Why Anthropology Still Matters (Part II): Arlene Torres
Arlene Torres has recently been awarded a grant by the National Park Service to conduct an ethnographic study of community formations in Paterson, New Jersey, where over 50 different ethnic groups reside. The city is also home to the Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park. Over the years, Torres’ contributions to the discipline include the […]
Bollywood and Violence
Irfan Ahmad, a political anthropologist, writes in Al-Jazeera about Bollywood and violence in India: On July 31, a shocking incident took place at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), one of South Asia’s top universities. In a dastardly attempted murder, shortly before noon, Akash Kumar, 23, and a student of Korean studies, entered the classroom […]
Why Anthropology Still Matters: Paul Stoller
Upon receiving the Anders Retzius gold medal for his significant scientific contribution to anthropology, Paul Stoller reflects on the meanings of the discipline and ponders over its value in this market economy with anthropologist, Gina Athena Ulysse, in her new interview series, Why Anthropology Still Matters on Huffington Post. Read the entire piece on the […]
Dig Wars!
The American Anthropological Association has written to the Travel Channel objecting to and asking for changes in the TV show “Dig Wars,” in which contestants are sent to various locations with metal detectors to see if they can locate and dig up antiquities. The material they dig up is called “loot,” and is evaluated for […]
The Language of Superman
What does a language sound like when it only exists in written symbols? The producers of this summer’s blockbuster Superman movie, Man of Steel , ran into this problem when it comes to the native language of Krypton, the fictional and faraway planet where Superman was born. So they turned to the Okanagan Valley, where University of […]
Nanotechnology and Religion
Chris Toumey, a cultural anthropologist at the University of South Carolina, studies relations between nanotechnology and faith: Until now, religions have been remarkably silent on nanotechnology, Toumey points out. Nothing compared to the harsh bioethical controversies about in vitro fertilisation in the Catholic world, for example. "Nanotechnology is a heterogeneous body of sciences and technologies: […]
Binge Watching
Grant McCracken discusses binge watching at wired.com Why do we binge watch? One way to answer this question is to say, well, we binge on TV for the same reason we binge on food. For a sense of security, creature comfort, to make the world go away. And these psychological factors are no doubt apt. […]
Jews in Bukhara
Alanna E. Cooper, an anthropologist and a Jewish cultural historian, began her research on an old Central Asian Jewish community because of a small and curious dictionary: I don’t remember the name of the man who sold the dictionary to me. He was one of the many people I met in the 1990s who was […]
Motherhood Across Cultures
The Toronto Star discusses the research of Jennifer Lansford, a professor of psychology and cultural anthropology at Duke University. Lansford conducts cross-cultural research on motherhood. “Universally, one of the key tasks of motherhood is to make children feel loved, accepted and valued, and that’s regardless of cultural context…Mothers who are able to do this successfully […]
About Diaperless Babies
Writing for NPR, the anthropologist Barbara King observes: “some parents, mostly in one area of New York City, as far as I can tell, are raising their children from birth without diapers.” She speaks to Meredith Small, an anthropologist from Cornell University, who explains: "Only Westerns make such a big deal about toilet training," and adds that […]