• Get a life, birthers
Alan Boraas, professor of anthropology at Kenai Peninsula College, offers on the ground evidence that the President of the United States is “American”: If Trump and other birthers hung out in the same Soldotna coffee shop that I do they could have asked fellow Americano-sipper Mary Toutonghi about Barack Obama’s origins. As described in a 2009 article by Jenny Neyman in the Redoubt Reporter, Toutonghi baby-sat the infant Barack after his mother returned to Seattle from Hawaii in 1962. Dunham had spent most of her high school years in Seattle and had gone off to the University of Hawaii, met a man, got pregnant, got married, had a son, and moved back to Seattle’s Capitol Hill district. Dunham lived in an old lumber-era mansion that had been converted to a four-plex managed by Toutonghi and her husband, a student at Seattle University. Dunham took evening classes at the University of Washington twice a week and Toutonghi baby-sat Barack along with her own kids. If Dunham had given birth to Barack in Africa a few months earlier, Toutonghi would surely have heard about it.

• “If nothing else, I gave you an interesting life”
During the past week, more reviews appeared of the biography of Ann Dunham, cultural anthropologist and mother of President Barack Obama. Here is an excerpt from the review in Newsweek: “In 1960, before the Civil Rights Act, before the women’s movement, a smart, white 17-year-old arrived at college to find herself pregnant within a matter of weeks. The startling part was not that she dropped out of school at the end of the semester. Or that the father of the child she was carrying was from a different continent and of another color. Nor was it startling that she married him, at a time when doing so qualified as a felony in nearly half of America. Or that she divorced her husband shortly thereafter. The startling part was her conviction–as the child grew into a man–that her son was so gifted ‘that he can do anything he ever wants in the world, even be president of the United States.’ And that she was right.” Other reviews appeared in the Seattle Post, The Washington Times, and the New York Times Sunday edition.
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• Kudos
Senior British diplomat James Bevan has been appointed as the U.K.’s High Commissioner to India. Bevan studied Social Anthropology at Sussex University before joining the Foreign Office in 1982.

• A book reviewed around the world
Ann Dunham, mother of the President of the United States, was a cultural anthropologist. The recently published biography about her, titled A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, was published shortly before Mother’s Day. The New York Times carried a review on May 3, written by cultural anthropologist Catherine Lutz of Brown University. USA Today chimed in on the same day. After that came reviews in The Washington Post, The Irish Times, The Nation (Nairobi), and The Times (London), and no doubt many more. Blogger’s note: Surely there has not ever been a biography of a cultural anthropologist that has received so much attention in the media. The President must be very proud of his mother. We are!

• Autism in South Korea
A new study, co authored by Richard Grinker, cultural anthropology professor at George Washington University, reports a higher than expected prevalence of autism spectrum disorders among middle class children in one city. The New York Times and NPR reported on the study.

• What goes in will come out
The earliest direct evidence of dog consumption comes from a rock shelter known as Hinds Cave in Texas. A dog bone was found in a coprolite (fossilized fecal matter) from a human and dated to 9260 years ago.

• Persian gazelle kill-off
About 5,000 years ago, in Syria, people drove entire herds of Persian gazelles to their death by using stone corrals. This finding is from research by archaeologist Melinda Zeder of the Smithsonian Institution and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A thousand years later Persian gazelles were rare in the region as they are now.

• Kudos
Three decades of archaeological research by Richard Hansen, professor at Idaho State University, are featured in the May edition of Smithsonian magazine in an article describing his work in El Mirador, a Maya cultural site in Guatemala and Mexico. In addition, there will be an event on the Mirador Basin at the Morgan LIbrary and Museum in New York City, a forthcoming article in Archaeology magazine, an exhibit in Paris at the Musée Quai Branly in June, and a feature on the National Geographic Channel in September.

Erik Trinkaus, professor of biological anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis and one of the world’s most influential scholars of Neanderthals, will receive the 2011 Arthur Holly Compton Faculty Achievement Award from Washington University.

• All bets still on for Royal Honeymoon destination
Sean Carey’s guest post in anthroworks on where the Royal couple will honeymoon got picked up by the Huff Po. Check out his cultural anthropology-informed prediction.

• Rx for love everlasting
USA Today carried a piece about keeping the spark in marital love, featuring advice from Helen Fisher, a research professor of anthropology at Rutgers University. For a romantic marriage to endure, Royal or otherwise, Fisher advises that couples should “keep taking novel exciting adventures together.” Also: choose someone with a similar personality type. And, Dr. Fisher says it is important to “make love regularly” because that triggers the testosterone system. Last, touching is good.

• Anti-royalist anthros arrested in London
Two cultural anthropologists were arrested in London on April 29, in advance of the Royal wedding, for planning a mock execution at Westminster Abbey. Blogger’s note and queries: For unknown reasons, my Tweet about this arrest attracted more re-Tweets than I have ever had the pleasure to experience. Is there a major population of anti-monarchists who follow aw on Twitter? And/or is it exciting for an anthropologist — two, in fact — to get arrested?

• The anthro way: documenting displacement
Canadian photographer and filmmaker Devin Tepleski was working on an archaeology dig in Ghana when he was asked by villagers, who would soon to be displaced by a hydroelectric dam, to tell their story. The result is a series of portraits of men, women and children standing knee-deep in the Black Volta river taken before the dam was built. Tepelski, in his last year of earning his degree in visual anthropology, realizes that, unlike photojournalists, he can make a long term commitment to a community and take a collaborative approach in telling their story.

• Conference in Ooty
Tamil Nadu, a state in south India, has a rich cultural heritage making it an endless source of fascination for anthropologists. A number of eminent anthropologists, researchers, tribal activists and students gathered in Ooty, a historic hill town in the state, on Thursday to discuss issues and challenges in anthropological research with special reference to Tamil Nadu.

• Tell it to me one more time: the “untold” story of human evolution
The Guardian carried a six-page feature on human evolution including commentary from bio anthropologist Robin Dunbar of the University of Cambridge.

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 5/2/2011” →