Trance states and ethnographic film
NeuroAnthropology rounded up a discussion on the Medical Anthropology listserve that collected suggestions about examples of trance states in ethnographic film. Some captivating links came out of it:
“Holy Ghost People” by Peter Adair, which shows folks in Appalachia (in what very much looks like trance-like states) handling snakes. You can also get this documentary in a series of six YouTube clips starting here
Thaipusam Ritual: Pain & Trance.
Doggerland – Mapping a lost world
Next nature featured one of those discoveries to emerge out of archeology that cannot help but give one a smile of pause and a thought that this too, indeed, will pass.
Doggerland is the name of a vast plain that joined Britain to Europe for nearly 12,000 years, until sea levels began rising dramatically after the last Ice Age. Taking its name from a prominent shipping hazard—Dogger Bank—this immense landbridge vanished beneath the North Sea around 6000 B.C.
Like all landbridges, Doggerland seems to have been a pretty busy thoroughfare for ancient hunters and gatherers. But archaeologists hardly gave it a thought until 2002, when a small group of British researchers laid hands on seismic survey data collected by the petroleum industry in the North Sea.
It is thought that the sea level rose no faster than about one or two meters per century, and that the land would have disappeared in a series of punctuated inundations. According to marine archaeologist Nic Flemming, a research fellow at the National Oceanography Centre of University of Southampton, UK. “It was perfectly noticeable in a generation, but nobody had to run for the hills.”
Although hunter-gatherers usually have any sense of ownership, land would have become an increasingly precious resource as the sea rose, which according researchers Clive Waddington & Nicky Miller might have led directly to the development of sedentism and territoriality.
DARPA brings Web 2.0 prowess to the battlefield
An interesting interview about TIGR, a recently deployed DARPA project in Afghanistan and Iraq. With a timeliness which is impressive for its contemporary awareness, TIGR integrates many layers of data (satellite photos, census data, road conditions) with metadata generated by military patrols (attack reports, experience with certain houses, etc). In this way, knowledge that is lost when units cycle out of a certain districts is able to be transferred to their replacements. The interview gives a sense of the development process, infrastructure and the uses of the system. I wonder if this sort of thing will be deployed in domestic law enforcement. In any event, it is interesting to observe how the widespread fervor and innovation of Web 2.0 technologies in the civilian realm prefigure military applications — almost a reverse dual use to the things. [link]
The ephemeral sights of shortwave radio
Shortwave radio must have been an extraordinary technology to really have been in the capture of. You order plans, build a ham radio, and suddenly, as if you have been imbued with some occult power, you become aware of these stratosphere-bouncing conversations that encircle the globe. This when there was much more of a global expanse to imagine — distant, exotic lands and all of the like.
These QSL cards a really quite beautiful — they seek to give visual form through one, light-stock, piece of card board: a terrestrial marker of an ethereal enterprise. To wit,
QSL cards (or letters) are exchanged to acknowledge ham radio contact between stations. Broadcast stations (mediumwave and shortwave) also offer colorful QSL cards to listeners who send in reports of reception. These souvenirs of the radio listening hobby (or “DX’ing,” as it’s sometimes called) are slowly vanishing as the radio hobbies shrink. Nowadays hams often “QSL” contacts via the internet, bypassing the cost and postage of physical QSL cards. Many international shortwave broadcasters have either drastically cut back services or closed down altogether as their target audience migrates to the internet and satellite radio. Thus, most of these QSL cards are echoes of stations long gone, and a knob-twiddling pasttime whose glory days have passed. [link]
