From Crystal Skulls to the Caste War
Intersections of Tourism, Archaeology and Heritage in the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico Archaeological sites in the Yucatán Peninsula are among the leading attractions for a thriving tourism industry and have helped to significantly boost the local economy since the 1970s. While the success of tourism has provided many economic benefits for the millions of people […]
Why the Present Matters: The Importance of Community Outreach and Public Engagement in Archaeology
But it is more important — because more humanizing — for us to understand the actors of the past in their full complexity and humanity, just as we would like to be appraised by future historians. Straw men and cardboard women are unworthy subjects and incapable of teaching us anything of value. – James Axtell […]
Shifting Perspectives: The Man in Africa Hall at the American Museum of Natural History at 50
The “Man in Africa Hall” at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) opened on June 8, 1968, after seven years of preparation. Colin Turnbull, hired in 1959 as the Museum’s first curator of African Ethnology, was tasked with curating the third iteration of an anthropology exhibit focused on Africa. By the time the Hall […]
Not for Sale: How WWII Artifacts Mobilized Japanese-Americans Online
On March 5, 2015, Eve M. Kahn’s “Newsworthy Notes” in the Antiques section of the New York Times included an announcement for a local auction alongside two short articles, “Remembering Ragtime” and “Go raise a glass” [1]. “Art of Internment Camps Will Head to Auction” was the first public announcement that the Rago auction house […]
The Nexus of Collaboration: Negotiating African American History and Public Interest in Southwest Virginia
On a hazy June afternoon in 2003, we stood on a bluff overlooking the New River in Whitethorne, Virginia with members of the newly formed Kentland Historic Revitalization Committee. The group had convened to curb a record of benign neglect in the historic district of Kentland Farm, the agricultural research station of Virginia Polytechnic Institute […]
Presumed Innocent: On Bill Traylor’s Verve
Something was definitely stirring deep within William “Bill” Traylor. In a span of four years, he expunged a lot of it, producing 1200 drawings and paintings with graphite pencil stubs and poster paint on discarded cardboard. Traylor bears the surname of the proprietor of the plantation in Dallas County, Alabama, where he was born into […]
Refusing to Look Away: The Act of Killing and the Indonesian genocide of 1965
The Act of Killing (2013). A Film by Joshua Oppenheimer. In the mid 1990s I was conducting transcultural psychiatric research in Bali, Indonesia, exploring the relationship between Balinese culture, individual experience, and the long-term outcome for severe mental illness. Engaging in person-centered ethnography, I interviewed a number of individuals on a weekly or monthly basis […]
Aliens
Before we can understand an alien civilization, it might be useful to understand our own. To help in this task, anthropologist Kathryn Denning of York University in Toronto, Canada studies the very human way that scientists, engineers and members of the public think about space exploration and the search for alien life. From Star Trek to SETI, […]