The Lily-Pad Strategy
Check out David Vine’s groundbreaking piece at TomDispatch.com: "The Lily-Pad Strategy, How the Pentagon Is Quietly Transforming Its Overseas Base Empire and Creating a Dangerous New Way of War." Anthropologist David Vine, author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia, has spent the last three years exploring the […]
Dangerous Mountains
Dr. Peter Wynn Kirby, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford, wrote an op-ed for The Japan Times and makes some thought-provoking observations about the connections between the stockpiling of whale-meat, plutonium and policiy making in japan: OXFORD, England — Mount Fuji stands as a powerful eco-symbol in Japan, invoked frequently to describe elements of […]
Family Stuff
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 […]
Capitalism and Intuition
Grant McCracken, an anthropologist, provides some business and management advice at Forbes.com: For decades, the mandate of successful executives was to set a plan and stick with it. Those days are gone, says Grant McCracken […] “Capitalism used to be so analytical, precise, and rule-oriented,” he says. “The whole job of management was staying away from what […]
Poco a poco: Writing from the Road in Lima, Peru
For as long as I have been conducting research in Lima, I have heard that the transit system is an analogy for the city’s character. I first came here in May 2009, and at the time Lima was populated by a tangled, unmapped network of privately-owned vehicles called combis that sped maniacally around the city […]
Reflections from Papua New Guinea: Making ‘friends’ and the desire for ‘white men’
Not long ago, I received a text message from a young woman, a minor acquaintance I'd only met a couple of times: Hi Barb its something personal bt I think u sud help me out plis… if posible plis I really want 2 make frend wit one of whom u knw who is interested with […]
The Ball
John Fox, a Harvard Ph.D. anthropologist, talked to CNN about his new book, The Ball: Discovering the Object of the Game CNN: Your book starts with a basic question from your son, "Why do we play ball?" Did you find an answer? Fox: I wouldn't say I found an answer. It's a philosophical question […]
Gender
The structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the critique of Feminist Anthropology are discussed in an Iranian.com piece on gender. The problem with structuralism is that it discards the concepts of freedom and choice, merely emphasizing the way different social structures shape an individual’s experience, outlook and behaviour. As for the works of Lévi-Strauss, feminist anthropologists […]
The Inaugural Post of Betwixt and Between: Anthropology Now’s Guest Blogger Venue
#Anthropology Once upon a time, in the late 19th century, anthropology was popular, but it wasn’t necessarily a good thing. From pseudo-scientific justifications of racial hierarchies to the displays of so-called primitive people at ethnographic expositions, anthropology satisfied an ever growing public yearning for the exotic thrill. This thrill for the exotic, for the occult, for […]
Public Anthropology in Greece
From Alex Argyriadis, a PhD Candidate in History and Anthropology at the University of Peloponnese, Greece: The first Program on Everyday Life and Culture in Greece was recently instituted at The University of Peloponnese. Founder and Head of the Program is the anthropologist C. Nadia Seremetakis (www.seremetakis.com), known worldwide for her influential writings as well […]