Anthropology – Corpus

What’s cooking in forensic anthropology?

3 September 2018 Leave a Comment

Jade S. De La Paz

I am a forensic anthropologist. No, not like Bones, but I’m glad you have heard of it! For those who have not, forensic anthropology is the application of biological anthropology in a medico-legal setting. In reality, it has many more uses than Bones gives it credit for. In forensic anthropology, we focus on estimating the biological profile of human skeletal remains: age, sex, stature, ancestry, trauma, disease, time since death, burial context, number of individuals, etc. All this information, gleaned from skeletal analysis, helps with identification efforts, trauma analysis, and the scientific understanding of death(s).

Blood moon at dawn

30 July 2018 5 Comments

Sue Wootton

2018_07_28 Blood Moon — Selenelion sunrise: Dunedin, 28 July 2018

We live in Dunedin, on the east coast of Te Waipounamu, New Zealand’s South Island. It’s a beautiful place at any time, but every so often the planets (so to speak) align and gift us some extra magic. One of those every-so-oftens happened at dawn on Saturday morning, 28 July 2018, when the sun, Earth and full moon aligned (with Mars in close attendance) to produce a lunar eclipse.

Dunedin was going to be a great place from which to view the blood moon, but even better, the perfect location for experiencing a selenelion. A selenelion is a rare celestial event that occurs when the eclipsed moon is visible on the western horizon at the same time as the sun rises in the east.

We set an alarm. And so too, it turned out, did half the population of the city. We might be Homo Scientificus on the outside, but we are still Homo Lunus in our souls.

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When ritual is the best vessel

12 March 2018 Leave a Comment

Susan Wardell

Medical anthropologist Dr Susan Wardell reviews Moon Circle: Rediscover Wildness, Intuition and Sisterhood by Lucy AitkenRead.

A moon circle is, by basic definition, a night-time gathering of women. Its roots as a cultural practice are very old, as old “as the ages”. Often outdoors, and comprising a mixture of symbolic activity and verbal sharing, the moon circle is making a resurgence in the contemporary West. AitkenRead’s book, unapologetically feminist in its goals, sets out to “rediscover wildness, intuition and sisterhood”:

We are purposely stepping into the river of womanhood that has twisted and turned throughout herstory.” – Lucy AitkenRead

For this kind of voyage, it seems ritual is the best vessel.

Vaccination debates and the pain of dividuality

7 August 2017 Leave a Comment

Susan Wardell

Dividuality: “the close proximity and unexpected pull of others in one’s life” (Garish Daswani 2011).

My ears are full of screaming: the name-calling, the CAPS, the exclamation points!!! Whenever vaccination comes up online, and comments are enabled, the conversation quickly devolves into an extremity of outrage and vitriol that reads to me like ‘moral panic.’

Coined in the late 1960s, the term ‘moral panic’ makes no judgement on the value of the issues under discussion. Rather, it highlights the social processes in the associated public discourse: the way that story, meaning, and affect coalesce around a particular social problem. Untangling an objective sense of risk from this is nigh on impossible. Besides, people are doing stupid, risky, and harmful things to each other, directly and indirectly, all day long, and in every part of the world. The question becomes not what to think of anti-vaxers, but why the panic about this particular issue, why here, and why now? I believe the answer is not purely medical, but also social and moral.

The Ethnographer’s Stomach

24 July 2017 Leave a Comment

Susan Wardell

goat intestine soup — Goat intestine soup

Ethnographers love to share food stories, especially awkward, confessional tales about the ‘horrors’ of the local cuisine. As we enter the field, through the simple (and yet so very enculturated) day to day act of eating we literally take the ‘other’ into our bodies. My time in Uganda, where I was conducting fieldwork for my PhD research on faith-based youth workers and wellbeing, was saturated with thoughts, worries, guilt, obligation, deception, conversation, and explanation about food.

On our first night in Uganda, fresh off the plane, the vivid, irrepressible Stephen Adundo Egesa (our host and key informant) took me and my husband to a dusty university canteen for dinner. We consulted the concise chalkboard menu and safely requested ‘Irish’ (potatoes) and beans. Slyly, Stephen added goat intestine stew to the list our waitress was making: “You have to eat Ugandan now, Dr Susie, Mr Andrew!” He watched our faces, grinning, while I fought to quell the roiling of my stomach as the sinewy stew was placed before us.