MIT Department of Anthropology

News Archive

MIT Anthropology

News Archive

Amberly Steward featured in Boston Globe

April 25, 2014

MIT Anthropology's Administrative Officer, Amberly Steward, was featured in a photo essay in the Boston Globe on the lunch break habits of working people in the Boston area.

MIT music documentary pays tribute to the Arab Spring

May 21, 2013

The PBS affiliate WGBH Boston/Channel 2 will air the MIT music documentary "Awakening: Evoking the Arab Spring through Music" on Friday, May 31 at 10:30pm. The documentary was directed by MIT Anthropology lecturer Chris Boebel and is the first work that MIT Video Productions has produced specifically for broadcast television.

Iris Sheu wins 2013 Howe Prize

May 14, 2013

MIT Anthropology is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2013 James Howe Prize is Iris Sheu for her paper entitled "Patient Barriers to Mental Health Care for the Cambodian Population in Lowell, MA."

Yehuda C. Goodman — Hebrew University of Jerusalem

March 1, 2013

Yehuda Goodman, senior lecturer in the department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a visiting scholar at MIT Anthropology, studies conversion to Judaism among immigrants recently arriving in Israel. Becoming a more integrated citizen in Israeli Jewish society involves a complex process of conversion, carried out in religious courts by Orthodox rabbis who act as official agents of the state. Goodman explores the variable interpretations and constructions of the converted subjects by the courts — especially Russian and Ethiopian immigrants — as well as the discursive negotiations among the participants.

The MIT Anthropology Mola

November 1, 2012

During his more than 40 years working with the Kuna people of Panama, Professor James Howe established a close, collegial relationship with the subjects of his research, people who became agents as well as subjects of their own ethnography. Some years ago, Howe commissioned from a Kuna woman a special tapestry called a mola for the MIT Anthropology Program.

Stefan Helmreich wins Rachel Carson Prize for Alien Ocean

October 30, 2012

Professor Stefan Helmreich's book Alien Ocean, Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, has won the 2012 Rachel Carson Book Prize, given by the Society for the Social Study of Science to recognize a book-length work of special social or political relevance in the area of science and technology studies.