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."
posted on Oct 9, 2008 - View this thread

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 on Aug 4, 2008 - View this thread

"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 on Jun 21, 2008 - View this thread

The Museum Of Weird Consumer Culture.

posted on Dec 14, 2007 - View this thread

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 on Jun 11, 2006 - View this thread

Whatcha doin' tonight? Me, I think I'll mosey over the block and a half to the Pit and take in the vibes at the Gathering of Nations Pow-Wow. Might even try to score some peyote. No, I'm not trying to reinforce a stereotype; I'm truly interested in the experience. Besides, I'm descended from Sequoyah - we're on the Dawes Rolls and everything. Ha! Who am I kidding? I'm just another stupid white girl.
posted on Apr 29, 2005 - View this thread

Narts! The Nart Sagas are arguably the most essential ingredient of Circassian Culture, to which they are what Greek mythology is to Western Civilization. Though much less known than their Greek counterparts, the Nart epic tales are no less developed. The heroism, sagacity, guile and ferocity of the Nart demi-gods are more than matches to those of the Greek Pantheon. If this selection of stories captures your interest, you might want John Colarusso's Nart Sagas from the Caucasus; you can read the introduction online ("A ship sailing across the Black Sea in the year 1780 eventually would have come upon a lush shore at the eastern end of the dark gray waters..."). Although they seem to have been brought by the Ossetes (and J. Cassian is posting an Ossetian tale, The Death of Soslan, on his blog), they're everywhere in the Northern Caucasus. And some people say they were the source of the King Arthur stories.
posted on Dec 4, 2004 - View this thread

Sapir/Whorf raises its head again in study of the Piraha tribe. I can't stop thinking about this article which appeared in the Globe and Mail Friday.

A study appearing today in the journal Science reports that the hunter-gatherers seem to be the only group of humans known to have no concept of numbering and counting. Not only that, but adult Piraha apparently can't learn to count or understand the concept of numbers or numerals, even when they asked anthropologists to teach them and have been given basic math lessons for months at a time ... the Piraha are the only people known to have no distinct words for colours.
They have no written language, and no collective memory going back more than two generations. They don't sleep for more than two hours at a time during the night or day. Even when food is available, they frequently starve themselves and their children, Prof. Everett reports.
They communicate almost as much by singing, whistling and humming as by normal speech.
They frequently change their names, because they believe spirits regularly take them over and intrinsically change who they are.
They have no creation myths, tell no fictional stories and have no art.

Can any of our anthropologists or linguists comment? I had thought that narrative was the common link in all human cultures....
posted on Aug 21, 2004 - View this thread

Wade Davis , on "Death and life in the Ethnosphere - The Naked Geography Of Hope" : "In Haiti, a Vodoun priestess responds to the rhythm of drums and, taken by the spirit, handles burning embers with impunity. In the Amazon, a Waorani hunter detects the scent of animal urine at forty paces and identifies the species that deposited it....On an escarpment in the high Arctic, Inuit elders fuse myth with landscape, interpreting the past in the shadow of clouds cast upon ice.....Just to know that such cultures exist is to remember that the human imagination is vast, fluid, infinite in its capacity for social and spiritual invention." The death of the Ethnosphere was Margaret Meade's great concern up to her death, says Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis of Serpent and the Rainbow fame and student of Richard Evans Schultes, founder of Ethnobotany : "The surprising results obtained from treating psychoactive plants allowed their users to communicate more directly with the unseen world which they believed to exist." Davis coined the concept of the "Ethnosphere" and has worked for it's preservation through Cultural Survival
posted on Aug 5, 2004 - View this thread

Sworn virgins. "A sworn virgin is called such because she swears—takes a vow under the law of the Kanun—to become a man. From the day she takes this vow (which is sometimes at a very early age), she becomes a man: she dresses like one, acts like one, walks like one, works like one, talks like one, and her family and community treat her as one. She is referred to as he. He will never marry and will remain celibate all of his life." If you find this stuff intriguing, by all means read Alice Munro's great short story "The Albanian Virgin" (from Open Secrets, 1994); you might also want to check out A Dictionary of Albanian Religion, Mythology, and Folk Culture, where there's much more cultural weirdness, and Edith Durham's classic High Albania (online here), from which I first learned of these mannish gals. Oh, and there's a movie!
posted on Jan 30, 2004 - View this thread

The Quiet American provides glimpses of other cultures via phonographs: snapshots of sound. (The field recordings in Vietnam are beautiful and evocative.) Vagabonding also conveys the wonders of travel. What other sites allow non-travelers to experience other parts of the world?
posted on Mar 5, 2003 - View this thread

Archaeoastronomy examines how ancient cultures studied and worshipped the heavens. From the arrangement of the Stonehenge stelae to the Mayan reverence for the planet Venus, this science has resulted in some fascinating and often beautiful discoveries, including star charts found in tombs in Ireland and Japan, the Lascaux caves in France, and rock paintings of a supernova in 1054 that resulted in the Crab Nebula. My personal favorite is the “Sun Dagger” in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (scroll down for photos).
posted on Aug 19, 2002 - View this thread

Every* day, lately, I see more news showing a tightening grasp** on the peoples of the world by agents of power and knowledge. Domestic affairs are more about foreignness than ever, it seems.
* Story about an expedition by Brazilian anthropologists to collect information on the size and number of uncontacted indigenous groups in the Amazon (without actually contacting them).
** Story about tensions between indigenes and commercial fisheries in the Torres Straits Islands. Australia gives broad protection of indigenous rights to land, but courts have not yet ruled on rights to the sea.
posted on Mar 28, 2001 - View this thread