Anthropological Reflection of Ourselves

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I have re-written my first post six times with six different topics. Ideas and possibilities are streaming in and out of my head. My keyboard is dying, the mouse is in revolt and I have a new camcorder with a record button that needs to be pressed. What am I writing about again? The small quiet inner voice says “Aw hush up and tell them a story.”

Once upon a time there was a 1952 comedy/mystery television show called Mr. and Mrs. North. They were the crime fighting team of the upper class set.

People use to die around them at an alarming rate. Mrs. North was a curious woman and I can't say I blamed her with the number of people croaking in her living room. She suggested ideas that were usually dismissed by her husband. This did not stop Mrs. North asking questions and it usually lead to her finding the killer of the week.

Most of the time Mrs. North’s words had very little importance to the men in her world. It was only when her ideas were reflected through a man's eyes and voice that they had any context. According to the cultural values of the time, Mrs. North solved the problem but her husband and his detective friend would take most of the credit.

As near as I can figure out the not so subtle message was, "Women are the supporters to their husband's vision and if she does 90% of the work and he takes all the credit she knows the truth and is warmed by his appreciative glory and some off-camera nooky." This is known as the invisible wink.

In academia a lot of history and culture has been lost because some, not all, of the anthropologists and ethnographers could not see the validity of the work being done by women. If the documentation was performed by women who were denied access to education or who had alternative methods of research then the collection was deemed useless.

So let’s peep over the anthropological side of the fence to sample some of the conversations about culture, indigenous peoples and the need to define our experiences.

The Columbia Migration Project was created by Maria Clara Gomez is an ethnographic videoblog that documents the reasons why Columbian citizens wanted to leave their country and those Colombians who have re-created their lives in other lands.

Click To PlayVideo from The Columbia Migration Project

The videos give the speakers the opportunity to contemplate what it means to leave their home and it gives a person like me a better understanding of the complexity of the immigrant experience.

Anthropologist Kimberly Christen is an assistant professor at Washington State University. Her blog, Long Road, focuses on issues pertaining to Australian Aboriginal issues, indigenous people’s rights and the politics that seem to intersect and conflict with those rights.

A number of the anthropology blogs are talking about a succession from the United State by some Native American Indian activists. Culture Matters Applied Anthropology, takes a deeper look at the situation, particularly the application of property laws as a means to generate action in human rights issues.

"One of the dimensions of this that interests me most is the way that property law is being used as a primary tool of activism. As I found in research on the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem-Terra or MST) in Brazil, since property law has become such an expansive area for pressing legal claims of all sorts (for example, trademark infringement being easier to pursue redress for than libel or slander), property has also become an important tool for human rights issues. Especially around indigenous groups and other traditional owners (sharecroppers and small farmers, maroons), land title is a major wedge for extracting not just regularization of holding, but also other concessions. In the case of the Lakota land, the declaration is explicitly being described as a shadow cast over any land transfers in the affected area.”

Brenda Norell is a reporter who