2011-07-28
bronze age - so many dolmens on the SW Korean peninsula
2011-07-26
socio-linguistics, American English: Getting on well, thanks
The debate over the use of Americanisms has divided readers of these pages in recent weeks. Here, American lexicographer and broadcaster Grant Barrett offers an American perspective.
2011-07-18
crossing Neanderthals and H.Sapiens Sapiens 35,000 years ago?
emerging details continue to surface
2011-07-07
naming a baby - what does it mean or indicate?
Naming Trends And How Parents-To-Be Face 'Baby-Name Hostility'
[excerpt] from radio, www.npr.orgWhen people find out they're expecting, choosing a name for their baby can be one of their most stressful tasks.
Part of that stress is because there has been a "baby-naming revolution" over the last half-century, says Laura Wattenberg, who wrote The Baby Name Wizard: A Magical Method for Finding the Perfect Name for Your Baby.
2011-06-25
archeology; graffiti; Israel
Archaeologists Unscramble Ancient Graffiti In Israel
2011-06-12
London Anthro Days 2011; also at U.Manchester
'Discover Social Anthropology': 30th June 2011
http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/disciplines/socialanthropology/undergraduate/discover/
This is a departmental open day to enable teachers and 6th form students to discover what social anthropology and its new A-level is all about and can mean for their teaching/studies.
[L.A.D. 2011 DETAILS TO FOLLOW]
2011-06-01
linguistics quirk, "foreign accent syndrome"
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/06/01/136824428/a-curious-case-of-foreign-accent-syndrome
[excerpt]
When Karen Butler went in for dental surgery, she left with more than numb gums: She also picked up a pronounced foreign accent. It wasn't a fluke, or a joke — she'd developed a rare condition called foreign accent syndrome that's usually caused by an injury to the part of the brain that controls speech.
Butler was born in Bloomington, Ill., and moved to Oregon when she was a baby. She's never traveled to Europe or lived in a foreign country — she's an American, she says, "born and bred."
2011-05-09
online journals of anthropology around the world
http://www.wcaanet.org/
The journals are listed under "Publications," with some 500 journals in all, a proportion of which offer free access to all of their articles on-line.
2011-04-25
local identity - Cornwall in England
In England, Cornwall Pays No Mind To Royal Wedding
Prince William, who's second in line to the British throne, is marrying Kate Middleton on Friday. The images and voices that will fill the airwaves that day will portray a kingdom full of loyal and joyous subjects. But in Cornwall, where the map says it is part of England, they don't feel very English.
http://www.npr.org/2011/04/25/135697378/in-england-cornwall-pays-no-mind-to-royal-wedding
2011-04-11
toys and gender and language
Gender stereotypes woven into language of toy ads
(word cloud to visually represent which words are most often used to market/package toys)
2011-04-08
linguistic fun. FW: LOL
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12893416
LOL around the world
- mdr (and derivatives)
- חחח/ההה
- 555
- asg
- mkm
2011-04-07
mapping Online Dating word choices
R. Luke DuBois... became fascinated with the language used in the profiles. So he overlaid data from 19 million online dating profiles onto US maps.
[interview with Turnstyle magazine] ...In addition to color-coded maps by gender, he also scanned a Rand-McNally Road Atlas into his computer and replaced the city names with unique words. "Not the word people used the most [in their dating profiles] – but the word that was used uniquely in that place – the word that shows up there more than anywhere else," said DuBois. The atlas maps are labelled with 20,000 unique words. He rattled off some combinations:
Dallas – "rich" Houston – "symphony" Santa Cruz – "liberal"
Atlanta – "God," "company," "coca," "jazz," "protestant"
GIS and underwater archeology - example from Florida
2011-03-02
pronunciation and identity - British Regions
[excerpt] ...This is because US audiences tend to identify the British accent with notions of social standing and refinement rather than geographical location, according to London-based film critic Ray Bennett of the Hollywood Reporter magazine, who spent 30 years living in North America.
"I'm from Kent, and people would ask me if I knew the Beatles," he says. "They think a British accent is like that of Alistair Cook. They aren't particularly conscious of regional differences.
"To them, an English accent is, basically, one that connotes class."
2011-02-19
about endangered languages (UNESCO Redbook project)

sample entry for VULNERABLE level of endangerment within the boundaries of Peru (62 languages endangered; 10 of these at the vulnerable level; example - the Quechua spoken in and around Cusco)
2011-02-12
qualitative methods (ethnography) book
Subject: [CAE_listserv] RE: Book for Qualitative Methods
...At the risk of being immodest, I would recommend the second edition of "Designing and Conducting Ethnographic Research," which is book one of the seven volume, exhaustive, Ethnographer's Toolkit. Book One is designed to be a comprehensive overview of qualitative and ethnographic research, from when it's appropriate through how to collect AND analyze data to issues of interpretation and ethics specific to such data. Jean J. Schensul and I have authored the entire series, minus book four, which is an edited volume of chapters describing cutting edge supplementary ethnographic methods, written by various authors who are experts in the use of those specific techniques.
The first edition of the entire Toolkit (1999) is available from Altamira Press, which is a division of Rowman and Littlefield. They also are publishing the second edition of the Toolkit; Book One is done and available for purchase; Books 2-5 (conceptual frameworks (2), essential data collection techniques (3: interviewing, observing, participant observation, and confirmatory ethnographic surveys), complementary data collection techniques and issues (4), and data analysis and interpretation (5)) will be available in early summer, and the final two books, Ethics and Relationships in the Field, and Team Research and Research Partnerships, will be available in fall. The latter two books are entirely new for the second edition, as are a number of the chapters in book 4.
Take a look at Book One; I think that it's what you would want for your course; I've used it myself for the same purpose and students loved the profuse examples and the reading level. We attempted to keep the content at a very high level, but make the text itself quite accessible. So while it's a "primer", we didn't dumb it down
2011-01-05
big archeology in Indiana
It's 1988. Workers building a road in Mt. Vernon, Ind. damage an ancient burial mound, causing a treasure trove of silver and copper to pour from the ground. A bulldozer operator decides to grab some of the treasure. He ends up in prison for looting.
It sounds like the plot of an Indiana Jones film, only it's not a movie. The treasure belonged to a mysterious and advanced culture that flourished in the Eastern and Midwestern U.S. nearly 2,000 years ago. Because it predates the written record, this prehistoric culture doesn't have a Native American name but in the 1800s, archaeologists dubbed it the Hopewell Tradition.
An exhibit of artifacts from the Hopewell site, curated by the Indiana State Museum and on display at the Angel Mounds State Historic Site in Evansville, Ind. through Jan. 14, is raising some fresh questions about these ancient Americans.
[opening excerpt from radio on Jan. 3, 2011]
2010-12-27
Thought Experiment, grasping 'culture'
1) Suppose you moderns travel back to the midst of a viking town or trading center: The weather and range of native plants and animals is not terribly different to what it was 1,000 years ago. Yet their solutions to personal hygiene, personal possessions, range of food choices and manner of obtaining, preparing and consuming may well contrast our own ways. The relative status of those you meet and appropriate response to encounters with each category of person could also seem alien or inscrutible until the culture logic is learned. In short, the sensory palette and physical resources will have changed in some ways, but in other ways there has not been a lot of change. But what is remarkably different is all the cultural "software and hardware" that has developed and grown elaborate these past 40 generations so that we have more specialized tools, controllability and scale of impact at our fingertips. As a single example, if you moderns want a drink of water in an urban setting you have a dozen ways to do it. But 1,000 years earlier in the same month and day the most common responses to feeling thirsty will have been different: no bottled water (but probably jugs or other potable reserves), no drinking fountains (but possibly a well for public or private drawing), no restaurant serving (ice) water before ordering (but probably an acceptable custom of asking a resident for some of their water). In short, if we place ourselves in the same physical setting and range of resources for food, shelter, gifting, creative expression, and tool making then there is much that THEY knew as a matter of course that we have forgotten. That part is 'culture'. And the reverse is true, too: we would project a course of action leading to shelter, getting - preparing - and consuming foodstuffs, and so forth that would seem improbable to those earlier people. In other words, all the social, material and ideational patterns & relationships that we bring to their landscape; or that they might bring to ours is what comprises 'culture'.
2010-12-21
Fall issue of AnthroNotes (Smithsonian Inst.)
Tourists and Strangers: An Anthropological Perspective by Lyra Spang
Going Native: The Anthropologist as Advocate by Robert Laughlin
Backyard Ethnography: Studying Your High School by Carolyn Gecan
Being a Refugee: Humanitarianism and the Palestinian Experience by Ilana Feldman
2010-12-17
anthro mix of insider-outsider viewpoints
Great ethnologists do more than record: they reveal…they entered their subjects emotionally,
intellectually, then revealed what they experienced within…What was needed, he said, was
the power of language, harnessed to humanistic ends 'by men who, if such exist, possess both
the scientific mind and the literary touch'.
[source] Edmund S Carpenter. 1991. "Frank Speck: Quiet Listener."
In: The Life and Times of Frank G. Speck, 1881-1950.
Roy Blankenship, ed. Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania Publications in Anthropology, Pp.78-83.
2010-12-14
kerfuffle - What is Anthro... Science or Humanities?
[W. Beeman] Nor do we beat our breasts over the investigative excesses of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. The world is a very different place than in the colonial era, and anthropologists, like all seekers of knowledge, must shake off the past and move forward trying to pursue our discipline--the most humanistic of the sciences and most scientific of the humanities and social sciences.
[H. Lewis] ...Indeed, it was the founder of American anthropology, Franz Boas, who most fully exemplified the scientist engaged in the struggle for human rights.
2010-10-22
podcasts with Practicing (applied, mainly private sector anthropologists)
The podcast series features interviews with:
- [Listen] Patricia Clay, a fisheries anthropologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
- [Listen] Judy Tso, owner and consultant of Aha Solutions
- [Listen] Kevin Bialy, an international program officer at the National Institutes of Health
- [Listen] Megan Hawkins, a cultural resource specialist with the Research Corporation of the University of Hawaii, where she is working with the US Army
- [Listen] Lee Cerveny, a research social scientist at the US Forest Service
- [Listen] Cheryl Levine, a social science analyst at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
2010-10-21
using films to illustrate anthro experiences/observations
(1) The French film "The Class" about a first year teacher is a great one about cross cultural communication. It has a few great scenes with a boy who is from Burkina Faso and he has to translate his own expulsion interview from a Parisian public school to his mother. Language has a lot to do with all of the events that lead up to his expulsion as well.
(2) I have used the Star Trek (The Next Generation) episode "Darmok" in which the captain of the Enterprise must communicate with an alien who communicates using only metaphors. I use it to engage intro classes with linguistic concepts. The conversation (unless you have dedicated anti-Trekies in the class) usually highlights relativism and the need to understand context in any communication.
2010-10-02
bride prices - child marriage essay
[unsuitable for younger viewers; self-immolation attempt around 5 minute mark]
2010-09-17
archeology beneath Phoenix, Arizona
by Craig Childs, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128778236
My hometown is greater Phoenix. Peel back just the top couple of feet there, and you'll find the remnants of a sprawling society of farmers who lived in adobe villages a thousand years ago...
2010-09-13
losing in translation
http://funnytranslator.com/ lets you type in a phrase, then it translates to another language, then back to English. This cycle repeats for the number of round-trip translations you specify. This vividly illustrates what happens in literal (word-level, not full context-level) translation. 2010-09-04materials and experiences from Peace Corps livesActivities and lessons based on Peace Corps Volunteers' cross-cultural experiences http://www.peacecorps.gov/wws/publications/ Building Bridges: A Peace Corps Classroom Guide to Cross-Cultural Understanding Uncommon Journeys: Peace Corps Adventures Across Cultures Voices From the Field: Reading and Writing About the World, Ourselves, and Others CyberVolunteer Letters: Stories From In-service Peace Corps Volunteers Insights From the Field: Understanding Geography, Culture, and Service Looking at Ourselves and Others Culture Matters: The Peace Corps Cross-Cultural Workbook Folk Tales: Stories From Peace Corps Countries Around the World Crossing Cultures: Peace Corps Letters From the Field
2010-09-03anthro education
2010-09-01future shock today
Here is a discussion prompt re: the pace of change.
Every so often, it hits home that we are actually living in one of those science-fiction worlds that I read about as a young nerd in the 1970s. Not, it turns out, one where we commute with jet packs; nor are Soviet and American colonists bantering about just how red the Red Planet should be. But now, while putting my keys in my pocket, I will sometimes accidentally hit a button on the BlackBerry that causes a robotic female voice to bark, "Say a command!" Never having gotten around to programming any in, it always feels like I'm letting her down. We're all walking around carrying devices that are in contact with unimaginably vast systems of information. You get used to it. It ceases to seem strange – which is, arguably, the strange part. Future shock becomes second nature. (To remember what things were like before requires something like the exact opposite of the willing suspension of disbelief.) And discussing any of this with friends or colleagues in their 20s is out of the question. It leaves me feeling like I have become my own grandfather... source, Surrendering to Tomorrow [September 1, 2010 by Scott McLemee] http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee305 2010-08-31underwater archeology in fresh water
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