Public Statement on the AAA’s “Repository for the Common Good”
The American Anthropological Association (AAA) has recently announced its intention to create what its president has termed a repository for the common good—a “freely accessible repository for all kinds of anthropological knowledge, including article preprints, conference papers, technical monographs and gray literature reports, datasets, project metadata, or any other kind of information anthropologists of all kinds and from all areas deem appropriate” [1]. At the same time, with little fanfare, the AAA has indicated that it plans to partner with Atypon [2], a company owned by the commercial publisher Wiley, in developing the proprietary infrastructure for this repository…. click here to continueI assume you do not necessarily need to be an anthropologist…
All anthropologists should consider using archives in their work. When I was in my 20s and working as a contract archaeologist on cultural resource management projects, I used state archives to get information on the land we worked on, and when doing ethnographic fieldwork in Egypt in 1989-90, I combed collections at the Egyptian Ministry of Irrigation, the American Research Center in Egypt, and the Institut d’Égypte. And while tens of thousands of pages of Freedom of Information Act documents form the backbone of my work examining relationships between anthropologists and the national security state, much of the context for examining these documents comes from identifying supporting documents in archives. Archives can be an invaluable resource for any anthropological project.
Wendy Fonarow arrived in Mexico City late in October 2017, eager to observe the nation’s Día de Muertos or Day of the Dead. Celebrations for this holiday—also called Día de los Muertos—start on the evening of October 31 and in fact span several days during which people celebrate lost loved ones. On November 1, they memorialize children, and on the second, adults.
On May 23, a bystander filmed 20-year-old Claudia Patricia Gómez González after a U.S. Border Patrol agent shot her in the head. The young woman had recently crossed into Texas from Mexico, and she was unarmed. In an article published soon after her death, her mother, who still lives in Guatemala, described her as “naughty and cuddly and playful,” adding that “she loved to draw and sing.”
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