• Peanuts for poverty and to heck with patents
The New York Times magazine featured an article on the rise of Plumpy’nut, a foil-wrapped peanut paste produced as a nutrition booster for starving people. A French company first started manufacturing and selling it. Now other manufacturers are making a similar product including Partners in Health in [...]
This week’s anthropology in the news is the final posting made with the assistance of Graham Hough-Cornwell. For the past year, Graham has been a vital force behind the blog from inspiration, contributing his own posts, editing, photo-research, publishing posts, checking analytics, and more. He is now moving on to intensive study of Arabic this [...]
• If Clef were president
Louis Herns Marcelin, a Haitian-born cultural anthropology professor at the University of Miami is paraphrased in the Seattle Times as saying that people with money and influence in Haiti are more likely to fear outsiders.
• About the mosque (you know which one)
An article in the Huffington Post discussed how Muslims around [...]
• Speaking the g-word on the Hill
Cultural anthropologist, medical doctor, charismatic social justice activist, and co-founder of Partners in Health, Paul Farmer came to DC last week and testified at a hearing on Capitol Hill of the Congressional Black Caucus. He argued that donors need to strengthen Haiti’s public sector: “How can there be public [...]
• Death Valley, New Mexico
The Espanola Valley of northern New Mexico has the highest rate of heroin-related deaths in the United States. The only prize for this distinction is the constancy of death. Angela Garcia is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California at Irvine and the author of The Pastoral Clinic: [...]
• One year after: return to repression in Honduras
Speaking from Honduras during a march of democracy protestors in the capital, professor Adrienne Pine, a cultural anthropologist at American University in Washington, DC, is quoted in the Huffington Post: “We’ve…returned to the 1980s, when death squads killed several hundred people…they’re using the same repressive strategies….Even the [...]
• A bridge too far: belated apology to Ngarrindjeri women
Labor Party Mike Rann, South Australia’s 44th Premier, formally acknowledged this week that Ngarrindjeri women did not fabricate claims about their secret “business” in the mid 1990s. They argued that construction of the Hindmarsh Bridge linking their territory to the mainland would violate their sacred and [...]
• Iran says thanks but no thanks to US help
“So why would we force it on them?” asks cultural anthropologist William Beeman, professor and chair of the department of anthropology at the University of Minnesota. In a letter to the editor of the New York Times, Beeman explains that the ability of the United States [...]
• Anthropologists offer insights into the Uzbek situation
“There is no way but to bring them back,” says Sergei Abashin, senior researcher at the RAN (Russian Academy of Sciences) Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology in Moscow, referring to the refugees who recently fled to Uzbekistan. He told BBC that the Kyrgyz state has been either [...]
• The not-so-Human Terrain System
The Huffington Post quotes Hugh Gusterson in a piece on the Human Terrain System: Gusterson says that the HTS is marketed as a way to build a more secure world, in fact it does the opposite in terms of supporting a “brutal war of occupation.”
• Not just any dame
Biological anthropologist and [...]
