http://funnytranslator.com/ lets you type in a phrase, then it translates to another language, then back to English. This cycle repeats for the number of round-trip translations you specify. This vividly illustrates what happens in literal (word-level, not full context-level) translation.
Building Bridges: A Peace Corps Classroom Guide to Cross-Cultural Understanding
Thirteen exercises for grades 6–12 to help students understand other cultures and promote tolerance for them. Uncommon Journeys: Peace Corps Adventures Across Cultures
Compelling stories from Peace Corps Volunteers about cultures around the world, with standards-based lessons for language arts, social studies, and geography classes. Voices From the Field: Reading and Writing About the World, Ourselves, and Others
More Peace Corps Volunteer stories about their service overseas, with standards-based lessons for classes in reading and writing literature. CyberVolunteer Letters: Stories From In-service Peace Corps Volunteers
A collection of letters written by actively serving Peace Corps Volunteers from 2000 to 2005 for students in the United States. The authors of these evocative stories, who sent their letters by e-mail, were known as CyberVolunteers. Insights From the Field: Understanding Geography, Culture, and Service
Readings and exercises that focus on the Dominican Republic as a vehicle to help students learn about geography, culture, and service—a quest that can lead anywhere in the world. Looking at Ourselves and Others
Activities and readings prompt students to define culture, to achieve new perspectives on their own culture and other cultures worldwide, to recognize differences in perception among cultures, and to challenge assumptions. Culture Matters: The Peace Corps Cross-Cultural Workbook
Designed for Peace Corps Volunteers, this practical, hands-on guide is also a rich and useful resource for students who want to look into their own culture and become more understanding of people of other cultures. Folk Tales: Stories From Peace Corps Countries Around the World
Folk tales often represent the soul and history of a place. Peace Corps Volunteers hear these stories woven into conversations and daily life. Here, Volunteers retell some of these remarkable tales from more than 25 countries. Crossing Cultures: Peace Corps Letters From the Field
A newly gathered collection of letters written by Peace Corps Volunteers capturing the adventures and challenges, joys and sorrows, trials and rewards of service in another land.
| Diary for September 2010 Thursday 16th September- Wales Anthropology Day Similar to the London Anthropology Day, the Wales Anthropology Day is a free open day for teachers, students and the general public who are interested in learning more about what it is like to study anthropology at university. On the day, participants will be able to take part in a series of workshops run by University of Lampeter staff and talk to students currently studying anthropology. To find out more and book your free place visit the following website. The controversial art of representation... Melville J. Herskovits (1859-1963) was a pioneering and controversial American anthropologist who played a prominent role in shaping African Studies as a distinct discipline. Herskovits's academic work was both influential and controversial and still emerges in on-going debates on questions of identity and representation. Herkovits at the Heart of Blackness is a documentary which tracks the development of Hervokits's career in relation to African American and Jewish experiences of exile, political oppression and exclusion. The film gives a critical review of anthropologist's role in representing and documenting other societies. Take a look at a preview of the film here. Small Places Large Issues The third edition of Thomas Eriksen's book is now available. Small Places Large Issues has become a classic for introduction to social anthropology for undergraduate students as well as those who are new to anthropology. It gives an excellent overview of topics such as kinship, ethinicity, ritual and political systems. The new edition has updated information and has increased emphasis on the interdependence between societies. Take a look here for other introductory texts to social anthropology.
Anthropology EducationThe September issue of the American Anthropological Association's official newspaper Anthropology News is entirely devoted to topics concerning anthropology and education. The issue includes articles on pre-university education, online courses, pedagogical standards and assessment models and much more. Take a look here for more information. |
Here is a discussion prompt re: the pace of change. Every so often, it hits home that we are actually living in one of those science-fiction worlds that I read about as a young nerd in the 1970s. Not, it turns out, one where we commute with jet packs; nor are Soviet and American colonists bantering about just how red the Red Planet should be. But now, while putting my keys in my pocket, I will sometimes accidentally hit a button on the BlackBerry that causes a robotic female voice to bark, "Say a command!" Never having gotten around to programming any in, it always feels like I'm letting her down. We're all walking around carrying devices that are in contact with unimaginably vast systems of information. You get used to it. It ceases to seem strange – which is, arguably, the strange part. Future shock becomes second nature. (To remember what things were like before requires something like the exact opposite of the willing suspension of disbelief.) And discussing any of this with friends or colleagues in their 20s is out of the question. It leaves me feeling like I have become my own grandfather... source, Surrendering to Tomorrow [September 1, 2010 by Scott McLemee] http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee305
from Lake Michigan's cold clear water, the Walter B. Allen project:
Meet six Smithsonian anthropologists and learn what inspired them to go into the field and why they love what they do...
research essay from The Museum of Underwater Archeology (August 2010): Great Lakes, USA. http://www.uri.edu/artsci/his/mua/in_the_field/road_trip.shtml
People play on computers.
People grill on a grill.People read books.People talk to people.People write on paper.People write and read papers.People read magazines. People lay on couches.People can talk and see.People can be a boy or a girl.People have flowers.People have houses.People love people.People have lives.
| Diary for August 2010
Monday 30th August- Booking Ahead for Wales Anthropology Day  Many of you who were not able to come to this year's London Anthropology Day will be happy to know that there is a sister event happening on the 16th of September in Wales. Every year the University of Wales Lampeter organises a free university taster day of anthropological workshops and films aimed at Year 12, 13, FE students and teachers. To find out more and book your free place visit this website. London Anthropology Day 2010 Photos now Online!
 The London Anthropology Day 2010 is a university taster day for Year 12,13 and FE students, career advisors and teachers. Organised by the Royal Anthropological Institute's Education Programme in collaboration with the British Museum and participating universities the event was held on 8th July. This year's event included 18 universities from England, Ireland and Wales and over 350 participants making it the largest London Anthropology Day to date. Take a look at the this year's photos along with other anthropological events on this website.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127859150 [discussion about the following article] For 70 years, this picture has been used to tell the same story – of inequality, class division, "toffs and toughs". As an old Etonian closes in on Downing Street, it is being trotted out again. But what was the story behind it? Ian Jack investigates [ From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Spring 2010; http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ian-jack/5-boys] Almost since its invention, photography has had the habit of turning people into symbols by accident. A painter might spend a year on a canvas, working up the personification of an abstract idea to its full visual glory ("Truth Triumphant" or "Temptation Denied"), but a camera could capture a scene in a fraction of a second, and if the scene was somehow striking and memorable – in its composition, its subject matter, its light – it might become "iconic", meaning that its particulars might be understood to suggest much more general emotions, conflicts and problems. When the shutter clicked, such a metaphorical future was rarely suspected either by the photographer or his subjects, who might not even be aware that a picture had been taken. The moment could be ordinary or extraordinary: a couple kissing in a Paris street, a sharecropper and her children in California, a burning child running down a road in Vietnam. It could happen anywhere, to anybody. It might happen even at an old-fashioned English cricket match.
June 13, 2010 For as long as anyone can remember, Churro sheep have been central to Navajo life and spirituality. Yet the animal was nearly exterminated by the federal government, which deemed it an inferior breed. Now the Churro is making a comeback, but the old Navajo ways may not. [ National Public Radio broadcast, Sunday, June 13, 2010]
Bournemouth University in the UK recently started work on a rare and historically important northwest European armed merchant ship. It was wrecked in the approaches to Poole Harbour in the early 17th century. With almost 40% of the port side of originating ship being present this project has the potential to yield important information about merchant vessels from this time period. The Swash Channel Wreck team has posted its first two entries on the MUA and will provide periodic updates over the next few months. project journal, ttp://www.uri.edu/artsci/his/mua/project_journals/swash/swash_intro.shtml
Many people alive today possess some Neanderthal ancestry, according to a landmark scientific study. The finding has surprised many experts, as previous genetic evidence suggested the Neanderthals made little or no contribution to our inheritance. The result comes from analysis of the Neanderthal genome - the "instruction manual" describing how these ancient humans were put together. Between 1% and 4% of the Eurasian human genome seems to come from Neanderthals. BBC story (excerpt). Full story, http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/8660940.stm
Deciphering what death means to chimpanzees has always been difficult, as they usually die without a human witness. Two new papers in Current Biology offer a glimpse into the minds of chimps as they confront death. In one case, when an older matriarch died, the researcher says the chimps were subdued for several weeks after she passed. [National Public Radio on 26 April 2010]
from the on-air, online (radio) essay series, "This I Believe" A Reverence for All Life
via National Public Radio, March 22, 2010 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124700865 In Jamaica, like all over the world, there are deep conversations about the ideal body type. While there are competing norms of beauty, some women are using extreme methods to fit their vision of beautiful, like ingesting chicken pills for broader hips and butts, and bleaching their skin to be whiter. And they're taking health risks to do so.
March 13, 2010 A dozen ancient shipwrecks have been discovered in the Baltic Sea, just east of Sweden. The well-preserved ships are hundreds of years old. The oldest wreck may date back 800 years. [National Public Radio]
Our series on maritime archaeology in Europe continues with sites in Belgium. ...sites from various time periods including the Doel Cog, the
eighteenth-century Buiten Ratel wreck, and the early twentieth-century
French military vessel Bourrasque.
The main webpage for all projects of the Musuem of Underwater Archeology is at
...from "The Meaning Of Liff", a creation of John Lloyd and Douglas Adams: Aberbeeg: Of amateur actors, to adopt a Mexican accent when called upon to play any variety of foreigner (except Pakistanis - from whom a Welsh accent is considered sufficient). Ewelme: The smile bestowed on you by an air hostess. Liff: A book, the contents of which are totally belied by its cover. For instance, any book the dust jacket of which bears the words. 'This book will change your life'. Meathop: One who sets off for the scene of an aircraft crash with a picnic hamper. Peoria: The fear of peeling too few potatoes. Scraptoft: The absurd flap of hair a vain and balding man grows long above one ear to comb it to the other ear. Thrupp: To hold a ruler on one end on a desk and make the other end go bbddbbddbbrrbrrrrddrr. Ventnor: One who, having been visited as a child by a mysterious gypsy lady, is gifted with the strange power of being able to operate the air-nozzles above aeroplane seats. Yarmouth: To shout at foreigners in the belief that the louder you speak, the better they'll understand you.
eye-opening poster by Pearson textbooks
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123131827 Comedian Russell Peters Capitalizes On Indian Roots ...He is now on the road with his Green Card Tour. He spoke with NPR's Audie Cornish from New York City. After ribbing Cornish about her family's Jamaican roots, he confessed his love for speaking in accents that are not his own. "Sometimes I get stuck in a Chinese accent and just want to talk to everybody like a Chinese person," Peters says. "Sometimes I might even just talk like myself, but that's on a crazy day." One of his standup routines includes a bit about the Indian accent.
The four field approach to anthro in North America comes from its 1800s roots: trying to understanding and inter-relate the scores of Native peoples at the time and the earlier societies leaving an imprint on the land. Archeology, linguistics, biological or physical anthropology, and cultural anthropology. Later in the 20th century the fifth field was added: Applied Anthropology.
Here is a synopsis from the website of the National Association of Practicing Anthropology, http://practicinganthropology.org/practicing-anthro/Practicing AnthropologistsPracticing anthropologists do exciting work to understand and help people around the world. We also turn up in places you might not expect to find us, including the fields of agriculture, computer science, law enforcement forensics, and more. Our profession is dynamic and constantly evolving into more opportunities for professional anthropologists. The links, at left, contain many examples of anthropology in action, and interesting information for the public, the press and educators. You can also locate a local organization dedicated to anthropology and share and view upcoming events related to our field. [elipsis...] Practicing anthropologists work in many industries and areas, including:Agricultural DevelopmentBusiness – Product DesignBusiness – Project ManagementBusiness – Program ManagementBusiness – Research and DevelopmentComputer Science – Database Design and DevelopmentComputer Science – Software Design and DevelopmentComputer Science – User Interface DesignCommunity DevelopmentCultural Resource ManagementEducation and TrainingEnvironment – ManagementEnvironment – PolicyGovernment – Local/Regional/FederalGovernment – MilitaryGovernment – International PolicyInformation Technology – Human Factors EngineeringInformation Technology – Localization and GlobalizationInformation Technology – Network Design and AdministrationLaw Enforcement – ForensicsLegal PracticesMedical – Health CareMedical – Public HealthMuseums – CurationMuseums – Program ManagersOrganizational ManagementNonprofit – Grant WritingNonprofit – ManagementNonprofit – PolicySocial Services
from the Bible (New International Version), Leviticus 11:20-22 cf. insect eating account by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio, Man Eats Bug (2004) 20 All flying insects that walk on all fours are an abomination to you. 21 Yet you may eat these: of all winged creeping things that go on all fours, which have legs above their feet, with which to hop on the earth. 22 Even of these you may eat: any kind of locust, any kind of katydid, any kind of cricket, and any kind of grasshopper.
In Class, Marines Learn Cultural Cost Of Conflict, mp3 audio download The students in front of Paula Holmes-Eber wear camouflage and have close-cropped hair. Most of them are Marine officers, and many of them have already been to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. They're here to learn the consequences of their actions. "Should we change another culture?" she asks the class. "The reality is, the second you land on the ground with 100,000 troops eating and using the materials of the area, you've changed the economy; you've changed the environment." "It's not should we," she tells them, "it's what are we doing — and is that what we want to be doing?" An anthropologist, Holmes-Eber trains American warriors to be sensitive to other cultures. She teaches operational culture at Marine Corps University in Quantico, Va. It's her job to get soldiers to think through how every move they make on the battlefield has a consequence — not just for enemy forces, but for ordinary people. [elipsis]
The archives for "Interfaith Voices" offer rich listening segments. This one includes segments about pilgrimage to sites where relics reside. Whiskers, Bones, Toes, and Teeth
In Rag and Bone, author Peter Manseau explores the macabre world of religious relics—the bodily odds and ends of saints, gurus and prophets, scattered all around the world. From Muhammed's beard whisker to the Buddha's tooth, it's a look at why we save and celebrate pieces of the dead. Our interview originally aired in July 2009. Peter Manseau, author of Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead, founding editor of killingthebuddha.com
For nearly 1,000 years, the Hopi people have lived on the same three mesas, land now considered part of northeastern Arizona. For all that time, they have been speaking the Hopi language, which is slowly dying. There are many hurdles standing in the way of preserving Hopi, including, for Hopi teens, the choice between preserving their culture and adopting a modern lifestyle.
http://public.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/atc/2009/12/20091229_atc_04.mp3?dl=1
[29 Dec 2009 National Public Radio broadcast; produced by Youth Radio: 5 minutes]
http://www.tollundman.dk/tollundmandens-tid.asp is about the "bog man" (Tollund, Denmark) with text, pictures, video about the time period of 500 BC to 800 AD - overlapping with the Okhotsk society along the north coast of Japan' north island of Hokkaido. In S. Sweden (west of Malmo) there is a village recreation with people volunteering to live in the old ways as an experiement. Imagine this experiment with Okhotsk living, as well.
issues such as migration, citizenship, youth crime and other topics | |
| Diary for 5th November to 11th November 2009
SUNDAY 8th November- Social Science for Schools  The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), have just launched a new website called Social Science for schools. The aim of the website is to provide teachers with accessible information bringing together ESRC funded research on issues such as migration, citizenship, youth crime and other topics, so that they have reliable quantitative and qualitative data to use in their classrooms. This is an excellent resource for any social science teacher!
...underwater archaeology in Europe. Today's entry on Belgium highlights past work including submerged medieval fishing villages, shipwrecks, exhibitions, and an online maritime database: click on the "Maritime Archaeology in Belgium" link at http://www.uri.edu/mua
| Diary for 1st October to 7th October 2009 Anthropologists who made history...
 In 1923 Margaret Mead set off to Samoa to conduct research on adolescence. Mead became the first anthropologist to explore the realm of anthropology of childhood, and throughout her career she helped to popularise the discipline with her writings. Her work is included as mandatory texts in undergraduate degrees in North America and Europe. In this podcast, Professor Adam Cooper and June Goodfield reflect on Mead's career, the controversies surrounding the personal and professional life, and her impact on the discipline as a whole. If you'd like to know more about Mead's life and her research, the Library of Congress has an excellent online exhibition and an extensive archive collection on Mead.
 After gaining a his first degree in Philosophy from Antioch College, Clifford Geertz went on to do his PhD in Anthropology at Harvard. Geertz did extensive research in Indonesia and then later in Morocco. Geertz was fascinated with the ways in which culture is expressed through ' a system of meanings embodied in symbols'. He became a founder of interpretive or symbolic anthropology, and his work was extremely influential within the discipline and beyond in other social sciences. In this podcast Byron Good, Professor of medical anthropology at Harvard Medical School, explains the contribution of Geertz's work to the discipline. For a wonderful summary of his life and work take a look a this obituary written in the New York Times. |
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