Can Anthropology Be Decolonized?
In recent years, anthropology has increasingly reckoned with its colonial and racist roots. In a special forum, scholars weigh in on what “decolonizing” means—and share their visions for…
Category: English
Elizabeth Farfán-Santos, “Undocumented Motherhood: Conversations on Love, Trauma, and Border Crossing” (U Texas Press, 2022)
Claudia Garcia crossed the border because her toddler, Natalia, could not hear. Leaving behind everything she knew in Mexico, Claudia recounts the terror of migrating alone with her…
Gillian Tan, “Pastures of Change: Contemporary Adaptations and Transformations among Nomadic Pastoralists of Eastern Tibet” (Springer, 2018)
Tibetan nomads have developed a way of life that is dependent in multiple ways on their animals and shaped by the phenomenological experience of mobility. These pastoralists have…
Lois Presser, “Unsaid: Analyzing Harmful Silences” (U California Press, 2022)
Harm takes shape in and through what is suppressed, left out, or taken for granted. Unsaid: Unsaid: Analyzing Harmful Silences (U California Press, 2022) is a guide to understanding and uncovering…
Platypus in 2023
Welcome to Platypus in 2023! We’re excited for another year of anthropological and social thinking around science and technology. Last year we had over forty-five posts on topics…
Review: Making Levantine Cuisine
Anny Gaul, Graham Ajman Pitts, Vichi Valosik, eds. Making Levantine Cuisine: Modern Foodways of the Eastern Mediterranean. University of Texas Press. Austin: 2021. ISBN: 9781477324585 Noha Fik…
Jessica Storey-Nagy takes the page 99 test
Page 99 of my dissertation falls in Chapter 1, “A ‘Viktator’ in the Making: Gaslighting Democracy, Telling Lies, and Evoking Histories,” which describes political culture in Hungary after…
Alasita: La feria aymara
Enero es un mes de intensa actividad en los talleres artesanales de las ciudades de El Alto y La Paz…
Goofy was a plant.
“one half of them who perish in London, dye of Phthisical and Pulmonic distempers; that the inhabitants are never free from Coughs” John Evelyn 1661 The biggest trick…
Namita Vijay Dharia, “The Industrial Ephemeral: Labor and Love in Indian Architecture and Construction” (U California Press, 2022)
What transformative effects does a multimillion-dollar industry have on those who work within it? The Industrial Ephemeral presents the untold stories of the people, politics, and production chains…
David Collier and Gerardo L. Munck, “Critical Junctures and Historical Legacies: Insights and Methods for Comparative Social Science” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)
Over the past 50 years, scholars across the social sciences have employed critical juncture analysis to understand how social orders are created, become entrenched, and change. In this…
Slurs
Defoe is as good at mocking Robinson as anyone, despite swallowing a thesaurus. In volume three: ”poor, wild, wicked Robinson” (316) “a churl, a morose, sour disposition, a…
Links & Contents I Liked 468
Hi all,Davos came & went, but there are also other important stories from Afghanistan, Brazil, on faux carbon offsets, value/poverty chains, peace intermediaries & much more!And another brand…
Hil Malatino, “Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad” (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
Fatigue, disorientation, numbness, envy, rage, burnout. What good could come from thinking about trans experience and these bad feelings? In Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad (University of…
Surviving the State: Struggles for Land and Democracy in Myanmar
How do farmers struggle for land and democracy in Myanmar’s hybrid political system? How might a feminist approach to this question look like and enable novel findings? In…
Interview with CBC Radio, Jan 17, 2023.
Interview with CBC Radio, Jan. 17, 2023. I did an interview with CBC January 17th that contributed to a web story on that day and short news items…
“The task was to fit their bodies into these infrastructural worlds.” Food, Bodies, and Ethnicities in the Work of Krishnendu Ray
David Sutton In this eighth interview in the series on the development of Food Anthropology I sit down with Professor Krishnendu Ray (NYU). We discuss Professor Ray’s initial…
Greenland’s South: Inuit pastoralists in a rapidly changing Arctic environment
The first thing flying into Kangerlussuaq, Greenland reminds us that this is ‘properly’ Arctic. For most people who call the North home, the Arctic is further up North…
Master’s positions (MA & MSc) in plastics and justice-based research methods
CLEAR has four Master’s positions (MA or MSc) for September 2023
A Tree’s Tongue
A Nigerian poet-anthropologist witnesses the powerful rising up of ancestors through the revival of a tree in the Igbo village of Ogbodu. “A Tree’s Tongue” is part of…
Indigenizing What It Means to Be Human
SAPIENS offers a curated collection of poems and stories that center Indigenous values, worldviews, and insights, creatively reimagining anthropology and the human experience. ✽ Anthropology’s fraugh…
Malini Ambach et al., “Temples, Texts, and Networks: South Indian Perspectives” (HASP, 2022)
For many centuries, Hindu temples and shrines have been of great importance to South Indian religious, social and political life. Aside from being places of worship, they are…
Don’t pursue a PhD as skills training for “the industry”!
Based on another recent conversation on LinkedIn-this time far more productive and polite compared to my previous experience, I want to expand a little on the answer I…