• Plaque it: Tally’s Corner, DC Elliot Liebow bucked the tide in the late 1960s when he decided to do his cultural anthropology dissertation research in a US city. Moreover, he chose to do participant observation with a group of low-income African American men. During his research, Liebow hung out around a street corner in [...]
NOTE: These two events have been cancelled. Gina Athena Ulysse, Wesleyan University Associate Professor of Anthropology, African Studies, Environmental Studies, and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Inaugural Fellow in the College of the Environment will be holding two events at GW – a workshop at 3pm and a performance at 6:30pm. See below for [...]
“Cultural Sameness” and “Cultural Otherness”: Benefits and Drawbacks in Applied Anthropological Work When: Tuesday, March 1 at 7:00 pm Where: Charles Sumner School 1201 17th St NW Washington, DC Presenters: Michael Cernea, Stan Yoder, more TBA Throughout much of the history of anthropology, students were expected to conduct fieldwork in cultures and societies not their own. [...]
• Social knowledge for good social policy Sean Carey, cultural anthropologist at Roehampton University and frequent guest blogger at anthropologyworks, published an article in the Guardian on how social anthropology speaks to big social questions such as multiculturalism and public services. The message: find out how communities work before forging policy. He takes you to Brick [...]
Urban Anthropology or Urban Sociology The Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, Germany, seeks to appoint three post-doctoral research fellows in Urban Anthropology or Sociology, each for three years. The anthropologists / sociologists will be employed to conduct research respectively in the following locations: New York (likely Astoria in Queens), Johannesburg (likely Hillbrow) and Singapore (likely [...]
Guest post by Sean Carey In 1980, a Mauritian sociologist friend confidently told me that a branded fast food culture as found in North America and Europe would never take off in his homeland. He reasoned that the population was already well served by street sellers, who produced classic Mauritian snacks like vegetable samosas, pakora [...]
Guest post by Ally Pregulman The United States’ perspective on gender in the military and the security sector as a whole is substantially different from how many other countries, particularly African countries, view their security. On January 19th, the US Institute for Peace (USIP) held a panel on mainstreaming gender in the military and the [...]
• The language(s) of protest in Egypt “Speaking truth to power” takes on cultural context in the 18 days of the Egypt uprising, so writes Ben Zimmer in “How the War of Words Was Won.” There are parallels to the use of language in other political uprisings. But the Egypt protests are distinct in many [...]
Cultural anthropologists have described and analyzed holidays as windows into local culture as well as indexes of larger global processes. As far as I know, Christmas is the only holiday so far that has generated an entire edited volume. A quick search into published work by cultural anthropologists yielded very little. One insightful article, by [...]
I’m delighted to learn that Slate’s Maura R. O’Connor mentioned Alex Dupuy’s “Ideological dogmatism and United States policy toward Haiti,” guest posted on anthropologyworks, in her article “Does International Aid Keep Haiti Poor? Why Is Haiti Growing Mangoes When It Needs Rice?”
