Yellow Water: Rupture and Return One Year after the Gold King Mine Spill
Beginnings Forged by glacial flows millions of years ago, the San Juan Mountains in southern Colorado remain a mystical landscape to many visitors. The lure of their sky-bound rocky spires, regionally called “fourteeners,” a colloquial title that references their higher-than-14,000-foot elevation, draws thousands of tourists annually to explore nostalgic remnants of the “wild west” in […]
Anthropology Now and Then in the American Museum of Natural History: An Alternative Museum
You know how they say in certain museums, history comes alive? Yeah. In this museum … it actually does. What are you talking about? Everything in this museum comes to life at night. – Night at the Museum, 2006 The American Museum of Natural History’s Cultural Halls are in serious need of deep rethinking […]
Trademarking Racism: Pseudo-Indian Symbols and the Business of Professional Sports
In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a novel by the Spokane author Sherman Alexie, a basketball player at an all-White high school is the persistent target of racist slurs. “Chief” and “Tonto,” he is called, “Squaw boy” and “Redskin.” He also experiences the indignity of sharing the court with a caricature of […]
Beer through the Ages: The Role of Beer in Shaping Our Past and Current Worlds
“Thirst rather than hunger may have been the stimulus behind the origin of small grain agriculture.” —Jonathan Sauer, 1953 “Man cannot live on beer alone. … Are we to believe that the foundations of Western Civilization were laid by an ill-fed people living in a perpetual state of partial intoxication?” —Paul Mangledorf, 1953 Doing field […]
New Guinea
Hugh Brody, a British Anthropologist and a filmmaker writes at Open Democracy about New Guinea, one of the most culturally and ecologically diverse regions in the planet. Tragically, industrial and international politics have devastated life there. Thursday, December 1, 2011, is the fiftieth anniversary of West Papua’s independence. On this day in 1961 West Papuans were […]
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 […]
The Amazon
“The Amazon is in the hands of the drug trade,” by Paolo Moiola, an Interview with Roberto Jaramillo, Jesuit priest and anthropologist, at Latinamericanpress: “Colombian Jesuit priest Roberto Jaramillo has lived in the Brazilian Amazon for the last 15 years. Since 2005, he is the regional leader of the Society of Jesus in the Amazon state. […]