• The trauma of war and rape In the first of a two-part story, CNN highlights the work of cultural anthropologist Victoria Sanford, whose research has involved listening to victim narratives of Maya women in Guatemala since her doctoral studies at Stanford University in the early 1990s. A Spanish speaker who had worked with Central [...]
• Colbert reporting Stephen Colbert interviewed Janny Scott, author of the biography, A Singular Woman, about President Barack Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, who was a cultural anthropologist. In her interview and in her book, Scott complicates the image of Obama’s mother as simply “a white woman from Kansas.” Blogger’s note: cultural anthropology does complicate things, [...]
When: Thursday July 14, 4:00pm – 6:00pm Where: SOAS Vernon Square campus in London – Room VG 06 (60) Topic: The Arab Spring? – anthropological perspectives. Jeremy Keenan will introduce the discussion. Look out for background material on the London Anthropology Forum Group site on the Anthropology Today web site. All welcome.
By contributor Sean Carey An 11 year-old African-Caribbean boy was refused entry to a Roman Catholic secondary school in North London in 2009 because he was wearing ‘corn rows’ (braided hair close to the scalp). Two years later, he has won a significant victory in the High Court. The decision by St. Gregory’s Catholic Science [...]
CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) has launched an Open call for Proposals for the “Farms of the Future” research project, aiming at the: Development of a method to study farmer’s social, cultural and gender specific barriers for enabling behavioral change and improve adaptive capacity, based on farmers’ exchanges between [...]
When: Wednesday, June 22 Where: Capitol Hill Join language advocates for this annual grassroots gathering founded by the National Alliance to Save Native Languages and leadership from the National Indian Education Association. This year’s summit, Promoting Indigenous Language Rights in Practice: Language Rights Advocacy Day on Capitol Hill aims to educate each member of the U.S. House and [...]
By contributor Sean Carey What a difference a year can make. For example, in the life of Wayne Rooney. In 2010 there was endless speculation about whether he would be leaving Manchester United and sign for Real Madrid (a new contract ensured that he didn’t). This year the headlines are all about his new hair [...]
Salt is something that many people in the world take for granted. The anthropology perspective is that anything taken for granted deserves closer analytical attention. Two recently published studies shed light on the importance of access to salt and its effects on human health. A team of multidisciplinary researchers examined people’s acecss to salt/iodized salt [...]
• Anthro of cybersex In an article on cyber-philandering, the Daily Beast mentions Helen Fisher, biological anthropologist in the Center for Human Evolutionary Studies in the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers University. The explanation provided is biological: sexual arousal pumps up dopamine levels, and brain scans show that the more dopamine is present in the [...]
Sean Carey’s earlier post about getting his car washed made me think that his car is probably cleaner than many people’s hands (you may recall a post in 2010 reporting on a study of fecal matter on public transportation riders’ hands in four places in the U.K). My morning’s ramble through Google Scholar led me [...]
