See also the best cultural anthropology dissertations of 2012, 2011, 2010, and 2009.
As usual, I did a key word search in Dissertation Abstracts International to find dissertations that address topics related to the anthropologyworks mission. Unfortunately, this source provides information almost exclusively on U.S. dissertations – it is not at all “international.” I invite other anthropologists around the world with access to more international databases to provide their own picks. Furthermore, “best” means my “best” picks…dissertations that I think connect to major global issues. I searched for anthropology dissertations related to human rights, justice, migration, gender, health, violence, conflict, environment, and energy.
I confess that I do not read the entire dissertations, only the abstracts. So, yes, as one commenter said a while ago, this post is actually “Best Dissertation Abstracts.” But shouldn’t an abstract be a pretty good indication of the subject matter of the dissertation as a whole?
Trophies. Flickr/Snap®
The dissertations are ordered alphabetically by the author’s last name. Dissertations are not generally available through open access.
I am very pleased to report that Lauren Carruth, one of my picks from 2012 was also awarded the Society for Medical Anthropology (SMA) Dissertation Award for her dissertation, In the Aftermath of Aid: Medical Insecurity in the Northern Somali Region of Ethiopia. The SMA Dissertation Award is given biannually to the author of a dissertation which is judged to be a significant and potentially influential contribution to medical anthropology. Lauren Carruth is currently a postdoctoral fellow teaching with the Elliott School and the Department of Anthropology.
Here are my 50 picks for 2013. They are wonderful set of studies with much to offer to scholars and public issues alike.
As of the end of 2013, e-cigarettes are hot. According to an article in The Calgary Herald, one sign of the burgeoning popularity of e-cigarettes is that Internet searches for the products have grown exponentially in recent years. A study by U.S. researchers showed a several hundred-fold increase between 2008 and 2010 in searches for the devices over other smoking alternatives such as nicotine patches.
Richard Hurt, who runs the nicotine dependence center at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, suggests the expansion of the e-cigarette industry and market is harmful because it is turning back the clock on tobacco control.
Cultural anthropologist Kirsten Bell, in contrast, believes e-cigarettes deserve a chance. A professor at the University of British Columbia, Bell has researched the public health responses to the devices. She feels e-cigarettes aren’t being given a fair shot: “They were sort of being condemned without trial by the majority of people in mainstream tobacco control in public health…You have this sort of unquestioning extension of smoke-free legislation to cover e-cigarettes when of course an e-cigarette isn’t a cigarette. It’s not a combustible product.” Bell thinks a moralistic agenda is at play, equating nicotine use with smoking, even though the dangers of cigarettes relate to how they deliver nicotine, not the compound itself
Couple Snap a Selfie, Macedonia. Adam Jones, Ph.D. Wiki Commons.
The meaning in the selfie
The Philadelphia Inquirer carried an article on the selfie in which it referred to the research of archaeologist Dean Snow on Paleolithic handprints on cave walls. What’s the connection? The fact that women are more likely than men to post selfies today and that Snow’s analysis of the handprints indicates that the majority were made by women. The meaning: authenticate the event. [Blogger’s note: that still doesn’t explain the gender difference].
Faye Harrison and public engagement
In an article in The Huffington Post, Gina Ulysses of Wesleyan University describes the contributions of University of Florida anthropologist Faye V. Harrison to the ongoing conversations about the future of the university and the “value of a liberal education within a hostile market economy.” Ulysses conducted the interview with Harrison at the November meetings of the American Anthropological Association.
Faye Harrison. University of Florida, 2010.
Harrison’s three-decade long career has been marked by dedication to publicly-engaged work about people who produce and apply both academic and nonacademic knowledge. Her research agenda goes beyond the ivory tower, into what she calls “peripheralized” and “minoritized” areas, engaging people who are typically left out of processes of knowledge-making.
What’s next for Harrison? For one thing, she is co-organizing, with cultural anthropologist Yasuko Takezawa of Kyoto University, a three-session panel entitled “Engaging Race and Racism in the New Millennium: Exploring Visibilities and Invisibilities for the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences” for the intercongress in Chiba, Japan, that will be held in May 2014. Continue reading “Anthro in the news 12/30/13”→
Following our annual tradition, anthropologworks herby names the cultural anthropologist most “in the news” in the previous year. I launched this feature in January 2011 by naming Paul Farmer the cultural anthropologist of the decade, and I identified the “Paul Farmer Effect” in which increasing numbers of students seek to combine medical anthropology and health/medicine studies.
2011 was another easy call: David Graeber, for his writings and activism related to the Occupy Movement. How can it be that the Occupy Movement was that long ago…
2012 was also a hands-down clear call: Jim Yong Kim, newly appointed as President of the World Bank. He was in the news frequently, whether or not he spoke in a voice that cultural anthropologists would recognize.
Now, 2013. Every year is different. 2013 did not have a dominating cultural anthropology figure in the news. By shear count or media hits probably Jim Kim would win again. But in looking for an anthropological voice and vision, I came up with someone with fewer media hits but vivid recognition nationally and internationally.
As you may have guessed this award carries no prize with it, nor is it guided by a selection committee. I – the blogger – get to make this call on my own.
Dame Anne Salmond. Source: New Zealander of the Year Awards
The 2013 cultural anthropology award from anthropologyworks goes to Dame Anne Salamond, DBE, FRESNZ, FBA, a cultural anthropologist and writer. Salmond is a Distinguished Professor of Maori Studies and Anthropology at the University of Auckland and the current New Zealander of the Year. [The following material is from Wikipedia].
In her work with the Maori, she had a close relationship with Eruera Stirling and Amiria Stirling, noted elders of Te Whānau-ā-Apanui and Ngati Porou. Their collaboration led to three books about Maori life:
Hui: A Study of Maori Ceremonial Gatherings (1975) – awarded the Elsdon Best memorial gold medal for distinction in Maori ethnology in 1976
Amiria: The Life of a Maori Woman, which won a Wattie Book of the Year Award in 1977
Eruera: Teachings of a Maori Elder won first prize in the Wattie Book of the Year Awards in 1981
Salmond’s work then turned to cross-cultural encounters in New Zealand, resulting in two works:
Two Worlds: First Meetings Between Maori and Europeans 1642-1772 (1991) which won the National Book Award (Non-Fiction) in 1991, and the Ernest Scott Prize in 1992
US Department of Homeland Security, US Border Patrol.
US-Mexico Border Patrol agents need training in every-day police skills
USA Today reported on the increasing number of cases nationwide in which Border Patrol agents back up local police or perform other police duties, such as serving warrants or responding to domestic disputes. Sometimes incidents turn deadly. Some critics say they aren’t adequately trained for this work. A report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General released in September found that many Border Patrol agents don’t understand their own policies on when to use force. The report also said trainees who leave the Border Patrol Academy “are not fully prepared for possible real-life situations they might encounter.”
The article quoted Josiah Heyman, a cultural anthropology professor at the University of Texas-El Paso, who has studied the border for 30 years, “Border Patrol agents are not adequately trained to solve problems with words,” he said. “They don’t have these every-day police skills.”
“Life in India humbles you”
The Hindu carried an article highlighting the work of cultural anthropologist Assa Doron. The Hindu caught Doron while he was vacationing in Kerala with his family, taking a break from his new book on garbage and waste disposal systems in India, co-authored with Robin Jeffrey. They are tracing the issue from the Mughal times, to the era when the British ruled India, to the present-day.
Boats on Ganges River in Varanasi. Maria Carmen. Flickr Commons.
Earlier, Doron co-authored Cellphone Nation, also with Jeffrey. Doron’s book, Life of the Ganga: Boatmen and The Ritual Economy, is a study of the boatmen of the Ganga and their multi-layered, multi-hued relationship with the river and the people. He is working on an anthology, a collection of works on the Ganga, including poems, essays and notes written by the likes of Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, and also translations of poems in Hindi on the river. Doron has also edited Gender and Masculinities: Histories, Texts and Practices in India and Sri Lanka. It includes chapters on the idea of masculinity, tracing it in history, literature, and development.
When asked: what has India taught him over the years, he responded, “Never take anything for granted. Life in India humbles you and fascinates you.”
Interview with David Kertzer
"The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara" by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim
In an interview with The Tablet, cultural anthropologist and university professor at Brown University, David Kertzer, discusses the impact the 19th century kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara had on both Italian and Jewish history. Renewed interest in the case is prompted by the Sotheby’s sale of the recently discovered painting, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara. The painting, by 19th-century German-Jewish painter Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, depicts Edgardo Mortara, a six-year-old Italian Jewish boy seized by church authorities from his family’s home in Bologna, based on a rumor that he had been baptized by the family’s illiterate gentile servant girl. If baptized, the boy would have to be considered a Catholic in the eyes of the church and would no longer be allowed to remain in the home of his Jewish family. Despite the family’s desperate pleas and protestations, Edgardo was brought to a monastery in Rome, taken in by the pope, and raised as a Catholic. When he grew up, he became a priest.
In 1997, Kertzer published a book on the Mortara case, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara. A finalist for the National Book Award, it was adapted into an opera and a play. A feature film is now in the works. The interview includes questions about the painting itself, its historical context, where it should reside, and what it means today.
Kertzer has spent much of his academic career researching Catholic Church-Jewish relations, the role of religion in politics, and the formation of political identities. His 2001 book, The Popes against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Antisemitism, has been translated into nine languages. His forthcoming publication, The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe, the result of research conducted in the newly opened Vatican archives, will come out next month.
The recent French interventions in Libya and Mali, and the most recent one in the Central African Republic, raise the question of the very existence of the state on the continent according to Jean-Loup Amselle, an anthropologist and director of Studies at the EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) in Paris.
Marcel Mauss. Flickr: Les bibliothèques de l'UPEC.
In an article in Worldcrunch, Anselle refers to classic studies by anthropologists that identified the existence in precolonial times of two types of societies: state societies represented by kingdoms and empires, and segmentary lineage societies, organized in tribes.
He states that the former’s characteristics are very different from those of the rational bureaucratic state, which one can observe nowadays in most developed countries.
For example, the Malian state machinery, like that of many other African countries, is “riddled by networks that feed on the range of resources available on the continent: mining and oil as well as international aid and drug trafficking.” The functioning of such networks is based on Marcel Mauss‘ theories of reciprocity and gift exchange, set out in his 1924 essay The Gift.
• G8 aid pledge for nutrition in developing countries
In June, the G8 Nutrition for Growth Summit pledged a landmark $4.15 billion to combat malnutrition in the developing world, the largest sum ever pledged to support nutrition. Nevertheless, a pledge is just a pledge, and a key step is to ensure the committed funds are realized. Then comes the implementation.
An article from Think Africa quotes Elizabeth Hull, a nutrition specialist and anthropology lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies, as noting that the funding compact contains “a strong emphasis on private-sector principles such as value for money and so on … The approach promoted seems to be very ‘outcomes’ focused.”
[Blogger’s note: six months after the pledge of $4.15 billion, it appears that only a fraction of that amount is actually a secure commitment; and experts say that even the full pledge level is far short of what is needed to solve malnutrition in low income countries].
• “The thieving craft” redeemed
From left: Mowarra Ganambarr Ḏätiwuy Thunderman and shark site, Arnhem Bay; Nänyin’ Maymuru Djarrakpi; Mundukul Marawili Fish trap, Baraltja. Berndt Museum of Anthropology, Perth
A review in the Australian of a new exhibit, “Yirrkala Drawings,” in Sydney praises the richness and beauty of art works displayed and provides some context of how they were collected.
Cultural anthropologist Ron Berndt conducted fieldwork in Arnhem Land, one of the five regions of Australia’s Northern Territory, in the early-mid twentieth century. His goal was the creation of a record of clan beliefs and the links between place and story-cycle. At the same time, he collected many drawings and marked down the drawings with numerals referring to expositions about them in his notebooks.
This is the first formal display of the large body of the drawings in an exhibition context, allowing for their full originality to be explored, and taken in. The principal scholar of Yolngu art history, Howard Morphy, professor of anthropology and director of the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at the Australian National University, offers an account of the works and their visual grammar in a catalog essay. Thus anthropology, that “thieving craft,” in this case, in some way, redeems itself by preserving and documenting art once taken away. Yirrkala Drawings is at the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney until February 23, 2013.
UC Berkeley anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes is shown here talking with Alberty Alfonso da Silva in the Recife, Brazil, slum he called home before and after being transported to South Africa to sell his kidney to a recipient flown there from New York City. Photo by John Maier.
UC Berkeley anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes has been honored by the American Anthropological Association with its first ever Anthropology in Public Policy Award for her trailblazing work shedding light on the dark practice of human organ trafficking.
The award, recognizing anthropologists whose work has had a significant and positive influence on government decision-making, was announced at a recent American Anthropological Association conference in Chicago.
In 1999, Scheper-Hughes, director of UC Berkeley’s medical anthropology program, helped found the Berkeley Organs Watch project. It monitors the organ-transplant trade for abuses among the transnational networks that connect patients, transplant surgeons, brokers, medical facilities and live donors, who often live in the poorest parts of the world.
“When I began the Organs Watch project, it was heretical to suggest that human trafficking for organs was not just a hyperbolic metaphor of human exploitation, but was actually happening in many parts of the world,” Scheper-Hughes said in her acceptance remarks.
But the project generated international headlines, particularly as Scheper-Hughes has called for more accountability from the medical profession in the field of medical anthropology. She also has been asked to testify before national and international governmental and medical panels, and has helped law enforcement agencies uncover illicit organs trafficking around the globe.
In recent years, Scheper-Hughes has advised the European Union, the United Nations and the Human Trafficking Office of the World Health Organization. She has also testified before Congress, the Council of Europe and the British House of Lords. In addition, she has consulted on several documentary as well as commercial films exploring organ trafficking.
In accepting the award, the self-proclaimed “agent provocateur” acknowledged that the complex social issues that anthropologists explore often have no single, simple solution, and one answer can prompt a new problem.
“So, yes,” Scheper-Hughes said in her speech, “I did help interrupt kidney trafficking in Moldova, only to have the international brokers use my Organs Watch web site … to set up a robust scheme in illicit transplants using Afro-Brazilian men from the slums of Recife to service Israeli and European transplant tourists to South African hospitals … And, yes, I contributed to the ban on the use of executed prisoners in China as organ suppliers, only to learn that new organ suppliers could be found in China among rural village girls and Vietnamese immigrants.”
Scheper-Hughes said agent provocateurs must continue “to put their bodies, as well as their words, on the line, and work on behalf of communities and populations under siege…”
For more information:
A 2004 story on the UC Berkeley NewsCenter reported on Scheper-Hughes’ transplant investigations in South America and Africa.
A 2007 story posted by UC Berkeley’s Center for Latin America recounted a presentation by Scheper-Hughes on the “medically disappeared” of Argentina during that country’s “Dirty War” of the 1970s and ‘80s.
HERITAGE 2014 – 4th International Conference on Heritage and Sustainable Development follows the path of the previous editions: it aims at establishing a state of the art event regarding the relationships between forms and kinds of heritage and the framework of sustainable development concepts.
Once again the four dimensions of sustainable development (environment, economics, society and culture) are the pillars of this event, defining a singular approach on how to deal with the specific subject of heritage sustainability. Furthermore, beyond the traditional aspects of heritage preservation and safeguarding, the relevance and significance of the sustainable development concept is to be discussed and scrutinized by some of the most eminent worldwide experts.
Heritage 2014 – 4th International Conference on Heritage and Sustainable Development proposes a global view on how heritage is being contextualized in relation with the four dimensions of sustainable development. What is being done in terms of research, future directions, methodologies, working tools and other significant aspects of both theoretical and field approaches will be the aims of this International Conference. Furthermore, heritage governance, and education are brought into discussion as the key factors for enlightenment of future global strategies for heritage preservation and safeguarding.
A special chapter on Heritage and Cultural Tourism was included in this edition, as cultural tourism became a major theme and a major area of research. Applied field research as well as theoretical approaches are welcome in this special chapter that is meant to be a wide and meaningful forum of debate on this topic.
HERITAGE 2014 is a peer reviewed conference. Abstract submissions are accepted until January 15th.
Visit the conference website for full details about the conference scope, topics and submission procedures here.
Topics:
· Heritage and governance for sustainability
· Heritage and society
· Heritage and environment
· Heritage and economics
· Heritage and culture
· Heritage and education for the future
· Preservation of historic buildings and structures
· Special Chapter: Heritage and cultural tourism
Secretariat HERITAGE 2014
Green Lines Institute for Sustainable Development
Av. Alcaides de Faria, 377 S12
4750-106 Barcelos, PORTUGAL
Telephone: + 351 253 815 037
Email: heritage2014@greenlines-institute.org
• Breast cancer screening in Israel: opportunity or not?
In Israel, a push to screen for a breast cancer gene leaves many women conflicted, according to an article in The New York Times. Israel has one of the highest rates of breast cancer in the world, and many scientists are advocating what may be the first national screening campaign to test women for cancer-causing genetic mutations that are common among Jews. But the tests mean that women have to choose between what they want to know, when they want to know it, and what to do with the information.
Komen Race for the Cure (for breast cancer) in Jerusalem 2012. Flickr/U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv
Jews of Ashkenazi, or central and eastern European, backgrounds, make up about half of the Jewish population in Israel and the vast majority of those in the U.S. They are much more likely to carry mutations that pose risks for breast and ovarian cancers, according to the National Cancer Institute.
The debate about screening is economic — will the state cover the costs of testing — and ethnic — will only Ashkenazi Jews be routinely tested? Israel is a melting pot of both Arab citizens and Jews from all over the world, and only half of the country’s six million Jews are of Ashkenazi ancestry.
Moreover, even though the testing would be voluntary, women could feel pressured to participate, said Barbara A. Koenig, a professor of medical anthropology and bioethics at the University of California, San Francisco. “When you institute mass screening, you’re making a collective decision that this is a good thing.”
• Sharing amidst poverty in the U.S.
An article in The Los Angeles times described how L.A.’s close-knit Tongan community struggles with poverty while maintaining their strong cultural tradition of sharing. Statistics show half of Tongan Angelenos live in poverty. But, they say, a culture of sharing means “no Tongan is here to get rich”—because even the smallest thing is given.
Scholars believe the numbers of people in the Tongan diaspora is larger than the population of Tongans on the islands. The article quotes Cathy A. Small, a Northern Arizona University anthropology professor who has long studied Tongan communities. When visiting a classroom in Tonga a few years ago, children were told to write letters to their mothers in New Zealand, saying what they wanted for their birthdays. “Nobody found the assignment strange.”
My interview with Grace started out light-hearted, as she responded matter-of-factly when I asked her age, that she was exactly fifty-nine and three-quarters. When I asked her to explain why she played bingo, her tone became slightly melancholy. She told me she had moved to Fairfield around nine years before because her husband took a job with the local fire company, and he encouraged her to come to bingo one night when he was working as a volunteer. She was worried that she would not know anyone and would have difficulty making friends, but she quickly met Sue and Darcy, who were sitting next to her then and have continued to do so for the past nine years. The fire department and bingo played integral roles in her and her husband’s life, making it a common sphere of public interaction for them. Unfortunately, Grace’s husband had passed away less than two months before our conversation and she was still quite emotional, her voice quivering when she told me this. Grace still attends bingo because she believes that it “gives balance” to her life during this difficult time; she can rely on bingo as an opportunity to be with her friends, which allows for a break from the stresses of home life (Grace, interviewed 8 April 2013, Fairfield).
While not everyone who plays bingo has a story like Grace’s, her narrative does show some of the unique aspects of bingo which I believe make the game important in two Pennsylvania towns, Fairfield and Bonneauville, and in the lives of the players, many of whom are senior citizens. In small, rural towns with few opportunities for social interaction, the bingo games coordinated by the local fire and EMS organizations provide an ongoing and dependable opportunity for creating and maintaining a social community. Bingo brings the players, mainly the elderly, out of their isolated private spheres and into a stable and reliable public sphere together. Participation in bingo encourages social interaction, allows for the creation and maintenance of friendships, has positive physical and mental health benefits, and brings people together to improve their local community.
There is a distinct lack of attention paid to events like bingo in the anthropology of aging, since this field generally focuses on disconnection seen in events like retirement and death, instead of connection, seen on both a personal and community-wide level in events like bingo. The intrinsic disengagement theory, which posits that old age is a universal time for withdrawal, with three potential circumstances for such disengagement, has been an influential albeit controversial theory. Those scholars who support the first scenario of the intrinsic disengagement theory suggest that society pushes elderly people away and inhibits their ability and opportunities for social interaction as a way to remain engaged (Keith 1980:343). In this thesis, I use bingo to argue against the idea that the elderly choose to accept this disengagement; the other possible circumstances associated with this theory are explained and elaborated in detail on page four. My fieldwork demonstrates that elderly players make a significant effort to attend bingo and value the social connections and interactions this activity provides. Furthermore, I argue that we must nuance our understanding of the processes of disengagement and engagement by considering key contextual factors, including town structure, dependence on automobile use, and cultural values such as independence. I suggest a new approach to the study of social isolation and connection in elderly populations, which is particularly applicable to the elderly living in rural areas.
To begin, I provide a concise history of the anthropology of aging and the prominent theory of intrinsic disengagement in particular. Next, I use ethnographic fieldwork to detail bingo as an event and then to critique intrinsic disengagement, particularly on the issues of social isolation, mobility and American values. I conclude my paper with an analysis of other organizations in Fairfield and Bonneauville that provide opportunities for social interaction in order to establish what is unique about bingo and how it best meets the needs of the community and players, particularly in terms of combating social isolation.
This article is a repost from Newswise and is written by Kansas State University’s Greg Tammen.
Experts in anthropology and cybersecurity at Kansas State University are examining the unspoken knowledge shared by cybersecurity analysts as a way to develop new automated tools that help analysts strengthen their cyberdefenses.
Xinming “Simon” Ou, associate professor of computing and information sciences, and Mike Wesch, associate professor of anthropology, recently received nearly $700,000 from the National Science Foundation to fund a three-year project that takes an anthropological approach to cybersecurity. Data will be used to develop algorithms for improved cybersecurity.
Ou and Wesch, along with Sathya Chandran Sundaramurthy, India, and Yuping Li, China — both doctoral students in computing and information sciences — are working alongside analysts in the university’s office of information security and compliance. The researchers are using anthropological techniques to understand how analysts perform their job duties. These techniques help them learn tacit knowledge rather than traditional formal knowledge about the job duties and manpower requirements for security operations centers.
“Tacit knowledge is the knowledge that we have about something that we can’t verbalize,” Wesch said. “You cannot walk into a New Guinea village and just ask people what their culture is. You have to live it and experience it to understand it.”
Researchers will translate this tacit knowledge into algorithms that will speed up various tasks and job duties performed by the analysts. For example, it takes a professional analyst between five and six minutes to find the Internet Protocol address and physical location of a computer that has been compromised by viruses and malware. An algorithm could complete the process in five to six seconds.
“We’d like to automate the boring, repetitive part of the tasks that aren’t heavily reliant on human intelligence but are more about humans doing them because they do not have better tool support,” Ou said. “That would free analysts to concentrate on the more complex tasks, such as investigating more large-scale, sophisticated attacks and plugging potential security holes in a network.”
The lack of understanding of the tacit knowledge in cybersecurity may be why so few commercial and open-source support tools are available to help cybersecurity analysts understand an attack in detail, Ou said. Often the tool developers do not understand the job and time requirement of security analysis, which limits the ability for them to design useful algorithms for these tools. As a result, finding information such as how the attacker got into the system and what data was compromised and damaged is a very labor-intensive process.
“A network is bombarded with attacks all of the time, and many of those attacks themselves are automated,” Wesch said. “We’re trying to automate parts of the defense.”
In addition to streamlining the repetitive tasks, researchers said their findings about what is needed for comprehensive cybersecurity analysis in this unique collaboration will lead to better training and education for the field.
“We’re ultimately building something like a conceptual model of how cybersecurity actually works, not just how it should work from a researcher’s perspective,” Wesch said.
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