Savage Minds Around the Web

Count Me In: Well it’s that time again. New decade, new census, new problems in counting racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Niraj Warikoo at The Detroit Free Press wrote about Middle Eastern Americans who fear that the elimination of the the ancestry section of the census will render them as invisible since people of Middle Eastern descent are instructed to list themselves as ‘White’ on the census. Warikoo interviewed Andrew Shryrock, offered insight on the relation between religiosity and racial self-identification.

More Organ Traffic News: The Associated Press is reporting that Israeli officials admitted that military doctors harvested organs of both Israeli soldiers and Palestinians with something less than knowledge and consent of patients’ families. According to the admission, harvesting practices ended in 2000, but have come to light after accusations by the Swedish government and the release of an interview Nancy Scheper-Hughes conducted with Israeli officials.

Anthropologist, Heal Thy (Dry-Skinned) Self: In a press release, cosmopolitan cosmetic line AnthroSpa Logic announced its arrival on the scene with a number of new products: “a combination of exotic, natural ingredients used for centuries by native peoples both medicinally and in beauty treatments to care for their skin.” File it under, ‘what to get for that hard-to-shop-for anthropologist’? Ok, I tried. Here is the website.

For an edition on “Moral Dilemmas and Ethical Controversies,” Stuart Kirsch’s guest editorial in Anthropology Today reflects upon Jared Diamond’s description of his experience in PNG and the blogosphere’s reactions to them (pdf here). Kirsch questions the conditions for an ethical critique to turn into a sustained effort for reform. Kirsch also informed me that this edition of Anthropology Today will be open access for six months.

As Languages Lay Dying: Paul Bignell at The Independent (UK) wrote a piece on University of Cambridge scholars who are busy salvaging the endangered languages of the world. While we may remain skeptical about the urgency of saving whole world view’s from the malevolent hands of language death, the article is lovely for its earnestness and has a pretty cool map.

Archaeology Videos: Thanks to anthropology.net, I came across the Archaeology channel, which has free streams of videos detailing the material record, conservation projects and cultural patrimony from archaeological sites from around the world. But my favorite archaeological video this week comes from the Onion. Forgive me if you’ve already seen it (as I have) reposted a couple times. It’s pretty fantastic.


Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of ‘Friendster’ Civilization

2 thoughts on “Savage Minds Around the Web

  1. Re dying languages article, to be sure, these efforts at preserving, revitalizing, and documenting such languages raise skeptical questions like which ones get “saved” and which don’t? which speakers are privileged and which are marginalized? for whose benefit is this effort? and haven’t people tried misguidedly to “preserve” and “inscribe” cultures and languages for ever? But why the dismissive “lovely earnestness”? In cases where only a handful of speakers remain, and where the community is willing, why not applaud linguists for documenting as much as possible? Also why conflate the question of revitalizing them with documenting them — aren’t there good arguments for documenting them without expecting them to be revitalized?

  2. With regard to the campaign to save endangered and dying languages, can I point to the contribution, made by the World Esperanto Association, to UNESCO’s campaign.

    The commitment was made, by the World Esperanto Association at the United Nations’ Geneva HQ in September.

    A glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net

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