The 2nd Annual UBC anthropology film festival starts this Friday, March 7 and goes until Saturday. The theme of this year’s festival is youth and collaborative film production. Entries were sent in from 21 countries!

The Festival Programme is now published online – check it out here, or get additional details on the Ethnographic Film Unit events page or the Festival Facebook page.

This Saturday March 8th is UBC Archaeology Day.

Each year, the two departments that are home to archaeology at UBC (Anthropology and Classics, Near Eastern and Religious Studies) come together to hear about each other’s work. The day of presentations, posters and discussion involves archaeology students and faculty from both programs, as well as friends and colleagues from the Vancouver area.

The theme this year is workshopping upcoming conference papers and features a number of graduate and undergraduate student projects.

The program is available here.

Have you ever found the perfect book at Amazon and wanted to quickly check if it was available at UBC Library? Do you wish you could find a copy of that great journal article cited on a webpage, without having to go into the Library catalogue on another webpage?

LibX is a browser plugin that provides direct access to the UBC Library’s resources from a webpage in two ways.

(1): It creates a searchbox – right in your browser toolbar – that allows you to search the UBC Catalogue, Journals, Google Scholar or WorldCat simply by highlighting or dragging-and-dropping the text. The search box is placed directly below the address bar in your browser, like this:

(2) LibX also places a tiny UBC icon
on pages displaying citation information, such as online book sellers, abstacts, or bibliographies. Clicking the icon takes you to related library offerings. For instance, on book pages at Amazon, the icon will link to the book’s entry in the UBC Library catalogue. The icon is displayed next to the book title, like this:

The icon is displayed at Google, Yahoo! Search, the NY Times Book Review, and other pages.

For more information and to download the plugin, go to: http://www.library.ubc.ca/labs/libx/

Did you know that we have online access to most North American Ph.D dissertations published post-1997? We do, through a database called Proquest Dissertations and Theses. You can access the database from the list of indexes and databases off the library home page (under the eresources tab, in the blue menu bar at the top).

Thanks to a handy search widget that ProQuest has created, you can give it a try right now from here. Just type your keywords into the box below:

function proQuestSearchGo(){
var url=”http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?RQT=305&FT=1&DBId=15119&SQ=”;
var searchInputEl = document.getElementById(“proQuestSearchInput”);
document.location=url + encodeURIComponent(searchInputEl.value);
}

function handleKeyPress(e,form){
var key=e.keyCode || e.which;
if (key==13){
proQuestSearchGo();
}
}

 

Enter your search terms:

I’ve added the widget to the Anthropology Subject Guide, in the section on theses and dissertations. Just look for the ProQuest search box, and enter your search terms.

(Remember that if you’re off-campus, you’ll need to authenticate using VPN or the proxy so that the database knows you’re from UBC – Contact me if you need help.)

If you’re looking for high-resolution images to use in a (non-commercial) anthropology presentation or paper, you’ll want to check out ARTstor. ARTstor is a digital library of roughly 550,000 images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social science.

Here’s a brief sample of collections of interest to anthropologists:

Photographs of Mayan Excavations – Images from the Carnegie Institution of Washington
(from the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University)

“The Carnegie Institution sponsored archaeological excavations of Mayan sites in Mexico and Central America from 1913 to 1957. Carnegie researchers embarked on annual expeditions to the Yucatan peninsula, from the lowlands of Peten to the highlands of Guatemala, conducting archaeological reconnaissance, excavation, and restoration at sites such as Uaxactun, Copán, Pedras Negras, Yaxchilan, Coba, Quiriguá, Tayasal, Kaminaljuyu, and Chichen Itza. Many of the buildings, monuments, and artifacts recorded in these photographs no longer exist, or are so physically damaged or inaccessible as to be unavailable to most researchers.”

Native American Art and Culture collection
(National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution)

“This collection has two components. The first consists of more than 10,000 high res images made from historic photographs richly documenting Native American subjects. These digital images have been made from glass plate negatives collected by or produced under the auspices of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) beginning in the late 19th century.

The second component of this collection consists of images of approximately 2,000 Plains Indian ledger drawings. Plains Indian ledger drawings, mostly produced in the middle to late decades of the 19th century, represent an important indigenous artistic tradition. These drawings on paper, often done on the pages of ruled ledger books acquired through trade, continue a long tradition of painting on buffalo hides and other available media.”

… And there’s so much more. Remember to truncate your search term (e.g. ceremon* or ritual*) in order to retrieve terms with variant endings. For more precise searches, search for a phrase in quotation marks (“…”), or use the Advanced Search feature to limit your searches by date or geography to locate a specific world culture.

You can access ARTstor from the information page here: http://toby.library.ubc.ca/resources/infopage.cfm?id=1076

This coming Thursday, Dr. Alexia Bloch of UBC’s Department of Anthropology presents a talk:

Post-Soviet Mistresses and the Turkish State: Negotiating Intimacy, Kinship, and Labor Migration in a Time of Transnationalism

Thursday, February 28, from 11:30-1:00 in ANSO 134

Dr. Bloch’s research focuses around dynamics of power, historical consciousness, and the anthropology of gender. Her current research concerns emerging capitalism and the transformation of gender relations, with an ethnographic focus on women migrants moving between centres of global capital and areas of the former Soviet Union. Her recent monograph publications include:

• Museum at the end of the world : encounters in the Russian Far East
• Red ties and residential schools : indigenous Siberians in a post-Soviet state

Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a climate change and Inuit rights advocate recently co-nominated (with Al Gore) for the Nobel Peace prize, will be speaking this Friday on “The Right to be Cold: the Global Significance of Arctic Climate Change” as part of the terry speakers series.

In the past two decades, Inuit across the Arctic have reported profound changes to their environment and wildlife — changes where their human right to life, health, subsistence, safety and security are all being violated as large countries emitting greenhouse gases continue their business as usual. Yet even as this immense struggle is ongoing, Inuit are now also faced with a renewed interest in the Arctic from a world hungry for its resources and newly opening shipping routes.

Sheila Watt-Cloutier will discuss the need for our world to re-connect around our shared Arctic, our shared atmosphere, and ultimately, our shared humanity. Individuals, communities, corporations, industries and nations must realize that the challenges in the Arctic are connected to the cars we drive, the industries we support, and the policies we create.

The talk is at the West Atrium of the Life Science Centre at 12:00 noon on February 29th. Seating is free and open for all UBC students, staff and faculty, and is first come first served (no tickets to pick up). More information can be found at http://www.terry.ubc.ca

The most recent issue of the UBC Department of Anthropology NEWS Bulletin (No. 4(2): 15 Feb. 2008) is out and available on the Anthropology department website.

As always, it includes a list of new faculty and student publications. I’ve repeated the list below, including links to the UBC Library catalogue record for holdings information or direct links to the online article in those cases where we subscribe to the ejournal (as indicated by this icon: )

• Powis, T.G., W.J. Hurst, M.d. C. Rodríguez, P. Ortίz C., Blake, Michael, D. Cheetham, M.D. Coe and J.G. Hodgson. 2007. “Oldest Chocolate in the New World.” Antiquity 81 (314).
• Bloch, Alexia. In Press. “Discourses on Danger and Dreams of Prosperity: Confounding U.S. Government Positions on Trafficking from the Context of the former Soviet Union.” International Migration and Human Rights: The Global Repercussions of US Policy, S. Martinez (ed.), 41pp., Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Creighton, Millie. 2008. “Tourism: Japanese Tourism.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World, Peter N. Stearns (ed.), Volume 7: 286-288.
• Miller, Bruce Granville. 2007. “Response to Nesper, Negotiating jurisprudence in tribal court and the emergence of a Tribal state: the Ojibwe in Wisconsin.” Current Anthropology, 48 (5):692-693. Nesper’s article is here, or jump to comments here.
• Shelton, Anthony. 2007. “The Collectors Zeal. Towards an anthropology of intentionality, instrumentality and desire.” In Colonial Collections Revisited, P. ter Keurs (ed.), Leiden, CNWS, 16-44.
• Shelton, Anthony, S. R. Butler. 2008. Forward. Contested Representations: Revisiting Into the Heart of Africa. Peterborough, Broadview Press, pp-1-3.
• Wyndham, Felice S. 2007. Review of “The Environment in Anthropology:A Reader in Ecology, Culture, and Sustainable Living.”by Haenn, N. and R. Wilk. American Anthropologist 109 (4): 767-768.

For more news from the Department, download the full Newsletter here.

This evening, the UBC Museum of Anthropology presents the second of three talks in the Mud Matters series:

Sculpted and Adorned: Mud Architecture in India

Art historian, curator, anthropologist, photographer, and author Dr. Stephen Huyler shares images and insights gained through 37 years of travel documenting folk art and aesthetics in rural India.

Tuesday, January 29, 7:00- 9:00 pm

UBC Library has several books by Dr. Stephen Huyler, including:

• Meeting God : elements of Hindu devotion
• Gifts of earth : terracottas & clay sculptures of India
• Painted prayers : women’s art in village India

If mud architecture intrigues you, then here are a few books to get you started:

• Down to earth : mud architecture : an old idea, a new future / based on an exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou, conceived and directed by Jean Dethier.
• Mud architecture of the Indian desert / Kulbhushan Jain, Minakshi Jain.
• The valley of mud brick architecture : Shibām, Tarīm & Wādī Ḥaḍramūt : ancient to contemporary design

This Thursday, Dr. Gaston Gordillo, UBC Dept. of Anthropology, presents a talk entitled:

Places that Frighten: Residues of Wealth and Violence on the Argentinean Chaco Frontier

Location and Time
Thursday, January 24,
11:30 am – 1:00 pm
AnSo 205

Since 1987, Dr. Gordillo has based his research in the Gran Chaco region of northern Argentina. His current SSHRC-funded research project, “The Traces of History: Ruins and Memories of the Conquest of the Argentinean Chaco” involves a multi-sited ethnography on the old frontiers of the Gran Chaco. The project analyzes the legacy of the region’s long history of violence and resistance in contemporary landscapes and memories and examines the ways in which history is inscribed on, and erased from, space.

For a full list of Dr. Gordillo’s publications, see his profile page at the Dept of Anthropology. His books are available at Koerner Library, including:

• Nosotros vamos a estar acá para siempre : historias tobas (2005)
• Landscapes of devils : tensions of place and memory in the Argentinean Chaco (2004) (preview online at GoogleBooks)
• Río y la frontera : movilizaciones aborígenes, obras públicas y MERCOSUR en el Pilcomayo (2002)

To locate copies of journal articles by Dr. Gordillo, try the MetaLib search tool to search across multiple databases. Click this link to launch a predefined search for his name, or create your own search in the MetaLib Anthropology and Archaeology PowerSearch Page. After the list of results is returned from MetaLib, use the UBC eLink icon to locate a copy of the journal. Many of the articles are available electronically to UBC faculty, students, and staff.