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 the lack of diaper use in many cultures does not reflect a lack of diapers:  “Of course they could use any cloth, but often this is the much easier way.”

Read more at NPR:

Think football, and odds are you think tailgate party. And with good reason — the tailgate party is among the most time-honored and revered American sporting traditions, what with the festivities, the food and the fans. And the beer. Don’t forget the beer.

 

To the untrained eye, these game-day rituals appear to be little more than a wild party, a hedonistic excuse to get loaded and eat barbecue. Not at all. They are, according to Notre Dame anthropologist John Sherry, bustling microcosms of society where self-regulatory neighborhoods foster inter-generational community, nurture tradition and build the team’s brand.

 

Sherry didn’t always feel this way. There was a time when he considered tailgating a boisterous nuisance, little more than a gauntlet of unrelated and unruly celebrations to be run if he were to reach his seat in Notre Dame Stadium. But then he had an epiphany: What if there was meaning to the madness?

 

“One day I slowed down and paid attention to things that were going on that weren’t individual celebrations,” he said of research presented in A Cultural Analysis of Tailgating. “It was much more nuanced that I had thought before.”

For both Jews and Muslims, circumcision is a religious and cultural practice. Within the last few weeks, Germany outlawed the practice of male circumcision for any but the strictest medical reasons. An atypical alliance of Jews and Muslims successfully challenged the German court's ruling and Chancellor Angela Merkel has promised to make religious circumcision practices (on males, but not females) legal once again.

Read more from William M. O'Barr at huffingtonpost.com

Is Infant Circumcision a Violation of Human Rights?

William M. O'Barr 

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.

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 people handled what anthropologists call material culture — what we call stuff. These were dual-earner households in a range of ethnic groups, neighborhoods, incomes and occupations, with at least two children between the ages of 7 and 12 — in other words, households smack in the weeds of family life.

Read more at NYTimes

Elinor Ochs’ latest research on child-rearing practices among middle class US families receives wide spread media attention:

Anthropologist Elinor Ochs and her colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles have studied family life as far away as Samoa and the Peruvian Amazon region, but for the last decade they have focused on a society closer to home: the American middle class.

Why do American children depend on their parents to do things for them that they are capable of doing for themselves? How do U.S. working parents’ views of “family time” affect their stress levels? These are just two of the questions that researchers at UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families, or CELF, are trying to answer in their work.

By studying families at home—or, as the scientists say, “in vivo”—rather than in a lab, they hope to better grasp how families with two working parents balance child care, household duties and career, and how this balance affects their health and well-being.

Read more at The Wall Street Journal:

A Field Guide to the Middle-Class U.S. Family
By SHIRLEY S. WANG, March 13th

Also, read responses to the original article at The Washington Post and Slate Magazine

Janice D’Arcy - Are we asking enough of our kids? Anthropologists don’t think so

Libby Copeland  - The American Middle Class: Guilty Parents and Lazy Kids

Fox News Latino reports:

Shoes, backpacks and other objects discarded in the desert by undocumented immigrants have been collected by a team of anthropologists to document the difficult journey they make to get into the United States.

“For me, these objects aren’t trash. They reflect the history of all the great migrations,” Jason de Leon, assistant professor at the University of Michigan and director of the Undocumented Migration Project, said in an interview with Efe.

Since 2008, De Leon and his team have managed to collect 10,000 objects which, he says, “are part of the heritage of the United States and also of Mexico. It’s important for Americans to understand the history of the Mexican migration.”

Read More here:

Border Crossing Trash Worthy of Study, Say Anthropologists

Roger N. Lancaster published an opinion Piece at NYTimes, arguing that “Our sex offender laws are expansive, costly and ineffective — guided by panic, not reason.”

In fact, the crimes that most spur public outrage — the abduction, rape and murder of children — are exceedingly rare. Statistically, a child’s risk of being killed by a sexual predator who is a stranger is comparable to the chance of being struck by lightning. The reported incidence of most forms of child abduction, including the most serious, has declined since the 1980s…

…No one can doubt that child sexual abuse is traumatic and devastating. The question is not whether the state has an interest in preventing such harm, but whether current laws are effective in doing so.

Click here for the rest

Sex Offenders: The Last Pariahs
By ROGER N. LANCASTER
Published: August 20, 2011

Louise Krasniewicz, an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke to CNN’s Only On the Blog about Arnold schwarzenegger:

Arnold’s importance has never been about his acting or his bodybuilding or his great wealth and power.Arnold was, and probably still is, important because he has been one of the few concrete examples we have of the American Dream being a real possibility. Arnold’s was the perfect story of a poor, uncouth, underclass, and uneducated immigrant making it big in America by understanding that the American Dream means you are not stuck with the story you are born with but that you can make and remake yourself.

What he may not have learned was that along the way you will be tempted severely to stray from the good path, to write your story in a way that is arrogant or based in hubris and deceit.

You can’t do that and still be a good American icon. The rules still have to apply to you at some point.

…Why would people go to an Arnold movie today? To see him fail in his comeback, to stare in awe at how he has changed, to shake their heads in disbelief?

We don’t go to movies just because we like the actors or think something will merely entertain us. We go to the movies because they are part of our cultural conversation. They are one tool we use to help us make sense of a stupid, chaotic, and meaningless world.

I think, then, people could make great use of any Arnold movie as they talk about the ideas and issues his behavior has brought to the foreground. I don’t think personal reputation has ever been his concern.

Click here to read the rest