• Go directly to jail: Prison sentence for Guatemalan dictator

Many major news media covered the sentencing of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt to a landmark 80 years in prison for genocide and crime against humanity. ABC News quoted Victoria Sanford, a cultural anthropologist at Lehman College, City University of New York, who noted that genocidal massacres occurred before and after Rios Montt, “but the bulk of the killing took place under Rios Montt.”

Sanford has spent about 50 months in Guatemala and participated in excavations in at least eight massacre sites. Several of the articles quote Helen Mack, a noted human rights activist, and sister of Myrna Mack, who was murdered in Guatemala in 1990 for her work on behalf of indigenous human rights .

• What would Paul Farmer say?

Time magazine carried an interview with medical anthropologist, medical doctor, professor, and health activist Paul Farmer, prompted by his new book, To Repair the World, a collection of his speeches including some of his commencement speeches.

The lead question is: “Are you ever tempted to tell graduates, ‘I could have saved thousands of lives with the money you spent on your degree?’”

Paul Farmer responds: “I don’t think of it that way. I think, Here’s a chance to reach out to people who probably are unaware — as I was at their age — of their privilege and to engage them in the work.” He was also interviewed on the Diane Rehm show.

• Presidential note of gratification

Leith Mullings, president of the American Anthropological Association, published an article in The Huffington Post, expressing her appreciation of President Obama’s acknowledgment of the importance of anthropology in a recent speech:

“As an anthropologist and president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), I was especially gratified to hear President Barack Obama acknowledge the discipline of anthropology and support its scientific integrity. In a speech at the 150th anniversary of the National Academy of Sciences, President Obama said:

‘And it’s not just resources. I mean, one of the things that I’ve tried to do over these last four years and will continue to do over the next four years is to make sure that we are promoting the integrity of our scientific process; that not just in the physical and life sciences, but also in fields like psychology and anthropology and economics and political science — all of which are sciences because scholars develop and test hypotheses and subject them to peer review — but in all the sciences, we’ve got to make sure that we are supporting the idea that they’re not subject to politics, that they’re not skewed by an agenda, that, as I said before, we make sure that we go where the evidence leads us. And that’s why we’ve got to keep investing in these sciences.’”

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Filed under: energy, gender & sexuality, justice, water by admin on May 13, 2013 | Social tagging: Barack Obama > Dominica > Egyptology > Guatemala > Hanging Garden of Babylon > India > jail > Jim Yong Kim > King Tut > Korea > National Academy of Sciences > Paul Farmer > Thailand > World Bank
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• What New Yorkers are thinking about

The Village Voice included a review of “a fascinating set of videos from an anthropologist named Andrew Irving, a researcher who spent part of 2011 documenting 100 random New Yorkers’ inner monologues.”

The videos, published by Scientific American, were created by Andrew Irving, professor and director of the Granada Centre of Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester, England. He spent part of 2011 documenting 100 randomly selected New Yorkers’ inner monologues. Irving stood on street corners and asked pedestrians to put on headsets and narrate their streams of consciousness out loud.

While each narrative is distinct, Irving picked up on a recurrent theme of economic instability and concerns in “the age of terror.” Irving told the Voice that this particular project arose out of work he had done in Uganda, trying to understand the thoughts of people diagnosed with HIV.

• Hello, God

In a guest column for The New York Times, cultural anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann, a professor at Stanford University, discusses findings from her ethnographic field work in a charismatic evangelical church in Chicago. It was not at all uncommon for people to talk about hearing God. She asks, what do we make of this?

“I don’t think that anthropologists can pronounce on whether God exists or not, but I am averse to the idea that God is the full explanation here. For one thing, many of these voices are mundane. A woman told me that she heard God tell her to get off the bus when she was immersed in a book and about to miss her stop… Schizophrenia, or the radical break with reality we identify as serious mental illness, is also not an explanation.” She provides more detail in her book, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God.

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Filed under: biological anthropology, hiv/aids, religion by admin on May 6, 2013 | Social tagging: Canada > cannibalism > Jamestown > Napoleon Chagnon > New York > New York Times > Uganda
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• On Russian distrust of U.S. missile plan

Press TV interviewed William Beeman, a professor of cultural and linguistic anthropology at the University of Minnesota, about U.S.-Russia relations especially in terms of Washington and NATO’s new plans to build an anti-missile system around Western Europe.

In response to a question about American plans to strengthen military bases in Alaska, Beeman replied, “This is an old, old story. The United States tried to establish missiles in Eastern Europe, supposedly in the Czech Republic, I believe, in order to defend against the attacks, as they said, from Iran. Now we are talking about North Korea.

“So the difficulty of course for Russia is that Russia wants to make sure that these missiles would not ever be deployed against Russia, and I can tell you that Russia borders both on Iran and on North Korea. So it is very hard for the United States to guarantee the Russians in any satisfactory way that these missiles would never be used against Russian territories, and I can really understand the Russians’ trepidation about this.”

• Christian belief, practice, and mental health

The Deseret News of Salt Lake City carried an opinion piece in response to a recent New York Times column by Stanford anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann, where she says that the reason is not entirely clear why church attendance “boosts the immune system and decreases blood pressure. It may add as much as two to three years to your life.”

She speculates that it is the social support of a congregation and the healthy habits of churchgoers. In clinical terms, she explains how someone can experience a God they can’t see and she observes, “those who were able to experience a loving God vividly were healthier — at least, as judged by a standardized psychiatric scale.”

Luhrmann is a professor of cultural anthropology at Stanford University and the author of When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God.

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Filed under: archaeology, cultural anthropology, military, religion by admin on April 29, 2013 | Social tagging: Arab Spring > art > Egypt > North Korea > Russia
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Guest post by Jamison Liang

As a graduate student in cultural anthropology whose research focuses on how international, national, and Islamic law have been applied to issues of gender and sexuality in the Indonesian province of Aceh, I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to partake in the recent conference, Sexuality and Political Change: A New Training Program hosted by Sexuality Policy Watch (SPW).

The meeting took place in Rio de Janeiro from March 18-22 and brought together 17 individuals from around the world who do research on sexuality in the global south and look to link their work to movements of political and social change. Sexuality Policy Watch, a Rio and New York-based organization, serves as a global forum for researchers and activists who engage with policy debates and initiatives on sexuality, gender, sexual and reproductive rights, HIV/AIDS, and LGBT activism. This pilot program aimed to provide a forum for participants to share our research and experiences while reflecting on the intersection of theory, research, and change in the realm of genders and sexualities.

One factor that made this conference so important for me—but also challenging—was the diversity of the participants both in interests and backgrounds. Attendees came from Argentina, Trinidad and Tobago, South Africa, Brazil, India, Egypt, the Philippines, Cameroon, China, and Mexico, among others. I was one of two Americans. We ranged from current graduate students to established professors to queer activists to UN lawyers and had expertise in areas including sexual health, LGBT rights, migration, and sex work.

In forums such as this, it is always helpful as a space for knowledge sharing, but it is undoubtedly difficult to negotiate how we translate all of our local identities and nationally-bound political structures into terms and strategies that have currency at the transnational and international level. (more…)

Filed under: communication, cultural anthropology, foreign/other, gender & sexuality, government, human rights, uncategorized by admin on April 29, 2013 | Social tagging: anthropology > LGBT > sexuality
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Proposals are sought for a two-day seminar to be conducted at SAR in fall 2014, in preparation for a plenary session at the SfAA meetings in spring 2015. The deadline for receipt of proposals is September 15, 2013. Details on this opportunity and the application process are found here.

Filed under: anthro connection, updates and publications by admin on April 29, 2013 | Social tagging: anthropology > scholarship
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By Sean Carey

It’s around 8 p.m. I have just turned the corner at the top of Shoreditch’s Great Eastern Street in London. I am walking past the fashionable Bird & Ballard coffee house when I am approached by a stockily-built stranger wearing a scruffy duffle coat with the hood up. I think he wants to know the time. I am wrong.

“I’m trying to get to Homerton Hospital because I’ve just fallen off my bike,” he says in a distinctive east London accent. “Could you spare some money so I could catch a bus?” As he speaks, he rolls up the left sleeve of his jacket and reveals an open wound on his forearm. It looks nasty.

I realize that I have met this man before. It was about six years ago at exactly the same spot. The memories come flooding back. It was exactly the same wound on the same arm. It was exactly the same form of words.

The penny drops. I realize that he is using a theatrical prop for the “I’ve-fallen-off-my-bike” wound. It’s very convincing though. I think to myself: although I fell for it then, I won’t this time. “I know you,” I say. “You pulled the same stunt on me a while ago.” The man, who I guess is in his mid or late 30s, looks taken aback but doesn’t miss a beat. “I’m not going to lie to you,” he replies, “but I’m homeless and I need some money to buy some food.”

This reply puts me in a dilemma. I have no idea whether he is homeless or not, or whether he is hungry. On the other hand, I’m impressed by his delivery.

In these sorts of urban micro-encounters a quick decision on my part is required. I decide that even if it’s a double scam, it’s a very good double scam. Looked at another way it’s high-level performance art played out on the street. He is the performer, and I am the audience.

I put my hand into my jacket pocket, and hand over a pound. “Thanks very much, guv’nor,” he says and disappears into the night.

Filed under: poverty by admin on April 28, 2013
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The worldwide resurgence of Islamic piety has raised important methodological and theoretical questions about subjectivity: what do these expressions of devotion mean to the people who engage in them? Mahmood (2006) argues that understanding Muslim women’s piety requires appreciation of an alternative subjectivity, one that challenges standard models of Western liberal feminism. Deeb (2010) has argued that pious discourse is not as coherent as all that, and that Muslim subjects entertain alternative models depending on the context. Professor of Anthropology, International Affairs and Human Sciences, Joel Kuipers calls for an ethnographic approach to piety, urging scholars to avoid prematurely attributing inner states and interior conditions to the people they describe. His research investigates piety in Islamic Java by examining ethnographically the role of Arabic as medium of expression in its context of use.

Joel Kuipers received his B.A. in English and sociology with Honors from Calvin College in 1976, and his M.Phil. (1978) and Ph.D. from Yale in 1982. Before he came to the Anthropology Department at The George Washington University in the fall of 1989, he served on the faculties of Brown, Wesleyan, and Seton Hall Universities. He has been a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (1994-95), and a visiting scholar at Harvard, Stanford, and Brown Universities. His main publications relate to the language and culture of Indonesia, and include: Power and Performance: the Creation of Textual Authority in Weyewa Ritual Speech (University of Pennsylvania, 1990); and Language, Identity and Marginality in Indonesia: the changing nature of ritual speech on the island of Sumba (Cambridge, 1998).

RSVP here

Filed under: events, religion, uncategorized by admin on April 23, 2013 | Social tagging: arabic > ethnography > Islam
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• Is egg freezing a good solution for professional women’s work-life challenges?

CNN carried commentary from cultural anthropologist Marcia Inhorn, the William K. Lanman Jr. professor of anthropology and international affairs at Yale University. Inhorn says, “Trying to balance career and family is difficult for many professional women. I am one of those educated career-driven women who completed my Ph.D., found a good husband and landed my first tenure-track job at a major public university by 35.” Egg freezing is the newest reproductive technology: a recently perfected form of flash-freezing that allows human eggs to be successfully stored in egg banks. Commercially available in American IVF clinics only since October 2012, egg freezing is being heralded as a “revolution in the way women age,” a “reproductive backstop,” a “fertility insurance policy,” an “egg savings account” and in particular, a way for ambitious career women to postpone motherhood until they are ready. With egg freezing, women can use their own banked eggs later in life to effectively rewind their biological clock, becoming mothers in their 40s, 50s and beyond. It’s a technological game changer that just might allow women to defy the notion that they can’t have it all.

Inhorn’s statements drew criticism from two other medical anthropologists, Lynn M. Morgan, Mary E. Woolley Professor of Anthropology at Mount Holyoke College, and Janelle S. Taylor, associate professor and chair of anthropology at the University of Washington. In The Feminist Wire, they write that Inhorn’s CNN advice  to women, “consider freezing your eggs” is right about one thing: “Trying to balance career and family is difficult for many professional women.” Yet the solution to the problem of balancing career and family for women – egg freezing – is entirely wrong. They point out that egg freezing is a new addition to the repertoire of assisted reproductive technologies, so of course people are intrigued. But egg freezing is also invasive, dangerous, unregulated, and very expensive. Worse, it is not a social solution, so it cannot address the social causes that make it so difficult for professional women to balance career and family.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Filed under: anthro in the news by admin on April 22, 2013
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Trends in Natural Disaster Response and the Role of Regional Organizations

Monday, April 22, 2013, 2:00 — 3:30 pm
The Brookings Institution, Saul/Zilkha Rooms, 1775 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC

Global demographic trends suggest that more people are living in areas vulnerable to sudden-onset natural disasters even as scientists predict that the frequency and intensity of these disasters are likely to increase as a result of the effects of climate change. These trends, coupled with recent high-profile mega-disasters like Hurricane Sandy and the drought in the Sahel, are raising global awareness of the need to build the capacity of national governments, civil society organizations and international actors to prevent, respond to and recover from natural disasters. The Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement’s third annual Review of Natural Disasters outlines these major disasters in 2012 and key response opportunities, in particular the role of regional organizations. Although regional mechanisms are playing increasingly important roles in disasters, there has been remarkably little research on their role in disaster risk management.

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Filed under: conservation, energy, environment, events, research, technology by admin on April 19, 2013 | Social tagging: brookings > disaster response > washington dc
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An editorial in the Economic and Political Weekly asks: Is the opposition to a proposed new BSc degree in community health course in the interest of the rural population?

“A Parliamentary Committee on Health recently asked that the government abandon its proposal to introduce a new educational course that will train healthcare providers for rural areas. The committee’s suggestion appears in tune with the Indian Medical Association’s (IMA ) shrill cries that this new course, the BSc in community health, will create “half-baked doctors” and with the general response of the MBBS doctors’ lobby that the government would be playing with the lives of the rural population.”

Filed under: development, government, health, medical anthropology, poverty by admin on April 16, 2013 | Social tagging: government > India > medicine > rural
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