SJ Dillon has been awarded the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship for their dissertation research into gender dysphoria. They will will provide an ethnographic account of a diverse group of trans communities in contemporary Atlanta, Georgia, and will compare discourses on gender dysphoria in national medical and state-level legal discourses to that ethnographic data.
Hunter Akridge is one of 16 Beincke Scholars nationwide. He has received the Department of Anthropology’s Outstanding Junior Award and the Trevor E. Stokol Scholarship for undergraduate research. Find more details on his research in the Emory News article.
Congratulations, Hunter!
The research found different and previously undetected ancestry in a man and a woman dating back 800 and 1,500 years, both from an archeological site in eastern Uruguay. This supports the theory of separate migrations from North America into different areas in South America. “We’ve now provided genetic evidence that this theory may be correct,” Lindo tells Phys.org.
Dr. Lindo published The genomic prehistory of the Indigenous peoples of Uruguay in PNAS Nexus, Co-authors are Roseirys De La Rosa, Andre L C d Santos, Mónica Sans, Michael DeGiorgio, and Gonzalo Figueiro.
Ruşen Bingül, a second-year Ph.D. student, has been awarded the American Ethnological Society (AES) Field Grant and the Halle Institute Global Research Fellowship for her summer doctoral research fieldwork. Both grants are for students who are in the pre-candidacy and whose projects involve ethnographic field research in anthropology or allied fields. Ruşen will use these grants for her summer fieldwork from May 15 to August 20, focusing on legal pluralism and alternative justice mechanism among Kurds in Mardin, the Kurdish Region of Turkey.
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 )
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.
Anthropologist Dietrich Stout decodes the brain’s “alphabet” and “grammar” for action to study behavioral evolution and measure the complexity of human technologies based on the making and use of different types of Stone Age tools.
EMORY ANTHROPOLOGY 