Vale Dell Hymes roundup and more from the Anthro world…

We have lost another great anthropologist recently. I have already announced the news and here is a few more links about Prof. Dell Hymes. and more of other stuff below…

Vale Dell Hymes

As Kerim noted, Dell Hymes passed away. My connection to Hymes is tangential?mostly the odd personal connections that come with the small world of academics?and others will be able to memorialize him better than I. The passing of Hymes and Lévi-Strauss so closely together is sad but also offers a time for us to reflect on these academics, their legacies, and their different personal style. Lévi-Strauss loved culture and, at times, seemed almost traumatized that he was forced to study people in order to get at it. Hymes?s writings are equally scrupulous, but deeply honor human life and are dedicated to finding the beauty and complexity in the ephemeral moments of our speaking and story-telling. In 1968 Lévi-Strauss?s structures took to the streets. In 1972 Dell Hymes published Reinventing Anthropology.

Dell Hymes? Passing

While no obituary has appeared yet, there seems to be conclusive understanding via the moccasin telegraph that Dell Hymes has passed away. So soon after the death of Claude Lévi-Strauss, this is another significant loss in the fields of Native American studies, anthropology and folklore studies.

Dell Hathaway Hymes, 82, Penn education dean
Philadelphia Inquirer
Dr. Hymes joined Penn as a professor of anthropology in 1965. He was appointed dean in 1975. He left in 1987 to became a professor of anthropology and

AAA Mourns Passing of Dell Hymes, Past President

from American Anthropological Association by Dinah

We sadly report the passing of former AAA president Dell H. Hymes, who died Friday, Nov 13, 2009, at the age of 82. Hymes was Commonwealth Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of Virginia. Prior to retiring, he taught courses in linguistic anthropology, Native American mythology, ethnopoetics, and Native American poetry. He authored numerous publications, including Ethnography, Linguistics, Inequality: Essays in Education, 1978-1994 (1997), and Now I Know Only So Far: Essays in Ethnopoetics (2003). AAA will publish a full obituary honoring Dell Hymes in a future issue of AN.

Dell Hymes, 82 Linguistics, anthropology scholar
Washington Post
Dell Hymes, an influential scholar of linguistics and anthropology who helped pioneer the study of how people use language in their everyday

Dell Hymes, Linguist With a Wide Net, Dies at 82
El Paso Inc
At his death, Professor Hymes was the Commonwealth professor of anthropology emeritus at the University of Virginia, where he had taught from 1987 till his

American Anthropological Association 2009 Annual Meeting

The American Anthropological Association will hold its annual meeting December 2nd through the 6th at the Philadelphia Mariott Downtown hotel in Philadelphia, PA. The theme for the 2009 meeting is “The End/s of Anthropology”.Below is my annual partial list of panels and meetings of interest to linguistic anthropologists, including those sponsored by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology.There

LSE academic awarded prestigious Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing The FINANCIAL The FINANCIAL — Dr Matthew Engelke|, a senior lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at LSE, has won the 2009 Victor Turner Prize for his ethnography,

Archaeology & Interpretation

?There is always a tension between past and present in archaeological interpretation; between the past meanings and processes which we wish to reconstruct from the material remains, and the meanings which we wish those remains to reveal to us in the present. This tension is nowhere greater than in accounts of past cultural groups.?

Surfing the credit crunch with Abdul Aziz

Keith Hart www.thememorybank.co.uk

The fall of the Berlin Wall was famously heralded as ?the end of history?, but in fact it restored a sense of history for many of us by catapulting us back to before the Cold War and even to the origins of the USSR in the Russian revolution. Questions that had been frozen for decades reappeared, such as ?What will be the glue of the new Russian Federation??, ?Will Germany resume its dominance of Central Europe??, ?What should be the boundaries of the European Union?? and so on. The war in former Yugoslavia reopened the history of genocide in Europe and Serbian nationalism confronted the complacent powers of Western Europe with an ugly reminder of their own history.

Anthropology and Journalism: Submit Your AN Article Proposal by Dec 18

Anthropology has long had a complex relationship with news media. In many ways, increasing collaboration between anthropologists and print, broadcast or online journalists offers great potential for making our research more accessible and theoretical perspectives more mainstream, in addition to boosting public understanding of and engagement with anthropological research findings. However, journalistic anthropology and anthropological journalism also pose several key challenges for practitioners in both fields, including difficulties in balancing the goals, priorities, timelines and communication styles of journalism and anthropology.

Policy Events @ the Annual Meeting

The Committee on Public Policy has compiled a list of policy-related events taking place at the annual meeting.  To view the detailed list, please click here.

The Autopsies Project

The Autopsies Project explores how objects die. Just as the twentieth century was transformed by the advent of new forms of media – the typewriter, gramophone, and film, for example – the arrival of the twenty-first century has brought the phasing out of many public and private objects that only recently seemed essential to “modern life.” ………..

Further information on this new research project, seminars, lectures, as well as the regular ‘Autopsies’ blog can be found here: http://www.autopsiesgroup.com

Psychoanalytic metaphors and mythical medical realities in Claude Lévi-Strauss?s contribution to medical anthropology

There are few subject areas in anthropology untouched by the seminal thought of the late Professor Claude Lévi-Strauss. Though he published only two or three essays concerned expressly with medical subject matter, his theorization in those places of the role of myth and shamanistic authority in symbolic/magical healing opened up questions with lasting significance. I would like to briefly review his ideas with the aim of proposing an alternative reading of them, particularly as they may be applied to contemporary debates in psychiatric anthropology.

0.179: Imperialism, Americanization, and the Social Sciences

Cultural imperialism rests on the power to universalize particularisms linked to a singular historical tradition by causing them to be misrecognized as such. (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1999, p. 41)

If the social sciences are Eurocentric, does this also mean that they are imperialist?

Where Immanuel Wallerstein finds liberalism as the underpinning of the geoculture of the capitalist world-system, rooted in Eurocentrism, Bourdieu and Wacquant (1999) find their counterparts in the hegemonic theories current in academia. They speak of commonplace notions and theses with which one thinks, but about which one does not think (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1999, p. 41). And why not?

Man happy with simple life in Utah cave United Press International Suelo took up his lifestyle nine years ago despite having a master’s degree in accounting and a degree in anthropology. He says he will never embrace a