By: Faye V. Harrison, Carole McGranahan, Matilda Ostow, Melissa Rosario, Paul Stoller, Gina Athena Ulysse and Maria Vesperi
The massacre in Orlando was just two days before we sat together around a seminar table in an idyllic New England college town. A massacre of forty-nine people out dancing, celebrating life in a gay nightclub called Pulse. They were mostly young, queer, and Latinx. Gone. Already stories had turned to focus on the killer’s motivations. Was this primarily homophobic homegrown terrorism or the machinations of the Islamic State? We were meeting at Wesleyan University in Connecticut to discuss the creation of the Public Anthropology Institute (PAI) and contemplate ways to use our scholarly knowledge of cultural difference for greater service globally. Given the disheartening public debate in this moment reminiscent of Dickens’ best and worst of times, we were convinced that this work is necessary in the face of such violence and hate.
By Krysta Ryzewski
Detroit moves quickly; issues of scale and pace in a city of this size pose major challenge to contemporary archaeological practice. I’m not sure what a decolonizing archaeology should look like here, but it’s happening nonetheless. It is grassroots.
Forensic Anthropology
Federal Bureau of Investigation (press release) (blog)
The facial approximation—rendered in clay using a forensic analysis of the women’s skull, along with a detailedanthropological workup and a deft artistic hand—was aimed at putting a distinctive face in front of as many people as possible, raising
Patricia Zavella wins anthropology association gender equity award
UC Santa Cruz
Patricia Zavella, UC Santa Cruz professor of Latin American and Latino studies, has been named winner of the 2016 AmericanAnthropological Association’s Committee on Gender Equity inAnthropology Award. The awards committee said Zavella’s career …
Vision and action in anthropological pursuit
The Statesman
Tarak Chandra Das is one hero who has not found a place befitting his importance in Indian anthropology. That his contributions to this field are enormous is never denied and it is time that matters are set right in an age where the examination of ..
The American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology News issued a Call for Proposals (text, photo, film, cartoon) to answer the question: “What can anthropology offer to public conversations about and understandings of mass shootings [in the wake of the attack in Orlando, FL].” Two-page proposals are due July 15th.
A garden isn’t just a patch of dirt where we plant vegetables, herbs, and flowers. A garden is a chronicle of culture. What we choose to grow often reflects our ethnic identities and customs that span generations. One tiny seed can be a tangible link between the world our ancestors knew and the world we inhabit today.
Edith Turner And The Anthropology of Collective Joy
Huffington Post
In cynical moments when I need to ponder the wonders of human existence, I think about the work of Edith Turner, a monumental anthropologist who died on June 18th of this year, one day after her 95th birthday. In all of her work Edie, as her friends …
Front. Ecol. Evol., 27 June 2016 | http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2016.00075
Deep Skull from Niah Cave and the Pleistocene Peopling of Southeast Asia
Darren Curnoe et al.
The Deep Skull from Niah Cave in Sarawak (Malaysia) is the oldest anatomically modern human recovered from island Southeast Asia. For more than 50 years its relevance to tracing the prehistory of the region has been controversial. The most widely held view, originating with Brothwell’s 1960 description and analysis, is that the Niah individual is related to Indigenous Australians.
[Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Kristen Drybread.]
The 2016 Olympics in Rio are fast approaching. For the past two months, people I haven’t seen in years—and people I have never even met—have been emailing to ask if I can help them find an affordable and, above all, safe place to stay during the Games. Never mind that I haven’t been to Rio for four years. Never mind that “affordable” and “safe” are relative terms. The assumption is that, having spent several years conducting fieldwork in northeastern Brazilian prisons (most recently in 2014-2015), I’m a better guide to Rio than the Lonely Planet.
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