Do Not Adjust Your Dial (Ep. #18 Re-release)
Apologies strange familiars. We had some technical difficulties this morning and you might have noticed an podcast briefly go out this morning that wasn’t supposed to. Just a…
Apologies strange familiars. We had some technical difficulties this morning and you might have noticed an podcast briefly go out this morning that wasn’t supposed to. Just a…
What would it mean to be no longer ‘in country’ in Australia? How would the legacies of British colonialism, and the attempted extirpation and survival of Australia’s indigenous…
That Syria has “a lot of sand” is meant to stand in for its lack of value. As a place that is sandy, it is not worth US…
I was having second thoughts, but pressed on safe in the knowledge that I was performing an act that would raise my esteem in the eyes of those…
Anthropology has long ago dispensed with the notion that there is any ‘one’ truth. But I think most ethnographers still hope that in describing a group, the people…
In preparing for fieldwork, I took a class on language training with Piers Kelly. While Piers was talking more specifically about learning in a context where a language…
During my 15 months of fieldwork in Iran, the gripe that a bachelor’s degree was now equivalent to that of a high school certificate from a few years…
“Livestock are essential to our lives. We live in a world that is saturated with livestock, and not just with the food that we eat, but with the…
Even as I attempted to (re-)present my research as anthropological, on its journey into the public sphere and a wider audience, it was interpreted and reinterpreted as ‘international…
Elizabeth has an agency all of her own, albeit one that we might not be familiar with, and so to reduce her experience only to the ties of…
I was determined to make sure that I was never bored during my fieldwork. Vibrant informants and constant social interaction were to be the key to my successful…
“Any concept — capitalism, neoliberalism, etc. — leaves an excess that it is the aim of anthropology to unearth. These are spaces that are not dominated by whatever’s…
I still remember vividly the words of an informant who, when asking him about his vision of a freer Iran, responded adamantly, “we don’t need more freedom, what…
As the dust settles on Iran’s recent bout of protests, the surge of commentary, punditry, and analysis is likely to continue, no longer working to explain these apparently…
For those of us who have grown up in the ‘West’, we tend to think of religion as a customizable category. Some of us are born into a…
On the 7th of September 2017, Syrian national Mouaz Al-Nass, a singer and drummer, recorded and then uploaded a video of himself reciting the adhan, the Islamic call…