David Vine, author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia appeared on Democracy NOW! with Olivier Bancoult, leader of the Chagos refugees.   Speaking of the fate of his people’s culture, Bancoult said “They just want to destroy it. This is why it’s so important for us to have our dignity and our fundamental rights back as all human beings to be able to live in our birthplace.”

David Vine has been working hard to make their story known.

For the last week or so, John Postill has been carefully examining Tom Boellstorff’s Coming of Age in Second Life – an ethnographical work that takes the world of Second Life as its subject. Postill provides a useful summary, though if you backtrack through his posts you can read about each chapter in greater detail.

The book is also winner of the Media Ecology Association’s 2009 Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Culture and received an honorable mention for the 2008 PROSE Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence in Media and Cultural Studies from the Association of American Publishers.

Margaret Mead, possibly the best-known, and certainly one of the most controversial, anthropologists in 20th-century America worked at the American Museum of Natural History for 50 years. On Thursday, November 13, at 6:30pm in the Kaufmann Theater (first floor) Nancy Lutkehaus, Professor of Anthropology, University of Southern California, author of the just-released MARGARET MEAD: THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN ICON, and Mead’s daughter and granddaughter, Mary Catherine Bateson and Sevanne Kassarjian present memories and images of this riveting woman. Introduced by Laurel Kendall, Curator, Division of Anthropology, AMNH. A book signing will follow. This event is co-presented with the Barnard Center for Research on Women and is supported, in part, by Sara Lee Schupf.

For complete line-up of films at the 32nd annual Margaret Mead Film Festival, visit www.amnh.org/mead.