Headhunters, The Musical! Material World posted on the theatrical rerelease of Edward Curtis’s In the Land of the Head Hunters. The travelling show will include a rendition of the original, rediscovered score to the 1914 silent film, as well as contemporary Kwakwaka’wakw dance presentations. Assuming none of them vanish that is. Check out the official website for presentation dates.

More on Pacific Northwest…Ted McIlwraith at Fieldnotes posted a link to the online videos of the Aboriginal Reconciliation lectures at Douglas College in British Columbia.

Forging Community: The Detroit Free Press had an interesting article on the history and changing social dynamics of Detroit’s Asian American communities.

Lost in Universal Translation: A recent talk by Terrence Deacon at the 2008 Astrobiology conference is making ways with technophiles. According to NewScienceSpace, Deacon’s talk centered on the possibilities of communication with non-human extra terrestrials through translation of the universal referents to the physical world.

Deacon argues that all languages arise from the common goal of describing the physical world. That limits the way a language could be constructed, he concludes … An alien race could use a strange medium like scents as their language, Deacon says, but the scents would still describe objects in their world. An odor that communicates “rock” or “tree” would be analogous to our words for the same objects.

Some blogs, like Technovelgy, have taken the news with some excitement, announcing that the scifi-inspired universal translator is possible.

Conspicuous Consumption Saves Lives: Paul Farmer was recently quoted in the Greenville News:

The Haitians he knows mostly asked for food when he arrived in the Caribbean nation 25 years ago. But now they want something else, he said.

“They say, ‘I want a Razr cell phone,’ or ‘I need a DVD player,'” Farmer said. “I can get annoyed by that or I can say, ‘That’s progress.'”

Or maybe communication and media technologies are real economic and material needs today in Haiti?
On a Mission: Every so often, missionfordummies gets updated, and I find their sociocultural analysis to be amazing, in so many ways. Here is the latest nugget of wisdom on how Latins are touchy/feely.