• How often do you think about…
The weather: Anthropologist of popular British culture, Kate Fox, finds that British people talk about the weather once every six hours and that 70 percent check the weather forecast at least once a day. Weather talk, she finds, is a way to facilitate conversation. She also learned that men are more optimistic about the weather than women.

• Chagos update
Cultural anthropologist Sean Carey published an article in the New Statesman about a recent meeting about the Chagos right of return that included Olivier Bancoult (leader of the Chagos Refugees Group in Mauritius), Roch Evenor (chair of the UK Chagos Support Association), and Henry Bellingham (Foreign and Commonwealth Officer for Africa and the Overseas Territories). Interestingly, no lawyers from either side attended the meeting. The two sides agreed to meet again in November. Carey notes that Bellingham may need to update his information sources rather than relying on Bush administration statements from 2004.

• Dead Sea Scrolls go digital
The 2,000 year-old Dead Sea Scrolls will go online next year. They will then become available to more than one billion internet users.  If their writers could only imagine…

• Paleo bread rising
Stone tools in Italy, Russia, and the Czech Republic indicate that human ancestors 30,000 years ago ground plants into flour from which they perhaps made bread-like products to supplement their largely meat-based diet. These findings throw into question the prevailing model of the Paleo diet as excluding processed food.

• When writing began
In Chicago, the Oriental Institute has mounted a new show, “Visible Language: Inventions of Writing in the Ancient Middle East and Beyond.” It includes a Sumerian clay object with impressed designs referred to as proto-cuneiform. The exhibit provides examples from Sumerian, Egyptian, Chinese, and Mayan writing in order “to present and describe four times in history when writing was invented from scratch,” said Christopher Woods, associate professor of Sumerology at the University of Chicago and curator of the show.

• Oldest hospital in Britain
Archaeologists have found the site of what may be Britain’s earliest known hospital. It is located in Winchester underneath a medieval infirmary and is dated to before the Norman conquest. Simon Roffey from the University of Winchester notes the importance of the pre-conquest date.

• Oldest door in Europe
Swiss archaeologists have found a 5,000 year-old door in Zurich which may be the oldest known so far in Europe. Several villages from the period have been found at the site where a car park is planned.

• The call of the Yeti
Reports of Yeti sightings in Russia’s rugged Kemerevo region, in Siberia, are attracting record numbers of tourists to the area. Moscow News quotes Sergei Vasiliev, anthropology department head of the Moscow Ethnology and Anthropology Institute as saying that there is no scientific evidence of the Yeti, or Bigfoot. Nonetheless, the region joins Loch Ness in Scotland as an important site of a form of tourism that is still in search of a name. Fictional tourism doesn’t seem to capture it. Readers: please send in suggestions.

• This law is our law
The New York Times carried an article about customary law in Bali, including severe ostracism via the process of kapsepekang. The article quotes Balinese anthropologist Degung Santikarma who says that Balinese society “appears to be orderly, but it’s really coercive…In Bali, culture is to control people.”

• Getting it straight on Hezbollah
William Beeman, professor and chair of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, published a letter to the editor of the New York Times in which he addresses Joe Klein’s review of a book by Thanassis Cambanis. Beeman, contra Klein, supports how Cambanis presents the role of Hezbollah in Iran.

• Count down: a last tribe under state gaze
Please keep your fingers crossed that the Indian state will not crush the life from the Andaman Island group called the Jarawa (with apologies: this group name is likely to be inappropriate, since it is what other groups have named them and not what they name themselves). A recent population count put their number at 365 which is 125 more than the previous census estimate of 2001. An article in The Telegraph (Calcutta) quotes V. S. Sahay, professor and head of the department of anthropology at Allahabad University, explaining that previous population counts were only estimates because the Jarawa have long resisted “contact” from outsiders. Sahay says, “much of the confusion” about Jarawa demographics has been clarified since “The Jarawas…are now in direct contact with us.” Blogger’s note: “contact with us” does not sound like a good thing, at all, for the Jarawa. I have been watching the Andaman situation for over a decade, and the Indian state continues to justify its unwanted presence among the “uncontacted” tribes on the grounds that they need to count them, for the state’s decadal census, and they want to deliver health care and other aspects of modern life to them. Recommended reading: James Scott’s, Seeing Like a State. 

• One of the new tribes: global digital workers
Sean Carey, cultural anthropologist and research fellow at the University of Roehampton, interviewed Tom Jordan, a “new breed” digital entrepreneur about his business in the Greater Shoreditch area of London. During the interview, Carey asks Jordan if smaller international players, such as Mauritius, can be part of the global digital work.

• Enough to make you sick
Catherine Trundle, lecturer in cultural anthropology at Victoria University (New Zealand) has received a research grant to study the effects of nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s at Christmas Island in the Pacific on British and New Zealand servicemen. About 1000 surviving veterans are seeking millions of pounds in compensation for themselves and their families.

• Anthro and an acting career
Jesse Eisenberg who plays the role of Mark Zuckerberg in the new movie, The Social Network, studied anthropology in college. This background will do him well in getting into, and presenting, Generation X culture. At the age of 27 years, he is already outside that world.

Continue reading “Anthro in the news 10/18/10” →

• Hunger in a rich land
According to a recent poll, Philadelphia is one of the poorest–and hungriest–10 cities in the United States. There is intergenerational hunger, hunger exacerbated by the cut-back in federal eligibility for welfare, and hunger because of the recent and continuing economic recession. Cultural anthropologist Mariana Chilton, an assistant professor at Drexel University’s School of Public Health, says that “hunger is ugly” because of its negative effects on children and on urban life. Nutritional deprivation affects brain development, she says, as well as student classroom engagement. Chilton is a national figure in hunger policy/programs, and she is also working with Sesame Street to help figure out how it can talk about hunger in America.

• Teen drinking culture
The Century Council has funded a research project at George Mason University to understand underage drinking in the U.S. in order to promote responsible decision making. The study is looking at the dynamics of teen drinking, the age at which teens start drinking, where they get the alcohol, how dangerously they drink, and how some teens manage not to drink. Cultural anthropology professor Hugh Gusterson of George Mason Univserity is co-directing the study.

• Mammography screening and culture
Medical anthropologist Galen Joseph published an article about the different perceptions of, need for, and use of mammography screening among Latino and Filipino academics and social service providers in the San Francisco area. Joseph is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine of the University of California at San Francisco. The findings, which have relevance to interventions, are published in the journal Health Education and Behavior.

• Food anthropologist career option
Mehmet Gur’s high-end Istanbul restaurant, Mikla, employs an anthropologist with a doctorate in food cultures whose mission is to provide insights for the restaurant’s menu about non-processed food and rare ingredients of Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

• Unknown (to us) language discovered
A previously unknown language (to outsiders) has been discovered in northeastern India. The language is called Koro and is spoken by 800-1,200 people. It is in danger of extinction. The researchers are K. David Harrison of Swarthmore College and Gregory D. S. Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. They worked with Indian researcher Ganesh Murmu. Their findings will be published in Indian Linguistics.

• Just like us: compassionate Neanderthals
In addition to their recent rebranding as creative tool makers, Neanderthals now are likely to be compassionate caregivers of sick individuals–another form of behavior long associated with modern humans. The findings are from a study led by Penny Spikins, lecturer in the Department of Archaeology of the University of York and are published in Time and Mind.

• In memoriam
Joan Miller, professor of anthropology at San Diego State University, died on September 28. She was a biological anthropologist who also taught a cultural film class. She was an active member of the Save the Chimps foundation.

• On caregiving and love
PBS carried an interview with Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University medical anthropologist and psychiatrist. Kleinman describes his family life since his wife developed Alzheimer’s disease in 2003. The disease brought her dementia and blindness, and Kleinman became her primary caregiver. He comments that last year’s health care debates in the U.S. paid almost zero attention to caregiving: “And yet this is what families are going to face in the future.”

• LGTB rights on campus
Students taking the class “Sexuality and Eroticism,” taught at Rutgers University by anthropology instructor Robert O’Brien, were inspired to organize a protest against harassment of LGBT students.

• On interethnic relations in Russia
The popular Russian talkshow, “Matter of Principles,” included Valery Tishkov, director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, along with three other panelists. He emphasized access to power or resources as the basis for conflict and hatred.

• Angolan youths’ role in the independence movement
Speaking at the 4th International Meeting of Angolan History, Angolan cultural anthropologist Carlos Serrano described the importance of young nationalists in Angola’s struggle for independence from the Portuguese in the 1940s.

• Farewell to bullfighting
Starting in 2012, bullfighting will be banned in Catalonia. The Financial Post quotes Carrie Douglass, professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Virginia, who sees the ban as a statement of separateness from Spain.

• The boy with the amber necklace
The skeleton of a teenage boy has been found near Stonehenge. He was wearing and amber necklace and hailed from the Mediterranean region according to analysis of some tooth enamel.

• Also a long way from home
A skull with the features of an Aboriginal Australian has been found in a cave in Brazil and dated at 11,000 years ago. Professor Walter Neves, in PLoS One, argues that the finding means there were two waves of migration to the New World including one from Southeast Asia. Maciej Henneberg, an anthropologist at the University of Adelaide posits that more than just one or two waves, people probably arrived through many, continuous flows.

• Kudos
Shannon Lee Dawdy of the University of Chicago was named a 2010 MacArthur Fellow. An assistant Professor of Anthropology, she is a historical anthropologist and archaeologist concentrating on the Atlantic World after 1450. Her recent fieldwork on garden and hospitality sites in New Orleans informs her current book project, Patina: An Archaeology of Everyday Aesthetics, which seeks to understand the connections between aesthetics and social life.