PhD Candidate Elena Lesley and alumna Emily Mendenhall discuss how Elena’s family’s experiences fleeing wartime Ukraine shaped her future research. Read the article, “Multi-Generational Voices from the Wreckage of War-Torn Ukraine,” available online.
Happy #AnthroDay! The Anthropology Department and Emory Anthropology Student Society (EASS) celebrated by hosting an information table and button-making station, where students made their own anthropology-themed buttons. Students also had the opportunity to share some things they love about anthropology. Here are some of the responses:
You can check out more about Anthropology Day at americananthro.org and by following #AnthroDay!
Emory College of Arts and Sciences has been awarded a $225,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to lead a yearlong examination of the histories of slavery in the Black Atlantic, as well as the struggles against it, in order to better understand current social justice efforts.
Co-organized by Emory College professors Bayo Holsey and Walter C. Rucker, an anthropologist and historian, respectively, “Visions of Slavery” will explore how slavery in the Black Atlantic has been archived, memorialized and interpreted both historically and more recently.
As part of the Mellon’s 2022-2023 Sawyer Seminar series, the symposium will unite Emory faculty across the humanities and social sciences with scholars from other metro Atlanta universities.
Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique (Stanford University Press 2020) is described as an “impressive treatment of the complex challenges that Palestinian LGBTQ activists face”.
The review of Dr. Atshan’s book is available online.
Dr. Sirak received her PhD in 2018 for her dissertation on “A Genomic Analysis of Two Early Christian Cemetery Communities from Sudanese Nubia”, she is now a staff scientist at Harvard University. Her research bridges the fields of Ancient DNA and archaeology and helps shed light on social structures as well as the genomes of ancient populations.
The 25th anniversary of Peter Little and Michael Watts’ edited book, Living Under Contract: Contract Farming and Agrarian Transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa (with Michael Watts), is the basis of a Special Issue of the Journal of Agrarian Change (Volume 22, Number 1, 2022).
The introduction to the journal issue discusses how “it was the publication in 1994 of Living Under Contract: Contract Farming and Agrarian Transformation in Sub-Saharan Africa, a collection edited by Peter Little and Michael Watts, that marked a seminal moment in critical scholarship on contract farming in the developing world. . . . The legacy of Living Under Contract is evident in the sustained engagement with contract farming by critical scholars in the subsequent three decades since its publication (see Vicol et al. 2022, 3-4, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joac.12471 . )” Peter Little and Michael Watts were invited to write the epilogue, titled “The afterlife of Living under Contract,” to the Special Issue (see Little and Watts https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joac.12467 )
Nomadic Peoples, 2021, volume 25, Number 2. As the introduction to the volume states, “the special issue interrogates the frequently overused concept of resilience through an examination of a series of case studies from East Africa. It addresses the ways in which anthropologists have studied the interactions between pastoral communities and outside actors under the guise of ‘building resilience’ ..and it challenges readers to think beyond persistent dichotomies of local/global, modernity/tradition, and culture/environment (Konaka and Little 2021: 165). Most of the articles in the issue were based on a panel sponsored by the Commission of Nomadic Peoples, International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) and presented at the Bi-annual Congress of the IUAES, held in Poznan, Poland, August 27-31, 2019. Peter Little.
James Rilling, Professor in the Anthropology Department at Emory University, used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan grandmothers brains while they looked at images of their children, their grandchildren as well as unrelated adults and children.
“When grandmothers viewed photographs of their grandchildren, they particularly activated brain regions that have previously been associated with emotional empathy, suggesting that grandmothers may be predisposed to share the emotional states of their grandchildren,” Rilling tells USA Today. When looking at picture of their adult children, areas of their brain associated with cognitive empathy where activated.
This research was also featured by CNN and the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
Recently discovered cave paintings and bone carvings offer new perspectives on long-held questions about art’s origins—not to mention the nature of art itself.
The paintings of Pigs were discovered on limestone walls of the Leang Tedongnge cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The question about what the oldest record of art is necessitates a definition of art, and leads us to the question of what the creation of art tell us about humans and their abilities at the time. The full article is available online. Dietrich Stout.
This week, the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s Fieldsights Blog won the 2021 New Directions Award, presented by the General Anthropological Division, a sub-section of the American Anthropological Association. Scott Schnur, a doctoral candidate in the Emory Anthropology Department, is a member of the graduate student collective who helps edit and write for the blog as part of SCA’s Contributing Editors program. Schnur has been a contributing editor since 2018, and in 2021 became the section editor for Member Voices, a section of Fieldsights.”I became interested in working with Fieldsights because of their commitment to open-access publication and the public-facing nature of the work. The site is a great forum for experimental writing and multi-media pieces which are engaging with important issues in the discipline and pushing it new directions,” he said. “Congratulations to everyone in the program and the editorial board!” Fieldsights has been published since 2012 and has a global readership.
EMORY ANTHROPOLOGY 