• Too soon to celebrate in Guatemala

Victoria Sanford, professor of cultural anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, published an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that it is too soon to declare victory in Guatemala given the evidence that the current president, the former military commander Otto Pérez Molina, may have been involved in the same mass killings for which General Ríos Montt has now been convicted.

Nonetheless, she states that the conviction of former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity is of monumental significance:

“It was the first time in history that a former head of state was indicted by a national tribunal on charges of genocide. It offers hopes to those similarly seeking justice in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua.”

• Culture and technology

CBS published a video interview with Intel’s cultural anthropologist, Genevieve Bell. Bell discusses the role of cultural anthropology in understanding people’s needs and preferences related to technology, people’s time patterns, social relationships, and more.

• World Bank to focus on delivery

The Washington Post carried an article describing the influence of Sir Michael Barber‘s philosophy of public management on Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank (as well as medical doctor, medical anthropologist, and former university president). Apparently Kim keeps a copy of Barber’s book, Deliverology 101, close at hand, calls him for advice, and has asked Barber to meet with senior World Bank staff.

• Contested pilgrimage in Islam

The Northern Echo (Ireland) noted that Madawi al-Rasheed, professor of anthropology of religion at King’s College London, presented a public lecture titled “Islamic Journeys: Contested Pilgrimage in Contemporary Islam” at Durham University as part of a series on Calendars and Festivals: Identity, Culture and Experience.

• Take that anthropology degree and…

…become a wine company owner and have to deal with branding issues because you are Nelson Mandela’s daughter. The New York Times carried an article on the legacy of Nelson Mandela and rights to use the Mandela name.

One of his daughters, Makaziwe Mandela, who has a Ph.D. in anthropology, runs a wine company with her daughter, Tukwini, called House of Mandela. According to the article, “She said many people made money off her father’s name and image, so why should the Mandelas be prohibited from using their name? I don’t hear anybody criticizing the Rothschilds for using their name.”

• Lost: Maya temple razed for road fill

Many international and local media covered the destruction of Noh Mul, a 2,300 year-old Maya temple in Belize, in order to provide fill for a new road. Work on the Noh Mul temple site has stopped, but the director of Belize’s Institute of Archeology said that 80 percent of the building was destroyed and nothing on the site is salvageable:

“The only thing left now is to watch the last bit of it crumble with the coming of the rainy season or to go in there and try to salvage the parts that remain that are scattered all over the site,” said archaeologist Dr. Jaime Awe. Dr John Morris of the Belizean Institute of Archaeology told The Independent: “It is incredible that someone would have the gall to destroy this building. There is no way they would not know that these are Maya mounds.”

• Lost and found: Ciudad Blanca

An interdisciplinary group of scientists from archaeology, anthropology, and geology have used new technology to discover a “lost world” in the Honduran interior.

Findings were presented at the American Geophysical Union’s annual conference. The team photographed the ground using new technology known as airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR). They found what appears to be a network of plazas and pyramids, hidden for hundreds of years.

The project’s lead archaeologists, Christopher Fisher and Stephen Leisz of Colorado State University, say the hidden city was probably home to a sophisticated Mesoamerican society, with paved streets, parks, pyramids and an advanced irrigation system.

The discovery of the ruins, which could date back to as early as 500 C.E., suggests the region’s pre-Hispanic civilization was significantly more developed than was previously thought.

• First New Zealanders

According to a report in The Marlborough Express (New Zealand), analysis of the remains of the first New Zealanders found buried on Wairau Bar, in Marlborough, shows there were three distinct groups of people buried there.

A University of Otago-led team of scientists learned about the diet, lifestyles and movements of the first New Zealanders by analyzing radioactive isotopes from their bones and teeth. Their findings were published in the international journal Plos One. The research suggests that one group of people was likely to be the first group of people to colonize Wairau Bar, possibly from Polynesia, about 700 years ago.

Dr. Rebecca Kinaston, a postdoctoral researcher and biological anthropologist at Otago, conducted the isotope analyses on the bone collagen and teeth. She said it suggested that members of this first group shared similar diets and childhood origins, while people in groups 2 and 3 displayed highly variable diets and spent their childhood in geologically different areas to those in group 1:

“Interestingly, group 1 individuals showed a dietary trend similar to that identified in prehistoric individuals from a site in the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia, with both sets of people sharing a low diversity in protein sources.” In contrast, dietary patterns in groups 2 and 3 were found to be in line with individuals who spent most of their lives eating from a wide range of protein sources, such as would be available through New Zealand’s then bountiful seal, moa and other bird populations.

• Neanderthal art pushes classification boundaries

An article in Nature magazine highlighted the question of whether the earliest known cave paintings indicate that Neanderthals were the mental equals of modern humans.

João Zilhão is the leading advocate for Neanderthals, “relentlessly pressing the case that these ice-age Europeans were our cognitive equals.”

Zilhão, an archaeologist at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies at the University of Barcelona in Spain, believes that other signs of sophisticated Neanderthal culture have already proved his point.

• Very old human ear bones

According to Fox News, a Binghamton University anthropologist is leading a study that has found the oldest human ancestor ear bones. The international team includes researchers from the U.S., Italy and Spain. The 2-million-year-old ear bones are from two species of early human ancestors in South Africa. The bones show a mix of ape and human like features.

Professor Rolf Quam says the human-like configuration implies that our hearing evolved very early: “Our hypothesis is that these changes in the ear bones might be something that occurs as early as bipedalism. It might be another hallmark of humanity in the skeleton.” The next step in the study will be reconstructing the hearing in these early human ancestors. It will be the first time an aspect of sensory perception is reconstructed from fossils of our ancestors. A video is included.

Filed under: anthro in the news, archaeology, cultural anthropology, religion by admin on May 20, 2013 | Social tagging: geology > Guatemala > Islam > Jim Yong Kim > Maya > Neanderthals > Nelson Mandela > New Zealand > World Bank
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Case Study of Rebgong

Monday, May 20, 2013
4:00-5:30PM
Mickey East Conference room, suite 501, 5th floor
Elliott School of International Affairs
1957 E Street NW

Yumkyi Dolma is a graduate student at the Central Minzu University in Beijing who specializes in education. She has conducted fieldwork on the impact of multilingual education in the northeastern region of Amdo (Qinghai province). She is currently completing a visiting fellowship at the University of Maryland where she focused her studies on sociolinguistics.

Co-sponsored by the Global Policy Forum

Filed under: cultural anthropology, development, education, events by admin on May 20, 2013 | Social tagging: anthropology > education > Tibet
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Ideas in Movement: Addressing Tensions in Anthropology, a conference for postgraduates in anthropology, will be held at the University of Aberdeen, October 28-29, 2013. The new deadline for proposals is May 31.

The Scottish Training in Anthropological Research (STAR) is proud to announce the 2013 RAI Postgraduate conference at the University of  Aberdeen. Established in 2006, STAR fosters collaborations between social anthropology staff and research students from the Universities of Aberdeen,  Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews. Plenary speakers are Tim Ingold and Rane Willerslev.

Today, confronted with a world that appears more dynamic and rapidly changing, anthropologists are questioning some fundamental conceptions, arguing from different and often contradictory perspectives. As a guiding concept for this conference we have chosen the role of tensions within the contemporary anthropological debate. Such tensions, flourishing all around the discipline, mark not only its conceptual history, but also its constant engagement with the constitutional concerns of our world. Among many, we might highlight tensions between the real and the imaginary, the fluid and the static, discourse and perception, nature and culture, purity and hybridity, the visible and invisible, ethnography and anthropology, discovery and construction, and so on. (more…)

Filed under: anthro connection, cultural anthropology, development, events, updates and publications by admin on May 20, 2013 | Social tagging: anthropology > research
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May 23, 2013, from 8:30am to 2pm
Location: Room 651 Duques Hall, GW (corner of G and 22nd St, NW Washington, DC)

Presentations and discussion will offer a creative re-thinking of African migration and displacement in which movement is typically cast as a process of “rupture” in which disconnections, losses, and dilemmas receive the most attention, thus neglecting how migrants and migration transform social, economic, and political processes.

Speakers include: Jennifer M. Brinkerhoff (The George Washington University), Stephen Lubkemann (The George Washington University), Loren Landau (Witwatersrand University), Martin Murray (University of Michigan), Jørgen Carling (Peace Research Institute Oslo), Lisa Cliggett (University of Kentucky), and Bruce Whitehouse (Lehigh University)

RSVP by May 19th to: abukar@gwmail.gwu.edu and Paragas@ssrc.org

Co-sponsored by: The Social Science Research Council and GW’s CIBER, IFER, CIGA, IGIS, Diaspora Program, and Africana Studies Program

Filed under: cultural anthropology, events by admin on May 19, 2013 | Social tagging: Africa > anthropology > migration
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• Go directly to jail: Prison sentence for Guatemalan dictator

Many major news media covered the sentencing of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt to a landmark 80 years in prison for genocide and crime against humanity. ABC News quoted Victoria Sanford, a cultural anthropologist at Lehman College, City University of New York, who noted that genocidal massacres occurred before and after Rios Montt, “but the bulk of the killing took place under Rios Montt.”

Sanford has spent about 50 months in Guatemala and participated in excavations in at least eight massacre sites. Several of the articles quote Helen Mack, a noted human rights activist, and sister of Myrna Mack, who was murdered in Guatemala in 1990 for her work on behalf of indigenous human rights .

• What would Paul Farmer say?

Time magazine carried an interview with medical anthropologist, medical doctor, professor, and health activist Paul Farmer, prompted by his new book, To Repair the World, a collection of his speeches including some of his commencement speeches.

The lead question is: “Are you ever tempted to tell graduates, ‘I could have saved thousands of lives with the money you spent on your degree?’”

Paul Farmer responds: “I don’t think of it that way. I think, Here’s a chance to reach out to people who probably are unaware — as I was at their age — of their privilege and to engage them in the work.” He was also interviewed on the Diane Rehm show.

• Presidential note of gratification

Leith Mullings, president of the American Anthropological Association, published an article in The Huffington Post, expressing her appreciation of President Obama’s acknowledgment of the importance of anthropology in a recent speech:

“As an anthropologist and president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), I was especially gratified to hear President Barack Obama acknowledge the discipline of anthropology and support its scientific integrity. In a speech at the 150th anniversary of the National Academy of Sciences, President Obama said:

‘And it’s not just resources. I mean, one of the things that I’ve tried to do over these last four years and will continue to do over the next four years is to make sure that we are promoting the integrity of our scientific process; that not just in the physical and life sciences, but also in fields like psychology and anthropology and economics and political science — all of which are sciences because scholars develop and test hypotheses and subject them to peer review — but in all the sciences, we’ve got to make sure that we are supporting the idea that they’re not subject to politics, that they’re not skewed by an agenda, that, as I said before, we make sure that we go where the evidence leads us. And that’s why we’ve got to keep investing in these sciences.’”

(more…)

Filed under: anthro in the news, energy, gender & sexuality, justice, water by admin on May 13, 2013 | Social tagging: Barack Obama > Dominica > Egyptology > Guatemala > Hanging Garden of Babylon > India > jail > Jim Yong Kim > King Tut > Korea > National Academy of Sciences > Paul Farmer > Thailand > World Bank
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• What New Yorkers are thinking about

The Village Voice included a review of “a fascinating set of videos from an anthropologist named Andrew Irving, a researcher who spent part of 2011 documenting 100 random New Yorkers’ inner monologues.”

The videos, published by Scientific American, were created by Andrew Irving, professor and director of the Granada Centre of Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester, England. He spent part of 2011 documenting 100 randomly selected New Yorkers’ inner monologues. Irving stood on street corners and asked pedestrians to put on headsets and narrate their streams of consciousness out loud.

While each narrative is distinct, Irving picked up on a recurrent theme of economic instability and concerns in “the age of terror.” Irving told the Voice that this particular project arose out of work he had done in Uganda, trying to understand the thoughts of people diagnosed with HIV.

• Hello, God

In a guest column for The New York Times, cultural anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, a professor at Stanford University, discusses findings from her ethnographic field work in a charismatic evangelical church in Chicago. It was not at all uncommon for people to talk about hearing God. She asks, what do we make of this?

“I don’t think that anthropologists can pronounce on whether God exists or not, but I am averse to the idea that God is the full explanation here. For one thing, many of these voices are mundane. A woman told me that she heard God tell her to get off the bus when she was immersed in a book and about to miss her stop… Schizophrenia, or the radical break with reality we identify as serious mental illness, is also not an explanation.” She provides more detail in her book, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God.

(more…)

Filed under: anthro in the news, biological anthropology, hiv/aids, religion by admin on May 6, 2013 | Social tagging: Canada > cannibalism > Jamestown > Napoleon Chagnon > New York > New York Times > Uganda
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• On Russian distrust of U.S. missile plan

Press TV interviewed William Beeman, a professor of cultural and linguistic anthropology at the University of Minnesota, about U.S.-Russia relations especially in terms of Washington and NATO’s new plans to build an anti-missile system around Western Europe.

In response to a question about American plans to strengthen military bases in Alaska, Beeman replied, “This is an old, old story. The United States tried to establish missiles in Eastern Europe, supposedly in the Czech Republic, I believe, in order to defend against the attacks, as they said, from Iran. Now we are talking about North Korea.

“So the difficulty of course for Russia is that Russia wants to make sure that these missiles would not ever be deployed against Russia, and I can tell you that Russia borders both on Iran and on North Korea. So it is very hard for the United States to guarantee the Russians in any satisfactory way that these missiles would never be used against Russian territories, and I can really understand the Russians’ trepidation about this.”

• Christian belief, practice, and mental health

The Deseret News of Salt Lake City carried an opinion piece in response to a recent New York Times column by Stanford anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann, where she says that the reason is not entirely clear why church attendance “boosts the immune system and decreases blood pressure. It may add as much as two to three years to your life.”

She speculates that it is the social support of a congregation and the healthy habits of churchgoers. In clinical terms, she explains how someone can experience a God they can’t see and she observes, “those who were able to experience a loving God vividly were healthier — at least, as judged by a standardized psychiatric scale.”

Luhrmann is a professor of cultural anthropology at Stanford University and the author of When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God.

(more…)

Filed under: anthro in the news, archaeology, cultural anthropology, military, religion by admin on April 29, 2013 | Social tagging: Arab Spring > art > Egypt > North Korea > Russia
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Guest post by Jamison Liang

As a graduate student in cultural anthropology whose research focuses on how international, national, and Islamic law have been applied to issues of gender and sexuality in the Indonesian province of Aceh, I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to partake in the recent conference, Sexuality and Political Change: A New Training Program hosted by Sexuality Policy Watch (SPW).

The meeting took place in Rio de Janeiro from March 18-22 and brought together 17 individuals from around the world who do research on sexuality in the global south and look to link their work to movements of political and social change. Sexuality Policy Watch, a Rio and New York-based organization, serves as a global forum for researchers and activists who engage with policy debates and initiatives on sexuality, gender, sexual and reproductive rights, HIV/AIDS, and LGBT activism. This pilot program aimed to provide a forum for participants to share our research and experiences while reflecting on the intersection of theory, research, and change in the realm of genders and sexualities.

One factor that made this conference so important for me—but also challenging—was the diversity of the participants both in interests and backgrounds. Attendees came from Argentina, Trinidad and Tobago, South Africa, Brazil, India, Egypt, the Philippines, Cameroon, China, and Mexico, among others. I was one of two Americans. We ranged from current graduate students to established professors to queer activists to UN lawyers and had expertise in areas including sexual health, LGBT rights, migration, and sex work.

In forums such as this, it is always helpful as a space for knowledge sharing, but it is undoubtedly difficult to negotiate how we translate all of our local identities and nationally-bound political structures into terms and strategies that have currency at the transnational and international level. (more…)

Filed under: communication, cultural anthropology, foreign/other, gender & sexuality, government, human rights, uncategorized by admin on April 29, 2013 | Social tagging: anthropology > LGBT > sexuality
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Proposals are sought for a two-day seminar to be conducted at SAR in fall 2014, in preparation for a plenary session at the SfAA meetings in spring 2015. The deadline for receipt of proposals is September 15, 2013. Details on this opportunity and the application process are found here.

Filed under: anthro connection, updates and publications by admin on April 29, 2013 | Social tagging: anthropology > scholarship
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By Sean Carey

It’s around 8 p.m. I have just turned the corner at the top of Shoreditch’s Great Eastern Street in London. I am walking past the fashionable Bird & Ballard coffee house when I am approached by a stockily-built stranger wearing a scruffy duffle coat with the hood up. I think he wants to know the time. I am wrong.

“I’m trying to get to Homerton Hospital because I’ve just fallen off my bike,” he says in a distinctive east London accent. “Could you spare some money so I could catch a bus?” As he speaks, he rolls up the left sleeve of his jacket and reveals an open wound on his forearm. It looks nasty.

I realize that I have met this man before. It was about six years ago at exactly the same spot. The memories come flooding back. It was exactly the same wound on the same arm. It was exactly the same form of words.

The penny drops. I realize that he is using a theatrical prop for the “I’ve-fallen-off-my-bike” wound. It’s very convincing though. I think to myself: although I fell for it then, I won’t this time. “I know you,” I say. “You pulled the same stunt on me a while ago.” The man, who I guess is in his mid or late 30s, looks taken aback but doesn’t miss a beat. “I’m not going to lie to you,” he replies, “but I’m homeless and I need some money to buy some food.”

This reply puts me in a dilemma. I have no idea whether he is homeless or not, or whether he is hungry. On the other hand, I’m impressed by his delivery.

In these sorts of urban micro-encounters a quick decision on my part is required. I decide that even if it’s a double scam, it’s a very good double scam. Looked at another way it’s high-level performance art played out on the street. He is the performer, and I am the audience.

I put my hand into my jacket pocket, and hand over a pound. “Thanks very much, guv’nor,” he says and disappears into the night.

Filed under: poverty by admin on April 28, 2013
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