Anthro roundup: ” Neuroanthropology of Social Space…”Clyde Snow dies at 86…”Cultural Ecology…

Anthropologist studies unifying potential of diversity

Phys.Org

Southeast Asia is about as far as one can get ? geographically and culturally ? from Iceland, where Hjorleifur Jonsson was born and raised. Yet it is this region that drew his interest as a budding anthropologist, and the area where his focus has remained.

ASU anthropologist studies unifying potential of diversity

Developing a Neuroanthropology of Social Space: Implications for North American Archaeology

Neuroanthropology by neuroanth

By Trevor Duke

Ybor City

A few days ago I was walking around Ybor City, a place near downtown Tampa known for its eclectic feel and mix of restaurants, alternative shops, and party spots. While Ybor is often associated with divergence from more typical forms of social life in the area, the spatial layout of the built environment was entirely familiar to me. Most buildings were squarely shaped and streets were laid out in a fashion similar to that of any other city I?d been in.

Cultural Ecology: Modeling with Computers

Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology

This post is part of a series on the history of computing in sociocultural anthropology.

Last week, I surveyed mid-century formalist approaches to computing and culture, which took culture as ideational ? a matter of mental states, structures, or content. Ethnoscience and cognitive anthropology epitomized this attitude toward culture, taking part in a cross-disciplinary ?cognitive revolution.? As Paul Edwards has outlined, computers were central to the emergence of cognitive science, which was founded on an understanding of the mind-brain relation by analogy to software and hardware. George Miller, a pioneer of cognitive psychology, suggested that computers helped collapse the behaviorist paradigm. Where behaviorism limited psychologists? theorizing to the mind?s strictly observable ?outputs? ? lever pulls and all that ? the computer offered a model for thinking about ?memory, syntactic rules, plans, schemata, and the like.? These notions could be instantiated in actual computers, providing a working model of what was going on in the mind. As Millersaid: ?We didn?t believe that computers were giant brains, but we could see the similarities.?

Carl Hoffman > Jared Diamond

Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology

Carl Hoffman is a travel writer who has recently turned his attention to New Guinea, where he produces grisly stories of cannibalism, murder, and The Smell Of Men. Jared Diamond is a scientist with decades of experience visiting New Guinea whose books attempt to humanize the people who live there. As an expert on Papua New Guinea, I was reallysurprised  to find that I was much more impressed with Hoffman?s understanding of Melanesia and its people than I was Diamond?s. So how could I like a cannibalism-obsessed journalist more than a scientist who admired Papua New Guinean?s parenting skills?

True Calling Interview: Anthropology in a Non-Traditional Path

Scientific American (blog)

I get to meld anthropology with digital media AND I get to write about the things that fascinate me and share them with you here. In hindsight, what I love about this interview is that it showcases my genuine love for this discipline. And I’m fortunate

Clyde Snow dies at 86; forensic anthropologist read old bones’ secrets

Los Angeles Times

As one of the world’s foremost forensic anthropologists, the wisecracking, chain-smoking Oklahoman had been on the witness stand many times before. But seldom had he been given the kind of golden opportunity he was handed in court by the deposed

Album Art for Anthropology

Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology

Shortly after I bought my wife a Kindle and started moving all my iTunes stuff over to Amazon Cloud Player I discovered that ACP had captured a bunch of podcasts I?d forgotten I had subscribed to. Maybe they were off of iTunes U or something, I don?t know. I listened to four or five and got into something else. In the meantime iTunes went on dutifully downloading them and I went on ignoring their existence.

Mock murder scene challenges anthropology, forensics students

Columbus Dispatch

Granted, they were plastic bodies, but they form part of a four-week forensic anthropology field school that 19 students are taking to understand how crime scenes are investigated. Burying the bodies weeks ago allowed the grass to grow, obscuring the

Ethnoscience: Being Scientific with Computers

Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology

This post is part of a series on the history of computing in sociocultural anthropology.

If we had to pick a moment when computers first appeared as anthropological research tools, it might be the 1962 Wenner-Gren Symposium on ?The Uses of Computers in Anthropology.? The proceedings would be published three years later, in a volume edited by Dell Hymes. Over the following decades, as journals featured reviews of computer programs for anthropologists, the symposium regularly served as the inaugural reference

Structuralism: Thinking with Computers

Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology

This post is part of a series on the history of computing in sociocultural anthropology.

In his foundational 1955 article ?The Structural Study of Myth,? Claude Lévi-Strauss outlined the program for a structuralist, cross-cultural study of mythology. The basic premise is prototypical structural anthropology: to analyze myths, one must decompose them into their constituent units (or ?mythemes?). Thus decomposed, hidden mythical patterns can be made evident. These patterns are the real ?content? of myths, according to Lévi-Strauss ? they persist across different tellings of the same myth, and they reflect the inner structures of the mind. More important for the structuralist project, they recur indifferent myths, cross-culturally, reflecting the psychic unity of mankind.1