Making Mess
Success stories are a powerful trope of international development and conservation work. They structure the way NGOs, governments and companies engage with powerful donors and public opinion. They…
Author: Gill
Finding My Forest Feet
The beautiful Lefini Reserve The first time I ever walked properly in the Congo Basin rainforest was two years ago. I felt like a huge, clumsy elephant –…
Local Contexts – Licensing and Labelling Traditional Knowledge
I went to a fascinating lunchtime talk last Thursday given by Dr Jane Anderson, a legal anthropologist at NYU who specialises in investigating the relationship between intellectual…
Worlds Collide
(Gosh, that was all getting a bit emo there for a minute wasn’t it? Like a fleeting return to my early naughties LiveJournal days. What’s needed here is…
The field and The Field: An Addendum
On Monday, I return to The Field. Now, since this basically involves me moving my books and computer equipment back to an office just over the road from…
The field and The Field – Adventures in Multi-sited Ethnography
“Fieldwork is not what it used to be”, to quote the title of Faubion and Marcus’ 2009 edited volume on the changing nature of social/cultural anthropology in the…
Orpheus – the most haunting love story ever told
Modern re-imaginings of Greek myths are a popular storytelling trope – my favourite of recent years being Anais Mitchell’s excellent folk opera Hadestown, which sets the story of…
Travels in the Congo: First Things First
So, I’ve been travelling and working in the Congo for about a month now and I already have an awful lot to write about – both the awesome…
Newspapers
So, after a long hiatus brought on partly by my web-host deleting my website and not keeping any back-ups (!), and partly by me being busy with work…
Africa Needs You!
I was disappointed to find, in a rare moment when I found myself watching live television the other day, this advertising campaign from VSO: Yes, that’s right viewer.…
Cracks in Everything
Philosophy is dead. At least, it is according to renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, who believes the discipline hasn’t kept up with modern developments in science to the extent…