The Universality of Homosexuality
Reflecting upon Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s assertion that there are no homosexuals in Iran, this Slate Magazine article discusses recent anthropological research conducted by Barry and Bonnie Hewlett and considers if homosexuality exists in every human society At a press event two weeks ago, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to elaborate on […]
On the Road
Bill Fairbanks, a retired anthropology professor from Los Osos, CA, has spent the last three summers walking along roads “to find out more about America’s inhabitants and what drives them.” I needed a challenge. So, I figured I would just walk across the country and study it as I go,” he explains. Read more at […]
Language Extinction
Cultural anthropologist Wade Davis has investigated zombies in Haiti, lived with tribes in the Amazon and Andes, and explored vanishing indigenous cultures from Borneo to east Africa. He has been the inspiration for three episodes of the television series The X Files. […] He said that every two weeks, somewhere in the world, an elder died […]
Homophobia in Soccer
Type the name of Philipp Lahm into the Google search engine and the first thing its “autocomplete” feature throws up about Germany’s national football captain is “Philipp Lahm schwul” – “Philipp Lahm gay”. […]As elsewhere in Europe, Germany has no openly gay men in the professional leagues. Given the amount of repressive hide-and-seek going on, […]
Sex, Crimes and Punishment
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 […]
Anarchy in the UK?
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 […]
Terrorism
Thomas Hylland Eriksen, a professor in the department of social anthropology at the University of Oslo, discusses the terror attacks at Norway at opendemocracy.net : By coincidence, I was in Oslo on Friday 22 July 2011. During this time of the year, the main holiday season in Norway, the cities tend to be empty and quiet. […]
Women’s World Cup
Anthropologists discuss football/soccer and culture at The New York Times and CNN: Beatriz Vélez, former anthropology professor at the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellín, studied the gender dynamics of football in her home city beginning in the 1990s. First, she wrote about the grudging acceptance girls received as token participants in the Football for Peace […]
Anthropology and Chess
The Boston Globe discusses Robert Desjarlais’ latest book, “Counterplay: An Anthropologist at the Chess Board:’’ Anthropology is the study of humanity and its many aspects. It generally divides its work into four fields: cultural, archeological, linguistic, and biological. Its horizons, of course, are simply as infinite as the experiences of mankind. We have never thought […]
The Meanings of Debt
David Graeber discusses economics at CNN.com Blogs: …If the study of history shows us anything, it’s that it all comes down to power. The people on the top know that everything is negotiable. If there’s a real problem, you can always work something out – which is what we saw in 2008, when the financial […]