Around the Web Digest – Week of February 14

I hope your Día del Cariño was full of love of some form – the version of the holiday I experienced in Guatemala pertains to a much wider definition of familial and platonic love than the typical US Valentine’s Day, which makes it easier to get behind. If you want me to feature anything in the digest, send me the link at rebecca.nelson.jacobs@gmail.com.

This HuffPost piece on Valentine’s Day looks at how the celebration is increasingly popular among younger people in Indonesia, and how the globalization of consumer culture overlays a deeper globalization of notions of romantic love: Valentine’s Day: A Global Perspective

Anthropology News also responded to the holiday by looking at how breaking up with someone on Valentine’s Day remains more of an unshakeable taboo than breaking up over social media: Achy Breaky Heart 

A far more important holiday took place on the 18th, as we observed: World Anthropology Day! The AAA storified some of the celebrations.

The Anxious Anthropologist discusses the experience of working on an interdisciplinary team and facing a “hierarchy of relevance” in which his/her work is undervalued by essentially leaning in, contributing to the team, and advocating for the value of anthropology in general: For Anthropologists, is Interdisciplinarity Ever Truly a Meeting of Equals?

On the Sapiens blog, Yolanda Moses is doing a series on race: Why We Must Talk About Race. It won’t be news to anthropologists but it could be a useful tool for teaching or outreach.

Allegra Laboratory was particularly active this week. One post caught my eye: Breakfast in Aidland Quotidian: Relations and Structural Contradictions. It begins a bit jarringly but contains a lot of insight into the dynamics of power that are normalized in aid work.

Is there a food movement? While people’s relationship to food may not have changed significantly enough to measure its impact yet, in Activist Chefs and the Food Movement, Food Anthro describes how chefs are making spaces for more activism in the professional food community.

See you next week!

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).