Though we rarely see them at work, building inspectors have the power to significantly shape our lives through their discretionary decisions. The building inspectors of Chicago are at…
Tenbun closed on March 28, 2020. The space it occupied was empty for a year and a half. Then on October 10, 2021, a new shop opened, Peke…
The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (Stanford UP, 2022) offers the first social and intellectual history of Dalit performance of Tamasha—a popular form of public,…
starting to see text everywhere, been editing other peoples work much.
Hi all,This week’s not-so-good news from Lebanon, Ethiopia, North Korea & Syria found a positive counterpart with powerful, hopeful stories from women contributing to change-from Vanuatu, Sweden, Sout…
China re-opened border in a final farewell to its strict zero-COVID policy on the 8th of January, 2023. But in the first few weeks of January, the Myanmar side…
While a graduate student in social anthropology, Moisés Lino e Silva’s curiosity about the scarcity of freedom and lack of liberty in Brazilian favelas led him to Rocinha,…
Herbalist weighing spices. Photo: Katharina Graf Katharina Graf The Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition is seeking recent PhD theses in the anthropology of food and…
In They Eat Our Sweat, Daniel Agbiboa engages the road transport sector in Lagos, Nigeria, to reveal how corruption operates through a dialectical “double capture” of state and…
Today I talked to Batja Mesquita about her book Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions (Norton, 2022). To a degree sometimes not realized, we discuss emotions through the lens of what have…
Not long ago it seemed flood control experts were close to mastering the unruly flows funnelling toward Hudson Bay and the Prairie city of Winnipeg. But as more…
A contributor to a special series on decolonizing anthropology argues that true decolonization would require the complete dismantling of existing global power structures, including academic discipline…
Three contributors to a special series reflect on why slowing down and building trust between community partners is fundamental to decolonizing anthropology—and our shared future. This contribution is…
A contributor to a special series on decolonizing anthropology reckons with bioarchaeology’s racist past by focusing on Black women’s creativity and everyday lives in her work. This contribution…
A contributor to a special series on decolonizing anthropology rejects the discipline’s colonial and racist roots and instead pursues ways of doing science that center human liberation and…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Enero es un mes de intensa actividad en los talleres artesanales de las ciudades de El Alto y La Paz…