Right. I hope you can all hear me. I'm David Moss, and I'm a member of the Anthropology Department at SOAS. I'm going to say something about the department, but really what I'm going to do is give you a bit of a taster lecture. The focus of the lecture, the purpose of the lecture is to tell you something about what anthropology is. How might we distinguish anthropology from other disciplines, other social sciences, and other subjects? Of course, I'd like to be able to do this in a more interactive way, and I would normally do that, because anthropology is a discipline that is often in which we learn significantly through interactions. However, we're stuck with this, and I'm going to give you the lecture, and then hopefully there'll be time for questions, and I can talk about studying as a postgraduate at SOAS, and maybe reference some of the different MA programs that you may be interested in or have already applied or registered for. So the anthropology department at SOAS is one of the leading departments in the country, and SOAS is in fact a rather special place in which to study anthropology, because as you will discover, the department is located in perhaps what is the world's largest concentration of regional specialists in the humanities and social sciences anywhere. So as anthropologists, we find many interconnections between the different fields of history, of politics, of literature, and religion, while providing a distinctive focus in our own subject. Sometimes SOAS itself can feel like one big anthropology department, and unlike many bigger universities at SOAS, anthropology is really at the center of the school and one of its most important subject areas, connecting out to history, to development studies, the study of religions, law, politics, and of course the many languages and literatures that are taught at SOAS, which give depth to our work. All in a university that is small enough for these connections to really count for something, but what is anthropology? And I think specifically the question is what is social and cultural anthropology, because there's another field of biological anthropology, the evolution and the characteristics of the human body, which I'm not going to talk about and which isn't taught at SOAS. Anthropology is a big field. After all, it has the whole of human society as its subject. Its aim is to understand humanity through its social and cultural variety, establishing what we as humans share and how we are differently formed by our particular societies. And it's through studying difference that we come to an understanding of what is distinctive about being human and what we share, whether the inhabitants of villages in the Amazon forests, tribals in the uplands, Indian farmers in South India, stock market traders in New York, immigrant in North East London, or factory workers in China. And today anthropologists are interested in the global processes that connect people across the world. Amazon livelihoods are threatened by demand for beef consumed in New York. As forests turn into grazing land, these connections are what we often look at. The Beijing Olympics to give another example produced a spike in demand for copper. And with it, brought dispossession to tribal or adivasi communities in India, shaping their mobilization by the Maoist activists. And now a virus jumps from bats to humans in a wet market or escapes a virology lab in Wuhan and other reasons. And two months, three months later, our lives are changed by COVID-19. Never have we been more aware of how humanity in its diversity is interconnected. And as anthropologists study these global interconnections, some of the frictions, some of the tensions involved in these global interconnections come to light. Now, anthropology is a science committed to discovering general principles and laws of human social life through verifiable fact. But it's also one of the humanities, like history, describing and interpreting cultures and societies. It's sometimes said of anthropology that it is the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanistic of the sciences. The topics that can be studied in anthropology are almost infinite. But what I'm going to suggest to you is that as an approach to these and any subject, there are three things that define and distinguish anthropology. And this is what I want you to perhaps take away from this lecture. The first is that anthropology has a comparative perspective, finding the universal and the particular in its cultural diversity. Second, anthropology has a method focused on fieldwork and direct experience of the human scale. Thirdly, it's a perspective that is holistic in the sense that it finds connections between different aspects of life in society. And I'll talk about these each in turn. So first of all, anthropologists cross cultural comparative perspective. By looking at how cultural life or economy or religion and even thought itself is organized differently in different societies, anthropologists are able to challenge some of the taken for granted assumptions about the what and how we in the cultural West look at it, whether we whether we're talking about economic systems, the environment, health, or the human person and mind. Anthropologists can challenge other disciplines such as economics or psychology that have built culturally Western assumptions into their theories and methods. So for example, a few years ago, I was investigating why credit schemes in tribal communities in upland, the western Indian region, a very poor and deprived region, why these credit schemes were failing. The project economists I worked with assumed that villagers would treat money and save and bank and borrow and repay as we in the West would. But these tribal villagers didn't treat money in that way. They didn't, as they were meant to, save and disperse loans and recover repayments from credit funds. Their farming economy was based on labor exchange and a system called Chandler through which villages would mobilize large sums of money and the system at a time at particular times of need, maybe when they were paring land or house building or for medical emergencies or marriages or funerals. In this Chandler system, it was obligation, the obligation of one family to another that was accumulated and accumulated in social networks and it was this obligation that was banked and not money. Money in this society was not a store of social obligation. Money savings into the project count didn't accumulate the social obligations that were part of the way that their economy worked. Borrowing from credit funds did not produce obligation to repay and for this reason the credit schemes failed. Through the failure of these schemes, the project economists were challenged to think about money and obligation and credit in a different way. And as an anthropologist on this project it was my task to try to discover what was different and what was distinctive and why this particular development program wasn't working. Nowadays I work as a psychological anthropologist and here my work shows me that different societies sustain quite different assumptions about the human mind and thought. In turn produce different mental experiences. The ideas that we in the West may have about separate individual minds and psychological processes in our heads are those which underpin western psychiatry and its diagnostic categories such as depression or psychosis. Don't privilege the theater of the mind as a site of action or where there are more porous ideas of mind distress is manifest perhaps more often as pain in the body or maybe as the presence of spirits in ways that are not recognized by western diagnostic categories. And this I found when working in South India and looking in particular at spirit possession and exorcism and the treatment of mental distress there. But other anthropologists have also examined these things and these turn out also to be relevant in looking at mental distress and its treatment in culturally diverse settings such as I do in a North London mental health service. The anthropologist Tanya Lerman has led us a team of researchers systematically looking at the degree to which the mind is understood and experienced as porous or as bounded. Bounded as we might in the West think of ourselves as the possessors of individual separate minds. To which inner experience is presumed to be important. We may prioritize inner experience in our discussion with each other about how we are and what's going on but this is not always a university of the case. The degree to which thoughts we often just sorry the degree to which thoughts we often describe as the imagination or fantasy are in other settings considered to be real real phenomena out there in the world. Now there is of course a tension between anthropologists discovery of culturally different experiences and ways of being and the strive to understand universal human characteristics. A tension between discovering similarity and highlighting differences which goes to the core of the of what the subject is about. For example to stick with the psychological anthropology examples the human brain has inherent characteristics for fantasy for vivid imagination. You think only of the imaginary friends that children might have the ability hypnotize ability the capacity to enter into states of trance. These are all capacities which are inherent in the human brain but these capacities are worked on by cultures and can allow that can allow people to experience different aspects of themselves as autonomous or outside of themselves in certain cultural contexts when patterned in certain cultural ways. In some societies and cultures various experiences of dissociation or imaginary friends are tolerated and encouraged and accepted in others they are purged out or pathologized as mental disorders rather than being cultivated or treated as real. The idioms the form or the behavior or the symptoms that signal distress vary across cultures even though the experience of distress and affliction is itself universe. So in thinking about these different experiences of being human anthropologists challenge what we call ethnocentrism. They adopt a cultural relativism methodologically and ethically in which we don't form judgments about the validity of other ways of thinking and experiencing. If the Azandi a tribe in Africa believe in witches we don't dismiss this as irrational but really try to understand what is it that sustains such a belief. What would the world need to be like for witches to be real? How does that understanding make sense? But if each culture makes sense only in its own terms how do we compare them? How do we compare one culture with the witches only understandable in its own terms? And this is a challenge that a challenge to anthropologists. We may use ideas like kinship or religion or economy to compare across cultures but then we might discover that kinship or religion is not a meaningful category in other places or other cultures. So we become caught up in the cultural fixity if you like of our own language and our own categories. Some anthropologists say that we simply cannot reduce differences of experience or ontology the understanding of what is real and what is not real. And we have to accept and only use people's own understandings. If to take the example from the anthropologist Eduardo de Veros de Castro if people in the Amazonian community he studied tell him that that the jaguar shape shifted into a human this should be taken at face value and not explained away in other terms. Other anthropologists disagree and insist that comparison is possible and necessary. And so as of course the so-called Western cultural viewpoint isn't the only one that is challenged through anthropology it isn't the only starting point as a very intercultural cross-cultural community. We have different cultural starting points for the cross-cultural study that is anthropology. So that was a few points about the first distinguishing characteristic of anthropology as a discipline that focuses on cross-cultural experiences and comparison. The second characteristic of anthropology is its distinctive method. Knowledge that is anthropological could be said to come from first-hand encounters from living among those we write about often for long periods of time and repeatedly over decades. And this means that anthropology is a discipline at the human scale. We have things to say about big issues whether on global environment or human migration or religion or global poverty and health mass media new information technologies of course pandemics. But we do so from the perspective of an understanding of human social relations culture interests are from observation and particularly from participation that comes from fieldwork even though we also use archives and surveys and other instruments there's something experimental in the practice of anthropology. You understand a phenomena by becoming a part of it and experiencing that phenomena that society that culture that institution along with those who are living who live their lives within it. Anthropology is a discipline in that sense of the everyday and of the present. The instrument of anthropological data collection is not primarily a questionnaire survey or an experimental design or a research protocol. The instrument of anthropological data collection is the person of the anthropologist a person trained to use their capacities for social engagement and subjectivity to make sense of another world. And this is what we call fieldwork and of course it's varied depending upon the different position that we have within a particular culture of society or institution that we're part of. So I've experienced different roles in relation to different periods being an anthropologist in my career from being a visitor, a guest living in a South Indian village for a year or so as an outsider learning to become and experience the day-to-day life of that community. Later on I worked as I mentioned earlier as a development project worker where I was both an insider of a community in that case a development project team but also an outsider in relation to the villages in an Indian region that the program was focused on. And the ethnography the writing up of this experience that I produced was both of the culture and society of an international development organization and of the interaction between that and the local communities that was a different position I was a partly insider and partly outsider. Subsequently I worked as an anthropologist visiting research fellow at the headquarters of the World Bank in Washington DC that was understood a bit like a village in order to understand the experience I'd had in living in South India and living in a village gave me skills to understand what were the driving social relationships and divisions and separations on my peers and rituals of a huge organization and in its headquarters. Subsequently I worked as an anthropologist studying the work of Dalit activists those who are placed at the bottom or excluded within the Indian car system discriminated as untouchables and I became enrolled onto their campaigns so I became a kind of activist researcher working alongside others on some important issues of human rights. And currently I work as an anthropologist within a mental health service in North London where I am embedded in a community mental health team where in order to understand and to be practised in a particular approach to mental health care so that I could become embedded and gain an understanding of the issues and concerns and questions around mental health care by becoming part of the process that I wanted to understand. So anthropology involves this tension between participation being close up and engaged in activities but it also involves standing right back zooming out and asking questions about what kind of a practice and experience is this a process of distanciation alongside the participation of getting close. So we stand we get very close to phenomena but they also stand right back and reflect on processes and reflect and write. There's a tension between participation and distanciation being very close and being being a part in order to reflect and write that is characteristic of the discipline. Anthropologists produce ethnography the writing the reflective critical analytical writing is essential to what anthropologists the process that is involved in writing is one that takes experience from one context and places it in another as we engage in comparative analysis as we as we relate to anthropological theory as we engage with other researchers working on other themes. So that's when we take our experiences as from fieldwork and we place them in another kind of context in our writing and then we take those writings back to the communities in which we have studied and to whom we have gained a closeness and there's another round of of engagement as this iterative and collaborative process kind of continues. Okay so that's the second characteristic of anthropology that it's its distinctive method the third thing I want to point to anthropology is the characteristic of holism I don't mean holism in the sense that there is a definable whole with boundaries and the frontiers that we can understand about any society or culture or situation. What I mean is that the reflective writing based on fieldwork that we that I've just said we call anthropology is a perspective that brings an interest in the relationships between different aspects of human existence. We refuse to be limited by the normal boundaries and to make connections between different aspects of everyday life between the emotions and the environment between social honor and economics between marriage and markets between family and finances and so on. The one when I say things are holistic is that anthropology is a discipline that tries to make connections by widening the pot as far as possible the field of what's relevant and what's interesting in a particular situation including the physical environment the emotional environment the myths the stories the history the architecture in which in which social life takes place all there is no thing there is nothing that in the sense is is not relevant to understanding a particular set of of relationships and phenomenology we take the widest possible view and make connections between different aspects of life as of course individuals do in the day to day living of lives in particular cultures. Some of the benefits or an example of the benefits of thinking outside of the box of raising unfamiliar questions because you're not bound by the normal disciplinary silos is that it's not a coincidence that it was an anthropologist Gillian Tett who was one of the few analysts to anticipate the 2008 financial crisis who she now works at the in the financial times applying her skills in ethnographic research on marriage systems and Tajikistan applying the things ways of thinking she'd she'd she'd learned through looking at the marriage systems to JP Morgan in 2006 the financial organization she discovered that the insular culture was leading to the creation of financial instruments that had little basis and could cause severe economic disruption. She's gone on to do work and has recently published a book called silo thinking look called the silo effect where every organization needs to disrupt it where she challenges the non holistic perspective of many disciplines that don't make don't look outside of particular bounded fields to raise critical questions of what's going on and it's often by adopting a different and unusual perspective that we can address some of the more critical questions that we face in society and in organizations. From our fieldwork approach and holism comes this ability to pose unfamiliar questions questions that are unfamiliar within any given field and allows anthropologists to be disruptive in some ways by by bringing in unfamiliar questions. And this has led to anthropologists making significant contributions in different sorts of fields maybe thinking about policy in the world I work in in international development. Colleagues of mine have do so similarly in relation to things like post-disaster reconstruction or in health management or in apprenticeship and craft work to start some of the fields in which my colleagues work and in many of these areas anthropologists are introducing surprising facts and surprising lines of questioning. So as we do this on the basis of quite long term and in-depth regional knowledge and my colleagues have expertise on different parts of Africa and Asia Nigeria or Malaya or Tanzania Ethiopia Yemen India Japan China and often this expertise has been acquired over many years through many repeat visits through acquiring linguistic and cultural familiarity with particular places and peoples and then bringing that to some of our thematic MA programs that many of you will be interested in whether in medical anthropology whether in migration and diaspora studies whether in the anthropology of food or the anthropology of development or in museums and and material culture or in the core social anthropology MA that some of you may be interested in that we that we also we also run. So I'm going to to pause there because I as I said I want this to be interactive and to answer questions or points that anybody might want to have either in relation to what I've just said or been saying or in relation to the experience of studying anthropology at SOAS and I will I will answer as best I can and hopefully we can have a bit of a bit of a discussion. So it's over to you and would anybody like to if you if you can speak and you've got your microphone on then put your question out there if you can't then put your question in a in the chat and I'll see if I can I'll read it out so others can hear it and then we can have a have a discussion based on the questions that have been put on the on the chat. If you want to raise yeah I think there's a raised hand function but I'm not sure how that's going to going to work so maybe we better stick with chat or if people can put that question. Anybody got a question or a question for Amy who has also is on here and Amy if you haven't seen if people haven't seen that she says hi I'm Amy I'm in London a current SOAS student and here to answer questions about student life in the anthropology department which of course is probably the most helpful voice to hear at this stage if you're thinking about studying anthropology in London at SOAS. Yeah I'll just I'll verbally introduce myself as well. I did a BA my BA at SOAS in social anthropology for three years and now I'm doing my masters in known Middle Eastern studies which isn't in the anthropology department but I've taken anthropology modules and still have quite close connections with the department so I can still answer questions about postgraduate life in that department. Thanks Amy that was that was Amy speaking wasn't it? Yeah sorry I can't see anybody so it's difficult to know. I mean maybe we maybe while people are get oh hang on we've got a question at what what um hi question from uh um Mabluk uh Woody Mann from Indonesia what and how the anthropology um can give solutions to the pandemic of the corona? Okay that's a that's a really interesting question um and actually I am currently putting together a research application to look at coronavirus and its impacts and particularly in relation to mental health because that's of concern to me. I think anthropology is actually very well placed to think about the impacts of the corona pandemic because the pandemic is of two kinds on the one hand the pandemic is a matter of infectious disease and that requires medical expertise to figure out how to manage that. On the other hand the impact of corona uh virus and COVID-19 is significantly about the way it has changed social relationships the kinds of social distancing the disruption to social relationships the shifts in the way that people connect and relate to each other um of course that has impacts on the economy or will have impacts on the economy so much as at the center of of the impacts of COVID quite apart from the um the strictly infectious disease control aspects are the impact on society and social relationships and anthropologists by by looking at those impacts close up um looking at the way in which people interact differently and how they adapt to the new forms of isolation the new forms of social sociality social relating is going to be crucial to how we adapt to the new way of living that the coronavirus is going to impose in the coming months. Okay another question um for Rose hello mostly a question for Amy um Amy can you see that question sorry it's been covered already in the presentation but I'm wondering what are the main strengths of so as compared to other British universe according to you Amy. Yep hello Rose um yeah I've just been jotting some things down uh I think what first came to mind uh the especially the anthropology department has its own very small library on the fifth floor called the Helen Kinnicka library and um this year I saw a lot more post-grad students in that in that library um but just the library in itself the South Library I'm not sure if you've visited the campus yet um but it's it's quite an amazing place to be the the collections they have there the whole of the ground floor is or most of the ground floor is um for anthropology theoretical stuff and then the next four floors are for specialist interests and really it's super interesting stuff there um yeah so the South Library is a really special place and also the the campus um is is quite a small campus and that has its pros and cons you know in between lectures that can be quite you know dodging the people but um also because it's so small you you really get close to people on your course and you get to see familiar faces every day and you can really make some strong connections with interesting people from across the world um and this you can learn as much from the experience outside of your lectures as so as as you can um in in the lectures um and also I found especially in the anthropology department the well especially my supervisor as well they really give you a lot of time there's the the department's quite big there's a lot of students in the department but my supervisor there gave me a lot of time and um compared to the department I mean now it was really a friendly place to be yeah I'm just just to quickly sorry Amy don't want to interrupt no no it's okay I'm just I don't know whether you you have the point I made at the the the beginning um about the fact that that is to so as not only is so as a relatively small university so it's it's it's meaningful when we talk about being a community because there really is that that that intensive interaction albeit it'll be different with social distancing or physical distancing but because we're in a we're in a university where everybody is interested in in cross cultural comparison where the cultural diversity of perspectives whether in a whole range of disciplines art architecture um law social science developments um media is what everybody is doing I said anthropology is in some so as it is in some sense itself a very large anthropology department um so the the depth of regional expertise that you have in so as which is a luxury for anthropologists to be surrounded by people who really know about the cultures and languages and histories and literatures of their particular regions in which anthropology means that we have an opportunity to acquire a kind of depth to our anthropological work and that means anthropologists are among the leading anthropologists in the country and I think that comes into um the nature of the teaching that you get so that's that I think that's one of the key things that distinguishes so as from other uh other other departments and we've got some other questions coming in here um Guy I studied philosophy for my first degree a long time ago and I mentioned any connections between philosophy anthropology as a follow-up I'll be a mature student and would like to know what preparation I should make to get ready for academic study again um so uh anthropology is is profoundly interconnected to philosophy and philosophy borrows from from anthropology um at the core of anthropology is a question about what are we what does it mean to be human what is knowledge given that we can't assume um the uh the the the the the objectivity around us um uh in a taken for granted way so there are there are all sorts of like a very long answer to that but I think there's time for that but but to say that a background with a first degree in philosophy is a very good foundation um for anthropology you will find um philosophical questions threaded through the different um aspect of of anthropology it's because anthropology apart from the other it's a very self-reflective discipline constantly asking itself about the foundations of its own knowledge and understanding given its encounter with different kinds of epistemologies and ontologies and other cultures and ways of being and experiencing reality as a mature student what would you do to prepare well I would suggest some uh you know reading some general apology books um and uh there are some I think on the website or or you can send a message to the convener of the program that you're interested in studying and they will send you some basic readings that might be uh that might be interesting and get you going um a question from Neville how important do you think it is to study a language and is it possible to study one as an additional module I'm interested in Asia but not exactly sure which region yet um it is important it's it's certainly uh it's certainly an advantage if you can study a language and it is possible to study a language as one of one of your modules at SOAS that is one of the other characteristics that SOAS has is the teaching of a wide range of languages and there's every encouragement given to students uh to study a language alongside their um alongside their their other subjects a specific study uh you can again have discussions more in more detail with the particular conveners of your program which Asian region you might be interested in which which language therefore might be relevant to you yeah um Amy's said and I think I would agree with this Thomas um Erickson's book Small Places Large Issues a good book good introduction to anthropology I've definitely endorsed that uh that suggestion um yeah I just wanted to add as well about the study in languages um I studied Arabic with my undergrad and I found it was not only you know interesting and it was just also a nice balance between anthropology and something quite practical um just different skills I think it was really a good idea to do the language if that's something you want to do and I think I think becoming familiar with another language also uh particularly a non-European language um where words and categories and and verbal forms are different also means you there's some experience of the different kinds of thinking that that that that that that different languages permit uh or or become habitual so it's it's languages closely connected to some of the broader questions that we ask as anthropologists any other any other questions perhaps Amy maybe we can have a conversation while waiting for others to come up with questions I'm just curious to know um or um you managed to combine different things language learning and sub and regional um you know regionally focused area study type work and thematic subject specific studies there were different frameworks and how did you find combining those different things in your study um yeah I'm I'm not sure if if it's something that is uh in the post-squared modules but I found in in year two you have to pick the compulsory um ethnographic region you know the ethnography of South Asia um ethnography of West Africa and I found uh that really helped me to um have a regional interest but also I found in my undergrads the the the compulsory modules we had to choose like uh social theory and that was the other one contemporary trends they there was so many connections between that and the other um the options we had to choose um um and the languages the yeah there was it all connects I I feel so in that sense is also a really good place to be because you you speak to people where so many themes connect and I found one of the biggest themes that's so us that's often discussed in I feel in every course is the politics of knowledge production and so us itself as a community as as um as lecturers as students are always questioning themselves about what does all of this mean anyway this thinking about different places of the world um who can think about different places of the world there's always this self-reflexive um questioning of of the the meaning of the point of so I asked the point of study and all this and it's really a challenge um which I'm glad I was I I had experienced um and it was one of the sorry I just I wanted to I was going to go to Sussex to do anthropology but I found uh when I visited SAS and I saw the posters on the wall and I saw how there's a big protest already going on it it was um it felt more of a challenge and that's why I chose us I think and I if somebody answered the earlier question about what was what's special about so as I think one of the things and I should perhaps have said this earlier is is this is the student body I mean we as as teachers learn every year from the students who we teach because of the the great diversity of backgrounds and experiences that people bring and so as a student at so as you're taught not only by the teachers but you're taught through the encounters in exchange with all the other students and very um skilled rich inexperienced and and understanding peers of yours um as you as your classmates as you go through your your degree um okay so we've got some questions more questions come here um will there be any modules particularly disrupted the online learning in term one for example language modules or is there good preparation across modules well I can't speak for all modules I'd like we're obviously in a fast moving situation and I think every effort is being made to um adapt for online uh online presentation and discussions in the um in in term one I don't think that that's um you know I mean obviously I don't I'm not I wouldn't say that any I can't say which or any particular modules are more could be more uh affected by moving online than others um but I think generally speaking yes I would say that there is good preparation across the modules um never another question can be language I'm also a mature student um 54 high um my self employment over 20 years has mostly gone in the current as it mostly got in the sorry I'm misreading this myself and bottom 20 years has mostly gone in the current crisis which is interesting to say the least the positive is I now find it can now finally do this which I've considered for a long time fantastic the university of the third age are there many my age I'm considering studying part time how many hours a week study might realistically be um the yes there are many age range of students so as is a ticket post graduate level is very broad um I think we have a lot of people who come to study um later on post career bringing all that richness of experience um to study um yeah that that that is you will not definitely you would not be alone or or unusual um at so as um how many hours of study well you normally follow four sort of um uh courses at any one time if you were doing it full time you'd be doing two rather than four um so you might find your lectures are on two different days and then you have tutorial groups so you might you might be one or two day two days the lectures would be an hour an hour long tutorial groups an hour an hour or more individual meetings with your tutor um on a as often as you felt was necessary um seminars and other things to participate in that'll give you some idea of the um of the weekly load in terms of hours I hope that's I hope that's helpful again please send a message to your program convener um you can find who that is on the website um for some more follow-up information on in relation to that question because I can't immediately think of the number the number of hours that would actually be a week four or five or something I'm not exactly sure um is there um is there a presentation file and certificate I don't know understand that is there presentation file and certificate I'm not sure I understand that question um sorry maybe could that be put in a slightly different way is there um a question uh from Elizabeth um oh okay sorry we've got an answer that we're preparing to adapt and teach all course of modules online via blended learning this is happening now for current students as they complete their studies this year yes um there you are guy um uh around the same age as Neville I wanted to see Amy here again I wanted to confirm with Elizabeth as well that the from because we received the email from Sirce yesterday that they were going to reopen the library in the campus is maybe that's something other people want to know as well yeah yeah the the library I think various bits of the campus bits the campus will be will be open um obviously with the um in in in ways that will allow use of those facilities that comply with the government's public health instructions around distancing um surfaces touching and so on this is a changing field and we don't know where we'll be in September exactly we don't know where we'll be in in January um but we expect some combination of online and offline small group uh physically distanced um teaching arrangements to be in place as as we go as we go forward I don't know Amy where you've any any thoughts on um on how you might imagine so as in a physically distanced environment um but I think that um you know I think it will be as as we move forward um in a probably a slow and step by step way um to um to have on campus as well as off as well as online uh teaching over the coming months another thing that just to mention that we have in our um as part of the postgraduate program obviously at the the writing of an independent piece of research your dissertation um is a key part of of studying at postgraduate level where you become in the driving seat you you shift being a consumer of knowledge to being a producer of knowledge working closely one-to-one with the super with your dissertation supervisor many of our students do uh field work what that field work means now is is uh is obviously in question but this year's cohort of students um quite a number of whom I'm supervising at them I've been um as to how they're doing their research uh dissertations using online um uh platforms online resources finding new ways of of posing questions and searching for answers doing a different kind of ethnography you remember I talked about the key element of anthropology being field work and ethnography but using using the present circumstance to to think creatively about about projects that they could develop um normally when we get back hopefully we will get back to um ordinary entrance um people do field work based assignments in some of the modules um throughout the the teaching terms as well as leading to in preparation to and as well as things that lead up to your uh dissertation work um we've got a question here uh from Bridget's um I'm trying to choose modules for the anthropology food would it be a good idea to choose a range of modules across disciplines or specific modules um I think I think it partly depends on how um how sort of closely tied uh degree to be in the sense thematically uh interconnecting and the synergies between different uh different modules or how you want to have a wide ranging breadth of of knowledge um I would suggest you discuss that in more specific detail based on your own uh where your career is going what you want to do next what skills you think you want to develop and do that with the program convener of the MA um the food MA uh Dr Jacob Klein that that would be my advice okay so eat your food food security module um yes again the specifics of how much overlap there is between selected modules and the ones that you're interested in and whether there's overlap with the core module that's something you should take up with with with Jacob as I say I teach a module on culture and psychiatry which is um anthropology and mental health psychological anthropology this uh year we had quite a lot of people from different MA programs including the anthropology of food interested in the relationships between food and mental health now that may be something that is of interest to some on the MA food program and and and not others others might be interested in the anthropology of development in relation to food or food in relation to migration and and diaspora so um the connections can be made uh in any way that you think will be of particular interest to you and maybe thinking about your option choices in terms of where your what the thing you want to focus on in your dissertation so that becomes a way preparing for your research project yeah I just want to add um I found it from a personal experience it it took me quite a lot of time in my BA just to figure out what anthropology is and um I could imagine that if you have to write a dissertation that I because I know there's a lot of choices that's where you can pick from across different departments and and you can do development studies or any other from any other department but um yeah I found it quite nice in my BA just to choose only anthropology modules and really get an understanding of what anthropology is because that's a huge question in itself as you could probably tell from David's lecture and things it's it's lots of different things in different moments of time as well yeah thanks Amy for all for all I'm just doing just to encourage people I think we're going to have to um end the session um shortly um but just to say that um do please questions by emailing um the program conveners um you'll find them on the anthropology MA programs if you if you click through you'll find the person who is the MA convener for that particular program and you can carry on the conversation and answer any of the any specific questions you've got or maybe have a and you're probably offered to have a phone call with you to chat through um some of the specifics that relate to your circumstances and the choices that you have to make um you know given given where you are at the moment so please don't don't hesitate to get in touch with um with people we're here to you know to really encourage people to talk through um the choices that they they they they have to make at the moment we have a later rival Frederick very much interested in the cultural and social end of anthropology which is the sub um and with some aspects as well well that's very much you you've come to the right place that's what so has focus is on and Liz is reminding us that if you have any individual admissions questions please email her uh it's the details are in the chat box and I think uh I think that um deadline for admissions off the top of my head um can anybody answer that question 31st of July um anyone Frederick uh interest in uh people in relation to cultural and social aspects contact the um the convener of the MA social anthropology would probably be the best um if you look on the website under the MA programs and so has and you've looked at social anthropology which is our sort of general um introduction to uh anthropology particularly for people who don't have a any background in anthropology although all of the MA programs none of them all assume that there is no background in anthropology so it can be studied by anybody um that would be the person to continue that conversation and I'm going to put my email up in case Henry wants to contact me for any further information dm21atsoas.ac.uk um so um any any further uh any any further questions you want to put to me drop me an email and I'll get back to you as soon as I can and just to say as um is that although 31st July is the deadline and we because I think we're in difficult and unusual circumstances we would certainly um consider applications after this date as well. Great thank you David very much for your presentation and for answering all those questions um and thank you to Elizabeth um as well and Amy um I hope you all enjoyed the session we'll be sending a recording of um of the presentation around I know um we was Frederick joined a bit late so you'll be able to see the whole session and the whole talk um that'll be available uh next week at the end of our open day series so thank you all again very much for connecting with us today I hope you enjoyed it and um thank you David for taking the time to speak with us. Great nice to nice to meet you all in this um in indirect way and hopefully um see many of you um through one medium or another um in the autumn and and into the new year welcome to SOAS


Thank you, Isabel, for a fantastic presentation, and giving us a really good foundation for some of the discussion that's going to follow today about the program itself. Next on, we have Professor Ron Costana, who's a professor of Data Sciences at Cranfield and also head of the Cranfield Environment Centre. Ron was one of two digital environment champions that were appointed in the early days of the constructing a digital environment program, along with Professor Steve Hallett, who's sat at the front table here, do you want to give everyone a wave, Steve? Thank you. So really the intention of this session, as you can see from the title, is just to walk you through some of the activities, some of the funded investments, the demonstrators, feasibility studies that have been undertaken during the course of the program, but also importantly some of the community engagement that has been undertaken in parallel as well. So Ron's going to walk you through some of those things and towards the end of this presentation I'll be reflecting on the wider impact and legacy of CDE.


Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Kiran, Srinivas Murthy. I'm going to present a topic on hyperconvergence and also talk about how Maxta has integrated with OpenStack. So in general, you guys might have heard quite a bit about hyperconvergence. I'm assuming either here in the trade shows and everywhere else, there's a huge infrastructure built upon hyperconvergence. So what is hyperconvergence? If you really look at it, the idea of bringing all these different components together and having it built in a data center with just industry standard servers is the key for building a hyperconverged model. So but what does it provide us? So one of the key aspects is provides the abilities of very seamless scale up and scale out capabilities. It provides us with shared storage capabilities.  And it supports physical as well as virtual environments. So the next question is, why would I want to deploy hyperconvergence? What benefits does it bring me? First and foremost, it really simplifies the whole IT administration and how you deploy the resources. How do you procure the resources? It makes it really simple from an end-to-end process point of view. That's one key aspect. The second aspect of it is, it gives the ability to build a Lego-like environment. Hey, you need more compute resources? You add more compute resources. You need more, say, storage resources? You add more storage resources. You don't have to plan anything upfront. Today, one of the biggest aspects of data center management is to envision what I need to procure in the next year or two years or three years. You don't have to go through that process anymore. It gives you a very seamless, small building blocks that you can use to scale as you need to scale. The next aspect, which is pretty important, is the ability to run on any standard servers. We all know that the server technology is making it really worthwhile to go deploy hundreds of them in a data center. It gives you the performance that you need. It gives you the cost efficiencies that you need. And today, especially Intel servers, you have 18 cores on a single socket. So you buy a dual socket. You have 32 cores. You have enough CPU resources. So using those to give you all the capabilities, you get a much cost-efficient and a cost-effective solution. That's one of the key aspects of being able to build a hyper-convert solution. So why now?  Why not five years back? Why not 10 years back? Why not two years from now? What makes it? And also if you look at the evolution, how has storage evolved? If you understand these concepts, it makes a lot of sense as why hyper-convergence makes sense today. If you look at the evolution, why would customers are trying out different things? One of the key aspects is to simplify management. How can I easily deploy resources? How can I easily plan my resources? So if you look at your traditional storage today, enterprise storages, EMC, NetApp, HP, Dell, it doesn't matter. The idea is it takes a long time to go configure them. You need your server resources. You need to coordinate with the server group. You need your storage resources. You work with your storage group. You need your network resources. You work with your networking group. Bringing all these together takes a quite good amount of time and sometimes months together. So companies evolved and they said, hey, what if I can make this simple? What if I give you the entire rack? It might be from different vendors, but I package everything in a single rack and give the rack as a solution to the customer. Companies like VCE came into existence with their VBlock, with NetApp, with FlexPod, with SmartStack. So all these convert solutions makes it simple, but it's not good enough. It still takes weeks before you can configure it. So hyperconvergence was evolved from there to say, I'll make it really simple. It is one building block that you go deploy and install. So installation is in seconds or maybe even minutes. So it makes it really simple for you to go deploy. So the other aspect is, if you think of why now, why not a few years back or why not moving forward? One of the key aspects, as I mentioned, is the availability of CPU resources. I have so much of resources that I can use today to give all the storage capabilities. Previously it was hard. I mean, there was probably 12 sockets with four cores in them. And having allocation for your compute resources and having allocate additional resources for storage was tough. So it became harder to combine all of them together. But now you have abundant of resources to really package all of these things together to give you the capabilities that you need. So if you sit back and think, how am I going in circles? So 20 years back, everybody used direct-attach storage.  And then people and end users said, ah, it's not working out. I need a sand infrastructure. It gives me better availability. It gives me better resiliency. I need to move away from direct-attach storage. But now if you look back, the approach is we are going back in circles to say, hey, direct-attach is the right way to go. So but now what is difference? Well, why now? What made it different? If you look at, there are a few aspects that's really different. One is, one big aspect is virtualization. It brings a whole different paradigm to your whole infrastructure. Makes it simple to deploy. Makes it easy. Gives me the ability to be agile. I can move my VMs any way I need. I can move it to any server I need. So makes it really different. Before, you could not do it with your classic applications. You could not move it from server one to server two. It did not even provide you with the availability, right? Hey, if something failed on server one, I could not use my application. I had to wait till my server came back up. So today with virtualization, it's some other server will pick it up. You can move your VMs over. Things change. The other aspect that changed was the whole global namespace thing. Hey, it's one global namespace across all the servers that I have. So it doesn't matter whether your VM is running on server one or server 100. It just doesn't matter, right? You get the access to your application. So some of these things really made it different compared to what it was a few years back. So it's not more, it's something more than just a direct-attached storage. It's day and night. So they are completely different from each other. And the other important aspect is also around having the ability to scale out gives you or eliminates the need for the storage islands, if I may say, right? Previously, if you really looked at it, I had my storage for my, say, a mail server. I had my storage for my database servers. So they were all individually customized to those needs. So today, that's not true anymore. I have a global pool of storage and the software is intelligent to handle what it needs. It's intelligent to understand, hey, this is a high performance virtual machine or a high performance application. I need to store it here. Or this is more of an archival-based application. I'm going to move this data to a different tier. So the software is intelligent enough to deal with these things. That's what makes it unique and that's what makes it easier to also use direct-attached storage versus having to buy an enterprise-class storage array. So the other question that comes into mind is, can I use it across all use cases? Is there a specific use case that I need to worry about? Or is it pretty much across the board? If you really look at it, storage in general is pretty horizontal, right? It serves multiple use cases across different industries and different verticals. So if you look at from hyper-convergence, we have seen it deployed as primary storage, which essentially means I'm running my business-critical applications. It could be your exchange servers. It could be your web servers. It could be your database servers, essentially providing the ability to run your mission-critical applications. And the other aspect is also around having a remote or a branch office deployment. See, a lot of times customers, they come up with newer offices and so on. So in these scenarios, would you want to go deploy your traditional storage array? Probably not, because it needs more management. You need to have a person who manages the storage. It's harder to go if you have 100 locations, you need 100 people managing these in 100 different locations. It becomes very hard to manage the storage array. Versus saying, hey, it runs a standard servers.  Anyway, you need to manage a VM. So there is no additional resources involved. Makes it more a logical use case to start to use hyper-convergence in that space. And a few other, like, virtual desktops. When you hear about hyper-convergence, moment you think of virtual desktops. So what does it mean? And why is it more prevalent in a virtual desktop environment? If you look at customers when they deploy newer technologies, they want to deploy it or use it for a specific use case that they are going or a new project that they are going to embark on. They don't want to disrupt what they have. And virtual desktops is a pretty interesting case in that sense. I'm going to virtualize my desktop environment. I don't want to use what I have, but I want to use something new. I want to try a new paradigm of deploying my storage in the data center. So it gives you the ability to try out hyper-converged models. So it's more of looking at from a perspective of what makes sense to start off as a new project versus trying to go replace what you have. And some of the other aspects are for primary storage, you would replace what you have. So it depends upon where customers would like to deploy. And the other very interesting use case is from a service provider model. So if you look at some of these web-scale companies today, like Google's of the world, Amazon's of the world, or Facebook's of the world, they are in this model. They use standard servers. They provide you with all the capabilities. So if you look at an enterprise, they are looking at these models and saying, if a managed service provider can deploy this model and be cost-effective and make money out of it, because in a traditional enterprise, the IT or IT in general is a cost center. It's not a revenue-generating unit. But if a service provider can generate revenue and be cost-effective, why cannot an enterprise solution do the same or enterprise do the same? So with that in mind, a lot of these enterprises are moving into this model to say, hey, yeah, let me go deploy this. Let me deploy it on industry standard servers. And for a managed service provider, it makes a lot of sense because that's the way for them to reduce their cost. Everybody wants to have a lower cost alternative to deploy their entire solution. So it makes a lot of sense for a service provider to go deploy on standard servers and at the same time, not to compromise on services. You would not go to a service provider if you don't have reliable service. You still need all the services, but at a much lower cost. So running it on standard servers, where we know the price of servers goes down every year, it makes a lot of sense to use it versus trying to go buy a standard enterprise storage array. So knowing a little bit of background about hyperconvergence, I just want to give you a brief overview of what MaxTi is and what MaxTi does. So MaxTi is a hyperconvergence company and essentially what we deliver or we maximize the promise of hyperconvergence and what does that mean? So if you really look at it, one of the key aspects is in a hyperconverged model, we should provide choice, whether choice could be in terms of the hypervisor that I use, the servers that I use, the drives that I use. So any of those, right? So we provide the ability to have a choice in all these different aspects. So we maximize the choice, we maximize simplicity. The way we do it is we have eliminated the abstraction or we have abstracted out the concept of managing storage, no more storage management.  It's pretty similar to managing CPU and memory resources. You don't manage CPU, you allocate CPU resources. You don't manage memory, you allocate memory resources. Storage is similar, you allocate storage resources. Oh, so what happens when I need to add more memory? It's a service action, you add memory. What happens if a drive fails? It's a service action, you replace a drive. So the idea of managing a resource is very similar to managing your VM resources. So we maximize the simplicity of managing your entire infrastructure. And the third aspect is scalability. Hey, I need to be able to scale when I need and what resources I need. I don't need to buy, say a large enterprise storage array today expecting I would have to grow to this stage. I need to invest for what I need today, knowing that I can add resources when I want. And that's essentially what we provide. You can scale up storage. You can scale up compute. You can scale up all the individual components in your data center, as and when you like. If you want to, you can replace your older lower capacity drives with a newer capacity drive. You can add drives to your empty drive slots, or you can add a new server. So you have multiple ways to scale your storage needs. And the last is cost, being able to provide the most cost-effective solution. Standards, industry standard servers, all the way from branded servers to white box servers. So you can choose the server technology that you want and that you like, and you can have all these storage features and capabilities delivered on top of it. So a quick view of an architecture of what we do. Say, these are all just standard servers. As I mentioned, we aggregate the storage resources across all these servers out in the data center. And of course, we leverage SSDs, whether it's SATA-based, PCI-based, NVME-based to provide the performance what applications are looking at or applications need. And we used spinning desks for capacity. And at the same time, deliver all the storage services. All the way from snapshots to clones to compression, thin provisioning, data deduplication, you get all the enterprise class features. And support for multiple hypervisors and multiple management products, including OpenStack, that gives you the ability to completely deliver all these on top of OpenStack. So how does Maxta integrate with OpenStack? And what are the things that we have done for OpenStack in particular? Maxta has developed two main integration points. One is through the Cinder driver support and the other is through the Nova support which enables customers to manage not just the storage aspect of it, but manage a VM. So even within an OpenStack environment, I can go take a snapshot of an instance. And taking a snap of an instance is, for us, is a storage metadata operation. We could do it in seconds or milliseconds and with zero capacity overhead, unlike a traditional snapshot in an OpenStack environment which is almost like a full copy of your entire VM. So it gives you all the capabilities at the storage layer by being able to use your standard OpenStack environment and being able to provide a very cost-effective and an efficient storage platform. And also the other aspect is HA, delivering an end-to-end HA product including for live migration. I can take a VM running on node one, move it to node 50, and you still have access to the VM and the data for this VM. So you don't have to worry about where my data is, what do I do, and where would I want to move my VM? So you don't have to worry about any of these aspects. You have your entire pool of storage that you can use and your VMs are running, leveraging the storage pool. So to summarize what we discussed in the last 20 minutes, the key value that MacStuff brings to the customers is number one, choice. It helps customers with the ability to pick their server, pick their hypervisor, pick their storage device so they can use any of the devices that they are currently using or they can move to the latest technology when the server vendors or the hardware vendors release on day zero. It maximizes the choice. And the second, maximize the simplicity. It provides you with the ability to manage a VM and not have to manage a particular storage entity.  And the third is very cost-effective solution. It lets customers not only maximize on their CAPEX savings, but also helps them to maximize on the OPEX savings without compromising any of the storage-level data services. That's the key what MacStuff can deliver to end customers. And that's essentially what I wanted to cover for the time for the last 20 minutes. And thanks for taking the time to listen.


Hi guys, it's Monica. I'm going to share with you a couple of products that I have been trying and liking very much. The first three products that I'm going to mention to you are actually gifted to me from the Octolene Network and I'm going to share what they are and how long I've been using them and what my thoughts are. So if you're interested stay tuned but before I go there please be sure to like the video, please be sure to subscribe, hit that notification bell so you'll get notified whenever I upload a video because it's so super exciting. You don't want to miss not one of them. Anyways the first thing I want to talk about is the shock and I'm talking mascara and this is Yves Saint Laurent. This was sent to me gifted from Yves Saint Laurent. I don't know if you can pick up on this but I'll definitely link it and I have it in black. This is long-awaring mascara.  I am all about my eyelashes lately. I think it's probably because they've been they've had such a huge dramatic improvement that you know when you when all of a sudden you go from nothing to all of a sudden having eyelashes it's like just such an amazing journey and so I have been experimenting with different mascara. A lot of you will know that I absolutely have my favorites and then I have products that are sent to me that I request which I'm really thrilled when they say yes and and I try those. So I received this about a week ago. It's only had a wear test of about a week so I'll tell you it claims to be long-lasting and on me it is definitely long-lasting. I put this on pretty early in the morning because I stopped my routine early so I might apply my mascara around six six thirty and then I am going until you know who knows maybe about eight thirty or nine before I take it off. So I have so far and I've been out in the wind in the heat in the rain. I've had all sorts of different conditions and so far I've had no flakiness with this at all. It is a pretty awesome mascara. It's like I think it retails like twenty nine dollars. I love the little brush. The brush works really well for me. I really like it. It's a very smooth application. It is very fluid in the sense that it goes on really nice. It seems to grab the base of my lashes and then coats all the way up and I really am enjoying this. Now you'll know that I love my it superhero and I love for drugstore my essence lash princess. Both of them are really really great. This one I love the process. I love when I say process I there's no clumping at all on my eye so I am really super enjoying this long-lasting no smudges. I think for me this is going to be ideal for my lower lashes ideal. So I think that's where I'm going to probably use this most is on my lower lashes and because I love my eyelashes so much any opportunity I have to experiment and to try mascara I'm going to grab it. This has just been a wonderful mascara. I've really enjoyed using it. Thank you so much Eve St. Laurent for sending this to me and I am loving it. The next thing I want to mention you're going to like kind of laugh at my hair. My hair is kind of I'm getting ready to take everything off after a full day but my hair is up in a what you call one of those in Vizzle Bobby's and this was also gifted to me via the Octoly Network. I received this and I actually received two of them. They're the slim versions of it. You know I don't have a whole lot of thick hair so I figured the slim versions were really really nice. I've seen these be reviewed on a number of other ladies channels and I just thought well you know my hair is getting longer. How is this going to work for me? So I just kind of like and this is no fake bun as you can tell it's just my own hair up there and I kind of like stack it. There's no pulling. There's no nothing. I really like it. So I was absolutely thrilled to get these and yeah everything I've heard about these is absolutely true. They are amazing. They don't pull it in your hair. They don't hurt at all. And the third thing that was sent to me from Jurgen's Natural Glow. This was also via the Octoly Network. It's dripping. It's dripping because I grabbed it out of my shower. So this I was really really intrigued in this. This is their Wet Skin Moisturizer Natural Glow. Now I have used their Facial Self Tanner, the Jurgen's Glow on and off for a number of years. A number of years. I never really had a major issue with this. It kind of builds slowly so I really like this. This I have always bought but this was gifted to me and I've used this a couple of times this week already. What I like about it is that when you put it on you use about a quarter size. You're in the shower. Your skin is wet. The water is off. Use about a size of a quarter for each leg and you can just you know massage it in really nice and then size of a dime for your arms. And if you want to go down into your chest that's fine too. And then you step out of the shower and rather than like rubbing you just kind of bolt dry. And I went to bed and I woke up the next morning and I just I didn't have like a you know in-your-face color but I looked down my legs and I had a little bit more of a color. I looked at my neck and my neck had a little bit more of a lighter color. So I like the fact this builds up slowly. So this is a keeper for me. Definitely, definitely like that. The other thing I just want to mention guys if you haven't used this a Jade Roller. You know I'd watched it. I think it was Natalie. I think she uses this Natalie the Beauty Diva. But it wasn't until I was watching Susan little poet and she was talking about this and how she uses it that something kind of resonated with me and I said I have to try it. So I ordered one and I've talked about this in a previous video. But I ordered one and because I keep it in the refrigerator and then I use it first thing every morning. I will after I rinse my face I go to my refrigerator. I take out my Jade Roller and I take out my two serums that I use every morning. Both of them are from Timeless. And one is my vitamin C and the other is my matrixal synx 6 right now. So I put my vitamin C, put the drops in my hands and then I just kind of put it all over. And then I take this baby and I go to town. It is cold. So use the smaller one near my eye bags which are really bad left right now because I did not sleep last night at all. A lot of stuff going on. Could use your prayers for my dad. I shouldn't have said that. But anyways, sorry guys. So I kind of focused with this cold Jade Roller and I think it just kind of opens up my eyes and wakes me up. But more importantly, the products I'm using on my skin I believe sink in super, super fast. So when I'm done I take my matrixal and I do the same thing and I pat that on and I use the Jade Roller. Now by this time it's kind of warming up. So depending on how I'm feeling, if I'm really really puffy, I might give it a quick rinse, put it back in the refrigerator for a bit. But more often than not I go right into the bathroom and I use my other serums. Lately what I've been putting on, I put my hyaluronic acid on. I use that every day. I put that on when that is done. Lately I've been using carrot seed oil and this I started using. I can blame little Susan for this little poet Susan for this as well because she was talking about this a lot. So I've been using this cream and going up my face with it and you know what guys I really like it. I think it's been really super, super nice. So if you're not using a Jade Roller, I think this is my sleeper skin care item. It sort of like went under the radar for the longest time for me and then when I finally got it and I got it, I am loving it. You want to talk about deep puffing your bags almost instantaneously with this and it's because you keep it cold. So my Jade Roller, yeah, definitely a sleeper but definitely a big hit and then the carrot seed oil. I am enjoying these are two new products. They were not sent to me. I bought them but I'm enjoying these tremendously and my Invisalbotham, these, oops, these are really, really cool. Love it and my mascara and my dirkens. So yeah, three things sent to me via the Octoly Network. Two things that I bought and yeah. So Jay and I are getting ready by the time you, well, I don't know when this is going live so I'm not going to say that. But Jay and I are packing to go to Canada and if you watched my vlog, you know that Jay had said or I had said we're going to stick to like having one duffel bag each. Well, Jay went up the attic and got a big suitcase down. So I have a feeling he is going to be overpacking for a Canada trip. I'm not pretty sure. So anyways, guys, thanks so much for watching. You have any questions about any of these products, please reach out to me. I am absolutely cannot tell you how much I'm enjoying this Jade Roller. What a shock. That was really, really, now wouldn't it be nice if I could roll away my wrinkles.


Former Crosby Mayor James Hunter was acquitted from two felony charges earlier this year, and last week he was acquitted from a third felony charge of possessing a stolen firearm. A hearing was scheduled to discuss the stolen firearm charge, but Hunter was acquitted without a hearing after the prosecutor agreed to dismiss the charge. Hunter purchased the reportedly stolen semi-automatic pistol a few years ago, not knowing it had been stolen in 1994. How was someone going to know that a gun was stolen? If it even was stolen, and frankly the evidence to me, I haven't even seen clear proof the gun was stolen. But assuming it was stolen in 1994, how would Mr. Hunter know about that, buying it in the 2010s? Chargers against Hunter for unlawful gambling and selling vehicle financing without a license are still pending. Hunter ran for Crosby Mayor this past election but lost to Bob Novak. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.