Can Archaeology Help Restore the Oceans?
On the Channel Islands, archaeologists draw lessons in sustainability from historic Chumash fishing practices. USING THE PAST FOR THE FUTURE Off the southern California coast lies a little-known…
Category: English
An open letter to the Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza.
TARA MAYHEW Dear Dame Rachel, The Children’s Commissioner’s Big Ask Survey (2021) gave voice to children and revealed the state of their nation. Children said they want good…
Edyta Roszko, “Fishers, Monks and Cadres: Navigating State, Religion and the South China Sea in Central Vietnam” (NIAS/University of Hawaii Press 2021
This remarkable and timely ethnography explores how fishing communities living on the fringe of the South China Sea in central Vietnam interact with state and religious authorities as…
Andrew Johnson, “If I Give My Soul: Faith Behind Bars in Rio de Janeiro” (Oxford UP, 2017)
Pentecostal Christianity is flourishing inside the prisons of Rio de Janeiro. To find out why, Andrew Johnson dug deep into the prisons themselves. He began by spending two…
50 years since the Australia army got out of Vietnam (though the rhetoric is still twisted).
“On Vietnam Veterans’ Day, 18 August 2023, a national commemorative service will be held in Canberra to recognise the 50th anniversary of the end of Australia’s involvement in…
Troublemakers well worth the catch up.
It was really great to catch up with a lot of people In Hsinchu last week, especially, after many years, the ever eloquent Ned Rossiter, and Brett Neilson,…
Relationships Carved From Clay Bring New Partners to Museums
Brian Vallo at SAR’s Indian Arts Research Center. Photo: Adria Malcolm for The New York Times …
Imagining Other Worlds at the India-Pakistan Border
For decades, soldiers at the border between Attari, India, and Wagah, Pakistan, have staged an elaborate ceremony for onlookers. An anthropologist reflects on the ceremony as a legacy…
Madam Cistern
The following monologue was originally written in Portuguese for the ongoing theatrical project Dramaturgias da água e da seca (Water and Drought Dramaturgies), developed by Pavilhão da Magnólia,…
Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas on her book, Genres of Listening
Interview by Sarah Muir https://www.dukeupress.edu/genres-of-listening Sarah Muir: In the book, you describe the extraordinary history and contemporary status of psychoanalysis in Buenos Ai…
A Honeysuckle Basket by Joan Shoemaker (Cherokee)
Pictured here (Figure 1) is a seed pot-style (i.e. globe shaped with a small opening) basket by Joan Shoemaker (b. 1937) (Cherokee Nation) (then) of Locust Grove, Oklahoma.…
The Woman’s Health Strategy for England neglects the realities of being a woman
NAOMI HANSEN House of Commons London SW1A 0AA stephen.barclay.mp@parliament.uk Dear Sir Barclay, I am writing to you today in regards to the Women’s Health Strateg…
Social Anthro#2: Kinship – Given or Made?
When you start to reflect upon the meaning of this blog's title, I would like to invite you to first think about the following questions: Why is it…
Karen E. Rignall, “An Elusive Common: Land, Politics, and Agrarian Rurality in a Moroccan Oasis” (Cornell UP, 2021)
Karen E. Rignall’s book An Elusive Common: Land, Politics, and Agrarian Rurality in a Moroccan Oasis (Cornell UP, 2021) details the fraught dynamics of rural life in the arid periphery of…
Sophie Bjork-James, “The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family” (Rutgers UP, 2021)
The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family (Rutgers University Press, 2021) provides an account of how a theology of the family came to dominate a white evangelical tradition…
Satsuki Takahashi, “Fukushima Futures: Survival Stories in a Repeatedly Ruined Seascape” (U Washington Press, 2023)
Both before and after the 2011 “Triple Disaster” of earthquake, tidal wave, and consequent meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, anthropologist Satsuki Takahashi visited nearby communities,…
Exploring Pedagogy and Teaching for a Post-Racist Imagination
In this episode, Janine de Novais discusses her new publication on Brave Community and teaching for a post-racist imagination. The episode is about the role of pedagogy in…
NEW article on Urban Reconstruction in Xinjiang by Madlen Kobi
This article investigates the relatively little explored urban development in China’s Northwestern Uyghur homeland of XUAR (Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region). Based on 12 months of ethnographic field…
NEW article on thermal practices to cope with summer heat in Chongqing by Madlen Kobi
Until the 1990s and the spread of air-conditioning, cooling down during the hot, humid, and windless summers in the city of Chongqing (Southwest China) was mainly practiced outdoors:…
Links & Contents I Liked 488
Hi all,I hope many of you are still on or about to leave for Global Northern summer holidays and I hope even more so that you are in…
Paying more attention to long-term caregivers in contemporary China
CHENGYUE PENG (to No. 57 An Ding Men Wai Da Jie, Dong Cheng District, Beijing) Dear Ms Sun: I am writing to advocate more concern for long-term caregivers,…
Sarah Muir, “Routine Crisis: An Ethnography of Disillusion” (U Chicago Press, 2021)
Argentina, once heralded as the future of capitalist progress, has a long history of economic volatility. In 2001–2002, a financial crisis led to its worst economic collapse, precipitating…
Colonizing Mars or Colonizing the Earth? A Reflection on Landscape and SpaceX in Texas
By Robert Kopack, University of South Carolina § I was startled awake by a faint voice announcing something across the humid, coastal air. Maybe it was a shift…
What Pots Say—and Don’t Say—About People
Archaeologists long abandoned the simple notion that “pots are people”—that people’s identities directly correspond with the pottery they made and used. What, then, can ceramics reveal about past…