Around the Web Digest: Week of October 18

Happy Sunday (technically)! If you come across any links to include here, email me at rebecca.nelson.jacobs@gmail.com.

It’s not explicitly anthropological, but City Lab started an interesting conversation about the problematic stereotypes embedded in dining out in the U.S. (such as referring to certain foods from the global South as “ethnic”) in How Not to Be a Restaurant Racist, which provoked the response What’s Very Wrong with “How Not to Be a Restaurant Racist” on The Stranger.

I also love this Material World post about how observers from the global North find the sight of luxury goods and wealth gaps “bizarre” in places like Accra: Ain’t No Jaguars in Ghana’s Urban Jungle Luxury and the Postcolonial Bizarre

Social Evolution Forum looks at the semantic frames that predispose people to make moral judgements — in this case, about war: Linguistic Framing of “War! What is it Good For?”

This post on Disability Fieldnotes explores the discomfort ethnographers may experience in telling stories about real people (who might read their ethnographies) from their own particular vantage point, and the freedom that fiction can provide in telling different kinds of truths: Truthtelling

Leiden Anthropology Blog reports on a recent meeting of the Conference of Hunter-Gatherer Societies, exploring the current potential of the concept of the hunter-gatherer: The Revival of Hunter-Gatherer Research

An example of such research appears in The Economist: Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep. The article (and potentially the study it describes) seems to suffer from some of the issues that plague hunter-gatherer research, including using modern groups uncritically as an analog for ancient patterns of human life.

Ethnography.com posted this fun update on that most classic of anthropological subjects, the Nacirema, and their ancestral relatives, the Poru: Battle Ritual Among the Nacirema

Multispecies.net points out that dogs help build rapport with strangers and increase the possibility of positive interactions in the street: Four Legs Good: Working with a Canine Research Assistant

According to IFL Science, genetic analysis of over 5,000 dogs suggests that Dogs May Have Originated in Central Asia

See you next week!

Around the Web, Blog post
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).