She was a very old woman, about the age of four-score years, and had been a witch for fifty years. She dwelt in the Forest of Pendle, a vast place, fit for her profession: What she committed in her time, no man knows. She was a general agent for the Devil in all these parts:… [Read more…]
December 30, 2010
A little off-topic but in my view worth reposting here from the original location. Notice that if Nicholas Wade’s view of anthropology were valid, this blog could not exist: science and research on sex and gender seem to be incompatible to him. “The purposes of the Association shall be to advance anthropology as the science… [Read more…]
December 15, 2010
“Who has higher fertility and more surviving offspring – the aggressive bully or the charming Statesman?” So Christopher von Rueden, described as a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, summarized the point of his research, publicized by UCSB, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Von Rueden admits… [Read more…]
November 14, 2010
You really have to watch those metaphors: “Johnny has two daddies” may have been common in Amazonian cultures blares World Science, inadvertently implying that researchers are suggesting traditional Amazonian society was unusually gay-friendly. Sify News manages at least to keep the story heterosexual: Extramarital sexual affairs were common in Amazonian cultures is its take. Still,… [Read more…]
May 5, 2010
Returning to a theme from the previous week, third genders, I begin my discussion of method and theory and how they change what archaeologists think we can do with a reconsideration rooted in Sandra Hollimon’s work on Chumash society of California. In Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives, I describe what Hollimon sketches out in a series… [Read more…]
May 4, 2010
My Discovery course at Berkeley, “Archaeology of Sex and Gender”, is taught over a 15 week semester. The first two sections of the course, “Thinking about sex and gender: disciplinary approaches” and “Sex and gender in the past: regional traditions” can stand alone as a one-quarter course at colleges that use the quarter system. Together,… [Read more…]
May 2, 2010
The last case study that I incorporate into the middle section of my course, Archaeology of Sex and Gender, draws on the archaeological, bioarchaeological, historical and ethnographic record from Native North America. The emphasis on the widest possible range of disciplinary perspectives is critical, to remind students of the differences in perspectives and methods that… [Read more…]
April 26, 2010
Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives emerged from an interdisciplinary course, and that meant that I needed to establish from the beginning how different disciplinary approaches worked. I wanted to discriminate between documentary histories and histories based on other kinds of material traces, created in the past and examined in the present. Within anthropology, I wanted to… [Read more…]
December 11, 2011
11