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 [...]
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 [...]
Jeffrey Cohen, associate professor of cultural anthropology at Ohio State University, is an expert on Mexican-U.S. migration. In an interview published in his university’s faculty and staff newspaper, he critiques Arizona’s new immigration law, SB1070.
U.S.-Mexican border, by Flick user Nathan Gibbs, creative commons licensed.
Cohen argues that such a law is unjust, inefficient and actually irrational [...]
Vice President Al Gore and Tipper Gore, married for 40 years and an iconic couple of marital endurance against high odds, are quietly separating. I am sure that thousands of other people join me in wishing them both the best as they move on into new directions.
While the media buzz about the separation, I note [...]
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 [...]
The major source of health information for South Asians in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area is not the family doctor: it’s the internet. In this respect, South Asians probably resemble most Americans. In other respects they do not.
The Washington, D.C., metropolitan area has the fifth largest South Asian population in the United States. To learn [...]
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 [...]
“Mother’s Day Paint Job,” creative commons licensed on Flickr.
One day out of 365? Not good enough.
Anthropologists have analyzed some annual holidays such as Mardi Gras in the West and Holi among Hindus in South Asia. They often involve “inversion.”
In Mardi Gras, people have a riotously good time in ways not normally accepted. Sexuality is emphasized. [...]
The Internet has been labeled a modern day Pandora’s box. It can let loose on the Internet viewing public any and all knowledge and opinions. Anna Kata, a graduate student in anthropology at McMaster University, mined several Internet sites for the “social discourse” they establish concerning the dangers of vaccination.
As context, she reports that around [...]
