Curated online listening/watching, bi-weekly

(example) From the email to American Anthropological Association members on Saturday, December 5, 2020 and issued for the past month or so as a convenience and way to promote wider participation in these arenas.
 

• Caste, Speaking of Race
• Moments of Resilience Amid a Pandemic, Sapiens
• Episode 117 - Fish People, The Dirt
• 85: How Food "Authenticity" Commodifies Identities With Jenny Dorsey, AnthroDish
• The Familiar Strange
• Ep# 68"Landing on the Earth": Ashley Carruthers on Organic Farming and Cycling in Vietnam, The Familiar Strange
• More than a Game: Sports, Race, and Masculinity in Diaspora w/ Vyjayanthi Vadrevu and Stanley Thangaraj, This Anthro Life
• Meet Islam's Da Vinci: Al-Biruni, father of geodesy, anthropology, and master of pharmacy, ZMEScience
• Seven Essential Listens From the Indigenous Podcasting Boom, Vanity Fair
• Why We Can't Stop Talking about 'Hipster' Pastors, Christianity Today
• Color Struck!, Zora's Daughter
• The Black Liberal Agenda, Zora's Daughter
• In Search of Light in Dark Times, The SCAS Talks Podcast
• Moments of Resilience Amid a Pandemic, Sapiens Podcast
• Full Moon over Chiapas, RadioAmbulante
• Allusionist 121. No Title
• The Invention of Race, NPR
• Episode 17 - COVID-19 and Fisheries Research, Social FISHtancing
• A breakdown of the hit crime television show Bones - what's real and what's fiction!, That Anthro Podcast
• Channel Islands Archaeology with Dr. Torben Rick, That Anthro Podcast

Maybe this source will present good things to share with students and colleagues now or in future years.

Used in conjunction with Wikipedias in multiple languages, this concentration of anthropology presentations will be a place to explore from time to time.

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OARR: Open Anthropology Research Repository is the free, publicly available anthropology resource where you can find and share research.

Excerpt from "Archaeology Dogs Can Help Scholars Sniff Out the Past"

A dog's nose performs at least 10,000 times better than ours. Specifically, dogs pick up on low-molecular-weight compounds that easily evaporate at room temperature and often carry an odor—what scientists call volatile organic compounds. Canines can detect one such part in every trillion.
     As a result, dogs have demonstrated uncanny olfactory abilities. They have sniffed out melanoma skin cancer in humans and detected pregnancy in cows just by picking up scents in their bodily fluids.
     So, what exactly are canines detecting at archaeological digs? "Our dogs are not actually searching for bones," Glavaš emphasizes. "They are searching for the molecules of human decomposition."

Source, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-dog-noses-help-archaeologists

Stories told by trash of the ancestors, digging on Mackinac Island

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mackinac-island-trash-dump

Literally salvage archaeology in two senses of the term: quick work at the time of major construction to salvage social and cultural information from the exposed ground, and also salvage as in 'junk yard' salvaging value from what has been discarded.

This article describes the work undertaken as part of the relocation of the island airstrip.

language as political hot-potato that is hard to handle (English graveyard, Gaelic text)

excerpt from Church of England refuses to allow foreign language on a gravestone, calling it a "political statement"

...the Church of England pushed back again when they saw the planned inscription on the cross: "In ár gcroíthe go deo," which means, "In our hearts forever" in the Irish language. This didn't seem particularly radical, especially as there are already Welsh inscriptions in the same cemetery. But once again, the diocesan advisory committee denied the family's headstone proposal. "Given the passions and feelings connected with the use of Irish Gaelic," said a Church judge who is also a local government judge, "There is a sad risk that the phrase would be regarded as some form of slogan or that its inclusion without translation would of itself be seen as a political statement."

After yet another appeal, the judge agreed to allow the Irish words only if they're accompanied by an English translation.

full text, https://boingboing.net/2020/06/26/church-of-england-refuses-to-a.html

excerpt, Indigenous + Scholarly lens on local life

extracted from "Indigenous Sociology for Social Impact" by Zuleyka Zevallos [The Sociological Review]

at https://www.thesociologicalreview.com/indigenous-sociology-for-social-impact/

...While sociology largely ignores Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives, Associate Professor Butler shows that the way in which we teach, research and discuss Indigenous experiences are framed through a White Western perspective that undervalues the complex cultures, spiritualities and social realities of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Non-Aboriginal sociologists focus on written texts that exclude Indigenous people, ignoring oral traditions and seeking to mediate Indigenous experiences through White authority. 

=-=-= comment:

Although the subject and context is different, there seems to a parallel impasse between campus-based scholars and their colleagues of the same training but working on applied/practicing project: academic thinkers seek grant support for wide engagement while applied thinkers seek client support for matters defined by contract - the former uses cases studies to get at larger questions, while the latter uses larger questions to frame specific instances to grapple with. Likewise of indigenous knowledge keepers versus outsider scholars there is an impasse as well as intersection. While both may engage in the same subject, the standpoints and purposes differ. Academics see the fieldwork subject as an illustration of wider things, while local experts see the subject as inseparable from the names, places, and lives touched by that subject.

Britain's "Pompeii" time capsule, the Bronze Age site at Must Farm

Awarded the 2020 Antiquities prize for newly published and open access article, "The Must Farm pile-dwelling settlement."

The article provides a site overview and the current interpretations of the archaeology alongside discussing the material found during the 2015-16 excavations.

See https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2019.38

or look at Facebook for updates to the project, https://www.facebook.com/MustFarmArchaeology/

reading - archaeology pages at Smithsonian Magazine

The section devoted to archaeology stories is at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/archaeology/

Some of the titles include the following. -- [fall 2019 to spring 2020]

Treasure Trove of Artifacts Illustrates Life in a Lost Viking Mountain Pass

In Groundbreaking Find, Three Kinds of Early Humans Unearthed Living Together in South Africa

A Mysterious 25,000-Year-Old Structure Built of the Bones of 60 Mammoths

Divers Recover More Than 350 Artifacts From the HMS 'Erebus' Shipwreck

Angkor Wat May Owe Its Existence to an Engineering Catastrophe

The Best Board Games of the Ancient World

To Craft Cutting Tools, Neanderthals Dove for Clam Shells on the Ocean Floor

Twelve Fascinating Finds Revealed in 2019

Archaeologists Are Unearthing the Stories of the Past Faster Than Ever Before

Oldest Known Seawall Discovered Along Submerged Mediterranean Villages

Language listening - ear for regional accents

A 5 min. stand-up comedy routine: regional USA accents by Fred Armisen, pretty impressive, https://youtu.be/G72tZdjnS2A

 - Good for people with an ear for languages; and for people learning USA lingua-culture.

online Anthropology encyclopedia

A recent (c.2018) resource to browse, https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/articles-a-to-z

Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology

exploring anthropology's view, several short videos

from Dr. Robert Borofsky at Center for Public Anthropology, March 24, 2020

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VIDEO PRESENTATIONS These videos are included in the Teaching and Learning Resources of Perspectives: An Open Introduction to Cultural Anthropology which is supported by the American Anthropological Association. They are freely available for instructors to use in their classes. Video Title                               Length Defining Anthropology - Lecture 1 12:52 Defining Anthropology - Lecture 2 7:02 Historical Trends - Lecture 1 10:33 Historical Trends - Lecture 2 11:23 Historical Trends - Lecture 3 10:54 Historical Trends - Lecture 4 10:26 Political Economy - Lecture 1 9:42 Political Economy - Lecture 2 12:35 Political Economy - Lecture 3 8:48 Political Economy - Lecture 4 8:35 Political Economy - Lecture 5 9:44 Political Economy - Lecture 6 10:24 Ethics - Lecture 1 13:26 Ethics - Lecture 2 16:57 Informants - Lecture 1 18:20 Informants - Lecture 2 15:19 Religion - Lecture 1 15:20 Religion - Lecture 2 14:45 Religion - Lecture 3 12:14 Social Organization - Lecture 1 9:51 Social Organization - Lecture 2 9:33 Social Organization - Lecture 3 11:32   All rights to these videos are reserved by Dr. Robert Borofsky. The videos are not creative commons licensed and may not be copied, edited, or included in other works without his written permission.

Public Anthropology

c/o 45-045 Kamehameha Hwy., Kaneohe, HI 96744

Article told from the point of view of people being recorded on camera or video camcorder: many considerations for the person waving the equipment around!

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Seven insights for photojournalists from those on the other side of the lens

https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2020/seven-insights-for-photojournalists-from-those-on-the-other-side-of-the-lens/

---subheadings

Actions over aesthetics

Expectations grow with experience

Representativeness over impact

Be more than just a fly on the wall

Privacy was more of a concern for older adults compared to younger ones.

Safety in numbers

There's no right to privacy in public — but people don't always understand that

45 years of fieldwork --documenting Japanese rural life in Kyushu since the 1970s

This newly released documentary will interest students of ethnography, not just those keen on life in Japan.

It is the first edition looking back at Joy Hendry's 45 years of anthropology field work in rural Japan (near Fukuoka), recorded during her fall 2019 return there in this documentary (later this year an enhanced version will be released, she sasys); about 45 minutes in length, Here is part of her email message on March 15, 2020 to the East Asia Anthropology listserv, forwarded with her permission. The idea of fieldwork scholars making a recap of their projects and career this way in visual form sets a good example to follow.

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...how we did anthropology in those days, and how things in rural Japan have changed, a film my son made last year when I went to return some family trees and a village chart to the people I worked with in 1975 will give you an idea. The film still has a few glitches, but might be interesting, especially as many of us are virtually housebound at present. https://youtu.be/x7qptoXqnhE "Understanding Japanese Culture - 45 years researching a village in rural Japan"

the 100 languages as of 2020

Something like 100 languages have written form to go with them. The other 6800 that remain on Earth are spoken-only.

This visual represenation of the biggest number of language speakers includes some explanation and discussion.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/100-most-spoken-languages/

Seeing the reverse - least number of speakers - in visual form wold be good, too!

One of the easily overlooked features of the (English language) Wikipedia is the sidebar at lower left in which a given topic is shown with hotlinks to all the other language-versions of Wikipedia, when that topic is also available there. Some subjects have lots of corresponding articles; others have few. In some cases the biggest number of Wikipedia articles (found in English, Dutch, German) provide outline and some content for the other languages. But in other cases the article is composed from scratch, using supporting documents of that other language, with little or no reference to the English or another source article.

Native American; paying attention to something besides capitalism

as an organizing principle for social life and livelihoods,

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/indigenous-climate-adaptation

Internment in concentration camps - the USA in WWII-era, but also Pres. Trump's Mexican border

Lest we forget:

One of the annual photo contest winners was this aerial view of the WWII-era Topaz concentration camp near Delta, Utah. Image description by photographer by Chang Kyun Kim follows. For anthropology colleagues teaching complex societies, this instance is one of the many instances of harm to remember. Today there are the USA camps near the Mexican border, both in USA and with the coercion of the Mexican government also based on Mexican land. And there are also the industrial scale and logic of the Chinese concentration camps in Xinjiang, filled with China's own citizens who follow the way of Islam, chiefly among the Uyghur-Chinese.

https://www.dpreview.com/news/6341303024/sony-world-photography-awards-2020?slide=9

see also an earlier project by another social observer, the award-winning documentary, "Resistance at Tule Lake," http://www.resistanceattulelake.com

Image Description: The lower part of the image shows the massive grids where the prison barracks of Topaz War Relocation Center that incarcerated 10,000 Japanese people living in U.S. were constructed. I tried to show the long lasting artifact and the harsh landscape that surrounds the camp site. It was taken with my drone in Nov 2019 in Delta, Utah.

This is part of a series (description by photographer follows).

Series Description: This series is about Japanese internment camps that were built in remote and harsh areas of the United States during the Second World War. These camps imprisoned 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry - more than 60% of them were U.S. citizens.

Working on the project reminded me of the racial antagonism we have witnessed in recent history, and led me to consider how radically our view can alter when war and terror affect our lives. History can always be repeated if not properly recalled or told. The pictures here were taken between 2018 and '19 in California, Arizona and Utah. For the aerial shots, I used a drone to capture the camp sites - these locations are so harsh and remote that no one would try building anything here.

Photography for seeing archaeology

Article from the folks at "the UK's Pompeii," bronze-age Must Farm archaeology project.

http://www.mustfarm.com/post-dig/post-ex-diary-20-the-importance-of-visualisation-photography-part-one/