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,…
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…
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…
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…
Written by Jehron Muhammad (RE: Africa’s Place in Global Diplomacy defined by Colonial and Post-Colonial History) Africa’s placement in global …
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…
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,”…
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…
