A Shaligram is Born – Part 2
This second part on the birth of Shaligrams is meant to briefly demonstrate the concrete links between the sacred contexts of Shaligram veneration and the actual practices devotees…
Tag: cultural anthropology
A Shaligram is Born – Part 1
Witnessing the appearance of a Shaligram stone within the Kali Gandaki river is to, quite literally, witness its birth. Formed in the womb of the mountains (the Himalayas)…
Agriculture in Human Evolution – by Keith Hart
In his Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men (1754) Jean-Jacques Rousseau was concerned, not with individual variations in natural endowments, but with…
Wedding Clothes and the Osage Community: A Giving Heritage
It is a great moment for a great project. Some Shreds and Patches readers will remember when, in 2017, the Mathers Museum of World Cultures hosted the special…
Interrogating the Concept of Categories – an Interview with Lochlann Jain
Stanford University anthropologist and artist, Lochlann Jain, speaks with Anne Brackenbury (former editor at University of Toronto Press who launched the ethnoGRAPHIC Series) to talk about Jain’s new…
The Political Economy of Food in an Unequal World-by Keith Hart
Food in a New Economic Order What is ‘new’ about neo-liberalism? It is a world economic order based on selective freedom, on the freedom of money…
Filtered Realities
In order to proceed, we must first acknowledge the more than three decades of work by a man who has been sounding the alarm concerning the…
What Students Deserve in a Textbook
With the recent release of Through the Lens of Cultural Anthropology, we asked author Laura Tubelle de González to talk about her new textbook, and her hopes for…
The Blueberry Wars
In elementary school, the first “robin red-breast” of spring signaled warmer days, colorful flowers, and a promise that the school year wouldn’t last forever. I considered robins m…
The Mueller Report: Highlights
The Mueller Report is probably one of the most extensive legal investigations in the history of the United States. Certainly, the circumstances necessitating it are historic…
Neo-Evolutionism with special emphasis on Steward and White
Contents Background: Revivals: Julian Steward: Leslie White: Background: The “golden age” of social evolutionism had basically ended by the 1890s, and after that time a sharp reaction against…
The Horror of War – Part 3
Sometime in June 1971, an incident occurred that completely changed my attitude toward the US Army. In fact, I was never the same again. It all…
Goose Lessons
What can an anthropologist (who specializes in humans) learn from an unlikely species (like a goose)? Plenty, it turns out. My husband and I went goose-banding the other day,…
Perspective: The Many Ways of Shaligram Darshan
Shaligram shrines are each as unique as the households that look after them. As I move into the planning stage for my second manuscript on Shaligram interpretive traditions,…
The Horror of War – Part 2
It was Christmas Eve and it just so happened that I pulled guard duty. The post I was assigned to was a 30-foot tower that stood…
The Horror of War – Part 1
With all the violence in the world and the ever growing movement of mankind toward more violence, it appears there is always a war somewhere…
The Virus of Violence
In the study of epidemiology, one has an opportunity to learn about communicable and non-communicable diseases. This curriculum is usually pursued on the graduate level and…
Reading Shaligrams
The book is nearly complete! It’s been a long road but I will be turning in the revised and completed manuscript to my publisher in just a few…
Birth as Ritual/Ritual as Birth
Cultural anthropologist, Robbie Davis-Floyd, is considered by many as the Queen of Childbirth Studies. A Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of…
An Anthropologist in the World Revolution – Pt. 2 by Keith Hart
As we approached the millennium, with the dotcom boom roaring away, I wanted to write a book that would sum up 30 years of teaching and…