Antropologins största gåva är något av en evig gåta
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…
Category: English
Marius Wamsiedel, “The Moral Evaluation of Emergency Department Patients: An Ethnography of Triage Work in Romania” (Lexington, 2023)
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…
Tessa Farmer, “Well Connected: Everyday Water Practices in Cairo” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)
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…
Excavating a 19th-Century Detroit Saloon
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…
Hiking Trails, Sustainable Tourism, and Bedouin Heritage
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…
Arseli Dokumaci, “Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds” (Duke UP, 2023)
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…
The right to dignity: Housing struggles, city-making, and citizenship in urban Chile
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…
Why Nahua Pilgrims Carry Thousands of Papers Up Sacred Peaks
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…
Memorializing Eruption
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.…
Where did all the gyoza go?
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…
Amanda Apgar, “The Disabled Child: Memoirs of a Normal Future” (U Michigan Press, 2023)
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…
Giving Winter a Funeral in Transylvania
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…
The Dirt
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…
Give a Hand To the Fallen, as Long as You Are Standing: Earthquake Disaster Relief among Afghans
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 Love Letter to the Munay-Ki
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…
Jennifer Petersen on her book, How Machines Came to Speak
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…
Sahlins biography June 2023 update
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…
Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour, “The Politics of Survival: Black Women Social Welfare Beneficiaries in Brazil and the United States” (Columbia UP, 2023)
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…
César Ernesto Abadía-Barrero, “Health in Ruins: The Capitalist Destruction of Medical Care at a Colombian Maternity Hospital” (Duke UP, 2022)
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…
Elizabeth Reddy, “¡Alerta!: Engineering on Shaky Ground” (MIT Press, 2023)
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…
Patrick Jory, “A History of Manners and Civility in Thailand” (Cambridge UP, 2021)
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,…
Developing Responsible AI with David Gray Widder and Dawn Nafus
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…
sNAPAshots: Lauren Penney
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…