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On the day of the one-year anniversary of Anthropology.net Kambiz Kamrani has launched the First Round of the Four Stone Hearth – The Anthropology Blog Carnival – a great initiative to promote anthropological blogging:

A blog carnival is a type of blog event. It is similar to a magazine, or a round-up, in that it is dedicated to a particular topic, and is published on a regular schedule.

A blog carnival is a great opportunity to discover new blogs and good blog posts. Especially interesting Paul Wren’s blog Wannabe Anthropologist about medical anthropology.

He points to the new issue of PLoS Medicine on “Social Medicine in the 21st Century”. It features research articles and essays which examine the importance of considering the cultural and social effects on health and health care, he writes and adds “The Research Articles are going to keep me busy for a long time”. That’s correct. Much interesting to read, among others about the impact to Tuberculosis care in the aftermath of armed conflict, the connections between health and socioeconomic status in India, anthropology in the Clinic, an Ethnographic Study of the Social Context of Migrant Health in the United States etcetc.

Interesting also the Carl Feagans’ review of Katherine A. Dettwyler’s ethnography “Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa.”:

Too often, statistics and headlines dominate Western knowledge of the plights of the developing world, but Dettwyler is able to objectify the problems and present them with a perspective that allows her readers to understand some of the associated cultural problems.

And finally there is AlphaPsy, a daily review of cognitive anthropology that is written in English by a team of French cognitive scientists and anthropologists. They share with us a critique of the new Paris Musée du Quai Branly – a museum of exotic art, as the author of this blog post calls it. He adds:

I know I am not supposed to call it that; I know that it is all about anthropological science and respectful curiosity. But whatever the brochures might say, the spiritual father of the Musée du Quai Branly is not Claude Lévi-Strauss; it would rather be Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet who launched the “Art Nègre” fad in early twentieth-century Paris.
(…)
the concept of Otherness (…) is currently enjoying, among the French intelligentsia, a favour which, in my view, can only be explained by its utter lack of content.

>> visit the First Round of the Four Stone Hearth – The Anthropology Blog Carnival (with a lot more to explore!)