Sean Carey writes at anthropologyworks.com about the attribution of the UK Riots to “outsiders:”

But how true is the “outsider” hypothesis in accounting for riots? In the UK in the early 1980s, people often thought that “outsiders” were responsible for disorders simply because a large crowd would gather when there was an incident which then developed into a riot. Commentators put two and two together and reasoned that the rioters could not all have been local. But research I was involved in strongly suggested that the people who were present on the streets at the time rarely came from outside the area, especially on the first night of disorder.

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Sean Carey also writes at the newstatesman.com about the relations between the riots and the consumption of goods. He quotes the late British anthropologist Professor Sir Edmund Leach:

Every society must bring the aggressive instincts of its individual members under control. This can never be achieved simply by outright repression or by moral precepts, but only by sublimation, that is by providing legitimate outlets for dangerous feelings.

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Maia Green comments on the recent events at Savage Minds: ”

Perhaps this week’s turmoil in the UK offers some scope for anthropology’s core strengths of empathy and interpretation.

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CNN runs a two-part story on the traumas of rape in wartime. The first part highlights the work of Vitoria Sanford among Mayan women in Guatemala:

It began as a headache. Then her throat started to feel tight. A dull pain welled in her chest and her joints ached.

But Victoria Sanford continued to do the interviews. Even in the middle of the night, the women in Guatemala always managed to find her, the “gringa” they heard had come to listen to them.

It was the early 1990s, years before the international community would formally recognize the Guatemalan government’s role in the systematic rape of its Mayan women — and decades before the current violence in Libya and elsewhere around the Middle East would once again remind the world of the brutal effectiveness of rape as a weapon of war.

Sanford was then in her early 30s and pursuing an anthropology doctorate at Stanford University. A Spanish speaker who had worked with Central American refugees, she befriended the few Mayans who had moved to California.

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Rape in wartime: Listening to the victims

Avram Bornstein, anthropologist at John Jay college in New York City, discusses his fieldwork with Palestinian day-laborers, the experiencing of circumventing Israeli checkpoints at dawn, the concept of structural violence, and impossibility of objectivity in the American Media.

Download the podcast here. (33 min)