New project to preserve endangered languages
Cambridge University has launched a project to help cultures under threat from globalization record their languages. The project, Oral Literatures, is led by the university’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. It has awarded several grants already to collect myths, poetry and songs, among other aspects of people’s oral literature. The [...]
Guest post by Graham Hough-Cornwell
It has been surprising to find so little fuss in the blogosphere over the newly-passed smoking ban in Iraq. Articles on the subject have tended to express some sense of dismay or curiosity, a sort of “why now?” feeling that puts the Iraqi parliament’s priorities into question. With the [...]
By Barbara Miller
Lead articles in the travel sections of the Sunday August 24 issues of The Washington Post and The New York Times raise some interesting questions about tourism in relation to indigenous peoples.
Both articles offer food for thought for anthropologists who work with indigenous peoples to protect, preserve, and “manage” their cultural heritage and [...]
Cognitive anthropologist has a message for Obama about health care reform
Cognitive linguistic anthropologist George Lakoff lists nine things that the Obama administration should have done earlier on in the campaign to reform health care. He also offers specific advice for how to win the campaign through a more effective communications system, including a brilliant suggestion [...]
By Barbara Miller
An article in The New York Times titled “Idle Iraqi Date Farms Show Decline of Economy “ (Aug. 14, 2009) describes the severe deterioration of agriculture in Iraq and highlights date farming as particularly hard hit. The article notes lack of water, fungi and pests as causal factors in the decline of the [...]
Guest post by Nick Bluhm
Can numbers alone capture the essence of human behavior? This is a question that most anthropology professors would quickly rebuff; yet former General Counsel of General Electric Benjamin Heineman posed this question in a recent article in The Atlantic.
Heineman suggests that in certain situations, an understanding of a community, country, or [...]
By Barbara Miller
The wealthy of New Delhi have taken to buying pedigreed dogs as status markers, and the vast majority buys male dogs. Owners are resorting to advertising to find female mates (in the sexual sense, it seems) for their dogs, but the search is often fruitless due to the scarcity of females.
The skewed set [...]
Paul Farmer, trained as both a medical doctor and a cultural anthropologist, has been under consideration as the new director of the United States Agency for International Development. Check out the Congressional Quarterly coverage here and the Foreign Policy coverage here.
Ashraf Ghani, former anthropology professor at Johns Hopkins University and World Bank professional, is running [...]
By Barbara Miller
The Economist reports that Sudan’s criminal law forbids “indecent clothing in public” with little in the way of further details. Sudanese journalist Lubna al-Hussein was recently arrested in Sudan along with 12 women for being improperly dressed. Ten of the 12 accepted the charge, and each was punished with 10 lashes and was [...]
Hello,
Welcome to the anthropologyworks blog, where I invite anthropologists and non-anthropologists to engage in a lively discussion of any and all topics, as long as comments and queries link, in some way, to anthropology. Please click here for more details.
I am a cultural anthropologist, and I teach cultural anthropology at The George Washington University. My [...]
