Newspapers and defining what we do

Ty Matejowsky and Beatriz Reyes-Foster, my colleagues at the University of Central Florida, have written a fine column that was picked up by our local newspaper, the Orlando Sentinel [The Sentinel has a paywall, but you can read a few stories a month without having to pay]. Reading this excellent piece makes me think that anthropologists should write for newspapers all the time, on all kinds of topics. Ty and Beatriz are right that anthropologists (especially cultural anthropologists) should get out and help define our own field.

It's a small point, but one of the things I noticed about the Sentinel format was that the paper didn't include links for the sites and topics that were in the column. I didn't know, for example, that the new head of the World Bank was an anthropologist (to be fair, they did link to one of their own stories there), and I haven't read the Living Anthropologically blog, or This is Anthropology. Thanks, Ty and Beatriz!

Finding a fish in the library

picture from newswise.com

On the right is Dr. Donald Stewart of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, who rediscovered a species of giant airbreathing catfish, Arapaima agassizii, but not in a river. Instead, the distinctive fish was found in the first monographs describing the Amazon river, from the early 1800s. The article in the scientific journal Copeia is here. It's a tidy conjunction of library research and field science, when something that can only be found in a few libraries is of use to scholars looking for fish in the field. The next step will be finding the species outside of the library.

Learning about dams on the Madeira

I confess that I am not very well informed about the construction of dams along the Madeira River, so I thought that it would be good to bring together some sources that relate to these issue. Here is an open access article from PLOS one that collates information about many dams in what the authors call Andean Amazonia, in order to assess the biological and ecological changes that will be brought about by dam construction at these two sites. The Santo Antonio and Jirau dams on the Madeira, just down stream of the Bolivian border in Brazil, were dubbed "critic proof" by the Wall Street Journal (sorry, that article is behind a paywall), but I have not read in journalism or academic literature about these their impacts. Survival International also has more information about the effects of dam construction on local indigenous people. Since the Madeira drains all of the Llanos de Mojos, these constructions presumably could change all of the seasonal patterns of drainage and flooding.

Finding the other Amazon

 

Image from Bloomberg Businessweek

I spend a lot of time looking for articles and books about archaeology and the Amazon (and other topics), and for those purposes Google Scholar and Papers are the tools that I use the most. But even though it's unfiltered, plenty of interesting information is out there on the internet, in places that those academically oriented tools don't always reach. But the keyword "Amazon" unfortunately has a double meaning that makes it less useful. This brief article makes it clear that the idea of the Amazon is up for grabs in a very practical sense, as an address on the web. I don't know how many countries, or jurisdictions, or kinds of law this question represents, but once again, the idea of the Amazon is shown to mean much more than a river in South America.

The Amazon as Refuge

Charles Mann and Susanna Hecht wrote this article for National Geographic describing maroon communities in the Amazon: places where escaped slaves, native Americans, and their children created settlements and societies outside of the reach of colonial society. In another part of the world, James Scott writes about places where groups of people escape the reach of various states (from China, from Southeast Asia, from South Asia) and create their own social order. Some of his strongest arguments are that political institutions, farming practices, social organization, even literacy might be part of strategies for living without the state, or in opposition to the state. In Southeast Asia, mountains and forests are the kinds of terrain that make the region remote. In the Amazon, it would be the forest and the swamp. Whether it fits with a global model, maroon communities are a significant part of the 17^th, 18^th, 19^th and 20^th century Amazon. Could there have been pre-Columbian analogies to modern maroon communities?

Don Lathrap as a Wordle

I thought it would be fun to put some articles by different scholars in the form of "wordles" or word clouds. I used the generator over at wordle.net, which is very handy. This one is from Don Lathrap's article about occupation and oxbow lakes: Aboriginal occupation and changes in river channel on the Central Ucayali, Peru. It's from American Antiquity and was published in 1968. The link to the wordle page is down at the bottom of the post. It's kind of fun to use this gadget to see what kinds of words come out in your own writing; maybe it will be revealing to compare different authors.