Here’s a quick round-up from the road. As per last week’s comments thread, feel free to post other articles in comments.
Anthropology in Space: Hot Cup of Joe is hosting the Four Stone Hearth this month, and the result is stellar. The Pulp Sci-Fi Edition of Four Stone Hearth has a lot of great contributions, including an opportunity to pimp this guy’s grant proposal.
High Drama or Low Farce? Culture Matters reported on an opera being produced around Ted Strehlow, an Australian anthropologist who worked with the Aranda in 1930’s.
Ethnography of Oil: Responding to an editorial in Anthropology Today (need permission to access), Lorenz at antropologi.info pulled together articles on the impact of growing oil prices on everyday life around the world.
Lost Tribes of London: Photographer and stylist Ari Versluis and Ellie Uyttenbroek (respectively) have mounted a show in London on “Tribalising Fashion.” True to their inspiration of 19th century salvage anthropology, the team consists of one who snaps the pictures and one who poses the ‘natives.’ [On a side note: the picture of a ‘bear‘ in this article looks completely indistinguishable from a football-watching big dude. They might have tried to gay it up a little.]
Repatriation of Remains: Kim Christen at Long Road linked to this article in the Australian about several continuing cases of repatriating remains.
Personal Histories: Middle Savagery posted videos of a series of lectures at Cambridge from Meg Conkey, Ruth Tringham, Henrietta Moore, and Alison Wylie on Personal History and Archaeological Theory. Parts 2 and 3 are here.
Aranda = Arrernte (the accepted spelling to date).
Yes, Jay, let’s criticize them for showing a gay man who looks like a regular person (which is what I assume you mean by saying he is “indistinguishable” from a football watching “dude.”) Rather than defy stereotype, let’s encourage these anthropological artistes and the journalists who cover them to “gay it up” by showing a more stereotypical bear… because striving for surface readings and the thinnest possible engagement with the “other” is what anthropology is all about. The picture was the only thing NOT wrong with the article.
Suddenly, SM is one of the gayer places on the internets! How _wonderful_. I kinda thought the bear in question looks pretty typically ‘bear,’ by which I mean: fat and hairy. Jay I think points to what might be called a ‘crisis in gay comportment,’ a revolution in ‘queer habitus,’ or perhaps, if you are Andrew Sullivan, “‘the death of gay culture'”:http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=cac6ca08-7df8-4cdd-93cc-1d20cd8b7a70 : a lot of gay style and straight style have converged in ways that sometimes make it hard to tell who is what! (Mind you, these observations pertain to the States, where I haven’t been for nearly two years, and NOT to Helsinki, where there are 3 gay men, and my boyfriend and I are two of them; and cf. earlier “remarks”:/2008/01/11/your-average-hindu-temple-is-more-fabulous-than-the-gay-bombay-new-years-party/ I made about globalization and gay identity.) One could argue that all of this reflects changing structural circumstances, as does Sullivan. One could also just say that it is the wheel of fashion turning, as it always does.
I do think baseball players and fans in the US are seeming gayer and gayer, or is it that gay guys are mimicking straight looks? The goatee or some sort of facial hair is a crucial operator here: in SF, for a long time, you knew the gay guy by the presence of facial hair — then I noticed that more and more straight dudes were wearing a goatee. And it all got confusing. This is to say nothing of that whole ‘metrosexual’ moment. Maybe an ethnographer of urban cultures and US masculinity can help me out.
Anywayz.