Spirituality
Spirituality is not what it once was – that much is certain, according to anthropologist Peter van der Veer. Working at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, he has examined the significance of the spiritual and its transformation processes in modern societies using the example of China […]
Solidarity and Redemption at MetLife Stadium
Dr. David J. Landes is an anthropologist studying Orthodox Jewish culture. Last Wednesday David joined 90,000 orthodox Jews in a spectacular religious ritual at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. He shared his fascinating field notes with The Talmud Blog: Over the past several decades a new ritual has taken hold within the Orthodox community, […]
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 […]
Family Life in the USA
Elinor Ochs’ latest research on child-rearing practices among middle class US families receives wide spread media attention: Anthropologist Elinor Ochs and her colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles have studied family life as far away as Samoa and the Peruvian Amazon region, but for the last decade they have focused on a society […]
Border Crossing
Fox News Latino reports: Shoes, backpacks and other objects discarded in the desert by undocumented immigrants have been collected by a team of anthropologists to document the difficult journey they make to get into the United States. “For me, these objects aren’t trash. They reflect the history of all the great migrations,” Jason de Leon, […]
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 […]
An American Dream
Louise Krasniewicz, an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke to CNN’s Only On the Blog about Arnold schwarzenegger: Arnold’s importance has never been about his acting or his bodybuilding or his great wealth and power.Arnold was, and probably still is, important because he has been one of the […]