Pocahontas and Rebecca: Two Tales of a Captive

The Jamestown colonists’ accounts of their capture of Pocahontas, her reactions to life among them, and the consequences for the success of the colony differ radically from the Mattaponi Indian oral history of the same events, published in 2007. Both versions present themselves as “true” — that is, objective reporting of real events; but the fact that each inverts the other raises questions of validity and, ultimately, of historiography in general. This paper argues that the question of veracity is irrelevant to our interpretation of these accounts. Instead, we must take them as representations of a culturally conceived reality—that is, as myth. Each Pocahontas narrative represents events in terms of contemporary cultural assumptions and agendas: in the case of the English, ideas about savagery and redemption; for the Mattaponi, the moral and economic primacy of native Virginians in the history of the foundation of the colonies and, thus, of the United States. The analysis confirms the idea that the conventional distinction between history and myth is invalid because it depends on Western (i.e., “scientific”) notions about reality and its representation

Video means I See : Media and Anthropological Instruction

The essays in this collection demonstrate that visual media are a more than acceptable substitute for introducing students to ethnographic practice, either on their own or as a complement to face-to-face enquiry

Teaching Star Trek as Anthropology

The original Star Trek television show is a “natural” for teaching anthropology. Like all science fi ction, the show is a refl ection of contemporary concerns--a form of mythology. Beyond this, the original show relied extensively on anthropological theory and ethnography in the construction of its plots. The author’s undergraduate course, described in this paper, aims to make students aware of these and also of the concerns of the nineteen-sixties (Viet Nam, the Cold War, civil rights, Hippies) that motivated many of the episodes. In the process, it illustrates how popular culture texts can be used in the classroom to engage students in ongoing anthropological debates and to demonstrate anthropology’s enduring perspectives and concepts

Museums and Memory

Selected Papers from the Annual Meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society, Staunton, Virginia, March, 2008https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_sasproceed/1004/thumbnail.jp

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead