Doctor Andrew Graan discussing fake news and anthropology on PoLAR

[…] So, where does fake news figure into all of this? I would like to suggest that fake news—both as deliberately false news stories and as a political epithet—constitutes a particular way of participating in a public. Let me explain.

Doctor Andrew Graan was invited to participate in Political and Legal Anthropology Review’s online series ‘Emergent Conversations’ with Meg Stalcup from the University of Ottawa and Adam Hodges from the University of Colorado Boulder.  In this conversation, the researchers share their views on fake news, disinformation, and political propaganda. Below you can find a link to the first part of the conversation below.

Truth vs Post-truth by Martin Shovel (https://twitter.com/martinshovel/status/804968341471457280).
Read more here!

Friday Seminar Series 13.3.: Antoinette Jackson, University of South Florida “Intangible Cultural Heritage and Living Communities – Curating ethnographic resources and engaging people”

Abstract:

A cultural heritage perspective places priority on values and meanings that people ascribe to places, things, and ways of remembering. This talk focuses on tensions, challenges, and rewards of engaging communities in curating ethnographic resources or resources that are defined as important to a people’s sense of purpose or way of life such as museums and other structures, personal artifacts, gravesites, and cultural and natural landscapes.

 

Antoinette JacksonAntoinette Jackson is Professor of Anthropology at the University of South  Florida (USF) in Tampa and Director of the USF Heritage Research Lab (http://heritagelab.org/). Dr. Jackson served as the Regional Cultural Anthropologist for the U.S. National Park Service Southeast Region (2012- 2016).  She has led numerous heritage preservation research projects in community with undergraduate and graduate students in the US and in the Caribbean and her work is widely published. Her book Speaking for the Enslaved—Heritage Interpretation at Antebellum Plantation Sites, was published by Routledge in 2012. Her most recent book, Heritage, Tourism, and Race—The Other Side of Leisure, will be released April 2020.

The Friday seminar is held 2-4 pm at Unioninkatu 35, Room 113/114. Everybody is welcome!

Friday Seminar Series 7.2 : Sasha Newell “The Crowding of Clutter: Possession, Heterochrony, and Congestion in U.S. Domestic Life”

The Crowding of Clutter: Possession, Heterochrony, and Congestion in U.S. Domestic Life

Sasha Newell, Université Libre de Bruxelles

February 7th 2020, 2-4 PM, Unioninkatu 35, Room 113/4

Building upon ethnography in U.S homes , this paper excavates affective intimacies with objects in relation to the animacy of accumulation. Unlike curated collections, accumulations of belongings grow and seep of their own accord in darkened corners, gradually accruing mass and inserting affective hooks into the tissue of their owners’ sociality, until they burst forth into visible space in ways that threaten normative values. Those who fail to contain such accumulations are classified as hoarders, their deviance essentialized as mental disorder, while others anxiously patrol the frontiers of ordered domestic space in hopes of keeping clutter at bay. Clutter is not only spatial but temporal, allowing for arcing constellations of temporal connections that congest and confuse the social space of the home, but also allow for contact and contemplation with both past and future potentiality. Because stored things are often part of the non-conscious cognitive dispositif through which memory, kinship, and temporality are intertwined, the affective force of possessions resists both mental and material containment.

New publications on borders and topology by Sarah Green

”Lines, traces, and tidemarks: further reflections on forms of border” in 2018, The political materialities of borders: new theoretical directions. Demetriou, O. & Dimova, R. (eds.). 1 ed. Manchester: University of Manchester, Vol. 2. p. 67-83 17 p. (Rethinking Borders). You can access the paper through the research portal.

“Entangled Borders” 2019. in Archivio antropologico mediterraneo. 21:2, pp. 1-14. This is open access and available here: https://journals.openedition.org/aam/1749

“Crosscuts” 2019. In Cultural Anthropology, “Theorising the Contemporary”, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/crosscuts

Border at the sea, Ouranopolis, Greece (Photo: Lena Malm). Part of ERC Advanced Grant research called Crosslocations, led by Sarah Green. 2017

New Publication by Anni Kajanus, together with Narges Afshordi and Felix Warneken, on how children’s understanding of hierarchical relations develops in China and the UK.

A. Kajanus, N. Afshordi*, & F. Warneken (2020), Children’s understanding of dominance and prestige in China and the UK, Evolution and Human Behavior, 41(19), 23-34. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2019.08.002

(*joint first authors)


Open access link (valid until 29 February, 2020): https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1aNWc3tz48qd8O

Kuvahaun tulos haulle Evolution and Human Behavior

 

New publication in American Anthropologist “Candomblé and the Academic’s Tools” by Elina Hartikainen

Academy Research Fellow Elina Hartikainen has published in Volume 121, Issue 4 of American Anthropologist.

Elina I. Hartikainen. 2019. Candomblé and the Academic’s Tools: Religious Expertise and the Binds of Recognition in Brazil. American Anthropologist. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13272

Latin American state efforts to recognize ethnically and racially marked populations have focused on knowledge and expertise. This article argues that this form of state recognition does not only call on subaltern groups to present themselves in a frame of expertise. It also pushes such groups to position themselves and their social and political struggles in a matrix based on expertise and knowledge. In the context of early 2000s Brazil, the drive to recognition led activists from the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomble ́ to reimagine the religion’s practitioners’ long- term engagements with scholars and scholarly depictions of the religion as a form of epistemological exploitation that had resulted in public misrecognition of the true source of knowledge on the religion: Candomble ́ practitioners. To remedy this situation, the activists called on Candomble ́ practitioners to appropriate the “academic’s tools,” the modes of representation by which scholarly expertise and knowledge were performed and recognized by the general public and state officials. This strategy transformed religious structures of expertise and knowledge in ways that established a new, politically efficacious epistemological grounding for Candomble ́ practitioners’ calls for recognition. But it also further marginalized temples with limited connections or access to scholars and higher education. [politics of recognition, politics of expertise, state recognition, Candomble ́ religion, Brazil]