Thomas Bierschenk: On Graeber on bureaucracy
David Graeber was certainly one of the most cited anthropologists of the early 21st century. More than a year after his untimely death, a substantive conversation about his…
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Dimitris Dalakoglou, Georgos Poulimenakos: The Past is on Fire: Wildfires, (Un)imagined Communities and the Shift to the Tourism of the 1%
In Greece, during the summer of 2021, we saw again a proliferation of wildfires that went on for days, like in 2020. While the climate change argument makes…
Steven Sampson: Cabal Anthropology – or whether the anthropology of belief helps us understand conspiracism
QAnon, Deep State, pedophile plots, George Soros, stolen elections, 9/11 truthers, Obama birthers, 5G penetration, the anti-maskers, the anti-vaxxers… We slow-working, ever so reflective anthropologi…
Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer: Siberia, Protest and Politics: Shaman Alexander in Danger
In 2021 a modest long-haired Sakha man named Alexander Gabyshev was arrested at his family compound on the outskirts of Yakutsk in an unprecedented for Sakha Republic (Yakutia)…
Paul Stubbs: Liminal Temporalities of Hope in Bosnia-Herzegovina
Image 1: Shows Tuzla Plenum, 2014 (Photograph by Tamara Opačić from H-Alter, 17 February 2014, http://h-alter.org/vijesti/plenum-je-uvijek-korak-ispred, Used with permission). The space where I li…
Abram Lutes: Anatomy of an Autogolpe: On the consolidation of Nayib Bukele’s power in El Salvador
For the first time since El Salvador’s mid-20th century military dictatorship, a single political party dominates both the legislative and executive branches of the government, and by all…
Jaime A Alves: F*ck the Police! Murderous cops, the myth of police fragility and the case for an insurgent anthropology
‘Blue lives matter,’ says the mantra of police fragility. The mythology about defenseless officers being hunted and killed by criminals is indeed a powerful one, mobilized by right-wing…
Giulia Dal Maso: The Landing of a Chinese Green Bond in Portugal
This post is part of a feature on “The Political Power of Energy Futures,” moderated and edited by Katja Müller (MLU Halle-Wittenberg), Charlotte Bruckermann (University of Bergen), and…
Dragan Djunda: Transition to nowhere: Small hydro, little electricity, and large profits in Serbia
When you enter the House of culture in Dojkinci, a small village on Stara Mountain, you are instantly amazed by its floor. The freshly painted red, green, and…
Pauline Destrée: Solar for the Few: Stranded Renewables and Green Enclaves in Ghana
Africa’s Green Energy Revolution In the past ten years, calls for a “green revolution” on the African continent have cast optimistic and promising scenarios of “leapfrogging” to mass…
Felix Lussem: Alienating “facts” and uneven futures of energy transition
We are in the middle of the Rhineland’s lignite mining region, a semi-urban to rural area in the west of Germany. The landscape is considerably altered by past…
Katja Müller, Charlotte Bruckermann, Kirsten Endres: Introduction: The political power of energy futures
Debates about climate change have long entered political arenas through diplomacy, bureaucracy and regulations as part of worldwide environmental governance. Global efforts to foster greener energy i…
Leivestad, Hege Høyer, Johanna Markkula and Elisabeth Schober: Beyond Suez. Escalating Ship Sizes and their Consequences
Stuck At the height of this pandemic’s third wave, with many of us sitting in what by now feels like an eternal lockdown, images of a gigantic ship…
Adam Brisley: Ethics and the Anthropological Worker
Contemporary anthropological praxis sits at the intersection of two ethical traditions. Many anthropologists are equipped with both a sophisticated understanding of the ethics and politics of rep…
Aliki Angelidou: “It is not the police that enters the universities, but democracy”: Greek universities as spearhead of an authoritarian turn
On February 22nd police forces entered the campus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, heavily beating many students, arresting 31 of them, and teargasing all those present, including…
Juzimu: Jack Ma: Wherever the Wind Blows
One day last October, I happened to spot an acquaintance’s post on Wechat. It was a simple message thanking all ‘Ant-izens’ (people who work in Ant Financial of…
Bruce Kapferer and Roland Kapferer: The Trump Saga and America’s Uncivil War: New Totalitarian Authoritarian Possibilities
Times are a Changing. The Trump phenomenon as a whole, his election, his presidency, the events of the Capitol, Joe Biden’s accession and Donald Trump’s impeachment are moments…
Remembering Leith Mullings (1945 – 2020)
Leith Mullings, Social Justice Anthropologist Jeff Maskovsky, City University of New York Leith Mullings’ death is a terrible blow to anthropology – and a heartbreaking loss to those…
Prem Kumar Rajaram: The Moral Economy of Precarity
The authors of The Anthropological Career in Europe (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) have made visible the inequality and hierarchy that has become increasingly normalized in higher education…
Ela Drążkiewicz: Blinded by the Light: International Precariat in Academia
I was reluctant to contribute to this blog series. The recently published EASA report (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) draws attention to precarious labour in anthropology. However, in…
Stephen Campbell: What can workers expect in post-coup Myanmar?
International media coverage of the February 1st military coup in Myanmar has been rather consistent. The focus, overwhelmingly, has been on the detention of State Counsellor and Nobel…
Susana Narotzky: A History of Precariousness in Spain
The EASA report on The Anthropological Career in Europe (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) is an important initiative that offers quantitative evidence about a situation which all of…
Giacomo Loperfido: On Excellence, Precarity, and The Uses of Public Money
Covid19 is producing a crisis – both sanitary and economic – of global structural proportions, threatening the very existence of society as we know it. All precarious segments…
Natalia Buier: What sample, whose voice, which Europe?
The EASA membership survey and the associated ‘precarity’ report (Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020) are an important and timely contribution. Surely these are findings we must build on…