Anthropology ideas - Research Paper Example

The Disappeared: Power over the dead in the aftermath of 9/11 Number The disappeared: Power over the dead in the aftermath of 9/11 is a journal article that depicts the account of how the remains of the victims of the disastrous terror attack on the World Trade Center on 11th September 2001 have been mistreated as well as misused. Furthermore, the article reveals the way in which the human remains were dumped in the Fresh Kills landfill and details how officials arranged to have the unidentified victim remains to be housed in a museum complex (Colwell-Chanthaphoh & Greenwald, 2011).

I believe the article depicts how a large schism was formed between the shared heritage that was formed out of the tragedy and the rights of every American citizen to care for the remains of their family members (Colwell-Chanthaphoh & Greenwald, 2011). From an anthropologist’s point of view, the controversy can bring about two anthropological perspectives. The first is that the actions of the state are working to break the individual right for any American citizen to take care of the remains of the their kin, while the second is that the state’s actions are working to form a new national, shared or common heritage.

I believe anthropologists should not take any side on the issue. In my opinion, the actions of the state will affect some part of the national heritage and change the cultural heritage of the nation.Colonialism, in my opinion, was a system that was largely motivated by the acquisition of natural resources where indigenous people were forced into hard labor. I was naturally aware of the era of colonization but did not really recognize the vast effects it had on the colonies as well as the colonizing nations.

In the colonizing nations, I believe that one of the lingering effects have to do with the mass transportation of the people in the colonies to the colonizing nation for labor. This greatly affected the demography as well as the cultural heritage of the destination country through the sharing and adoption of different cultural values. Colonization introduced the act of reflexibility in anthropology where anthropologists consider past actions in order to choose the topic to be researched and the method by which they write the ethnography.

ReferencesColwell-Chanthaphoh, C., & Greenwald, A. M. (2011). ‘The disappeared’: Power over the dead in the aftermath of 9/11 . Wiley Online Library, 5-11. Retrieved from Wiley Online Library.