Writing Life No. 19: An Interview with Jason Pine by Jason Pine
Figure 1 (Jason): Writing is painful for me. I do TRX Suspension Training with an amazing online and affordable personal trainer/physical therapist (email me and I’ll give you…
Category: English
Did Margaret Mead Think a Healed Femur Was the Earliest Sign of Civilization?
According to a commonly shared story, the anthropologist Margaret Mead was supposedly asked by a student what she thought was the earliest sign of a civilized society. There…
Did Margaret Mead Think a Healed Femur Was the Earliest Sign of Civilization?
An anthropologist digs into the origins of a popular story attributed to Margaret Mead about the original sign of civilization. ✽ According to a commonly shared story, the…
Jennifer Natalya Fink, “All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship” (Beacon Press, 2022)
Disability is often described as a tragedy, a crisis, or an aberration, though 1 in 5 people worldwide have a disability. Why is this common human experience rendered…
Andrew Simon, “Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt” (Stanford UP, 2022)
Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt (Stanford UP, 2022) investigates the social life of an everyday technology—the cassette tape—to offer a multisensory history of modern Egypt.…
Çigdem Çidam, “In the Street: Democratic Action, Theatricality, and Political Friendship” (Oxford UP, 2021)
Çigdem Çidam, Associate Professor of Political Science at Union College, has a new book titled In the Street: Democratic Action, Theatricality, and Political Friendship (Oxford UP, 2021) that examines political…
Understanding the Shaman’s Tribulations
Understanding the Shaman’s Tribulations – By Taba Menia – The scholarship of shamanism is closely related to ideas about traditional healing and their knowledge. Found across the world…
Living With the Prospect of Assisted Dying
[no-caption] The Real Tokyo Life/Getty Images Excerpted from The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America by Anita Hannig. © 2022 by Anita Hannig.…
Living With the Prospect of Assisted Dying
Excerpted from The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America by Anita Hannig. © 2022 by Anita Hannig. Used with permission of the publisher,…
Amy L. Stone, “Queer Carnival: Festivals and Mardi Gras in the South” (NYU Press, 2022)
Queer Carnival: Festivals and Mardi Gras in the South (NYU Press, 2022) reveals the importance of citywide celebrations like Mardi Gras and Fiesta for LGBTQIA+ communities in the US South.…
Holger Droessler, “Coconut Colonialism: Workers and the Globalization of Samoa” (Harvard UP, 2022)
In Coconut Colonialism: Workers and the Globalization of Samoa (Harvard UP, 2022), Holger Droessler provides a novel history of the impact of globalization on Sāmoa and vice versa. Using a series of…
No Open Access Today, Anthropology: On the latest AAA-Wiley Announcement
Last November, it looked like some good things were on the horizon for Open Access and the American Anthropological Association’s publishing portfolio: At this morning’s #AAA2021Baltimor…
Review: Farms to Incubators
Wu, Amy (2021) Farms to Incubators. Women Innovators Revolutionizing How Our Food is Grown. Fresno, California: Craven Street Books. Ellen Messer (Tufts University) This book, like the docum…
Is Donated Blood a Gift or a Commodity?
In 1950, human blood was stored for patient use at a U.S. Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration/Wikimedia Commons In the spring…
Is Donated Blood a Gift or a Commodity?
An anthropologist dives into the morally fraught blood and plasma industry and what it reveals about human societies—the good, the bad, and the gory. ✽ In the spring…
Michael Prentice on his book, Supercorporate
Interview by Katherine Chen https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=31761 Katherine Chen: Your book Supercorporate, an ethnography of a multi-conglomerate steel company that you call Sangdo, ar…
Louis M. Maraj, “Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics” (Utah State UP, 2020)
Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics (Utah State University Press, 2020) explores notions of Blackness in white institutional—particularly educational—spaces. In it, Louis M. Maraj theorizes how Black identity operates with/against…
The Future of Religion: A Conversation with Robin Dunbar
Of the many differences between the West and the rest of the world the issue of religiosity is one of the most striking. In the West ever fewer…
Detangling Molecular Hauntings: Hair as a Site of Preserving Lived Experience
This browser does not support HTML5 audio Listen to an audio recording of this piece read by Benjamin Schaefer Hair is a dynamic biological structure an…
Denys Gorbach: Ukrainian identity map in wartime: Thesis-antithesis-synthesis?
The cultural and linguistic heterogeneity of Ukraine is a well-known fact, used and abused in explanations of the ongoing war. Having taken root in the early modern period…
Newsletter · Vol 29.2 · June 2022
Dear readers, Welcome to NAFA Network’s second edition of 2022.
Symptom Lexicon
AUTO-PAGE-TITLE The activity of list-making is an eclectic process that enables us to draw on varied, fragmentary sources, and simultaneously negotiate their meaning. It allows us to admire…
Introducing a New TGA Editor: Connor Martini
I’ve yet to meet an academic who is not a geek. What it means to be either an academic or a geek is, by necessity, flexible and inconsistent,…
Melissa Caldwell on her book, Living Faithfully in an Unjust World
Interview by Natalja Czarnecki https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520285842/living-faithfully-in-an-unjust-world Natalja Czarnecki: You write that inter-faith food aid organizations occupy a …