2019. Edited by Sarah Besky and Alex Blanchette
The authors of this volume push ethnographic inquiry beyond the anthropocentric documentation of human work on nature in order to develop a language for thinking about how all labor is a collective ecological act.
SAR board member and eminent archaeologist, Jerry Sabloff has devoted considerable effort to the study of settlement patterns in Mexico and Central America—the when, where and how non-elite Maya people lived and worked. Sabloff discusses his discoveries in a Q&A interview in the 2019 issue of Knowable Magazine and presents on the topic in this fall’s SAR In-Depth course.
At the heart of her research, SAR senior scholar Dean Falk asks, “What can fossils, babies, and Einstein tell us about the way our brains have evolved?” Falk addressed this question and more during a tour of lectures and interviews across western Australia this summer, where, on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Radio program “Late Night Live”, she touches upon evolution and language, the uniqueness of Einstein’s brain, and “hobbits”, or the newly discovered (and short) human species, Homo floresiensis.
SAR senior scholar, Carol MacLennan, has focused her research on mining policy in the US and is currently completing her manuscript, Laid to Waste: Lessons from 100 Years of Mining, which explores the ongoing cultural and environmental impact of copper mining in New Mexico and Michigan.
SAR Announces 2019-2020 Resident Scholars: C.J. Alvarez, Patricia Crown, Rashmi Sadana, Fátima Suárez, and Davina Two Bears.
Cities are shaped as much by paper and rubber stamps as they are by bricks and mortar, argues Matthew Hull in Government of Paper. By tracing the unexpected ways in which documents travel, he exposes the secret life of paper that profoundly shapes the built landscape of the planned city of Islamabad, and more broadly, gives us new ways of understanding bureaucracy on a global scale.
A new, widely acclaimed book by SAR scholar alumnus David Treuer is challenging long-held views of the state of Native America. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, argues that Dee Brown’s famous history of Native American dispossession and genocide, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, perpetuates a mistaken impression of the situation of American Indians today.
Exploring the world of death and mourning has always been part of anthropological work, but the opportunity to examine these topics in an interdisciplinary setting is rare in academia. This fall, SAR hosted an Advanced Seminar that enabled a cross-disciplinary dialogue among ten scholars who are currently studying death practices and their cultural relevance.
Earlier this month, the American Anthropological Association hosted the 117th annual meeting in San Jose, California. For many, the gathering is a five-day whirlwind of presentations, panels, committee meetings, awards, and social gatherings. Among the 6,000 anthropologists and related professionals in attendance, there were hundreds of SAR alumni.
For SAR’s 2018-2019 Mellon Fellow John Arroyo, the hotly contested gubernatorial race in Georgia is more than just a news story passing through his feed. Since July 2016, Arroyo, the MIT-trained urban planner, has been visiting Gwinnett County, Georgia, and researching Mexican immigrant experiences in the region. Arroyo’s timely ethnographic research illustrates the importance of new perspectives based on interdisciplinary research that bridges urban planning with migration studies, Latinx studies, and urban sociology.