Pervez Hoodbhoy and Scott Atran on hope and extremism

By Profs. Pervez Hoodbhoy and Scott Atran After he circulated his address to the UN Security Council on extremism (available here), Prof. Scott Atran received the following response from Prof. Pervez Hoodbhoy of Pakistan. Prof. Hoodbhoy is a nuclear physicist, essayist, national security advisor, and social activist. A prize-winning scientist with a...

Apr 2015

Scott Atran on Youth, Violent Extremism and Promoting Peace

On 23 April, 2015, Prof. Scott Atran addressed the UN Security Council, to our knowledge the first time an anthropologist has ever been asked to speak to this body. In particular, he spoke to the Ministerial Debate on ‘The Role of Youth in Countering Violent Extremism and Promoting Peace.’ His presentation on youth radicalization condenses in a very...

Apr 2015

Plastics, tiny penises, and human evolution

By Greg Downey.  (5000 words) An Italian study in 2012 found that men’s penises were growing smaller over time — two centimetres lost from grandfather to grandson in the twentieth century. Conservative radio bloviator Rush Limbaugh knew who to blame: ‘feminazis, the chickification, and everything else’ linked to feminism. Other commentators, a bit more...

Apr 2015

Culture like Relativity

One of the prominent ways to think about culture is as a system of symbols or beliefs. For example, Clifford Geertz wrote in 1973: Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law...

Mar 2015

Common Brain Mechanisms in Mental Illness

An important new meta-analysis of brain imaging research came out this week in JAMA Psychiatry, “Identification of a Common Neurobiological Substrate for Mental Illness” which highlights the importance of the insula and anterior cingultate in healthy brain function. Neuroscientist News provides an effective overview of the results that came out of Amit...

Feb 2015

Applied Anthropology as Limit

Of late I’ve been saying that the constraints that come with applied work are useful for doing good theoretical and empirical work. Just as experimental models bring demands to the research process that can clarify methods and outcomes, so too can applied work. I mean this point in two ways: (1) Grand theories can be grand and all, but when they are...

Dec 2014

Oppression, Mental Health, and the House Science Committee

By Steven Folmar, Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Anthropology, Wake Forest University      On September 15 of this year, I learned from my Program Officer at the National Science Foundation (NSF) that the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology had requested the “jacket” for my NSF-funded project, “Oppression...

Oct 2014

Asifa Majid on language and olfaction

When I first ran across Asifa Majid’s  article with Ewelina Wnuk in Cognition, about how speakers of Maniq, a language indigenous to southern Thailand, have a vocabulary for talking about smell, I was taken aback. In anthropology, especially since the work of people like David Howes, Constance Classen, and Andrew Synott, we know very well that different...

Sep 2014

Our Brains as Alien Technology

Our brains are alien technology. We don’t understand how they work, and the glimpses we have gotten so far indicate that our brains work quite differently than our own smart technology. After a century of research, we are just beginning to understand the brain. Unlike the heart, or even our DNA, we do not have an in-depth sense of how the brain accomplishes...

Jul 2014

Bringing Scholarly Book Review into the Digital Age: The American Anthropological Association Initiative

Better, faster, stronger. Whether Superman or Daft Punk, the motto works. But until now, these words didn’t apply to how academic books got reviewed. The American Anthropological Association (AAA), with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and prominent university presses, looks to change that. The AAA is launching a digital book review platform...

Jul 2014