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@theanthrolibrarian-blog
"These are icons designed by Liu Yang, a Chinese born but educated in her teen through adult life in Germany. Her work shows how East meets West. Her work fits so well with globalization of culture, people and places.
See whether you agree with her."
"The grim legacy of America's treatment of its native peoples is explored in detail in this documentary. Filmmakers Robin Davey and Yellow Thunder Woman take the perspective that if one is to define "genocide" as the a deliberate effort by a government to exterminate a people, then the United States is clearly guilty of the crime given their actions against America's indigenous population over the past 300 years. Davey and Thunder Woman back up their argument with footage detailing the economic marginalization of American Indians, the consistent violation of legal agreements reached with native tribes, the mismanagement and consistent neglect of Indian reservations, the brutalization of Native Americans as they were segregated onto flinty soil and forced to live under substandard conditions, and the refusal of the mass media to report stories of suicide and Columbine-style school shootings among reservation youth. The Canary Effect was screened in competition at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival."
When I teach qualitative research methods the first assignment involves a participant-observation exercise in public spaces and I encourage students to disrupt those settings, at the very least by asking questions, but even better by participating in ways that provoke a response in others. For the very brave these may become what Garfinkel calls “breaching experiments” where behavior is strategically designed to go beyond the realm of acceptable or predictable. The idea is that one can reveal some of the inner-workings of social interaction in the way those subject to such behavior try to resolve and make sense of what is, essentially, senseless. I like to show this flash mob – Frozen in Grand Central – in my class to illustrate the point. (Read More)
"Although meat is said to be the most highly prized category of food in the majority of human cultures, it is also, according to a recent ethnographic survey, “vastly more likely to be the target of food taboos,” than any other type of edible substance.[1] People throughout the world display strong aversions to killing and consuming particular animals, and the choice of which animals to proscribe varies unpredictably from culture to culture, and from place to place.
Professor James Serpell
The origin of these taboos has been one of the central preoccupations of anthropologists for more than a century, and the debate has gradually polarized into two opposing factions. On one side it is argued that restrictions on eating certain animals exist because there are (or there were in the not too distant past) sound practical, health-related or ecological reasons for such restrictions.[2] In the other camp, it is proposed that particular animals are not eaten because they have acquired various symbolic connotations that render their consumption unacceptable: For example, an animal might be tabooed because it combines anomalous or non-prototypical features—such as the pig’s cloven hooves combined with its failure to chew the cud—that somehow make it unpalatable.[3] Or the animal may symbolize the social group itself, and not eating it thus becomes a kind of gastronomic metaphor for exogamy,[4] or simply an expression of the structural workings of the ‘the savage mind’.[5] Rather than attempting to critique these various ideas, the purpose of this essay is merely to propose an alternative theory: That cultural proscriptions against eating particular animals represent a form of psychological coping mechanism that serves to dilute and displace individual moral responsibility for the killing and consumption of animals in general. Allow me to explain.
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Abstract:
"The dominant view in today's evolutionary psychology is that our instincts were stamped into our DNA during the infamous EEA, "The Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness." This is generally reckoned as a roughly two and a half million-year hunter-gatherer phase that ended before the climax of the last Ice Age. Since then, our genetically preprogrammed heritage has supposedly been locked in stone (or better yet, in an amino acid code). We are, so says the current argument, tribal hunter-gatherers decked out in modern clothes.
However a strong case can be made for the possibility that human biology has continued to evolve during the ten thousand years since Jericho's builders erected the first city walls. Genes change far more speedily than most evolutionary psychologists realize. Natural selection has had 400 generations to rework our bodies and our brains since the days when Catal Huyuk, Suberde, and Tepe Yahya joined Jericho's mesh of intercity trade. Four thousand years before the rise of the Sumerian cities of Ur, Uruk, and Kish, Stone Age metropolises from Anatolia to the edges of India were already rich in challenges and opportunities. These urban traps and niches may well have been selectors forming much of what we are today. Homo urbanis has not only arrived, he has long since elbowed Homo tribalis far off to the side."
Based on a hominid molar, scientists from Germany, Bulgaria and France have documented that great apes survived in Europe in savannah-like landscapes until seven million years ago.
A seven million year old pre-molar of a hominid discovered near the Bulgarian town of Chirpan documents that great apes survived longer in Europe than previously believed. An international team of scientists from the Bulgarian Academy of Science, the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, and Madelaine Böhme from the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment at the University of Tübingen was involved in the project. The new discovery may cause a revision in our understanding of some major steps in hominid evolution.
To date scientists have assumed that great apes went extinct in Europe at least 9 million years ago because of changing climatic and environmental conditions. Under the direction of Nikolai Spassov from the National Museum of Natural Science in Sofia, Bulgaria, the molar was discovered in Upper Miocene fluvial sediments near Chirpan. The morphology and the great thickness of the tooth enamel point to a hominid fossil. The age of the fossiliferous sands at 7 million years reveals the fossil to be most recent known great ape from continental Europe.
Until now, the most recent fossil was that of a 9.2 million year old specimen of Ouranopithecus macedonensis from Greece. Hominids therefore were thought to have disappeared from Europe prior to 9 million years ago. At this time, European terrestrial ecosystems had been changed from mostly evergreen and lush forests to savannah-like landscapes with a seasonal climate. It had been thought that great apes, which typically consume fruits, were unable to survive this change due to a seasonal deficiency of fruits.
The scientists found animals typical of a savannah in the fossil-bearing layer: several species of elephants, giraffes, gazelles, antelopes, rhinos, and saber-toothed cats. This discovery suggests that European hominids were able to adapt to the seasonal climate of a savannah-like ecosystem. This conclusion is further corroborated by electron microscope analysis of the tooth’s masticatory surface, which reveals that the Bulgarian hominid had consumed hard and abrasive objects like grass, seeds, and nuts. In this respect, the feeding behavior of this animal resembles that of later African hominids from about 4 million years ago (e.g. australopithecids like ‘Lucy’).
“We now also need to rethink where the origin of humans took place,” says Professor Madelaine Böhme of the University of Tübingen. So far, most scientists believe that human evolution happened exclusively in Africa and that humans migrated from Africa to other continents. “There is increasing evidence, however, that a significant part of human evolution happened outside Africa, in Europe and western Asia.”
That migration plays a major role in early hominid evolution was documented by paleontologists from the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment in June 2011, when they presented an early Eurasian hominid. A further piece to the puzzle had furthermore been an isolated molar tooth excavated southwest of Sigmaringen, Germany, and dated to 17 million years ago. The Tübingen group of paleoclimatologists led by Böhme reconstructed the climate at this time and demonstrated that great apes dispersed at this time under a tropical-subtropical and humid climate from Africa into Europe. Together, both investigations document an at least 10 million year lasting population of great apes in Europe and a significant evolution from fruit-eaters to harder object feeders.
Neanderthals mated with some modern humans after all and left their imprint in the human genome, a team of biologists has reported in the first detailed analysis of the Neanderthal genetic sequence.
The Neanderthal DNA that Svante Pääbo analyzed came from these three bones.
The...
Elif Shafak: The politics of fiction
Learn more about the Easter Island Statues, read extensive research reports, browse through the archaeological collection!
"Ten years after the Taliban’s leaders fled their country in apparent defeat, the war in Afghanistan has become what one observer calls 'a perpetually escalating stalemate.' As in Iraq, the United States military has responded to bad news with counterinsurgency: eliminate troublemakers in the dark of night, with the most lethal arts, and befriend tribal elders by day, with cultural sensitivity and expertise. The Army has gone so far as to embed credentialed social scientists with front-line troops in 'Human Terrain Teams' that engage in 'rapid ethnographic assessment' — conducting interviews and administering surveys, learning about land disputes, social networks and how to 'operationalize' the Pashtun tribal code.
The military, in short, demands local knowledge. But what kind of local knowledge is in supply, and what does it indicate? Though the chief purveyors of such insight, academic ethnographers, have balked at working with the military — the American Anthropological Association issued a report condemning the Human Terrain program as a violation of professional ethics — they have not ignored the country. Noah Coburn’s 'Bazaar Politics' is the first extended study of an Afghan community to appear since the Taliban fell. It follows an ambitious history of Afghanistan by the Boston University anthropologist Thomas Barfield, and an impassioned essay by Rory Stewart, the Conservative M.P., author-adventurer and Kabul preservationist, that faults the international effort in Afghanistan for its neglect of ethnographic insight. Whatever anthropology has to say about America’s longest war, it’s saying it now.
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"Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is one of the most original and influential minds in evolutionary anthropology. She first became known for her field study of Hanuman langurs, the sacred monkeys that range widely in the Indian peninsula. They are large and sometimes dangerous, and Hrdy was among that second generation of bold primatologists, just behind Jane Goodall and Diane Fossey, who did original work with primates.
Hrdy discovered, among other things, that dominant males in a group are challenged from time to time by roving adventurers who can mate only by defeating them. If defeated, the former leaders slink away, often wounded, while their successors attack and kill all infants under six months old. This brings their mothers back into heat, and the slain infants are supplanted by the new males’ offspring. Females resist this bravely, but to little avail.
If such behavior had been limited to langurs, it might have been an anomaly. But thanks in no small part to Hrdy’s leadership, it was also documented in chimpanzees, patas monkeys, lions, and many other species. Competitive infanticide was seen as a dark side of Darwinism, and a confirmation that no part of nature is free from the amoral logic of natural selection.
Hrdy went on to write a well-received book on the evolution of females, The Woman That Never Evolved.1 The mythic figure of that title was the soft, generous, seductive, maternal idol of the prehistoric world that served in the minds of many as a foil to their own muscular ancestors; these heroes needed something to fight for, fight over, and defend, and ideally she should be the defenseless, feminine figure of their dreams. In fact, this idol was not what she seemed, and by carefully demonstrating the power and aggressiveness of primate females both human and prehuman, Hrdy discredited this founding figure.
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"Johnny C. Parks died two days before his first birthday more than a century ago. His grave slipped from sight along with the rest of the tiny town of Bluffton when Lake Buchanan was filled 55 years later.
Now, the cracked marble tombstone engraved with the date Oct. 15, 1882, which is normally covered by 20 to 30 feet of water, has been eerily exposed as a yearlong drought shrinks one of Texas' largest lakes.
Across the state, receding lakes have revealed a prehistoric skull, ancient tools, fossils and a small cemetery that appears to contain the graves of freed slaves. Some of the discoveries have attracted interest from local historians, and looters also have scavenged for pieces of history. More than two dozen looters have been arrested at one site.
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antropologiavisualysonora:
This field needs a kick in the pants. How else can I explain what’s going on in American anthropology? Just at the time the public and our institutions are crying out for more open publications, anthropology’s largest professional association closed off its journals. Not that it matters much,…
via The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
Links to open access anthropology journals.
