Guest post by Barbara Rose Johnston
I received last week copies of two very different publications reporting on outcomes from the scientific assessment of life in a nuclear warzone. These studies consider, first, the health experience of resident populations living in areas contaminated by nuclear weapons fallout, and, second, the health of people as affected [...]
So-called honor killings take the wind out of a form of cultural relativism that I refer to as absolute cultural relativism. According to absolute cultural relativism, anything that goes on in a particular culture, and is justified within that culture, cannot be questioned or changed by insiders or outsiders. For insiders, such questioning is cultural [...]
European colonists came to North America seeking religious freedom and economic opportunity. They destroyed the very same for those who had lived here for centuries.
One person’s liberty often means someone else’s shackles. One group’s success often means another group is in ruins.
The boom and crackle of Independence Day fireworks in the United States are [...]
Journalist and filmmaker Sebastian Junger says that he wanted to make you feel like you are actually there in a remote combat outpost in Afghanistan in Restrepo. He and his partner Tim Hetherington, succeeded. After the documentary’s powerful 90 minutes, people in the packed AFI theater in Silver Spring, Md., on Friday June 28 [...]
Guest post by Eben Kirksey
President Obama turned his back on Indonesia recently — canceling his visit there for the second time this year. His mother, Ann Soetoro, was a cultural anthropologist who spent much of her adult life helping economically-marginalized people of Indonesia. If she were still alive, she might well be disappointed in her [...]
Patricide, or the murder of one’s father, is often associated with political intrigue at high levels: a son seeks his father’s throne and doesn’t want to wait for his father’s natural death.
The reported murder of an Iraqi man by his son and a nephew because he worked for the U.S. military as a translator [...]
While out running errands this morning on Connecticut Avenue in the far northwest part of Washington, D.C., I was struck by how quiet it was — even compared to other Sundays — in terms of low traffic density. And quietness.
Then I heard it: the noise of several Harleys in unison moving south on the [...]
I hope that some people reading this blog have seen the 1965 documentary, Dead Birds. If you haven’t, please try to do so. It’s a very long film, in black and white. I viewed it in a college class many years ago. For me, the big lesson was that the Dani people of highland New [...]
The Nacirema are a large and diverse group of people who live south of Canada and north of Mexico (spell the tribal name backward in case you haven’t figured out who they are). In the mid-20th century, Horace Miner wrote a clever parody about the culture of this tribe. The nickname continues to have some [...]
The latest issue of the Journal of Women’s Health includes three articles describing health risks of women in the United States related to social exclusion and cultural factors. They all demonstrate that good health is about a lot more than medical care.
The first article looks at three factors associated with cardiovascular disease–hypertension, elevated cholesterol, and [...]
