• On time (or not)
The BBC carried an article about the findings of a multidisciplinary research team from Portsmouth University that the Amondawa people of the Brazilian Amazon have no abstract concept of time. Blogger’s note: see next item.

• Just try it: be bored
At a recent TEDx conference in Sydney, corporate anthropologist Genevieve Bell urged people to stop fiddling with their mobiles and embrace boredom in order to fuel creativity. Bell is the Director of Interactive Research and Experience Research at Intel in Portland, Oregon. She also said, “It’s harder to be bored than ever.”

• Our gossip, our selves
A letter to the editor of The New York Times noted that anthropologists, along with psychologists, sociologists, psychiatrists, physiologists, biologists, and other scientists can contribute to studying why and how people gossip, as the “culture of gossip is more prevalent and powerful now than ever before.” This claim is based on social media, such as Facebook, where content is mainly about friends and family.

• Giving her credit
The Christian Science Monitor carried a review of A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother which credits Ann Dunham, a cultural anthropologist, with giving her son confidence, intelligence, ambition, idealism, and humor.

• Battle of the Buddha (he would not be pleased)
First the Taliban and now Chinese capitalism. China is planning to the launch a huge copper mine in Mes Aynak, Afghanistan. It will destroy an important Buddhist site. Archaeologists were originally given three years to do conservation work, but President Karzai reduced it to one year. Dr. Omar Sultan, renowned archaeologist and Culture Minister, says that with funding and a team of 40 archaeologists, the essential conservation work can be done on time.

• A dung deal
The Incas’ rise to power depended significantly on llama dung as fertilizer. A new study, picked up by The Times (London) argues that llama dung allowed the Incas, around 2,700 years ago, to switch from reliance on growing quinoa to maize and that this transformation allowed Inca expansion. According to Dr. Alex Chepstow-Lusty of the French Institute of Andean Studies in Lima, who led the study: “Maize and muck were the essential ingredients to drive the expansion of the Inca Empire.” The study is published in the journal Antiquity.

• More pyramids in Egypt
According to an article in Australia’s Herald Sun, satellite imaging has discovered 17 buried pyramids in Egypt and thousands of other tombs and buildings dating to the time of the pharoahs. The article quotes archaeologist Sarah Parcak of the University of Alabama, who used the technique to identify tombs that were pillaged during the recent political revolution. Findings are documented in a film to be broadcast on BBC.

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 5/30/11” →

• Who’s stressed and why?
USA Today quoted Elinor Ochs, professor of cultural and linguistic anthropology at the University of California at Los Angeles, in response to a new U.S. study reporting on the relationship between husbands and wives doing household chores and stress levels: “This is the first time biological stress levels have been coordinated with…information we have about every moment of people’s lives across a week.” The study, conducted at UCLA, is described in the Journal of Family Psychology. Key findings are: men’s stress levels drop when their wife is doing chores, and women’s stress levels drop when their husband help with chores. Among the households in the study, women spend twice as much time as men on household chores.

• Mother is gold in Nigeria
Africa News quoted Misty Bastian, professor of cultural anthropology at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania, in a review of a new book on gender in Nigeria entitled Mother is Gold, Father is Glass by social historian Lorelle D. Semley. She said that the “book will be of great interest to Africanist historians, anthropologists, and others…”

• Oldest organized mining in the Americas
Archaeologists have discovered a 12,000 year-old iron oxide mine in Chile that is the oldest evidence of “organized mining” in the Americas. Findings are reported in Current Anthropology. Blogger’s note: the concept of unorganized mining has my attention.

• Height may be over-rated
Alexandra Brewis, professor of anthropology at Arizona State University, cautioned about “super-sizing humans” in a Room for Debate feature in the New York Times. She mentions the work of Andrea Wiley in challenging common assumptions about pro-height cultural values and emphasis on children drinking more milk.

• Kudos
Kay Fowler, emerita Reno Foundation professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada, is one of the 212 new members elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Fowler is the only representative from a Nevada institution among the 4,300 active members.

• Largest U.S. Campus prize to anthropology student
An anthropology major who wrote about a life-changing trip to Tanzania and the simple pleasures of life in a small town in Maryland has won the largest student literary prize in the nation, the Sophie Kerr Prize awarded by Washington College in eastern Maryland. Graduating senior Lisa Beth Jones will receive a check for $61,062 from an endowment.

• Faculty campus prize
Donna Chollett, associate professor of anthropology and Latin American area studies coordinator at the University of Minnesota-Morris, received a 2011 Imagine Fund award. It will support research on the question “Are Social Movements Morally Noble? Challenging the Intrinsic Virtuosity of Grassroots Social Movements.” Her enduring interest in rural communities and sociocultural change in Latin America will take her back to her established research site in Puruarán, Michoacán, Mexico, this summer to learn why a worker-run sugar mill cooperative failed to live up to its potential for modeling democratic ideals and ensuring economic stability.

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 5/23/11” →