Thank you, Kambiz, for letting me introduce my new book to the Anthropology.net community.
The story behind The Genius of Kinship is an interesting one. In 1991, then a student of history at the St. Petersburg State University, I wrote a course paper on the traditional social organization of the Shoshone Indians as could be gleaned [...]
I recently got an email from German Dziebel letting me know that he’s recently published his book titled, “The Genius of Kinship,” in English. The book explains American Indian kinship systems, and synthesizes ethnographic, linguistic and population genetic lines of evidence to discuss kinship organization. I do not yet have a copy of the book [...]
I wanna know your thoughts on this issue. The issue is about cognitive differences between the sexes, which is always a hot anthropological issue. Recently, Sheril Kirshenbaum from The Intersection posted some examples of NSF’s Science and Engineering Indicators 2008 report. The results of the report indicate that females are much less adept in answering [...]
The 36th edition of the Four Stone Hearth anthropology blog carnival is being hosted over at Afarensis, and as ever we are treated to a good and eclectic mix of what’s been catching the eyes of various anthro-bloggers this past week or two.
Next time round we’ll be nipping over to Hot Cup of Joe, who [...]
Sincere thanks to Kambiz Kamrani for asking about the motivation and meaning behind my book Tattooing the World: Pacific Designs in Print and Skin (Columbia University Press, 2008).
The book is inspired first by sheer love of the designs and their meanings. What an amazing story it is to consider the way modern tattoo was [...]
I remember as an undergraduate at UCSC, I had a discussion with a graduate student who was studying tattoo culture. I forgot her name, but I know she was a student of Triloki Pandey. As part of her dissertation, she engaged in some participant observation to understand the mentality and transformation one makes when becoming [...]
The creative PNAS study that Razib pointed out the other day is out, and I’ve read it. It comes from two biologists at Stanford, Deborah Rogers and Paul Ehrlich, who studied the canoe design of 10 Polynesian groups and one Fijian group for functionality and symbolism. The paper, “Natural selection and cultural rates of change,” [...]
The American Association for the Advancement of Science just wrapped up its annual meeting yesterday and the press is releasing a lot of summaries on what was presented. Of interest to anthropology are these four postulates, presented by Marc Hauser, the factors that differentiate human cognition.
Before I jump into this, I wanna review that in [...]
The breakthrough of 2007, as announced by AAAS, the nonprofit organization that publishes Science, is human genetic variation. Human genetic variation has been studied for quite sometime and the primary reason to study genetic variation in humans is to discover and describe the linkage of genes to many human diseases. This is an increasingly powerful [...]
This short comical clip got me to think if anyone out there has considered digitizing dance? This is can be more than a new type of ethnographic research. One could not only digitize dance as a sort of cultural preservation but one could begin to do really interesting statistics and comparisons of cross cultural dances [...]
