UPDATED: All a hoax! But at least we got punked by Roxanne herself and not by some blogger – I don’t really hold it against her.
I don’t know about the “nature” in this story, but the “culture” is too good to pass up. Remember Roxanne? Well, that’s Doctor Roxanne to you, and she got it the hard way. This is a warm-feeling kind of story, and not (just) from the hip-hop nostalgia.
Hey, it’s a carnival! Today I’m honored to host the latest edition of Four-Stone Hearth,number seventy-four in a regular series of installments rounding up the hottest (and thenottest) of the anthropological blogosphere. Or to be precise:
The Four Stone Hearth is a blog carnival that specializes in anthropology in the widest (American) sense of that word. Here, anthropology is the study of humankind, throughout all times and places, focussing primarily on four lines of research:
- archaeology
- socio-cultural anthropology
- bio-physical anthropology
- linguistic anthropology
Each one of these subfields is a stone in our hearth.
So, check out the home site, and if you’re interested in joining up, please write to Martin Rundkvist.
So down to business. This will be a somewhat non-linear review of the latest from the anthropology blogosphere thematically; we’ll see how that goes. To begin with, let’s talk about anthropology and a couple of high profile busts. In particular, the big corruption roundup in New Jersey this summer that netted mayors and wealthy developers and all kinds of good things, was driven in part by anthropological research. Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ ongoing study of the global trade in human organs picked up on the tangled web of laundered money from the other end. Her detailed records on kidney ‘matchmaker’ Levy Rosenbaum helped the FBI catch and prosecute not just organ traders, but money-launderers throughout the network. I found this first via Lorenz, but there’s also a great interview on WNYC and a story on none other than FOX News. You can find some other links about it at the AAA Blog as well.
The other big bust news involves the trade in Native American artifacts. Starting back in June, the FBI began indicting residents of Blanding UT for looting on public lands. The same investigations have since spread well beyond Utah, and folks are starting to express concern about the way this bust was conducted and what it will mean for the legitimate trade, for Native American craftspeople and tourism and etc. This one’s anthropologically fascinating, not just because it involves archaeological materials, but because it plays on some important tensions between public and private goods, the ownership of cultural heritage, and so on. Taking artifacts from private property, with permission, is legit; taking them from public lands is looting. Identifying the provenance of any particular item is exceedingly difficult, of course, and documenting and tracking permission is almost as bad. Teofilo, late of Chaco Canyon, has been following this story – maybe start with the latest and work back?
That’s just a joke, by the way – I love IR, I do! Please don’t fire me.
But anyway, this post by D. Drezner on the Foreign Policy blog really gets down to the nitty-gritty. How would IR theory deal with a zombie invasion? And since I’m an anthropologist I’m forced to ask – could anthropology do better? I’ll add that I’m not apologizing for going off-topic here: considering a socio-political theory of zombies raises valuable questions about life and non-life, and hence is very nature/culturey. Really. So I encourage anyone reading to visit the original article (comments too) and come back here to propose a more anthropological/cultural take on the problem. Anxious potential victims await your guidance.
I figured I’d share this New York Times article, because it’s pretty interesting, and because the subheading tells me it “raises the question of what now constitutes a natural body”. And how!
Since The New York Times is writing about taxonomy all of a sudden (Minerva’s owl and all that), and since by training I’ve had to think a lot about the ways and means by which humanity has named the world, I thought I would share this in response:
She Unnames Them
Ursula K. LeGuin [audio!]
MOST of them accepted namelessness with the perfect indifference with which they had so long accepted and ignored their names. Whales and dolphins, seals and sea otters consented with particular alacrity, sliding into anonymity as into their element. A faction of yaks, however, protested. They said that “yak” sounded right, and that almost everyone who knew they existed called them that. Unlike the ubiquitous creatures such as rats and fleas, who had been called by hundreds or thousands of different names since Babel, the yaks could truly say, they said, that they had a name. They discussed the matter all summer. The councils of elderly females finally agreed that though the name might be useful to others it was so redundant from the yak point of view that they never spoke it themselves and hence might as well dispense with it. After they presented the argument in this light to their bulls, a full consensus was delayed only by the onset of severe early blizzards. Soon after the beginning of the thaw, their agreement was reached and the designation “yak” was returned to the donor.
Continue reading ‘(Un)Naming’
