35 posts in 2017
October 24, 2017
Cultureblog
by/par Martha Radice President’s welcome Welcome to this new issue of Culture! As we pass the midpoint of the fall term, the CASCA-IUAES conference of May seems a long way away already. It marked not only a remarkable achievement for the local organizing committee and the two associations it brought together, but also a new…
Read MoreOctober 23, 2017
Article
by Mike Callaghan, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine At first glance, the current obsession with big data – and especially its uses in social science – seems very much of the moment: an exciting new technology to be applied to any number of problems. And yet, a closer look suggests that much of the…
Read MoreOctober 23, 2017
Article
by Eric Henry, Saint Mary’s University and Pamela Downe, University of Saskatchewan Note: On September 29, 2017, the CASCA Executive Committee sent a letter to the Honourable Kirsty Duncan, Minister of Science, and Ted Hewitt, President of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, outlining CASCA’s objections to the Canada 150 Research Chairs Program…
Read MoreOctober 23, 2017
Cultureblog
Image: Rosita Henry, Chandana Mathur and Homa Hoodfar by/par Nathalie Boucher, Organisme R.Es.P.I.R.E., and Martha Radice, Dalhousie University (la version française suit) 10 life lessons from Homa Hoodfar Nathalie Boucher and Martha Radice report back from a roundtable featuring Homa Hoodfar at the CASCA-IUAES conference 2017. Dr. Hoodfar (from Concordia University) was arrested while conducting fieldwork in…
Read MoreOctober 23, 2017
Cultureblog
by Van Troi Tran, Université Laval In 2018, for the first time in its history, the CASCA annual meeting will be held in Cuba. Our host, the Universidad de Oriente in Santiago de Cuba, will welcome us from the 16th to the 20th of May. As with any brand-new experience, the prospect of travelling to…
Read MoreOctober 23, 2017
Cultureblog
by Van Troi Tran, Laval University For the first time in its history, in 2018, the annual CASCA meeting will be held in Cuba. We will be hosted at the Universidad de Oriente in Santiago de Cuba from May 16 to 20. As with any first, the prospect of going into unfamiliar territory for most...
Read MoreOctober 23, 2017
Article
by Mariela Eva Rodríguez, National Council of Science and Technological Research (CONICET) and University of Buenos Aires, and Ana Vivaldi, Simon Fraser University On August 1st 2017, Santiago Maldonado, a 28-year-old ally supporting Mapuche land claims in Argentina and Chile, was forcefully disappeared during a violent repression by the Argentine National Gendarmerie[1]. The repression was carried out in the…
Read MoreOctober 23, 2017
Cultureblog
Senses in the Cities; Experiences of Urban Settings Chapter 6 – The Senses of the Interactional Self in the Uses of Pershing Square, Los Angeles By Nathalie Boucher Routledge, 2018 Urban landscapes are usually thought of first and foremost as engineered formations designed for functionality. It is quite clear, however, that cities and towns are…
Read MoreOctober 23, 2017
Cultureblog
Peaceful Selves: Personhood, Nationhood, and the Post-Conflict Moment in Rwanda by Laura Eramian Berghahn, 2017 This ethnography of personhood in post-genocide Rwanda investigates how residents of a small town grapple with what kinds of persons they ought to become in the wake of violence. Based on fieldwork carried out over the course of a decade, it…
Read MoreOctober 23, 2017
Cultureblog
Plurilinguisme et pluriculturalisme: Des modèles officiels dans le monde Indigenizing Language Policy in Canada: Redressing Racial Hierarchies By Donna Patrick Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2016 Rares sont les sociétés contemporaines qui ne sont pas pluriculturelles et plurilingues, en raison notamment de l’émergence de l’anglais comme nouvelle lingua franca et de l’augmentation des flux migratoires des quarante…
Read MoreOctober 23, 2017
Cultureblog
Mobile Secrets: Youth, Intimacy, and the Politics of Pretense in Mozambique Julie Soleil Archambault Chicago University Press, 2017 Now part and parcel of everyday life almost everywhere including across much of Africa, mobile phones have radically transformed how we acquire and exchange information. By engaging with young adults in a Mozambique suburb, Mobile Secrets examines…
Read MoreOctober 23, 2017
Cultureblog
Perspectives: An Open Introduction to Cultural Anthropology Edited by Nina Brown, Thomas McIlwraith, and Laura Tubelle de González. Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges/American Anthropological Association, 2017. Perspectives is an open access, peer-reviewed cultural anthropology textbook aimed at first year students in universities and colleges. Produced by an editorial team associated with the Society for…
Read MoreOctober 23, 2017
Cultureblog
ExtrACTION: Impacts, Engagements, and Alternative Futures Chapter 6 – Contingent Legal Futures: Does the Ability to Exercise Aboriginal Rights and Title Turn on the Price of Gold? by Andie Diane Palmer Routledge, 2017 This timely volume examines resistance to natural resource extraction from a critical ethnographic perspective. Using a range of case studies from North, Central and South…
Read MoreOctober 23, 2017
Cultureblog
Spirit & Mind: Mental Health at the Intersection of Religion & Psychiatry Edited by Helene Basu, Roland Littlewood and Arne S. Steinforth LIT Verlag, 2017 Since more than a century, anthropologists and psychiatrists engage in conversations concerning relationships between embodied wellbeing and religion. Taking account of shifting meanings of `religion’ in global modernities, the contributions…
Read MoreOctober 23, 2017
Cultureblog
Urban Encounters: Art and the Public Edited by Martha Radice and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017 Public art is on the urban agenda. Given recent claims about the importance of creativity to urban prosperity, opportunities for installing or performing art in the city have multiplied. As cities strive to appear culturally dynamic, the stakes of…
Read MoreOctober 23, 2017
Cultureblog
Power Through Testimony: Reframing Residential Schools in the Age of Reconciliation Edited by Brieg Capitaine and Karine Vanthuyne UBC Press, 2017 Power through Testimony documents how survivors are remembering and reframing our understanding of residential schools in the wake of the 2007 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a…
Read MoreOctober 23, 2017
Cultureblog
A Fragmented Landscape: Abortion Governance and Protest Logics in Europe Chapter 12 – Abortion Governance in the New Northern Ireland by Robin Whitaker and Goretti Horgan Berghahn, 2016 Since World War II, abortion policies have remained remarkably varied across European nations, with struggles over abortion rights at the forefront of national politics. This volume analyses European abortion…
Read MoreMay 13, 2017
Networks
At the 2017 meeting of the CASCA Women’s Network, Dr. Homa Hoodfar was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award for Contributions to Feminist Anthropology in Canada. We are pleased to publish Sally Cole’s description of Dr. Hoodfar’s incredible career and to welcome her back to Canada after her months-long imprisonment in Iran. Born in Iran in 1951, Homa…
Read MoreApril 20, 2017
Article
by Robin Ridington, University of British Columbia (password dzfn) In 1967, I recorded the last Dane-zaa Dreamer, Charlie Yahey telling his culture’s creation story in the Beaver language. As he spoke into my tape recorder, he knew that he was creating a performative document for future generations. On the recording he said, “the world will…
Read MoreApril 20, 2017
Networks
The CASCA Women’s Network has had a very successful year. At the 2016 CASCA conference in Halifax, Martha Radice (Dal) organized the annual WN sponsored Cross-Disciplinary Panel on Feminist Research and Pedagogy, with guest Professors Marnina Gonick ((MSV), Diane Lewis (Dal), and Ingrid Waldron (Dal), with discussant Tina Lee (Wisc). As well, Brian Noble and Pauline McKenzie Aucoin co-chaired…
Read MoreApril 20, 2017
Cultureblog
By Éric Gagnon Poulin, Université Laval Following a major public consultation across Quebec in 2008–2009, the Ministry of Employment and Social Solidarity identified the fight against prejudice as a priority element to better combat poverty: “[…] it emerged that certain areas of intervention are considered to be…
Read MoreApril 20, 2017
Article
By Daniel Tubb, UNB Fredericton Anthropologist, ethnographer, writer? What am I? I spent seven years as a grad student (two in coursework, two and a half in both fieldwork and writing) and two as a postdoc. Only lately have I begun to identify as a writer. When did this happen? In the morning, I think.…
Read MoreApril 20, 2017
Cultureblog
By Éric Gagnon Poulin, Université Laval Don’t study the poor and powerless because everything you say about them will be used against them – Laura Nader[1] Poverty as a subject of study Does studying poverty contribute to the reproduction of stigmas? The act of classifying, categorizing, defining, etc. is certainly a danger of reinforcing…
Read MoreApril 20, 2017
Article
By Ian Puppe, Western University I woke on November 9th, 2016, planning to leave London, Ontario for Nashville, Tennessee. I stumbled into the kitchen, made coffee and looked out the window. The sky was grey and overcast and spit a light rain. A man walked past with a solemn expression. Behind him a boy glanced…
Read MoreApril 20, 2017
Cultureblog
Created in 1972, the Mercury series is the Canadian Museum of History’s primary vehicle for publishing academic research and includes numerous landmark contributions in the disciplines of Canadian history, archaeology, culture and ethnology. Books in the series are published in either French or English, and all include an abstract in Canada’s other official language. https://press.uottawa.ca/series/french-and-canadian-studies/mercury-series/ethnology.html?___store=uop_eng…
Read MoreApril 20, 2017
Cultureblog
Bound Feet, Young Hands: Tracking the Demise of Footbinding in Village China Laurel Bossen and Hill Gates Stanford University Press, 2017 Footbinding was common in China until the early twentieth century, when most Chinese were family farmers. Why did these families bind young girls’ feet? And why did footbinding stop? In this groundbreaking work, Laurel…
Read MoreApril 20, 2017
Cultureblog
Water, Knowledge and the Environment in Asia: Epistemologies, Practices and Locales, edited by Ravi Baghel, Lea Stepan, Joseph K.W. Hill Chapter 10 – Being-in-the-water, or Socialisation through Interactions with water in the Thermal Baths of Taipei by Nathalie Boucher Routledge, 2017 The dramatic transformation of our planet by human actions has been heralded as the coming…
Read MoreApril 20, 2017
Cultureblog
Anthropology of Los Angeles; Place and Agency in an Urban Setting, edited by Jenny Banh and Melissa King The People in Los Angeles Public Spaces Are Not Dead: Micro-Sociability in the Squares, Plazas, and Parks of the Postmodern Global City. By Nathalie Boucher Lexington Books, 2017 The Anthropology of Los Angeles: Place and Agency in an Urban…
Read MoreApril 20, 2017
Cultureblog
Language and Legitimation: The Discursive Construction of the Francophone Speaker By Laurence Arrighi and Annette Boudreau Through the exemplary case of the Francophone speaker, the contributions gathered in Language and Legitimation – The Construction of the Francophone Speaker help to shed light on the role played by institutions, ideological traditions and epistemological practices in the way…
Read MoreApril 20, 2017
Cultureblog
Entangled Territorialities: Negotiating Indigenous Lands in Australia and Canada Edited By Françoise Dussart and Sylvie Poirier University of Toronto Press, 2017 Entangled Territorialities offers vivid ethnographic examples of how Indigenous lands in Australia and Canada are tangled with governments, industries, and mainstream society. Most of the entangled lands to which Indigenous peoples are connected have been…
Read MoreApril 20, 2017
Cultureblog
Farm Labor Struggles in Zimbabwe: The Ground of Politics Blair Rutherford Indiana University Press, 2016 Blair Rutherford (Carleton University) has a new book, Farm Labor Struggles in Zimbabwe: The Ground of Politics. Published by Indiana University Press, this ethnography examines the tumult of agrarian politics during a time of transformative change through focusing on farm…
Read MoreMarch 22, 2017
Cultureblog
In response to concerns raised by members about the place of French at the joint CASCA-IUAES conference, the CASCA Executive Committee would like to issue the following statement: CASCA is a bilingual association, which has francophone and anglophone members. We promote the activities and defend the interests of our members in both English and French,…
Read MoreFebruary 23, 2017
Cultureblog
By Donna Patrick, Carleton University Context The Brazilian Anthropological Association (ABA, http://www.portal.abant.org.bro, http://www.portal.abant.org.br, Facebook ABA.antropologia, Twitter @aba_ant) is currently being intimidated by representatives of the National Congress who represent the interests of the Agribusiness in the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (CPI) installed to investigate the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) and the Institute of Colonization and Land…
Read MoreJanuary 23, 2017
Cultureblog
By Bruce Miller, UBC Daniel Brasil, a recent PhD graduate of the UBC department of anthropology, has tragically died recently. I learned from the Brasilian consulate in Vancouver that he was helping some construction workers and a pillar fell on his head. He was a member of the Brasilian diplomatic service. Daniel completed the first…
Read MoreJanuary 13, 2017
Cultureblog
By Brian Noble, Dalhousie University Dear colleagues, students, friends I write to share the sad news from the international Indigenous community that Art Manuel, one of the world-leading voices and activists for Indigenous land and human rights has passed away suddenly. http://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/arthur-manuel-died-indigenous-leader-1.3932412 http://www.metronews.ca/news/vancouver/2017/01/12/indigenous-leader-and-land-defender-arthur-manuel-dies.html Some of you may know I have been honoured by a…
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