The Committee on Public Policy has compiled a list of policy-related events taking place at the annual meeting.  To view the detailed list, please click here.

Workshops

• Public Policy as Anthropological Process: Strategy Development Using an Empowerment Model (requires preregistration)
• Legislative Advocacy Workshop (requires preregistration)
  

Forums

• Open Forum: Council on Anthropology and Education Policy Engagement Working Group
• Hope is not Enough: A Policy Forum Examining President Obama’s LGBT Civil Rights Policy Agenda (sponsored by CoPP)
• Professional Ethics and the Security Sector: A Dialogue with the Larger Anthropological Community (sponsored by CoPP)

Sessions

Wednesday

• How Categories Affect Care: Expanding Opportunities or Limiting Care in Health Policy and Clinical Services

Thursday

• The End(s) of Language: Language and Educational Policy
• Food Security: Policy, People and Technology

Friday

• Ethnography and Language Policy – New Means, New Ends, New Times
• Transnational Labor Migration: The Policy Nexus (organized by IGAPP)
• Employee Free Choice Act (sponsored by CoPP)
• What if Policy Makers Listened to Anthropologists about Welfare Reform and Poverty?
• Bureaucracy and Befuddlement: Policy and Imperfect Translation (organized by IGAPP)

Saturday

• Ethnographies of US Foreign Policy: War- and Democracy-Making under the Anthropological Lens
• Feminism and Social Policy: Diverse Perspectives
• From Deep Description to Social Policy: Translating Anthropological Research into Advocacy for Latino Populations
• Making Cognitive Approaches in Environmental Anthropology Count: Bridging Findings to Policy

Sunday

• Beyond Policy Transfer: Transnational Translations and the Reconfiguring of Technocracy and Politics (organized by IGAPP)
• The Devil is in the Consequences: (Mis)Translating Social Policy into Practice

Anthropology has long had a complex relationship with news media. In many ways, increasing collaboration between anthropologists and print, broadcast or online journalists offers great potential for making our research more accessible and theoretical perspectives more mainstream, in addition to boosting public understanding of and engagement with anthropological research findings. However, journalistic anthropology and anthropological journalism also pose several key challenges for practitioners in both fields, including difficulties in balancing the goals, priorities, timelines and communication styles of journalism and anthropology.

Anthropology News seeks articles addressing these topics and more for our April 2010 “Anthropology and Journalism” issue. To participate, email a 300-word abstract and 50-100-word author biosketch to AN editor Dinah Winnick at dwinnick [at] aaanet.org by Dec 18. See our full CFP at www.aaanet.org/issues/anthronews/CFP-Journalism.cfm.

We sadly report the passing of former AAA president Dell H. Hymes, who died Friday, Nov 13, 2009, at the age of 82. Hymes was Commonwealth Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at the University of Virginia. Prior to retiring, he taught courses in linguistic anthropology, Native American mythology, ethnopoetics, and Native American poetry. He authored numerous publications, including Ethnography, Linguistics, Inequality: Essays in Education, 1978-1994 (1997), and Now I Know Only So Far: Essays in Ethnopoetics (2003). AAA will publish a full obituary honoring Dell Hymes in a future issue of AN.

A memorial gathering will take place at the upcoming AAA meeting in Philadelphia, on Saturday, Dec 5, 7:30-9:30 pm in Grand Ballroom III of the Courtyard Marriott. In addition to being a past AAA president, Dell Hymes was also a past president of the American Folklore Society and Linguistic Society of America. Additional reflections on his life and work can be found on Savage Minds, Jason Baird Jackson’s blog, Daily Progress, Philly.com and Language Log. Readers are welcome to post additional links in comments.

The Indiana U School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI has announced the launch of a new MA degree in applied anthropology, which will accept its first class of students in fall 2010. The program website notes:

The Master’s of Arts in Applied Anthropology offers students the opportunity to use anthropological theories and methods toward the goals of solving real world problems.  The program is constructed around a set of core courses together with independent research and internships.  The degree takes advantage of our long-standing departmental strengths in Public Archaeology, Urban Anthropology, International Development, Globalization, Medical Anthropology and Museum Studies.

For more information about the program, see the IUPUI anthropology website.

Click to listen to the Profiles in Practice Podcast [mp3]

In February 2007 the Practicing Anthropology Working Group (PAWG) launched a “Profiles in Practice” column in Anthropology News that highlighted anthropologists working outside of academia.  PAWG soon transformed into the more permanent AAA Committee of Practicing, Applied and Public Interest Anthropology (CoPAPIA), which reimagined its Anthropology News column under the new title “Anthropology Works” in September 2008.

CoPAPIA is now building upon past Profiles in Practice columns with an online interview series geared towards students interested in anthropology but uncertain about career paths that await them after graduation.  The series is hosted by Ruth Sando, owner of Sando and Associates, who is a practicing anthropologist and former board member of the Washington Association of Professional Anthropologists.  This week she interviews Cheryl Levine, a social science analyst at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

If you are interested in participating in this podcast series, please contact Brian Estes at bestes AT aaanet DOT org

From the Society for Visual Anthropology:

The Icebox Project Space at Crane Arts will feature an innovative group exhibition entitled Ethnographic Terminalia from December 2-20, 2009. Scheduled to coincide with the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, this year in Philadelphia, the curators have brought together an international group of artists and ethnographers who are actively engaged in experimental and emergent cultural forms.  Visitors are invited to join in a multisensorial happening that challenges the boundaries and borders that demarcate the margins of ethnographic, anthropological, and art practices. A diverse group of artists and anthropologists present boundary troubling works in eleven separate installations; each installation project in Ethnographic Terminalia offers a thought provoking and playful (or agitating) alternative to considering what lies both beyond and within imagined and constructed boundaries of the skilled practices of artists and ethnographers.

This exhibition features original works by: Trudi-Lynn Smith; Erica Lehrer and Hannah Smotrich; Kate Hennessy and Oliver Neumann; Marko and Gordana Zivkovic; Chris Fletcher; Roderick Coover; Jayasinhji Jhala; Craig Campbell; Mike Evans and Stephen Foster; Stephanie Spray; and Scott and Jen Webel. While these works are deployed within the rubric of anthropology they answer visual and aesthetic questions in unique and particular fashion, decentering the priviledged categories of both ethnography and art through various mediums.

According to the curatorial team: “This exhibit will be of great interest not only to professional anthropologists but other publics as well.  By drawing the studied methodologies of ethnography into a familiar art environment this collective exhibition delivers an all too uncommon challenge to disciplinary and professional boundaries.  By engaging with the politics of representation, memory, documentation, and archive Ethnographic Terminalia will impress upon all visitors their own stake in the interpretation of cultural worlds.” The works presented in Ethnographic Terminalia address the possibility of showing and interpreting cultural worlds outside of the traditional cinematic, museological, and textual frameworks of Cultural Anthroplogy while challenging the art world to consider the sensuous complexities and textures of everyday life.

Visit the website for more details about the show: http://metafactory.ca/terminalia

Elinor Ostrom recently received a 2009 Nobel in Economic Sciences for work examining how humans use institutions to sustainably manage common pool resources. Those interested in learning more can see her Stockholm Whiteboard Seminar video now available on the Stockholm University website.

Ostrom’s work is familiar to many anthropologists. In 2006 she became the founding director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity in Arizona State U’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change. She is also affiliated with Indiana U and, as the video indicates, on the board of the Stockholm Resilience Centre. Amber Wutich and Michael E Smith of Arizona State U further discuss Ostrom’s award and her relationship with anthropology in a forthcoming Anthropology News article (see our December issue).

UC Berkeley has announced that AAA member Mari Lyn Salvador, a scholar of Panama’s Kuna people and their textiles, has been named director of the Phoebe A Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Salvador was CEO of the San Diego Museum of Man from 2004 until 2009. She is a member of the board of directors of the California Association of Museums and served as president of the AAA’s Council for Museum Anthropology.

The Hearst Museum houses more than 3.8 million cataloged objects, primarily from early California and other portions of North America, as well as from ancient Egypt, Africa, Oceania and Peru. More information about the Hearst Museum collections is available online.

Julie Koppel Maldonado has submitted the following report on a memorial lecture honoring Ruth Fredman Cernea, presented by the Washington Association of Professional Anthropologists (WAPA) on November 1.

Jonathan Boyarin, PhD, JD, Leonard and Tobee Kaplan Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at UNC Chapel Hill, spoke to a crowd of 250 people on “The Anthropology of Jews and the Jews in Anthropology” at the Ruth F. Cernea Memorial Lecture at 3:00 pm on Sunday, Nov 1, at the Katzen Arts Center’s Recital Hall, American U. The audience included Ruth’s family, members of the anthropological community, friends and others interested in the topic.

The Memorial Lecture honored the late Ruth Fredman Cernea, PhD, a cultural anthropologist and scholar of the Jewish Diaspora, and author of several books on Jewish culture, symbols and history. She was also a past president and long-time active member of WAPA. More than 20 years of research and interviews went into her most recent book, Almost Englishmen: Baghdadi Jews in British Burma (2007). Her other books include The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate (2006), The Passover Seder: Afikoman in Exile (1995; original 1981), and she was the long-time editor of the Hillel Guide to Jewish Life on Campus, an annual guide for students and families.

Anthropologist Judith Friedenberg and Rabbi Max Ticktin began the event with remembrances of Ruth as a friend and an anthropologist. They discussed Ruth’s lifework and contributions to anthropology and Jewish studies, mentioning her particular ability never to lose track of her personal life while pursuing her scholarly work.

Jonathan Boyarin’s lecture linked to these ideas in discussing how it is possible to be in and of the thing one sets out to analyze. He discussed the suppressed discourse in anthropology of talking about Jewishness and talking about the ethnographer’s self. The event was a commemoration and celebration to honor Ruth Fredman Cernea, who, in the words of Dr. Boyarin, worked within and for the community she studied.

This was the first time WAPA honored the memory and research of a departed member by organizing a public memorial lecture. The lecture was co-sponsored by the American U Anthropology Dept, American U Jewish Studies Program, U Maryland Anthropology Dept, U Maryland Hillel Center, Hillel Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, Society for Applied Anthropology, and US ASEAN Business Council’s Project for Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue. Additional support was provided by the University of Chicago Press.

A message from T.J. Ferguson, AAA Executive Board member and incoming chair of the Anthropological Communication Committee:

In November and December 2009, AAA and Wiley-Blackwell are offering free access to over ten years of Anthrosource content, AAA’s online portal for anthropological research.

I encourage the practicing community to take advantage of this opportunity to explore the benefits of Anthrosource as a research tool. In particular, I’d like to draw to your attention some efforts being made in American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of AAA, to make sure this title brings practicing, applied, and public anthropologists and their contributions into this august record of the field.

In June 2009, the journal published a review by Melissa Checker of 2008 literature, “Anthropology in the Public Sphere, 2008: Emerging Trends and Significant Impacts.”   The editor of the journal, Tom Boellstorff, plans to have these annual recaps each year, summarizing key contributions and themes in the documents produced by applied, practicing and public anthropologists.

This same issue features a research article by Timothy de Waal Malefyt, “Understanding the Rise of Consumer Ethnography: Branding Technomethodologies in the New Economy.”

American Anthropologist will also, starting in March 2010, launch a second new feature. The journal will begin reviewing professional reports and other  documents that public, practicing, and applied anthropologists create, but which have not been published by university presses or in other traditional academic venues, and thus have historically been occluded from book review sections.

Because the journal is both widely visible in the discipline and because of its role as an unofficial record of the discipline, I am very excited to see these new efforts featuring the emerging place of practicing anthropologists in our field.

T. J. Ferguson

Anthropological Research, LLC.

Click here to learn more about how to get free access to AAA pubs during November and December.

 AAA members always have free access to AnthroSource as a benefit of their membership. To learn more about becoming an AAA member or to join, visit http://aaanet.org/membership/.

To recommend an AnthroSource subscription to your library, click here. We also offer free subscriptions to Historically Black College and Universities, Tribal Colleges and Universities, and First Nation Schools. Contact Dion Dears at ddears@aaanet.org for details.