Anthropology Around the Web

Today I’m experimenting with a new type of post – a small selection of anthropology-related news and articles that have popped up around the internet in the past 24 hours or so. In my duties as the Foundation’s communications assistant and social-media jockey, I get to sample a huge amount of anthropology stuff on a daily basis, and sometimes the fragmented nature of the usual channels (twitter, etc) make me wish there was a place where the most interesting things could be gathered.

And as far as the credibility of my editorial eye goes…don’t worry, I have a Masters. 😉

-Daniel

(Thanks to @BoneGirlPHD, @johnhawks, and others for turning me on to these links)

• Tuscans are found to have the highest genetic similarity to Neanderthals of all the samples in the 1000 Genomes project.

• It’s the 40^th anniversary of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, one of the most well-known, controversial and studied cultural-preservation projects.

• Eugenie C. Scott, physical anthropologist and executive director of the National Center for Science Education, guest blogs for RealClimate.org with some sage wisdom for educators running up against resistance to teaching credible science.

• Berkeley sociologist Claude S. Fischer’s excellent culture-and-society blog MADE IN AMERICA has an insightful and data-rich piece on the highly misunderstood history of marriage in the United States.

• Continuing SAVAGE MINDS’ incredibly exciting devotion to talking up the new and equally exciting open-access journal HAU, the well-known anthropology blog has posted the latest installment of the open access ‘reading circle’ in which the bloggers select a piece of freely available scholarship and open it up to discussion, with particular care given to thinking through and with HAU’s impetus to reviving “ethnographic theory”. This week it’s Vicente Diaz’s paper on Austronesian seafaring.