Angela Garcia, Anthropology Now author, wrote an op-ed in LA Times on anti-addiction vaccines:

My aunt Marion is in the hospital dying of liver and kidney failure, the result of her 20-year struggle with heroin use. I was told of her imminent death the same day news broke about a vaccine against the drug. "Breakthrough heroin vaccine could render drug 'useless' in addicts," one headline read. "Scientists create vaccine against heroin high," proclaimed another.

Meanwhile, my aunt finds temporary relief in the ever more frequent administration of opiate pain medication — the very kind of drugs she used illegally.

The idea of an anti-addiction vaccine is not new. For nearly 40 years scientists have been working on vaccines against all kinds of addictions, including nicotine, marijuana and alcohol. There are even trials of vaccines to prevent obesity. None of the anti-addiction vaccines has yet received Food and Drug Administration approval, however, and most of the studies are still in their early stages.

Read the rest here:

Heroin vaccine won't 'cure' what ails addicts
By Angela Garcia
April 15, 2012

Speaking to Voice of America, Medical Anthropologist Elise Johansen joins the widespread call to end Female Genital Mutilation:

…FGM, a practice which dates back thousands of years, persists despite widespread recognition of its harmful physical and psychological effects on girls and women.

Involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, FGM’s immediate health complications include severe pain, shock and hemorrhage, and longer-term consequences such as cyst formation, infertility, increased risk of childbirth complications, and newborn deaths.

Elise Johansen, a Medical Anthropologist for the World Health Organization (WHO), says that although traditional circumcisers remain the primary practitioners of FGM, doctors, nurses and other health-care providers are increasingly conducting the procedure, perpetuating the so-called medicalization of FGM.

“By allowing health care providers to perform FGM, it signals that this is an okay practice, that maybe it is healthy or harmless,” she says, explaining that the WHO strongly opposes the practice. “So it actually contributes to make sure that the practice continues, I think.”

Read more here:

Health, Rights Groups Demand Tougher Anti-FGM Laws
Lisa Schlein | Geneva

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.

Read the rest at anthropologyworks.com

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)