• Not funny

In an article in the Huffington Post, Christa Craven, assistant professor of anthropology and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and chair of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the College of Wooster, takes on campus jokes about sexual violence. Pointing out what should be unnecessary – that such jokes are not funny — she offers steps to address this widespread and enduring problem.

Craven, who has been threatened as a professor, writes: “What bothers me the most about my experiences…is that over the past 20 years, I see little difference in how we — as a society and in many campus communities — are responding to sexual violence and threats of violence. Many continue to see violence as an essential part of masculinity and adopt the naïve (and often dangerous) stance that ‘boys will be boys.’”

• The ills of humanitarian health aid

Medical anthropologist Paul Farmer of Harvard University writes about “the caregivers’ disease” in the London Review of Books. He ponders recent health humanitarianism in West Africa in response to the Ebola outbreak, providing a wide historic sweep from Graham Greene’s writings to medical anthropologist Adia Benton‘s book, AIDS Exceptionalism: Development through Disease in Sierra Leone. He praises her book as a “withering critique” of the workings of public health funding.

• Spelling bee culture

WBUR (Boston NPR) highlighted the research of Shalini Shankar, sociocultural and linguistic anthropologist at Northwestern University, in an article on the May 28 results of the 2015 Scripps National Spelling Bee. Her current research examines the growth and proliferation of spelling competitions, specifically how they have become a mass-mediated, sport-like spectacle, why South Asian American children dominate them, and how spelling bee franchises are being exported to other countries leading to further commodification of the English language. Shankar is conducting fieldwork in the New York City area on spelling bees, spellers and their families, broadcasters such as ESPN and SONY TV, spelling bee production companies, and the Scripps Foundation. Continue reading “anthro in the news 6/1/15” →