Republished with permission from Berkeley News
In her research, writing and teaching, medical anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes focuses especially on violence, suffering and premature death on the margins of the modern world. Best-known for her work on the global trade in human organs, she was invited to participate in a Vatican conference last summer on human trafficking. The experience brought the Berkeley professor — a lifelong Roman Catholic and sometime critic of the church — into close proximity with Pope Francis. Scheper-Hughes recently shared reflections on the pope and the state of the Catholic Church with Berkeley News.
In 2011, I made a single-shot feature film – Rati Chakravyuh (2013, 105 minutes) that was a summit of my life long engagement with the ontology of cinematic temporality. A “single-shot feature film”, also called “continuous shot feature film” is a full-length movie filmed in one long takes by a single camera. This is one of the most technological challenging, aesthetically provocative and complex cinematic feats in the history of cinema. Only less than a dozen such films have been made.
Last year, in the midst of a campus mobilization led by Black students that rocked the U of Missouri (“Mizzou”), we caught a glimpse of a particular breed of non-apology, one anchored in Christian neoliberalism and felicitous of white privilege.
I’m referring to the November 9th resignation speech of Tim Wolfe, former President of Mizzou. Wolfe’s resignation represented a win for campus activists who through protests, encamped demonstrations, a hunger strike, and a historic strike of many football players, publicized the endemic racial injustice at Mizzou.
Staunchly opposed to marriages outside his nation, John Ross, the principal chief of the Cherokee from the late 1820s until his death in 1866, helped introduce restrictive laws against intermarriage between Cherokee women and white men. Ross, also known as Kooweskoowe, famously forbade his relatives from marrying outsiders. Yet, after his Cherokee wife died, he courted women in the elite circles of white American society. Mary Brian Stapler, a young white woman from Wilmington, Delaware, became the great love of his life, and their courtship and eventual marriage led to one of America’s epic romances. At the same time as Ross was negotiating his nation’s treaty with the U.S. government, he was working on his own “treaty,” as he called it, with Stapler. His courtship letters were sent from Washington, D.C., New York, and the Great Plains.
Biblio File: Butte instructor explores heart of linguisticanthropology
Oroville Mercury Register
Mike Findlay, longtime Butte College anthropology instructor (and my colleague), is a man full of liver. As he points out in his new textbook, while the reference doesn’t make sense to most English speakers, for many in Asia “the liver is associated ..
What’s the newest and weirdest sub-culture on the Internet, you ask? If you’re Vice Magazine, it’s apparently tulpamancers.
Tulpamancers are people who, through extended bouts of concentration and visualization, produce a special kind of imaginary friend that they call a tulpa. Tulpas are understood to be distinct sentient beings with their own personalities, inclinations and (relative) autonomy. Through various active and passive processes known as ‘forcing’ tulpamancers spend hours solidifying their impressions of their creations as something more than just an ordinary inner voice. (Active forcing means concentrating single-pointedly on the tulpa’s form and features, passive forcing is when the tulpamancer finds ways to bring tulpas into more regular routines, such as through ‘narrating’, where tulpamancers chat with or read stories to their creations). Tulpamancers meet tulpas in imagined environments called ‘wonderlands’, dream or mind-scapes that more fully contextualize interactions and provide a place for tulpas to ‘hang out’ when idle. They also work to perfect ‘imposition’ -seeing, hearing, or feeling tulpas in the ‘real world’ – and may practice tulpa-possession or even ‘switching’, where the tulpa takes over the host’s body and the host temporarily occupies the tulpa’s form in the wonderland.
Combating extremism with anthropology
Daily Times
How do we come to grips with the unprecedented menace of extremism and intolerance? In today’s increasingly exclusionary and insecure world, anthropology can guide us in the right direction. It is a unique opportunity for anthropology in any walk of …
Professor seeks to apply satellite imagery to anthropology
UConn Daily Campus
Dartmouth University professor Jesse Casana shared hisanthropological usage of the CORONA satellite imagery system during a lecture entitled “Lost Landscapes: Research Applications of Declassified CORONA Satellite Imagery” on Friday afternoon at the …
Living humans, all 7.3 billion of us, are classified as Homo sapiens. That means we are all part of the same species; our genus is Homo, meaning “man,” and our species is sapiens, meaning “wise.” Both genetic and fossil evidence place the origin of our species at about 200,000 years ago in Africa. But when and where did the earliest members of the genus Homo evolve? And what makes our genus unique compared with other branches on our family tree?
David Beriss
University of New Orleans
After the festivities of Carnival, we have Lent. Here in New Orleans, even if you are not Catholic, you are surrounded by information about restaurants with Lenten specials, Friday night church fish fries, and other fishy pleasures. Church leaders are called upon to clarify if things like alligator are approved for consumption during Lent (it is). There is some interesting history behind this, of course. But the fact is, this is a great time for seafood lovers in Louisiana. There is a lot of fresh and local seafood around most of the time, but at this time of year we are encouraged to eat it more than usual.
Anthropology professor excavates ancient tombs in Sudan
Purdue Exponent
Incredibly, remnants of this civilization still exist, giving Michele Buzon, an associate professor of anthropology, the chance to uncover more information about the relationship between the Nubians and Egyptians. “My collaborator, Dr. Stuart Tyson ..
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