I think I’ve mentioned before, but I really don’t understand the lure of watching sports on TV. Or in person. Or from a skybox in a stadium with 50,000 other people. Generally, I don’t understand watching sports. So when I moved to Manhattan, Kansas, home of the Kansas State Wildcats with a Big 12 football team, I didn’t quite understand what I was getting myself into. When I rented an apartment directly across the street from the university’s football stadium, my friends couldn’t believe my good fortune. I couldn’t understand why that would be exciting; I was happy just to get housing close to my classes……..
Without context, look back at ‘father of anthropology’ Franz Boas comes up short
Alaska Dispatch News
Franz Boas is widely hailed as the “Father of AmericanAnthropology.” An immigrant from Germany who first arrived on these shores in the 1880s, he rejected the prevailing belief among Western students of human cultures that there was an evolutionary .
In this piece I would like to explain, in detail, why I think Peter Wood’s recent piece in Anthropology News is fundamentally misguided. For a lot of readers, there will be no point in my doing so — they will just write Wood off as ‘racist’ and move on. I’m, shall we say, extremely sympathetic to this point of view. But I do think that Wood’s piece deserves some scrutiny to explain why so many people find it so misguided.
Why a Christian Anthropology Matters for Liberty and Love
Acton Institute (blog)
In her essay, she presents the biblical case for gender equality in a humorous and insightful way, grounding mutuality in theologicalanthropology. From the Genesis narratives to the new earth of Revelation, she affirms this thesis: We are all human
As many of you know, National Anthropology Day Is Coming. Since this novel holiday first reared its arbitrary and conventional head a few weeks ago, people have been asking: how can we celebrate National Anthropology Day? The answer, my friends, is: Mint.
That’s right: 19 February is also National Chocolate Mint day. Rejoice!
Two correspondents have written to let me know that a book by anthropologist and former SLA president Jane Hill is in the news.
Hill’s Everyday Language of White Racism (2008) presents an ethnographic analysis of everyday discourse.* She argues that although racist discourse has been transformed in the United States racism has not actually gone away.
Pigs for the Ancestors is an iconic ethnography, taught for decades in introductory courses and graduate seminars alike. Rapport’s theoretical ambition, the richness of highland PNG life, the detail in the ethnography — it all works together to produce an ethnography whose life has exceeded its sell-by date for decades. And now, the University of California San Diego provides 420 new ways to teach it: a massive, open access collection of 420 photos taken by Roy Rappaport across the course of his career.
This seems like a very interesting project that has an associated Youtubechannel. Old works of physical anthropology often included galleries of physical types of different ethnic and racial groups, and for many people this would have been one of the few opportunities to see people much different than themselves. It is nice to see modern technology being used to preserve a snapshot of the appearance of (admittedly not-average) examples of living ethnic groups. Of course, this is not a problem for the more populous or culturally prominent ethnic groups of the world, but when was the last time you saw what a Kalmyk,Uyghur, Kyrghyz, Altaian, Bashkir, or Lezgin looked like? (There seem to be English, French, and Russian versions of some of these materials).