Monkey See, Monkey Do: Planet of the Apes, Animalization and the Visual Politics of Occupation
By Emma Louise Backe When War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) concluded, Caesar had successfully led his people to a place where they might be able…
Author: Emma Louise Backe
Multiverse of Madness and the Problem of Mother as Monster
By Emma Louise Backe Wanda by César Castillo Marquez Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness is essentially a horror movie with the trappings of Marvel’s characteristic action…
From Hope-Punk to Speculative Fiction: TGA 2020 Round-Up
Believe it or not, we started 2020 with the proposition of Hope-Punk, the possibilities that could emerge through the disposition of hope. Throughout this year, we’ve explored how…
“Burn Him”: Midsommar, Horror and Anthropology
[Content and spoiler warning: This piece discusses key plot points from the film Midsommar and includes descriptions of suicide and racial violence.] When the five main characters of…
The Poetics of Internet Memes
By Kai Blevins I believe in low theory in popular places, in the small, the inconsequential, the antimonumental, the micro, the irrelevant; I believe in making a difference…
“I’m All I Wanna Be” – Video Self Presentation in the Age of COVID-19
By Steven Dashiell As COVID-19 makes videoconferencing more normative, one sociologist examines who much work goes into what we see, and don’t see, in the webcam image. The…
So You Want to “Do” Digital Ethnography
By Devin Proctor It’s a weird time, yes? Many of us (anthropologists) are teasing out the nuances between synchronous and asynchronous class meetings, dealing with the horror of…
Navigating the Maze: Models of Cultural Revitalization in HBO’s Westworld
By Haley Bryant The Maze on Kissy’s scalp HBO’s 2016 reboot of the 1970’s sci-fi film Westworld is not only one of the most visually interesting television programs…
Choosing Your Own Adventure: My Life as a Teenage Dungeon Master and How it Prepared Me to Become an Anthropologist
By Holly Walters “Sherlock Holmes was the first fictional creation adults openly embraced as “real,” while deliberately ignoring or minimizing its creator, and this fetishization has continued for…
2019 in Review: Hopepunk
By Emma Louise Backe Avengers: Infinity War (2018)—the penultimate movie in the Avengers Marvel franchise—ended in defeat, the assorted heroes unable to stop Thanos from using the Infinity…
Grief and Getting Beyond the Endgame
The lasting impact of Avengers: Endgame on our understandings of heroism, masculinity, and mental health. By Emma Louise Backe An hour before I walked in to see Avengers: Endgame,…
Fact in Fiction: Examining archaeology’s influence on the speculative genre
By Catherine Hill Anyone who has a passable knowledge of the works of novelist HP Lovecraft is probably aware of the prominent role that archaeology and intrepid archaeologists…
Space Races & Special Forces at Smithsonian’s Future Con
In April of 2018, as cosplayers, geeks, and comic vendors descended on the Walter Washington Memorial Convention Center in Washington, DC for the annual Awesome Con, affiliates of…
2018 in Review: The Year in Horror
By Emma Louise Backe In February 2018, Guillermo del Toro was awarded the Oscar for The Shape Of Water, an interspecies period romance premised on inverting the horror…
TGA Editors’ Picks: Favorite Posts of 2018
Like the maelstrom of political media, 2018 was also an eventful year for anthropology. Anthropology Twitter was kept occupied with conversations about the rejection of an apolitical research…
TGA’s 2018 Holiday Wishlist
Struggling with what to get friends or family members this holiday season? Don’t know what to ask for yourself (apart from a device that will help you get…
HAU’s Hauntings
How does the genre of weird fiction provide the destabilizing framework for the future of HAUtalk? The HAU controversy is a dense teratoma,[1] a complicated intermingling of issues…
Zombies in the Classroom: The Importance of Teaching the Zombie Apocalypse in Anthropology Classes
By Jennifer Trivedi The zombies were everywhere – on televisions and film screens, in books and online searches, at doors in October. And they caught my attention. I…
Twisted and Evil: Ableism in Star Wars
By Cindee Calton “Seriously, Star Wars? Again?” was the exact phrase that ran through my mind the first time Dryden Vos appeared on screen during my first viewing…
The Celestial Ethnographers: Imagining the Future of Anthropology in Star Trek Discovery
By Logan A. Kirkland & Joshua W. Rivers “Culture,” so-called, is implanted in nature; the environment, or Umwelt, is a model generated by the organism. Semiosis links them.” -Thomas…
Monstrous possibilities: Kaiju as beauty and terror
By Esther R. Anderson Kaiju are giant monsters that can be seen causing filmic chaos without apparent cause or motive. As genetically-engineered creatures, aliens, or remnants of a…
The Word: Rhetorics of Resistance in Westworld and The Handmaid’s Tale
By Emma Louise Backe Dolores Abernathy—titular host in HBO’s Westworld series—spends most of the second season with a gun on her hip and a constellation of blood spattering…
The Elysium Effect: Space Law and Commercial Space Disparities
By Savannah Mandel Have you ever seen Elysium? It’s a 2013 science fiction movie directed by Neill Blomkamp about a future Earth where the elitist upper echelon of…
Personalizing Access, Personalizing Praxis #hautalk
Anthropology trained us to identify systems of oppression, those “invisibilized” dimensions of culture that reek of prejudice, privilege, and disproportionate power dynamics. These are the very theore…