Critical Brass: Street Carnival and Musical Activism in Olympic Rio de Janeiro (Wesleyan University Press, 2022) tells the story of neofanfarrismo, an explosive carnival brass band community turned activist musical movement…
Where would we be without the knee? This down-to-earth joint connecting the thigh and the lower leg doesn’t receive the attention it deserves. Yet, as The Curious Human Knee (Columbia…
Gustaf Redemo: Åren på resande fot i antropologins land har delvis gjort mig till en främling. Ibland känner jag mig mer befryndad med mina invandrade elever än de…
Marius Wamsiedel’s book The Moral Evaluation of Emergency Department Patients: An Ethnography of Triage Work in Romania (Lexington, 2023) is an ethnography of the social process by which healthcare workers…
Who is responsible for ensuring access to clean potable water? In an urbanizing planet beset by climate change, cities are facing increasingly arid conditions and a precarious water…
A filmmaker highlights the work of urban archaeologists digging a woman-owned business opened in the late 1800s. In this short documentary, Wayne State University archaeologist Krysta Ryzewski and…
Ben Hoffler is the co-founder of several hiking trails in the Middle East, including the Sinai Trail, the Red Sea Mountain Trail, the Wadi Rum Trail, and the Bedouin…
For people who are living with disability, including various forms of chronic diseases and chronic pain, daily tasks like lifting a glass of water or taking off clothes…
How do poor people in the burgeoning cities of the Global South assert their right to housing and to the city? How do they constitute themselves, and demand…
Along mountain pilgrimages, two anthropologists learn how an Indigenous Mesoamerican religion helps people practice a reciprocal relationship with the Earth. Based on Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain: Na…
Perched on a makeshift stage, a trio dressed in wool ponchos sings pirekuas, the region’s most acclaimed and loved musical genre in a mix of Purépecha and Spanish.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
