anthropologica

Dear Introduction to Culture and Society Students:

Please find links to the first two readings for the Spring 2012 KUSTAR course below:

Shakespeare in the Bush – http://www.slgardiner.com/Bohannan1966.pdf

Body Ritual Amongst the Nacirema – http://www.slgardiner.com/Miner1958.pdf

Note that these links will be available only a short while before being removed and are provided on a fair use basis as copies of articles generally available for the convenience of students in this class only.

The Donria Kondh, a traditional group in India, has won a hard-fought victory against the multi-billion dollar mining company Vedanta Resources. According to Survival International India’s Environment Minister  Jairam Ramesh ruled yesterday that the mining giant’s plans to extract bauxite from from hills sacred to the small tribal group in the eastern part of the country amounted to a “blatant disregard for the rights of the tribal groups” and questioned the legality of a company refinery built in the area.

The years long campaign to stop the mining project has attracted unprecedented attention for a small tribal group, receiving support from the British and Norwegian governments, the Church of England, human rights and environmental groups. Survival International, an NGO that promotes indigenous rights, has been at the forefront of the battle to stop the mining. A short film, Mine: Story of a Sacred Mountain, has been widely viewed, helping to promote international support for the Dongria.

Read more about the Dongria and view the film at the Survival International site.

(http://www.survivalinternational.org/)

(Photo: A Dongria Kondh woman picks millet in Niyamgiri, India. Credit © Toby Nicholas/Survival.)

My wife, Angie Reed Garner, and I co-authored a chapter for the forthcoming book Women, War, and Violence: Personal Perspectives and Global Activism (Palgrave-Mcamillan, 2010), edited by Robin Chandler, Linda K. Fuller, and Lihua Wang.

Our essay, “Relationships of war: Mothers, soldiers, knowledge” speaks to problems of knowledge and the cultural and affective separation of home and front, and how gender expectations are used to control knowledge, reinforce secrecy, and shape the national imagination.

The following was sent out on the Survival International mailing list (22 July 2010) and I am posting it here along with action links and links to the originating organization. The “Bushmen” are a traditionally gathering-and-hunting group from southern Africa who have been the subject of numerous anthropological studies, including Marjorie Shostak’s widely read Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (Harvard University Press, 1981).

The map to the left indicates traditional “Bushmen” areas.

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Previously published under the titled The Nuclear Jihadist, The Man from Pakistan: The True Story of the World’s Most Dangerous Nuclear Smuggler (Twelve, 2007) is written by two investigative reporters, Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins and is about A. Q. Khan, the Pakistani metallurgist called the “Father of the Islamic Bomb”.

In spite of the breathless subtitle, Frantz and Collins have written a carefully researched book that simultaneously traces Khan’s role in the development of the Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program and the often conflicted efforts of the CIA and the IAEA to counter nuclear proliferation–though in the case of the former it should be added “when it was politically expedient”.

The author’s document Khan’s theft of centrifuge technology (essential in enriching uranium to a concentration which can be weaponized) from the Dutch branch of Urenco–a British, German, Dutch consortium set up to enrich uranium for civilian use and make Europe independent of American suppliers. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a link to a basic discussion of the tensions between cultural and physical anthropology.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=404341&c=1