Sorry for the lack of posts lately! I’ll be in Ann Arbor tomorrow for the Michigan Undergrad Arch conference if any of my lovely followers happen to go to Michigan. Look for the girl awkwardly talking about bones. (or boners)
Unhappy with portrayals of Native Americans in mainstream media, a group of students from South Dakota’s Rosebud Sioux Reservation created a video to show that their community is about more than alcoholism, broken homes and crime.
The students are visiting Washington, D.C., on Monday to lobby Congress for increased funding for schools on reservations.
Filmed in black and white, the student-produced video More Than That takes viewers through the hallways, classrooms and gymnasium of the Rosebud Sioux Reservation’s county high school.
Using their bodies as signposts, the students explain that they’re more than stock images of poverty, alcoholism and violence. With words drawn on their hands, arms and faces, they share the traits that describe who they really are: humor, intelligence, creativity — and the list goes on.
The point the students are trying to make, says English teacher Heather Hanson, is that they’re not victims.
The nonprofit National Association of Federally Impacted Schools invited the Lakota students to attend its winter conference Monday in Washington, D.C. While in town, the students will also lobby South Dakota’s congressional representatives.
posted by npr
Evolution isn’t just a story about where we came from. It’s an epic at the center of life itself. Far from robbing our lives of meaning, it instills an appreciation for the beautiful, enduring, and ultimately triumphant fabric of life that covers our planet. Understanding that doesn’t demean human life — it enhances it. We may be animals, but we are not just animals. We are the only ones who can truly appreciate, as Darwin put it, that there is “grandeur in this view of life,” and indeed there is.
“Imagine if children could also buy bags of little toy African-American slaves and their white slave masters, or Jewish holocaust prisoners and their SS Nazi guards, or undocumented Mexicans and their INS border guards.”
“Imagine if the African-American set included little whips and ropes so the white slave masters could flog the slaves that were lazy and lynch those who defied them. Imagine if the border guards in the Mexican toy set came with little nightsticks to beat the illegal aliens, infrared scopes on their rifles to shoot them at night, and trucks to load up those they caught. Imagine if the Jewish and Nazi toys included little barbed wire prison camps and toy trains to load up and take the prisoners to the toy gas chambers or incinerators, batteries not included.”
-From Cowboys and Indians: Toys of Genocide, Icons of American Colonialism, by Michael Yellow Bird
Some days — some years — it’s hard to think of a more apt symbol for Pakistan than this 1,800-year-old sculpture of beauty and pain. The world doesn’t need to see Pakistan’s soft image; it needs to see its human face.
This. Book. How could anyone not want this book? If you tell me that you will never come across human and faunal remains together EVER in your entire career as a bioarchaeologist, well, I will probably have to call you a liar. This book is amazing and outrageously expensive. Make sure to write this bad boy into a grant!
Title: Human and Nonhuman Bone Identification- A Color Atlas
Author: Diane France
Bust of Antoninus Pius, Roman, Ca. 140-150 CE
Museo Nacional del Prado, On View in Room 27
Them curls, you guys, seriously.
DNA studies do not indicate that separate classifiable subspecies (races) exist within modern humans. While different genes for physical traits such as skin and hair color can be identified between individuals, no consistent patterns of genes across the human genome exist to distinguish one race from another. There also is no genetic basis for divisions of human ethnicity. People who have lived in the same geographic region for many generations may have some alleles in common, but no allele will be found in all members of one population and in no members of any other.
Continue reading at NowPublic.com: Human Genome Project Announces That “Race” Does Not Exist | NowPublic News Coverage http://www.nowpublic.com/world/human-genome-project-announces-race-does-not-exist#ixzz1k3Ae3Pv3 (via pugsandpaintbrushes)
Ethnic Naga men wear traditional clothing and participate in a rally, urging the Indian government to expedite the India-Naga political dialogue for a positive solution in New Delhi, India, on Feb. 25.
anthropology and development: a feel good essay →
Given this swiftly changing context, the world of development is increasingly fertile ground for anthropologists seeking to engage with the public sphere in creative ways. Here are two ways that we think anthropology can be put to good use:1) As new development regimes change people’s lives in unexpected directions, anthropology can help us understand how this situation creates opportunities for positive social change. Many anthropologists will argue that they should remain as skeptical and critical of these neo-imperial projects as they were of the older ones. If nothing else, the shifts in the development field are sure to bring about a host of new problems.But there are also new possibilities. Ethnographic fieldwork is ideally situated to capture not only the harmful aspects of new development regimes but also the opportunities for social creativity that may arise as the “ancient régime” crumbles. Fieldwork lets us delve into the cracks and work at the interstices, revealing how development creates new aspects of social life as much as it destroys and dominates others…
2) Based on the ethnographic record, we should use our knowledge to propose alternative solutions to persistent social problems. If we extend the case of anthropology’s selective appropriation of Foucault to the anthropological project as a whole, we might say that simply denouncing and lambasting development actually cuts anthropology short of its full potential. Tellingly, Harry Walker recently observed in a review of anarchist anthropology that, “anthropology has an important role to play in revealing the diversity of existing worlds in the service of conceiving alternatives”. Some of the most stunning discoveries that anthropologists have made are stunning not simply because they’re theoretically sophisticated, but also because people in this world actually do them. In other words, we are all capable of leading different lives and creating different societies.
