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.
The immersive film Voices of the Rainforest spans a day in the life of the Kaluli people in their Bosavi rainforest home in Papua New Guinea, highlighting the sounds of the animals, insects and natural world that the Kaluli believe speak of their ancestors.
William Calvo-Quirós, one of SAR’s 2018-2019 Mellon Fellows, was one of three Americans invited to join 230 global participants in the World Conference on Xenophobia, Racism, and Populist Nationalism in the Context of Global Migration.
Since the 1970s sociologist Kersti Yllö has been working in area of sexual assault that receives little attention. In 2016, she and anthropologist M. Gabriela Torres published an edited volume of new research addressing the topic. Marital Rape: Consent, Marriage and...
Abou Farman (Anthropology, The New School) was recently at SAR as a participant in the advanced seminar “Death Culture in the 21st Century,” co-chaired by Shannon Lee Dawdy (University of Chicago) and Tamara E. Kneese (U. San Francisco). Knowing about my interest in Amazonia, Abou passed along information on a recent tragedy in Amazonian Peru that took place not far from the major city of Pucallpa.
Jamila Bargach has spent the majority of her adult life working to improve the lives of women in her home country of Morocco. SAR is proud to have been a nine-month home for Bargach while she explored how a simple technology—a petroleum-based mesh strategically placed...
SAR scholars have pursued many unusual research projects over the decades, but one of the more memorable of recent years was that of Miriam Kolar (Weatherhead Resident Scholar, 2016-2017). Kolar, who received her doctorate from Stanford, is a prominent practitioner of the emerging specialty of archaeoacoustics, which brings together acoustic science and archaeology in an effort to understand how sound was used in used in prehistoric times to coordinate collective activity and, in some cases, to inspire awe during religious rituals.
