Category: English
Ioannis Gaitanidis, “Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan: Beyond Religion?” (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Ioannis Gaitanidis’ book Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan: Beyond Religion? (Bloomsbury, 2022) critically examines the spirituality phenomenon in contemporary Japan by looking at the main actors involved in the discourse:…
Det sociala arbetets marknadsplats – en flanerande professors betraktelser
Magnus Dahlstedt: Innan föredraget flanerar jag med etnografens blick runt, tittar på folk, följer deras rörelseschema. Så småningom går det alltmer upp för mig. Det jag under lång…
First SAR Centennial Medal Presented to N. Scott Momaday
On February 25, SAR President Michael F. Brown, Ph.D., presented SAR’s first ever Centennial Medal to author N. Scott Momaday for distinguished service to SAR and the world.…
The Good Enough Life
Today’s book is: The Good-Enough Life (Princeton UP, 2022) by Avram Alpert. We live in a world oriented toward greatness, one in which we feel compelled to be among the wealthiest,…
Laurah E. Klepinger, “Transnational Yoga at Work: Spiritual Tourism and Its Blind Spots” (Lexington Books, 2022)
Transnational Yoga at Work: Spiritual Tourism and Its Blind Spots (Lexington Books, 2022) is an ethnography about local wageworkers in the Indian branches of a transnational yoga institution and…
Can Digitizing Gravestones Save History?
An anthropologist is digitizing gravestones at Burial Hill, a historic cemetery in Plymouth, Massachusetts, that holds the remains of some of the first Pilgrims. Documenting these unique records…
Editorial Note: Introducing the new Engagement team
The Sierras in California. Photo by: Ángela Castillo Engagement is happy to announce a new editorial team starting in 2023! Ángela Castillo-Ardila, Colin Hoag, Jia Hu…
Tomaso Ferrando: Beyond Speculation
On May 21, 2022 the cover of The Economist left no space to the imagination: a set of skulls replaced the grains of a wheat straw, and the…
All balls have colors but some balls are more colorful than others
By Peter Versteeg – The opening images of the documentary “White Balls on Walls” show us an ivory tower: a huge building, shining white, almost sterile, a stronghold…
Paper: Relational infrastructures
Budka, P. (2023). Relational infrastructures: Transportation and sustainability in the Subarctic town of Churchill, Canada. Paper at Biennial Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society, Rovani…
materialism and truth
Do we spend too much time worrying about truth and its manipulation of the senses, priority of matter etc., Rene Descartes owes us much as the destructive consequences…
Antonius C. G. M. Robben and Alex Hinton, “Perpetrators: Encountering Humanity’s Dark Side” (Stanford UP, 2023)
Perpetrators of mass violence are commonly regarded as evil. Their violent nature is believed to make them commit heinous crimes as members of state agencies, insurgencies, terrorist organizations,…
Who Pays the Price When Cochlear Implants Go Obsolete?
Some cochlear implant users can’t afford to keep up with compulsory technology upgrades. After becoming dependent on the devices, they’re losing their hearing and feel abandoned by manufacturers.…
sNAPAshots: Mohini Mehta & Chad Morris
We have two exciting episodes in store for viewers this month, as we begin Season Two of sNAPAshots and NAPA’s 40th year! Hear from Mohini Mehta a PhD…
Adventures in chatGPT #2: A conversation with Nick Seaver
After writing my last post about chatGPT, I got in touch with Nick Seaver to see what he had to say about some of these issues. Here’s our conversation:…
Digital Multiples and Social Media
In this post, we unpack the meaning and many works of creating and maintaining digital multiples, a term we coined in our recent ethnography, A Filtered Life, to…
A Story of Icelandic Skulls
An anthropologist journeys to the Arctic Circle and finds a surprising story about the human remains that end up in museum collections. “Prime harvest”—that’s how one early 20th-century…
NEW article on state, family, and the scaling of care by Christof Lammer
The minimum livelihood guarantee (dibao) in the People’s Republic of China has been claimed to be the „world’s largest cash-based social policy.“ Examining the making of d…
Jeffrey G. Snodgrass, “The Avatar Faculty: Ecstatic Transformations in Religion and Video Games” (U California Press, 2023)
The Avatar Faculty: Ecstatic Transformations in Religion and Video Games (University of California Press, 2023) creatively examines the parallels between spiritual and digital activities to explore the roles that symbolic…
The Borders of Normality
How can we describe the shifting ways in which racism intersects with other systems of oppression in the present? As an anthropologist who has researched the contemporary German…
Michele Friedner on her book, Sensory Futures
Interview by Timothy Y. Loh https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/sensory-futures Tim Loh: Congratulations on this exciting new book! Your first book, Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban …
