Would it be inherently evil if there were not 6,000 spoken languages but one?
posted by Gyan on Oct 29, 2009 - 148 comments

Ardipithecus: We Meet At Last. (Single Link Carl Zimmer)
posted by HumanComplex on Oct 1, 2009 - 20 comments

"The most important of the all-too-human functions of consultants is to sanctify and communicate opinion. Like ministers of information, consultants condense the message, smooth out the dissonances, unify the rhetoric, and then repeat and amplify it ad nauseam through the client's rank and file. The chief message to be communicated is that you will be expected to work much harder than you ever have before and your chances of losing your job are infinitely greater than you ever imagined."

If you've ever known a management consultant, this explains why they always seem to have that "outrageously unjustified level of self-confidence." A fascinating insider's look into the anthropology of business consulting -- Masters of Illusion: The Great Management Consultancy Swindle
posted by Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese on Sep 16, 2009 - 76 comments

As an evolutionary anthropologist, I find it is important to consider the evolution of other speci...OMG PUPPIES Photos! Video! who's a good boy?
posted by device55 on Sep 11, 2009 - 38 comments

Twilight of the Neandertals - "Some 28,000 years ago in what is now the British territory of Gibraltar, a group of Neandertals eked out a living along the rocky Mediterranean coast. They were quite possibly the last of their kind [meanwhile] around 30,000 years ago, the number of modern humans who lived to be old enough to be grandparents began to skyrocket." (via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Jul 30, 2009 - 44 comments

What can you with an anthropology degree? Bust an illegal organ transplant ring, apparently. [more inside]
posted by greatgefilte on Jul 25, 2009 - 43 comments

From these various anthropological approaches, a basic dichotomy has emerged between two types of societies from very different ecosystems: societies born in rain forests and those that thrive in deserts.... Begin with religious beliefs. A striking proportion of rain forest dwellers are polytheistic, worshipping an array of spirits and gods.... But desert dwellers... are usually monotheistic. Of course, despite allegiances to a single deity, other supernatural beings may be involved, like angels and djinns and Satan. But the hierarchy is notable, with minor deities subservient to the Omnipotent One. This division makes ecological sense.... Desert societies, with their far-flung members tending goats and camels, are classic spawning grounds for warrior classes and the accessories of militarism.... Rain forest cultures also are less likely to harbor beliefs about the inferiority of women; you won’t be likely to find rain forest men giving thanks in prayer that they were not created female, as is the case in at least one notable desert-derived religion.... (Previously, previously, previously)
posted by orthogonality on Jul 12, 2009 - 73 comments

Recent research has shown Neanderthals were sophisticated and fearless hunters, successfully killing a large variety of dangerous game. But as far as humans were concerned, Neanderthals may have possibly been tasty main courses themselves, perhaps one reason for their, uh, "disappearance". Yet humans didn't always sit atop the food pyramid - the oldest human hair has been discovered - inside fossilized 200,000 year old hyena dung.
posted by stbalbach on May 17, 2009 - 67 comments

The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology has put 675 reels of archival 16 mm film online via the Internet Archive. Most of the film is unedited, and stems either from Museum research, or was donated by interested amateurs. Much of it is silent, reflecting the technology of the day. One highlight are the four surviving reels of the long-running TV show 'What in the World" (look for the episode starring Vincent Price), but the archive is full of other hidden gems, such as the 1950s archaeological expedition to Tikal, a 1940 film "A 1000 Mile Road Trip Across America", and Glimpses of Life Among the Catawba and Cherokee Indians of the Carolinas (1927). The films are downloadable in various formats, including MPEG2, Ogg Video, and 512Kb MPEG4. Happy browsing! via.
posted by Rumple on May 3, 2009 - 12 comments

Last year, best-selling biologist Jared Diamond (prev) published an article in the New Yorker describing a cycle of revenge in Papua New Guinea, contrasting the conflicting human needs for vengeance and for justice. (Mefi discussion). Now, the subjects of Diamond's article are seeking their own revenge, suing the publishers for $10 million, claiming Diamond's story amounts to false accusations of serious criminal activity, including murder. [more inside]
posted by CheeseDigestsAll on Apr 29, 2009 - 65 comments

Revealing how we are just a bunch of monkeys... (via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Mar 28, 2009 - 15 comments

For most of us, science arrives in our lives packaged neatly as fact. But how did it get that way? Science is an active process of observation and investigation. Evidence: How Do We Know What We Know? [HTML version, Flash version also available] examines that process, revealing the ways in which ideas and information become knowledge and understanding. In this case study in human origins, the folks from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology explore how scientific evidence is being used to shape our current understanding of ourselves: What makes us human—and how did we get this way?
posted by netbros on Mar 25, 2009 - 15 comments

Paula Loyd, a 36 year old anthropologist and US Army reservist, is the third social scientist to be killed within the last 8 months while working for the US Army's controversial Human Terrain System project in Afghanistan. [more inside]
posted by fourcheesemac on Jan 9, 2009 - 63 comments

Neuroanthropology's Best of Anthropology Blogging 2008. [Via]
posted by homunculus on Jan 3, 2009 - 11 comments

Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss turned 100 on Friday. NPR's Frank Browning offers an appreciation of his work (audio). Anthropologist Dan Sperber (at OpenDemocracy) offers a succinct appraisal of his influence. Patrick Wilcken (TLS) writes about "the century of Claude Lévi-Strauss." [more inside]
posted by fourcheesemac on Nov 29, 2008 - 22 comments

How We Evolve: "A growing number of scientists argue that human culture itself has become the foremost agent of biological change, making us — for the past 10,000 years or so — the inadvertent architects of our own future selves." [more inside]
posted by homunculus on Oct 9, 2008 - 49 comments

Sound glimpses into the past. The Phonogrammarchiv was founded in 1899 and is the oldest audiovisual research archive in the world. There are some fascinating sound samples listenable online from the Historical Collections-1899 to 1950, including: The First Expeditions 1901 to Croatia, Brazil and the Isle of Lesbos; Zulu Recordings 1908; Papua New Guinea (1904-1909) and some lovely recordings of old Musical Boxes from Vienna and Prague. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye on Sep 24, 2008 - 7 comments

Who said structuralism was dead? John Curran posts Great Diagrams in Anthropology, Linguistics, and Social Theory - an illustrated assortment of sociology's greatest hits, arranged neatly for your viewing pleasure.
posted by puckish on Aug 21, 2008 - 15 comments

Anthropologists in the digital domain tend to be a day late and a dollar short as far as us early adopters are concerned, but Michael Wesch managed to capture the popular imagination with his YouTube video, The Machine is Us/ing Us. He recently gave a presentation to the Library of Congress titled An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube in which he talks about the best of the web (not to be confused with The Best of The Web.)
posted by PeterMcDermott on Aug 4, 2008 - 29 comments

Are you a young middle-class creative type (probably white) who has chosen to live in an urban neighborhood that your parents would have shunned? Have the families that formerly lived in your neighborhood (probably not white) been pushed out by soaring rents and real-estate prices to the city fringes or suburbs? The New Republic on demographic inversion.
posted by digaman on Aug 2, 2008 - 64 comments

The UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History has an extensive, searchable online collection. It focuse on material art and household items and has objects from all over the world. The website can be browsed either by geographic orgin: Africa, Asia, North and Central America, Pacific, South America, or through its two exhibits, Intersections: World Arts, Local Lives and Fowler in Focus. Some of my favorite objects (but really, everything is entrancing) are The Blind Scholar (a Taiwanese handpuppet), Chikunga (a Zambian mask) and a stirrup spout bottle which looks like a puma eating a piglet (Peruvian). All items have accompanying descriptions and some have short texts or audioguides with further information.
posted by Kattullus on Jul 23, 2008 - 3 comments

"Cultures at the far edge of the world" (YT) and "The worldwide web of belief and ritual" (YT). Two TED talks by anthropologist and explorer Wade Davis (previously) on the diversity of the world's indigenous cultures and their beliefs, and the richness of the "Ethnosphere," which he describes as "the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness." [Via Mind Hacks]
posted by homunculus on Jun 21, 2008 - 12 comments

"Skin painted bright red, heads partially shaved, arrows drawn back in the longbows and aimed square at the aircraft buzzing overhead. The gesture is unmistakable: Stay Away. The apparent aggression shown by these people is quite understandable, for they are members of one of Earth's last uncontacted tribes." [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi on May 29, 2008 - 88 comments

Masseiana - Containing the three major works of Gerald Massey and his minor work commonly titled: The Lectures. Published here in their entirety, fully revised and amended, with additional material by the editor.
posted by tellurian on May 13, 2008 - 3 comments

Gary Snyder, sublime and seminal poet of ecological awareness and activism [YouTube link], Zen appreciation of "ordinary mind" and American speech, shamanistic intimacy with the natural world, and surviving member of the Beat Generation (West Coast posse) at age 78, has won the $100,000 Ruth Lilly poetry prize. "Gary Snyder is in essence a contemporary devotional poet, though he is not devoted to any one god or way of being so much as to Being itself," said Poetry magazine editor Christian Wiman. "His poetry is a testament to the sacredness of the natural world and our relation to it, and a prophecy of what we stand to lose if we forget that relation.” Previous recipients of the Lilly prize include Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, and W.S. Merwin. [Previously mentioned here.]
posted by digaman on May 7, 2008 - 43 comments

Vengeance Is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even? [more inside]
posted by chunking express on Apr 24, 2008 - 52 comments

Apa Tani bleeding tubes filmed by Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf and Paro, Bhutan in 1936 from Frederick Williamson, are just two of the extraordinary offerings from the Digital Himalaya Project.
posted by tellurian on Apr 3, 2008 - 8 comments

What Europeans think of each other
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Feb 20, 2008 - 76 comments

A new look at race through three lenses: History, human variation and lived experience. Be sure to check out some of the quizzes, notably White Men Can't Jump and other assumptions about sports and race. [via SpoFi] A product of the American Anthropological Association.
posted by psmealey on Feb 3, 2008 - 14 comments

The rock art of the Tassili culture is found throughout North African mountains, the Tassili n'Ajjer. The rock art of Europe is well known around the world. Lesser known but just as amazing and less well-understood is the rock art of North Africa. (prev.,prev.) This tradition is thought to have developed independently of European rock art although researchers agree about very little else about it. This art hearkens back to a time when the Sahara's climate was milder and more wet. This rock art has often been compared to the pre-Nguni San rock art of Southern Africa. There are of course people who believe that aliens did it. The more research that is done about this area and its archaeology, the more we may have to rethink our ideas about the Sahara. . Sadly enough, like many archaeological sites it is becoming endangered.
posted by anansi on Jan 31, 2008 - 8 comments

The Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology has a nice collection of online exhibits, including ones on Roman glassmaking, the ancient history of wine, and a history of body modification. (Other exhibits have appeared on Mefi previously.)
posted by Upton O'Good on Jan 13, 2008 - 3 comments

How to wash your hands and ride the elevators in the new New York Times Building.
posted by Xurando on Dec 20, 2007 - 21 comments

The Museum Of Weird Consumer Culture.
[more inside]
posted by sushiwiththejury on Dec 14, 2007 - 39 comments

Does Denial Make The World Go 'Round? "In the modern vernacular, to say someone is 'in denial' is to deliver a savage combination punch: one shot to the belly for the cheating or drinking or bad behavior, and another slap to the head for the cowardly self-deception of pretending it's not a problem. Yet recent studies from fields as diverse as psychology and anthropology suggest that the ability to look the other way, while potentially destructive, is also critically important to forming and nourishing close relationships. The psychological tricks that people use to ignore a festering problem in their own households are the same ones that they need to live with everyday human dishonesty and betrayal, their own and others'. And it is these highly evolved abilities, research suggests, that provide the foundation for that most disarming of all human invitations, forgiveness."
posted by amyms on Nov 24, 2007 - 12 comments

Stone Age Feminism? Among Neanderthals, hunting big beasts was women's work as well as men's, so it's a safe bet that female hunters got stomped, gored, and worse with appalling frequency. And a high casualty rate among fertile women - the vital "reproductive core" of a tiny population - could well have meant demographic disaster for a species already struggling to survive among monster bears, yellow-fanged hyenas, and cunning Homo sapien newcomers. Via.
posted by amyms on Nov 16, 2007 - 74 comments

Growing Up Sexually: A world atlas and encyclopedia of cross-cultural practices in the sexual enculturation of children. The project overview gives context for the site, which is a subproject of the frighteningly comprehensive International Encyclopedia of Sexuality. Primary author of site is an M.D. No images, text may not be safe for work.
posted by Rumple on Nov 9, 2007 - 32 comments

Lucy, one of the oldest and most complete fossilized hominid skeletons, is hitting the road. Although not without a little controversy. (And that's even before the creationists get wind of the tour!)
posted by tugena13 on Aug 28, 2007 - 15 comments

Leave Those Kids Alone. The idea that parents should be engaging in play with their children is a modern concept (and not necessarily a good one, according to anthropologist David Lancy). Via.
posted by amyms on Jul 23, 2007 - 70 comments

The Etruscan civilization flourished in central Italy around the 6th century BC before the rise of the Roman Empire. Known for high art and high living, some say the Etruscans were influential in molding Roman and western civilization, however it has always been an enigma on where the Etruscans originally came from. DNA evidence has probably solved the mystery, confirming what Greek historian Herodotus first said over 2,500 years ago.
posted by stbalbach on Jun 24, 2007 - 33 comments

Rude at Bonnaroo --eventblogging as mock ethnographic survey of sorts, in the proud tradition of Margaret Mead -- and Body Ritual Among the Nacirema. (from the ever Rude Pundit, who's also performing there) ; >
posted by amberglow on Jun 16, 2007 - 9 comments

86 the Stone Age. And don’t say Primitive or Tribal on the BBC. It might be OK to say “changed little since the Stone Age.” Or maybe Stone Age is a fine euphemism for uncivilized. Perhaps the west needs more than 30 years to rethink it’s own tribal superstitions.
posted by conch soup on Mar 7, 2007 - 44 comments

Robert Krulwich tells the tale of Dr. Alan Rabinowitz and his friend... "Dawi told Alan the terrible secret that explained why there were so few Taron (left in the world). And then Alan told Dawi a secret of his own..." (includes audio link)
posted by ZachsMind on Feb 3, 2007 - 12 comments

Sabine is an ordinary German woman - except that she grew up among the Fayu tribe of West Papua and only moved to Europe at 17.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Jan 17, 2007 - 43 comments

Neanderthals & Modern Humans Interbred. Hybrid Skull Unearthed in Romania ...
... that includes features of both modern humans and Neanderthals, possibly suggesting that the two may have interbred thousands of years ago. Neanderthals were replaced by early modern humans. Researchers have long debated whether the two groups mixed together, though most doubt it. The last evidence for Neanderthals dates from at least 24,000 years ago
posted by Bodyguard on Jan 16, 2007 - 62 comments

Pioneering Anthropologist Clifford Geertz Dies. An era ends.
posted by Seth_Messinger on Oct 31, 2006 - 55 comments

The End of Marriage An anthropologist's view of the "sanctity of marriage" debate doesn't see much function in the modern world for "an empty ritual that provides little or nothing of value."
posted by jefgodesky on Jun 22, 2006 - 69 comments

Shakespeare in the Bush: in which an anthropologist tells the story of Hamlet to a group of Tiv, and ideas about the universal nature of literature get the worst of it.
posted by a louis wain cat on Jun 11, 2006 - 27 comments

This year's Malinowski Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics was presented by David Graeber, until recently an Associate Professor at Yale, entitled Beyond Power/Knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity. (PDF link) Although Yale declined to provide a reason for Mr. Graeber's recent dismissal, it's likely that his outspoken anarchism and activism, as well as his support for a union of graduate students, were influences in the decision. He explained some of his views on anarchism, "globalization", and, yes, hope for the future, on the Charlie Rose Show. (Youtube) Weekend reading assignment: Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. (PDF link)
posted by dinsdale on Jun 10, 2006 - 22 comments

Aboriginal Australia — AIATSIS's map of aboriginal tribes. For some context, AusAnthrop's " Tribal and language database" can be quite useful. (via Savage Minds).
posted by jefgodesky on May 31, 2006 - 18 comments

Prehistoric art in the American Southwest.
posted by snsranch on Feb 6, 2006 - 9 comments