Guest post by Terence Turner “Debating Belo Monte Hydroelectric Complex on the Xingu River,” creative commons licensed content by Flickr user International Rivers. March 14, 2007. UPDATED: Once again, the indigenous peoples of the Xingú valley in the Brazilian Amazon are planning to make the long journey to the town of Altamira*, where the Trans-Amazonica [...]
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 [...]
• A shot heard round the world Yes, they did. Have sex. The news is out, and the media worldwide are buzzing about it. Svante Pääbo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, is the lead scientist of the 58-member international research team that decoded the Neanderthal genome using material extracted [...]
“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. [...]
The headlines are saying that “Chimps shake their heads to mean ‘no’ just like humans” with the implication that it may “reflect a primitive precursor of the human ‘no’ headshake,” according to Christel Schneider of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Schneider spotted “preventive head shaking” from studying tapes of chimpanzees [...]
It was a quiet week for anthropology in the mainstream media, and I have only four items to share. To whet your appetite, three are about food. • Go ask Alice The Economist, ever watchful for studies that have to do with…well, economics, picked up on a study of mushroom gathering in Tlaxcala, Mexico. Luis [...]
The latest issue of the Journal of Women’s Health includes three articles describing health risks of women in the United States related to social exclusion and cultural factors. They all demonstrate that good health is about a lot more than medical care. The first article looks at three factors associated with cardiovascular disease–hypertension, elevated cholesterol, [...]
