Word: anthropologist
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...anthropologists bother to do fieldwork at all? Nigel Barley, an anthropologist and African specialist at London's Museum of Mankind, ponders the question in this witty memoir of his hapless adventures. Some go to grind an ax or two, as students of Margaret Mead now know. But Barley believes that most anthropologists pursue fieldwork for its cheery reminiscences and lifelong opportunities to one-up colleagues who have never traveled. Experience abroad, he says, confers a "valuable aura of eccentricity upon the really rather dull denizens of anthropology departments...
...touring academic picks up the language in a month or so, finding many eager, friendly and articulate informants, all committed to Western notions of veracity. He finds the tribe's way of life is marked by high spirituality and harmony with nature. After a suitable time, the anthropologist is warmly welcomed into the tribe, usually after he scratches the earth with a hoe, showing that he too understands the ways of nature...
Hennie is the pseudonym of an outspoken Anglican priest in Wyndal, a pseudonymous white settlement in a lush, isolated valley north of Cape Town. His audience is Vincent Crapanzano, an anthropologist at New York City's Queens College, who assembles in Waiting an oral biography of South Africa's white community, the 16% minority that rules a nation at once divided and single-minded. Over the course of the book, Van der Merwe and more than 30 other Wyndal residents vent their passions, explain their prejudices and in effect deliver their own eulogies. "We lack (tribal ritual) so terribly...
...fabric were found scattered among the burial sites. Terraced fields sculpted into the slope indicate sophisticated agricultural techniques. Perhaps most amazing, says Lennon, 3-ft.-high wood carvings on some building eaves have weathered the humid climate so well that their "assertively male" forms can still be seen. Marvels Anthropologist Jane Wheeler, co-leader of the study: "We have no idea why the carvings would be so perfectly preserved--but there they...
...find initially seemed unimpressive. Kamoya Kimeu, head of Anthropologist Richard Leakey's proficient fossil collecting team, last summer discovered a hominid skull fragment that was 1½ in. square on a rocky slope above northwest Kenya's Nariokotome River. But over a month's time, the expedition crew, under the joint leadership of Leakey, director of the National Museums of Kenya, and Alan Walker, professor of cell biology and anatomy at the Johns Hopkins University medical school, began to turn up other whisky-colored skeletal pieces in the nearby sandy debris: first a rib, then a scapula...