• Iran says thanks but no thanks to US help “So why would we force it on them?” asks cultural anthropologist William Beeman, professor and chair of the department of anthropology at the University of Minnesota. In a letter to the editor of the New York Times, Beeman explains that the ability of the United [...]
Journalist and filmmaker Sebastian Junger says that he wanted to make you feel like you are actually there in a remote combat outpost in Afghanistan in Restrepo. He and his partner Tim Hetherington, succeeded. After the documentary’s powerful 90 minutes, people in the packed AFI theater in Silver Spring, Md., on Friday June 28 were [...]
Diana Putman, a USAID health specialist working with the Pentagon’s Africa Command, spoke up about a poorly conceived idea of the State Department in concert with the US military. She spoke up all the way to the top of the chain of command, to the four-star head of Africa Command, General William “Kip” Ward. Putman [...]
Could it be Chevron? Suzana Sawyer, professor of cultural anthropology at the University of California-Davis, breaks down Chevron’s multi-million dollar “Human Energy” PR campaign that was launched in 2007. Chevron is the second largest oil company in the United States and fourth largest in the world. Its ad campaign, which includes television commercials and print [...]
According to a news report from South Africa published in the Irish Times, sex workers are experiencing an economic downturn during the 2010 World Cup rather than the expected upswing. Only those working closest to the stadia are finding that business is brisk. Some sex workers point to increased police presence, the cold weather, girls [...]
• Anthropologists offer insights into the Uzbek situation “There is no way but to bring them back,” says Sergei Abashin, senior researcher at the RAN (Russian Academy of Sciences) Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology in Moscow, referring to the refugees who recently fled to Uzbekistan. He told BBC that the Kyrgyz state has been either [...]
Guest post by Eben Kirksey President Obama turned his back on Indonesia recently — canceling his visit there for the second time this year. His mother, Ann Soetoro, was a cultural anthropologist who spent much of her adult life helping economically-marginalized people of Indonesia. If she were still alive, she might well be disappointed in [...]
Anyone who has been reading this blog knows that the blogger doesn’t see much use in country-level data. But if that’s the only thing you have, and the topic is compelling, let’s see what it says. Take a look at the findings from a Pew Research Center Report of 2006, with the unlikely but intriguing [...]
Patricide, or the murder of one’s father, is often associated with political intrigue at high levels: a son seeks his father’s throne and doesn’t want to wait for his father’s natural death. The reported murder of an Iraqi man by his son and a nephew because he worked for the U.S. military as a translator [...]
Guest post by Graham Hough-Cornwell The World Cup is all of six days old and already the controversy rages. Not over the best team, the most skillful player, the biggest disappointment, or the prettiest goal, but over the vuvuzela, a thin plastic horn popular at South African soccer matches and blaring by the thousands at [...]
