An interview by Maggie Ronkin with Fayyaz Baqir, Director of the Akhter Hameed Khan Resource Center, Islamabad, Pakistan
MR: What regions of Pakistan and sectors of the population are affected most by the tragic flooding?
FB: Vast swathes of land in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (previously the Northwest Frontier Province), Southern Punjab (the Siraiki region of [...]
Blogger’s note: I depend largely on my Google reader system to feed me the anthropology news every week for my weekly round-up of “Anthro in the news.” But a lot that is anthropological goes on under the covers, so to speak: it is just not named “anthropology.”
Out of curiosity, I went to Google news yesterday [...]
Cultural anthropologist, medical doctor, and humanitarian activist, Paul Farmer of Harvard University and Partners in Health, testified to the Congressional Black Caucus on July 27. His focus was on Haiti. His pitch is that the aid money flowing into Haiti must not go only to NGOs, to non-state organizations, but also must be used to [...]
Guest post by Graham Hough-Cornwell
The XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna concluded on July 23. Twitter buzzed all week with updates from speakers and attendees, and comments from those who, like me, didn’t attend but followed from home.
The biggest stories of the week? Undoubtedly at the top are the speeches of Bill Clinton [...]
Possibly trillions of dollars worth of mineral deposits lie untouched beneath the surface in Afghanistan. A recent New York Times report generated a flurry of discussion about whether this subterranean wealth would help Afghanistan and its people or prove to be a “resource curse” that instead brings more violence.
One thing is certain, if the minerals [...]
Diana Putman, a USAID health specialist working with the Pentagon’s Africa Command, spoke up about a poorly conceived idea of the State Department in concert with the US military. She spoke up all the way to the top of the chain of command, to the four-star head of Africa Command, General William “Kip” Ward.
Putman [...]
Foreign aid and charity are often well-intentioned but just as often have no positive effects on the target population for a variety of reasons. Worse yet, aid may make people’s situation worse with one of the most clear and painful examples being food aid (if you don’t believe this statement, read up on what sending [...]
In the late 1970s, Haiti’s rural population was 80 percent of the total population, while today it is 55 percent. This rapid shift has led to Haiti being “terribly out-of-balance” as Robert Maguire testified (PDF transcript) before the Subcommittee on International Development, Foreign Assistance, Economic Affairs and International Environmental Protection of the U.S. Senate Committee [...]
Despite an abundance of aid materials and the good intentions of relief agencies, relief efforts in Thailand following the December 2004 earthquake/tsunami were afflicted by skewed distribution.
Jin Sato, associate professor in the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo, analyzes the factors that skewed relief good distribution in an article [...]
In rural Haiti, before entering anyone’s yard, one calls out : “Onè! (Honor!), waiting to hear the welcome, “Respe!” (Respect) before entering. Cultural anthropologist Jennie Smith-Paríolá did long term fieldwork with “peasant” groups in Haiti’s Northeast, Central Plateau, and Grand Anse regions. She learned much about the values of honor/respect and how they infuse Haitians [...]
