New Titles in Anthropology
We are pleased to announce the publication of a new edited collection by Carole McGranahan and John F. Collins, Ethnographies of U. S. Empire (Duke University Press). The volume demonstrates how a methodological and theoretical commitment to ethnography sharpens all of our understandings of the novel and timeworn ways people live, thrive, and resist in the imperial present.
"Ethnographies of U.S. Empire is an exceptionally rich collection of articles on the variety of forms American imperialism takes, both internally (starting with the dispossession of Native peoples from their lands) and globally. And unlike some of the grander and less grounded takes on empire as an almost abstract phenomenon, these authors approach the problem ethnographically, through closely observed case studies that powerfully capture the texture of experience of real people in real places in a world of colonial, post-colonial, and imperial power." - Sherry B. Ortner, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles
For more information, and to order the paperback at a 30% discount, please visit dukeupress.edu/ethnographies-of-us-empire and enter coupon code E18ETHN during checkout.
Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plains edited by Andrew J. Clark and Douglas B. Bamforth
Hot off the University Press of Colorado “The best book-length coverage of conflict among small-scale societies within a regional (cultural) context that has been published for a number of years. . . . [A]ny archeologist interested in the role of warfare in prehistoric North American societies should buy a copy.” - George Milner, Pennsylvania State University.
The Great Plains has been central to academic and popular visions of Native American warfare, largely because the region’s well-documented violence was so central to the expansion of Euroamerican settlement. However, social violence has deep roots on the Plains beyond this post-Contact perception, and these roots have not been systematically examined through archaeology before. War was part, and perhaps an important part, of the process of ethnogenesis that helped to define tribal societies in the region, and it affected many other aspects of human lives there. In Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plains, anthropologists who study sites across the Plains critically examine regional themes of warfare from pre-Contact and post-Contact periods and assess how war shaped human societies of the region.
Joyce, Arthur A. and Barber, Sarah B., Eds. 2017.
Religion and Politics in the Ancient Americas. Routledge.
This exciting collection explores the interplay of religion and politics in the precolumbian Americas. Each thought-provoking contribution positions religion as a primary factor influencing political innovations in this period, reinterpreting major changes through an examination of how religion both facilitated and constrained transformations in political organization and status relations. Offering unparalleled geographic and temporal coverage of this subject, Religion and Politics in the Ancient Americas spans the entire precolumbian period, from Preceramic Peru to the Contact period in eastern North America, with case studies from North, Middle, and South America.
Protecting Sacred Space: Rosalila's Eccentric Chert Cache at Copan and Eccentrics among the Classic Maya by Ricardo Agurcia Fasquelle, Payson Sheets, and Karl Andreas Taube. Monograph 2. Precolumbia Mesoweb Press, San Francisco. Paperback, 152 pages, fully illustrated in color.
From Precolumbia Mesoweb Press
"Eccentric flints" have been the focus of research among Maya scholars for close to a century. Unfortunately, most elaborate eccentrics in museums and private collections were looted and thus are lacking in information about their archaeological context and dating. Therefore most remain as intricately elaborate, enigmatic artifacts, with their meaning, iconography, and objectives of manufacture and placement forever hidden from scholarship. This study focuses on a cache of nine eccentrics and three bifaces placed within the Rosalila structure at Copan, Honduras, and excavated by Ricardo Agurcia Fasquelle in 1990. The nine are the largest and most elaborate set of eccentrics ever excavated in the Maya area, and because they required extraordinary skill, indicting their unusual importance, their manufacture is considered here in detail. Because the cache was carefully excavated, it presents an unusual interpretive opportunity.
Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World
Catherine M. Cameron provides an eye-opening comparative study of the profound impact that captives of warfare and raiding have had on small- scale societies through time. Cameron provides a new point of orientation for archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and other scholars by illuminating the impact that captive-taking and enslavement have had on cultural change, with important implications for understanding the past. University of Nebraska Press
Kaifa's Guide to Safe, Fun, Responsible Travel to Cuba and B(l)ack.
Since the policy openings between Cuba and the United States were announced at the end of 2014, I have been fielding numerous queries about how to travel to Cuba. I decided it was time to put my knowledge on paper and this is the result. If you have a trip in the works - or know someone who does - I hope you will check out and share this resource! Amazon.com: Kaifa's Guide to Safe, Fun, Responsible Travel to Cuba and B(l)ack eBook: L. Kaifa Roland: Kindle Store www.amazon.com
Curtis Martin (MA ’75). 2016. Ephemeral Bounty; Wickiups, Trade Goods, and the Final Years of the Autonomous Ute. University of Utah Press. ISBN 978-1-60781-467-2. The study of the last remaining Ute wickiups, or brush shelters, along with the historic artifacts found with them has revealed an understudied chapter of Native American history—the early years of contact with European invaders and the final years of Ute sovereignty. Ephemeral Bounty is the result of this archaeological research and its findings on the protohistoric and early historic Ute Indians of Colorado.
Craig R. Janes (MA 1978) and Oyuntsetseg Chuluundorj. 2016. Making Disasters. School for Advanced Research. Santa Fe. Janes is Director and Professor in the School of Public Health and Health Systems at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
Colin Flahive (BA ANTH/Asian Studies) 2015. Great Leaps: Finding Home in a Changing China.
2019 Publications
Cathy Cameron and Lindsay Johansson (PhD Candidate) wrote chapters for 2019 Interaction and Connectivity in the Greater Southwest edited by Karen G. Harry and Barbara J. Roth. University Press of Colorado.
2018 Publications
Linda White (PhD 1999) 2018. Gender and the Koseki In Contemporary Japan, Surname, Power, and Privilege. Routledge.
Tamara Hale People Are Not Users. Journal of Business Anthropology, [S.l.], v. 7, n. 2, p. 163-183, nov. 2018. ISSN 2245-4217.
Jacob Seding (PhD 2015) is an author in a major article about the peopling of the Americas in Cell Reconstructing the Deep Population History of Central and South America.
Graduate student, Richard Bender (PhD Candidate), has two new publications out in The International Encyclopedia of Biological Anthropology (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118584538). The first is on "body fat patterning," and the second focuses on "energetics." Darna Dufour is also an associate editor for the series.
Bailey Duhé (PhD Candidate) article is published in Museum Anthropology.
Two new recent publications by Carole McGranahan
“Refusal as Political Practice: Citizenship, Sovereignty, and Tibetan Refugee Status,” American Ethnologist 45(3), 2018, pp. 367-379.
“Ethnography Beyond Method: The Importance of an Ethnographic Sensibility,” SITES: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies 15(1), 2018, pp. 1-10.
Ben Joffe served as editor and translator for a publication that is about to be launched worldwide. It is a book by my teacher and research collaborator Tibetan yogi and traditional physician Dr Nida Chenagtsang, and deals with the subject of Karmamudra, or traditional Tibetan Tantric Buddhist sexual yoga practices. It is the first in-depth English language introductory text for the general public ever published on this subject. Ben’s foreword to the book is posted in full on his blog.
Shankman, Paul. The Public Anthropology of Margaret Mead; Redbook, Women’s Issues, and the 1960s.
Current Anthropology Volume 59, Number 1, February 2018.
…To understand Mead’s views, her Redbook columns can be read in tandem with the broader history of public opinion during this period and her own personal career. This article concludes with a discussion of Mead’s success as a public intellectual in this forum and why her kind of public anthropology is unlikely to be replicated by anthropologists today.
Richard Bender, Heather Williams, and Darna Dufour just had some recent research (from a 2017 paper in the American Journal of Human Biology) published online at Science Trends.
2017 Publications
Cathy Cameron’s research on captives caught the attention of Scientific American for their December edition, dedicated to “World-changing ideas that are poised to transform society.” The article, “How Captives Changed the World,” tells how “Stolen people—mostly women and children—were a driving force in the evolution of modern society.” Available now on newsstands.
Page McClean (PhD student) has been invited to publish a paper in an edited volume from the University of Artois (France). The paper she gave in Buenos Aires last August, at the Visible Evidence Conference, was on "Temporality and Reenactment in the Work of Patricio Guzmán".
Goldfarb, Kathryn E. 2017. "Food, Affect, and Experiments in Care: Constituting a 'Household-like' Child Welfare Institution in Japan." In Child's Play: Multi-Sensory Histories of Children and Childhood in Japan, S. Fruhstuck and A. Walthall, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 243-263.
Fostering synthesis in archaeology to advance science and benefit society
Scott Ortman et al. PNAS Journal.
…Archaeological data can be key to expanding scientific understandings of human social dynamics, redressing injustices of the past, empowering local and descendant communities, and aiding in the formulation of solutions to contemporary problems.
Paul Shankman authored a chapter on what happened to cultural evolution in cultural anthropology entitled '"It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time": The Fate of Cultural Evolution in Cultural Anthropology' appearing in These "Thin Partitions": Bridging the Growing Divide Between Cultural Anthropology and Archaeology (2017) edited by Joshua D. Engelhard and Ivy A. Rieger and published by the University of Colorado Press. Ivy Rieger (PhD ’15)
Devin B. Pettigrew (2017): Ozark atlatls and darts: Old finds and new interpretations, Plains Anthropologist, The Basketmaker atlatl type of the North American Southwest has a known wide distribution southward into Mexico, northward into the Great Basin, and as far east as the panhandle of Oklahoma. An artifact excavated in the early twentieth century from a Missouri bluff is clearly an atlatl of this type, extending its known occurrence into the Ozarks. A cross-peg atlatl from the Ozarks of Arkansas represents a type also present in the area surrounding the Trans-Pecos of south Texas. Both types of atlatl were in use by Mesoamerican groups at the time of contact. To complete this survey of the weapons, parts of atlatl darts from the Ozarks will also be examined. These artifacts add to a growing body of evidence for the prehistoric sharing of ideas and traditions between the Ozarks and the Southwest.
CD Byron, MC Granatosky, HH Covert. 2017. An anatomical and mechanical analysis of the douc monkey (genus Pygathrix), and its role in understanding the evolution of brachiation. American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
Joanna Mishtal (PhD ’06, Faculty Univ. Central Florida) has won the Adele E. Clark Book Award for The Politics of Morality: The Church, the State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland. The award honors a groundbreaking work judged to be the most potentially influential contribution to scholarship on reproduction. The Politics of Morality is a compelling investigation of reproductive life in Poland after the fall of socialism and the rise of Solidarity and contains insights that reverberate far beyond Poland, with its examination of the role and influence of the Catholic church, the rise of conservative moral politics, the shifting legal and practical roles of the medical profession in reproductive care, the impact of neoliberal economic policies on childbearing, and challenges to reproductive activism.
Hoffman, David M. [PhD ’06, Faculty Mississippi State] 2017. Parks, Proxies, and People: Ideology, Epistemology, and the Measurement of Human Population Growth on Protected Area Edges. Environment and Society 8:1 161-179.
Photo by H. Covert. Red-shank douc, an endangered primate of Vietnam
Herbert H. Covert, Hoang Minh Duc, Le Kha Quyet, Andie Ang, Amy Harrison-Levine & Tran Van Bang (2017). Primates of Vietnam: Conservation in a Rapidly Developing Country, Anthropology Now, 9:2, 27-44
Brzezinski, Jeffrey S., Arthur A. Joyce, and Sarah B. Barber. 2017. Constituting Animacy and Community in a Terminal Formative Bundled Offering from the Coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27(3): 511–531.
Richard Bender, Heather Williams, and Darna Dufour just had a research article released (early access) for The American Journal of Human Biology: “No change in energy efficiency in lactation: Insights from a longitudinal study”
Merriman, Dani R. 2017 "El Arte y la Condición de Víctima: lo político y lo estético de ´hacerse visible.´" (The Art of Victimhood: the politics and aesthetics of ´becoming visible´). Maguaré. 30(2): 47-79. Published in Maguaré, the Anthropology Journal of the National University of Colombia in Bogotá.
Sheets, Payson. 2017. Abundance in the Ancient Maya Village of Cerén. In Abundance; the Archaeology of Plenitude. Smith, Monica L., Ed. University Press of Colorado.
Drought, Local Institutional Context, and Support for Violence in Kenya. (2017). Journal of Conflict Resolution. Andrew Linke, Frank Witmer, John, O’Loughlin, J. Terrence McCabe, Jaroslav Tir
An Anthropology of Lying: Trump and the Political Sociality of Moral Outrage. Carole McGranahan for the American Ethnologist.
Joanna Lambert’s co-authored primate population study in Science Advances was picked up by both the Coloradan alumni magazine and CU’s A&S online magazine
“Exploring Culinary Practices Through GIS Modeling at Joya de Cerén, El Salvador”. Farahani A, Chiou KL, Cuthrell RQ, Harkey A, Morell-Hart S, Hastorf CA, and Payson D. Sheets. Chapter 5 In: Sayre, MP and Bruno MC, Eds. Social Perspectives on Ancient Lives from Paleoethnobotanical Data. 2017. Springer ISBN: 978-3-319-52847-2 (Print) 978-3-319-52849-6 (Online)
John C. Whittaker, Devin B. Pettigrew and Ryan J. Grohsmeyer. 2017. Atlatl Dart Velocity: Accurate Measurements and Implications for Paleoindian and Archaic Archaeology. PaleoAmerica.
Willi Lempert (PhD candidate) has a couple of new publications:
- Planeterra Nullius: A Post-Apocalyptic Parable. A sci-fi short story parable about Australian colonial invasion told through a parallel story of alien invasion 600 years later.
- "Moondust and Cosmo/politics" the second episode in his podcast trilogy
Study finds link between protein, obesity rates in Latin women
Tracy Bekelman [PhD ‘16] got the attention of news outlets such as MSN with the publication of her dissertation: Bekelman TA, Sanatmaria Ulloa C. Dufour DL, Marin-Arias L, Dengo AL. 2017. Using the protein leverage hypothesis to understand socioeconomic variation in obesity. American Journal of human Biology.
See: UPI.com MSN.com Sciencedaily.com Medicaldaily.com cuanschutztoday.org
Carole McGranahan. 2017. "Imperial but Not Colonial: Archival Truths, British India, and the Case of the “Naughty” Tibetans" in CSSH/Comparative Studies in Society and History
Refugees, Immigrants, and Trump’s Executive Order: Six Anthropologists Speak Out Carole McGranahan, Marnie Thomson (PhD 2016) et al. blog for Savage Minds
Essays by PhD candidate Willi Lempert and Associate Professor Carole McGranahan in the special series "What Are You Reading? Responses to the Election and Inauguration" in the journal website of Cultural Anthropology:
Indigenous Filmmakers Reimagine Science
Willi Lempert (PhD candidate) just published an online article in the same vein for the blog Labocine. In today's politically polarized climate, climate change denial and other profit-driven positions have led to caricatured rifts between pro and anti-science positions, undermining productive and nuanced debates about what science is, could be, and should be. Expanding the genre of science fiction, Indigenous filmmakers help to critically and thoughtfully engage the nature and limitations of science.
Ancient Chaco Canyon population likely relied on imported food
The ancient inhabitants of New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon…likely had to import corn to feed the multitudes residing there, says a new CU Boulder study by CU Boulder scientist and ANTH colleague Larry Benson.
Cathy Cameron’s Beyond Germs: Native depopulation in North America has been selected for inclusion in Choice Magazine’s list of Outstanding Academic Titles. The complete list will
appear in the January edition of the magazine.
Payson Sheets’ Cerén site Structure 4 graces the cover of the new Encyclopedia of Geoarchaeology (2017), Editors: Gilbert, Allan S. He also has an article about the site inside. Available from Springer.