Frank Korom, professor of anthropology and religion at Boston University, provides some background on the caste system in India and current plans to ask citizens to report their caste in the upcoming 2011 national census. India’s commitment to carrying out a census of its entire population involves a massive effort, one that is part of [...]
From our friends at American University, via the Washington Association of Professional Anthropologists (WAPA): Revolutions! Building Emancipatory Politics & Action The 7th Annual AU Public Anthropology Conference Registration deadline: September 12 Join us for a revolutionizing conference as we work towards building coalitions across diverse social justice movements. We invite community activists, practicing and academic [...]
• Death Valley, New Mexico The Espanola Valley of northern New Mexico has the highest rate of heroin-related deaths in the United States. The only prize for this distinction is the constancy of death. Angela Garcia is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California at Irvine and the author of The Pastoral [...]
Guest post by Graham Hough-Cornwell The XVIII International AIDS Conference in Vienna concluded on July 23. Twitter buzzed all week with updates from speakers and attendees, and comments from those who, like me, didn’t attend but followed from home. The biggest stories of the week? Undoubtedly at the top are the speeches of Bill Clinton [...]
• Toward an anthropology of the anti-burqa Sean Carey asks: is there an anthropological explanation for the high-level of disapproval for a garment worn by so few? In France, approximately 2000 women out of a total Muslim population of 5 million wear a burqa, or full-body covering. He turns to examining the opposition within the [...]
11th Annual Northeast Historic Film Summer Symposium July 22 – 24, 2010 85 Main Street Bucksport, Maine From the official press release: Among the presenters are your AMIA-list associates Jennifer Jenkins, University of Arizona; Ross Lipman, UCLA Film & Television Archive; J. Fred MacDonald, and Paul Spehr. The NHF Summer Symposium is a multi-disciplinary gathering [...]
• One year after: return to repression in Honduras Speaking from Honduras during a march of democracy protestors in the capital, professor Adrienne Pine, a cultural anthropologist at American University in Washington, DC, is quoted in the Huffington Post: “We’ve…returned to the 1980s, when death squads killed several hundred people…they’re using the same repressive strategies….Even [...]
So-called honor killings take the wind out of a form of cultural relativism that I refer to as absolute cultural relativism. According to absolute cultural relativism, anything that goes on in a particular culture, and is justified within that culture, cannot be questioned or changed by insiders or outsiders. For insiders, such questioning is cultural [...]
• A bridge too far: belated apology to Ngarrindjeri women Labor Party Mike Rann, South Australia’s 44th Premier, formally acknowledged this week that Ngarrindjeri women did not fabricate claims about their secret “business” in the mid 1990s. They argued that construction of the Hindmarsh Bridge linking their territory to the mainland would violate their sacred [...]
Sylvia Tamale, a feminist sociologist and legal scholar who teaches at Uganda’s Makerere University, is quoted in a recent PlusNews article as saying that the “risky sexual practices” framework, as uncritically accepted in HIV policy circles in Uganda, is “racist, moralistic and paternalistic.” Instead of fighting people’s culture, she suggests that raising people’s awareness about [...]
