Around the Web Digest: Week of May 3

¡Hola chicos y chicas! Next week instead of the weekly digest I’ll be sending you all a “Wish You Were Here” postcard from the Yucatán. As always, you can bring blogs to my attention at rebecca.nelson.jacobs@gmail.com .

In my ongoing search for anthropologists in the private sector, I came across this piece in MetroNews Canada on Ford’s cultural anthropologist. A fun excerpt: “How does one gather cultural anthropological data? By shadowing people, from the time they get up to the time they’re done for the night, for several days in a row, much like a reality show, just without the cameras, fake drama, and C-list celebrities.” Yes, Ford Motor Company Has Its Own Cultural Anthropologist

In high school, I did a report on cannibalistic practices around the world… so of course I was a sucker for this sensationalizing piece in The Conversation. One good thing about the Paleo Diet is that it’s opened a space to talk about the human past:   The “Other” Red Meat: On the “Real” Palaeodiet

I didn’t have the energy this week to try to find more four-field posts but here’s one on Cahokia at Anthropology.net: Megafloods and the Collapse of Cahokia

This Somatosphere post takes an interesting angle on a phenomenon we’ve come to see as exclusively race-based by pointing out that teens are treated as mentally deficient: Policing at the Synapse: Ferguson, Race, and the Disability Politics of the Teen Brain

Continuing the theme of policing, here’s a book excerpt on American Ethnography Quasimonthly on “driving while Mexican”: Regulating Lowrider Space

This piece on Access Denied is a little dry but it points to the need to create broader coalitions to press for immigration reform and ultimately promote migrants’ well being:  Arguing for Alliances: Why Business and Religious Leaders Should Promote Migrant Health Care

In an effort to be topical, I looked for an anthropological analysis of the British elections and found it on The Memory Bank: The 2015 British Election and the UK’s Creeping Constitutional Crisis. You’re welcome.

I’m not sure about this one, a post by Paul Stoller for HuffPost, but ultimately it resonated with me because many of my students discussed an exercise we did (on linking the labels on their clothing to locations known for factory rights violations) in their final exams: In Search of Soul and Soulful Social Science 

So how DO you teach complex social issues? This post on Struggle Forever discusses a technique that might be useful: Playing Games with Anthropology

What’s Wrong with the Global North and the Global South? What indeed, Thomas Hylland Eriksen? Spoiler alert: they may not be tied to Cold War geopolitics like the First and Third World, but they’re still essentializing.

As always, thanks for reading and I’ll see you the week after next!

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).

2 thoughts on “Around the Web Digest: Week of May 3

  1. I can’t take credit for the reality tv show analogy, but I think it worked. At least better than my suggestion regarding the participatory driving-thoroughness of en-roading [auto]mobyllic imaginaries.

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