Around the Web Digest: Week of January 24th

Happy Monday, dear readers! Don’t forget to send me any links to feature here at rebecca.nelson.jacobs@gmail.com.

Incredibly (or not so incredibly, given the power of his name as clickbait), there’s another post this week on the anthropology of Trump (“antrumpology”?), this time from a biological anthropology perspective: Evonomics Renowned Anthropologist Says Donald Trump and Alpha Male Chimpanzees Play the Same Political Game

This Leiden Anthropology Blog also uses Trump as an example, using a Daily Show clip to highlight how humor can demarcate social boundaries or comment on them: Humour: A Threat to Society?

Thematically related is this Anthropology Now post that I can’t clam to understand very well (poetry was never my forte): Laughter is Social Glue

In The Water Cooler Problem, Sapiens, the Wenner Gren public anthropology project, points out that coordination across cultural boundaries and distance has always required a tremendous investment of time and effort.

BBC Radio featured this program on the history of anthropology: From Savage to Self

Having just moved to DC myself, I found this post on Food Anthropology particularly interesting in how it explores the disjuncture between “Washington,” the world of politics, and “DC,” the living heart of the city: D.C. is Mambo Sauce

This Science Alert delivers exactly what its title promises: Here’s What Fruits and Vegetables Looked Like Before We Domesticated Them

As a kind of counterpoint, Food Anthropology also featured a two-part series on the debates surrounding genetically modified crops that generally comes down against GMOs for reasons related to the unequal distribution of risks and the loss of biodiversity: Genetically Engineered Crops and Sustainability: Controversies and Commentaries for 2016 Part 1, Part 2

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).

One thought on “Around the Web Digest: Week of January 24th

  1. Ah, the water-cooler problem. I flash back to 1981. I was talking to my boss Bob Cutts, a former Stars & Stripes reporter turned PR flack, about how digital networks were going to make it possible for people to work from home. Cutts said, “No. It is going to force people who do business to stick closer together. With all that new information pouring in, the biggest problem is going to be figuring out what is important and to whom. For that there will have to be face-to-face meetings. So companies that do a lot of business together will want it to be easy for their people to get together and put their headquarters next to each other.” In retrospect, this still seems like a smart observation.

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