Episode of a neat little anthropology television program from the 1990s, “Strangers Abroad”, all about anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard and his very influential work on witchcraft among the Azande and Nuer in East Africa
SAVAGE AMERICA
time will discover the hand that baptizes him.
-
2013-05-16 8 notes
-
2013-05-08 190 notes
The Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City is one of the signature works of architect Pedro Ramirez Vazquez, who died April 16 at 94.
Source: modernizing
-
2013-04-18 25 notes
Eric Hayot discusses anachronism, elderly resentment, and Claude Levi-Strauss in Japan:
Time makes us all anachronisms to ourselves. As we get older, we are all left behind by a history we had once been sure we were making. We struggle, in our aging bodies, to recall the embodied force of fitter, sharper selves. The problem is worse, presumably, if you live to be 100, like the late anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (born in 1908, he finally passed away in October 2009). By then, you may have lived long enough, as Lévi-Strauss did, to see your upstart theories kill their most visible father (Jean-Paul Sartre), dominate the village for decades, produce a litter of influential children (Althusser, Foucault, Bourdieu), and gradually fade into respectability, granting you the privileged gestures of institutional and governmental recognition — Nicolas Sarkozy visiting you at home on your birthday, for instance — that we use to bury something while praising it.
Source: lareviewofbooks
-
2013-04-16 7 notes
If I were to generalize,” Mr. Graeber says, “I would say that what we see is a university system which mitigates against creativity and any form of daring. It’s incredibly conformist and it represents itself as the opposite, and I think this kind of conformism is a result of the bureaucratization of the university.
—
A Radical Anthropologist Finds Himself in Academic ‘Exile’
not really a Graeber fan but he’s correct
Source: chronicle.com
-
2013-04-15 4 notes
-
2013-04-02 4 notes
Source: failuresconference.wordpress.com
-
2013-03-28 6 notes
And the Huitotos too, they are compacted with the devil, they see and converse with each other. Because the Huitotos have no soul, but just a spirit of air. They don’t eat. What they eat is wind, or flowers, nothing more than the fragrance of flowers…like those spirit creatures, freaks, and monsters in the medieval bestiaries depicting the ‘marvels of the East,’ the savages of India and Ethiopia, and, which were, one can safely presume, influential in the imaginings of the great discoverers and conquistadores. Colombus, it is said, studied these entities, and it has been speculated that Hieronymus Bosch found in them figures to fill his hells…Tied to the devil in the way that they are, the Huitotos have no moral sensibility. Like animals, they don’t know the difference between right and wrong. But like animals, they are powerful and have sensibility and knowledge possessed by no human.
— Michael Taussig, “History as Sorcery”, Representations No. 7 (Summer ‘84)
-
2013-03-24 9 notes
The adaptability and plasticity of sorcery are the result of its ambivalence and circularity, and it is precisely on this ambiguity that lies the creative potential of sorcery…in magic there is always a missing link - something in between the premise and the achievement of the final objective that remains unknown, unexplainable, a mystery: transforming the handkerchief into a dove, water into wine…In the face of unexplainable facts, and more acutely in the face of misfortune, we need names, we need something or somebody to take the responsibility…the disjuncture between the world and our knowledge and power to control it is especially evident in moments of radical social change and transformation, when history knocks on the door. It is right then that sorcery may come in handy to help us get some protection from the unexpected or that we may accuse others of using occult powers against us. Sorcery becomes again a way of producing meaning, a social theory to make sense of unexpected and adverse events for which no traditional explanation exists.
Roger Sansi and Luis Nicolau Pares, “Introduction”, Sorcery in the Black Atlantic (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
-
2013-03-14 9 notes
Chagnon is right when he notes in Noble Savages that anthropologists have often been critical of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology (explaining observed behaviors as a result of genes that were selected in the distant past to maximize reproductive fitness). Chagnon may be sensitive to these criticisms because he is a sociobiologist. However, these criticisms are hardly limited to anthropologists, and furthermore, the critiques are based on logical alternatives and data, that is, on scientific grounds. Similar to how Chagnon extrapolates from his data on homicide to the inherently violent nature of Paleolithic humans, he extrapolates from a critique of sociobiology to widespread biophobia. However, this extrapolation is not evidence based. Contra Chagnon, in anthropology today one finds a broad and growing engagement in nearly all subfields of anthropology with the natural and biomedical sciences and non-human and human biologies. These engagements are likely not the types that Chagnon would recognize, but they are undeniable.
—
I’m really tired of thinking and reading about Chagnon but this piece by former AAA prez Alan Goodman is probably the best response yet
Source: The Huffington Post
-
2013-03-06 6 notes
A book review on Feb. 19 about the anthropologist Napoleon A. Chagnon’s “Noble Savages” referred incorrectly to an academic group’s position on the relation of science and anthropology. The group, the American Anthropological Association, has a long-range plan referring to “anthropological sciences”; it did not vote to “strip the word ‘science’ from its mission plan.” • A report in the Observatory column on Feb. 26 about the resignation of a social anthropologist from the National Academy of Sciences referred incorrectly to criticisms of Napoleon A. Chagnon’s research on an Amazon tribe. Some criticism of the research has in fact appeared in peer-reviewed journals; it is not the case, as Dr. Chagnon said, that no such journals published the criticism.
—
Yowch, NYT.
Source: The New York Times
-
2013-03-04 25 notes
To regard people as if they were not people is objectification. It is repugnant in modern cultural life, and it is a false proposition as science, because, in a nutshell, people really are people. So, as a scientist working on people, you have three choices. Either you can pretend that they’re not people (evil), or you can pretend that you are not a person (stupid), or you can acknowledge that the classic subject/object distinction that is fundamental to classical science simply breaks down here. That is eventually what Martin Arrowsmith realized (medical researcher, not an anthropologist, but the point holds) in the famous 1925 novel by Sinclair Lewis. You can’t pretend you are not human, and you can’t pretend they are not human, but somehow you still have to do your scientific work as rigorously as possible, confronting the culture in your science as fairly as possible. This science is reflexive.
Source: anthropomics.blogspot.com
-
2013-02-20 3 notes
G.H. Shepard’s “Grace of the Flood: Mushrooms and Mayan Culture in Chiapas” featuring David Arora
This film (Hi-8 color video, 20 min.) explores the knowledge and use of mushrooms by Tzeltal and Tzotzil Mayan Indians of Chiapas in southern Mexico. Filmed in 1992, the video includes a special participation by renowned California mycologist David Arora, author of the popular mushroom guides “Mushrooms Demystified” and “All that the Rain Promises and More.”
Filmed and edited by Glenn H. Shepard
Produced in the Ethnographic Film Program at the University of California, Berkeley
copyright 1993, G.H. ShepardSource: vimeo.com
-
2013-02-19 24 notes
While we recognize that the figure of Indiana Jones is attractive, it is about as useful for understanding anthropology as Fred Flintstone is for understanding life in the Neolithic. Your article perpetuates an outdated and narrow stereotype of our profession. The 11,000 members of the American Anthropological Association alone actually spend their time doing a vast array of things. Today’s anthropologists can be found in such diverse endeavors as leading the World Bank, designing health care for areas devastated by disaster, or researching the causes of the 2008 recession or the deaths of 100 boys in a defunct reform school in Florida. The representation of a field paralyzed by debates about ‘science, ’ vs. ‘advocacy ’ is similarly inaccurate, given the non-polarized ways most anthropologists today understand ‘science’, ‘advocacy’ and the nature of the field. The article also misses one of Napoleon Chagnon’s lasting legacies to our field: the reminder to engage in constant reflection about anthropological ethics.
— Indiana Jones is to Anthropology as Fred Flintstone is to Neolithic Life
Source: blog.aaanet.org
-
2013-02-13 8 notes
Source: The New York Times
-
2013-02-11 16 notes
I think, like shamanism and yagé, terror is something that I like to keep corralled in a corner. I have a feeling that to talk and write about violence, you often get into a sort of pornography of violence. And violence is such a phenomenon that writing about it can make it worse. I don’t see violence as — how should I put it? You can’t objectify the violence and treat it as an object to be prodded and measured and so forth. I feel that writing, no matter what the style, gets the writer and reader involved [in violence] in ways that make the world a worse place. So I treat it with incredible respect, and I sort of have an idea that you can talk about it, write about it once, and you should shut up after that.
— Los Angeles Review of Books - I Swear I Read This: John Cline Interviews Michael Taussig
Source: lareviewofbooks.org
