Okay, okay. I've mentioned the 75 'hand axes' discarded at El Pulguero, Baja California. I can tell you from personal observation that Baja has plenty of similar 'Acheulean' archaeological occurrences. Shortly after I moved to Berkeley, California to take up my Ph.D. preparation at UC Berkeley I was invited to a holiday celebration at the then offices of the Institute for Human Oranges Origins and the Berkeley Geochronology Laboratory, just north of campus. I met Garniss Curtis and Carl Swisher that night, along with Don Johanson and Bill Kimball. Besides my companion for the night, the most memorable moments were when someone off-handedly mentioned a tray of hand axes that had been collected in Baja California. They were every inch hand axes, if calling large bifacial cores by that name is your habit.     Such artifacts aren't unique to the Baja peninsula, either, to which the objects in the photo below will attest. Those below, from the Topper site in the Carolinas, scream HAND AXE to me. How 'bout you?Source: Ashley M. Smallwood. "Clovis biface technology at the Topper site, South Carolina: evidence for variation and technological flexibility." Journal of Archaeological Science 37:2413--2425, 2010.I don't normally like rubbing other people's noses in the stuff they peddle. However, in the case of North America's spitting-image-of-hand-axes bifaces, I simply can't help myself. There are yet more. Those illustrated below arise from the GS Lewis site, also in the Carolinas. These, too, are referred to as "preforms," although the reduction sequence, if one existed for these 'facts, isn't well represented in this graphic, which was presumably intended to do just that. The upper 'fact is cleaver shaped, while the lower is hand axe shaped. It's hard for me to see how the one arises from further reduction of the other in this scheme.Sassaman, Kenneth E., Randy Daniel, and Christopher R. Moore. "GS Lewis-East: Early and Late Archaic Occupations Along the Savannah River, Aiken County, South Carolina." Savannah River Archaeological Research Program, South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina, 2002.So, my astute archaeological acolytes, what's a subversive to do, save to continue inching the knife inward at the same time as twisting it ever so slightly to remind the victim that one is serious about the intended outcome? Or, do I ease off, hoping that I've made my *cough* point?Final word of the day: If you keep coming back, I'll keep on trying to give you something to compensate you adequately for your effort. TTFN!SA announces new posts on the Subversive Archaeologist's facebook page (mirrored on Rob Gargett's news feed), on Robert H. Gargett's Academia.edu page, Rob Gargett's twitter account, and his Google+ page. A few of you have already signed up to receive email when I post. Others have subscribed to the blog's RSS feeds. You can also become a 'member' of the blog through Google Friend Connect. Thank you for your continued patronage. You're the reason I do this.

Preamble: An immensely significant phase of science is emerging. It explains why things exist the way they do. Its purview includes everything from the tiniest of subatomic particles to plant and animal species, planets and beyond. The explanations are based on observable facts and sound logic. To transfer this precious wisdom meticulously and quickly, it is necessary to form a team of exceptionally competent intellectuals with keen observation and rational thinking from diverse scientific backgrounds at once. This requirement is the basic objective of this Report. Preface: Report Ceenom is a unique report of tremendous significance. It reports the emergence of a decisive phase of science far more extensive than any of the discoveries made so far. It sheds light on hidden mysteries behind everything of the physical world that we perceive with our five senses and provides clear, irrefutable evidence. It takes us to elevated levels of intellectual competence and teaches us to use logic in the most exalted and precise form. Every branch of science will undergo fundamental change. The intellect will get fine-tuned, enhancing vision which will fetch insight and provide solution to various intriguing problems facing science and humanity. Mathematics and colour will be defined for the first time; the origin and evolution of various forms of beliefs and philosophies will be known with logical evidence; persisting miseries will be resolved. The forthcoming wisdom is powerful, logically sound, and heralds a great era of humanity. Report Ceenom consists of the Report and the List of Addresses to which it has been sent which includes top-ranking universities, research institutions, science academies, social and human rights organisations, renowned researchers and Nobel laureates, heads of nations, and the UN. More than 3600 emails have been sent; the matter has been publicised over forty social networks and several blogs; and hard copies have been sent by surface mail to more than 360 selected centres. The domains Cee.Ci and ceenom.org are used to post the report and the list on the web. When compared to the boundless breadth the Report relates, only very limited aspects could be included here. It delves into unfathomable depths concerning space, time and consciousness, the fundamental laws upon which the universe has evolved, mathematics and colour (ever-existing laws of nature), and every branch of science. It is strongly suggested that this be read entirely and not partially, with absolute attention, logical thinking and sense of responsibility, and communicate and share the matter at once. It is intended for serious readers only. A casual reading is not recommended. Human is about to know “who and what for am I” and “where from and where to am I” with clear logical proof. In order to convey the most vital revealed knowledge to humankind, it is essential to form a team of highly capable intellects with keen observation, unbiased and rational thinking and strong scientific outlook. This has become the reason for setting up the websites, preparing this report. Such a team needs to be set up at once; delay of each moment causing immense loss. Read the full Report at: cee.ci or ceenom.org

Episode 13 of The Great Transformation, takes us to Gaoling Village (高岭村), which is located on Qiniang Mountain at Shenzhen’s eastern most edge on the Dapeng Peninsula. The story of … Continue reading →

General Charles Gordon, left; Muhammad Ahmad, the Sudanese mahdi, right The current crisis in Mali, which has now spilled over into neighboring Algeria, is the latest outbreak of mahdi madness on the African continent. In Islamic eschatology, the mahdi is a savior of the Muslim community near the time of the apocalypse. The British colonial empire faced several mad mullahs when they tried to rule Sudan. One such infamous mahdi was Muhammad Ahmad, who proclaimed himself the leader of the Muslims against the Turkish oppressors in the 1870s. On January 26, 1885 the Mahdists following Abdullah Taashi took control of Khartoum, slaughtering the entire British garrison, including General Charles Gordon, before a relief force could reach the besieged city. These were the days in which a mahdi could inspire an army, over 50,000 men in the case of the force that overran Khartoum. In 1898 Lord Kitchener led a British invasion force of over 8,000 men assisted by 17,600 Sudanese and Egyptian troops. The British gunboat diplomacy resulted in a resounding defeat for the Mahdists at the Battle of Omdurman. Kitchener lost 47 men with 340 wounded, while the the Mahdists suffered 9,700 killed, 13,000 wounded, and 5,000 captured. The Sudanese mahdi and the mad mullahs the British encountered in 19th century Afghanistan were not pietist reformers, but leaders of jihad against the hated occupier, whether fellow Muslim Ottoman Turks or infidel Europeans. The current crisis in Mali is an echo of past mahdis, but with a modern twist. The twist is how we now define a never-ending war on terrorism. Western views of the entire region entrapped by al-Qaeda confuse the situation on the ground. (more…)

Mega hits 100,000 registered users in one hour as Kim Dotcom teases MPAA with ‘MegaMovie’ screenshot from The Next Web by Alex Wilhelm Update: Mega crossed the 250,000 user mark and massive usage has brought the site to a crawl. So far, Mega has won the day. After calling Barack Obama out on Twitter, Kim Dotcom has launched Mega, the replacement to Megaupload from The Next Web by Alex Wilhelm A Year After SOPA, A Look At The Next Five Battles For Internet Freedom from EFF.org Updates by Trevor Timm One year ago today, Internet users of all ages, races, and political stripes participated in the largest protest in Internet history, flooding Congress with millions of emails and phone calls to demand they drop the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)—a dangerous bill that would have allowed corporations and the govenrment to censor larger parts of the Web. Digital Humanitarian Response: Moving from Crowdsourcing to Microtasking from iRevolution by Patrick Meier A central component of digital humanitarian response is the real-time monitor-ing, tagging and geo-location of relevant reports published on mainstream and social media. This has typically been a highly manual and time-consuming process, which explains why dozens if not hundreds of digital volunteers are often needed to power digital humanitarian response efforts. To coordinate these efforts, volunteers typically work off Google Spreadsheets which, needless to say, is hardly the most efficient, scalable or enjoyable interface to work on for digital humanitarian response.   Google’s Eric Schmidt calls for an open Internet as he lifts the lid on his visit to North Korea from The Next Web by Ken Yeung Twitter: 100% of the Senate, 90% of the House are active on the social platform from The Next Web by Alex Wilhelm How to Protect Your Privacy from Facebook’s Graph Search from EFF.org Updates by Adi Kamdar Earlier this week, Facebook launched a new feature—Graph Search—that raised some privacy concerns with us. Graph Search allows users to make structured searches to filter through friends, friends of friends, and strangers. This feature relies on your profile information being made widely or publicly available, yet there are some Likes, photos, or other pieces of information that you might not want out there. The Creepy Details of Facebook’s New Graph Search from EFF.org Updates by Adi Kamdar Google+ Communities: A Beginner’s Guide from Mashable! by Ryan Lytle 10 Things We Learned From Facebook’s Graph Search from Mashable! by Emily Price Map of 500M Foursquare checkins demonstrates how they built a “Google PageRank for the real world” from The Next Web by Matthew Panzarino Fortune’s top 100 employers for 2013: Google first, Microsoft #75, Apple and Facebook don’t make it from The Next Web by Emil Protalinski 5 Instagram Alternatives If You’re Worried About Your Photos from social media vb by meloniedodaro The latest storm around the terms of service changes has prompted many users to seek out Instagram alternatives due to the prospect of having their precious moments sold without their approval. Here are the top 5 Instagram alternatives that take pictures just fine. 7 Ways Mobile Apps Are Driving Revenue for Businesses from Mashable! by Ryan Matzner Google Grants $3.7 Million to Civic Innovation and Open Data Projects from Mashable! by Zoe Fox Kaspersky uncovers Red October malware campaign targeting governments for the last 5 years from The Next Web by Emil Protalinski Smartphones Consuming More Data Than Tablets for the First Time from Mashable! by Anita Li Twitter in 2012: A year of conflicts, product evolution and cranking up the cash machine from The Next Web by Robin Wauters 10 Epic Works of ASCII Art from Mashable! by Christine Erickson Can Twitter Predict the Future? Pentagon Says Maybe from Mashable! by Nextgov ‘Red October’ cyber-attack found from BBC News | Europe | World Edition A ‘significant’ cyber-attack that may have been stealing confidential documents since 2007 has been discovered by Russian researchers.

Ronald Coase won a Nobel prize in economics for inventing the idea of transaction costs in his famous paper “The nature of the firm” (1937). He has just announced his desire, with Ning Wang, to found a new journal called “Man and the economy”. Their manifesto, “Saving economics from the economists”, was published in the Harvard Business Review for December 2012. Coase argues there that “The degree to which economics is isolated from the ordinary business of life is extraordinary and unfortunate…In the 20th century, economists could afford to write exclusively for one another. At the same time, the field experienced a paradigm shift, gradually identifying itself as a theoretical approach of economization and giving up the real-world economy as its subject matter. This separation of economics from the working economy has severely damaged both the business community and the academic discipline. “. He continues, “Economics thus becomes a convenient instrument the state uses to manage the economy, rather than a tool the public turns to for enlightenment about how the economy operates. But because it is no longer firmly grounded in systematic empirical investigation of the working of the economy, it is hardly up to the task….The reduction of economics to price theory is troubling enough. It is suicidal for the field to slide into a hard science of choice, ignoring the influences of society, history, culture, and politics on the working of the economy. It is time to reengage the severely impoverished field of economics with the economy. Market economies springing up in China, India, Africa, and elsewhere herald unprecedented opportunities for economists to study how the market economy gains its resilience in societies with cultural, institutional, and organizational diversities (sic). But knowledge will come only if economics can be reoriented to the study of man as he is and the economic system as it actually exists.” This plea echoes a movement of economics students a decade ago, calling itself “post-autistic economics”, which later took the form of the real-world economics review. In addition, the legions of heterodox economists multiply and an interdisciplinary World Economics Association, formed in 2011, soon acquired over 10,000 members. So there is plenty of resistance within the profession to an economics whose dominant model is one of rational choice in “free” markets. From Coase’s summary and these other developments we may infer several priorities: to reconnect the study of the economy to the real world; to make its findings more accessible to the public; and to place economic analysis within a framework that embraces humanity as a whole, the world we live in. A century ago, Alfred Marshall defined economics as “both a study of wealth and a branch of the study of man” in his synthesis of the marginalist revolution, Principles of Economics (1890). Marshall was Keynes’ teacher at Cambridge, a cooperative socialist who also developed a Hegelian theory of the welfare state. The “human economy” approach shares all these priorities. Our focus definitely draws inspiration from and seeks to contribute to the tradition of economic thought, but, more explicitly than the currents within economics described above, we are open to other traditions in the humanities and social sciences, notably anthropology, history and development studies. The Human Economy Program at the University of Pretoria has been shaped more directly by another movement of the last decade which now goes by the name of “alter-globalization”. It is the third phase of an international project that originated in the first World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre in 2001. The first phase (2002-2009) was a series of volumes in several languages, produced by a network of researchers and activists in Latin America and France, which aimed to introduce a wide audience to the core themes that might organize alternative approaches to the economy. These books, called Dictionary of the Other Economy, brought together short essays on the history of debate on particular topics and offered some practical applications of concepts relevant to building economic democracy. Taken together they pointed to a new language for addressing common problems of development. A second phase saw publication of the first English collection in this series, The Human Economy: A Citizen’s Guide (Hart, Laville and Cattani 2010), for which a number of additional authors were commissioned from Britain, North America and Scandinavia. The new title reflected a desire to emphasize continuity with existing practice in a global context of humanity as a whole. The emphasis was on what people are doing already, even if this is obscured, marginalized or even repressed by mainstream institutions. Fifteen countries were represented, but there were no authors from Asia and Africa, where most of the people live.  Extension of the international project to the Anglophone West still left a lot to do. It was also clear that the focus on interaction between researchers and activists left questions of research methodology relatively unexplored. The University of Pretoria program is a new departure in several senses. First, by adding a Southern African node to the burgeoning network of scholars and activists represented by publications so far, it seeks to give greater weight to African and Asian voices and to broaden the geographical range of South-South and North-South dialogue. Second, it is the first coordinated academic research program in the process initiated by the World Social Forum and encapsulated in the series of books mentioned above. Earlier volumes were aimed at a general audience of activists, whereas our priority is to contribute dedicated academic research to the search for greater economic democracy. Third, starting from a core of social anthropologists, the program has extended its reach to include sociology, history, political science, economics, geography, education and agriculture. In the first two years we have appointed 18 post-doctoral fellows from Africa (South Africa, Zimbabwe and Angola), Asia (Nepal), the Americas (Brazil, Jamaica, USA and Canada) and Europe (Britain, France, Germany, Netherlands, Spain and Italy). In 2012 we appointed an inter-disciplinary group of 8 African PhD students from South Africa, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Cameroon. The majority of these two groups are carrying out research in Southern Africa, but they bring to Pretoria previous and continuing research interests in a wide range of geographical areas. The Human Economy program started out with only loose guidelines. Our aim is to build a conversation, among ourselves and with other specialists, ultimately with the general public. This conversation is as much based on empirical investigation and comparison as it is on developing a theoretical and methodological framework for planning research. Our first basic method is inspired by the ethnographic revolution that launched social and cultural anthropology in the twentieth century. This was the first sustained effort by a class of academics to break out of the ivory tower and to join the people where they live in order to discover what they do, think and want. Second, the economy is always plural and people’s experience of it across time and space has more in common that the use of contrastive terms like “capitalism” or “socialism” would suggest. This approach addresses the variety of particular institutions through which most people experience economic life. Third, our aim is to promote economic democracy by helping people to organize and improve their own lives. Our findings must therefore ultimately be presented to the public in a spirit of pragmatism and made understandable for readers’ own practical use. All of this is compatible with a humanist view of the Human Economy. It must be so, if the economy is to be returned from remote experts to the people who are most affected by it. But humanism by itself is not enough.  The human economy must also be informed by an economic vision capable of bridging the gap between everyday life (what people know) and humanity’s common predicament, which is inevitably impersonal and lies beyond the actor’s point of view (what they don’t know). For this purpose a variety of methods have to be drawn from philosophy, world history, literature and grand social theory. Globalization is irreversible and we have to extend our normal reach to address its contradictions. Emergent world society is the new human universal – not an idea, but the fact of our shared occupation of the planet crying out for new principles of association. We urgently need to make a world where all people can live together. Small may be beautiful and a preference for initiatives grounded in local social realities is unchallengeable, but large-scale bureaucracies, whether governments or business corporations, are also essential if our aspirations for economic democracy are to embrace the movement of the world we live in. What after all is the “great transformation” of human history that we are living through? Around 1800 the world’s population was about one billion. At that time less than 3 in 100 people lived in cities. The rest lived mainly by extracting a livelihood from the land. Animals and plants were responsible for almost all the energy produced and consumed by human beings.  A bit more than two centuries later, world population has reached seven billions. The proportion living in cities is about a half. Inanimate sources converted by machines now account for the bulk of energy production and consumption. For most of this period, the human population has been growing at an average annual rate of 1.5%; cities at 2% a year; and energy production at around 3% a year. This last figure is double the rate of population increase, a powerful index of the economic expansion of the last 200 years. As a result, many people live longer, work less and spend more than they did before. But the distribution of all this extra energy has been grossly unequal. A third of humanity still works in the fields with their hands. Americans each consume 400 times more energy than the average Ugandan. This hectic dash of humanity from the village to the city is widely assumed to be driven by an engine of economic growth and inequality known as “capitalism”. But several social forms have emerged to organize the process on a large scale, not all of them reducible to this single term: empires, nation-states, cities, corporations, regional federations, international organizations, capitalist markets, machine industry, global finance and telecommunications networks. There is a pressing need for more effective social coordination at the global level and the drive towards local self-organization is strong everywhere. Special-interest associations of every kind proliferate. Resistance to the unequal society we have made often takes the form of denigrating the dominant bureaucratic institutions — “the state” and “capitalism” being favourites in this regard – in favour of promoting small-scale self-organized groups and networks. Yet it is inconceivable that any future society of this century could dispense altogether with the principal social forms that have brought us to this point. So the real task is to work out how states, cities, big money and the rest might be selectively combined with citizens’ initiatives to promote a more democratic world society. A first step would be to emancipate ourselves from viewing the economy exclusively in national terms. This idea is not particularly new. It is just that many activists in the SSE (social and solidarity economy) field will not consider working with bureaucracies that they think of as the enemy. Yet the French revolution was partly financed by the shippers of Bordeaux and Nantes, the Italian revolution by the industrialists of Milan and Turin. Kenya’s world-leading experiment in mobile money, M-pesa, was launched by a subsidiary of Vodacom. Hewlett-Packard has developed research stations in outlying areas for some years now as part of an attempt to make computers accessible to the world’s “poorest four billions”. The notion of a “popular economy” has emerged in Latin America since the 1990s, bringing new coalitions (peasants, urban informal workers, unions) into an alliance with progressive political regimes. Brazil under Lula introduced a community banking system combining microfinance and complementary currencies with strong local democratic input. The government of Uruguay has sponsored a “3C” alternative circuit of exchange and credit for SMEs in which national utilities and local tax offices anchor the circulation of unpaid invoices as currency. South Africa is developing a solution to the problem of slow payments to the self-employed by pioneering a clearing system that allows banks to pay 70% of the value of invoices immediately. It doesn’t make sense to go it alone on a small scale, but equally one has to be selective in picking capitalist firms and state regimes to work with. This dialectic of small-scale humanism and large-scale impersonal institutions may be illustrated by an example, even if the balance here is tipped towards the former pole. Lindiwe — a middle-aged Zulu woman who once worked in a factory and is now a domestic servant in Durban — rents township accommodation from the municipality and travels to and from work in informal minibuses. She looks after her mother who receives a state pension and her brother’s young daughters since he has AIDS. Her teenage sons are unemployed and drifting into crime and drugs. Her husband disappeared over ten years ago. She sells cosmetics to neighbours in her spare time, shops once a week in a supermarket and at local stores the rest of the time. She attends a prosperity church, has joined a savings club and owes money to loan sharks, but doesn’t have a bank account. Note the complexity of her economic arrangements and the variety of sources she draws on, few of them directly part of corporate capitalism. Lindiwe understands her own life better than anyone else. But there are questions she doesn’t know the answers to: Why are there no longer mining jobs for the men? Why did all the factories close? Why are the schools failing? Why has a Black government done so little to reduce poverty and inequality? So the human economy approach must somehow bridge the gap between Lindiwe’s life and a world driven by forces she cannot know. But, given our preference to anchor economic strategies in people’s everyday lives, their aspirations and their local circumstances, the intellectual movement involved should be conceived of as being one of extension from the local towards the global. We can’t arrive instantly at a view of the whole, but we can engage more concretely with the world that lies beyond the familiar institutions that immediately secure our rights and interests. According to Mauss and Polanyi (especially, but all the founders of modern social theory too), the chief way of achieving social extension has always been through markets and money in a variety of forms. Lindiwe could not juggle the plethora of institutional factors in her life without money. Money and markets are intrinsic to our human potential, not anti-human as they are often depicted. Of course they should take forms that are more conducive to economic democracy. Her unanswered questions require a new kind of political education, one grounded in the circumstances she knows well, but also capable of opening up to broader perspectives. It helps to recognize that money and markets span the extremes of infinite expansion and finite closure. As Simmel said, money reflects our human potential to make universal society. It is also true, of course, that human motivations for economic action are more holistic than the economists allow for, taking in concerns with well-being and the good life, for example. These have traditionally been shaped by organized religion. A human economy approach must revisit the complex interaction between religion, education and economy too. The principles of an “economy”, conceived of as a specific strategy, must be discovered, articulated and disseminated. Such an economy, to be useful, should be based on general principles that guide what people do. It is not just an ideology or a call for realism. The social and technical conditions of our era — urbanization, fast transport and universal media – should underpin any inquiry into how the principles of human economy might be realised. A human economy approach does not assume that people know best, although they usually know their own interests better than those who presume to speak for them. The history of the word “economy” is both long and unfinished. Any modern English dictionary reveals the residue of that history in the way we use terms like economy, economical and economize today, referring as they do to order, management and thrift in contexts ranging from household budgets to the world of markets and money. In origin “economy” privileged budgeting for domestic self-sufficiency; political economy promoted capitalist markets over military landlordism; national economy sought to equalize the chances of a citizen body. Perhaps “human economy” could be a way of envisaging the next stage, linking unique human beings to humanity as a whole. It would then be a synthesis of the various elements in a sequence of social extension, house-market-nation-world, whose typical social units are not replaced, but rather co-exist. We are of course getting way ahead of ourselves. The Pretoria Human Economy program is first of all a new node in an international network animated by a common desire to advance economic democracy through academic research, social initiatives and public outreach. Based in Southern Africa, our aim is to articulate a new perspective in South-South and North-South dialogues concerning a better world. This will be achieved through research and intellectual exchange more than by issuing programmatic statements such as this one. But we have to keep our eyes on the prize. So why not ask where the human economy is situated in a historical sequence of named economic strategies that still co-exist? Appendix 1 contains an expanded list of candidates drawn from economic history, each with its own governing principles. Finally, there is a contemporary political context that might add point to the human economy idea at this time. Oliver Williamson received a Nobel prize in economics last year for his development of Coase’s theory of the firm. Coase asked why, if markets are efficient, any self-employed person would choose to work in a collective rather than outsource what they can’t best do themselves. Williamson takes this division between what is internal and external to the firm to be entirely flexible, as should be the social division of labour as a whole, including relations between corporations and governments who have maintained an uneasy alliance for a century and a half. The Fordist phase of internalizing transaction costs is over for a number of reasons, not least because the digital revolution has cheapened the cost of transferring information reliably. This does not mean that corporations have ceased to be large and powerful. Of the 100 largest economic entities on earth two-thirds are corporations and, of those, half are bigger than all but 8 countries. Moreover, I believe we are witnessing a drive for corporate home rule which would leave them the only citizens in a world society made to suit their interests. This is the logical conclusion of the collapse of the difference between real and artificial persons in law in the late 19th century (Hart 2005 The Hit Man’s Dilemma: Or business personal and impersonal), granting business corporations the legal standing of individual citizens. As Thomas Jefferson foresaw, how could mere human beings compete with organizations of their size, wealth and longevity? Coase/Williamson provides the flexibility to imagine a world where companies control the marketing of their brand, outsource production, logistics and much else and internalize government. For example, why rely on governments for conflict resolution? Corporations also have to handle conflict resolution internally. Why have state laws, when what the world needs most is moral law? The discourse of Corporate Social Responsibility is a major field for negotiating changes in the relationship between firms and society. We all know about the privatization of public services, which is another side of that coin. This is a matter of deadly significance and we have to ask what kinds of political mobilization are capable of resisting it. The human economy idea may have its origins in small-scale informal activities and a humanist ideology, but effective resistance to a corporate takeover will require selective alliances between self-organized initiatives on the ground and large-scale bureaucracies of the public and private kind. It will also require the development of global social networks of the kind from which our Human Economy program drew its impetus. For, as Camus told us in The Plague, the human predicament is impersonal; there are powerful anti-humanist forces in our common lives. So we have to build bridges between local actors and the new human universal, world society. To be human is to be a person who depends on and must make sense of impersonal social conditions. But in the struggle with the corporations, we need to be very sure that we are human and they are not. The drive for economic democracy will not be won until that confusion has been cleared up.   Appendix 1   Some forms of economy and their principles Domestic economy: budgeting for household self-sufficiency, anti-market Religious economy (Buddhist, Christian, Islamic): countryside and city in God’s natural plan, for commerce against usury Political economy: capitalist markets against military landlordism National economy: moderating capitalist inequality in a national citizen community (macro-economics) Market economy: rational individual choice in a free market (micro-economics) Socialist economy (cooperative, state, communist): control by the workers in a workers’ state Capitalist economy: one-world capitalism, free flow of money, financial globalization Human economy: house-market-world, human beings for all humanity, economic democracy         [thememorybank.co.uk] Tweet This Post

Check out the comments in this post:   Anthropology: The landmark books   Last year I posted an open thread called “Anthropology: Five Books,” in which I asked readers to list the five books they feel best represent the discipline.  The responses were great.  I think it’s time to try another open thread along similar lines, but let’s take a bit of a different route.  During that last thread, I asked about books that both represent anthropology and appeal to general readers.  This time, let’s talk about the books that form your own personal anthropological canon.   Fred Limp (SAA President) Responding to Open Access in Archaeology from Digging Digitally by Eric Kansa Again, thanks to everyone for the thoughtful comments and discussion on my prior post here and elsewhere. I also want to thank Fred Limp, President of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) for taking the time to share his thoughts on the topic, including posting them on this blog. Below are the comments he emailed to me (with permissions to post): Anthropology Beyond Capitalism from Anthropology Report by Jason Antrosio Inspired by the special issue on Beyond Capitalism in Anthropology News and the publication of excerpts from Guy Alperovitz’s America Beyond Capitalism in Truthout, a collection of related material from the anthropology blogs. Please let me know of additional resources! Building an Anthropology of Bicycling from Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog by Adonia Researching bicycling, like many ethnographic projects, suggests a bodily incorporation of the ethnographer into some local practice. I mean, I could study the social and cultural life of bicycling and not also ride a bike, but that would be like a celiac studying people who sample bread. Actually, that’s kind of accurate, because there is not one kind of bicycling, just as there is not one kind of bread. The celiac could enjoy millet and rice flour loaves, while avoiding those with wheat flour. I study and practice urban transport bicycling, which includes what I think of as “urban recreational cycling,” but I don’t know much about mountain biking, long distance recreational cycling, or racing. Militanthro: Anthropology and the Study of NATO and the U.S. Military from OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY by Maximilian Forte Neuroanthropology on Facebook – A Round-Up of the Good Stuff from Neuroanthropology by neuroanth Earlier in this year, Greg and I started micro-blogging and posting links on our Neuroanthropology Facebook site. We’re over 1,000 likes there, so thanks to everyone who has taken part in building our presence on Facebook. Anthropology & Democracy III: The stand aside or do something edition from Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog by Ryan This is Part III of a series of posts on anthropology and democracy.  Part I is here, Part II, here. In the USA, the spectre of democracy looms.  It is days away.  November 6, when people all across the country will step into a small booth and exercise their right to participate in the democratic system by choosing between representatives from the two dominant political parties (oh, and a slew of others that the vast majority of people have not heard of).  This is democracy at the highest political level.  Democracy at its finest.  The pinnacle.  Right? Danish media reactions to Journal of Linguistic Anthropology paper from Society for Linguistic Anthropology by Chad Nilep [The following is a guest post by Martha Sif Karrebæk.] On the 13th of August I was contacted by a journalist from the biggest national radio station in Denmark who wanted me on air the  following morning. Later that day as well as the following days I was called by a bunch of journalists, from other radio stations, newspapers, magazines and even the two national television stations, including the 9 o’clock news (see the list below). Cultural Competency in Anthropological Perspective from Neuroanthropology by daniel.lende The rise and wane of the cremation ritual from Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog by Dienekes A thought occurred to me recently as I was reading about the Urnfield culture and the two components of the Andronovo horizon, the Alakul and Fedorovo cultures which contrasted in their practice of cremation vs. inhumation. It seems that the cremation ritual rose to prominence during the Bronze Age and then largely waned during the Iron Age. Notes on “The Poetics of History” from Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog by Matt Thompson Metahistory (1973) is a remarkably prescient text. One of my projects this summer was getting to know Hayden White and I thought I might share some of the notes I took on the introductory chapter to his best known book. What brought me to the work initially was my interest in history and memory studies. Although the author’s intent is to address historians, Metahistory can be read as a comprehensive framework for thinking about how anthropologists construct representations through ethnography or how a community comes to relate to its past through the composition of historical narratives. Anthropology Blogs 2013 from Anthropology Report by Jason Antrosio Anthropology Blogs are a way to understand What is Anthropology. In 2013, anthropology unveils the This Is Anthropology–a big thanks to Jason Miller, Charlotte Noble, and Janelle Christensen for their work, and see theirNeuroanthropology – This Is Anthropology commentary. Anthropology, Gun Reform, American Anthropological Association from Anthropology Report by Jason Antrosio

From David Denison: Not sure where this fits in the misnegation scheme of things.  On Jazz Record Requests (BBC Radio 3, 19 Jan 17:00) the presenter quoted a listener's request as follows: I think that not many listeners will be familiar with this track - and should be. As David observes, "The intended meaning is obvious" — and the number of negatives is appropriate — but something has gone wrong. Two things combine to create the problem: (1) The placement of the negative (in the subject "not many listeners"); and (2) the syntactic level of the and coordination (partnered with the verb phrase "will be familiar"). In addition, the intended meaning is more consistent with but than with and. If we ignore the initial qualifier "I think …", the structure looks something like this: (I've used "***" to mark the verb phrase ellipsis "familiar with this track".) This means that there are not many listeners for whom it's both true that they are familiar with this track and that they should be familiar with this track. And that, unfortunately, is more or less the opposite of what the presenter clearly meant, which is that (most or all) listeners ought to be familiar with the track, even though they mostly now are not. The presenter could have fixed the problem by changing the level of coordination to sentences instead of verb phrases: Or by putting the negation in the first conjoined verb phrase rather than in the subject: Or both: Other solutions are obviously possible as well. This is the sort of thing that often goes wrong in extemporaneous speech, where we're somehow managing to cast complex hierarchies and conjunctions of concepts into word-sequences in real time. It's especially common when an additional thought is added to the ingredients list after the cake is partly baked, as seems to have happened here. Not many of us are capable of getting it right all the time — nor should be.

Having learned his lesson in 2008, today Chief Justice Roberts apparently had the oath of office written out on a sheet of paper in his hand, and thereby avoided any uncertainties about adverb placement: For background, see "Adverbial placement in the oath flub", 1/20/2009 "Rectifying the oath flub", 1/21/2009 "New light from Toobin on the oath flub story", 9/18/2012 And for discussion of the Zombie Rule about "split verbs" and its role in helping to generate the 2008 oath flub, see: "The split verbs mystery", 8/23/2008 "When zombie rules attack", 8/26/2008 Steven Pinker, "Oaf of Office", New York Times 1/21/2009

Erdoğan ‘stands against all kinds of nationalism’ from Hurriyet Daily News Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan rejects all ethnic nationalist attitudes, saying there is no ‘Kurdish problem’ but ‘My Kurdish brother’s problem’   Suspect detained in Paris killings released from Hurriyet Daily News One of two suspects that were detained last week in connection.   Tens of thousands say goodbye to PKK founder from Journalist in Turkey, background articles, news and weblog about by Fréderike Geerdink DIYARBAKIR – In the Turkish city of Diyarbakir tens of thousands of people said goodbye to PKKfounder Sakine Cansiz and two other Kurdish female activists, who were murdered in Paris last week. Her family members who live in Rotterdam were also present. The ceremony was emotional and passed without any incidents. On Wednesday night the   Theories and Motives Abound in the Killing of 3 Kurds in Paris from NYT > Turkey by By DAN BILEFSKY; Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Istanbul. The brother of one of three Kurdish women found shot to death in Paris said he considered it a professional assassination aimed at derailing peace talks. People walk with the coffins, covered with PKK flags, of three Kurdish activists as tens of thousands of people gather for their funeral in Diyarbakir, sourtheastern Turkey, Thursday, Jan. 17, 2013. Kurdish quest tests Erdogan’s claim to be a regional leader by Acturca Financial Times (UK) Tuesday, January 15, 2013, p. 4 By David Gardner in Beirut It is almost a geopolitical cliché that, when a long and intractable conflict looks as though it might be soluble, maximalist headbangers or vested interests gorged on the dislocation of war emerge to exercise a violent veto. This has been a Renewed Negotiations between Turkey and the PKK: Hopes for a Breakthrough? by Acturca INSS Insight (Institute for National Securities Studies) No. 396, Jan 15, 2013 Gallia Lindenstrauss * The reports of a resumption of negotiations between Turkey and Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Öcalan represent one of the positive developments of early 2013. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is highly popular among his public, and one Turkey and the Kurds: The Blood-Stained Path to Peace by Acturca German Marshall Fund of the United States, January 15, 2013, 3 p. Amberin Zaman * Last week’s murder of three female activists from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in the heart of Paris has added a dramatic new twist to Turkey’s efforts to end the 28-year-long Kurdish conflict. As French police continue their investigation Sakine Cansız, Fidan Doğan, Leyla Söylemez from Mavi Boncuk by M.A.M A youthful picture of Sakine Cansız with her uncle Hüseyin Yıldırım in Tunceli (Dersim)   Follow-up for the Paris Murders from The Istanbulian by Emre Kızılkaya A huge funeral ceremony for three female members of the PKK who were shot dead in Paris last week has been held in Diyarbakir without incident.   The PKK’s European front organization: a weak link in the chain from Hurriyet Daily News Negotiations between the Undersecretary of the National Intelligence Organization on. Turkey demands info on Paris killings from France from Hurriyet Daily News Turkey is seeking information from France on the killing of three Kurdish women in Paris. OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR; How Turkey Can Make Peace With the Kurds from NYT > Turkey by By ALIZA MARCUS; If Turkey genuinely wants peace, it needs to negotiate with the democratically elected Kurds in its own parliament. Deux journées sous hautes tensions en Turquie pour les funérailles des femmes kurdes assassinées à Paris. from YOL (routes de Turquie et d’ailleurs) by anne Öcalan’s TV keeps politicians busy from Hurriyet Daily News No television set has ever provided such fodder for debate among politicians as the one given. Three murders and a funeral from Hurriyet Daily News On the night of Jan. 9, three women were murdered in Paris, in a seemingly professional assault against. Kurdish problem at the crossroads from Hurriyet Daily News On Jan. 14, 1994, a young Daily News journalist, Ruhi Can Tul, was killed when a bomb went off on… BDP represents Kurdish Turks from Hurriyet Daily News In Diyarbakır, thousands peacefully participated in the funeral of three Kurdish activists killed in Paris. Gov’t content with funeral in Diyarbakır ceremony from Hurriyet Daily News Government officials are contented with the funeral ceremonies for the three Kurdish women murdered in Paris Noam Chomsky urges Turkey to pursue Kurdish peace from Yahoo news ISTANBUL (Reuters) – The American left-wing philosopher and activist Noam Chomsky urged Turkey on Friday to end its “malignant” war with Kurdish rebels, saying recent peace efforts offered a real chance of a settlement. Chomsky, whose writings have in the past caused trouble for his Turkish publisher, said the growing independence of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq and the possibility Paris – Moscow Express | Guns, Drugs and PKK from Mavi Boncuk by M.A.M Paris murders of three women PKK operatives had connections to fundraising and drug trafficking which inevitably involved gun running. Strangely a kingpin of the Moscow connection, Aslan Ûsoyan[1] was shot in the head by a sniper[*], and despite efforts of his bodyguards and ambulance workers he died en route to the hospital on 16 January 2013. Analysts of the murky Russian underworld said a number of different groupings could be behind the attack.     Thousands gather for funerals of Kurdish activists killed in Paris from World news: Turkey | guardian.co.uk Kurdish legislators vow to continue supporting peace efforts to end conflict between Turkey and Kurdish rebels Tens of thousands gathered in Turkey on Thursday for the funeral ceremony of three Kurdish activists shot dead in Paris in an attack many believe was an attempt to derail peace talks. Kurdish legislators, meanwhile, vowed to continue supporting peace efforts to end the decades-long conflict between Turkey and autonomy-seeking Kurdish rebels.   Democratic reform in Turkey: constitutional ‘moment’ or constitutional process? from open Democracy News Analysis – by Firat Cengiz Constitutions are highly entrenched laws that express the common identity of the nation. They require substantial public involvement. Yet in Turkey, the details of the reform process have not been fully disclosed, and it is being rushed through.

Bu yazı 2001′den… SAĞLI SOLLU İLERLEYELİM BEYLER Nihayet otobüsteyim. Halk otobüsü o kadar dolu ki bir yere tutunmamıza gerek yok. Gayet samimi bir şekilde duraktan hareket ediyoruz. -Abi bi öğrenci uzatır mısın? -Pason var mı? -Yok. -Pason yoksa tam alırız. -Peki peki abi, tam al. Gökçek’e bir hislenme, yola devam. Bu saatte otobüste oturacak yer bulduğuma şaşarak şoförün arkasındaki koltuğun pencere kenarına kuruldum. Koltuğun kenarında “gazi, malul, hamile ve çocuklu bayanlara ayrılmıştır” yazıyordu. Bir keresinde robadan bir bluz giyince dolmuşta adamın birinin beni hamile zannedip yer verişi geldi aklıma. Neyse etrafıma şöyle bir bakıp tarife uyan kimse olmadığını görünce vicdanım hafifledi, yerimden kalkmadım. Yine esnaf eylemi vardı, yollar kapalıydı. Önümüzde yürüyen gruptan 10-15 kişi dönüp otobüse bindiler. Eylem alanına kadar yürümeyecekleri için kendilerini çok akıllı buluyorlar, aralarında gülüşerek yürüyen grubu enayi yerine koyan laflar ediyorlardı. Sınıf mücadelesinin geldiği nokta gözlerimi yaşartmıştı. İçimden lahavle çekerek tekrar pencereden dışarıya bakmaya koyuldum. Demokraaaasi kültürü diye bas bas bağırıyordu birileri geçen gün Meclis TV’de. Siyaset o derece profesyonelleşmişti ki, artık “emekli milletvekili” diye bir şey vardı. Bir gün bile vekil olsanız kıyak emekli olabiliyordunuz. Koltuk sevdasıyla aynı safta olanlar nasıl da ezip geçiyorlardı birbirlerini. Biletçi hışımla bağırdı: -Abicim, ilerleyelim biraz, koltuk başlarını beklemeyelim. Bir de sarışın güzel kadın vardı, ekonomiden anlayan. Üniversitede kalsaydı daha mı iyi olurdu. -Sarışın abla, ablacım ilerlemiyorsun bari yolu tıkama. Atatürk Orman Çiftliği’nin önünden geçerken yanımda oturan yaşlı amca bir iç geçirdi: “Başını kaldır da bir bak!” Hani şarkı var ya Pınar AYLİN’in: “birileri gelse de beni alsa” Amca gazetesini okurken göz ucuyla ben de bakıyorum, yazı dizisinde sağdaki ve soldaki açmazlar anlatılıyor. Biletçi yine bağırıyor küçücük çalışma mekanından: -Sağlı sollu ilerleyelim beyler! -Boşlukları dolduralım beyler! Yaşlı bir teyze bindi otobüse, önce karşı koltuktaki delikanlıya baktı belki yer verir diye. Pencereden dışarıya bakıyor paşam, hiç oralı değil. Otobüste yaşlılara yer verme sen siyasette ver. -Yaşlılara yer verelim gençler, ayıp oluyor! Aydınlık için bir dakika karanlık eylemleri yaygınlaşıyormuş yurt çapında. Glu glu demiş Erbakan. Gazetedeki fotoğrafını tam glu glu derken çekmişler sanki, adamın dudakları u harfini çıkarırken donakalmış. Adamların canı Susurluk ayranı çektiyse demek ki. -Pencerelere dönelim abicim, ilerleyelim duraklarda bekleme olmasın. Biletçi şoföre dönüp sinirli sinirli:”Abi yine geç kaldık, nasıl yetişeceğiz?” diye sordu. Şoför de:“Duraklarda durmayız koçum, sen kafana takma” diye cevap verdi. Biletçi orta kapıda duran birine seslendi: “Ağabeycim dört duraktır ineceğim deyip orta kapıyı işgal ediyorsun. İnmeyeceksen ilerle be ağabeycim.” Okuluma geldim nihayet. Hınca hınç dolu otobüsten güç bela attım kendimi dışarıya. Laboratuardaki bankomun üstünde “…veya kocaman gözlüklerin, beyaz önlüğünle bir laboratuarda…” Kendimi deneylerime verdim. Kulağımda biletçinin sesi: “Sağlı, sollu ilerleyelim beyler!”

note to self: on the origins of Mr Gradgrind   Filed under: Dickens, Marx

Daniel Sarewitz, co-director of the Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University, penned an early January op-ed in Nature, Science Must Be Seen to Bridge the Political Divide. In it he argues that science must be seen to remain apolitical, so as to maintain its funding and its respected position in society. Science and politics shouldn’t mix, which means scientists should stop being so political, in this case supporting the Democratic party. For the third presidential election in a row, dozens of Nobel prizewinners in physics, chemistry and medicine signed a letter endorsing the Democratic candidate… If the laureates are speaking on behalf of science, then science is revealing itself, like the unions, the civil service, environmentalists and tort lawyers, to be a Democratic interest, not a democratic one. This is dangerous for science and for the nation… In the current period of dire fiscal stress, one way to undermine this stable funding and bipartisan support [for science] would be to convince Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, that science is a Democratic special interest. Sarewitz’s foil in making this argument, in telling Nature’s readers to make a New Year’s resolution to “gain the confidence of people and politicians across the political spectrum by demonstrating that science is bipartisan,” is social science. That is where the danger lies – that science could actually become like social science! This concern rests on clear precedent. Conservatives in the US government have long been hostile to social science, which they believe tilts towards liberal political agendas. Consequently, the social sciences have remained poorly funded and politically vulnerable, and every so often Republicans threaten to eliminate the entire National Science Foundation budget for social science. It doesn’t matter to Sarewitz that many of the problems science is tackling are increasingly in the realm of social science, as he notes in his editorial. Rather, what matters is keeping science’s respected position. As scientists seek to provide policy-relevant knowledge on complex, interdisciplinary problems ranging from fisheries depletion and carbon emissions to obesity and natural hazards, the boundary between the natural and the social sciences has blurred more than many scientists want to acknowledge. With Republicans generally sceptical of government’s ability and authority to direct social and economic change, the enthusiasm with which leading scientists align themselves with the Democratic party can only reinforce conservative suspicions that for contentious issues such as climate change, natural-resource management and policies around reproduction, all science is social science. The US scientific community must decide if it wants to be a Democratic interest group or if it wants to reassert its value as an independent national asset. So social science gets thrown under the bus – we’re not an “independent national asset.” And indeed, after the economic meltdown, many have questions about just how independent and useful economics and economists are. In many ways, though, economics failed by trying to be too science-like, in modeling economies rationally and creating new mathematical approaches that seemed to give control over risk and then blew up in the face of human limits and greed. We naturalized debt, as David Graeber has argued so well in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Yet debt is as much a moral concept as it is an economic one. The change to be made isn’t to maintain the fiction of the economy as a natural creation, with outside regulation correcting the human flaws that inevitably get introduced. Rather, it’s recognizing that we have a human economy, and need to develop economics that way, as Keith Hart just eloquently outlined. A similar problem crops up in the Sarewitz op-ed. He wants to reserve a model of “science” that exists largely in some mythic past, of independence and rationality and the ability to make sound judgments. Indeed, that is the main point emphasized in The Atlantic piece by neurologist Puneet Opal, The Dangers of Making Science Political. Opal builds on Sarewitz: We in democracies should make every effort to promote the objectivity of scientists so they can seek and communicate the best approximation of truth in the natural world, using their training and resources. And the approximation, is only because we will never know reality, but we can get amazingly close with scientific evidence and logical thinking. As scholars in Science and Technology Studies have long argued, science is a human activity. Sergio Sismondo writes in An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies: Science and technology are thoroughly social activities. They are social in that scientists and engineers are always members of communities, trained into the practices of those communities and necessarily working within them. These communities set standards for inquiry and evaluate knowledge claims. Opal’s simple presentation of science as some pure and ideal pursuit is also hard to reconcile with all the recent press about science fraud, and the recognition that scientists have badly misplayed their hand in environmental debates precisely by clinging to this purist model. They brought a knife to a gun fight, thinking that other people would listen because they offered “the truth.” And that’s a major problem. The central conceit of Sarewitz’s article is mistaken, the benefit he believes will come from becoming “bipartisan”. To connect scientific advice to bipartisanship would benefit political debate. Volatile issues, such as the regulation of environmental and public-health risks, often lead to accusations of ‘junk science’ from opposing sides. Politicians would find it more difficult to attack science endorsed by avowedly bipartisan groups of scientists, and more difficult to justify their policy preferences by scientific claims that were contradicted by bipartisan panels. Let’s think about that. In Sarewitz’s world, politicians will naturally listen better to bipartisan endorsements. Take a recent example, the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles plan for “Financial Responsibility and Reform.” Politicians just fell over themselves to enact that bipartisan approach to dealing with a major social problem, didn’t they? An even better example is smoking. If the model is somehow that by inserting better, more independent information into the political process, more rational and scientific decisions will be made, then that’s the wrong kind of scientific flow chart. Tobacco companies had major profits at stake, and major money to spend. They spent it on politicians and scientists alike. It wasn’t on a search for “the truth” about tobacco. Here’s the opening to a review of the book Doubt is Their Product. The sabotage of science is now a routine part of American politics. The same corporate strategy of bombarding the courts and regulatory agencies with a barrage of dubious scientific information has been tried on innumerable occasions — and it has nearly always worked, at least for a time. Tobacco. Asbestos. Lead. Vinyl chloride. Chromium. Formaldehyde. Arsenic. Atrazine. Benzene. Beryllium. Mercury. Vioxx. And on and on. In battles over regulating these and many other dangerous substances, money has bought science, and then science — or, more precisely, artificially exaggerated uncertainty about scientific findings — has greatly delayed action to protect public and worker safety. In other words, political interests have used one of science’s guiding principles – of skepticism and doubt – against itself. Propping up a model of science as truth forgets the messy process of how scientists actually arrive at conclusions. Scientists often try to promote one rhetorical approach within their field (theory, uncertainty, questioning), and try to present another model of science for public consumption (truth, independence). But do they really think people are so naïve that they don’t pick up on this? Politicians and corporate heads certainly are not. Indeed, I think that the most obvious social outcome of science becoming “bipartisan” is that these other, much more powerful groups will welcome the recognition that science is inherently political, and thus truly driven by interests and not by a search for truth. Skepticism has already been employed against science. Recognizing that science needs to be bipartisan? That will become just another tool that can be used against science in the political process. Imagine a bipartisan approach to evolution or to reproduction… Sarewitz also misdiagnoses how science is viewed by the public. He has a view from the inside, of the beauty and power of science. From the outside, at best it’s “really smart people who sometimes act like know-it-all’s.” At worst, it’s “arrogant pricks who want to control the world.” I mean, kids’ cartoons are full of this stuff. The evil scientist who wants to rule the world. So, science as independent in the eyes of the public? That bus left the station a long time ago. Sure, it’s one way to interpret science. But there are plenty other ways available to discerning and non-discerning people alike. In this public realm, it is often how authoritative knowledge is claimed that makes people to react badly: I know more than you, so I get to tell you what you’re supposed to do. Yet this approach is exactly what Sarewitz is claiming in the Nature op-ed. Scientists are this “independent national asset” who should be searching for ways to “strengthen their authority.” Not follow the bad political path of social science into irrelevance… Sarewitz is using academic politics to try to fight larger politics. That’s the wrong approach. Social scientists and scientists should be grouped together, rather than split apart. They both offer authoritative knowledge, acquired through long training, membership in specific communities, and standards of evidence. People generally recognize these sorts of claims to authority better than “the truth” or “I know more than you do.” Think athletes. Many people can talk a good game, but to really play the game, that’s a different story. So I’d encourage Prof. Sarewitz to recognize that science and social science can make good bedfellows, both in politics and in academia. Rather than throw one under the bus, it would make better sense to develop more comprehensive approaches so that the research and ideas we produce as a whole can have a public impact. And to recognize that art and writing and critical thought – domains of the humanities – also play a central role in increasing the role of considered knowledge and developed skills in today’s world. After all, as Sarewitz notes, many of the most pressing problems we face today are exactly at the intersection of multiple disciplines. As scientists seek to provide policy-relevant knowledge on complex, interdisciplinary problems ranging from fisheries depletion and carbon emissions to obesity and natural hazards, the boundary between the natural and the social sciences has blurred more than many scientists want to acknowledge. Recognizing that fact as a starting point, and then moving to examining how to build common approaches to research, communication, and policy, is a more sound approach.

24 Feb: Short Film Nite - four short films about the border A screening of the films Performing The Border (1999) and Europlex (2003) by Ursula Biemann. In these two short films, Biemann tracks the activities that enact the border. In the first, we see the feminisation of the border in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico and in the second the repeated crossings [...]

There is more to the transformation of the arts in Egypt in the revolution than graffiti and street painting, argue Sonali Pahwa and Jessica Winegar in a public-access  article in a recent issue of Middle East Report. In an essay entitled “Culture, State and Revolution,” Pahwa and Winegar describes two often overlooked aspects of the effects of [...]

Dijital pazarlama iletişimi alanındaki güncel gelişmelerin ve trendlerin nabzını tutan, teori ve pratiği birleştiren bir eğitim programı sunuyoruz. Üst düzey akademik kadro ve sektörün tecrübeli isimlerinin katılımıyla gerçekleştirilecek olan sertifika programında amaç, katılımcıları içerik yaratmaktan, dijital iletişim stratejileri oluşturup, dijital mecraları yönetmeye ve ölçüm kriterlerini doğru yorumlamaya kadar dijital pazarlama dünyasına tam donanımlı olarak hazırlamaktır. Süre:  Toplam eğitim süresi 8 hafta, 38 saattir. Çarşamba 19.00-21.00 Cumartesi 10.00-13.00 Tarih: 13 Mart 2013 -4 Mayıs 2013 tarihleri arası Ücret: 2500TL + KDV %20 Erken kayıt indirimi bulunmaktadır. “erken kayıt kontenjanımız sınırlıdır “ Bilgi mezun, öğrenci ve mensuplarına %25 indirim “Kontenjan 10 kişi ile sınırlıdır Kayıt için: Hande Akyıl  hande.akyil@bilgi.edu.tr  (212) 311 7216 Bilgi için: Alper Barış alperbaris@kapital.com.tr   (212) 282 2640 – 138 Program  

• Revenge against French fueling conflict in Mali and Algeria Mali. Source: CIA Factbook. The contested region is in the north. An article in The Star (Toronto) about how Mali’s conflict spilled across its borders into Algeria this past week quoted Bruce Whitehouse, a cultural anthropology professor at Lehigh University, and a Fulbright scholar who has lived in Mali. He says: “They want to get back at the French desperately and they have a history of carrying out a tit-for-tat response when it comes to French intervention …They clearly want to portray what they’re doing as a direct and balanced response to what’s being directed against them … It will bring a lot more pressure from the United States and European governments to get involved … (It) might be a good thing from Mali’s point of view. Algeria has what’s reckoned to be the most capable military there and they have experience and they know the terrain.” • Mali: Where music is dangerous An opinion piece in the Cyprus Mail says that Islamic extremism is stopping the music in Mali: Talking Timbuktu/Amazon.com “We all have a favourite album. Mine is Talking Timbuktu, the collaboration between the great Malian musician Ali Farka Tourι and Ry Cooder. Arguably it’s some of the best guitar playing you’ll ever hear. Ali died in 2006, but his son Vieux carries the sound onward, that curious mix of African soul and heart with a blues base. “So it was with utter horror that I heard Lucy Durán, who hosts the BBC programme World Routes and teaches the anthropology of world music at SOAS (University of London), say in an emotional comment this week that one of the terrible side effects of the extreme Islamic fundamentalism now invading northern Mali is the silencing of music. Outlawed under Sharia law, all instruments, radio, CD players have been destroyed, and as Lucy chillingly said, those seen playing guitars were threatened with having their fingers cut off.” • Shot across the bow to economics #1: Consumer choice better informed by a new “gang” that includes cultural anthropology An article in The Atlantic mentions anthropology as a member in a “new gang” of social and behavior sciences that does a better job of explaining consumer choice than economists do. • Shot across the bow to economics #2: Cultural anthropology provides “behavioral insight” about U.K. voters Lord O'Donnell Lord O’Donnell, the top U.K. civil servant until 2011, said the Government has for too long “assumed that people behave in the way that economics text books would have us believe.” He said “the answer is better government, based on how people really behave, which quite often means less government and certainly less expensive government … [and] that elements of sociology, political science and anthropology should be used by the Government to ‘understand how societies function in a world full of real people.’” Lord O’Donnell said the so-called “behavioural insight team” in the Cabinet Office is already applying some of those principles to areas of government. • Indies as cultural critique An article in The Chronicle for Higher Education leads with the following: “Entering the fractious world of indies is a new and unusual interlocutor: Sherry B. Ortner. How did the well-known anthropologist come to write her latest ethnography on independent filmmaking? The story begins years ago with Sherpas. Ortner’s early fieldwork in Nepal was the basis of several books, starting in the late 1970s and culminating in the ethnography Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering (1999). Then came a shift that would eventually lead to Not Hollywood: Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream, forthcoming from Duke University Press.” The article quotes her as saying: “I thought, either I’m going to write x-more-many Sherpa books or do something else.” Ortner is a professor of cultural anthropology at UCLA. In recent works, she has turned to looking at culture in the United States, including her book New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture, and the Class of ’58 (2003), a study of her graduating class at Weequahic High. Wanting to take a wider view of American mores, she “settled on Hollywood as a font of certain kinds of major cultural themes.” She planned a “Hortense Powdermaker redux,” or a “re-study” of that anthropologist’s Hollywood, the Dream Factory (1950). “But she soon faced a major problem: studio access: ‘I just couldn’t crack it,’ she says. One executive she interviewed had qualms about her using any quotes. ‘We’d have to go through the lawyers … You don’t want that, I don’t want that.’ The scholar says she didn’t ‘so much consciously give up on Hollywood’ as she became more and more interested in the independent scene — its blossoming when it did, its social world, and the ways it defines itself. Ortner argues that independent films, particularly the darker ones, are best understood as cultural critique. They grapple with the range of profound changes in American society under neoliberal capitalism, which she describes as “the more brutal form of capitalism that has become dominant in the United States since about the 1970s.” • Diamond in the rough Source: Amazon.com Blogger’s note: We all saw it coming — the flood of reviews that would follow the publication of a book with a simple message, that “traditional” cultures have some good ideas and practices, using ethnographic content, written by a famous non-anthropologist, Jared Diamond. Diamond is probably the person who is most often mistaken-for-an-anthropologist in the world. Here are few highlights from the many reviews rolling in about The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? In a blog post for NPR, biological anthropologist Barbara King asks why Jared Diamond makes anthropologists so mad. She provides an excellent round-up of some of the recent commentary: “Jared Diamond is once again inflaming my tribe. In his new book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies, Diamond questions the practice of psychologists who base their claims about human nature entirely on people from WEIRD — Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic — societies. “In fact, Diamond writes, people in small-scale societies, people who gather and hunt, herd animals or farm, may have figured out better ways than WEIRD ways to treat people, solve social problems and stay healthy. So far, this sounds pretty much like an embrace of the cross-cultural diversity that we anthropologists work to understand, even to celebrate. “So what’s the backlash all about? In a beautifully written piece for The Guardian, Wade Davis says that Diamond’s ‘shallowness’ is what ‘drives anthropologists to distraction.’ For Davis, geographer Diamond doesn’t grasp that ‘cultures reside in the realm of ideas, and are not simply or exclusively the consequences of climatic and environmental imperatives.’ Rex Golub at Savage Minds slams the book for “a profound lack of thought about what it would mean to study human diversity and how to make sense of cultural phenomena.” In a fit of vexed humor, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for anthropological research tweeted Golub’s post along with this comment: “@savageminds once again does the yeoman’s work of exploring Jared Diamond’s new book so the rest of us don’t have to.” This biting response isn’t new; see Jason Antrosio’s post from last year in which he calls Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel a ‘one-note riff,’ even ‘academic porn’ that should not be taught in introductory anthropology courses.” A review in The National Post mentions Diamond’s “failed anthro footing,” saying, “While amusing to read, Diamond’s moralizing of the West is weakly substantiated. Take his advice to “Western” moms: go tribal. Hold your children more often (or always), breast-feed them on demand (or at least until they are three years old), and learn to place them upright in prams rather than lying them down so your child can share your perspective on life. These moral improvements will improve your child’s motor-neural skills and they will make society a better place. Too bad Diamond doesn’t have evidence to confirm any of this. There’s no proof tribal women do these things regularly, or that they do so willingly, or that tribal children grow up better, stronger or smarter because of such actions. Nor do we have evidence that Western moms and dads fail to do these things. Diamond says he’s not romanticizing tribal life, but it’s hard to figure out what he’s doing when he tells the individualized, non-communitarian parents of the West to adopt tribal “allo-parenting” techniques. A review in The Telegraph offers a more positive take: “Jared Diamond, the author of the fantastic Guns, Germs and Steel – notable not only for its hugely sensible discussions of race, empire and civilisation, but also for its clear-eyed and important look at the relative sizes of great ape genitals – has written a new book called The World Until Yesterday, it’s about what the West can learn from other civilisations. I’m always a bit dubious about that sort of thing, not because there is nothing that the West can learn — that’s clearly not true — but because it’s always difficult to walk a line between sensibly looking for useful information, and the sort of full-blown tie-dye hippy thing where you start using Ayurvedic medicine and talking about chakras. But I have no doubt that Diamond, who is a good scientist and spent years living with Papua New Guinean tribes, will be able to walk that line.” • Reflections on Sudan studies The Sudan Vision Daily carried an article about the anthropological research of Richard Lobban and Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, staring in 1970 when they launch their doctoral field studies and archival research. Later, in 1981 Carolyn and Richard, along with other colleagues incorporated the Sudan Studies Association. • Snow activism in Syracuse, N.Y. Syracuse snow. Flickr/Zixi Wu Knee-high snow build-up in Syracuse prompted citizen action, given the lack of code enforcement in the city.   Every Saturday, a group from the Westside Residents Coalition goes out with their shovels, start chopping the ice and scooping the snow until they hit cement. A grant bought 50 shovels and pays for cocoa and snacks for those who show. “I think everyone recognizes this is a problem. It’s just not clear how to solve it,” said John Burdick, professor of cultural anthropology and chair of the anthropology department at Syracuse University, helped start the group. One of his areas of academic interest in grassroots activism. • “Snow:” you know it when you see it According to an article in the Washington Post, a longstanding debate in anthropological linguistics began over a century ago with the writings of founding figure Franz Boas: “… Boas didn’t mean to spark a long argument. Traveling through the icy wastes of Baffin Island in northern Canada during the 1880s, Boas simply wanted to study the life of the local Inuit people, joining their sleigh rides, trading caribou skins and learning their folklore. As he wrote proudly to his fiancee, ‘I am now truly like an Eskimo … I scarcely eat any European foodstuffs any longer but am living entirely on seal meat.’ He was particularly intrigued by their language, noting the elaborate terms used to describe the frozen landscape: ‘aqilokoq’ for ‘softly falling snow’ and ‘piegnartoq’ for ‘the snow [that is] good for driving sled,’ to name just two. Source/Washington Post. Nicholas Roemmelt “Mentioning his observations in the introduction to his 1911 book Handbook of American Indian Languages, he ignited the claim that Eskimos have dozens, or even hundreds, of words for snow. Since then, many linguists considered this assertion to be based on sloppy scholarship and journalistic exaggeration. “The latest evidence, however, suggests that Boas was right all along. Igor Krupnik, a cultural anthropologist at the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center in Washington, believes that Boas was right. Krupnik and others charted the vocabulary of about 10 Inuit and Yupik dialects and concluded that they indeed have many more words for snow than English does. Central Siberian Yupik has 40 such terms, while the Inuit dialect spoken in Canada’s Nunavik region has at least 53, including ‘matsaaruti,’ for wet snow that can be used to ice a sleigh’s runners, and ‘pukak,’ for the crystalline powder snow that looks like salt.” • More linguistic wars: Everett said to be losing to Chomsky According to The Canberra Times, the documentary, The Grammar of Happiness, will soon air in Australia. It portrays the David and Goliath contest between Daniel Everett and Noam Chomsky on the “theory of language” as universal (Chomsky) or shaped by specific cultural contexts (Everett who has lived with the Piraha Indians of the Amazon for many years): “The makers of this documentary, Australia’s Essential Media and Entertainment, have cleverly used the conspiracy hook to draw us into a scholarly debate that in every likelihood would not otherwise have reached beyond academic journals. American Daniel Everett was a devout missionary when he first decamped to the Amazon more than 30 years ago to save the Piraha tribe. Realising they didn’t need the lessons of God, he began studying their language, identifying some peculiar traits (no words for colour, numbers, nor tenses) and controversially claiming their language lacks recursion, the ability to build an infinite number of sentences within sentences. The latter claim set him on a collision course with revered intellectual Noam Chomsky. “If Everett’s claim that culture rather than genetics had shaped the Piraha language, the theory of universal language would be undermined. The issues come to a head when a team of cognitive scientists from MIT are prevented by Brazilian authorities from visiting the Piraha to gather fresh evidence. The film presents an interesting case study of anthropology and theories of language, while strongly suggesting the debate Everett is losing has less to do with science than political correctness.” • Muslims in Hong Kong marginalized by language The South China Post reported on how Muslims in Hong Kong can speak in fluent Cantonese and are accepted as Hongkongers, but are still marginalized in the city with local schools lacking Chinese language classes tailored to their second-language needs. The article quotes Paul O’Connor, adjunct assistant professor in the Chinese University anthropology department, who has studied the history of Muslims in Hong Kong since 2003: “They need institutional apparatus to actually be able to access further education, vocational education; to actually contribute, to actually be able to fill in forms they get at the doctor’s office … Right now, they feel Hong Kong is a free society and a free place … but there will come a time where, if they’re increasingly peripheral and they cannot contribute to society, there’s going to be real disaffection.” O’Connor has interviewed 37 young Muslims about their daily lives and perceptions of society since 2006. Many of them believe in infinite opportunities, but the realities of not being able to read and write Chinese as well as native Chinese students — despite speaking fluent Cantonese — are a barrier once they leave school. • Talking the talk in California Researchers from Stanford University have launched a new research project, Voices of California, to determine if Californians have accents. So far, they have visited Redding, Merced and Bakersfield. Penelope Eckert, professor of linguistics and anthropology at Stanford, believes there’s more to it than vowel shifting and vocabulary: “It’s really important to portray California as it is,” Eckert told Stanford News. “People have this view of California based on Hollywood, and California really is a very diverse state.” Eckert and her researchers say they’ve found distinctions between coastal California and Central Valley, such as influences of southern twang from Dust Bowl migrants. The presence of many Latinos in California affects language as well. Participants talk about their lives as well discuss special words, expressions, and pronunciations. Each reads a list of words that researchers think have distinctive pronunciations in California. • Moon landing site now part of New Mexico cultural heritage Buzz Aldrin with U.S. flag on the Moon/NASA Apollo Archive In 1999, a student asked New Mexico State University anthropology professor Beth O’Leary a question during a presentation she was giving on cultural preservation. He asked if federal preservation laws applied to the moon. It stumped her. So she went on a mission with some colleagues known as the “Apollo 11 Preservation Task Force,” to establish guidelines to protect the Apollo 11 Tranquility Base, or the spot where humans first landed on the moon.   “This is all part of human heritage. We need to think outside of the box and look at ways to preserve certain things,” O’Leary said. “If that goes, what do you show your kids? What do you tell your kids about your lives and your country and your heritage?” Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin “…. created an archaeological site,” O’Leary said. They show what kind of technology humans were working with at the time, comparable to early arrowheads, spears and the first evidence of fire. So this site deserves protection, just as national monuments are well-preserved and protected on Earth. Otherwise those 1969 footprints will be erased by lunar robots or future astronauts. O’Leary and the team have also added the lunar site to the historic registers of New Mexico and California. O’Leary says: “It became a property listed in the New Mexico register … We’re hoping to put it on more state registers.” • Cadavers are making a comeback Several years ago, there was a move away from cadavers in anatomy classrooms to “virtual learning.” Now there is a renewed emphasis on learning from human cadavers. An article in the San Jose Mercury quotes Richard Baldwin, laboratory manager for the anthropology department at UC Santa Cruz. “You never know what you’re going to get,” he said. The organs, he noted, can be damaged by disease or have subtle differences in placement — things that students won’t see in a digital anatomy atlas, no matter how accurate it is. Cabrillo College student Gordon Landon, a personal trainer and aspiring public health specialist, said the anatomy class helps him point precisely to a muscle and explain how an exercise is working it. But he admitted that the first day he spent with the cadavers, he was sick to his stomach and had to leave the lab or risk throwing up. Baldwin has had several UCSC students who, reeling from the loss of a grandparent or other family member, decide to drop the class and return another year. Some never return. • Take that anthropology degree and… …become a famous movie producer. Gigi Pritzker, an heiress who produces movies, is poised to expand her company atop the one that got away from Warner with a film version of ”Ender’s Game” set for release on November 1. A tale of violent interplanetary warfare, it is intended to extend the young adult line of those recently merged studios, whose blockbusters, ”The Hunger Games” and the ”Twilight” films, have had about $4 billion in worldwide ticket sales. Pritzker, now 50, is the daughter of the entrepreneur Jay Pritzker, who created the Hyatt hotel chain, and whose death in 1999 left her with a fortune valued by Forbes Magazine last year at $1.9 billion. In an interview, she declined to discuss her wealth last week. But she did explain that her father was supportive when, after studying anthropology at Stanford University, and then taking courses in documentary filmmaking, she joined a friend to found Odd Lot, a New York-based company that made music videos and public service advertisements, among other things. Successes like those, Pritzker said, suggest there is a path that can lead from small, and almost accidental, adventures in the film business to something resembling a major enterprise. ”It’s only in looking back that you see, maybe there was a pattern,” Pritzker said by telephone from her home in Chicago, “‘I’m very opportunistic by nature.” This week will find Pritzker at the Sundance Film Festival. …become a successful Chinese micro-blogger. Bloggers use allusions, pictograms, word-plays and nicknames to get round the internet blocks and to evade the censors. They have helped push China to dump unpopular construction projects, to start paying real attention to concerns about pollution and environmental degradation and come down harder on obvious corruption. Hundreds of millions of Chinese voices clamoring for change are hard to ignore, even for hardened Chinese government officials. Elain Sui, a 25-year-old university student from the southern city of Guangzhou, checks her weibo account before she even gets out of bed every morning. She says microblogger power has changed her homeland: “China has changed a lot because of Sina Weibo. Sina Weibo is one of the most important platforms for Chinese people.” She has a degree in anthropology, so she is interested in the way people adapt to different situations. “There might be too much censorship…but I think it’s changing because the government doesn’t have the energy any more. I think weibo is really a good platform for people to express themselves. The Chinese government is changing now. Communication with citizens is more important than censorship.” Nonetheless, Elain didn’t want her photo taken and did not provide her full Chinese name. …become an aviation museum curator. Sarah Willett was hired a few weeks ago as curator in the Historic Aviation Memorial Museum in Tyler, Texas. “I’ve already learned a lot about aviation, but I still have a lot to learn.” Willett, who has a B.A degree in anthropology and a masters degree in museum science from Texas Tech University, faces the huge task of identifying and creating a computerized record of hundreds of thousands of objects. Topics span from flight pioneers such as Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, to the space age. Several rooms are devoted to the history of air combat. The exhibit chronicling the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia over East Texas in 2003 includes the famous photos of glowing shuttle debris streaking across a blue sky taken by Tyler cardiologist Dr. Scott Lieberman. Around the corner from that is a flight simulator once used to train commercial airline pilots. …become an activist for sex worker safety. Isabel Chen, a University of British Columbia medical student has launched an online fundraiser for a pilot project to provide 100 sex trade workers in Vancouver’s downtown eastside with a GPS-enabled panic button that would send a text message to summon help. While the panic button idea isn’t new, Chen is proposing to use GPS-enabled texting technology to create a mobile safety net for sex workers. Once the panic button is pressed, it would send a text message alert to a specified phone number, giving the user’s GPS coordinates. “We figured out a way to keep it low cost and relatively low tech and still preserve a woman’s sense of anonymity rather than having to give over her coordinates to the police or a private company,” said Chen. She earned a B.A. in cultural anthropology and a Master’s of Public Health at Yale University. …become a U.S. army strategist and then a public policy student. Nathan K. Finney is a United States Army Strategist currently attending the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He holds a Masters in Public Administration from the University of Kansas and a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Arizona. He recently blogged about Values and National Security: The Value of an Education in Power. • Archaeology workshops for prisoner rehab in Wales Archaeology is being used in a Bridgend prison to help rehabilitate offenders. Parc Prison has been holding special workshops to contribute towards the rehabilitation of its inmates. The project, called Motivating Offender Rehabilitation through Archeological Recording, Investigation and Analysis, is a pilot scheme run by Cadw, the Welsh Government’s historic environment body. • New BBC series on invention University of Bristol industrial archaeologist, Cassie Newland, will be presenting the new landmark BBC Two series, The Genius of Inventions, which starts on January 24. Newland, a teaching fellow in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology joins Michael Moseley and Professor Mark Miodownik as they explore how inventions changed the lives of ordinary people over the centuries. The series will run for four weeks and will look at speed, power, communication and the visual image. Newland is an expert on the development of telegraphy during the nineteenth century. She completed her Ph.D. in Bristol’s Department of Archaeology and now teaches on the MA in Historical and Landscape Archaeology. • Fog of war: no luck in search finding buried Spitfires in Burma Several news sources carried pieces about the failed expedition to find Spitfires allegedly buried in Burma at the end of the Second World War. A British team of archaeologists and documentary makers, sponsored by the computer company Wargaming, set off for Burma in the new year. The team hoped to recover Spitfires at Mingaladon, a Royal Air Force airfield that now serves as the Rangoon airport. Archaeologists believe there are no planes buried at the sites where they have been digging, and they have concluded that evidence does not support the original claim that as many as 124 Spitfires were buried at the end of the war. Wargaming.net, the firm financing the dig, has also said there are no planes. But project leader David Cundall, a Lancashire farmer, says they are looking in the wrong place. He told the BBC that he feels very frustrated but is determined to keep up his campaign, remaining convinced that Spitfires are buried in Burma. • Medical malpractice in the Renaissance: death by gangrene for Medici warrior The legendary Renaissance warrior Giovanni de’ Medici did not die from an improperly amputated leg, as widely believed, but an infection. Led by Gino Fornaciari, professor of forensic anthropology and director of the pathology Museum at the University of Pisa, the exhumation of his body aimed at establishing whether the surgery carried on the celebrated condottiero (mercenary soldier) was improperly performed. Although he had acquired a reputation for invincibility, Giovanni of the Black Bands (1498-1526) died at only 28 after being hit by a cannon ball, in a battle in Lombardy on November 25, 1526. He was fighting the Imperialist troops marching to the sack of Rome. Resulting amputation of his leg apparently led to gangrene. • Whose bones are these? In the run-up to Mexico’s bicentennial celebration in 2010 of independence from Spain, then-President Felipe Caldéron oversaw an elaborate parade to escort the bones of 13 of the nation’s founding fathers from their resting place at Mexico City’s iconic Angel statue to a national museum. The parade included full military honors and crypts with skulls and other skeletal fragments of war leaders placed on velvet and transported in horse-drawn carriages. Millions of Mexicans from across the country paid their respects. But not all of the bones, it turns out, belong to the “founding fathers.” One was a woman, others belonged to children, and some came from deer. Jose Antonio Pompa, a top member of the investigating team from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH says the mix of bones is explainable since the bodies of many of the national heroes were treated carelessly, allowed to mingle with other dead in cemeteries, and only decades later recovered and given their proper place. • Archaeology in a conflict zone Despite much turmoil in the region, an Italian archaeologist is digging at a famous site that sits on Turkish-Syrian border. According to an article in The New York Times, the Syrian civil war is not the first conflict to complicate Professor Nicolò Marchetti‘s efforts to turn Karkemish, an ancient city site on the banks of the Euphrates, on Turkey’s southern border and inside a restricted military zone, into a public archaeology park. Before his team started digging, under the watchful eyes of armed Turkish soldiers, he had to make sure that land mines planted in the 1950s had all been cleared away. Marchetti teaches Near Eastern, or pre-classical, archaeology at the University of Bologna and has led excavations at Karkemish on and off for two years after being granted the first access allowed to anyone in decades. The aim is to open a first stage to tourism by October 2014. That goal remains realistic, he said during a tour of the site late last year. • Searching for Maori origins A Hawaiian linguistics professor believes eastern Polynesian ancestors, including Maori, began their colonization of the Pacific from remote atolls near the Solomon Islands, not Samoa as has long been believed. It is from these coral outcroppings, which barely break the Pacific Ocean and sustain tiny populations, that the original homeland of Pacific peoples, Hawaiki, may be located. Professor William Wilson has been a key figure in the revitalization of the Hawaiian language movement. In a paper published in Oceanic Linguistics, Wilson argues that while anthropologists and linguists have assumed East Polynesia, including New Zealand, was settled from Central Western Polynesia, most likely Samoa, his study suggests otherwise. The paper details 73 lexical and grammatical structures that are shared by the outlier and eastern Polynesian languages but not by Samoan or any other western Polynesian languages. He believes outlier populations, sophisticated navigators, voyaged to Samoa and back to the outlier atolls. After a time, the language evolved and it was from the atolls that the ancestors of Maori and others eventually set out. Otago University archaeologist Professor Richard Walter said it sounded plausible and should be tested archaeologically. • On Fijian origins Commentary by Christopher Griffin in The Fiji Times states that recent discussion on the origins of the first Fijians following upon Margaret Wise’s Fiji Times (8/12) coverage of a presentation to lawyers at Natadola by Alisi Daurewa have been “a little confusing, to say the least, especially the alleged connection between Lapita culture and Tamil Nadu” [South India]. Dr. Christopher Griffin has a first degree in sociology and doctorate in social anthropology and formerly taught sociology at the University of the South Pacific in Samoa. He. Before retiring to Fiji he lectured at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia, where he is an Honorary Senior Fellow. • India-Australia relations 4,000 years ago People from India migrated to Australia and mixed with Aborigines 4,000 years ago. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, report “evidence of substantial gene flow between Indian populations and Australia about 4000 years ago” The researchers believe the Indian migrants may have introduced the dingo to Australia. They also suggest that Indians may have brought stone tools called microliths to their new home. Findings are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “For a long time, it has been commonly assumed that following the initial colonization, Australia was largely isolated as there wasn’t much evidence of further contact with the outside world,” explained Prof Mark Stoneking, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. • Early Nevada textiles on display Fort Rock sandal 9,000 to 13,000 years old/Nevada State Museum Sandals, mats and bags dating to at least 9,000 years ago give a rare glimpse of prehistoric life documented at the Nevada State Museum in Carson City. Archaeologist Pat Barker will discuss the prehistoric textiles in the Great Basin at the museum’s Frances Humphrey lecture series 6:30-8 p.m. Thursday.   “Because of the excellent preservation due to the Great Basin’s dry climate, Nevada is a great place to study textiles,” Barker said. “Looking at children’s sandals and footwear with holes where the ball of the foot or heel would have been connects us to prehistoric people in a real way.” Working for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and now as a museum volunteer, Barker has been studying the museum’s collections for more than a decade. He attended the University of California, Riverside, earning a doctorate degree in anthropology and is president of the Great Basin Anthropological Association and a board member of the Nevada Rock Art Foundation. • Exercise for your brain ABC News carried an article about tips for doing well on the upcoming free Mensa IQ test. One of them includes the value of exercise to promote brain power, as demonstrated by anthropological research: “According to a study published in January by David Raichlen of the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, there is strong evidence that bouts of exercise and a long-term training regiment increases the size of brain components and improves cognitive performance.” • Kudos Anne Salmond/University of Auckland The New Zealander of the Year title is awarded to someone who has made a major contribution to the nation, outstanding service to the country, and inspiration through achievement. One of the finalists this year is Dame Anne Salmond. Dame Anne is a Distinguished Professor of Maori Studies and Anthropology at Auckland University and the author of seven award-winning books on Maori life and early contacts between Europeans and islanders in Polynesia. The finalists were selected from 700 nominations, and the winners will be announced at a gala dinner on February 28. Kathryn Weedman Arthur, professor at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg, was awarded the Gordon R. Willey prize from the American Anthropological Association, which published her article in its journal, American Anthropologist. The prize is given to the best archaeology paper published in the journal during the past three years as determined by its officers. She is recognized for documenting the use and creation of stone tools by Ethiopian hide workers and providing evidence that challenges entrenched assumptions about history, invention and the roles of women. “Man the toolmaker” and “woman the gatherer” are ideas that have been embedded in Western analysis of ancient and prehistoric cultures since the Victorian era, Arthur said. As such, very little of material culture, the discovered objects that help archaeologists understand the daily lives of long-past peoples, is attributed to women. “In our Western-centric reconstructions of the past, women bear children while men hunt, butcher, explore, lead rituals and produce technology – including stone tools,” Arthur wrote in the introduction to her prize-winning article, “Feminine Knowledge and Skill Reconsidered: Women and Flaked Stone Tools.” In the Konso region in southern Ethiopia, Arthur found a group of skilled women creating and using stone-flake scrapers to process raw animal hides with methods that provide a window to prehistory. She has interviewed women hide workers, learning their methods, and indexing their tools and materials.

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The International Qur’anic Studies Association (IQSA) was formed in 2012 as a consultation leading to an independent learned society for scholars of the Qur’an. The Society of Biblical Literature was awarded a grant for this consultation from the Henry Luce Foundation, which was announced [link to press release] on 29 May 2012. The founding directors of the IQSA steering committee are Gabriel Said Reynolds and Emran El-Badawi, with administrative support for the consultation and grant from John F. Kutsko. The goal for the consultation is to form an independent, international, non-profit learned society, whose members include scholars of the Qur’an from universities and institutions around the world. This collaborative work involves meetings, publishing, and professional development. IQSA will be a network for a diverse range of scholars and educators, and it will serve to advocate for the field of Qur’anic studies, in higher education and in the public square. Its vision of Qur’anic Studies is interdisciplinary, and it seeks to involve specialists in literature, history, archaeology, paleography, and religious studies. As such, IQSA is not just a professional guild for scholars; it also welcomes the participation of the public. Its diverse governing body and members come from Islamic as well as Western societies. A core tenet of IQSA is “mutual understanding through scholarship.” The steering committee is preparing to launch IQSA as an independent organization during three-year consultation, which involves drafting its official charter and developing its program resources. Membership in IQSA will be open and unrestricted, and you are invited to become a part of the IQSA network. Visitors are encouraged to join the IQSA e-mail list through the homepage.