Anthropology THOMPSON, blog.

Anthropology Free-For-All Parenting

Please Ignore The Sirens And The Flashing Red Light

January 23, 2023 69 Comments

In other news:

Grown men in children’s clothes hanging around schools is not acceptable.

The lady quoted above is referring to this ongoing adventure in sensitivity and tolerance:

A man in Essex county, England, is causing concern amongst locals, especially parents, after being spotted loitering near children’s schools while wearing a schoolgirl uniform. In response to complaints, Essex Police is insisting the man “does not pose a risk,” and has warned the public against sharing photos of him on social media.

Quite how the lack of risk was determined has not been made clear by the police. And as one might imagine, many parents, and schoolgirls, aren’t entirely thrilled to find said gentleman on the bus used by the girls to get to and from school, and loitering near their school, repeatedly, while wearing their school’s uniform, complete with stockings, a pleated skirt, and what appears to be a wig.

Consider this an open thread.

Reading time: 1 min

Written by: David

Academia Anthropology

The Scissors Suggest A Failure Of Patience

January 12, 2023 65 Comments

Via the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, I bring you bondage news:

As I took the decorations off my artificial Christmas tree and put them away, I found myself mulling over new year’s resolutions… Carefully handling each branch, I snipped away at the wires and started feeling for this tree. With each snip and painstaking unwinding, I recognised that I was releasing the tree from the bondage of appearance and glitter.

The bondage of glitter, I mean.

As an Anishinaabekwe, I am most at home among my mitig (tree) relatives. So when one is brought into my home, I feel like I’m welcoming family. I live by the beliefs and values that I’ve been taught: that I have a relationship with everything around me — the flying beings, the growing beings, the swimming beings, the four-legged beings and the rooted beings.

And the mass-produced plastic trees.

Reading time: 2 min

Written by: David

Anthropology Auto-Erotic Radicalism Food and Drink

Tongue Action

January 3, 2023 52 Comments

From the pages of Bon Appétit, where Brooklynite pronoun-stipulator Isha Maratha is determined to overshare:

My First Time Eating an Oyster Was an Act of Queer Intimacy.

Ms Maratha’s first time, in Boston, during college orientation, is recounted in some detail:

My own acquaintance with the oyster started off memorable — hot and vulnerable, in public, and somehow profoundly intimate. The oyster covers most of your face when you eat it, and it’s usually alive when you do. It can keep a secret. In it, there is something uniquely unspoken between the eater and the eaten.

If anyone’s getting aroused by this, I’m fetching the hose.

When the server brought out a tray of shaved ice, my peers looked on, nonchalant and delighted. I slipped on a facade that I too, was well-acquainted with the mollusc. I wasn’t about to give an arbitrary group of strangers at my liberal arts college the benefit of knowing that I — the only Indian girl I had seen on campus thus far — would be performing the act for the first time.

If madam’s outpourings seem a bit much, be assured things do not get better on that front.

Reading time: 2 min

Written by: David

Academia Anthropology Problematic Toilets Pronouns Or Else

Bearded Man Gets Big Mad

December 21, 2022 55 Comments

Further to this recent drama, more overseas toilet-dispute news:

I’m not a man! There’s nothing that prevents me from slapping you in the face!

It turns out that a summer dress doesn’t make you a lady.

A female student at the University of Brasilia, the one being harangued and threatened, was seemingly unaware that the university has organised its bathrooms by “gender identity, not sex,” and so lively scenes are to be expected. The gentleman in question, Tulio Henrique Carvalho dos Santos, has, we learn, a history of difficult behaviour. Including hair-trigger aggression and denouncing any interruption of his loud and lengthy pronouncements as “transphobia,” akin to “racism,” and therefore a basis for legal action.

The University of Brasilia has subsequently issued a statement declaring the campus a “tolerant and plural place that values the richness and potential of diversity and respect for differences.” Which would presumably explain all the shoving, screaming and threats of violence.

Update, via the comments:

Reading time: 1 min

Written by: David

Academia Anthropology Problematic Competence

What It Touches, It Stupefies

December 19, 2022 73 Comments

Lifted from the comments, Elizabeth Weiss attends the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association:

I made a special effort to attend sessions each day, looking specifically for sessions that dealt with human remains. However, if I had thought that there may be some interesting physical or archaeological sessions to attend, I was quickly disabused of that notion.

There were many red flags indicating that this conference would have a greater emphasis on the political trends of anti-colonialism, indigenous knowledge, and atonement for past behaviour. For instance, there were nearly eighty sessions that used the keyword “decolonisation” and over seventy sessions that used the term “white supremacy” (none of these were ethnographic studies on actual white supremacist groups, such as the Aryan Brotherhood).

What she finds, it turns out, is in large part a gathering of the pretentious and neurotic, the casually incompetent, and the ideologically addled. Among whom, audio recordings of interviews are equated with colonialism and strip-mining, and therefore neglected in order to disavow an “extraction mindset,” and for whom “scepticism is violence” and “asking for evidence… plays to ‘right-wing pundits.’” Oh, and among whom, “anthropology of the self” is The New Hotness. Yes, these titans of rigour and fearless enquiry.

Via Darleen.

Reading time: 1 min

Written by: David