AnthroCurrents – November 1, 2016
Trick or Treat?
Anthropologists Discover Isolated Tribe Of Joyful Americans Living In Remote Village Untouched By 2016 Election. From The Onion.
Sam Migliore (Kwantlen Polytechnic U.) is interviewed by the local newspaper in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada about an ethnography of zombies. Yes, he knows a few.
Phillips Stevens, Jr. (U. of Buffalo) is interviewed by WBFO Radio about how the “curse” on the Chicago Cubs—up to the current World Series in American baseball—has truly been a case of magical thinking.
Applied Ethnography
A pharmaceutical magazine’s online outlet posts a video from a market research agency explaining What is Ethnography? and their use of ethnography in medical device market research.
Brandwatch Blog offers 3 examples of using ethnography to study social media usage on issues of misogyny, racism, and the US presidential election.
The notion of corporate anthropology is making a debut in the American jewelry industry as a response to changing demographics and shopping trends. This brief note, however, just scratches the surface.
MotivIndex.com describes development of their global database of consumer behavior and offers it as a tool to “conduct large scale ethnographies in a matter of weeks.”
Lisa Galarneau (Freelance Market Researcher) published a white paper on cyborg anthropology, which also actually already has a Wikipedia page. She offers an overview of the current and future state of cyborg humanity.
“Traditional” Ethnography
Peabody Museum at Harvard University gets coverage on Fox News for its 150th anniversary year. And another version from the Associated Press, in the Seattle Times in this instance, announcing an April 2017 exhibition titled “All the World is Here: Harvard’s Peabody Museum and the Invention of American Anthropology.”
Visual Anthropology
Wade Davis: Photographs is a new book by the anthropologist and former “explorer in residence” at National Geographic. This link is to an interview with CBC Radio about his work and the new book.
“The Anthropologist,” a film written by Daniel Miller, gets hometown coverage from The Putnam County News,
An Indonesian newspaper reviews Racial Science and Human Diversity in Colonial Indonesia and recommends it of interest to lay readers as well as academics.
Reports of students walking out of an anthropology class at Texas State U. made it from campus newspapers to the International Business Times. Professor Jon McGee was lecturing on the topic of race and apparently his statement that all humans are “African” was too much for some white Texans to take. Professor McGee did not see the “walk out” as a disruption in the large lecture hall.
Awards
Lochlann Jain (Stanford U.) wins the 2016 J.I. Staley Prize (School of Advanced Research) for the 2013 book Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us.
Susan Stebbins (SUNY Potsdam) received the 2016 Educator of the Year Award from the Native American Association of New York.
Sarah Cowie (U. of Nevada, Reno) has been selected as a Kavili Felllow by the National Academy of Sciences, an award to distinguished young scientists.
Of Interest
A reader’s guide to the anthropology of ethics and morality. Part Two of a series from Somatosphere.net.
Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era. A WBUR Radio interview with the author, historian Tiya Miles (U. of Michigan).
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