Anthropological Niche

Same-sex sex has been decriminalized in India!  According to the BBC News report:

A court in the Indian capital, Delhi, has ruled that homosexual intercourse between consenting adults is not a criminal act.

The ruling overturns a 148-year-old colonial law which describes a same-sex relationship as an "unnatural offence".

Homosexual acts were punishable by a 10-year prison sentence.

Many people in India regard same-sex relationships as illegitimate. Rights groups have long argued that the law contravened human rights.

According to Culture Matters, the new book, Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter: Reflections on Research in and of Corporations (Berghahn Books), appears to promise interesting content on corporate anthropology:

1) Melissa Cefkin: Introduction: Business, Anthropology, and the Growth of Corporate Ethnography      
2) Donna K. Flynn: “My Customers are Different!” Identity, Difference, and the Political Economy of Design
3) Chris Darrouzet, Helga Wild, and Susann Wilkinson: Participatory Ethnography at Work: Practicing in the Puzzle Palaces of a Large, Complex Healthcare Organization
4) Brigitte Jordan with Monique Lambert: Working in Corporate Jungles: Reflections on Ethnographic Praxis in Industry
5) Dawn Nafus and ken  anderson : Writing on Walls: The Materiality of Social Memory in Corporate Research   
6) Françoise Brun-Cottan: The Anthropologist as Ontological Choreographer
7) Martin Ortlieb: Emergent Culture, Slippery Culture: Conflicting Conceptualizations of Culture in Commercial Ethnography
8) Jeanette Blomberg: Insider Trading: Engaging and Valuing Corporate Ethnography
9) Michael M. J. Fischer: Emergent Forms of Life in Corporate Arenas

Philippe Bourgois was recently interviewed about what it is like being a public anthropologist.  Here is a part of the abstract from the interview:

Philippe Bourgois' (San Francisco State U) recent book, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Cambridge University Press, 1995), is an engagingly written and candidly honest account of discrimination, education and the underground economy in New York's East Harlem. In addition to an impressive body of work in the venues of academic anthropology, Dr. Bourgois has written articles for The Nation, Harper's Magazine and the New York Times Magazine; and has been featured on the Phil Donahue Show, National Public Radio, Science, People and Fortune Magazine.

The Neuroanthropology blog has posted a list of social networking sites that anthropologists are using to connect and share information.