• Australia’s first indigenous Rhodes Scholar
Adelaide University student Rebecca Richards is the first Australian indigenous Rhodes Scholar. She will study anthropology at Oxford and pursue her passion for repatriation of objects to indigenous communities in Australia as well as survival of their languages and cultures. She has custodial responsibilities for her family site and other women’s sites in the Flinders Ranges.

• Riches from a poor country
In the 1930s, 21-year-old Alan Lomax recorded many hours of music in Haiti. Lomax went on to become a renowned folklorist and ethnomusicologist. For decades, the recordings sat in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Discovered in the late 1990s, they have been meticulously edited and annotated by Gage Averill, dean of arts at the University of British Columbia. The recordings, which were released this year as a boxed set, Alan Lomax in Haiti, have received two Grammy nominations.

• Audio on science vs humanities
An audio debate on defining anthropology as a science or not between professor Peter Peregrine, president of the Society for Anthropological Science, and professor Hugh Gusterson, executive board member of the American Anthropological Association.

• Holiday lights as social capital
The Washington Post [note: WaPo link has gone dead, here’s another one] quoted biological anthropologist David Sloan Wilson of SUNY Albany in an article about the meaning of holiday lights in public areas: “One way that neighborhoods express their feelings of neighborliness is to decorate the house, not the inside but the outside…It’s an expression of goodwill, basically.”

• Like a bridge over Stonehenge
An Aboriginal archaeological site in Tasmania, perhaps 42,000 years old, will have a concrete highway bridge built over it. The decision to allow the project comes in spite of pleas from many archaeologists including Sandra Bowdler, emeritus professor at the University of Western Australia. She compared the project to building a bridge over Stonehenge.

• Neglect may outdo Vesuvius
Pompeii is crumbling. This World Heritage site, and one of the most famous attractions in Italy, is in danger again. Lack of maintenance and heavy tourist use are taking their toll, and only 20 percent of the site is considered adequately secured. Another problem is the many stray dogs. Moreover, in the words of Pietro Giovanni Guzzo, an archaeologist who supervised the site for the Culture Ministry from 1994-2009, “Pompeii is fragile.”

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 12/20/10” →

• How to slow cholera in Haiti
Paul Farmer and co-authors published an article in the Lancet laying out five steps for slowing the death toll of cholera in Haiti. Several media including NPR, CNN, and the New York Times picked up on step 3: providing cholera vaccine. For more information on all five steps, see a post on this blog.

• More on Haiti: when god is too busy
Gina Athena Ulysse, associate professor of cultural anthropology at Wesleyan University, teaches a course called Haiti: Myths and Reality. She also writes scholarly articles and poems to get her message across. And she is a performer, bringing her message to the stage through her show Because God is Too Busy: Haiti, Me and the World. Ulysse combines her love of Haiti with her academic training, her singing, and her performance. The Huffington Post carried an article about her work. She will perform God is Too Busy at several locations in the next few months, including at George Washington University in late January.

• UBC-Okanagan anthro students and professor honored
The Center for a Public Anthropology gave its Public Anthropology Award to 15 students in an intro anthropology class at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan. The students wrote essays on the question: Who should be the beneficiaries of anthropological research? The professor, Diana French, was also honored with this year’s Eleanor Roosevelt Global Citizenship Award from Public Anthropology. This is the second year that Professor French’s students have swept the Public Anthropology student awards. The Center for a Public Anthropology will send French to Brazil to present a gift from her class to the Yanomami Hutukara Association.

• Public anthropology voices welcome in Australia
Lindsay Tanner is the inaugural vice-chancellor’s fellow at Victoria University, Australia, and a former federal politician. In an op-ed in the Australian, he talks about the need for more academic input into policy debates: “While disciplines such as nuclear physics and anthropology are obviously important, they’re typically not as proximate to the world of day-to-day problem-solving in business and government as areas where VU [Victoria University] is strong, such as health, transport, communications and financial services. It’s in these areas that our public debate desperately needs stronger intellectual input.”

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 12/13/10” →

• On the Foreign Policy list
In its December issue, Foreign Policy magazine named Paul Farmer, medical anthropology professor at Harvard and co-founder of Partners in Health, as number 35 in the list of top 100 innovative thinkers of 2010 “for showing the world what to do and what not to do in Haiti.” The four-column spread on Farmer includes 5 Lessons from Haiti’s Disaster.

Many of the FP’s great thinkers 2010 included a note about what they are reading. David Petraeus, number 8 on the list, is reading Thomas Barfield’s Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History. Clay Shirky, number 67, mentioned James Scott’s Seeing Like a State.

• Wiki leaks and Chagossians
Cultural anthropologist Sean Carey of Roehampton University wrote about some of the political machinations surrounding leaked cables related to Diego Garcia in the New Statesman and he was quoted in the Express. David Vine, professor of cultural anthropology at American University, published an article describing the use of faux environmentalism to prevent the return of the Chagossians to Diego Garcia.

• Anthro’s mission possible
The Chronicle for Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed carried an article about the revised mission statement of the American Anthropological Association which deletes the word “science.” CNN, Nature, and several bloggers have chimed in.

• What the Nacirema want
Gillian Tett, cultural anthropologist and writer for the Financial Times, compares publishing books in Britain and the US. Self-deprecation, she says, sells well in Britain. In the US, however, self-doubt is not appreciated in a writer: “you must act as if you are an expert, filled with complete conviction.”

• In memoriam
C. Scott Littleton, anthropology professor and department chairman at Occidental College, died November 25 at the age of 77 years. He was known for his studies of comparative Indo-European mythology and folklore, Arthurian legends, Japanese culture, and unidentified flying objects. Littleton taught a range of anthropology courses at Occidental from 1962 to 2002 and served as chairman of the sociology and anthropology department in several stints from 1967 to 1994. After the anthropology department split off, he was its chairman from 1995 to 2000. Besides scholarly works, Littleton authored a science fiction novel, Phase Two.