anthropology

Examining White People

February 9, 2015 by fritztucker

Qallunaat! Why White People Are Funny by Mark Sandiford, National Film Board of Canada I just watched a great film, Qallunaat! Why White People are Funny, an anthropological study of White people featuring the Inuit writer Zebedee Nungak. He begins: We Inuit are deeply fascinated by Qallunaat and their ways. The word “Qallunaat” is used universally by Inuit to describe White people. But it doesn’t refer so much to skin color, as a state of mind, a culture that has reached all corners […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker • Tags: anthropology, capitalism, children, colonialism, education, ethics, film, gender, History, immigration, politics, race

Joy in a Police State

December 9, 2014 by fritztucker

Although the video of this young girl’s spontaneous dance party has been viewed by millions, energetic outbursts by young children on the subway are more typically followed by a parent threatening or abusing the child if he or she doesn’t sit still. I witnessed one such scene on a nearly empty E train the other day. I’ve observed scenes like this regularly since I began riding the subway daily as a teenager. More often, I noticed public child abuse at the […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: African-Americans, anthropology, education, ethics, History, New York City, police state, politics, sociology, subway

Henrietta Lacks (re The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks)

Consent and Money

November 19, 2013 by William Eaton

A dialogue on the ethical dilemmas in the reporting and writing of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks By Sue Ellen Christian and Ann Miles Sue Ellen Christian is an associate professor of journalism at Western Michigan University. Her book, Overcoming Bias: A Journalist’s Guide to Culture and Context was published in 2012 by Holcomb Hathaway. Ann Miles, Ph.D., is a cultural anthropologist. She is the author of From Cuenca to Queens: An Anthropological Story of Transnational Migration and Living […]

Categories: Article, Fall 2013 Issue • Tags: anthropology, ethics, Henrietta Lacks, journalism

Reading 25 April – 1 May 2013 (ZiR)

April 25, 2013 by William Eaton

William Eaton, Zeteo Editorial Adviser [One in an ongoing series of posts. For the full series see Zeteo is Reading.] 25 April 2013 “If I were to generalize,” the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber said recently to a reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education, I would say that what we see is a university system which mitigates against creativity and any form of daring. It’s incredibly conformist and it represents itself as the opposite, and I think this kind of conformism […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: anthropology, Camus, Marx, men, Occupy Wall Street, reading, Shakespeare