CFP: Theorizing Harm
Whether focused on toxicity, disease, disaster, violence, or malfunction, STS scholars have long studied harm. Given the great diversity of approaches and cases, this panel seeks to take…
Category: English
Surekha Davies, “Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monsters” (Cambridge UP, 2016)
You find a lot of strange things on late medieval and “Age of Discovery” era maps. Of course there are weird beasts of every sort: dragons, griffins, sea…
Haircuts and Billionaires
Outer Space Podcast Trilogy 1: Haircuts and Billionaires
Society Must Be Defended: Join us for a Read-In on 20 January 2017
By: Paige West and JC Salyer In the wake of the 2016 US presidential election scholars across the country and internationally have worked to understand the drivers…
Why we throw coins in fountains: a cultural explanation
by Peter Wogan Why do so many of us get pleasant, uncanny sensations when we throw a coin in a fountain and see it resting in the water…
Rice Reveals African Slaves’ Agricultural Heritage
Clues about the history—and survival—of African slaves in the Americas can be found in certain plants, such as rice. David Williams When Tinde van Andel purchased a small…
Precision is not accuracy.
We often use the words precision and accuracy interchangeably in everyday conversation, but in statistics they mean different things.
Anthropologizing Software and Design
Charles Pearson is an anthropologist working in tech who has written a few great articles for Medium on his experiences. In his recent piece, “Why Every Software Team…
Anthropologizing Software and Design
Charles Pearson is an anthropologist working in tech who has written a few great articles for Medium on his experiences. In his recent piece, “Why Every Software Team…
Data Waves – finding meaning through music
Miranda Marcus, UCL Digital Anthropology How do we display data in a way that is meaningful? This is the question that has been posed by Dr Robin Carhart-Harris…
anthro in the news 1/11/17
Toman Sasaki, a genderless danshi, at a Japanese shopping mall where he performed with his band, XOX. source: Ko Sasaki for The New York Times gender blending in…
Jessica Dempsey on Enterprising Nature: Economics, Markets, and Finance in Global Biodiversity Politics
A great new book from Jessica Dempsey (UBC Geography). Description below and a short animated video from her website. The publisher’s description does not do the book justice…
The poor state of development journalism: Daily Mail, BBC & ‘Ethiopian Spice Girls’
The Daily Mail campaign against ‘wasteful’ foreign aid is in full swing (see my earlier reflections in my 2016 blogging review) and in the latest example we can…
The poor state of development journalism: Daily Mail, BBC & ‘Ethiopian Spice Girls’
The Daily Mail campaign against ‘wasteful’ foreign aid is in full swing (see my earlier reflections in my 2016 blogging review) and in the latest example we can…
“He’s the least racist person I know”: Racism, the Mad Butcher and Empathy
Great piece by my colleague Catherine Trundle. vicanthropology We’ve all been reading about the celebrity New Zealand businessman the Mad Butcher (Peter Leitch) and his so-called ‘friendly banter’.…
What FoodAnthropology Is Reading Now, January 10, 2017
A brief digest of food and nutrition-related items that caught our attention recently. Got items you think we should include? Send links and brief descriptions to dberiss@gmail.com or…
Native by Design
Who has the right to manufacture, sell, wear, or display objects and designs that come from or are inspired by Native Americans? Alannah Giannino/Flickr In March 2016, Denver,…
Interview: Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets by Roman Sieler
Roman Sieler’s Lethal Spots, Vital Secrets: Medicine and Martial Arts in South India (Oxford University Press, 2015) is a fine-grained ethnographic study of varmakkalai–the art of vital spots,…
Familiar with Graphic Anthropology? Didn’t think so… by David Johansson
During the second part of this spring sociologist Ugo Corte and I will teach a new master course in the Ethnography of the senses here at Uppsala University.…
Medicine, Technology, and the Ever-Changing Human Person
Though we often take for granted that humans are persons, they are not exempt from questions surrounding personhood. Indeed, what it means to be a person is largely…
Laura J. Olson and Svetlana Adonyeva, “The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise” (U. Wisconsin Press, 2013)
The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013) by Laura J. Olson and Svetlana Adonyeva casts a new look at the traditional…
Blogging for research
There are many reasons why anthropologists and other social scientists choose to blog. For instance, anthro everywhere! began as a way to share resources with instructors, students, and othe…
Blogging for research
There are many reasons why anthropologists and other social scientists choose to blog. For instance, anthro everywhere! began as a way to share resources with instructors, students, and othe…
The Three-Headed Dog: Sexwork and Migration Mystery
Despite how it might look to those who’ve known me only since Sex at the Margins, I’m not making a sudden switch to fiction. It’s one of the…