When I was a teenager (waaaaay back in the 1980s) I occasionally wondered how society was going to refer to the years after 2000. I saw several possibilities including things like ‘twenty-0-six’ (a parallel construction with, say, nineteen-0-six) or even ‘two thousand and six.’ (I have never heard anyone use ‘twenty hundred’ to [...]
There’s a neat story over at This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics describing an attempt to learn why McDonald’s drive through customers buy smaller sized Cokes than when they order at the counter. The post is amusing for its descriptions of the trials of doing ethnographic research while walking up [...]
The Supreme Court of Canada decisions in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia this week (R. v. Marshall; R. v. Bernard) continue to generate discussion in print and radio media in British Columbia. Much of the discussion surrounds the implications of the decision (or lack thereof depending on your perspective) for native groups in BC [...]
At various times during this teaching semester, I have had a hard time convincing my Introduction to Cultural Anthropology students that there is a difference between an environmental anthropologist and an environmentalist. While people have no difficulty seeing that a linguistic anthropologist is an anthropologist with an interest in the uses of language, the [...]
The full text of the Supreme Court of Canada decisions in Regina v. Marshall and Regina v. Bernard (2005 SCC 43) is now available here.
The Union of BC Indian Chiefs has issued a response to the Supreme Court of Canada rulings today which denied logging rights to the Mi’makq in the Maritimes. Highlights from the release include the following:
Grand Chief Edward John, a member of the First Nations Summit Political Executive said after reviewing the decisions: “Today’s [...]
The Supreme Court of Canada ruled today that the Mi’kmaq do not have the right within their eigthteenth century treaty to log Crown land. Because the Mi’kmaq did not prove they had logged Crown-controlled land at the time of their treaty, their claims were denied. CBC.ca carries the story and this quotation is [...]
I am having a hard time finding print or internet media sources on this story … but BCTV News has been running a television piece on a native fishery on the Fraser River just east of Vancouver. Each summer in British Columbia, we hear about various ‘openings’ for salmon fishing for commercial fleets or [...]
In light of having subjected my cultural anthropology students to a brief discussion about altruism from the perspective of biological anthropology, my students will be amused by this post which describes a McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario) study about a species of fish that acts altruistically.
Using a combination of laboratory experiments and underwater field observations in [...]
I carefully avoided downloading Google Earth — after playing with Google Maps and some of the hacks people created for I sensed I could lose myself for days all over the planet if I installed Google Earth. I was being good!
Then I read Rex’s recent post at SavageMinds.org about staring down from above into [...]
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