Jews in Bukhara
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 […]
Motherhood Across Cultures
The Toronto Star discusses the research of Jennifer Lansford, a professor of psychology and cultural anthropology at Duke University. Lansford conducts cross-cultural research on motherhood. “Universally, one of the key tasks of motherhood is to make children feel loved, accepted and valued, and that’s regardless of cultural context…Mothers who are able to do this successfully […]
About Diaperless Babies
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 […]
Turning the City Inside-Out?
Asef Bayat. 2012. “Politics in the City-Inside-Out” City and Society 24, 2:110–128. In cities such as Beirut and Cairo, the quiet everyday ways that poor people reappropriate space from the rich in the Middle East creates a new version of urban public space that Asef Bayat terms the “city-inside-out.” This new version of urban public […]
Standing in the Need : Communication Failures That Increased Suffering after Katrina
“FEMA has took over this parish. We know what we need to do and how to do it, but you know, what can we do when somebody else is calling the shots?” -Buffy (November 2005) Katrina tore into the Gulf Coast in 2005 bringing fright and ruin and heartbreak. It ripped open the collective American […]
Part Three of Three: New York City
[audio:https://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/bitstream/1810/244088/1/BBC_OLIYH_NYC_17Dec2012.mp3] New York has long been a city of immigrants, and as a result of waves of immigration, language experts describe it as the most linguistically dense city on earth. Mark Turin travels to the Big Apple to track the many languages of New York. He travels the 7 train, designated a US Heritage Trail, […]
Health Workers’ Lives On The Line
In December, nine Pakistani health workers, most of them women, were murdered as they went door-to-door delivering polio vaccines to the children of their neighbors. Media attention to this event has focused on the fact that the CIA recently used a fake vaccination campaign as a cover when searching for Bin Laden, claiming to be […]
Language Politics in South Africa
Anthropologist and linguist Dr Mark Turin travels to South Africa to get to grips with the country’s complex language politics and policies. Until the mid 1990s, there were just two official languages, English and Afrikaans, while other indigenous African languages were sidelined. Today the situation is different, with eleven official languages recognized by the Constitution […]
Linguistic Diversity and Language Endangerment in the Himalayas
[audio:https://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/bitstream/1810/244041/1/BBC_OLIYH_Nepal_03Dec2012.mp3] Landlocked and mountainous Nepal is home to over 100 languages, many of which are now endangered. Languages spoken for generations may soon be extinct. Anthropologist and linguist Dr Mark Turin has spent years talking to the last speakers of languages under threat, and now he returns to the Himalayas to show us how communities […]
Targeting the Gun Question: The “Culture War” in Scope
A lineup of hot-button issues has plagued the political life of the United States for decades, at least since the 1970s: abortion, sexualities, religion, evolution, censorship, recreational drugs, guns. An odd list on the face of it, but supposedly, the nation’s population divides into one of two camps over each issue, or so sociologist James […]