American Anthropological Association » Lisa

Same-Sex Marriage Victories

Lisa — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 19:05:00 +0000

The Iowa Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of gay marriage, making it the third state to allow such unions.

The Swedish Parliament has also approved same-sex marriage by an overwhelming margin.

The AAA has released an official statement in support of such unions.

Posted in Advocacy

Armenian Genocide

Lisa — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:23:00 +0000

The Armenian Genocide Resolution has returned to headlines prior to Obama’s visit to Turkey. The resolution labels the deaths of up to 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire starting in 1915 as “genocide.” According to The Hill, past administrations have failed to recognize the World War I-era killings as genocide out of fear of damaging US-Turkey relations. Obama, however, made a campaign pledge to recognize the genocide, saying that the facts documenting the killings are “undeniable” and that “an official policy that calls on diplomats to distort the historical facts is an untenable policy.” Of course, campaign promises to Armenians have been broken in the past, and Obama may decide to tread carefully with Turkey.

Posted in Advocacy

US Endorses UN Statement to End Discrimination

Lisa — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 17:39:00 +0000

In a reversal of Bush-era decisions, the Obama administration endorsed the UN Statement on “Human Rights, Sexual Orientation, and Gender Identity.” The statement condemns human rights violations based on sexual orientation and gender identity wherever they occur. The US is now the 67th nation of the UN’s 192 member states to sign the statement.

Posted in Advocacy

AAA Attends Humanities Advocacy Day

Lisa — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 19:44:51 +0000

AAA Executive Director Bill Davis and Director of Public Affairs Damon Dozier joined over 120 representatives and advocates from humanities-related associations to lobby and educate federal legislators on the importance of increased funding for the humanities.

Advocates distributed issue briefs, discussed humanities projects in their states and districts, and asked that members of Congress support increased funding, including an increase of $75 million for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), two agencies that provide crucial support to scholars and educators.

Davis met with staff from the offices of Senators Christopher “Kit” Bond (R-MO) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO), while Dozier met with representatives from the offices of Senators Carl Levin (D-MI) and Debbie Stabenow (D-MI). Dozier also had an opportunity to meet with staff from the office of Representative John Dingell (D-MI) as well.

As in the past, the AAA was a co-sponsor of the event, coordinated by the National Humanities Alliance, a non-profit coalition founded in 1981 to advance humanities policy.

Posted in Advocacy, Public Affairs

Pulse of the Planet #9

Lisa — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 19:41:55 +0000

CounterPunch‘s “Pulse of the Planet” series kicks off 2009 with Barbara Rose Johnston’s article, “Water Culture Wars.” The series was initially derived from conference papers delivered at the “Pulse of the Planet” panel during AAA’s 2008 annual meeting in San Francisco.

Johnston describes the controversial events that transpired at the 5th World Water Forum in Istanbul, Turkey and the recommendations that were drawn from the “water and cultural diversity” sessions. In these sessions, Johnston and other presenters stressed that “Water is a fundamental human right and a core element that sustains cultural ways of life and the environments on which we all depend.” She also sheds light on how water development projects often violate human rights and lead to the displacement and impoverishment of millions, particularly ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples.

Prior Pulse of the Planet Articles:
“Ecological Crisis and Eco-Villages in China” ~ Shannon May
“How Dow Chemical Defies Homeland Security and Risks Another 9/11” ~ Brian McKenna
“The Inequities of Climate Change and the Small Island Experience” ~ Holly Barker
“What the Next President Must Do to Save FEMA” ~ Gregory V. Button
“The Clean, Green Nuclear Machine?” ~ Barbara Rose Johnston
“Carbon Offsets: More Harm Than Good?” ~ Melissa Checker
“The Human Right to Eat” ~ Joan P. Mencher
“Dam Legacies, Damned Futures” ~ Barbara Rose Johnston

Posted in Anthro in the Media

Friends of the CoE Launched

Lisa — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 19:40:34 +0000

The Friends of the Committee on Ethics was formally launched this month. This newly established ad hoc consultative body will provide expertise and informal consultation to the membership of the AAA about ethical quandaries they may have encountered in both research and applied settings. Comprised of former chairs of the Committee on Ethics, the Friends will bring their experience and multiple perspectives to issues that merit ethical consideration. Questions for the Friends should be submitted to the Chair of the Committee on Ethics. Additional information is available on our website.

Posted in Public Affairs

Applying Forensic Anthropology in Guatemala

Lisa — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 19:44:00 +0000

The AAA Committee for Human Rights has written to Guatemalan authorities on numerous occasions regarding the safety of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Team (FAFG), especially its director Fredy Peccerelli who, along with his family, has been the target of several death threats. FAFG exhumes mass graves in an effort to identify massacre victims of Guatemala’s 36-year insurgency, during which an estimated 200,000 people were killed and numerous human rights violations occurred. Fredy and the rest of FAFG are hoping to compile enough evidence to identify and prosecute the perpetrators of these massacres. You can read the full story from Scientific American here. And a related story on FAFG’s most recent efforts.

Posted in Advocacy, Anthro in the Media

CFP: "Health and the Productivity of Human Rights Discourses"

Lisa — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 17:20:00 +0000

Call for Papers
Title: Health and the Productivity of Human Rights Discourses

Co-sponsor: Committee for Human Rights, American Anthropological Association

Abstract:
This panel brings together ethnographic and theoretical papers to examine the productivity of human rights discourse in the fields of public health, medicine, and anthropology. In our contemporary world, a discourse of health as a human right has played a central role in configuring humanitarian responses to disasters, economic inequality and poverty, and the differential burden of disease. It has also raised methodological, conceptual, and ethical challenges in the field of medical anthropology. We are interested in bringing together critical ethnographic examinations of the mobilization of human rights discourse in informing claims to health by communities, populations, and the state, as well as reflections on how human rights discourse has informed the knowledge and concepts of health and well-being in anthropology. In keeping with the theme of the AAA meetings, we hope to foster discussion about anthropology’s “ends”: how can anthropological modes of knowing inform and help shape responses to global differentials in well-being, health, and life chances that are lived and experienced locally? What critical reflections from the field of health can be brought to bear on the discourse of cultural relativism in anthropology, and what alternative frameworks might we generate from these reflections?

By focusing on the productivity of human rights discourse, this panel is particularly interested in the new directions, methods, and concepts that can inform and challenge discursive understandings of health, knowledge, and values. Such new directions may include exploring the instabilities of a language of rights in advancing claims to health, and how local concepts of health and well-being are conditioned by often invisible institutional failures as well as economic insecurity and emergent value systems. How are humanitarian interventions and large-scale public health initiatives informed by regimes of value? How are discourses of human rights enacted by the local to advance claims to health from the state, and how are subjects constituted through this discourse? In examining such interventions and claims predicated on “health as a human right”, what local and trans-local concepts of the human emerge? Refracting such questions back on our own discipline, this panel explores how the language of rights has informed our field’s knowledge production on health, our ethnographic engagements, and our stakes in normative projects.

Organizers: Clara Han and Robin Root

Please send a 250-word abstract to Robin Root (rroot@nyc.rr.com) and Clara Han (clarahan@jhu.edu) by March 26.

Posted in Uncategorized

AAA Joins Call to End “Ideological Exclusion”

Lisa — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:07:33 +0000

AAA is one of several academic, free-speech, and civil-rights organizations to sign a letter to top officials in the Obama administration urging them to end the federal government’s practice of denying visas to foreign intellectuals based on ideology.
The letter–addressed to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano–argues that the State and Homeland Security Departments have compromised U.S. interests by barring dozens of prominent scholars, artists, writers, and activists over the past eight years based on their ideas, political views, and associations. The full text of the letter to Attorney General Holder and Secretaries Clinton and Napolitano is available online at: http://www.aclu.org/images/general/asset_upload_file609_39050.pdf [pdf]

A petition for individuals to sign has also been made available at https://secure.aclu.org/site/SPageServer?pagename=Nat_Petition_Ideological_Exclusion. Please circulate the petition to anyone you think might be interested.

Posted in Advocacy

Awa Indians Murdered

Lisa — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:09:00 +0000

CNN reported that guerrilla troops of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have killed at least 10 more Awa Indians this week, bringing the total to 27 in the last two weeks. FARC targeted the Awa after accusing them of aiding the Colombian government. Earlier this week, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe called the FARC “executioners.” He demonized their bloody action against the indigenous tribe and has ordered his army into the remote areas where the killings took place in order to secure the territory and administer humanitarian aid.

~Author: Leo Napper, AAA intern

Posted in Public Affairs