Kim Shively, professor of cultural anthropology at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, published an article in the Morning Call (Allentown, Pennsylvania) about how autism can be fatal to children. Her article notes a recent death by drowning of a five-year old autistic boy in Allentown. She focuses on the variety of autism that involves a tendency to wander away from home, arguing that it is the most dangerous, especially for non-verbal children. She notes that “public safety and health service providers in our area…have poor understanding of what autism is or how it is manifested.” She offers three recommendations.
Sons of a paramount chief, seated, with an African slave, 1904. The Guardian/Institute for Iranian Contemporary Historical Studies, Tehran, Iran
African slavery in Iran
Anthropologist Pedram Khosronejad is Farzaneh Family Scholar and Associate Director for Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies at the School of International Studies of Oklahoma State University. He has embarked on a new and controversial topic in Iranian studies, developing a narrative on African slavery in Persia through archival photography, interviews, and texts. The African slave trade in the Persian Gulf began well before the Islamic period. Mediaeval accounts refer to slaves working as household servants, bodyguards, militiamen and sailors in the Persian Gulf including what is today southern Iran. In Iran’s modern history, Africans were integral to elite households.
ATTN (France) published an article documenting recent terrorist attacks in France along with commentary from cultural anthropologist John Bowen’s article in Time. January 8, 2015, following the Hebdo attack. Bowen, who teaches at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote that the causes of the many attacks in France are complex and include France’s longstanding connections with Islam and its large Muslim population which is 7.5 percent of the total.
Sickness and the city
The Financial Times reported on findings from a study led by researchers at University College London (UCL), which sheds light on why most diabetes sufferers live in cities. Risk factors include increased junk food consumption, lack of safe spaces for exercise, social isolation, and economic inequalities. The research was based on interviews with diabetics and those at risk of the disease in five cities: Copenhagen, Houston, Mexico City, Shanghai, and Tianjin. The goal is to develop policies to break the link between diabetes and urbanization. The article provides commentary from David Napier, professor of medical anthropology at UCL, who said that, by focusing on medical factors, traditional research has failed to capture “the social and cultural drivers” that made urban populations especially vulnerable to type 2 diabetes, the type often linked to obesity. Napier noted that policymakers and urban planners must come up with strategies to promote healthier living in cities to avoid accelerating the growth of diabetes and other chronic conditions such as heart disease and cancer.
Mark Schuller, assistant professor of anthropology and NGO development leadership at Northern Illinois University, contributed an article in The Haitian Times in response to the question: What’s going on in Haiti? How is the progress, after three and a half years and billions of dollars?
One thing going on in Haiti: rendering of Port-Au-Prince Marriott, scheduled to open in 2014/NY Times
After a recent trip there, he comments that it’s particularly difficult to respond: “…when you get off the plane, there are signs of progress. The airport has been renovated. The roads around Port-au-Prince are being repaired. For those in bright t-shirts on their way to the provinces, travel times have been considerably reduced. Stopping en route in a guarded, air conditioned restaurant or supermarket offers the appearance of relative affluence with customers stopping to inspect shelves full of packaged imported food. If one has the funds, a private vehicle and the inclination to go to a night club or restaurant in the affluent Pétion-ville, the trip home is safer…”
Schuller considers the president of Haiti, Michel Martelly, who as a popular musical performer was known as “Sweet Micky,” and says that “…as head of state, he is performing progress (as noted anthropologist and artist Gina Athena Ulysse puts it)”..and: “The performance appears to be working..” given positive reviews from development agencies, NGOS, foreign governments, and some members of Haiti’s poor majority who have gotten jobs.
An unidentified Ixil Mayan in a mass grave. Photo/AP, Daily Mail
The Ixil came under the spotlight after a Guatemalan court found former dictator Efrain Rios Montt guilty of genocide on May 10 for the scorched-earth policies used against them during his rule in the 1980s. The conviction was annulled 10 days later following a trial that did nothing to change their lives of the Ixil people.
Byron Garcia, a social anthropologist who has worked in the area for a decade and who now lives in the Guatemalan capital, said Ixil Maya live in the same poverty as always: “People have been relegated to less productive places, places where you can’t grow food, to the mountains made of stone…The young people who can, sow plots of land. And when they can’t, they migrate.”
And, further, he said that victims feel a need to tell their stories, to be heard, to be indemnified, to find the bodies of their loved ones and be able to bury them. [Blogger’s note: the Daily Mail article includes some amazing photographs]. Continue reading “Anthro in the news 7/8/13”→
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