Anthropology roundup: “On the anthropology of climate change….

On the anthropology of climate change

Mainstream literature on globalization tends not to take the uniqueness of each locality seriously enough, says Thomas Hylland Eriksen. He explains how the anthropology of climate change is responding to the need for an analysis of the global situation seen from below.

The Anthropocene: Great Marketing, Wrong Product

It was in 2011 that the Economist, a publication usually known for arcane speculation on geopolitics and economics, welcomed its readers to the Anthropocene and warned that humans had “changed the way the world works.” The drumbeat behind the concept has continued, recently receiving new momentum with the release in the Jan. 8 issue of the journal Science of a report by the Anthropocene Working Group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy of the International Commission on Stratigraphy with the catchy title “The Anthropocene Is Functionally and Stratigraphically Distinct From the Holocene.” News outlets such as the BBC provided extensive coverage.

The Beach – A Frontier of Nostalgia

by Duane Jethro

The beach is a place of waste and ruin. Rotting seaweed, stinking dead seals, cracked and crushed shells, deflated bluebottles, fat blobs of translucent jellyfish melting away in the sun. All the finished, broken things spewed out by the ocean.

Why We Must Talk About Race

I grew up a black woman in urban Los Angeles during the age of the civil rights movement. “Race” was all around me, woven into the fabric of my personal life, my community, my country. Perhaps it was inevitable that I would become a cultural anthropologist who studies how race works in the world. I’ve always wanted to know why. Why do we live in this community, and not another? Why are people treated differently because of their skin color, and is this true all over the world? Anthropology was the discipline that provided me with a platform to answer such questions, which I have been asking ever since I can remember.

 

Why the world needs World Anthropology Day

Today is World Anthropology Day, a global celebration of all things anthropological. The American Anthropological Association beta-tested this new holiday last year as ‘National Anthropology Day’, and we had a splendid time celebrating with delicious recipes and reminiscing about Alessandro Volta (andmore). But ‘world anthropology day’ is a better fit, not only because it is more inclusive, but because it helps point out just how tight the fit is today between the world and anthropology.

Book: The Theological Anthropology of David Kelsey
Yale News
David Kelsey’s two-volume study, “Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology,” has been recognized as a major achievement, the culmination of decades of theological thought about what it means to be a human being in relationship with God.

UCSB Plans Plethora of Family-Friendly Activities for WorldAnthropology Day
Noozhawk
Anthropology is a broad subject. But then, so is humankind, the amorphous body that anthropology as a field of study seeks to better understand. Anthropology looks at us — our origins, our physical and cultural development, our biological ..

If true, this is very hard to reconcile with late (60kya) out of Africa and may be a smoking gun for pre-100kya presence of anatomically modern humans in Eurasia. From the paper:
Pioneering anthropologists, such as Émile Durkheim and Bronisław Malinowski in the early twentieth century, have long argued that supernatural beliefs offer a powerful way to build materially cooperative societies. But in the thriving new field of

Sam Beck’s book frames anthropology as a means of change

Sam Beck has co-edited a new volume on the theory and practice of public anthropology. Source: Cornell Chronicle.

Scientists: Neanderthals Mated with Humans 100000 Years Ago
Sci-News.com
The team, led by Dr. Sergi Castellano of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Prof. Adam Siepel of Cornell University, Ithaca, analyzed the genomes of a Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) and a Denisovan from the Altai Mountains …
Humans and Neanderthals may have interbred 50000 years earlier than previously thoughtWashington Post
Neanderthal-Human Sex Happened EarlierDiscovery News
Neanderthals and humans interbred ‘100000 years ago’BBC News
TIME –GenomeWeb –ZME Science
all 39 news articles »

Forensic anthropologist shares experiences with SBCC students
The Channels
A 20 gallon cooler swarming with maggots filled with a horrendous smelling soup containing decomposed flesh and bones was found sitting outside a morgue. A forensicanthropologist and a grad student spent an entire day sifting through the cooler filled ..

Skeletons Come Out of the Closet
The UCSB Current
Anthropology is a broad subject. But then, so is humankind, the amorphous body that anthropology as a field of study seeks to better understand. Anthropology looks at us — our origins, our physical and cultural development, our biological .

 

Anthropology Day panel addresses racism in the field
Dailyuw
On Feb. 18, World Anthropology Day, graduate student Acquanda Stanford and program assistant Sasha Duttchoudhury facilitated an open discussion between faculty members and students about the legacy of racism in the field of anthropology.

 

Archaic introgression in Pygmies

We must remember that detecting archaic admixture in Africa is a statistical power game where only a particular type of such introgression can be detected:

First, it needs to be from highly diverged Palaeoafrican sources so that it will look very different from plain H. sapiens DNA. Unlike Eurasia, there’s no genome of an ancient Palaeoafrican one can compare against. All inference is based on African genomes having an improbable amount of heterozygosity in parts of their genome.


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