Category: General Anthropology

Anyone that has spent time reading my entries in this blog already knows that I am an advocate of anthropologists working in all levels of government, military and intelligence communities. The latest entry into the conversation is from this New York Times piece entitled “Army Enlists Anthropology in War Zones”.

By all accounts in the press, which I readily acknowledge from personal experience can be a dubious source, the presence of anthropologists has been effective in actually reducing the violence in some areas.…

When understanding culture is your abiding interest and passion, everyday is a good day to be an anthropologist, however yesterday supplied us with some particularly exciting media happenings.

First of all, news broke that during his appearance at Columbia University, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad had let it be known that there are no gay people in Iran. This is an exciting development for anthropologists wishing to study one of those ever elusive “purely heterosexual” societies.…

The post about the Human Terrain System showed up in this thread on the Small Wars Journal. So here is what is interesting to me. On their search box, look up anthropology or anthropologists (make sure you click the button to just search the journal and not the web) and you will see a lively discussion about the role of anthropologists in war and the abuses in the past. This is not anthropologists talking about it, but military and military interested folks talk about OUR contribution (or lack thereof) in that field.…

So, anyone else see this on Slate?

A quote:

“This trade is almost inevitable. In a poor country, such as Mali or Cambodia, foreigners are likely to be willing to pay more for artifacts than the locals would. The logic of the market would pull the choicest objects into foreign collections and foreign museums. Many see this as undesirable, and so most countries maintain some form of ban on trading antiquities.…

It started pretty simple. I was driving to Palo Alto to work with another agency on a project, and when got off hwy 84 on to El Camino Real things got… odd.

I don’t why she was nude. I don’t know why she seemed to be running errands on El Camino Real at 9:15am. I most certainly do not know why she was compelled to combine nude with running errands, but apparently that seemed to be the rule of the day.…

The U.S. Army is moving forward with a program called the Human Terrain System. This program attaches anthropologists to operational units in Iraq to both learn about and help the military navigate the complex cultural issues they are encountering.

One anthropologist that is a member of the HTS project is Marcus Griffin, on a year long leave from his job teaching anthropology at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia.…

I am a bit speechless, but maybe I can express it in blogging (now that I have this outlet).

So the current issue of Anthropology News has an article about biological anthropologists being upset with the Leakey Foundation for having journalist Nicholas Wade as one of their speakers (get the scoop here: Nicholas Wade Speaks to Leakey Audience: Productive Dialogue or Dangerous Advocacy?

That is not what I’m upset about. I agree, biological determinism should be questioned, critiqued, put into context, as necessary.…

We are just chock full of new bloggers this week. The latest addition to the ranks is Donna Lanclos. Donna currently lives in North Carolina. While she is a cultural anthropologist and folklorist by graduate training, she claims to be part archaeologist by marriage. She is the author of the book At Play in Belfast: Children’s Folklore and Identities in Northern Ireland (2003 Rutgers University Press).

Check out her first post The Sentimental Anthropologist.…

For my first post, I thought I’d present something I wrote quite  a while ago, but still feels like a very current take on my feelings about anthropology.  It was originally written (and delivered) as a commencement speech, in the spring of 2000:

I did my fieldwork in Northern Ireland, and I worked mostly with primary school kids.  These were working-class kids, who lived in the neighborhoods hardest hit by the violence and poverty engendered by and at least partly responsible for the Troubles, the Protestant/Catholic divide. …

Tony Waters has just uploaded his first blog post to Ethnography.com, “Is There A Point To Learning Another Language?” Check it out. Tony comes to us from the Sociology department at California State University at Chico where he is a professor, though he is currently teaching in Germany. His books include: Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan (2001), The Persistence of Subsistence Agriculture: Life Beneath of the Marketplace (2007), When Killing is a Crime (2007)

Welcome Tony!…

I am teaching at a German University which trains people to work internationally. This means that classes are held in both German and English, students do internships abroad, and all students are assumed to be fluent in both English and German. Last night, one of the students who did an internship in the UK last summer, indicated that she had heard a British manager indicate that it was not necessary for English speakers to learn a second language, as everyone else is learning English.…