Understanding and Supporting Community Responses to Urban Violence When: Thursday, February 10th, 2011 from 12pm-2pm Where: MC 13-121
The World Bank
Chair: Sarah Cliff, Director, World Development Report
Presenters: Alexandre Marc : Cluster Leader, Conflict Crime and Violence Team, Social Development Department (SDV), World Bank Alys Willman: Social Development Specialist, Conflict Crime and Violence Team, SDV, World Bank
Discussants: Junaid Ahmad: Sector Manager, Africa – Urban & Water, World Bank Rodrigo Serrano: Senior Social Development specialist, LAC, World Bank
For millions of people around the world, violence, or the fear of violence, is a daily reality. Much of this violence concentrates in urban centers in the developing world. Cities are now home to half the world’s population and expected to absorb almost all new population growth over the next 25 years. In many cases, the scale of urban violence can eclipse those of open warfare; some of the world’s highest homicide rates occur in countries that have not undergone a war, but that have serious epidemics of violence in urban areas. This study emerged out of a growing recognition that urban communities themselves are an integral part of understanding the causes and impacts of urban violence and of generating sustainable violence prevention initiatives.
The Faith and Organizations Project: Findings and Process
When: Tuesday, February 1st, 7:00 pm Where: Charles Sumner School
2101 17th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20036
Presenters: Jo Anne Schneider, Isaac Morrison, Laura Polk
The Faith and Organizations Project is a trans-disciplinary, multi-methods ethnographic project looking at the relationship between faith based organizations and their founding communities (see faithandorganizations.umd.edu). The project just completed a Lilly Endowment-funded project comparing 81 faith communities and organizations from Catholic, Mainline Protestant, Jewish, Evangelical, Quaker and African American Christian traditions. The project model involves agency hosts and practitioners as active participants in all aspects of the project, creating products for a variety of audiences. This presentation will briefly outline key findings, talk about project process, and discuss experience working on anthropologist-led, trans-disciplinary projects in the career paths of project researchers.
Among the many 2010 AAAS Fellows chosen for their contributions to science and technology are eight anthropologists. Six of the eight are biological anthropologists. Two are archaeologists. They will be recognized at the Fellows Forum to be held February 19, 2011, during the AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. The new Fellows will receive a certificate and a blue and gold rosette as a symbol of their distinguished accomplishments.
Anthropologyworks offers sincere congratulations to the awardees and a request to the AAAS to widen its purview in the future. Creative commons licensed on Flickr by Mae Wells The AAAS awardee profile in anthropology is far too narrow. It overlooks many excellent cultural and linguistic anthropologists whose work clearly contributes to “science and technology.”
Dozens of cultural and linguistic anthropologists are working on topics such as health, violence, migration, fertility, nutrition, environmental pollution, and digital technology, to name just a few. How can it be that not one of such cultural/linguistic anthropologists was named an AAAS Fellow in 2010?
The 2010 awardees are:
Richard A. Diehl, University of Alabama.Professor Diehl is a Mesoamerican archaeologist who specializes in pre-Columbian cultures of Central Mexico and the Olmec culture of the tropical lowlands of the Mexican Gulf coast. He retired from the University of Alabama in 2006, although is currently a Professor Emeritus.
Agustín Fuentes, University of Notre Dame. Professor Fuentes is a biological anthropologist. His research and teaching interests include the evolution of social complexity in human and primate societies, cooperation and conflict negotiation, human diversity, and reproductive behavior and ecology.
Richard L. Jantz, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Professor Jantz is the Director of the Forensic Anthropology Center at the University of Tennessee. He conducts research on human variation, skeletal biology and forensic anthropology. He is primarily concerned with developing computerized data bases in these areas and how they can address a variety of research questions.
Michelle Lampl, Emory University. ProfessorLampl is a biological anthropologist with a research focus on human growth and development. She investigates the mechanisms of growth and influencing factors, both genetic and environmental, and she collaborates with scientists internationally on research projects related to fetal and infant growth.
Paul W. Leslie, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. ProfessorLeslie is a biological anthropologist. His research concerns the relationship among the demographic, socioeconomic, and biological characteristics of human populations, in an ecological context, especially in East Africa.
Fiona B. Marshall, Washington University in St. Louis. ProfessorMarshall is an archaeologist with an appointment in African and African-American studies. She is one of the world’s pre-eminent scholars on the origins of agriculture in Africa and on donkey domestication. In collaboration with the St. Louis Zoo, she is studying behavior of the African wild ass and the relationship of sociality to domestication processes.
Anne C. Stone, Arizona State University. ProfessorStone is a biological anthropologist with a primary focus on anthropological genetics. Her regional focus is South America. Her current research is on applications of population genetics to questions concerning the origins, population history and evolution of humans and the great apes
Samuel D. Stout, Ohio State University. Professor Stout is a forensic and biological anthropologist. His research interest include skeletal biology, health, and bioarchaeology.
The University of California Press in association with the Center for a Public Anthropology is sponsoring an international competition that awards a formal, publishing contract for the best book proposal submitted — independent of whether the author has completed (or even started) the proposed manuscript.
If you are interested in learning more about the University of California Press/Public Anthropology Competition, the book contract, the five thousand dollar advance and the new deadline, please click here.
The 2011 Anthropology Methods Mall is online. This site has info about five, NSF-supported opportunities for methods training in cultural anthropology.
1. Now in its seventh year, the SCRM (Short Courses on Research Methods) program is for cultural anthropologists who already have the Ph.D. Three five-day courses are offered during summer 2011 at the Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort, North Carolina
2. Now in its 16th 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 2011 course runs from July 17–August 6 at the Duke University Marine Laboratory.
A new short video is now online featuring UMBC anthropologist Bambi Chapin tackling the question of what makes a good mother.
Chapin is co-editor of the December issue of Ethos on “Mothering as Everyday Practice,” which explores not just what mothers say about parenting, but what they actually do and why. Chapin undertook this research while parenting her own child in the field, and she describes how others’ reactions to her mothering had unexpected effects on her fieldwork.
Guest post by Julia Friederich, Jessica Grebeldinger, Stephanie Harris, Jacqueline Hazen, and Casey McHugh
The following is an edited transcript of an interview with Philippe Bourgois, the Richard Perry University Professor of Anthropology and Family and Community Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Barbara Miller conducted the interview on October 26, 2010, as part of her introductory cultural anthropology class at the George Washington University. Her 280 students had just finished reading In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, and several of them submitted questions for the interview.
Skyping with Philippe. Photo credit: Elliott School of International Affairs, GW
BDM: First, please tell us why you decided to do your dissertation fieldwork in the United States?
PB: I didn’t! I began my dissertation research with the Miskitu Indians in Nicaragua. But the Nicaraguan Revolution, a popular guerrilla movement that eventually overthrew the Somoza dictatorship, was trying to develop an independent socialist government at the time, and the US, through the CIA, destabilized the situation. The CIA distributed machine guns among the people and it turned into civil war. So I went to Costa Rica and Panama where I did research on the United Fruit Company’s banana plantations, and really that’s what eventually brought me to East Harlem. I thought if I can study ethnic conflict in Central America, I should study ethnic conflict and its political economy in my own country. I wanted to look at segregation and what I call “de facto inner city apartheid” in the US. So I went up to East Harlem in New York City and started my new research project there while I was writing my dissertation about the ethnic divide-and-conquer strategy of a US multinational corporation in Costa Rica and Panama. It became my first book: Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation.
The Migration Policy Institute’s (MPI) National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy is embarking on a timely new research project examining the well-being and development of young children in Black immigrant and refugee families in the first decade of life (birth to age 10). We welcome your support in circulating our Call for Papers to interested parties.
The Nacirema are a large and diverse group of people who live south of Canada and north of Mexico (spell the tribal name backward in case you haven’t figured out who they are). In the mid-20th century, Horace Miner wrote a clever parody about the culture of this tribe. The nickname continues to have some currency among anthropologists and their students. It’s a clever way to get Americans to think of their culture as a culture: contextualized, changing and not at all natural.
Because the Nacirema are such a large and diverse population, I ask students in my introductory cultural anthropology class to avoid referring to Americans as a whole. Because of the many and deep differences across regions, urban/rural, class, age groups, genders, ethnicity and more, I ask that any mention of Americans be preceded by several adjectives.
I have long held to a belief that the only thing all Americans share is knowing what crayons smell like. I have learned much, therefore, from reading Cracked Bell by Tristram Riley-Smith, and I may have to acknowledge that all Americans share an attraction to the concept of freedom.
Riley-Smith is English. He earned his doctorate in cultural anthropology at Cambridge University and did his fieldwork in Nepal. In 2002, he moved to Washington, D.C., working in the British Embassy. Over the next few years, he cast his anthropological gaze on America, taking the pervasive value of freedom as his focal point.
His book provides deep insights for those who wish to understand the United States. In seven chapters, he explores the theme of freedom in America from different angles, all wide angles that allow space for Riley-Smith to draw on his very deep well of knowledge about my country. He knows far, far more about my country than I do — a citizen steeped in its history from childhood and nurtured on its popular culture. I stand in awe of the range of Riley-Smith’s data: historic documents, movies, one-on-one interviews with Americans throughout the land and much, much more.
Chapter one tackles the question of identity. Riley-Smith raises the question of how can and does a sense of identity as American exist out of so much difference? He discusses how the education system shapes a shared sense of identity, as well as “rituals” such as summer camp and mass devotion to sport teams. Yet freedom and opportunity cannot and do not successfully bridge the deep divisions of race and ethnicity and the dispossession of American Indians and the poor in general.
Riley-Smith goes on to tackle six more big issues, bringing to each of them startlingly original insights. Chapter two examines consumerism, with Riley-Smith taking us down the corridors of excess and into the aisles of Walmart where the freedom to consume in fact shackles us all. Other chapters address religion, innovation, the wilderness, war and peace and law.
Riley-Smith isn’t as naive as Mork, who came to America from another planet to learn about our customs, but his observations are just as crisp and memorable. This is not a book you can whiz through in a few hours. I had to stop frequently, put it down, and think. It’s worth the effort.
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