SMH offers enculturation argument about topless lust

The Life and Style section of the Sydney Morning Herald has a fascinating article by Sydney-based writer Emily Maguire about the way culture trains men and women to respond in particular ways to their “biological responses to beauty.” Here’s an excerpt:
…boys are not taught, as girls are, that their bodies could have a disruptive [...]

More on the Military’s ‘Culture Rush’: Brian Selmeski interview

There’s a culture rush going on in the U.S. military. While the Human Terrain System gets most of the media attention for being the face of the military’s sudden interest in culture, there are a whole host of other military efforts revolving around the concept of culture. For example, as we have mentioned on Culture [...]

Iraq, occupation, culture and the military: brief roundup

There has been a fantastic discussion going on here on Culture Matters that I wanted to draw attention to, for those who don’t meticulously follow the stream of comments on older posts.  After I ate humble pie over my simplistic and error-filled rendering of Steve Featherstone’s recent article on the Human Terrain System in Harpers, [...]

Operational Culture for the Warfighter

Marine Corps University Press has just published a book by Barak A. Salmoni and Paula Holmes-Eber called “Operational Cultures for the Warfighter: Principles and Applications.”  Word got out that they were offering free copies of the book for a short time, and I wrote to request my own copy.  Dr Holmes-Eber, who is an anthropologist [...]

Pentagon officially begins project ‘Minerva’

Wired magazine has just reported that the Pentagon has kicked off ‘Minerva’, its project to include social scientists and other academics into the “War on Terror”.  The article also mentions the debate that has been going on in anthropology over the US military’s new-found enthusiasm for culture and social science methods.
Wired also has covered this [...]

“To wage war, become an anthropologist”

Brian McKenna writes in CounterPunch that he wants to work for the Army War College. Here’s an excerpt:

“To wage war, become an anthropologist.” That’s the opening line from a 2007 article in the U.S. Army War College journal “Parameters.” The feature, by Oxford educated historian Patrick Porter, says, “from the academy [...]

Applying Anthropology in the Future: the future is now

I’m sure many of you have heard about Masdar, the ‘green city’ being built in Abu Dhabi.  For those of you that haven’t the city is touted as:

a world model of energy conservation with zero carbon emissions and zero waste. Compared to average urban levels, fossil fuel consumption will be reduced by 75%, water [...]

how dictionaries mark the evolution of language

When I arrived in Australia 5 months ago, one of the first things that struck me was how different the English here is. When a student pronounced one of the class assignments “a bit naf,” I ran to Jovan to ask him what it meant. He soon delighted in feeding me baffling [...]

Is copying “part of Chinese culture”?

I have often encountered culturalist explanations of why Chinese don’t respect intellectual property rights. One version of this is that it “in Chinese culture,” it is okay to copy other people’s writing without acknowledgement. I remember a professor at Heidelberg, Germany’s most famous university, asking me whether this was true. This has always seemed to [...]

Cultural Diversity versus Cultural Difference; Examples from Australia

In one of my previous posts, I talked about the Norwegian anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s essay on cultural diversity versus cultural difference called Diversity versus difference: Neo-liberalism in the minority debate (http://folk.uio.no/geirthe/21st.html)
Eriksen describes cultural diversity as aesthetic aspects of a specific culture like arts, cuisine, folklore which are neutral and don’t require any [...]