China and the Olympics Anthropologist Susan Brownell studies sports and the Olympics: My question, "will the Olympics change China, or will China change the Olympics?" was really an attempt to prod my audiences to think about the bigger question of the…
The Lily-Pad Strategy Check out David Vine’s groundbreaking piece at TomDispatch.com: "The Lily-Pad Strategy, How the Pentagon Is Quietly Transforming Its Overseas Base Empire and Creating a Dangerous New Way of War." Anthropologist David Vine,…
Dangerous Mountains Dr. Peter Wynn Kirby, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford, wrote an op-ed for The Japan Times and makes some thought-provoking observations about the connections between the stockpiling of whale-meat, plutonium and policiy making in…
Family Stuff From 2001 to 2005, a team of social scientists studied 32 middle-class families in Los Angeles, a project documenting every wiggle of life at home. The study was generated by the U.C.L.A. Center on the Everyday Lives of Families to understand how…
Capitalism and Intuition Grant McCracken, an anthropologist, provides some business and management advice at Forbes.com: For decades, the mandate of successful executives was to set a plan and stick with it. Those days are gone, says Grant McCracken…
The Ball John Fox, a Harvard Ph.D. anthropologist, talked to CNN about his new book, The Ball: Discovering the Object of the Game CNN: Your book starts with a basic question from your son, "Why do we play ball?" Did you find an…
Gender The structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the critique of Feminist Anthropology are discussed in an Iranian.com piece on gender. The problem with structuralism is that it discards the concepts of freedom and choice, merely emphasizing…
The Inaugural Post of Betwixt and Between: Anthropology Now’s Guest Blogger Venue Dillon Mahoney #Anthropology Once upon a time, in the late 19th century, anthropology was popular, but it wasn't necessarily a good thing. From pseudo-scientific justifications of racial hierarchies to the displays of so-called…
Aliens Before we can understand an alien civilization, it might be useful to understand our own. To help in this task, anthropologist Kathryn Denning of York University in Toronto, Canada studies the very human way that scientists, engineers and…
