Without Norms, Societies Fall Apart
From time to time, I meet an American who likes to tell me that the United Kingdom, the country of my birth, has a weaker democracy than the…
Author: Hugh Gusterson
Will U.S. University Students Spread COVID-19?
In the 1980s, the Reagan administration made plans for the orderly evacuation of U.S. cities in the event of an imminent nuclear war. Supposedly, city residents with odd-numbered…
Can Protestors Humanize the Police?
Watch this video. In it, a group of young Black Lives Matter protestors in Charleston, South Carolina, take a knee, facing a line of police in riot gear.…
COVID-19 and the Turn to Magical Thinking
The late 19th and early 20th centuries were a time of unprecedented shock and trauma for many Africans. European invaders appeared, armed with guns for which African spears…
The Problem of Imagining the Real
As the novel coronavirus sent China into lockdown, my wife and I started to carefully follow the news. China was far away, and it was hard to imagine…
What’s Wrong With “the Chinese Virus”?
Most Americans take it for granted that in the 1960s, more than 58,000 U.S. soldiers died in something called the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, however, there is no…
Why Targeting Heritage Is a Crime Against Humanity
“A barbarian is someone who looks at culture and finds no beauty at all. A barbarian looks at a mosque or a burial mound, and dreams only of…
Reconsidering How We Honor Those Lost to War
Cities in the southern U.S. are currently under pressure to take down statues of Confederate leaders, whose publicly sanctioned presence is a constant source of injury to many.…
Trump L’oeil
Anthropologists are addressing the mystery of President Donald Trump. They are trying to decipher what his victory portends and whether it is an anomaly (caused by Russian hacking,…
Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy: Bullying, Domination, and Fearmongering
When pundits and defense intellectuals fret about Donald Trump’s foreign policy (if “policy” isn’t too grand a name for what often amounts to little more than improvised verbal…
Understanding Mass Killings
Media commentary on Micah Johnson, the African-American who killed five police officers in Dallas on July 7, has focused on his animus against white police and his interest…