About this time of the year, I generally do a re-cap of the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting. However, I didn't attend AAAs this year for the first time in five years, so I don't have much to report. Anthropologists' annual awkwardly-timed professional ritual just went down in Washington DC and I thought I would see if anything newsworthy came of it. Doing a Google news search with a variety of permutations of the association name (American Anthropological Association in quotes and not, AAA, etc.) and other keywords (Washington, annual, meeting, 2014, etc.), I managed to find one or two things. As I (and others) have noted before, the AAA meetings don't attract a lot of press. New discoveries or items of broad public interest are apparently not generally discussed at AAA. This year, the most notable item in a news search is the rejection of a resolution to boycott Israel over what the resolution referred to as “Israel’s ongoing, systematic, and widespread violations of Palestinian academic freedom and human rights.”

One other item popped up which actually resembles something newsworthy on the scholarly front (as opposed to the business of the association).  Kari Lyderson at the Crux writes about a movement to bring anthropological expertise to bear on the ongoing Ebola Virus Disease epidemic in West Africa. Sharon Abramowitz, a terrific medical anthropologist at the University of Florida, has helped to found an initiative called the Ebola Emergency Response Initiative, the aim of which is to provide social and cultural expertise to help with control of the EVD epidemic. This is good news and exactly the sort of thing I would like to see more of at AAA. There are many ways that improved cultural understanding by medical personnel and public health practitioners could help to bring this epidemic under control – a point that anthropologist/human behavioral ecologist Barry Hewlett been making for years now. These are issues we've thought about a bit here and that my Ph.D. student Gene Richardson is actively working on in Sierra Leone right now.