Anthropology of Tourism is a network of tourism scholars seeking to formally establish itself as an Interest Group of the American Anthropological Association. While this group is primarily for members of the AAA, others can join the network as “friends” of the Anthropology of Tourism.
Category: cultural anthropology
Engaged anthropology with and for Latino immigrants
The University of South Florida News carried an article about ongoing research into the consequences of new Latino immigrants, African Americans and working class Whites coming face to face at work in the U.S. South and how to better bridge differences. The project is led by cultural anthropologist Angela Stuesse, an assistant professor at the University of South Florida. Here are some excerpts, with some paraphrasing, from the article:
Recent immigrants and people descended from earlier immigrants – whether voluntary or forced – often eye each other warily, sometimes finding themselves at odds. Making a connection can be as simple as knowing how to start a conversation – one that can become the basis for working together – rather than a fight. But as Stuesse has found, such conversations often don’t just happen. And if they do, they can be touchy. “Across cultures, knowing what not to say can be as important as knowing what to say and how to say it,” points out, and “Immigrants, too, may hold racial and other biases toward those they come into contact with. There’s a need to help groups understand each other. Ideally, they can work together and develop mutual respect.”
Stuesse’s research has produced her forthcoming book, Globalization ‘Southern Style, which describes the transformation of small-town Mississippi when Latino immigrants begin working and organizing alongside African Americans in the area’s chicken processing plants.
While working in Mississippi, Stuesse was a founding collaborator of the poultry worker center, MPOWER, where she drew upon her research to help facilitate structured dialogue and spaces for political education and cultural sharing among immigrant and U.S.-born poultry worker leaders.
She has also developed Intergroup Resources, a comprehensive new online resource center that is becoming a national network. The user-friendly Intergroup Resources website built and designed by Stuesse’s research team offers curricula, dialogue guides, educational materials and descriptions of the efforts of various groups.
Review of new book on widows of Japan
An open access review in Pacific Affairs of Deborah McDowell Aoki’s book, Widows of Japan: An Anthropological Perspective, says that this “…comprehensive study of Japanese widows brings into focus the complex, ambiguous, often tragic history of the impact of spousal death on Japanese women. Her eight years of research from 1996 included 58 interviews with women from urban and rural areas. She states the themes in the introduction: ‘the fetishism of female bodies to protect and embody family honor, the historical role of state formation in creating family and kinship systems, and the integrative functions provided by women…’ ”
Cultural Heritage Management Program in Egypt
The Master in Cultural Heritage Management is a multidisciplinary postgraduate program designed for students and professionals who are interested in heritage conservation, site management, museum studies, tourism, creative industries, architectural heritage, historical towns, and cultural landscapes.
CHM is a one-year program with a particular attention on complementing the theoretical approach with a practical experience gained on field visits of monuments and sites. The general goal of the program is to enhance the knowledge of professionals and graduates in the field of heritage protection, management and dissemination of the values of the diverse Egyptian cultural heritage.
For your reference please find here following additional information on the course.
The program is co-directed by Professor Fekri Hassan, Université Française d’Egypte, emeritus Petrie Professor of Archaeology, University College London, and Professor Maria Gravari-Barbas, Director of the Institut de Recherche et d’Etudes Supérieures du Tourisme (IREST), UNESCO Chair in Cultural Tourism, University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Continue reading “Cultural Heritage Management Program in Egypt”
Anthro in the news 1/21/13
• Revenge against French fueling conflict in Mali and Algeria
An article in The Star (Toronto) about how Mali’s conflict spilled across its borders into Algeria this past week quoted Bruce Whitehouse, a cultural anthropology professor at Lehigh University, and a Fulbright scholar who has lived in Mali.
He says: “They want to get back at the French desperately and they have a history of carrying out a tit-for-tat response when it comes to French intervention …They clearly want to portray what they’re doing as a direct and balanced response to what’s being directed against them … It will bring a lot more pressure from the United States and European governments to get involved … (It) might be a good thing from Mali’s point of view. Algeria has what’s reckoned to be the most capable military there and they have experience and they know the terrain.”
• Mali: Where music is dangerous
An opinion piece in the Cyprus Mail says that Islamic extremism is stopping the music in Mali:
“We all have a favourite album. Mine is Talking Timbuktu, the collaboration between the great Malian musician Ali Farka Tourι and Ry Cooder. Arguably it’s some of the best guitar playing you’ll ever hear. Ali died in 2006, but his son Vieux carries the sound onward, that curious mix of African soul and heart with a blues base.
“So it was with utter horror that I heard Lucy Durán, who hosts the BBC programme World Routes and teaches the anthropology of world music at SOAS (University of London), say in an emotional comment this week that one of the terrible side effects of the extreme Islamic fundamentalism now invading northern Mali is the silencing of music. Outlawed under Sharia law, all instruments, radio, CD players have been destroyed, and as Lucy chillingly said, those seen playing guitars were threatened with having their fingers cut off.”
Anthro in the news 12/31/2012
From the blogger: Here is the last aitn for 2012. I had to work hard to find any mainstream media mention of cultural anthropology, whereas archaeology continues to attract substantial media attention, and we can almost always count on something about Neanderthals to attract interest. Please check out anthropologyworks’ short piece on the cultural anthropologist who was most in the news in 2012. Stay tuned for 2012 highlights from aitn and my top dissertation picks for 2012. And Happy New Year!
The Global and Mail (Canada) asked several writers and avid readers to comment on their top book of 2012, from contemporary fiction to classic literature and nonfiction. Novelist Sheila Heti chose Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
“I can’t think of anyone who shouldn’t read David Graeber‘s paradigm-shifting book on the ethics of debt. He’s an anthropologist and one of the Occupy movement’s greatest thinkers. Here, he shows how debt has been a central economic, political, and social tool throughout human history. It’s an essential read, particularly for those who, in the wake of the financial crisis, believed we were at the beginning of “an actual public conversation about the nature of debt, of money, of the financial institutions,” and were stunned not to see that conversation happen.” Heti’s most recent book is the novel How Should a Person Be?
• Hadrian’s auditorium found under streets of Rome
Several media sources, including the BBC, covered the findings in Rome of an ancient auditorium 18 feet below one of Rome’s most-trafficked junctions. Italian archaeologists announced the discovery of a 900-seat arts center dating back to the second-century reign of Emperor Hadrian.
• 800 year-old skeletons unearthed in Cholula, Mexico
Archaeologists in central Mexico uncovered the bones of 12 children and adults who may have been buried 800 years ago, according to an expert with Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History.
The skeletons were discovered as the archeologists supervised the installation of a new drain in an old neighborhood of Cholula, a city located 120 kilometers north of the Mexican capital. They were found buried just a few centimeters below a paved section of asphalt, said archeologist Ashuni Romero Butron, who added “fortunately they were not damaged by erosion before the paving.” He said most of the 12 skeletons are complete and laboratory analysis is ongoing.
Israeli archaeologists have uncovered a rare temple and religious figurines dating back to the Judaean period nearly 3,000 years ago. The discoveries were made at Tel Motza, outside Jerusalem, during archaeological work ahead of new highway construction in the area. Anna Eirikh, a director of the project, said the discoveries were rare evidence of religious practices outside Jerusalem in the Judaean period. The findings date to the 9th-10th century B.C.E.
• Death of a pharoah
Scans of the mummy of Ramses III reveal that his throat was slit. The pharaoh Ramses III ruled Egypt in the 12th century B.C.E. A plot by his wife to kill him in order to place her son on the throne is documented in an ancient papyrus, but the exact circumstances of Ramses’ death have been unclear. ”The big cut is in his throat, and it was very deep and large,” said Albert Zink, an anthropologist at the European Academy, who was involved in the research. ”It would have killed him immediately.” Zink and colleagues from Egypt, Italy and Germany, published their findings in the British Medical Journal. [Blogger’s note: so now we know the immediate cause of death, but we still don’t know who did the deed].
• 4,000 year-old spear heads found in Sinaloa, Mexico
Archaeologist Joel Santos Ramirez said that the find “will change the chronologies of the antiquity of human settlement in the northwest of the country.”
• Neanderthal genome mapping update
According to a piece in CBC news, renowned archaeological geneticist Svante Paabo is almost finished with the mapping the DNA of Neanderthals, a distant cousin of modern humans.
Paabo has found that many people today carry within their DNA about 3 to 5 percent in common with Neanderthals. Paabo says it is important to learn more about Neanderthal DNA to reveal the differences between us and them, differences that have seen modern humans survive and thrive over the millennia while Neanderthals have become extinct.
• In memoriam
Glenys Lloyd-Morgan died at the age of 67 years after a career devoted to the understanding of Roman archaeology. She graduated from the archaeology department at Birmingham University in 1970 with a dissertation on Roman mirrors. In 1975, she joined the Grosvenor Museum, Chester, where she catalogued collections and did re-enactments as a Roman lady. Later, she became a finds consultant specializing in Roman artifacts. She was made a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1979.
Anthropologist of 2012
The cultural anthropologist most in the news in 2012 was Jim Yong Kim. Kim was trained as both a physician and medical anthropologist, one of the first students to go through Harvard’s joint Ph.D./M.D. program. Later he became chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at the Harvard Medical School and then president of Dartmouth College from 2009 to 2012. Along with Paul Farmer, he is co-founder of Partners In Health.
After his appointment was approved, however, talk of his anthropological credentials died down. In other words, a connection with anthropology was taken as a weakness by his opponents. Now that he is president of the World Bank, his identity as an anthropologist has been quietly erased.
Dr. Kim, president of the World Bank, physician and medical anthropologist, is anthropologyworks’ anthropologist of 2012.
Last year’s anthropologist of the year was David Graeber. Before that, anthropologyworks named Paul Farmer as the anthropologist of the decade, 2000-2009.
Anthro in the news 12/24/2012
• Hopes dashed for Chagossians
Aw’s Sean Carey published two articles in The Independent about the recent consideration of the Chagossians‘ claim for a right to return to their homeland.
In his second article, Carey reports on the decision: “Yesterday, there was huge disappointment amongst Chagossian communities in Port Louis, Mahe, Crawley, Manchester, Geneva and Montréal. A seven-judge chamber of the European Court of Human Rights decided by majority that the case regarding the right of return of the exiled islanders was inadmissible. Geographically and legally, it has been a long journey with many twists and turns for the islanders, the descendants of African slaves and Indian indentured labourers. The decision by the Strasbourg court means that they continue to be barred from returning to their homeland in the Chagos Archipelago, after their forced removal by the British authorities between 1968 and 1973, so that the US could acquire Diego Garcia, the largest and southernmost island, for its strategically important military base.” After eight years, a decision of inadmissable.
• Declining monkhood in Thailand
In Thailand, Buddhist temples grow lonely in villages as consumer culture rises and there is a shortage of monks. According to an article in The New York Times, monks in northern Thailand no longer perform one of the defining rituals of Buddhism, the early morning walk through the community to collect food. The meditative lifestyle of the monkhood offers little allure to the distracted iPhone generation. Although it is still relatively rare for temples to close down, many districts are so short on monks that abbots here in northern Thailand recruit across the border from impoverished Myanmar, where monasteries are overflowing with novices.
”Consumerism is now the Thai religion,” said Phra Paisan Visalo, one of the country’s most respected monks. He continues, ”In the past people went to temple on every holy day,” Mr. Paisan said. ”Now they go to shopping malls.” William Klausner, a law and anthropology professor who spent a year living in a village in northeastern Thailand in the 1950s, describes the declining influence of Buddhist monks as a ”dramatic transformation.” Monks once played a crucial role in the community where he lived, helping settle disputes between neighbors and counseling troubled children, he wrote in his book, Thai Culture in Transition. Klausner says that today most villages in northern Thailand ”have only two or three full-time monks in residence, and they are elderly and often sick.”
Continue reading “Anthro in the news 12/24/2012”
Walking the cockney walk
by Sean Carey
Until I found a copy online, it had been some years since I had read Marcel Mauss’s seminal 1934 essay, Les Techniques du Corps. He focused on how membership of a particular society obliges people to use their bodies appropriately in activities like walking, running, sitting, eating, climbing, jumping, swimming, and marching.
I had forgotten a lot of the basic argument. But I did remember a few things. Firstly, Mauss’s observations and analysis of the body – “man’s first and most natural instrument” – reinforced something that I had already learned from cultural anthropology: what is deemed as acceptable and unacceptable customary behavior often varies according to differences in gender, social class, geographical area, and social occasion.
Secondly, I could recall that Mauss’s powerful concept of “prestigious imitation” was literally an eye-opener for a field worker in terms of observing customary use of the body and how it can change. It highlights, for example, the way in which people of a lower status (belonging to subordinate social groups) l tend to imitate the body techniques of those of higher status (belonging to dominant social groups) in order to acquire improve their relative position in the social order.
In the mid-1980s, I was carrying out fieldwork in London’s East End, an area of the U.K. which has served as a reception area for many migrant groups fleeing persecution or famine including Huguenots, Irish, Ashkenazi Jews, and Somalis, as well as those seeking economic betterment. I became aware of the difference between first generation, 1.5 generation, and second and third-generation male Bangladeshis, in terms of how they moved, especially how they walked. (Young Bangladeshi females took a different trajectory in terms of the control and use of their bodies, but I will not that address that topic here.) Continue reading “Walking the cockney walk”
2013 Methods Mall: Training for cultural anthropologists
The 2013 Anthropology Methods Mall is online. This site has info about six, NSF-supported opportunities for methods training in cultural anthropology.
- SCRM (Short Courses on Research Methods. For those with the Ph.D.)
- SIRD (Summer Institute on Research Design. For graduate students)
- EFS (Ethnographic Field School. For graduate students)
- SIMA (Smithsonian Institution Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology. For graduate students)
- WRMA (Conference Workshops on Research Methods in Anthropology. For all anthropologists)
- DCRM (Distance Courses in Research Methods in Anthropology)
1. Now in its ninth year, the SCRM (Short Courses on Research Methods) program is for cultural anthropologists who already have the Ph.D. Two five-day courses are offered during summer 2013 at the Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort, North Carolina.
Behavioral Observation in Ethnographic Research (Instructors: Raymond Hames and Michael Paolisso) July 15-19, 2013
Methods of Ethnoecology (Instructors: J. Richard Stepp and Justin Nolan) July 29-August 2, 2013
APPLY TO THE SHORT COURSES ON RESEARCH METHODS HERE. DEADLINE FEB. 15, 2013.
2. Now in its 18th year, the SIRD (Summer Institute on Research Design) is an intensive, three-week course for graduate students in cultural anthropology who are preparing their doctoral research proposals. The 2013 course runs from July 14-August 3, 2013 at the Duke University Marine Laboratory. Instructors: Jeffrey Johnson, Susan Weller, Amber Wutich, and H. Russell Bernard.
APPLY TO THE SUMMER INSTITUTE ON RESEARCH DESIGN HERE. DEADLINE March 1, 2013.
3. Now in its second year, the EFS (Ethnographic Field School) in Tallahassee, Florida is a five-week field school in ethnographic methods and community-based participatory research. The program is open to graduate students in cultural anthropology. The 2013 field school runs from July 7-August 10, 2013 and is coordinated by Clarence (Lance) Gravlee. Guest faculty include Sarah Szurek, Tony Whitehead, and Stephen Schensul.
APPLY TO THE TALLAHASSEE FIELD SCHOOL HERE. DEADLINE FEB. 15, 2013.
4. Now in its fifth year, the SIMA (Smithsonian Institution Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology) is open to graduate students in cultural anthropology and related, interdisciplinary programs (Indigenous Studies, Folklore, etc.) who are interested in using museum collections as a data source and who are preparing for research careers. The course runs from June 24-July 19, 2013. Instructors: Candace Greene, Nancy Parezo, Mary Jo Arnoldi, Joshua Bell, and Gwyneira Isaac, plus visiting lecturers.
APPLY TO THE SUMMER INSTITUTE IN MUSEUM ANTHOPOLOGY HERE. DEADLINE March 1, 2013.
5. Now in its ninth year, the WRMA (Workshops in Research Methods in Anthropology) program offers one-day workshops in conjunction with national meetings of anthropologists. Click HERE for information about the next workshops at the meetings of the American Anthropological Association in San Franciso, California,November 14-18, 2013 and the Society for Applied Anthropology in Denver, Colorado, March 19-23, 2013.
6. Now in its second year, the DCRM (Distance Courses in Research Methods in Anthropology) is open to upper division undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals. Four courses are offered in summer 2013: Text Analysis, Geospatial Analysis, Network Analysis, and Video Analysis. The development of these fee-based courses is supported by the National Science Foundation. Enfollment is limited to 18 participants.
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