground by being able to show how Neanderthals were actually pretty successful, more like us: creative techies. This week’s media covered Neanderthal technological innovations as big news in the archaeo world. The BBC quotes Julien Riel-Salvatore, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado in Denver, who has led a team of researchers in a long-term study of Neanderthal tools in several sites in Italy: “Basically, I am rehabilitating the Neanderthals.”

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 9/27/10” →