10 Reasons Why It’s Better to Teach at Abbott Elementary than Cornell University

I’ve Watched One and Done the Other, so I Know     Not all teaching is the same. I know this because I went to school from kindergarten through five years of graduate school and experienced all kinds of teachers along the way. Also, for over 30 years I taught anthropology at Cornell University, day after day, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, everything from giant classes of 120 students to small seminars with four or five students. In addition, I am the parent of a daughter who went…

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The Joy of Venetain Street Art

How Venetian Artists Keep Their City Alive (Vatican Stamp with art appropriated from Alessia Babrow) In spring 2020, Italian artist Alessia Babrow got a real shock when the Vatican issued an Easter stamp using a piece of her street art. Babrow had been posting a series of images up on walls and corners all over Rome for a project she calls “Just Use It,” but the wording didn’t mean anyone could then take her art for their own purposes. As reported by international media outlets, Babrow puts hearts on all the great…

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The Bernie Meme—An Example of Cultural Diffusion

Knitters and Others are Spreading the Bern     The Bernie meme is giving us all a lot of laughs now that we have a new president as well as a vaccine coming our way. There’s Bernie on the Eifel Tower, sitting in the New York subway, hanging out with Batman, and on and on. Every time I see one of these altered photos I burst out laughing, and as an anthropologist, I am also so please to see the swift cultural appropriation of a cold guy at a traditional Western ceremony…

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Anthropologists In Space

The Otherworldly Tale of Anthropologists and Space Aliens     On October 4, 1957, Russia launched the first satellite, the first human-made object, to orbit the earth, calling it “Sputnik” which is Russian for “traveler.” America wanted to be the first in space — after all, the Cold War was raging, and the space race was part of that war — but it took a year before they launched a similar U.S. satellite. Those launches, and the space race in general, were signs of a massive, universal, culture shift for the human…

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