Publications
New Titles in Anthropology
We are pleased to announce the publication of a new edited collection by Carole McGranahan and John F. Collins, Ethnographies of U. S. Empire (Duke University Press). The volume demonstrates how a methodological and theoretical commitment to ethnography sharpens all of our understandings of the novel and timeworn ways people live, thrive, and resist in the imperial present.
"Ethnographies of U.S. Empire is an exceptionally rich collection of articles on the variety of forms American imperialism takes, both internally (starting with the dispossession of Native peoples from their lands) and globally. And unlike some of the grander and less grounded takes on empire as an almost abstract phenomenon, these authors approach the problem ethnographically, through closely observed case studies that powerfully capture the texture of experience of real people in real places in a world of colonial, post-colonial, and imperial power." - Sherry B. Ortner, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles
For more information, and to order the paperback at a 30% discount, please visit and enter coupon code E18ETHN during checkout.
Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plains edited by Andrew J. Clark and Douglas B. Bamforth
Hot off the University Press of Colorado “The best book-length coverage of conflict among small-scale societies within a regional (cultural) context that has been published for a number of years. . . . [A]ny archeologist interested in the role of warfare in prehistoric North American societies should buy a copy.” - George Milner, Pennsylvania State University.
The Great Plains has been central to academic and popular visions of Native American warfare, largely because the region’s well-documented violence was so central to the expansion of Euroamerican settlement. However, social violence has deep roots on the Plains beyond this post-Contact perception, and these roots have not been systematically examined through archaeology before. War was part, and perhaps an important part, of the process of ethnogenesis that helped to define tribal societies in the region, and it affected many other aspects of human lives there. In Archaeological Perspectives on Warfare on the Great Plains, anthropologists who study sites across the Plains critically examine regional themes of warfare from pre-Contact and post-Contact periods and assess how war shaped human societies of the region.
Joyce, Arthur A. and Barber, Sarah B., Eds. 2017.
Religion and Politics in the Ancient Americas. Routledge.
This exciting collection explores the interplay of religion and politics in the precolumbian Americas. Each thought-provoking contribution positions religion as a primary factor influencing political innovations in this period, reinterpreting major changes through an examination of how religion both facilitated and constrained transformations in political organization and status relations. Offering unparalleled geographic and temporal coverage of this subject, Religion and Politics in the Ancient Americas spans the entire precolumbian period, from Preceramic Peru to the Contact period in eastern North America, with case studies from North, Middle, and South America.
Protecting Sacred Space: Rosalila's Eccentric Chert Cache at Copan and Eccentrics among the Classic Maya by Ricardo Agurcia Fasquelle, , and Karl Andreas Taube. Monograph 2. Precolumbia Mesoweb Press, San Francisco. Paperback, 152 pages, fully illustrated in color.
From
"Eccentric flints" have been the focus of research among Maya scholars for close to a century. Unfortunately, most elaborate eccentrics in museums and private collections were looted and thus are lacking in information about their archaeological context and dating. Therefore most remain as intricately elaborate, enigmatic artifacts, with their meaning, iconography, and objectives of manufacture and placement forever hidden from scholarship. This study focuses on a cache of nine eccentrics and three bifaces placed within the Rosalila structure at Copan, Honduras, and excavated by Ricardo Agurcia Fasquelle in 1990. The nine are the largest and most elaborate set of eccentrics ever excavated in the Maya area, and because they required extraordinary skill, indicting their unusual importance, their manufacture is considered here in detail. Because the cache was carefully excavated, it presents an unusual interpretive opportunity.
Captives: How Stolen People Changed the World
provides an eye-opening comparative study of the profound impact that captives of warfare and raiding have had on small- scale societies through time. Cameron provides a new point of orientation for archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and other scholars by illuminating the impact that captive-taking and enslavement have had on cultural change, with important implications for understanding the past.
Kaifa's Guide to Safe, Fun, Responsible Travel to Cuba and B(l)ack.
Since the policy openings between Cuba and the United States were announced at the end of 2014, I have been fielding numerous queries about how to travel to Cuba. I decided it was time to put my knowledge on paper and this is the result. If you have a trip in the works - or know someone who does - I hope you will check out and share this resource!Amazon.com: Kaifa's Guide to Safe, Fun, Responsible Travel to Cuba and B(l)ack eBook: : Kindle Store
Curtis Martin (MA ’75). 2016. Ephemeral Bounty;Wickiups, Trade Goods, and the Final Years of the Autonomous Ute.University of Utah Press. ISBN 978-1-60781-467-2.The study of the last remaining Ute wickiups, or brush shelters, along with the historic artifacts found with them has revealed an understudied chapter of Native American history—the early years of contact with European invaders and the final years of Ute sovereignty.Ephemeral Bountyis the result of this archaeological research and its findings on the protohistoric and early historic Ute Indians of Colorado.
Craig R. Janes (MA 1978) and Oyuntsetseg Chuluundorj. 2016. . School for Advanced Research. Santa Fe.Janes is Director and Professor in the School of Public Health and Health Systems at the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
Colin Flahive (BA ANTH/Asian Studies) 2015. .
2019 Publications
Cathy Cameron and Lindsay Johansson (PhD Candidate) wrote chapters for 2019 edited by Karen G. Harry and Barbara J. Roth. University Press of Colorado.
2018 Publications
Linda White (PhD 1999) 2018. Gender and the Koseki In Contemporary Japan, Surname, Power, and Privilege. Routledge.
Tamara Hale.Journal of Business Anthropology, [S.l.], v. 7, n. 2, p. 163-183, nov. 2018. ISSN 2245-4217.
Jacob Seding (PhD 2015) is an author in a major article about the peopling of the Americas in Cell.
Graduate student, Richard Bender (PhD Candidate), has two new publications out in The International Encyclopedia of Biological Anthropology (). The first is on "body fat patterning," and the second focuses on "energetics." Darna Dufour is also an associate editor for the series.
Bailey Duhé (PhD Candidate) article is published in Museum Anthropology.
Two new recent publications by Carole McGranahan
“,” AmericanEthnologist 45(3), 2018, pp. 367-379.
“,” SITES: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies 15(1), 2018, pp. 1-10.
Ben Joffe served as editor and translator for a publication that is about to be launched worldwide. It is a book by my teacher and research collaborator Tibetan yogi and traditional physician Dr Nida Chenagtsang, and deals with the subject of Karmamudra, or traditional Tibetan Tantric Buddhist sexual yoga practices. It is the first in-depth English language introductory text for the general public ever published on this subject. Ben’s foreword to the book is posted in full on his .
Shankman, Paul.
Current Anthropology Volume 59, Number 1, February 2018.
…To understand Mead’s views, her Redbook columns can be read in tandem with the broader history of public opinion during this period and her own personal career. This article concludes with a discussion of Mead’s success as a public intellectual in this forum and why her kind of public anthropology is unlikely to be replicated by anthropologists today.
Richard Bender, Heather Williams, and Darna Dufour just had some recent research (from a 2017 paper in the American Journal of Human Biology) published online at .
2017 Publications
Cathy Cameron’s research on captives caught the attention of Scientific American for their December edition, dedicated to “World-changing ideas that are poised to transform society.” The article, “How Captives Changed the World,” tells how “Stolen people—mostly women and children—were a driving force in the evolution of modern society.” Available now on newsstands.
Page McClean (PhD student) has been invited to publish a paper in an edited volume from the University of Artois (France). The paper she gave in Buenos Aires last August, at the Visible Evidence Conference, was on "Temporality and Reenactment in the Work of Patricio Guzmán".
Goldfarb, Kathryn E. 2017. "Food, Affect, and Experiments in Care: Constituting a 'Household-like' Child Welfare Institution in Japan." In , S. Fruhstuck and A. Walthall, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 243-263.
Scott Ortman et al. PNAS Journal.
…Archaeological data can be key to expanding scientific understandings of human social dynamics, redressing injustices of the past, empowering local and descendant communities, and aiding in the formulation of solutions to contemporary problems.
authored a chapter on what happened to cultural evolution in cultural anthropology entitled '"It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time": The Fate of Cultural Evolution in Cultural Anthropology' appearing in These "Thin Partitions": Bridging the Growing Divide Between Cultural Anthropology and Archaeology (2017) edited by Joshua D. Engelhard and Ivy A. Rieger and published by the University of Colorado Press. Ivy Rieger (PhD ’15)
(2017): , Plains Anthropologist, The Basketmaker atlatl type of the North American Southwest has a known wide distribution southward into Mexico, northward into the Great Basin, and as far east as the panhandle of Oklahoma. An artifact excavated in the early twentieth century from a Missouri bluff is clearly an atlatl of this type, extending its known occurrence into the Ozarks. A cross-peg atlatl from the Ozarks of Arkansas represents a type also present in the area surrounding the Trans-Pecos of south Texas. Both types of atlatl were in use by Mesoamerican groups at the time of contact. To complete this survey of the weapons, parts of atlatl darts from the Ozarks will also be examined. These artifacts add to a growing body of evidence for the prehistoric sharing of ideas and traditions between the Ozarks and the Southwest.
CD Byron, MC Granatosky, . 2017. American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
Joanna Mishtal (PhD ’06, Faculty Univ. Central Florida) has won the Adele E. Clark Book Award for The Politics of Morality: The Church, the State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland. The award honors a groundbreaking work judged to be the most potentially influential contribution to scholarship on reproduction. The Politics of Morality is a compelling investigation of reproductive life in Poland after the fall of socialism and the rise of Solidarity and contains insights that reverberate far beyond Poland, with its examination of the role and influence of the Catholic church, the rise of conservative moral politics, the shifting legal and practical roles of the medical profession in reproductive care, the impact of neoliberal economic policies on childbearing, and challenges to reproductive activism.
Hoffman, David M. [PhD ’06, Faculty Mississippi State] 2017. . Environment and Society 8:1 161-179.
Photo by H. Covert. Red-shank douc, an endangered primate of Vietnam
, Hoang Minh Duc, , , & Tran Van Bang (2017). , Anthropology Now, 9:2, 27-44
, , and Sarah B. Barber. 2017. Constituting Animacy and Community in a Terminal Formative Bundled Offering from the Coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27(3): 511–531.
, Heather Williams, and just had a research article released (early access) for The American Journal of Human Biology:
Merriman, Dani R. 2017 (The Art of Victimhood: the politics and aesthetics of ´becoming visible´). Maguaré. 30(2): 47-79. Published in Maguaré, the Anthropology Journal of the National University of Colombia in Bogotá.
. 2017. Abundance in the Ancient Maya Village of Cerén. In Abundance; the Archaeology of Plenitude. Smith, Monica L., Ed. University Press of Colorado.
Drought, Local Institutional Context, and Support for Violence in Kenya. (2017). Journal of Conflict Resolution. Andrew Linke, Frank Witmer, John, O’Loughlin, J. , Jaroslav Tir
. for the American Ethnologist.
co-authored primate population study in was picked up by both the Coloradan alumni magazine and ’s
. Farahani A, Chiou KL, Cuthrell RQ, Harkey A, Morell-Hart S, Hastorf CA, and . In: Sayre, MP and Bruno MC, Eds. Social Perspectives on Ancient Lives from Paleoethnobotanical Data. 2017. Springer ISBN: 978-3-319-52847-2 (Print) 978-3-319-52849-6 (Online)
John C. Whittaker, and Ryan J. Grohsmeyer. 2017. . PaleoAmerica.
(PhD candidate) has a couple of new publications:
- . A sci-fi short story parable about Australian colonial invasion told through a parallel story of alien invasion 600 years later.
- the second episode in his podcast trilogy
Study finds link between protein, obesity rates in Latin women
[PhD ‘16] got the attention of news outlets such as MSN with the publication of her dissertation: Bekelman TA, Sanatmaria Ulloa C. Dufour DL, Marin-Arias L, Dengo AL. 2017. Using the protein leverage hypothesis to understand socioeconomic variation in obesity. American Journal of human Biology.
See:
. 2017. in CSSH/Comparative Studies in Society and History
, (PhD 2016) et al. blog for Savage Minds
Essays by PhD candidate and Associate Professor in the special series in the journal website of Cultural Anthropology:
(PhD candidate) just published an online article in the same vein for the blog Labocine. In today's politically polarized climate, climate change denial and other profit-driven positions have led to caricatured rifts between pro and anti-science positions, undermining productive and nuanced debates about what science is, could be, and should be. Expanding the genre of science fiction, Indigenous filmmakers help to critically and thoughtfully engage the nature and limitations of science.
The ancient inhabitants of New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon…likely had to import corn to feed the multitudes residing there, says a new Boulder study by Boulder scientist and ANTH colleague Larry Benson.
Beyond Germs: Native depopulation in North America has been selected for inclusion in Choice Magazine’s list of Outstanding Academic Titles. The complete list will
appear in the January edition of the magazine.
Cerén site Structure 4 graces the cover of the new (2017), Editors: Gilbert, Allan S. He also has an article about the site inside. Available from Springer.
Tamara Hale (ANTH Adjunct) new article on teaching design anthropology, "disconnection" from technology and the bridge between academic and applied anthropology is out. It's based on an experimental student partnership with Otterbox, the maker of smartphone covers. Annals of Anthropological Practice 40 (2):207-218. Dr. Hale is a Postdoctoral Fellow, Design Anthropologist and UX Strategist.
Emily Benton Hite [PhD student], David Barton Bray, Elvira Duran & Armando Rincón-Gutiérrez (2016): , Society & Natural Resources.
ABSTRACT: Studies of coffee agroecosystems have focused on their role in providing habitat for biodiversity across a range of management intensities. These studies have not taken into account the temporal and spatial transformations in coffee landscapes and their impacts on structural heterogeneity and biodiversity, nor systematically linked these transformations to farmer management responses to price and policy shocks. We utilize a coupled natural–human system framework to examine the historical transformations of the coffee landscape in a matrix of community-protected forests in a coffee-growing community in Oaxaca, Mexico, and study how those transformations impact tree biodiversity across a range of management options, including formerly certified organic and conventional coffee, abandonment, and conversion. The coffee landscape has historically transitioned from forests and fields (1950s–1960s) to one dominated by coffee (1970s–1980s) to a richly mosaic and biodiverse landscape (1990–2010) resulting from 43% recent abandonment and conversion of coffee back to forest and fields.
received the Archaeology Division’s 2016 Gordon R. Willey Award “recognizing an outstanding publication in archaeology in American Anthropologist” at the recent AAA Meetings in Minneapolis. The paper was “How People Moved Among Ancient Societies: Broadening the View”.
2016. Rethinking Muslim Identity in Sri Lanka. In John C. Holt, ed., Buddhist Extremists and Muslim Minorities: Religious Conflict in Contemporary Sri Lanka. Oxford University Press, 54-77.
2016. Islamic and Buddhist Impacts on the Shrine at Daftar Jailani, Sri Lanka. In Deepra Dandekar and Torsten Tschacher, eds., Islam, Sufism and Everyday Politics of Belonging in South Asia. London and New York: Routledge, 62-76.
was honored with a gift for his 2015 book, The Heraldry of Chiepetlán, Tlapa, México.
(2016) , The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 17:5, 399-418,
DOI: 10.1080/14442213.2016.1208676. Published online: 20 Oct 2016.
(PhD ’12) was distinguished by the journal Primates with a 2016 Most-Cited Paper Award.
LaFleur M, Sauther M, Cuozzo F, Yamashita N, Jacky Youssouf IA, Bender R (2014) Cathemerality in wild ring-tailed lemurs (Lemur catta) in the spiny forest of Tsimanampetsotsa National Park: camera trap data and preliminary behavioral observations. Primates 55: 207–217
As lead author, she will receive gifts from the Japan Monkey Centre, the Primate Society of Japan, and Springer.
You will also recognize names of most co-authors.
(2016) , Japanese Studies, 36:2, 151-154, DOI: 10.1080/10371397.2016.1209730
(2016) , Japanese Studies, 36:2, 173-189,
DOI: 10.1080/10371397.2016.1208531
(PhD ’14) has an opinion piece out in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists on
The Hands of Donald Trump
just completed an article with linguistic colleague and former MA student in linguistics Matthew Bruce Ingram entitled “.” The article is available online now at HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, attributes the success of Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 Republican primary to its value as comedic entertainment, as seen in the way Trump uses gesture to critique the political system and caricature his opponents.
Abstract: Commentators from a broad range of perspectives have been at pains to explain Donald Trump’s transition from billionaire businessman to populist presidential candidate. This article draws on cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, and rhetorical theory to argue that the success of Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 Republican primary was in part due to its value as comedic entertainment. We examine the ways that Trump’s unconventional political style, particularly his use of gesture to critique the political system and caricature his opponents, brought momentum to his campaign by creating spectacle. Poststructuralist and neo-Marxist scholars have asserted that late capitalism values style over content: Trump took this characteristic to new heights. The exaggerated depictions of the sociopolitical world that Trump crafts with his hands to oppose political correctness and disarm adversaries accrues visual capital in a mediatized twenty first century politics that is celebrity driven.
When Cultural Anthropology Was Popular: A Quiz
Guest post by on: Cultural anthropologists are often concerned that their work is not getting the public attention that it deserves. Yet just a few decades ago, cultural anthropology was …
2016. Competition and Conflict in the Upper Belize River Valley: Insights from the Ancient Maya Minor Center of Callar Creek, Belize. Journal of Field Archaeology 41(3): 297-311.
"Would Margaret Mead Tweet?” Recent PhD in cultural anthropology is the Savage Minds guest blogger for the month of September. Her first essay is
and Caroline Schuster. 2016. “(De)materializing kinship: Holding together mutuality and difference.” Social Analysis 60(2): 1-12.
2016. “‘Coming to look alike’: Materializing affinity in Japanese foster and adoptive care.” Social Analysis 60(2): 47-64.
is a co-editor of the most recent special issue of Annals of Human Biology entitled "Human Biology of the Amazon" (Volume 43, issue 4). The issue highlights recent human biology research taking place in Amazonia and was timed to commemorate the Brazilian Olympic Games, the first to be held on the South American continent.
Articles in the special volume include populations living in Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador and cover a range of topics including human diet & nutrition, HIV/AIDS, climate change and child growth and development and environmental contamination.
2016. Development Conflicts and Changing Mortuary Practices in a New Guinea Mining Area. The Journal
of the Polynesian Society 125(2):133-147.
2016. “Correlating Local Knowledge with Climatic Data: Porgeran Experiences of Climate Change in Papua
New Guinea,” in Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions, 2nd ed., pp. 186-199. S. Crate and M.
Nuttall, eds. New York: Routledge.
has two new articles out, both in the journal Cultural Anthropology:
Scott
has been awarded the 2017 Linda S. Cordell Prize for his book,Winds from the North: Tewa Origins and Historical Archaeology. Ortman's book addresses a long-standing question in Southwestern archaeology: what happened to the 13th-century inhabitants of the Mesa Verde region? The School for Advanced Research will hold a reception during the 2017 SAA conference to present Ortman with a $5,000 check and commemorative plaque. The prestigious prize was founded in memory of our renowned colleague, Linda Cordell.
, an instructor in -Boulder’s departments of Critical Media Practices and Anthropology, has received a grant to design and launch a new peer-reviewed, open-access journal called Mimesis: The Journal of Documentary and Ethnographic Media. The journal will be ground-breaking in its use of multimedia. “Many academic journals include online photo or video supplements to written articles,” Hammons explained, “but in Mimesis, they will be integrated and inseparable. The text will not work without the media and vice versa.” The grant to launch Mimesis was awarded by the University of Colorado President’s Fund for the Humanities, which awards grants across the university system. imesis will publish its first issue in January 2017.
article, ‘How People Moved among Ancient Societies: Broadening the View,’ has been selected for the 2016 Gordon R. Willey Prize which "recognizes the best archaeology paper published in the American Anthropologist over a period of three years.” The $1000 prize will be presented at the AAA meetings this year.
received a LEAP Associate Professor Growth Grant for her book project titled Political Life and Social Death: A Tibetan History of Exile and Loss. Keep an eye out for this one.
recently published:
- 2016. Sympatric apes in sacred forests: shared space and habitat use by humans and endangered Javan gibbons (Hylobates moloch). PLoS ONE 11(1): e0146891. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0146891
- 2016. and the Irony of Antipathy to Resilient Animal Species. EnviroSociety. 19 January.
- 2016. Remembering Jerry Lwanga: A Perspective from His Colleagues. International Journal of Primatology, early online DOI 10.1007/s10764-015-9888-3
and Joanne Baron, eds. 2016. Political Strategies in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.
- Sarah Kurnick. Paradoxical Politics: Negotiating the Contradictions of Political Authority.Pg 3-36.
- Arthur Joyce, Sarah B. Barber, Jeffrey Brzezinski, Carlo J. Lucido, and Victor Salazar Chavez. Negotiating Political Authority and Community in Terminal Formative Coastal Oaxaca. Pg 61-96.
Sara Kurnick. 2015. The Origins of Extreme Economic Inequality: An Archaeologist’s Take on a Contemporary Controversy. Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress.
Grogan KE, McGinnis GJ, Sauther ML, Cuozzo FP and Drea CM.2016. Next-generation genotyping of hypervariable loci in many individuals of a non-model species: Technical and theoretical implications. BMC Genomics 17::1-16. DOI 10.1186/s12864-016-2503-y2015. Beyond Collapse: Archaeological Perspectives on Resilience, Revitalization, and Transformation in Complex Societies. Edited by Ronald K. Faulseit. SIU Press Carbondale
- Chapter 10. Jakob W. Sedig. (PhD 2015) The Decline and Reorganization of Southwestern Complexity: Using Resilience Theory to Examine the Collapse of Chaco Canyon.
Dudney, Katherine, Sarah Warren,Erin Sills,and , 2015. How Study Design Influences the Ranking of Medicinal Plant Importance: A case study from Ghana, West Africa. Economic Botany 69(4):306-317.
Jacka, Jerry K. 2016. “Working in the ‘Life Market’: Gold, Coffee, and Violence in the Papua New Guinea Highlands,” in The Anthropology of Postindustrialism: Ethnographies of Disconnection, pp. 22-37. I. Vaccaro, K. Harper, and S. Murray, eds. New York: Routledge.
New Scientist magazine in London featured research in a story entitled
At the conclusion of 20 months of fieldwork in Australia, short film on Aboriginal sign language, Marumpu Wangka, will be screened at the Intendance Film Festival in Denver on June 25. National Indigenous Television will air a half-hour program inspired by the short and directed by Lempert in the coming months, using a mix of documentary, scripted drama, and visual dictionary elements. For a preview of his work on Aboriginal hand signs, see Lempert’s recently published blog/video on the new sapiens.org website:
was guest editor of the March issue of the . This is a special issue on drones in archaeology with 8 specialized articles and 27 authors. UCB Anthropology is leading the field in drone research and development!
‘Hysteria’ theory short on science--- and . In 2011, 12 high-school girls in upstate New York began to exhibit strange neurological symptoms… The diagnosis was “conversion disorder…But that conclusion relied on a “dusty old Freudian theory” and ignored other likely causes… such as…a nearby Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site tainted with trichloroethylene and cyanide…
, Bianca Williams, and sat down with Distinguished Cultural Anthropologist Faye Harrison to discuss decolonizing anthropology. The conversation was published in two parts on the Savage Minds blog as part of their ongoing series.
and each have chapters in May’s Special Issue of the Archaeological Papers of the AAA: Archaeology of the Human Experience..
- Cameron: “The Variability of the Human Experience: Marginal People and the Creation of Power”
- Ortman: “Discourse and Human Securities in Tewa Origins