Category Archives: Around the Web

Around the Web

Welcome to Around the Web, where Savage Minds maintains a green-ethos by recycling old links.

Mosques in America

  • Perhaps unsurpisingly opposition to the “Ground Zero mosque” is spawning general opposition to mosques in the United States as visibility is translating into hostility for Muslims in America. This after a Time magazine poll found that 43 percent of Americans hold unfavorable views of Muslims. Could the public debate in the U.S. be edging closer to the much more bitter conflict in Europe that has had France banning facial veils and Switzerland banning minarets?

Neurology supports anthropology on gender as learned behavior

  • In the new book, Delusions of Gender, brain researcher Cordelia Fine argues that while there may be slight variations in the brains of women and men the wiring is soft, not hard. “It is flexible, malleable and changeable.” Larry Summers be damned!
  • Language Log has an appreciation and links to reviews.

James Bond, cultural anthropologist

  • Movie buffs already know that the future of the James Bond franchise is uncertain. But Hollywood screenwriters are betting on his return with this potential screenplay where the British secret agent ventures into the Sahara to meet the Taureg people of uranium rich West Africa and find an American anthropologist who is seeking to help a former research subject who has been accused of a terrorist attack. Cultural anthropologist Michael Lieber, formerly of UCLA, is co-credited with the original concept.

Texting in Africa

  • In Africa as many as 30 percent of malaria drugs may be fake. A new program in Nigeria provides consumers with a code on the drug’s packaging that can be sent via text message to a hotline. A reply of ‘OK’ verifies the legitimacy of the medicine.

Race in the Gilded Age

  • An intriguing book reviewed by NPR explores the changing notions of race in the United States after the Civil War through the case of a man who lived a double life. As a Black man living in Brooklyn he went by James Todd, married a Black woman, and had a decent job as a physical laborer. As a White man he was Clarence King, a scientist and well connected socialite.

Chimp invents backscratcher

  • For many primatologists human culture differs from that of apes only by degree, not in kind. Researchers of a wild chimpanzee community in Uganda observed a male with partially paralyzed hands using a vine to scratch his back. The practice subsequently spread to seven, perfectly healthy chimps.

Recent archaeological finds

  • In the UK archaeologists from the universities of Manchester and York have dated a residential structure, associated with the archaeologically rich Star Carr site, to 10,500 years old. “This changes our ideas of the lives of the first settlers to move back into Britain after the end of the last ice age.”
  • In southeastern Georgia near the border with South Carolina, a significant discovery of a Confederate prison known as Camp Lawton. There were no above ground remains of the prison as Union troops burned it to the ground after capturing it, so its exact location has remained a mystery until now.

“Breastfeeding: It’s what your tits are for” Whip ’em out and enjoy this great celebrity PSA:

You can contribute to Around the Web by emailing your links to me at mdthomps AT odu.edu

Marc Hauser’s Trolley Problem

Many of you may be following the Marc Hauser case. If you aren’t: the NY Times has reported on it (here and here), the Chronicle of HIgher ed has published a leaked document from a former research assistant in Hauser’s case, Language Log, John Hawks and NeuroAnthropology have all posted some links, greg laden has a hilarious post about his perception that Hauser could make his new world monkeys consistently do surprising things. And so on.

I have a weak sense of the details, but I do know that accusations of fraud, regardless of whether fraud was committed, tend to have a range of effects on people involved, especially the administration of a university, the graduate students in a lab, and the fellow researchers in an accused’s field. One might think of this as Hauser’s trolley problem, a tool he’s fond of using himself in order to supposedly get at the basic biological modules or organs of morality. In this case, the person on the track, about to be flattened by a runaway trolley, is Hauser himself. One can imagine a number of scenarios: should one pull a lever to save Hauser? Should one push an unnamed (fat) graduate student or post-doc onto the track to save Hauser? Should one divert the trolley onto a track containing five other researchers who work on moral cognition, or leave it on the track towards Hauser to save those five? Should one derail the trolley and risk destroying a building (cognitive science at Harvard) that might contain sleeping researchers, etc. etc. etc.

As many journalists have noted, there is irony in the fact that Hauser’s forthcoming book is called Evilicious: Why We Evolved a Taste for Being Bad. But it’s more than irony, it’s a question of scale and temporality. Whatever evil is at stake here, it might have both a distant cause (evolution) and a proximate one (the institutional pressure to publish and the problem of being a star scientist), and neither Hauser nor anyone else seems able to mount a theory that would accommodate both. If there is a problem with Hauser’s style of research, it’s probably not that it is fraudulent. More likely, the problem is that his theories cannot explain the possibility of fraud arising as a result of the intense desire to prove that fraud has an evolutionary origin.

Around the Web

Around the Web, your weekly tour through anthropology blogs, human culture in the news, and ocassionally links to weird stuff my Facebook friends post on their profiles.

New paleolithic evidence also the oldest

  • A recent article in the journal Nature makes the case for stone tool use at 3.39 mya, contemporary with Australopithecus Afarensis and the oldest date yet affixed to this technological breakthrough. John Hawks has praise for the discovery
  • Anthropology.net cries foul, err… crocodile, I mean.

Human evolution datebase

  • Also at John Hawks, an extensive bibliography of human evolution. There’s a nice introduction here and you can search the real deal here. Caveats abound as their are 11,000 entires and likely some mistakes and omissions. But the whole thing has been accomplished through volunteer labor and is a work in progress. Does anyone know of anything comparable for other subdisciplines of anthropology?

New primate species

  • As if it wasn’t enough to discover a new mammal, we have now, in the Columbian Amazon, a new monkey. Wow! Meet the Caqueta titi monkey, that’s Callicebus caquetensis if you speak Latin.

Globalized mass media and popular culture

Haiti, still

  • Anthropology grad student and earthquake survivor Laura Wagner reports from the tarp cities of Port-au-Prince and hits the beach with her friends. “I am told that the American reading public has ‘Haiti fatigue,’ that they don’t want to read stories about the disaster and its aftermath anymore. Part of me wants to retort, ‘You know who else has Haiti fatigue? Haiti.'”
  • The medical need in Haiti is still so great. Some new flip-flops can help.

Food and culture, in Flushing, Queens

  • Now a commercial hub for a growing East Asian community, Flushing, Queens, is home to many Asian grocery stores. But non-Asian residents are angry that their supplies of Boar’s Head and bagels are drying up. “They were asking for a deli; we actually don’t have much experience with delis,” said Mr. Chen.

In vitro fertilization, in India

  • The Washington Post reports on the number of Indian women over age 50 seeking out in vitro fertilization. Despite a national population of 1.2 billion and growing, some older women still desire to give birth after a lifetime of being infertile or to have a son after conceiving only daughters.

Standing in line, in India

  • This report on queuing as a cultural practice captures what is best about the anthropology of everyday life. When you think about how much time is spent in lines, what temporal percentage that might be in our lives, it is apparent just how much discipline and repetition, not to mention ideology, is devoted to this most mundane task.

Revolutionary politics and art

  • Boingboing ran links to some absolutely amazing contemproary Oaxacan street art. I only wish they had communicated more contextual information about where this graffiti is as the power of the art stems not only from its imagery but from significance of its location as well.

Around the Web gets meta: Yes folks, it was just a matter of time before Savage Minds’ own weekly round up of web links started including other blog’s weekly round ups of web links. It’s like Cliff Notes for Reader’s Digest!

Pre-Timewaster: In this very blog I linked to the good, giving, and game sex advice columnist, Dan Savage, who was gushing (tee-hee) over the new book, Sex at Dawn, about how primate evolution continues to play a profound role in contemporary human sexuality. Now another enthusiastic review of the same book has turned up again in an unusual place, Gizmodo.

Timewaster: Hat tip to Teaching Anthropology for turning up this gem.

Seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Oh yes you have! Email me at mdthomps AT odu.edu.

Around the Web

Savage Minds’ own patented high-tech webpage filtering software combs teh interwebs for interesting, urgent, and provacative links that usually have something to do with anthropology.

Extractive Colonialism or Globalization?

Culture and American Politics

  • Maxine Udall, one of the best written blogs on my RSS feed, provides some compelling supporting arguments to why well paved roads are an economic necessity, and why letting them go to gravel to keep taxes low is a bad idea. Salon commentator Glenn Greenwald comes to the same conclusion for different reasons, but without the nostalgia for Eisenhower. They’re both talking about this WSJ article.
  • Where do angry Tea Partiers go on vacation? Colonial Williamsburg, of course.

Illegal drugs and new research

Anthropology on the interweb

  • I just got turned on to Somatosphere, a really excellent anthropology blog. Recent posts have included video of the plenary talks by Judith Farquhar and Donna Haraway at the 2010 Society for Cultural Anthropology conference in Santa Fe. And links to an archive of video interviews with prominent anthropologists including: Geertz, Leach, Douglas, Mintz, Rabinow, and the Comaroffs.
  • Zero Anthropology has an interesting piece on the culture concept and the many permutations of the Luftwaffe quote, “Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.”
  • Kudos to the blog Anthropology in Practice for making it to the big board over at Boingboing for their three part series on coffee! Readers, just to let you know, you can submit Savage Minds to Boingboing anytime. Illustrated Man was pretty good, right? I really want one of these nerd merit badges!

Reports from “the Field”

Meat eating and human evolution

Issues in Academia

  • Articles like, “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go” and its sequels (here and here) put English majors on notice that the job market was terrible and their participation in grad programs exploitative. The market has gotten rough for the social sciences too, as many underemployed Ph.D’s can attest. But the hard sciences? Yup, its officially bad for them too.
  • Dean Dad notices an unusual pattern at his community college this season. Applications are up — makes sense, its a recession — but registration is down. A little legwork revealed that even at the c.c. level, students who have been unemployed for too long are getting priced out of higher education.

Seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Yes you have! Shoot me an email, mdthomps AT odu.edu.

Around the Web

Racism at the USDA:

  • The Institute for Southern Studies puts the current fiasco surrounding the firing of Shirley Sherrod in perspective with this historical primer, “It’s an astonishing development given the history of race relations at the USDA, an agency whose own Commission on Small Farms admitted in 1998 that ‘the history of discrimination at the U.S. Department of Agriculture … is well-documented’ — not against white farmers, but African-American, Native American and other minorities who were pushed off their land by decades of racially-biased laws and practices.”

Mexico-US Border

  • The University of Texas at Austin has developed a web video project, “Border Views,” with weekly updates. The series opens with three brief videos from anthropology professor Cecilia Balli on border politics, violence, and transformations in modern Mexican masculinity. I will be very interested to see how this develops as more faculty get involved in sharing their own disciplinary focus with the public.

“Cyborg Anthropology”

  • Register here for a free online lecture by anthropologist and software designer, Amber Case.

Humans, Art, Nature

  • Multispecies Salon is organizing an art swarm in New Orleans to coincide with the upcoming AAA conference and is accepting submissions until September 1. This year’s themes are: Life in the age of biotechnology, Edible companions, and Hope in blasted landscapes. The show will be hosted by multiple galleries located in the St Claude Arts District. I and my (non-edible) companions will be there.

Publishing News

  • The AAA is pretty proud that the journal Cultural Anthropology has been ranked as the second most cited journal in anthropology. You know what? I hate rankings. But I gotta admit that I’m curious as to which journal is Number 1. Anyone want to take a guess?
  • Anthropologi.info just put up a selection of open access journals with a custom Google search line for navigating the content. Go on and give it a try. Hopefully this kind of thing will grow and improve over time. Could it bring a revolution to academic publishing?

Revolution!

  • Speaking of revolution… American University is hosting “Revolutions! Building Emancipatory Politics and Action,” October 16-17, with a submission deadline of September 12. From the press release: “Unlike many academic events built around formal papers, this conference will focus on bringing panelists and audience members together to discuss concrete ways social scientists can support, strengthen, and contribute to activist movements striving toward progressive political action.”

Timewaster

 
 

Seen something interesting that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Of course you have! Don’t be shy and send an email to mdthomps@odu.edu

Around the Web

Ignoring the Iroquois:

  • The Iroquois Nationals, the flagship lacrosse team of the Iroquois Confederacy which spans the U.S. and Canadian border, were invited to the 2010 World Lacrosse Championships in England but did not play. The host country refused to recognize the players’ Haudenosaunee passports, insisting that they travel as Americans or Candians before a visa would be issued. The game of stickball tightly bound to their tribal identity, the Iroquis team felt that nothing is more important than their sovereignty and did not yeild.

Defining contemporary racism:

  • John Jackson takes up an issue that, with Arizona’s immigration legisilation, Mel Gibson’s latest rantings, and the NAACP’s calling out of extreme elements in the Tea Party, has been at the forefront of politics and culture lately. He makes two important points about racism that I find myself largely agreeing with. First: “racists are never just racists… To call someone racist isn’t about explanatory exclusivity.” And second: “racism is less about what someone is (absolutely and forever) than about what a person does (in specific moments)… it doesn’t make sense to think of racism the way we think of, say, racial identity (as something we conspicuously carry around with us all the time, everywhere we go).”

Other news, not at all related to racism:

  • Users of Facebook India can now get an app to whiten their skin in their profile photos, brought to you by Vaseline skin whitening creams. Thanks global capitalism!

Maxine Udall, girl economist:

  • Following up on the animated David Harvey lecture, I clicked on a link from Ethnografix to this blog by Maxine Udall and I’ve been rewarded for it. The posts have a witty, conversational tone like this one about the challenges of sailing a small boat against bigger boats (that can steal your wind) as a metaphor for the difficulties of opperating a small business in the ongoing recession. I’ll be keeping an eye on this well written blog.

Propublica wins at journalism:

  • Check out this awesome database on the how the federal stimulus package is being spent. Just click on your state and you’ll be provided with details that break down the spending by county and correlates that with unemployment data. I am optimistic about the future of non-profit journalism and what such entities can provide for our society. It certainly provides a compelling model in comparison to the MSM.

Primates in pictures:

Paging physical anthropologists:

  • Can somebody debunk this please? A paper in the Review of Economics and Statistics claims that “unattractive individuals commit more crime in comparison to average-looking ones, and beautiful individuals commit less crime.” This makes me want to barf in anger! Gak! I’m choking on my own rage here. Although I love the imagery of the man getting his head measured. Def swiping that for use in a Gen Anth lecture.

Section news:

  • SANA needs a web person who can design a new look for the site, decrease clutter, improve organization, modify design and make the underlying code more accessible/compliant with industry standards. The position pays $1,000 per annum and includes a seat on the SANA board. The site is now mostly informational and requires only monthly updates. SANA has basic web hosting and benefits from technologies no more advanced than Flash, Java, Javascript and simple HTML and CSS. Requirements: Ideally an Anthropology Graduate student, but definitely familiar with the academy. Able to make the regular updates to the site upon request of the officers (a few hours of work per month). MUST be proficient in HTML 4.0 and CSS 2.0. Capable to do research into other technologies to evaluate their usefulness to SANA. Submit to lbolles@umd.edu, Noah.Gillespie@rockets.utoledo.edu and john.clarke@open.ac.uk a resume, focusing on web experience, 2 references including email addresses, and a mock-up proposal for SANA home page. DEADLINE JULY 29, 2010

New Classic Maya discovery:

  • A tomb in Guatemala, so well sealed that it produced “a smell of putrification” when it was opened has yeilded forth textiles, wood carvings, and ceramics.

Timewaster: The Old Spice meme makes it to the academic library–

Seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Email me at mdthomps@odu.edu.

Around the Web

The World’s Smallest Violin Plays for the Rich

  • The NYT reports that the rich are walking away from their mortgages “at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population.” I guess all that hard work and talent that won them their high stations in our meritocracy just wasn’t enough. It’s so unfair!

Academia in the MSM

  • Also in the NYT, does this story seem familiar to you? Across the U.S. college and university budgets for administration and recreation are growing while the budgets for instruction are shrinking. Call it the resortification of academia. We may be teaching our courses with TA’s and adjuncts, but we’ve got a awesome new rock climbing wall!
  • Another story that hits close to home, WaPo reports that it’s tough as hell to be a mother and get tenure. Does this sound like you, or your significant other? “Working mothers who devote day and evening hours to parenting duties end up repaying the time at night and on weekends, feeling somewhat like perpetual graduate students.” Here’s a link to the AAUP findings that prompted the news report.

Australopithecus Afarensis

  • In case you missed it, here’s Yohannes Haile-Selassie on NPR’s Science Friday talking about the new partial Afarensis skeleton, Kadanuumuu. The news story from Science is here. This guy must keep pretty busy. Wasn’t he just lead author on that Ardipithecus article?

Heads Up from the AAA

  • The U.S. State Department is raising the fees on American passports by 35%. Don’t forget if you’re going to the AAA’s in Montreal that you’ll need a passport. I’m saving my pennies already and apparently I’ll need a few more, mine expired last month.

Differences of Degree, or Kind?

  • Primatology.net ran a thoughtful post, ‘Do animals keep pets?’ The thought experiment began with a piece in Psychology Today, not a journal, I know, but still an intriguing question. The crux seems to lie in the PT author’s definition of pet as an animal without utilitarian value to its keeper. You don’t need to be Donna Haraway to see the problem with this, mandating a distinction between work and play is a central value to Western cultures. Perhaps the PT author has fallen into the classic trap of naive realism. I see no reason why there should not be a very broad, inclusive definition of pets that subsumes some non-human interspecies relationships.

Bringing Knowledge to the People

  • Here’s some good news, a mall in Dallas, TX, now has its own public library branch. I love my public library, I’m there every week, but its walking distance for me. By making the printed word more accessible (CD’s and DVD’s too, I know) public libraries keep themselves relevant and at the forefront of voters’ minds. And as the parent of small children I know that I seldom go to the mall to shop, usually I’m there because the weather is bad and I’m looking for something to do with my kids. This sounds like a big win and I hope it catches on.

WEIRDness

  • Who is WEIRD? People from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies are WEIRD. The International Culture and Cognition blog has the abstract of a recent study that claims that the lack of cross-cultural research study participants has skewed behavioral science. Neuroanthropology has a article summary and extensive commentary.

Timewaster: For this week’s web video, a pre-industrial Estonian Simpson’s parody. Enjoy!

Seem something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Hit me up at mdthomps@odu.edu


Around the Web

Here in Hampton Roads we’ve got the Army base Fort Eustis, the Norfolk Naval base (the largest naval base in the world), Langley Air Force base, plus the Coast Guard, NASA, and a Naval weapons station — the Fourth of July is kind of a big deal. So indulge me in a little flag waving.

Sadly, after this short was filmed the Sweedish Chef was deported by the INS. We need a path to citizenship, people!

And now back to our regularly scheduled blog post.

“Discover it, then blow it up”

  • NPR had an interesting piece on a 1962 experiment to detonate a hydrogen bomb in outer space, it features a fascinating if disturbing video of the light show from the surface of the Earth. (Props to A Hot Cup of Joe who tipped me off to the story)

Racial bias and the SAT

The AAA moves into online video

  • The AAA blog put up a series of videos, “Ten Years After: The Legacy of Eric R. Wolf”, taken at the most recent annual meeting. I am heartened by this move and would like to thank whomever took the initiative to make this important panel accessible to everyone. Perhaps in the future there will be even more videos with better production values and we can all give TED a run for their money!

East European Cave Art

  • My favorite lecture to give in General Anthropology is the Upper Paleolithic explosion of cultural innovation, so I was very keen to read this news report in Science on the discovery of cave art in Romania. Too bad there’s only one picture. Commentary from John Hawks is here.

The Cultural Experience of Time

  • Anthropology in Practice has run a series of three posts on time. This one about time, colonialism, and power is my favorite. As I read I was visualizing the concatenations of time as an othering device, like “CPT” or “Indian Time”, which always have to do with the perceived divergences of non-Whites from the Protestant work ethic.

$$$$$$$

  • AAA anounces “The National Endowment for the Humanities has launched a new grant program, Enduring Questions, to support the development of a course that addresses some of the fundamental questions raised by the humanities: What is good government? What is the relationship between humans and the natural world? Are there universals in human nature? And others. The grant awards up to $25,000 to support the design, preparation and assessment of the course.”

An Anthropologist Among the Generals

  • Diana Putman is recognized for “constructive dissent” by the State Department for risking her prestige in USAID in challenging US military orders in Africa. Anthropologyworks got the scoop she is a cultural anthropologist. The Washington Post has the news.

Timewaster

Marx for Visual Learners (Katty Perry Remix)

While working on Monday’s Around the Web column I followed a link from Ethnografix to video from this New York Observer piece about David Harvey and I got so excited about the video I couldn’t wait to finish the blog to share it.

As Harvey speaks on the contemporary global economic crisis (if you listen closely you can tell he’s been edited) the animation illustrates his points in a charming, cartoony way reminiscent of the popular UPS whiteboard ads. The animation comes from the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts (RSA) which has produced a number of similar features including one by Barbarah Ehrenreich.

I watched it twice in quick succession and instantly wanted to send it to every Marxist I know. But why preach to the choir? Send the video to everyone in your address book, and maybe once they’ve read Marx (just to try it) they might find they like it.

Around the Web

Live and direct from the Comfort Suites in Charleston, West Virginia, it’s Around the Web with Savage Minds!

Tomorrow is the last day of our cross-country family road trip and I’m happy to report that reuniting our adopted daughter with her birth-brother and sister went off without a hitch. Also we paid a visit to the Chicago Art Institute and the Field Museum, both of which were totally mind blowing.

I’m catching up on all my blog reading right now and feeling a bit like I’m drinking from the fire hose. So this week I’ll be linking you to some older material and without providing commentary. Next week back to the regular Around the Web you know and love.

Theory

 
 
Fieldwork and Observation

 
 
Linguistics

 
 
Publishing

 
 
Academia

 
 
Seen something around the web that you would like to share with the Savage Minds community? Email me at matthew.thompson@cnu.edu

Around the Web

One part news, one part blogs, a splash of internet flotsam, shake with ice and strain.

Game changer in Afghanistan: While wars are often sold to the public in ideological terms, underlying these professions of belief are material concerns, namely control over resources. You don’t even need Marx for that conclusion, just go straight to Malthus. But does this hold true if we consider the American-Afghanistan war, for what resources do they have? Opium? Goats? How about recently discovered mineral deposits worth one trillion dollars! What happens next will be very interesting.

  • NYT broke the story about a team of U.S. geologists who followed maps generated by Soviet geologists in the 1980s that revealed huge stores of iron, copper, and lithium, as well as caches of gold and rare-earths used in high tech applications. Could economic growth driven by mining help end the war and ween Afghanistan off opium production? Or will large scale mining operations, as they have in many other places around the world, more closely resemble extractive colonialism leaving the people impoverished and the local environment devastated?
  • Commentary — Foreign Policy is skeptical about the estimated value of the mineral resources, the timing of the story’s publication, and the ability of the Afghani government to develop those resources in any productive way.
  • Could Afghanistan’s future resemble the mining operations in Papua New Guinea where entire villages are dispossessed of their land and corporations distribute compensation to individuals not collectives? (Just last week our own Rex was blogging about PNG, mining, and citizenship.)
  • May I recommend Breaking the Iron Bonds on the subject of American Indian mineral rights. Many of the same exploitative mining practices were overseen by the U.S. federal government on Indian land in the twentieth century.

 
UC system libraries vs. Nature Publishing Group: The big news in academia this week was the University of California making a stand against journal price increases demanded by NPG, which publishes the uber-prestigious journal Nature as well as many noted scientific and medical journals. UC, like all of California, is under tremendous pressure to make budget cuts and claims that NPG is jacking up the price of its journals by 400%. Baring a return to the lower price, the entire UC system is threatening to drop the journal from their libraries and ask all faculty to boycott NPG by abstaining from submitting publications, resigning from editorial positions on NPG journals, and refusing to conduct peer review for NPG.

 
More on publishing:

 
Dean Dad, my new favorite blogger: I’m the newly minted fan of an anonymously authored blog, “Confessions of a Community College Dean”. Under the nom de blog of Dean Dad, the author writes about administrative issues such as budgeting, hiring, and trends in higher ed. Here are two excellent recent posts.

  • Wal-Mart U.: The mega-retailer teams up with the for-profit American Public University to offer discounts to its employees.
  • Is higher ed a bubble economy? The Dadster speculates that schools with high tuition and low prestige, such as for-profit universities, will be the hardest hit when the bubble pops.
  • I wonder what Dean Dad would make of this article in the Washington Post on the interest Congress is taking in regulating for-profit universities, which serve nearly 2 million students.

 
Foreign Anthropologists in America: Remember being an undergrad and reading “Body Ritual of the Nacerima” for the first time? Or how much fun it is to teach that article when the class really wants to play along? That’s the power of making the familiar seem strange and the strange seem familiar. Strangeness is why I love anthropology and why I am drawn to these two new books.

 
Timewaster: The satirical web video “BP Spills Coffee” went viral early last week. So if you haven’t already had it forwarded to you twice, here’s your chance to jump on the bandwagon. The website ifitwasmyhome.com will superimpose the distressingly large shadow of the Deepwater Horizon spill on your hometown.

Seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Send the link to matthew.thompson@cnu.edu

Around the Web

Your weekly dose of internet links, blogs and news, with an anthropological twist.

Japan FTW / Japan WTF: Sometimes I come across an amusing link that’s really random and instead of publishing them right away I hang onto them until enough to be considered a theme. This week I’m squeezing off a list of interesting items from Japan.

 
Oil spill disaster: It seems some conscious consumers are opting to boycott BP, I know my neighborhood store seems less busy than usual. However, may I note that the other oil companies are not exactly paragons of social justice by comparison? Perhaps the most radical action one can make in this instance is to drive less. Much less. I haven’t picked up anything about the Deepwater Horizon from the anthropology blogs yet. I’ll share any such links as I come across them.

 
War and the social sciences: The blog Zero Anthropology has been running so many posts on the Human Terrain System lately (six this past week), I’ll just direct you to their site rather than link to each posting.

 
Downloading Culture: The Cranky Linguist turned up a web page from an online degree mill that links to “100 Incredible Anthropology Lectures.” I have enjoyed listening to some philosophy and psychology lectures on iTunes U, and I’ve watched some of David Harvey’s lectures of Marx’s Capital too. Has anyone put their lectures online who cares to offer some reflection about it?
 
Fishy business and other food posts: For three semesters I taught a popular Food and Culture course, and even though that course is on hiatus (until I’m paid to teach it again) I’m constantly on the lookout for food related internet links.

 
Visualizing Australia:

 
Timewaster: Enjoy this video of a woman playing the guitar with some seriously creative handwork on the neck. Not exactly “like never before” as the YouTube headline bills it, but maybe kind of like a lap steel? It’s like her skin is so strong she doesn’t need a slide. I don’t know, how would you describe it? Yep, I could totally do this too, if I wasn’t so busy blogging. Heh.
 
Seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Hit me up at matthew.thompson@cnu.edu

Around the Web

Here at the Around the Web corner office in 1 Savage Minds Plaza we’re constantly striving to improve our blogging. We’re not afraid to try cutting edge formatting techniques like underlining and bulleted points. And hey! If anyone wants to give us some feedback on how to make this column a little better, don’t be shy and speak your mind.

FEMINIST HULK SMASH TWITTER: Out of teh suck that is the internet emerge precious gems like High Expectations Asian Father and Shit My Dad Says. But whither the radical politics? Pick up this twitter feed where the Incredible Hulk smashes patriarchy in all capital letters.

 
 
Have a cow, man: This is an interesting post from the Open Anthropology Collective about ritualized animal sacrifice at the World Cup in South Africa and the state of ritual theory in anthropology. Contrary to many of the comments on this post I find Van Gennep and Turner’s theories to be quite elastic in analyzing culture, expression, and performance. Have others abandoned these theories in like fashion? Or do they still hold appeal for you as they do for me?

 
 
Islam and “the West,” again: Here are a collection of links concerning France’s proposed burqa ban and related confrontations between state and ideology.

  • Reuters places the proposed burqa ban in the context of French colonialism of Algeria and Morocco
  • An editorial in Slate proclaims, “Like the Taliban and the Saudi government, France is selfishly using women as silent chess pawns in the greater game of cultural domination and control.”
  • Anthropologist Gabriele Marranci suggests, “We have to read the ban through ‘values’ and ‘morals’ seen as part of a ‘civilizing’ ideology. Europe, with the end of communism and an increased social political identity crisis, seems to increasingly employ defensive epistemological paradoxes to affirm a patronizing ‘moral’ superiority over its own Muslim minorities.”
  • The Washington Post reports that in Aceh, a more conservative autonomous region of Indonesia, there will be a ban on women wearing pants and tight fitting-clothes.
  • A senior at Pomona College flying out of Philly was detained and handcuffed by the TSA then questioned by the FBI, for carrying Arabic flash cards in his pockets. So start putting your terrorist language materials in your checked luggage!

 
 
Violence in Jamaica: More than seventy people have died in recent clashes between Jamaican government forces and armed factions aligned with Christopher Coke, a neighborhood political boss and drug kingpin. Complicating matters for Prime Minister Bruce Golding is the close patron-client relationship between the government and “garrison” communities where such kingpins run votes for the government in exchange for free reign in their neighborhood. Oh, and he had to publicly apologize for hiring lobbyists to fight Coke’s extradition to the U.S. on drug trafficking charges.

  • Anthropologist Huon Wardle has some insightful commentary on the conflict and the comments section of the post have many useful links to online coverage of the issues.

 
 
Kids these days: As professors we often slip into critique of our students’ behavior – texting in class, citing Wikipedia in essays, drinking “energy drinks,” wearing mini-skirts with Uggs – by way of a liberal dose of mythologizing our own undergraduate experience. My own self-told narrative of college places all my attention on two things: anthropology and intoxication. And so I tut and smile politely when I see kids out on a Friday night, knowing that they could never hold a candle to the shenanigans of my heyday.

 
 
Love and theft: I am both sympathetic to and frustrated by this post from Ethnography.com about the obscurity of anthropology relative to other disciplines. I don’t think the culture-concept was ever anthropology’s to claim as exclusive property. I also get the sense that anthropology has worked hard on marginalizing itself in the academy and that this contributes strongly to the poor marketability of our graduates relative to other disciplines.

 
 
Facebook is finite and other notes from the future: I only recently became aware of the fact that Facebook limits the number of friends a user can have when I noticed one of my friends was friends with the prominent American Indian poet Joy Harjo. Intrigued I clicked on her name to see what info she had public and there was the message, “PLEASE NOTE: At FB friend capacity. Join fan club.”

 

Also check out this picture I snapped out front of my neighborhood 7-11. Yoville, Farmville, and Mafia Wars Slurpees! I still haven’t decided if these games are the new Pet Rock, or if Facebook will become to online communication what Amazon is to online retail.

  • The Republican party’s hilarious new website where anyone and everyone can post policy ideas for the GOP to consider. As a good friend of mine observed, “Apparently Republicans are unaware that the internet is populated overwhelmingly by people who are morons, trolls, or (usually) both.” Also Boehner has five times as many Facebook friends as Pelosi, ZOMG!!1!
  • Not to be outdone Senator Ben Nelson (D-NB) admitted during a recent interview, when questioned about a possible bill capping ATM fees, that he has never used an ATM. Although, to his credit, he said, “I know about the holograms.” I had to laugh listening to the pundits on the Diane Rehm Show parse this one: Talking Head #1: “He doesn’t know how to use an ATM? How does he pay for lunch?” Talking Head #2: “That’s what lobbyists are for.”
  • Our cyborg melding of nature and technology now means that computer viruses can spread to people! On a related note, is anyone else bothered that the average age of the Senate is currently 63, making it the oldest Senate in history?

 
Seen something around the web that you’d like to share with the Savage Minds community? Email me at matthew.thompson@cnu.edu.

Around the Web

Around the Web: Anthropology, culture, blogs, news, and internet weirdness baked fresh each Monday at Savage Minds.

General-ly speaking: This fall I’m teaching General Anthropology for the first time in like five years, so I’m on the lookout for new ideas to spice up a course that, in all likelihood, is the only exposure most undergraduates will have to the discipline. Interesting assignments like this project in web design about students’ international travel experiences could be one antidote to the standard issue essay assignment. In my intro classes I always forward a strong argument against race thinking, but I’m a little apprehensive about using Neanderthal genomics to debunk the idea of race. It sounds like an interesting idea but I’m a little unsure about it. Maybe someone in the comments section can speak to this? In place of race thinking, anthro textbooks trot out a short list of go-to examples of human variation as rooted in evolutionary adaption to environment. One of these classic examples is how populations that live in high altitudes are barrel chested and can make better use of the thin air. Anthropology.net pointed me to a May 13, 2010, publication in the journal Science that backs up these claims with genetic studies of Tibetans. Last but not least, the highs and lows of the new “nature” documentary Babies: The Film are well covered by Teaching Anthropology. The video preview reminded me somewhat of the beautiful Material World and Hungry Planet books (the latter I’ve used in my Food and Culture class) which also have their limitations but are still very thoughtful conversation starters.

There’s no accounting for Tastebook: Facebookers will remember that not long ago one could “become a fan” of this and that (I became a fan of Duke losing), but recently that has been replaced by the same “like” button used to comment on friend’s updates and photos. The International Culture and Cognition blog asks an interesting question, why make our preferences public? One answer, the blogger suggests, is that the user builds cultural capital by associating themselves with certain products or celebrities, but I’m not buying it. I’m going to pick Freud over Bourdieu in this instance and claim that clicking the “like” button is about the pleasure principle. People enjoy hitting “like” and that’s what motivates them to participate in its narrow evaluation of everything. But the bigger question may be: can social theory explain why there is no “dislike” button? (Or is it simply that that would make Facebook too much like Digg?)

Damn dams: Terry Turner reports, via the blog Anthropologyworks, that the Brazilian government has renewed efforts to dam major tributaries of the Amazon in the Xingu Valley. The article offers compelling reasons against progressing with the dam project in terms of the loss of indigenous land reserves and biodiversity, but its the local and national social movements that have coalesced around opposition to the dam that is really fascinating to the anthropological observer. This feature length story is briskly written. A good read.

Late(r) capitalism: Around the time of the Enron collapse questioning the ideology of free market capitalism gained some legitimacy outside of the anti-globalization social movements and academic left. Then in subsequent years that furor died down somewhat, Sarbanes-Oxely didn’t seem to have any teeth, and it was business as usual. Now the Great Recession, the Greek debt crisis, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill have brought some of those questions back to the popular imagination. Three links on this subject were forwarded to me all last week: an exerpt from the book Ill Fares the Land , a David Harvey for laypeople type essay in Salon , and a provocative graph showing increasing disparities in wealth distribution between Whites and Blacks. The theme here is that “the people” are sick of the Wall Street fatcats and want a return to American industrial prowess. You can color me skeptical. The recent victory of Rand Paul in the Republican primary for Senate in KY shows that free market fundamentalism is alive and well. This current crisis is a blip, its going to take more, much more, to force ideological change in the US.

Baseball Fandom: Baseball is one of those things I just don’t get. I mean I’ve been to a few minor league games – the Durham Bulls, back when I was at Chapel Hill – and its fun to drink beer in the sun with your friends, but I certainly don’t see the appeal of watching the sport on television. Regardless I enjoyed this insightful reflection on being a NY Mets fan. Why do people root for a team that consistantly dissappoints? Why do fans chose to identify with a team that keeps getting beat?

Maps of the Middle Ages: Here is a cool article in the Washington Post about a conference sponsored by the Library of Congress on portolan maps of the sixteenth century. What beautiful objects!

This week in the future: Anthropology. Science Fiction. Two great tastes that go great together? I give you African Cyberpunk. If you can’t make it to class, send your Anybot to deliver the lecture, but don’t blame me if your students send Anybots to take notes. Paging Lawnmower Man, we’re getting closer to immersive virtual reality (I hope the cognitive anthroblogs pick this up). Oh, and artificial life is now a possibility too. “Naturally I would use artificial life to clean up environmental pollution and cure diseases, but of course my first order of business would be creating a woman that looks like Kelly Le Brock in Weird Science.” Just be sure to watch out for those six-legged timber cutters, though I’ve heard they’re perfectly safe. At least until Skynet is up. Yep, the future’s going to be a pretty strange place. And its where we’ll be spending the rest of our lives.

Not Taking this Lying Down: Check out this collection of photo images of discarded mattresses. Hey! I’ve got some of those from my fieldwork too! Great minds think alike, eh?

Ahh… good times, good times.

Seen something around the web that you would like to share with the Savage Minds community? Email me at matthew.thompson@cnu.edu

Around the Web

Neanderthal News: Obviously the big news this week is the publication of a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome in the May 7, 2010, issue of the journal Science. If you’re like me you need to know how this effects you Gen Anth lectures. Check out this awesome blog published by the Special Libraries Association – Biomedical and Life Sciences Division, which leads with the keen observation that Science has become a major player in paleoanthropology publication. As expected other blogs picked up the Neanderthal story including the reliable John Hawks. Best LOLZ goes to Boing Boing with a pic of a couple of skeletons caught in a compromising position, the comments section is also a riot. In other Ice Age news, some guy in Manitoba brought Wooly Mammoth blood back to life Jurassic Park style. Can’t wait for the petting zoo!

Habban in the House: And while I’m name checking Boing Boing, check out this cool picture of an Arab musician playing some kind of bagpipe-like instrument, which we learn through the miracle of crowd sourcing is called a Habban.

Coastal Archaeology and the Oil Spill: According to retired archaeologist Noel Stowe, the Deep Water Horizon oil spill and its clean-up poses an imminent threat to thousands of archaeological sites along the Gulf coast. Stowe claims that if the oil spill washes ashore and comes into contact with shell middens then it will be impossible to carbon date them, moreover the use of heavy machinery in the clean-up could potentially crush shell middens into dust.

Mapping with Lidar: More archaeology news! Husband and wife team Diane and Arlen Chase successfully used airplane mounted laser sensors, or lidar, to map a Mayan urban complex in Belize known as Caracol. After decades of on-the-ground surveys and field research they were astounded when lidar completed scanning the area in only a matter of days. The Chases estimate that at its peak, the site hosted a population of 115,000 spread over 80 square miles and are convinced that lidar will revolution the archaeology of heavily forested tropical environments.

Teaching with Twitter: I read with great interest this report by Bill Caraher about using Twitter to communicate with students in a large lecture class, for I too will teach an introductory course that meets once a week at night this fall. Somewhat disappointed, Bill notes that Twitter did not provide “the social media plus education utopia” he had hoped for, but he plans to try again.

In the Nick of Time: Female circumcision, is there anything that prompts more westerners to say, “You know, somebody ought to go over to that African continent and just straighten the whole place out.” The American Academy of Pediatrics released a surprising statement promoting the practice of reducing genital mutilation in the United States by offering to “nick” baby girls (their words) in a ritualized bloodletting that one of the author’s compared to an ear piercing. The comments section on this article are quite interesting.

NYC Underground Scene: Better than any episode of Dirty Jobs is this article about the working lives of “sandhogs,” tunnel diggers laboring 600 feet below the surface of Manhattan. No word yet on the CHUDs.

Obligatory Depressing Arizona Paragraph: Last week the governor of Arizona signed a bill prohibiting ethnic studies courses in public schools, a move advocated by the State Chief of Schools who claimed that Tuscon’s schools were teaching Mexican-Americans that they oppressed by Whites. WaPo blogger, Valerie Strauss sees a pattern here, “Legislators in many states seem intent on dictating to educators how to do their jobs, even though the lawmakers don’t really have a clue. We tried this once before, in a big law called No Child Left Behind, which was designed with the input of not a single teacher, and which spectacularly failed in its goal to close the achievement gap.” Syndicated columnist Eugene Robinson saw the move as adding insult to the injury of SB 1070 writing, “Mexican American students, it seems, should not be taught to be proud of their heritage.” It’s just the latest in a series of provocations that has included: President Calderon protesting SB 1070 to President Obama, the City Council of Los Angeles voting to boycott contracts with Arizona businesses, and a gang of White boys in Morgan Hill, California, having the wise idea of wearing American flag t-shirts on Cinco de Mayo as some sort of boneheaded statement. Sigh Chuck D said it best, yo.

Shades of Marvin Harris And finally, who among us hasn’t wondered, “Why don’t we put more cows on treadmills?” I’m definately using this next time I teach India’s Sacred Cow.

Seen something around the web that you want to share with the Savage Minds community? Email me at matthew.thompson@cnu.edu