19 July. Deadline for Independent Assessment of Human Terrain System…

2500 Year Old Anatolian Face:

A University of Otago team has re-created the face of a 2500-year-old Turkish peasant, its second such project, and hopes its technology will be used in courts in coming years. University of Otago senior lecturer in anatomy and structural biology Dr George Dias, who heads the group, the only one in New Zealand doing facial reconstructions, hoped to refine the technology to a standard where it would stand scrutiny in court, and act like a fingerprint for identification. Dr Dias travelled to Turkey last year, after a request from Anadolu University, with which Otago has an ongoing collaboration, for a facial reconstruction for a body uncovered during an archaeological dig in Kultepe, a site that was on the crossroads of east-west and north-south trade routes.……..

Independent Assessment of Human Terrain System: Findings to Pentagon on 19 July 2010

The Independent Assessment of the US Army?s Human Terrain System requested by the House Armed Services Committee is scheduled to be completed on 19 July 2010. The Center for Naval Analyses?CNA?was contracted by the Undersecretary of Defense, Intelligence, to conduct the Independent Assessment. According to Tim Sullivan of the CNA, ?The International Affairs Group (IAG) of CNA was responsible for conducting the assessment and will turn over its report to the sponsor [USD/I] on July 19^th.?

HTS and Anthropology: Political Terrain

Jason Motlagh posted a nice short piece about anthropology and HTS at Time.com on Thursday. Motlagh points out some key issues at the heart of the HTS acrimony and makes note of both the AAA?s CEAUSSIC statement and the campaign by the Network of Concerned Anthropologists (NCA).

Despite the piece giving voice to many of us HTS critics? greatest hits, there are a few more that I feel the need to shout out myself.

From Nature/Culture to Culturally-Dominated Nature: A Spring Conference Overview

A particularly packed spring conference season recently wound up for me, having attended four conferences over the course of about a month and a half. Two of these stood out for the contrast of the approaches to the human, personhood and the self and the questions they raised for the study of each. What was most interesting, was the relative absence of the human in these social science meetings (one anthropology, the other a multi-disciplinary crowd of sociologists, historians and anthropologists, among others), either ignored or present only in its most generic form. The two conferences in question were the biennial meeting of the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA) and the annual meeting of the Association Francophone Pour le Savoir (ACFAS). I will start with a discussion of the second, but focus on the first.

Olga Solomon on Anthropology and the Study of Autism

More of the articles in the 2010 issue of the Annual Review of Anthropology are now available online (unfortunately only to those with subscriptions or institutional access).  One of the most interesting reviews is an article by Olga Solomon called “Sense and the Senses: Anthropology and the Study of Autism.”  Solomon is a linguist in the Department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy at the University of Southern California, who has written extensively on autism, language and sociality.  She was a co-editor of a recent special issue of Ethos on autism, which I wrote about here several months ago.

General Petraeus? Magic Bag: Human Terrain System and Covert Ops

So General David Petraeus is back on the COIN campaign trail arguing that pacifying the Human Terrain (HT) is his number one priority. Petraeus? model program for converting an indigenous human terrain that is opposed to US occupation to a pliant human terrain has been the troublesome US Army Human Terrain System run out of TRADOC?s G-2 (Intelligence) unit.

RealId and Salvage Ethnography

This post is about how ephemeral virtual worlds are, and how they thus prompt some general thoughts about how fieldsites change over time. But to get there I need to explain what RealID is.