Adam Henne, and his great new blog natures/cultures (it has the tagline, “get with the nature fetish”), is hosting the 74th edition of the anthropology carnival Four Stone Hearth.
It goes from big busts (yes, let your fetish run wild) all the way to bodies and pots. Plus penis enlargers and lucha libre thrown in for fun. A lot of burning material this time!
So head over to the 74th edition of Four Stone Hearth.
Keeping it simple – the top, anthro and mind.
Top of the List
Dana Foundation, Cerebrum 2009: Emerging Ideas in Brain Science
Get a wealth of online articles from some of the top names in the field
David DiSalvo, I Must Be Guilty – the Video Says So
Like the Stanford Prison, except we make ourselves guilty through indirect manipulations by others (in this case, researchers). Sounds like the world we live in: the media says so…
Gillian Tett, Eliminate Financial Double Think
Tett has a PhD in social anth and writes for the Financial Times – a heady combination! Check out this line: “But if regulators and politicians are to have any hope of building a more effective financial system in future, it is crucial that they start thinking more about power structures, vested interests and social silence.”
Stephen Casper, Book Review: Wilson and Cory, The Evolutionary Epidemiology of Mania and Depression: A Theoretical and Empirical Interpretation of Mood Disorders
Praising the good and dissecting the bad in a new effort to explain the high prevalence of mania and depression in the modern world
Fail Blog
Always something amusing here
Ed Yong, Robots Evolve to Deceive One Another
Absolutely amazing research and absolutely amazing outcome. Match artificial neural networks with robots that can move and communicate with one another, let evolution happen, and you get a variety of adaptive behavior. Including patterns of deception.
Eugenia Tsao, The Drug Barons’ Campaign to Make Us All Crazy
“the extent to which our lives and livelihoods have been colonized by the reductive logic of pharmaceutical intervention remains breathtaking.” For more, see Antropologi’s Why anthropologists should politicize mental illness, which links to a longer Tsao article and provides more background
Malcolm Dando, Biologists Napping While Work Militarized
Nature editorial on how mind-altering agents need to be included in our definitions of chemical warfare. The work is being done – will we stand up against it?
Anthropology
Nicholas Kristof & Sherul WuDunn, The Women’s Crusade
Our paramount moral challenge – the brutality and oppression inflicted on women worldwide – and ways to address it. For more, check out their book Half the Sky
By Brandon Sparks
Imagine you are hungry. You have been hungry for weeks, with no end in sight due to a heavy drought that severely diminished your land’s production. Your gravely ill sister lives with you, as do her two young children, further straining your limited food supply. Then your neighbor dies. You do mourn, but you also feel relief – relief because you will be able to take your family to the funeral. There they will be able to eat.
This post examines food crises in Lesotho and the role funerals play in coping with these food shortages within a rural town and neighboring villages. In my senior thesis written on the costly funerals in Lesotho and the impact of HIV/AIDS on their practice, I found that the local Basotho people use funerals as a food coping mechanism. Lesotho often suffers from periods of drought that place a burden on food resources and force people to look for methods to supplement their daily food.
I will begin with a brief look at the factors behind the food shortages, followed by a description of funeral practices and how families are able to use them to for food coping. Lesotho is a small country in southern Africa. Through a quirk in British rule, it remained independent from South Africa and is now the only country to have its entire border completely surrounded by another country. The terrain is mountainous and has earned Lesotho the nickname of “the roof of Africa.” Less than eleven percent of the land is arable and farmers are at the peril of periodic droughts.
Lesotho also has one of the highest HIV/AIDS prevalence rates in the world, with some estimates as high as thirty-one percent of its over two million population carrying the virus (Brummer 2002). The high percentage stems from Lesotho’s history of labor migration to the gold and diamond mines of South Africa, where Basotho men would contract the disease and then bring it home to their families in Lesotho.
The attraction of mining employment to Basotho (from Lesotho) men comes partially from the lack of opportunities at home. Agriculture production has dropped in the past fifty years due to deterioration of the land through erosion, mono-cropping, and overgrazing, insecurities in the system of land tenure that inhibited farmers from securing their holdings, population pressure that increased exploitation of arable land, and environmental factors like hail, frost, and drought (Murray 1981). These factors, coupled with population growth, mean that the frequency and severity of food crises has increased in the last century.
Continue reading “Funerals and Food Coping in Rural Lesotho”
By Stephan Schleim
Looking for a “Neuro Revolution”? Zack Lynch wants to offer you one in his new book.
With a title like Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World and the author celebrated as a leading technology consultant and market researcher in marketing blurbs, readers might expect the author’s opinion to be based on the state of the art of neuroscience. However, frequent mistakes and shortcomings in his presentation of the scientific findings and methodology seriously call into question whether Lynch is the right person to sketch a possible “neuro future” and to address the prospects and limitations of neurotechnology.
The first surprise comes on page 3, where Lynch describes his first experience with a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner, one of the most frequently-used research tools in contemporary cognitive neuroscience. He explains that “the machine’s computer had recorded and analyzed data about how those loud thumping noises had bounced back from the structures under my skin.” To uninformed people, the noise of high-field MRI scanners will indeed be one of their most salient features. However, it is a mere epiphenomenon subject to the sophisticated technology necessary to change strong magnetic fields in short intervals. The technique itself is based on inaudible electromagnetic waves (like those emitted by a cellphone) to investigate brain structure and function.
SharpBrains and the American Society on Aging are co-producing a Brain Health Day during ASA’s West Coast Conference on Aging. It will happen on Friday, Sept 11th, at the Oakland Marriot City Center, Oakland, California. SharpBrains has all the details on planned activities, talks, registration, and more. Registered participants will even get a complementary copy of the book The SharpBrains Guide to Brain Fitness.
Here is the description:
Since 2006, healthy aging pioneers have been actively evaluating and implementing an expanding menu of stimulating brain health programs. The American Society on Aging and SharpBrains have partnered to introduce aging professionals to the best practices in a variety of community-based and residential settings, discuss emerging trends that will affect your work in years to come, and offer you resources to understand and navigate through the growing array of options.
September 11-13 will see the conference “Across the Generations: Legacies of Hope and Meaning” hosted at Fordham University in New York City. The anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson will be giving the keynote address, “The Changing Shape of Lives: Making Meaning across Time.” Jerome Bruner will also be part of a panel “Minds and Meanings” the first day. You can access the entire schedule here.
The conference is hosted by The Institute of General Semantics, whose website provides more info about the conference and the institute itself.
Neuroanthropology 