Crooked Cats
This book is a rich cultural analysis of how people live with big cats in India in times of the Anthropocene and climate change. As people are increasingly…
Category: English
What a Cow’s Horn Reveals About Khoisan Medicine
An archaeologist explains what a 500-year-old horn container found in South Africa illuminates about precolonial Khoisan medical and spiritual knowledges. This article was originally published at The…
An Anthropology of Algorithmic Recommendation Systems
On the morning of Friday, March 10, 2023 Nick Seaver and I met over Zoom to talk about his new book Computing Taste: Algorithms and Makers of Music…
On Finding Awe and Being a Human in the Cosmos with Sasha Sagan
The COVID-19 pandemic forced many of us individually and as a global cohort to reassess how and why we live the ways that we do and what really…
Why These Hong Kong Urbanites Are Farming
An anthropologist takes readers inside a Hong Kong ecovillage, revealing a small but thriving movement built around food, sustainability, and community. A HONG KONG ECOVILLAGE One January morning,…
I Do This for You, Mom
One day, a woman in Baltimore received a text message from her mother wishing her a happy holiday. But something didn’t feel quite right. Jeri Hutton Green is…
Frenchy Lunning, “Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence” (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
Cosplay, a portmanteau of “costume” and “play,” emerged from geeky Japanese subcultures to become a popular hobby, and even profession, around the world. Frenchy Lunning dives into the…
Making Forecasts Work: The Evolution of Seasonal Forecasting by Funceme in Ceará, Northeast Brazil
Every January, government officials, urban dwellers, and rural families across the state of Ceará, Northeast Brazil anxiously await the rainy season forecasts from Funceme, the Research Institute for …
Of Cars and Riots
After 22 years, the social-democrat majority in the Berlin Senate has come to an end. At the election in February, the conservative party (CDU) received 28% of the…
Ingrid Kummels discusses her book, Transborder Media Spaces
Interview by Alana Mazur https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/KummelsTransborder Alana Mazur: One of the main themes running through your book is Indigenous audiovisual media and mediatized …
“Skull, bones found in septic tank at vacant [Kadoma-shi,] Osaka Pref. [apartment]”
This is a mere 20 meters from my home; I walk past it twice a day. I walked past the septic cleaner truck around 8:30 this morning. There…
Brian Villmoare, “The Evolution of Everything: The Patterns and Causes of Big History” (Cambridge UP, 2023)
Big History seeks to retell the human story in light of scientific advances by such methods as radiocarbon dating and genetic analysis. Brian Villmoare’s book The Evolution of Everything:…
Ethnographic Postcards: The Good Polyester
Polyester is widely considered an unsustainable fabric polluting our environment but in Ghana, it is seen as a sustainable, good material. The post Ethnographic Postcards: The Good Polyester…
How Do We Heal?
A poet-anthropologist who is a Passamaquoddy tribal member lights a path toward healing both within the field of archaeology and in reflecting on the voices and presence—past, present,…
RECONSTRUCTING NARRATIVES AND HISTORICTY OF CASTE
Shalina Mehta Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology (retd.) Department of Anthropology Panjab University Chandigarh Shalinamehta137@gmail.com Many a doctrine is like a windowpane. We see trut…
Call for Submissions: Editors’ Forum on Popular Culture Representations of Anthropologists
We are excited to announce our very first “Editors’ Forum.” As part of this initiative, we are calling for blog submissions on the fascinating topic of “Popular Culture…
Alexa Hagerty, “Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains” (Crown, 2023)
In Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains (Crown, 2023), anthropologist Alexa Hagerty learns to see the dead body with a forensic eye. She examines bones for marks…
sNAPAshots: Mohini Mehta
https://practicinganthropology.org/wp-content/uploads/2023.04.01_Mohini-Mehta-sNAPAshot.mp4 0:10[On Screen Text – Scrolling] sNAPAshots Interviewer 0:10 Welcome back to season two of sNAPAshots….
sNAPAshots: Chad Morris
https://practicinganthropology.org/wp-content/uploads/2023.04.01_Chad-Morris-sNAPAshot.mp4 0:00 [NAPA Logo] Interviewer 0:11 Welcome to sNAPAshots: Conversations with Practicing, Professional, and App…
Eli Elinoff, “Citizen Designs: City-Making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand” (U Hawaii Press, 2021)
What does it mean to design democratic cities and democratic citizens in a time of mass urbanization and volatile political transformation? Citizen Designs: City-Making and Democracy in Northeastern…
Austerity: An Economy of Words? Pt. 2
Written by Keith Hart The originality of Keynes Commerce waxed and waned throughout the agrarian era, until the market became …
The mental tangles of classification
Citational politics often means citing a diverse group of authors, but often that will bring up the political and practical problems of categorization.
Links & Contents I Liked 477
Hi all,Any weekly review post that features a link to Robert Chambers’ work is a good post ;). More seriously, lots of new research, reflections & reporting from humanitarian…