A new blog: Anthropology and Publicity

Anthropology and Publicity – new blog (and workshop)

In a new blog called Anthropology & Publicity several authors discuss the reasons for the underexposure of anthropological knowledge and explore ways to improve its dissemination and application in society. The blog is part of a workshop at the Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands. One of the organizers is Martijn de Koning, author of the blog Closer

Public Anthropology: Some notes, hopes and wishes

Guest Author: Lorenz Khazaleh

How can anthropologists better contribute to the public debate? Questions about how to make anthropology more public have been debated over and over again.

I?m not sure if anthropological knowledge really is underexposed and that there is no willingness to share knowledge.

Do they really need our “help”? New Anthropology Matters is out

What kinds of theoretical insights have emerged from the anthropology of development? What can anthropologists learn from development work? Anthropology Through Development: Putting Development Practice into Theory is the topic of the new issue of the open access journal Anthropology Matters that was released a few days ago.

Public Anthropology: The Example of the Culture of Poverty

Guest Author: Daniel Lende

Graffiti and garbage. That phrase in the recent New York Times article, ?Culture of Poverty? Makes a Comeback, captured why I had to respond to the renewal of ideas linking culture and pathology.

When people see graffiti and garbage, do they find it acceptable or see serious disorder?

?Sorry, I don?t speak anthropologist?

Guest Author: Daan Beekers

As unquestionable specialists in the making (and breaking) of culture, anthropologists are in a position to provide invaluable insights on such burning issues as the perceived crisis of multiculturalism in Europe, the public presence of religion and persistent ethnic and religious violence around the world. Why, then, do these insights so often seem to fail to get the attention they deserve?

Tourism Featured in November AN

from American Anthropological Association by Amy

VIRTUAL ISSUE: COSMOPOLITANISM – CONVERSATION WITH AUTHORS AND COMMENTARY

In our attempts to draw out common themes related to Cosmopolitanism in these highly disparate essays, we asked each author to respond to the following set of questions:

The anthropology of trash

An interesting interview with the anthropologist-in-residence of the NYC Department of Sanitation.

The charismatic family: the Family of Love and the British middle class

The article postulates a structural similarity between New Religious Movement ?families? and Mainstream middle-class ?families?. Analysis of the former permits with regard to the latter the theorization of the exclusive family, posited as an intergenerational alliance of married couples. Both entities are constituted in charismatic, witnessing, and corporate processes. With the New Religious Movements, contradiction pertaining to a foundational state of communitas stimulates such processes, whilst with the exclusive family the parallel contradiction pertains to marriage. The focus is mainly on the exclusive family ?corporation?. In terms of charismatic and witnessing meanings this is compounded of relations of filiation, whose genealogical character is constituted symbolically to resolve marriage’s contradiction, and simultaneous relations of intergenerational affinity. The altruistic social obligations associated with such relations are explicated as misrepresenting the strategic nature of transactions between senior and junior generation married couples. Finally charisma envelops the resultant exclusive family, to express both its corporate properties and its further contradictions.

Cranial differences between Japanese Samurai and townsfolk

International Journal of Osteoarchaeology DOI: 10.1002/oa.1215

Evidence for temporal and social differences in cranial dimensions in Edo-period Japanese