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 getting rid of his belongings in advance of his migration from Bukhara. He invited me to his home and showed me the small stack of books on the floor of his empty living room.

I couldn’t quite make out what they were, except that they had been printed in Jerusalem about a century earlier. The man wanted only a few dollars for them, so I took them with me.

The dictionary was the most curious of the lot. Less than 50 pages long, with translations of just 700 words, its ambition lies not in its length but in its breadth. Six columns run across each page: Hebrew, Persian, Russian, Spanish, Arabic and Turkish.

Read the rest at the Jewish Daily Forward:

Jews of Bukhara Helped Me To Understand Personal History
By Alanna E. Cooper, May 09, 2013

Spirituality is not what it once was – that much is certain, according to anthropologist Peter van der Veer. Working at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, he has examined the significance of the spiritual and its transformation processes in modern societies using the example of China and India. He has found that contradictions to the concept of spirituality are part of this and have by no means stood in the way of an international career. However, many of the modern trends contradict the original idea of spirituality.

Read more at Phys.org or here.

Spirituality on the way to globalisation

August 21, 2012

Dr. David J. Landes is an anthropologist studying Orthodox Jewish culture. Last Wednesday David joined 90,000 orthodox Jews in a spectacular religious ritual at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. He shared his fascinating field notes with The Talmud Blog:

Over the past several decades a new ritual has taken hold within the Orthodox community, the daily learning of a prescribed daf, or double sided page, of the Talmud Bavli. The nature of this ritual, though, has yet to be fully investigated.

[...] A genuine feeling of community was felt within the stadium. It was easy to strike up conversations with complete strangers, everyone seemed eager to share with one another where they lived and whether they were being me’sayem (completing the Talmud). The crowd was laid-back and comfortable. People mostly sat quietly and listened to the speeches, but there were many quiet conversations going on. On the playing field, where I was sitting, the aisles were filled with people milling about, chatting on their smartphones. Everyone seemed to be taking pictures. In front of the dais there was a constantly changing cluster of people jockeying for position in order to snap shots of the various gedolim (revered sages).

[...] Everyone danced or swayed in their rows, except, of course, the women who were sitting very still in their seats high up in the third tier. The work of establishing solidarity is inevitably partial and obscures the work of exclusion that is its complement. It was a given that no women could participate in the learning of daf yomi – they were thanked, though, for making it possible for their men to learn — and there were no women in the program or in the videos, including the historical footage from pre-War Europe.  

Read more at The Talmud Blog:

Solidarity and Redemption at MetLife Stadium: Notes from the Siyum Ha-Shas- Guest Post by David J. Landes

Posted on August 3, 2012 by The Talmud Blog

David J. Landes is an independant academic living in the New York area. His dissertation, which he wrote in Princeton University’s Department of Anthropology, is based on fieldwork that he conducted at Yeshiva University and in the Modern-Orthodox community.

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 implications for the developed West of China's rise, because Westerners seemed so concerned about the question of whether hosting the Olympics would push China toward Western-style political reforms, and no one seemed concerned about the question of whether, instead of us changing China, China might actually change us. I felt that many of my Western listeners needed to be awakened out of their self-centeredness.

China did change the Olympic Games, and since the Olympic Games are a thoroughly global event, those changes reflect the changes that China has instigated in the world order. The world financial crisis hit right after the Beijing Games, in large part due to the fact that the integration of China into the global economy, which the Olympics marked, had tipped it off balance.

Read more at The Atlantic

A New Kind of Spectacle: How China Changed the Olympics

The world went into the 2008 games asking whether the Olympics would change China, but maybe it was the other way around.