A Message from Executive Director, Dr. Edward Liebow
By Marilyn Johnson, http://www.marilynjohnson.net/new__i_lives_in_ruins__i__123545.htm
Chapter 1 Field School: Context is everything
Field school is a rite of passage. If you are studying archaeology, or even thinking about it, you need to apprentice yourself to an excavation specifically set up to help train field-workers. This usually takes place in a desert or jungle, a hot and often buggy place at the hottest and buggiest time of year. A century ago, field school meant signing on to a dig under the supervision of an archaeologist, who would teach you the fine art of excavating while hired locals did the hard labor. Now the locals work as translators, drivers, guides, or cooks, and the students do the heavy lifting, moving rocks and hauling dirt and slag—for instance, in a foul pit in Jordan that, back in the tenth century b.c., was a copper smelt. "I can't prove it," the lead archaeologist at that site told National Geographic, "but I think that the only people who are going to be working in this rather miserable environment are either slaves . . or undergrads." Students not only work without the prod of a whip, they pay for the privilege. Field schools got that school in their name by charging tuition, quite a lot of it, usually thousands of dollars. Where would archaeology be without these armies of toiling grads and undergrads? Are they the base of a pyramid scheme that keeps excavations going with their labor and fees?
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eBook at amazon.com, http://www.amazon.com/Lives-Ruins-Archaeologists-Seductive-Rubble-ebook/dp/B00IHZNRQE/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie
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See the huala (trance mediums/ shamans) among the Mangghuer people of the Sanchuan Region, on the northeast Tibetan Plateau. The movie is intended for a general, rather than an academic, audience, so please feel free to share the link with your students, neighbors, grandmas, etc. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUjLwtix2_U
The Gods Incarnate - The Huala of China's Sanchuan Region
In today's Academic Minute, the University of Toronto's Mary-Ann Pouls Wegner describes some recent finds from an archaeological excavation in Abydos, Egypt. Wegner is assistant professor of Egyptian archaeology in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at Toronto. She also serves at Project Director for the North Abydos Votive Zone Project. Find out more about her here. A transcript of this podcast can be found here.
While visiting a high school choir class, the anthropologist in me found ways to introduce vocal art to illustrate some of the variety of music expression. Surely there are more or better references to sample, but these came first to mind:
Humans feel motivated to create and consume many artistic forms. Why don't other animals produce or consume such things as dance, music, visual art, verbal arts of story and lyric and declamation?
Recognizing patterns and relationships, then applying ones known by experience to new material is something that characterizes human minds and hearts. In abstract terms this search for meaning is an extension from the core motivation in spoken (and thus also written) language. For some reason a given musical phrase, movement sequence, or choice of words stands out in a person's mind. It "means" something or resonates with a feeling or concept in one's own mind, as yet perhaps not articulated into a definite form. The artist answers a specific itch by producing sequences of pattern and meaning. The audience may dwell on a novel piece of work to grasp it, or in dim recognition of knowing it from another place or medium. Alternatively the audience may be actively seeking something to touch the itch they feel, and therefore browse rapidly through the works until they find something partly or fully connected to the meaning they are seeking. In the case of visual arts, the elements of composition, light, texture, narrative (intertexuality) or context could spark the feeling of recognition and personal meaning attached to the work. In other words the meaning can be perceived indirectly, incidentally and thus unintentionally.
Discussion of interaction between colonists in North America and the native peoples, as written in Fur and Fortune: in Part III (after the French and Indian wars of 1750s-60s) the narrator (of the audio book version) refers to "The Indians." And yet this catch-all phrase sweeps together groups big and small, ones friendly and hostile to "The Europeans" or to "The English Speakers." Elsewhere there are some smaller categories such as Five Nations or Algonkian tribes. But it would probably be more true to experience of those on the ground at the time to refer to themselves not as categories of some abstract Nation (which is the label we organize citizens by today) but according to their location, local leader or some other term of limited scale. For the author perhaps the analytical goal of grouping anonymous souls into competing interests is useful, but probably this corresponds little to the local experience that motivated and guided the people being so labeled. Forever there is a tension between analytical abstraction and anonymity on the one hand and names and faces of individual lives and significance on the other hand.
[reference, Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America]
A century ago the six Crow Reservation Districts came together for a cultural gathering with other Great Plains tribes. The Crow Fair honors that tradition with a "giant family reunion under the Big Sky." Every third weekend of August the Apsaalooke Nation puts on a five-day festival in southeastern Montana, with a parade, Pow Wow, rodeo, and traditional and fancy dancing. In 1977 a team of NPR producers and recordists spent a week collecting sounds and interviewing people at this annual event. This early ambient sound-portrait breathes with the arts and activities of the Crow people.
Part one of two. Listen…
The heads of four major archaeological institutes at Israeli universities have written to Limor Livnat, the country's culture minister, to ask that she withdraw proposed changes to the Antiquities Authority Law, Haaretz reported. Currently the chair of the Antiquities Authority Council must be a scientist who is a member of the Israel's National Academy of Sciences. Livnat has argued that the pool of candidates isn't large enough, and she wants to be able to select someone after consulting with the National Academy of Sciences, but not necessarily from that body. The academic institute leaders argue that this shift is an attempt to put a right-leaning scholar in charge of the council and its work.
[from Inside Higher Ed.com, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/07/22/qt#265849 ]
Gender stereotypes woven into language of toy ads
(word cloud to visually represent which words are most often used to market/package toys)
sample entry for VULNERABLE level of endangerment within the boundaries of Peru (62 languages endangered; 10 of these at the vulnerable level; example - the Quechua spoken in and around Cusco)
An exhibit of artifacts from the Hopewell site, curated by the Indiana State Museum and on display at the Angel Mounds State Historic Site in Evansville, Ind. through Jan. 14, is raising some fresh questions about these ancient Americans.
[opening excerpt from radio on Jan. 3, 2011]
Tourists and Strangers: An Anthropological Perspective by Lyra Spang
Going Native: The Anthropologist as Advocate by Robert Laughlin
Backyard Ethnography: Studying Your High School by Carolyn Gecan
Being a Refugee: Humanitarianism and the Palestinian Experience by Ilana Feldman
