#Anthropology roundup: “Humanity’s Surprising Variety of Approaches to Toilet Training…

[no-caption] David D/Flickr

This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Are 2-year-olds too young to start toilet training?

Sun Ra > Black Panther

The Black Panther movie has been out for a little bit now, and posts both pro and con have been circulating on the Internet (Kerim has a quick roundup in a microblog of his). As a white guy who studies the Pacific, I don’t really have anything to say about Black Panther, which I liked as well as any entry in Marvel’s massive movie franchise. I guess it’s not surprising that Black Panther’s hero ends up endorsing an Obama-like liberal internationalism nor that the separatist (his father) and radical revolutionary (the pretender to the throne) both had porridge which ended up being too cool and too hot respectively. Just given the amount of eyeballs and dollars which the movie has attracted, it will probably be debated in the halls of Afrofuturism for a good while to come. But perhaps the release of the movie gives us a chance to return to one of the figures of Afrofuturism who  deserves to be remembered even more than he is today: Sun Ra.

Grief Can Make Us Wise

A candlelight vigil on February 15 honored the victims of the recent mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida. Jim Rassol/Getty Images

In the first hours after the February 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, we saw the same scenes of horror, shock, fear, and heartbreak replayed over and over again. As with other recent mass shootings, much of the reporting focused on the gunman, his weapon, and his strategy, as if the reporter’s work would be done once we knew who to hate.

Petty Nationalism and the Right’s War on Language

This post was submitted by Phillip M. Carter, an associate professor of linguistics at Florida International University’s Cuban Research Institute

The French Revolutionaries, compelled as they were by their own notion of égalité, put forth a radical idea: eliminate social inequality by giving all French citizens access to the French language. A common language, disseminated to the masses in a standardized form through a national system of public education, they thought, would enfranchise the disenfranchised and centralize the concerns of the nation in the lives of the citizenry. Une langue, un peuple, une nation, they told the world – ‘one language, one people, one nation.’ Their idea to articulate national identity through monolingualism caught on, not only across Europe, but the world over.

Lazy PowerPoint (Working With Text 4)

We all know we should bike to work, but sometimes the weather is bad, or we are late, or just feeling lazy, and so we take the car. Similarly, we all know that we shouldn’t use use PowerPoint, or if we do use PowerPoint we shouldn’t stuff them full of text and bullet points but instead use illustrative pictures. But sometimes we are running late, or just feeling lazy, or maybe even have a good reason1 for using text-heavy slides, so today I’m going to show you the quickest, laziest, way to turn a text file into a presentation.

in Madagascar, caring is a community affair

Professor Douglas Hume with his research assistants in Mahatsara, Madagascar, in summer 2012; they were conducting an ethnographic interview with an informant (not pictured). Provided by Douglas Hume
Ivory beads and ochre—affixed to the pelvic bones of a child—likely decorated the burial clothing of this 10-year-old interred at Sunghir some 34,000 years ago. E. Trinkaus/Trinkaus and Buzhilova/Antiquity

Around 34,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers who roamed the Russian plains started to bury their dead at the site of Sunghir, about 200 kilometers east of what is today Moscow.

    1. Ancient cave paintings turn out to be by Neanderthals, not humans  The Verge
    2. Earliest cave art belonged to Neanderthals, not humans: study  Yahoo7 News

Full coverage

ask an expert: anthropologist Susan Brownell watches world come together at olympic games

UMSL Anthropology Professor Susan Brownell is an expert on the Olympic Games, having studied their history and attended five Games – the first in Los Angeles in 1984. Later this week, she will travel to Pyeongchang, South Korea, for her first Winter Games. (Photo by August Jennewein)

Susan Brownell has spent considerable time researching Olympic Games, both their history and their standing in our modern world, during her career.

What is Good Food? Five episodes of delicious stories and conversations about how we know what we eat is ‘good’. This podcast series is produced by a group of food researchers, and our conversations are based on papers presented at a food research workshop organised by the SOAS Food Studies Centre and University of Warwick Food GRP.

Via itunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/what-is-good-food/id1309980803?mt=2

Via soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/whatisgoodfood

Staring back at the evil eye

A few months into my fieldwork in a Romanian village, I was told by friends that I wonder way too much. When visiting people in their homes, I alway noticed something interesting, be it old house architecture, inventive implements, cute animals or anything catching my attention. My mistake, I was told, was expressing my curiosity

Who First Buried the Dead?

The skeleton on the left is “Lucy,” an Australopithecus afarensis that is 3.2 million years old. The one on the right is a Homo naledi called “Neo,” which is roughly 250,000 years old. John Hawks/Wits University

This article was originally published at Aeon.


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