Where did all the gyoza go?
The frozen gyoza vending machine that appeared in my neighborhood last year is now empty. No gyoza, no product descriptions. I inquired at the small, narrow izakaya to…
Category: English
Amanda Apgar, “The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future” (U Michigan Press, 2023)
When children are born with disabilities or become disabled in childhood, parents often experience bewilderment: they find themselves unexpectedly in another world, without a roadmap, without community, and…
Giving Winter a Funeral in Transylvania
In a village in Romania, residents maintain a centuries-old carnival tradition called farsang to mark winter’s death. ✽ As the morning sun ambles over blunted cliffs, whips break…
The Dirt
Discard Studies is an interdisciplinary field of research that takes systems of waste and wasting as its topic of study, including but beyond conventional notions of trash and…
Give a Hand To the Fallen, as Long as You Are Standing: Earthquake Disaster Relief among Afghans
Mullah Yaqub appeared in the doorway of his Quranic school, and smiled when he saw me, shaking my hand firmly. He looked tall in his long dark-blue felted…
A Love Letter to the Munay-Ki
A poet exuberantly gives thanks for the Munay-Ki rites enlivened across the ages and shared by the Q’ero people in the Peruvian Andes. “A Love Letter to the…
Jennifer Petersen on her book, How Machines Came to Speak
Interview by Joseph Wilson https://www.dukeupress.edu/how-machines-came-to-speak Joseph Wilson: The combination of legal discourse analysis and technology studies in this book is a fascinat…
Sahlins biography June 2023 update
Here’s a quick update regarding my work on the Marshall Sahlins biography up to 1 June 2023. I spent most of May not actually writing the biography, but…
Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour, “The Politics of Survival: Black Women Social Welfare Beneficiaries in Brazil and the United States” (Columbia UP, 2023)
Poor Black women who benefit from social welfare are marginalized in a number of ways by interlocking systemic racism, sexism, and classism. The media renders them invisible or…
César Ernesto Abadía-Barrero, “Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care at a Colombian Maternity Hospital” (Duke UP, 2022)
In Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care at a Colombian Maternity Hospital (Duke UP, 2022), César Ernesto Abadía-Barrero chronicles the story of El Materno—Colombia’s oldest maternity and…
Elizabeth Reddy, “¡Alerta!: Engineering on Shaky Ground” (MIT Press, 2023)
The Sistema de Alerta Sísmica Mexicano is the world’s oldest public earthquake early warning system. Given the unpredictability of earthquakes, the technology was designed to give the people…
Patrick Jory, “A History of Manners and Civility in Thailand” (Cambridge UP, 2021)
If you’ve visited Thailand even for a short time you’ve probably been given, or have come across, some basic instructions on dos and don’ts — where to put,…
Developing Responsible AI with David Gray Widder and Dawn Nafus
Contemporary AI systems are typically created by many different people, each working on separate parts or “modules.” This can make it difficult to determine who is responsible for…
sNAPAshots: Lauren Penney
https://practicinganthropology.org/wp-content/uploads/Lauren-Penney-sNAPAshot.mp4 Dr. Penney participated in this interview in her personal capacity on September 21, 2022. Transcript 0:00 [On Screen I…
The Breath We Leave: SAR Literary Day 2023
It was the kind of morning best spent in a worn chair next to a lamp reading a good book. Rain pelted at the r…
Africa’s Place in Global Diplomacy…
Written by Jehron Muhammad (RE: Africa’s Place in Global Diplomacy defined by Colonial and Post-Colonial History) Africa’s placement in global …
For Mark
A few of us held a Japanese version of an Irish/Klingon wake in honor of our friend and colleague Dr. Mark Hollstein who passed away suddenly and unexpectedly…
Why I Ask My Students to Swear in Class
An anthropologist uses explicit insults to get students thinking about gender and power in everyday language. Plus, a brief explainer on the slang term “sus.” ✽ “Insult me,”…
Michael Jackson, “Friendship” (U Pennsylvania Press, 2023)
In Friendship (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), renowned anthropologist Michael Jackson draws on philosophy, biography, ethnography, and literature to explore the meanings and affordances of friendship—a relationship just as significant…
“In Tokyo, Skipping the Hot and New for Enduring Haunts”
Photo and story from The New York Times, 5/29/23. Using a guidebook published more than 20 years ago, a writer searches out the bars and restaurants that express…
The sweetest globalization ever… (maybe too sweet; you might want to drop it on the floor a few times and then expose it to smoke for a while to get to a more realistic taste…)
No product endorsement intended…
Ancient DNA Supports Swahili Oral Traditions
Two researchers explain how ancient DNA research is helping to restore the origin story of the Swahili people along the coastal region of East Africa. This article was…
Ökonomische Anthropologie im (Nach-)Krisenmodus
Just zu dem Zeitpunkt, als ich 2008 in Bahrain für meine Masterarbeit zum Thema Islamic Finance Feldforschung betrieb, brach im euro-amerikanischen Raum eine kapitalistische Welt zusammen. Spekulation…