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 [...]
Sylvia Tamale, a feminist sociologist and legal scholar who teaches at Uganda’s Makerere University, is quoted in a recent PlusNews article as saying that the “risky sexual practices” framework, as uncritically accepted in HIV policy circles in Uganda, is “racist, moralistic and paternalistic.” Instead of fighting people’s culture, she suggests that raising people’s awareness about [...]
• Africa is not a big country
In a letter to the editor of The New York Times concerning an article on the global war on AIDS, Steve Black zings it for totalizing “Africa.” He writes, “Now just imagine what would happen to investment in the United States if articles did not distinguish between the United [...]
• Yo-Yo Ma’s anthropological soul
Classical cellist Yo-Yo Ma is, according to an article in the Washington Post, “one of the most recognizable classical musicians on the planet.” Besides being a star of the musical world, he is also a social activist, in his own way. “I realized late in life,” Ma says, that my twin [...]
This list is intended to provide a guide to recent resources on culture and society in Haiti for people who wish to be better informed about the context in which the recent earthquake and its devastation are occurring. With apologies, most of the journal articles are not public access.
Furthermore, we really encourage everyone to visit [...]
UPDATE 1/14: This post was linked in a story by Discovery News’ James Williams.
Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the island of Hispaniola. Following the island’s discovery by Columbus in 1492, Spanish colonialists exterminated the island’s indigenous Arawak Indians. In 1697, the French took control of what is now Haiti and instituted an exceptionally [...]
As any cultural anthropologist will tell you, a decade is an arbitrary cultural construction with no inherent meaning. I agree. But it does offer a potentially interesting way to bracket a period of time within which a lot happens but not too much — at least not too much for my memory to handle.
On Morning [...]
