Around the Web Digest: Week of June 14

This week either the anthroblogosphere was quiet, or I was too distracted by the hoopla surrounding Rachel Dolezal to keep up… help me out  by sending me links at rebecca.nelson.jacobs@gmail.com!

As you might have expected, anthropologists weighed in on the scandal surrounding Rachel Dolezal, the academic who was outed as “passing” as black. In this interview on the AAA blog, Patricia Sunderland points out that strategic racial repositioning has a long history:  Race and Rachel Dolezal

And on Anthropology While White, The Rules That Rachel Broke discusses “racecraft” and Dolezal’s negation of the continuous social processes that go into creating racial identity, in favor of a personal, psychological narrative.

Somatosphere features this analysis of how to communicate the mixed methods that medical anthropologists often use to various audiences, including “the public.” Creating Methods That Speak Across Disciplines in Medical Anthropology

The Memory Bank critiques anthropology’s tendency to analyze people’s relationships with money in simplistic (straw man) terms in this post: The Limits of Naivety for the Study of Money 

In the context of the ongoing debate surrounding Alice Goffman and the ethics of ethnography of criminality, Anthropoliteia raises issues of representation and positionality in studies of global policing: Conference Report: Global Policing at Oxford

This excellent analysis of sexual harrassment at cons (comic conventions) suggests that women are increasingly entering a male-defined space, threatening men who feel that rights are a zero-sum game: The Character of Sexual Harrassment at Cons

Probably surprising no one, a genomic study concluded that Kennewick Man resembles modern Native American populations more closely than any other. Could one of the reasons for identifying him as non-Native possibly have been political? I like the flat statement in the title of this post on Dienekes’ Anthropology blog: Kennewick Man was Native American. 

The Center for Imaginative Ethnography’s summer series features literary experiments like the following, scenes in a drama about gringos’ motivations, ulterior and otherwise, for learning Spanish:  Imperfect Tense: An Ethnodrama of American Adults Learning Spanish in Mexico

See you next week!

Around the Web
Rebecca Nelson

Rebecca Nelson is the executive director of América Solidaria U.S. She recently graduated with a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on volunteer tourism in Guatemala and how it is opening up new avenues for tourists and hosts to develop more cosmopolitan understandings of the world (as well as opening up new forms of friction over the circulation of knowledge).