Executive Session proposals will be accepted through 5pm EDT on Friday, February 3, 2012.

With respect to early registration, if a panelist needs to delay his or her registration, the organizer may contact the executive program chair (2012aaaprogramchair@gmail.com).  Also, please be aware that the AAA has always had a policy of reimbursing registration fees if a panelist cannot attend because his or her panel was not chosen.

With respect to paper abstracts, more information about the session simply helps the executive program committee make a more informed decision.  Given that these changes were a surprise for a few session organizers, we are extending the deadline for panel abstracts until February 3, 2012.

Lee is the first and only anthropologist to date to receive a CPRIT award!

Texas voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment in 2007 establishing CPRIT and authorizing the state to issue $3 billion in bonds to fund groundbreaking cancer research and prevention programs and services in Texas. CPRIT’s goal is to expedite innovation and commercialization in the area of cancer research and to enhance access to evidence-based prevention programs and services throughout the state. CPRIT accepts applications and awards grants for a wide variety of cancer-related research and for the delivery of cancer prevention programs and services by public and private entities located in Texas. More information about CPRIT is available on its website.

Due to strong interest from students, Alma College has added anthropology to its expanding list of majors.

Mary Theresa Bonhage-Freund, associate professor of sociology and anthropology, says anthropology has long been a popular “program of emphasis” (POE), which is an academic option for students who choose to create an interdisciplinary focused concentration beyond traditional majors. She wasn’t surprised when a student signed up to major in anthropology on the first day that students could do so.

“This term, we had to add another section of the introductory anthropology course because there was a waiting list for it,” she says. “With this kind of student demand, adding anthropology to Alma’s majors makes a lot of sense.”

Bonhage-Freund says the skill set that students develop as a result of studying anthropology is in high demand, ensuring that they can explore career possibilities in a wide variety of fields.

Click here to read the entire article.

Shaping an Earthen Pot by Doranne Jacobson

Title: Shaping an Earthen Pot
Photo Courtesy of Doranne Jacobson
Contest Category: People
Caption: A village potter creates a water storage vessel, continuing a subcontinental tradition of more than 4,000 years. His young son looks on, starting to learn skills passed from father to son for untold generations. India’s potter castes proudly bear the title Prajapati, or Lord of Creatures, reflecting their ability to transform ordinary clay into essential household and ritual vessels as well as sacred images. Today, however, increasing use of plastic and tin containers is putting many potters out of business. This potter’s brother works as a van driver, and his son may not be able to earn a living practicing their ancestral occupation. Nimkhera, Madhya Pradesh, India, March, 2010.

Look for details on the 2012 AAA Photo Contest in late April!

Missed last week’s photo? Click here.

Prof. Niko Besnier has received an ERC Advanced Grant for his multi-sited comparative ethnographic project that will investigate the migratory dynamics at play between selected developing countries and selected countries in the industrial world in three different sports, soccer-football, rugby union, and cricket.

In the last few decades, the erosion of the social and economic structures that previously provided straightforward raison d’être to men have transformed, in all societies of the world, masculinity into a problematic category. In the Global South, deepening economic, political and social insecurities have further compounded the fragility of masculinity. Younger men in particular find it increasingly difficult to secure a productive role in local economies, and many in the world’s more destitute countries are investing their hopes in the possibility of becoming a successful professional athlete.

But athletic talent can only translate into economic productivity in the industrial North, and athletic migrations have become, for large number of boys, young men, families, villages, nations and states in the Global South, the solution for a masculinity under threat, the way out of economic precarity, and the embodiment of millenarian hope.

This multi-sited comparative ethnographic project seeks to investigate the migratory dynamics at play between selected developing countries and selected countries in the industrial world in three different sports, soccer-football, rugby union, and cricket. It explores ways in which these three sports represent for young talented hopeful in the Global South various embodiments of hope for the redemption of masculinity and of its productive potentials.

The research will open new theoretical avenues for an understanding of the constitution of masculinity in the context of globalisation, changes in the structure of nation-states and the meaning of citizenship, and the constitution of everyday lives in more destitute regions of the world.

http://www.fmg.uva.nl/sociology_anthropology/news.cfm/F87559B4-89DF-458F-9A0257D3AEDE648E

In the event you missed it, here’s the background of this revision process:

At the 2011 AAA Annual Meeting recently held in Montréal, Quebec, Canada, the AAA Executive Board (EB) voted to receive a draft revision of the AAA’s Code of Ethics as revised by the Task Force for Comprehensive Ethics Review. The EB also passed a resolution thanking the task force and its chair, Dena Plemmons, for all of their hard work. Beginning in early 2009, the Task Force was commissioned to review the Code of Ethics and consult extensively with relevant AAA committees and commissions, the Section Assembly, the membership at large and other interested parties. The Task Force finished its review in October 2011.

After receiving the draft, the EB appointed a subcommittee to review the draft code which is currently available for review on the AAA website. The subcommittee is chaired by Vice President and President-Elect Monica Heller, and members include Hugh Gusterson, Jean Schensul, Ida Susser, Vilma Santiago, Deb Martin, Sandra Lopez Varela and AAA President Leith Mullings (ex-officio). The subcommittee will present its recommendation to the Executive Board at its May meeting.

Submitters must be current members and registered to attend the Annual Meeting in San Francisco November 14-18, 2012.

AAA is only accepting submissions seeking Executive Program Status now, all other annual meeting submissions will begin on February 15, 2012.

Don’t forget to submit your materials to share as well.

The Human Studies Film Archives joined the University of Pennsylvania Museum in returning to the São Lourenço Bororo people in the Brazilian village of Tadarimana DVD copies of the only surviving films from a 1931 film project considered to be one of the first synchronous sound ethnographic film projects after the advent of sound technology.  In 2010 archivists at HSFA and Penn Museum discovered that HSFA had the only known existing copy of The Hoax, one of the films made from the University of Pennsylvania sponsored 1931 Matto Grosso expedition.  In 2011 HSFA worked with the University of Pennsylvania Museum, which archives what remains of this filming project, to issue this film and the only other existing film from this project on DVD.  Recently, the Brazilian anthropologist, Dr. Sylvia Caiuby Novaes worked with members of the  São Lourenço Bororo people to translate the sound.  Click here, to view the Penn Museum’s blog post on the translation and the earlier blog post on the discovery of the film.

There is also a clip attached to the SIRIS catalog record.