It’s funny… in making up potential things to try for my 50 New Things list, I find myself adding on all the ideas and events I’ve wanted to try for a while, but never got around to doing. Some of them are bigger, like “climb Halfdome,” but some of them are small and simple. I…
I was recently asked the following question: “Why is it important for feminists to study and comprehend women-centered cultures?” While I thought it a good question, I also think it can and should be fruitfully expanded, in that I do not think only feminists should study these fascinating matriarchies. Learning is good, and as the…
This was a quick one-page paper written for one of my classes, which has a wonderful name: “Tree of Brilliant Fruit: Finding Spiritual Wisdom Through the Arts.” I’m sharing the paper here because the book was interesting, I’m open to other folks’ interpretations, it’s fun, and I like sharing writing. I can probably come up…
I was going to write in a rather scholarly mode about my visit to the Tarim mummies, but I think all my “scholarly” has been temporarily burned out of me by my intensive month or so of thesis writing. I’ll have to write about that too at some point — what a trip that was!…
(Since I seem to be musing about honesty recently… a short college paper written in 1999 for a primate anthropology class. Enjoy!) A current ‘hot’ topic in primate studies today is the issue of infant killing. Our readings contain three articles on the subject. The first was the 1977 Hrdy article “Infanticide as a Primate…
Well, after giving it the old college try, I think posting former papers from college in this format is way too much bother! If I refer to them in future reviews or Firestarters, I’ll upload them here as single, very long pages, rather than a kabillion short blog entries. That being said, as promised, here…
Possible Solutions It is a simple but appealing answer to say all that needs to be done to solve the problems delineated and explored above is to restructure the societies in the readings. Were this to occur, then by definition women and minorities would not be repressed any longer, but would instead be hegemonically considered…
In yet another essay which discusses violence against women, Kumar notes that it is the deliberately poor definition of what constitutes rape and wife-beating that allows it to continue in India, despite laws forbidding it. She notes furthermore that women are often blamed for the attacks against them due to their “easy virtue” or due…
It would make sense the society of the newly established nation-state would incorporate both its previous, ‘historical memory’ based power within itself, whether theoretical, religious, or physical, and that the struggle for power should occur between the varying discourses presented by each of these types of power. Also, by their very nature within the society…
Thus the current fundamentalist and nationalist mythologies insidiously create and define themselves in an essentialist fashion because they are needed in order to define boundaries and categories, to oppositionally create classes and hierarchies based on power through repression. Unfortunately these politicized religions frequently maintain much the same hegemonic thought patterns, albeit with different dominant players,…