The Global Gender Program will host “Prenatal sex selection: global patterns and a focus on South East Asia”.
In this seminar Christophe Z Guilmoto, demographer and director of research at the Center for Population and Development (CEPED), Institute of Research for Development (IRD), Paris, will discuss current global patterns and trends relating to pre-natal sex selection, as well as the relationship between the practice and kinship structures in Vietnam and Indonesia.
When: October 9, 2013, 2:00-3:30pm
Where: Lindner Family Commons
1957 E Street NW
The Elliott School of International Affairs
Washington, DC 20052
The Georgetown University Conflict Resolution Program is calling for student papers, art, and videography for their conference, “Managing Diversity in Divided Societies.” Submissions should address the following questions:
What tools and mechanisms best promote diversity? How is diversity best approached in conflict societies? How can the arts be used to engage diversity and enhance societal well being?
Cash prizes will be awared to the top three finalists in the categories of diversity, conflict, and peace-building. Submissions are open to third and fourth year undergraduate students and graduate students.
Abstracts will be accepted until October 15th. Submissions are due on December 1st. The conference will be held on January 30-31st.
The Royal Anthropological Institute is pleased to announce that a conference, Anthropology and Photography, will take place at the British Museum, Clore Centre, in conjunction with the museum’s Anthropology Library and Research Centre. The aim of the Conference is to stimulate an international discussion on the place, role and future of photography. Panel proposals are therefore welcome from any branch of anthropology.
We welcome contributions from researchers and practitioners working in museums, academia, media, the arts and anyone who is engaged with historical or contemporary production and use of images.
Panels can draw upon (but are not limited to) the following themes:
The use of photography across anthropological disciplines
The changing place of photography in museums and exhibitions
Photography and globalisation
Photography, film and fine art
Revisiting and re-contextualising archival images
Photography and public engagement
Ethics, copyright, access and distribution of images
Technological innovation and its impact
Regional photography practices
Visual method and photo theory
The call for panels opens on 1 August 2013 and closes on 31 October 2013.
The call for papers opens on 27 November 2013 and closes on 8 January 2014.
• Happy birthday to the Occupy movement Zuccotti Park/Wikipedia
This past week marked the two-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement. On September 17, 2011, a small band of activists took over Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park until Mayor Michael Bloomberg cleared them out. An article in Businessweek notes that, in contrast to the thousands who packed the park in 2011, only around 100 people showed up for Tuesday’s anniversary at Zuccotti Park. Perhaps the movement is defunct. Businessweek reports that, recently David Graeber, professor of cultural anthropology at the London School of Economics, said that he is “taking a little time off” from the movement.
• Hearing voices and sometimes killing people
In an opinion piece for The New York Times, cultural anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann of Stanford University writes about the rising “specter of violence caused by mental illness.” She emphasizes that the vast majority of people with schizophrenia never commit violent acts. In fact, they are far more likely to be the victims of violence than perpetrators of it.
The risk of violence from people with schizophrenia, she says, increases sharply when people have disturbing hallucinations and use street drugs. We also know that many people with schizophrenia hear voices only they can hear, and “They are often mean and violent.”
She asks “whether the violent commands from these voices reflect our culture as much as they result from the disease process of the illness.” The cultural construction of the messages of voices appears to be demonstrated by a comparative study Luhrmann is conducting with colleagues at the Schizophrenia Research Foundation in Chennai, India, to compare the voice-hearing experience of 20 people with schizophrenia in San Mateo, California, and 20 people in Chennai. While both groups of patients have much in common, the voices heard by patients in Chennai are considerably less violent than those heard by patients in San Mateo.
She says that as the memorial was being designed, there was tension between commerce and remembrance: “This is one of the most valuable pieces of land in the world — it held the largest office complex in the country … But then you had all these other people who said this is a now historic piece of land where so many thousands of people were killed.”
The memorial includes One World Trade Center, which will be used as commercial space, and a memorial area with reflecting pools and the names of those who died. While some families are pleased with the design of the memorial plaza, others hoped that there would be artifacts from that day incorporated into the memorial.
“For many families, they felt like there needed to be more that remembered the day itself and the attacks, and not just the twin towers,” Greenspan said.
• On the future of the Occupy Wall Street Movement
Q: Were you disappointed that the Occupy Wall Street movement didn’t accomplish more?
A: I’m personally convinced that if it were not for us, we might well have President Romney. When Romney was planning his campaign, being a Wall Street financier, a 1 Percenter, he thought that was a good thing. That whole 47 percent thing that hurt him so much was something the right wing came up with in response to our 99 percent.
The Sydney Morning Herald published an article by cultural/economic anthropologist David Graeber of the London School of Economics on nonsense, or bullshit jobs, jobs that involve a lot of time devoted to activities that really do not need to be done.
The kinds of bullshit jobs under The Office's Michael Scott are all too real for some. Credit/Wikipedia
Graeber argues that by eliminating the bullshit work, people could be freed to “pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions and ideas.”
The last century in the U.S. has seen the decline of productive jobs in industry and farming along with “the creation of whole new industries such as financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors such as corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources and public relations.”
The Guardian picked up on bullshit jobs and published an article with tips about how to tell if you have a bullshit job as well as help assessing the amount of bullshit that may be involved in your not-totally-bullshit job.
• Interview with Jim Kim on Syria and more
Jim Yong Kim, World Bank president and medical anthropologist, was interviewed by Bloomberg News. He discusses the possible military strike against Syria in terms of its economic consequences. He also mentions the humanitarian connection, from his perspective as a medical doctor, about the use of chemical weapons. When asked about his views on who might be the next U.S. Federal Reserve Chair, Janet Yellen or Larry Summers, he said that both are excellent.
Iquitos, Loreto region. Peru.2012. From The Liquid Serpent by Nicolas Janowski • A photo is worth a thousand words
The New York Times highlighted the work of Nicolas Janowski, a freelance photographer who was trained as an anthropologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. In recent years, he has traveled around the western part of the Amazon in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. One result of his ongoing project is a photographic essay called The Liquid Serpent, referring to an indigenous term for the river that flows through the heart of the Amazon. The title offers a glimpse into Janowski’s conception of the region as having magical and mystical qualities. He says in his introduction: “The Amazon is neither man nor animal; she is nature’s hybrid.”
• The shifting odds of life and death in the Alto
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, published an article in Natural History magazine describing changes in a shantytown in northeastern Brazil. She first lived in the Alto as a Peace Corps worker in 1954 and later returned to do fieldwork on poverty, hunger, and child death. Those experiences led to her book, Death Without Weeping and many other publications.
Book cover
The undercurrent driving the book is the very high rate of infant and child mortality at the time. Parents responded through delayed bonding until a child made it through the early years.
Fifty years later, fertility rates are down in Alto as are infant and child mortality rates. Scheper-Hughes writes: “…the bottom line is that women on the Alto today do not lose their infants. Children go to school rather than to the cane fields, and social cooperatives have taken the place of shadow economies. When mothers are sick or pregnant or a child is ill, they can go to the well-appointed health clinic supported by both state and national funds. There is a safety net, and it is wide, deep, and strong.”
Yet, now “The people of the Alto do Cruzeiro still face many problems. Drugs, gangs, and death squads have left their ugly mark. Homicides have returned with a vengeance, but they are diffuse and chaotic … One sees adolescents and young men of the shantytowns, who survived that dangerous first year of life, cut down by bullets and knives at the age of fifteen or seventeen by local gangs, strongmen, bandidos, and local police in almost equal measure.”
As Scheper-Hughes has written so compellingly for many decades, the “modernization” of life and death churns on, taking different shapes in different contexts. One wonders what the next fifty years will bring to the people of the Alto.
The Washington Post carried an opinion piece by cultural anthropologist Hugh Gusterson, professor at George Mason University.
Gifts, but do they come with strings attached? Flickr/FutUndBeidl
Gusterson asks: what is the difference between a gift and a bribe, and provides some cultural anthropology insights: “Gifts are given in all cultures, and to remarkably similar effect … gifts by their nature create social ties and a sense of reciprocal obligation. To give a gift is to expect something in return, though it undermines the power and mystique of the gift to spell out too clearly what that something is … The failure to give something in response can end a friendship … Anthropologists have found that gifts create two kinds of relationships: those between equals and those that establish subordination.”
Gusterson goes on to discuss whether a federal grand jury will indict Virginia Governor Robert F. McDonnell: “…we know that McDonnell and his family accepted gifts including a $6,500 Rolex watch, a $10,000 engagement gift, $15,000 in wedding catering and a $15,000 Bergdorf Goodman shopping spree, not to mention $120,000 in loans, from Jonnie R. Williams Sr., chief executive of the Henrico-based company Star Scientific. If prosecutors determine that McDonnell made specific promises to promote Star Scientific’s dietary supplement Anatabloc in exchange for these favors, the governor could soon be spending a lot of time in court … For prosecutors, the key question is whether there was a clearly articulated ‘quid pro quo.’ If so, the gifts were bribes. If not, they were gifts. To me, as an anthropologist, this largely misses the point.”
[Blogger’s note: assuming I am on target here — a gift requires a return, unless it falls into the extremely rare and hard-to-document category of a “pure gift” for which the giver has absolutely no thought whatsoever of any kind of return].
• Benefits of postpartum placentaphagy to moms?
According to reporting in the Monterey Herald, a survey of 189 women who had consumed their babies’ placentas — raw, cooked or in capsule form — revealed that 95 percent reported their experience was either positive or very positive, and 98 percent said they would repeat the experience.
Placenta capsules. Flickr/latisha
The article quotes Daniel Benyshek, co-author of the study and associate professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas: “Of course, we don’t know if those are placebo effects and their positive results are based on their expectations.”
The survey results were published in the journal, Ecology of Food and Nutrition. The report disclosed that the first author, Jodi Selander, is the founder of Placenta Benefits, an online information source that also offers training for placenta encapsulators. Benyshek is planning a double-blind pilot study that would compare the effects of placenta capsules and a placebo on women’s postpartum experiences.
A supporter of deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi on Aug. 12, 2013. VOA/Reuters
Early this week, Voice of America reported that supporters of ousted Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi were defiantly remaining at their protest camps in Cairo, despite days of warnings that the government would soon move on the sites. The article quoted Saba Mahmood, associate professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, who told VOA the interim government has not broken up the camps because the resulting bloodshed would be a “very serious political cost.”
But she says Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood is facing bigger stakes than getting him back in office: “So there is that issue that if indeed they back down, they’re going to not just simply lose Morsi, but they’re going to lose even the basis — the political, social basis — they have built over the last 40 years.”
[Blogger’s note: since then, much blood has been shed and are yet to see what the political costs for the military government will be].
• A probable first in history of anthro: U.S. President fist-bumps anthropologist
While on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, according to the Boston Globe, U.S. President Obama played golf with World Bank President Jim Kim.
[Blogger’s note: Jim Kim, as most aw readers know, is not only the president of the World Bank but also a medical anthropologist, doctor, health advocate, and former university president].
President Barack Obama and World Bank President Jim Kim playing golf on Aug. 14, 2013. Darlene Superville/Associated Press
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