Graduate Lunch Series: “Making Up Kinds of People Making Kinds of Things: The Origin of Anthropology and Ethnology” with Dr. Adam Kuper
Friday, November 15th, 2019 12:00 – 1:30 pm African Studies Seminar Room, Fifth Floor 232 Bay State Road Anthropology and ethnology were among the ‘human sciences’ that emerged in Europe in the 1820s and 1830s. The ethnologists looked to find a home for themselves in the new constellation of public museums. Their first theoretical debates […]
Prof. Robert Hefner Speaks at International Conference on “The Islamic Case for Religious Freedom”
The question of whether religious freedom is an exclusively Western and “liberal” value or one that has resonances in Islamic civilization and modernity has been fiercely debated in recent years, in policy circles as well as by anthropologists like Saba Mahmood and Talal Asad. On November 11 and 12, the Department’s Bob Hefner attended an […]
Graduate Lunch Series: “Eskimo Snow in Brazil: An Anthropological Perspective on Color and Race” with Dr. James P. Ito-Adler
Thursday, November 7th, 12:15 – 2:00 African Studies Seminar Room fifth Floor 232 Bay State Road James P. Ito-Adler is a social anthropologist who specializes in the study of Brazilian society and culture. His fieldwork experience includes work with the Japanese in Brazil, the Portuguese in Cambridge and Somerville, and Alaska Natives on the North Slope. […]
Graduate Lunch Series: “Harmful Comparisons: Frames of Genocidal Violence and the Intractability of Belonging in Germany” with Dr. Sultan Doughan
Friday, October 25th, 2019 12:00 – 1:30 pm African Studies Seminar Room, Fifth Floor 232 Bay State Road Anthropologists have recently attended to the phenomenon of national belonging by pointing to local practices in their transnational articulation as a complex claim to homeland or exclusion thereof. This paper aims to contribute to these debates by […]
Andrea Blackburn Awarded National Geographic Society Grant
PhD Student Andrea Blackburn was awarded a National Geographic Society Early Career grant for her PhD dissertation work on Orangutan Seed Dispersal Effectiveness, working with Professor Cheryl Knott on her long-term orangutan project in Borneo.
Congratulations to Dr. Cartmill!
The Darwin Award for 2019 has been conferred upon Matt Cartmill, Professor and former Chair of Anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences at BU! The Charles R. Darwin Lifetime Achievement Award is the highest honor given by the leading international professional society for biological anthropology, the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. The award […]
BioAnthro Dialogue with Dr. Ralph Holloway (Columbia) & Dr. Robert D. Martin (Field Museum of Natural History)
Over the past 20,000 years, the volume of the human braincase has shrunk–as much as 10%, by some estimates. Some experts say that this shrinkage just mirrors a shrinkage in body size resulting from poor nutrition in farming societies. Others believe that evolution has worked to conserve calories by making the human brain smaller and […]