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Anthropology Today is a bimonthly publication which aims to provide a forum for the application of anthropological analysis to public and topical issues, while reflecting the breadth of interests within the discipline of anthropology.
It is also committed to promoting debate at the interface between anthropology and areas of applied knowledge such as education, medicine, development etc. as well as that between anthropology and other academic disciplines.
The journal is international both in the scope of issues it covers and in the sources it draws from.
ISSN 0268-540X. Incorporating RAIN (issn 0307-6776; as from vol. 15: 0268 540X).



December 2011 (v27 i6)

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Anthropology in China

China has its own anthropology ancestors, revered today well beyond the discipline. In this photograph, former Vice Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress Gu Xiulian and former Finance Minister Xiang Huaicheng jointly unveil a statue built to commemorate the centenary of the birth of Fei Xiaotong, China’s most celebrated anthropologist.

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October 2011 (v27 i5)

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Terrorism in Norway

At the Blue Stone Monument in the centre of Bergen, Norway's second city, a young couple mourns the 77 Norwegians killed by a right-wing extremist in Oslo and Utøya on 22 July 2011.

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August 2011 (v27 i4)

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Smolensk and the palace of culture

In this issue, Michal Murawski approaches the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw as a medium through which to track Poland's shifting attitude towards Russia, especially in the wake of the 2010 Smolensk plane crash that took the lives of the Polish president, his wife and top-ranking state and military officials. The crash took place just a few kilometres from the site of the 1940 Katyn massacre, in which Stalin's NKVD shot dead thousands of Polish army officers. Pointing the finger at Russia, many Poles refer to the crash as 'Katyn II'.

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June 2011 (v27 i3)

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ANTHROPOLOGISTS AND ADVOCACY

Insecurity is a major concern for mobile pastoralists in many regions of the world. In this issue, Mark Moritz and Paul Scholte discuss their involvement with mobile pastoralists in the Far North Region of Cameroon, where insecurity has long been a major concern, with children commonly being kidnapped and held for ransom by heavily armed criminal gangs.

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April 2011 (v27 i2)

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Front cover: THE EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION OF 2011

Over a million Egyptians in Tahrir Square praying in remembrance of the 25 January revolution's 'martyrs'. More than 300 people were killed in the popular uprising that forced President Hosni Mubarak to step down on 11 February. A memorial, seen in the centre of the image, displays the photographs of some of those who lost their lives.

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February 2011 (v27 i1)

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Front cover: 25th South East Asian Games

The 2009 Southeast Asian (SEA) Games in Vientiane, the first to be hosted by Laos in the event’s 50-year history, was widely experienced by Laotians as an unprecedented moment of national success, reinforcing national symbols and materializing national memory and ideology. In this picture two fans play giant khene, a bamboo free-reed musical instrument distinctive to Laos and the ethnically Lao areas of northeast Thailand.

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December 2010 (v26 i6)

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Anthropology Today December 2010 volume 26 issue 6

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PUBLIC ANXIETY AND PERSONAL GENOMICS

When the University of California at Berkeley sent letters to incoming freshmen in the summer of 2010, inviting them to submit their DNA for genetic testing, the plan quickly attracted national media attention and generated heated debate.

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October 2010 (v26 i5)

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Anthropology Today October 2010 volume 26 issue 5

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RETHINKING SUICIDE BOMBING

The body is a key focus for anthropological research and analysis. The cover photographs highlight the way multiple aspects of life, including political life, are mapped onto the body, and the emergence of a collective, as well as individual, identity through these experiences.

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August 2010 (v26 i4)

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Anthropology Today August 2010 volume 26 issue 4

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THE GAZA FREEDOM FLOTILLA

Mohammed Rassas, a second-generation Palestinian, sports a T-shirt declaring his longing for the homeland he has never known. Mohammed's family was forced to leave Palestine long before he was born, with no opportunity for return. Instead, Mohammed has lived most of his life between Saudi Arabia and Greece, which became his second home.

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June 2010 (v26 i3)

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Anthropology Today June 2010 volume 26 issue 3

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A Greenpeace activist dressed as Justice protests in front of the Japanese embassy in Buenos Aires. She draws attention to the trial of Toru Suzuki and Junichi Sato, two Greenpeace activists seeking to expose corruption in the Japanese whale meat industry, who are being prosecuted in the Japanese courts for theft and trespass, in a trial that has continued since 2008.

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April 2010 (v26 i2)

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Anthropology Today April 2010 volume 26 issue 2

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A positive, albeit anthropomorphized, view of badgers appears in this illustration for the original edition of the children's classic Wind in the willows. Badgers are shortly to be culled in north Pembrokeshire as part of a Welsh Assembly Government campaign against bovine TB. Pat Caplan's article in this issue discusses the arguments around the cull and the reasons behind the varying positions held by local people on this issue.

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February 2010 (v26 i1)

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The front cover shows Joshua French and Tjostolv Moland, two Norwegian ex-soldiers accused of murdering their Congolese driver, being paraded through the streets of Kisangani in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on the first day of their trial in August 2009. A second photo shows the front page of the Ugandan newspaper Sunday Monitor of 4 October 2009, reporting on the military training camp that French and Moland set up in Uganda. The two images are testimony to the wide interest their case has generated in DRC, Uganda and in Norway.

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December 2009 (v25 i6)

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Anthropology Today December2009 volume 25 issue 6

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Museum Anthropology

In 2009, the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, Canada, closed for six months for expansion and extensive renovations to the original building, designed by world-renowned architect Arthur Erickson. This series of photographs by David Campion documents the emergence of Haida artist Bill Reid’s great sculpture The Raven and the First Men from the plywood shelter custom built around the work to protect it during construction.

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October 2009 (v25 i5)

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Anthropology Today October 2009 volume 25 issue 5

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Fieldwork and Technology

The images on the front and back covers illustrate two of several reflections in this issue on the impacts of technology on the world studied by anthropologists. On the front cover, an internet cafe is one of the first sights to greet visitors to Dhunche, once a ‘remote’ area in northern Nepal. On the back cover, a youth tries out a telescope during the commemoration of the confirmation of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity at Roça Sundy, Príncipe, where Arthur Eddington observed a total solar eclipse.

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August 2009 (v25 i4)

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Anthropology Today August 2009 volume 25 issue 4

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Ethnographic Documentaries and Public Anthropology

Ethnographic documentaries are a shop window for anthropology. These cover photos represent three well received films shown at the most recent RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film held at Leeds Metropolitan University in July. The festival is a biennial event at which visual anthropologists, filmmakers and documentarists mingle.

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June 2009 (v25 i3)

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Anthropology Today August 2009 volume 25 issue 3. Front and back cover by Sean Weisgerber

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Heritage Protection

Created in the aftermath of World War II, UNESCO was mandated to engage in a worldwide educational campaign aimed at establishing the conditions for lasting peace. This involved working out and disseminating a new world view based on a revised conception of human diversity. The founders of UNESCO argued that prejudice relating to human diversity is the main cause of war, and hoped that a radical modification of the existing vision of that diversity would help to guarantee of peace.

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April 2009 (v25 i2)

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Anthropology Today April 2009 volume 25 issue 2. Front and back cover by Sean Weisgerber.

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Ethnicity, Race and the Limits of Human Identity

The front and back covers show artist Sean Weisgerber's interpretation of the theme of this issue, the problem of classifying human identity in a world of fusion and change. Articles address biometric security, the use of the concept of ‘tribe' in US army counter-insurgency programmes, and human identity as constituted in and through debate among Afghani refugees recently returned from northern Pakistan to Afghanistan.

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February 2009 (v25 i1)

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Anthropology Today April 2009 volume 25 issue 1

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A boy shows off on his horse at the annual festival of racing, games and music in Barsko'on, Kyrgyzstan in October 2007. The festival includes endurance races of up to 36 kilometres over steep, rocky mountain paths and streams, a far cry from the bowling-green surfaces of Churchill Downs and Newmarket.

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