AnthroCurrents – March 6, 2015

A biweekly look at recent stories on anthropology and practicing anthropologists in the popular media

• Radio Australia offers a fascinating perspective on “alcohol-fuelled violence,” which is that it is culturally constructed. Dr. Anne Fox, founder of Galahad SMS Ltd. in the UK is featured, and her research immediately brought to mind an article I read in the New Yorker years ago, which you can find here.
• You already knew this, but the Paleo diet is likely not an accurate depiction of what Paleolithic peoples ate. When I am foraging through my kids’ snacks late into the night, I imagine that, like me, a person from the Paleolithic would also have eaten whatever they could find there, provided they could get the packages open.
• Not sure whether ancient peoples practiced placentophagy, but this is a growing trend in the U.S., according to a site called Growing Your Baby (I have my doubts). They contacted an anthropologist to weigh in on this practice.
• Technology review describes some of the work being done by “computational anthropologists.” In this case, they are analyzing Wikipedia to identify “significant people” and how’s these groups of people differ depending on the Wikipedia language version.
• Tricia Wang says what we’re all thinking in an interview on the O’Reilly Radar podcast: “I think oftentimes people expect that the [quantitative] data’s going to give you answers. Data does not give you answers; it gives you inputs.” She says the qualitative and quantitative data have to work together