The swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung writes about matrimonial ads in newspapers of india. While it's still mainly the duty of the parents and relatives, to get someone married, the traditional way of contacting other parents face to face is decreasing, more and more Indians are searching with some special ads in newspapers, the author writes. If you are interested in this, you may take a look at the very popular indian matrimonial site shaadi.com. Totally uncommon for europeans is of course that you can browse the database by a huge variety of religions and castes. Via Hirnverbrannt

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The University Library of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich offers as a special service an online-library of dissertations. The University Library offes a tool for publishing dissertations online. Technical questions are to be addressed to Mr. Volker Schallehn, Tel 089 2180-2144 / e-mail: volker.schallehn@ub.uni-muenchen.de. Access through as Munich University Library dissertations online.

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"Cherchez le Chercheur" No. III Remember last week’s photograph? The ‘traditionalists’ were monitoring the performance of a cleansing ritual in front of the royal palace. Today you find the same crew posing for a group shot on the junction of a forest trail. Amongst them are the leading priestess (okomfo, smoking her pipe), junior priests and cult novices (in white cloth), and a chief’s spokesman (okyeame, holding the golden staff). And, difficult to ignore, a foreigner.

It seems rather uncommon for a fieldworker to have his picture taken with his ‘objects’. For the most part it is his duty to stand behind the camera. Who, then, makes him to be the object in the field? It is (or, it was in my case) local acquaintances and what one might call field assistants; or friends from home on a visit to the fieldworker’s remote world; or even journalists hunting for pictures of exotic cultures – but locating just another invader...

Expect next week’s entry with a photographic episode about a SPIEGEL journalist who run into the researcher in the field. Also check the ‘colonial version’ of the picture above, just for fun...

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Pondicherry University, Department of Anthropology, and Institut für Ethnologie und Afrikanistik of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich are the cooperation partners on the basis of a Memorandum of Understanding aiming to facilitate the cooperation in the field of research and in a student-exchange program. For further information please contact the coordinators in Pondicherry, Dr. T. S. Naidu (for India) or Dr. Hilde Link (for Germany). Pondicherry University, Department of Anthropology

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The University of Buffalo maintains a Anthropology Review Database. You can search and also browse through all reviews. It doesn't seem to be a small amount: about two new reviews a week, so one should take a look here more often. Via Archaeology Weblog

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Some hours ago we finished our introduction course to the Ethno::log, which was held here in Munich in our institute. I say thank you for your interest.

As mentioned, I provide at this place now additional information about our working group, all the links from my presentation and further information to the weblog phenomenon (in german).

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The following review is worthwhile to read, as it sums up a lot which time and again resurfaces in discussions:

ROSE, STEVEN. 1999. "Evolutionary Psychology -- Biology Impoverished", in: Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (London) 24 (3).

This essay reviews 'Divided labours: an evolutionary view of women at work' by Kingsley Browne (70 pp., ISBN 0 297 841408), 'The truth about Cinderella: a Darwinian view of parental love' by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson (68 pp., ISBN 0 297 841610), 'Shaping life: genes, embryos and evolution' by John Maynard Smith (50 pp., ISBN 0 297 841386), and 'Neanderthals, bandits and farmers: how agriculture really began' by Colin Tudge (53 pp., ISBN 0 297 842587), published in 1998 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson at E4-99 each.

"These four little books, in a series called Darwinism Today, may represent the only tangible memorial to the Darwin Centre at the London School of Economics, which flourished for a few years in the mid 1990s, and was committed to publicising the fashionable theses of what was once called sociobiology but is now named evolutionary psychology (EP). The declared aim of EP is to provide explanations for the patterns of human activity and the forms of organisation of human society which take into account the fact that humans are animals and, like all other currently living organisms, are the present day products of some 4 billion years of evolution. Whilst there is nothing in principle wrong with such an agenda, EP bases its worldview on a peculiarly narrow version of ultra-Darwinism pursued with singleminded and almost religious fervour. It does seem to be the fate of all great and innovative thinkers, religious, political, or scientific, to have their ideas adopted and oversimplified to the point of being traduced by later followers. This is certainly the case with the current coterie of so called Darwinists.

Apart from Darwin himself, EP's modern hero figures are, from the classical sociobiological period of the 1970s, Richard Dawkins, Robert Trivers, and E. 0. Wilson, and, more recently, the social psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby and the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, around whom have been grouped a heterogeneous collection of camp followers, including real philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, manque philosophers such as Helena Cronin (organiser of the Darwin Centre and coeditor of this series), and journalists such as Matt Ridley. All are prolific writers and their popular books will be familiar to many. [...]".

The complete review can be read here, and the discussion thread which developed from it here. via Anthro-L

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The Ludwig-Maximilians University (Munich) has just put online its Server for Electronic Publications. The server meets the requirements of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol (OAI), which means that the metadata of every publication is available. Furthermore a full-text search is possible. There isn't yet a single publication on the server, though. But hopefully there are things to come ... See our recent related story

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Indian Country Today is a news site focussing on american indians. " Week in and week out, Indian Country Today publishes more original journalistic content on American Indian issues - written by a sizeable full time staff of American Indian and non-native reporters with extensive experience in Native communities - than any other news source."

I would be interested in comments about reliability, political position and background of this newspaper, which seems to have been started as a printed edition and is still available as that.

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