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.

Otto Pérez Molina. Flickr/World Economic Forum

“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…

House of Mandela. Source: 5ounces.co.za

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.

Rebecca Kinaston/University of Otago

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

Spots and stencils in El Castillo cave, Spain — one at least 40,800 years old — might be the handiwork of Neanderthals/Pedro Saura

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.

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

Photo courtesy of RAI Postgraduate Conference

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.

Tensions have long been central to anthropological inquiries, and are still at the forefront of contemporary debates. As new ideas distance themselves from old ones, their resemblance seems paradoxical. Even as anthropologists bury the past trying to move beyond old tensions, they continually resurface in different forms. Having this in mind, important questions emerge: what does it mean to overcome old tensions? Do we really move beyond them? Are there alternatives to simply pushing against them? Moving away from naïve dualism and their simple dissolution, we invite postgraduate students and early career researchers from all sub-disciplines of anthropology and other related fields, to propose theoretical and ethnographic papers that engage with ­ but by no means should be limited to some of these emerging and historical tensions.

Paper abstracts should be submitted to *raipgconference2013@gmail.com*.

Submissions should include name, institution, a 300 characters short summary and a 250 words long abstract. Please include three or four keywords below the body of the abstract.

In order to showcase emerging anthropological research in Scotland, a selection of papers will be gathered in a panel at the ASA conference that will take place in Edinburgh in 2014, an event once again organized by the STAR consortium.

For more information, please visit our website www.raipgconference2013.com.

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

Official site.

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?

U. of California Press

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:

Leith Mullings

“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.’”

• Jim Kim goes for big dams

The World Bank is once again pushing large-scale hydropower projects around the globe, something it pretty much abandoned a decade ago. Such big projects are argued to be crucial resolving the tension between economic development and the need to reduce carbon use.

Three Gorges Dam/Pedro Vásquez Colmenares

Big dam projects were shunned in the 1990s, in part because they are disruptive to communities and ecosystems. But the World Bank president, medical doctor, and anthropologist, Jim Yong Kim, is trying to eliminate poverty while adding as little as possible to carbon emissions.

“What’s the one issue that’s holding back development in the poorest countries? It’s energy. There’s just no question,” Kim said in an interview.

In response, Peter Bosshard, policy director of International Rivers, says: “It is the old idea of a silver bullet that can modernize whole economies.” International Rivers has organized opposition to the bank’s evolving hydro policy and argued for smaller projects designed around communities rather than mega-dams meant to export power throughout a region.

• More news on Jim Kim

The Economic Times (India) reported on World Bank President, Jim Yong Kim’s, description of the Aadhaar card as one of the best examples of integration of technology for social welfare use. Kim stated his belief that this massive effort by the Indian Government would help in achieving the World Bank’s new goal of poverty eradication by 2030.

• Sexist Thai politics

The Nation (Thailand) reported on reactions to using the term prostitute as a reference to slam Prime Minister Yingluck Shinwatra, which degrades women and perpetuates misogynic attitudes.

Chiang Mai University anthropologist Pinkaew Luangaramsri says she is disappointed that many feminists chose to keep quiet about the issue simply because they’re politically against Yingluck: “They don’t come out because they’ve taken a political stance. This is not healthy… They hate Yingluck, the prime minister. But coming out [to criticise Chai] doesn’t mean they have to necessarily support Yingluck. If they don’t, then who else will?” Pinkaew said regarding women as mere objects is still prevalent in Thailand and the Kingdom has yet to develop political correctness when it comes to gender issues.

• Who shares and why in Dominica?

The Independent Online described findings of three U.S. anthropologists who did fieldwork in an Afro-Caribbean village on the island of Dominica. Their main research question was: Does a person earn a better social reputation by helping the same person on a regular basis, or by assisting large numbers of different people occasionally?

Dominica Panorama/Wikipedia

The village population of around 400 mainly earns a living from the cultivation of the Caribbean bay tree, the leaves of which are steam distilled to produce essential bay oil. The study recorded who worked in the village’s eight distilleries over a 20-month period. Bay oil distillation is extremely taxing work and impossible to perform alone. The anthropologists found that it was a tradition in the village for individuals to provide assistance to a person if they had received help with labor in the past from that individual.

“Because the village is small and the activity is highly conspicuous, people realise when they are obligated to assist,” wrote the team led by Shane J. Macfarlan from the University of Missouri in Swallow Hall. Findings are published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

• Korean adoptee criticizes Korean adoption policy

Shannon Heit. Korea Times/photo by Shim Hyun-chul

“In the ’60s and ’70s, especially, during the Park Chung-hee administration, the main goal was economic development. In the end, children who were like me were sold to other countries.” She said adoption agencies played a critical role in “exporting” Korean babies to other countries, reaping economic benefits from them.

• When God talks, many share same concerns

Dharma Bohall, 13, extends her arms in prayer during the America for Jesus prayer rally on Sept. 28, 2012, on Independence Mall in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Joseph Kaczmarek)

• What to do in Philly

An article in The Philadelphia Inquirer points to many places to go, things to see, including this note: At the Penn Museum at 11 a.m. Sunday, May 19, Stephen Phillips, an anthropologist who specializes in Egyptology, will describe how plants and flowers found in King Tut’s tomb offer hints of what killed the boy pharaoh: “We all know about the gold and the incredible treasures that were found there… But there were also juniper berries and cardamom pods. No one thinks about that when they think of King Tut.”

• Lost and found: Pictish kingdom

Archaeologists from Aberdeen University plan a major dig to uncover one of the lost Kingdoms of the ancient Picts, the tribe of legendary warriors whose empire stretched from Fife to the Moray Firth before they mysteriously vanished from history. Until recently historians had believed that Fortriu, one of the most powerful Kingdoms of the “painted people,” had been based in Perthshire. Recent research now places the Pictish stronghold much further north to the Moray Firth area.

• Lost and found: Hanging Gardens of Babylon

The location of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the Hanging Garden of Babylon, has long been a mystery. Archaeologists have been unable to find its traces among Babylon’s remains. Did it ever actually exist? After many years of study of textual evidence, Stephanie Dalley of Oxford University has concluded that the garden was built at Nineveh, 300 miles from Babylon, in the early 7th century BCE by the Assyrians in the north of Mesopotamia (now Iraq), rather than by their enemies, the Babylonians, in the south.

[Blogger's note: fascinating story of rebranding, and I look forward to learning about the Babylonians got their name linked to the gardens for centuries... equivalent to the Empire State Building of Philadelphia?].

• Protecting Neanderthals from slander

David Frayer, professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas, published an op-ed in The New York Times pointing out that Neanderthals are quite close to humans, so it’s best to avoid using the term as an insult: “Neanderthals lived much richer lives than ever presumed. They were not exactly like us, but they bred with us and their genes and behavior are part of our heritage. So, be careful when you call someone a Neanderthal. You’re speaking about part of yourself. ”

[Blogger's note: I realize the header for this piece is a little extreme, but I invoke blogger's rights And who knows, someday reconstituted Neanderthals may have lawyers.]

• Oldest archaeological evidence of early human ancestors

A small antelope leg bone with cut marks, indicative of early human butchery practices. (Credit: Image courtesy of Baylor University/Science Daily)

Beginning around two million years ago, early stone tool-making humans, known as Oldowan hominins, started to exhibit a number of physiological and ecological adaptations that required greater daily energy expenditures, including an increase in brain and body size, heavier investment in their offspring and significant home-range expansion. Demonstrating how these early humans acquired the extra energy they needed to sustain these shifts has been the subject of much debate among researchers. The study, led by Joseph Ferraro, assistant professor of anthropology at Baylor University, offers insight with archaeological evidence from the two million-year-old site of Kanjera South in Kenya. The study’s findings are published in PLOS One.

Ferraro is quoted in Science Daily: “Considered in total, this study provides important early archaeological evidence for meat eating, hunting and scavenging behaviors -cornerstone adaptations that likely facilitated brain expansion in human evolution, movement of hominins out of Africa and into Eurasia, as well as important shifts in our social behavior, anatomy and physiology.” The research team has worked at the Lake Victoria site for more than a decade, recovering thousands of animal bones and rudimentary stone tools.

• In memoriam

Peter Drewett, British archaeologist, died at the age of 65 years. He was at the forefront of the development of the discipline in the last three decades of the 20th century, teaching and researching at the London Institute of Archaeology (now part of UCL) from 1973 until 2004, when he left to become the first professor of archaeology at the University of Sussex.

His love of archaeological fieldwork inspired his writing, including his book, Field Archaeology: An Introduction (1999), which has seen multiple editions. He excavated sites in the Caribbean, making a lasting contribution to the archaeology of that region, and investigated Neolithic sites on Lantau Island, Hong Kong. He was a champion of local societies and the role of the volunteer. A member of the Sussex Archaeological Society from 1973, he served as chair of its governing body in the 1980s and again in the 2000s, and later as president.

In his later years, he turned his attention to the parish of Chalvington with Ripe, in the low weald of East Sussex and contributed to a book entitled Portrait of a Parish 2012, his last published work.

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.”

Andrew Irving, New York Stories: The Lives of Other Citizens/Village Voice

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

Tanya Marie Luhrmann/Stanford

“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.

• Survival cannibalism in Jamestown

Time magazine, USA Today, and many other mainstream media reported on findings of cannibalism in the early American settlement of Jamestown, Virginia.

According to forensic anthropologists Douglas Owsley and Kari Bruwelheide, both at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., remains of a girl show cuts marks indicating cannibalism after she had died. Owsley says that he is certain that the marks were not made by animals foraging on the body after death: “I’m very used to seeing post-mortem animal damage from chewing and gnawing, and this is absolutely not that… This is clearly work done by metal tools such as a cleaver or a lightweight hatchet and a knife.”

• Under the car park

Two Roman burials under excavation. Credit: University of Leicester. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Leicester)

The latest dig reveals a 1,700 year-old Roman cemetery: Archaeological Project Officer John Thomas said: “We have discovered new evidence about a known cemetery that existed outside the walled town of Roman Leicester during the 3rd-4th Centuries AD.”

• Assessment of sexual harassment in bio anth spreads to Canada

The Globe and Mail (Canada) carried an article about concerns raised by a U.S. study, led by Kathryn Clancy, professor of biological anthropology at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, revealing problems of male harassment and even rape of females during fieldwork. The article quotes Tina Moffat, associate professor of anthropology at McMaster University in Canada, and current president of the Canadian Association of Physical Anthropologists. [Blogger's note: the terms biological anthropology and physical anthropology are used somewhat interchangeably].

• Still fighting after all these words

Slate published an essay by Greg Laden summarizing key issues in the ongoing controversy about research ethics in Napoleon Chagnon‘s fieldwork among the Yanomamö of the Venezuelan Amazon.

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.

U.S. and NATO Patriot missile deployment to Turkey. Flickr/Staff Sgt. Daniel Owen

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

Credit: Random House

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.

• Marketing meds with anthropology insights

A press release on the Wall Street Journal website describes the role of cultural/social/linguistic anthropology in its new marketing strategy which seeks to discover and use “layman’s language” for developing branding of particular items.

3v07 Medical Advertising has developed a quantifiable way to choose the words that best communicate with each audience. Healthcare advertising is seeing more medical device companies going direct to consumers thanks to the effectiveness of the Internet in reaching people looking for answers online to their medical conditions. This has made it important for medical device manufacturers to speak in the “voice of the consumer.” Jeffrey Moore, owner and creative director at 3v07, says, “What the market needed was the ability to mitigate risk and be very effective in communicating in layman’s language the benefits of a device or procedure. This alone can be the key differentiator in a patient’s request for your product or procedure.”

• More on marketing anthropology

An essay in The Huffington Post discusses the advantages of studying psychology and anthropology because they provides insights into successful product marketing:

“What really makes people buy? What underpins human decision making? Do we actually have the agency and power to make logic-based choices, or must we surrender to our inherent gut feelings? This has dominated the conversation in the marketing world for decades, and research has proven time and time again that it is our hearts, not our heads, that drive people to buy. In fact, the part of our brain that controls our feelings and decision-making has no capacity for language. It is a bit unnerving to realize that we can essentially be tapped into and programed by marketers to invest in their products, but given that we are all trying to connect with others to “sell” offers of our own, it would likely be to our benefit to understand the fascinating world of influence as well.”

• Cultural anthropologists should market cultural anthropology

The Orlando Sentinel carried an opinion piece by Ty Matejowsky and Beatriz M. Reyes-Foster, professors in the department of anthropology at the University of Central Florida, in which they argue that cultural anthropology has been in the news recently but mainly in a negative light: “it seems that journalists only acknowledge cultural anthropology when it is gripped by controversy.”

They suggest that: “Anthropologists need to take better ownership of our brand. The complexity of anthropological concepts such as ‘culture,’ ‘power’ and the ‘global’ should not dissuade anthropologists from engaging in meaningful public discourse.”

• Why anthropology matters: a larger view

Gina Athena Ulysse. Source: ginaathenaulysse.com

Gina Athena Ulysse, professor of cultural anthropology at Wesleyan University, contributed an essay to The Huffington Post on the relevance and importance of cultural anthropology, weaving it around the recent award to Paul Stoller of Anders Retzius gold medal from the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography (more on this award below in Kudos).

She asked him to reflect on the significance of this recognition in these times when cultural anthropology is getting “a bad rap.” He replied: “Anthropology will continue to get a bad rap as long as we anthropologists think and write about the human condition in obtuse ways. When I talk about my life in anthropology and the people I have come to know and love over the years, I find people in the audience moved — not because what I had to say was particularly brilliant, but because I opened my experience — my joy and pain and that of my Nigerian friends — to them and such an opening established a connection. At my last several talks, I [have] seen people shed a tear to two when I talk about the depth of my ethnographic experience and the depth of the humanity of my Nigerian friends. That kind of connect is usually missing in anthropological accounts. In my view of things, this connect should be the centerpiece of what we do.”

• Take that anthro degree and…

…become a successful artist. X Andrade, a cultural anthropologist/artist lives in Ecuador. He writes about the influence of his anthropology studies:

X Andrade. Source: kcet.org

“I was greatly influenced by a set of fruitful dialogues while studying anthropology at The New School For Social Research in New York City. Poole’s course on Visual Cultures, Johannes Fabian’s studies on vernacular painting and history in Zaire, Steve Caton’s ethnographic approach to film, Terry Williams’ attention to sexual images and the city, and Kevin Dwyer’s work on dialogical anthropology were crucial to shaping my ethnographic view of images. In several of those courses, artists attended and actively participated in pushing the borders of their own practice. Among them, of foremost importance were my dialogues with Aleksandra Mir, by now a very well known name within the global art circuits. While in NYC, I contributed to Mir’s Naming Tokyo, an alternative map of that city meant to convene idiosyncratic readings of constructed space and the politics behind labeling the urban gridlock.”

• Looting of archaeological sites in Egypt

According to an article in The Guardian, Egyptian archaeologists fear for pyramid sites as illegal building gathers pace in wake of Arab spring. Many Egyptians are grabbing areas in the ancient land of the pharaohs to bury their dead

In Manshiet Dahshur, 25 miles south of Cairo, the villagers recently extended the boundaries of the cemetery. For Ahmed Rageb, a carpenter who buried his cousin in the annexe, it was a logical decision.

An archaeologist inspects a new cemetery illegally built near the Black Pyramid at Dahshur/Guardian

“We want to bury the dead,” he said, strolling through the new cemetery after visiting his cousin’s tomb. “The old cemetery is full. And there is no other place to bury my family.”

The new tombs are perilously close to the pyramids of Dahshur, less famous than those at Giza, but just as venerable. The article quotes Mohamed Youssef, Dahshur’s chief archaeologist: “What happened was crazy … They came and took space for about 20 generations.” According to some residents, people who have lived and died in the area have the right to be buried in Dahshur. However, Youssef argues that some have other intentions, including looting: “Some of them have a real need for the tombs for their families … But when you have 1,000 people, some of them will want to do illegal excavation.”

Nigel Hetherington, a British archeologist, said that he documented dozens of new illegal establishments on historical sites between the capital and Dahshur following President Hosni Mubarak’s fall in 2011.

• New theory of Maya origins

Science Daily covered a forthcoming publication in the journal Science about the origins of Maya civilization. The new University of Arizona study challenges the two prevailing theories on how the ancient civilization began, suggesting its origins are more complex than previously thought. Anthropologists typically fall into one of two competing camps with regard to the origins of Maya civilization. The first camp believes that it developed almost entirely on its own in the jungles of what is now Guatemala and southern Mexico. The second believes that the Maya civilization developed as the result of direct influences from the older Olmec civilization and its center of La Venta. It is likely, however, that neither of those theories tells the full story, according to a team of archaeologists archaeologists led by Takeshi Inomata and Daniela Triadan: “We really focused on the beginning of this civilization and how this remarkable civilization developed.”

• Many very old skeletons found in Sumatra

Professor Truman Simanjuntak holds an exact replica of an ancient stone hand ax excavated from East Java/University of Wollongong

Truman Simanjuntak of Jakarta’s National Research and Development Center for Archaeology said that he and his colleagues have never before found that many remains in a single cave.

The cave is known as Harimaru or Tiger Cave, and also contains chicken, dog and pig remains. Thousands of years ago, the Tiger Cave and other limestone caverns nearby were occupied by Indonesia’s first farmers. They used the caves to bury their dead, explaining the 3,000-year-old cemetery unearthed by Simanjuntak’s team. The ancient farmers also manufactured tools in the caves and produced rock art.

• Kudos

Every three years, the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography bestows the Anders Retzius gold medal on a scholar they believe has made a significant scientific contribution to anthropology. This year’s awardee is cultural anthropologist, Paul Stoller, who received the medal from His Majesty King Carl Gustav of Sweden.

Festivities included a symposium on “anthropology and well-being” the theme he chose, inspired by Yaya’s Story: The Quest for Well Being in the World, his latest book. Stoller, professor of anthropology at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, has conducted extensive field research on religion and magic in Niger and Mali as well as among African immigrants in New York City. An expert and leading thinker in the fields of economic, reflexive and visual anthropology and anthropology of the senses, he is the author of eleven books spanning from ethnographies and biographies to memoirs and novels. He is also a prolific blogger for The Huffongton Post. During his thirty years in anthropology, Stoller has experimented with writing, believing there is no single way to write about the human experience.

• In memoriam

Hugo Nutini, professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, died at the age of 84 years. Nutini was hired at Pitt in 1963, at a time when universities across the country were expanding their social studies programs, splitting anthropology into a discipline apart from sociology. He was one of the original members of Pitt’s Center for Latin American Studies, which was created the next year.

He studied the Mexican aristocracy, in an era when anthropologists did not study the bourgeoisie. He wrote about Mexican folk sorcery and the story of tlahuelpuchi, a vampire-witch that feasted on infants. He studied the importance of “fictive kinship” — the sacramental, ritualistic relationships between nonkin (think godmothers and godfathers, in Catholicism). When he died, he was writing about rural Mexico’s drift away from the Catholic church and toward Protestantism. In all, he published hundreds of papers and more than a dozen books. “He was an icon,” said Kathleen Musante DeWalt, director of Pitt’s Center for Latin American Studies.

Photo courtesy of 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.

Jean Wyllys/ Photo courtesy of Jamison Liang

The week began with participant presentations followed by intense discussions on how to theorize change in relation to our work. We were fortunate to have a visit from Jean Wyllys, Brazil’s first openly gay congressman, and lectures which considered the influences of “homonationalism,” religious fundamentalism, and international aid conditionality in Africa.

We debated about the extent to which victimization can serve as an effective narrative for achieving social justice and at what point subjects need to be recast as political agents. We then turned to case studies, including the court case which brought down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, thereby decriminalizing homosexual sex, and the political process that helped Argentina realize its outstanding law on gender identity.

Jamison Liang/ Photo courtesy of Jamison Liang.

My work in Aceh has prompted me to consider to what extent global human rights instruments on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) can help to protect LGBT communities. Does naming sexualities and genders in these documents, while increasing their visibility, ultimately lead to a backlash? If so, how do we mitigate this risk? Notably, one of the avenues which I am currently exploring is how to “translate” international human rights terminology into a locally understood and respected cultural framework, especially one that has legal traction. By doing so, it may be possible to overcome the false claim that queer identities are inherently Western and, as an extension, un-Islamic. As I presented my research as a case study, it was extremely helpful to hear feedback from participants who suggested alternative theoretical approaches to my work.

Still, this was a challenging conference for me personally because I was one of the only researchers from the global north and one of the few who did not study my own country. I found myself struggling to walk the line between saying I wished to do applied research without it being misread as an attempt to “save” queer Indonesians from oppression. Indeed, I had probably become too comfortable in the American academic world where doing work abroad is both common and accepted so long as one has a valid research interest and is respected by the community one wants to work with. What gave me the right to study Indonesians and why was I interested in them? What does it mean for me as a hapa located in the global north to be doing this work? While I often think about these questions privately, I was not used to having to justify my identity and positionality in such a contentious public space.

SPW group/ Photo courtesy of Jamison Liang

This conference offered me an opportunity for reflection on how I frame my research and how I position myself in relation to research participants. It opened my eyes to the different theories and strategies activists and academics from the global south galvanize around, perspectives that are often overlooked in American academia.

Jamison Liang is currently pursuing an MA in Anthropology and International Development as a National Science Foundation Fellow at George Washington University. His current research interests include the role of law in realizing social change in Aceh, Indonesia and the influence of development actors in shaping rights-based rhetoric around sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) policies. He received his BA from Washington University in St. Louis with concentrations in Art History, Anthropology, and Gender & Sexuality Studies.

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.

Bird and Ballard, Shoreditch. Flickr/Ewan Munro

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.