19th Century Song called “Yemen”
In 1894 the composer Harry G. Martin wrote a piece of sheet music called “Yemen,” drawing on a stanza in the famous poem Lalla Rookh by Thomas Moore.…
Category: English
NAFA International Ethnographic Film Festival 2022
The 41st NAFA film festival took place from 7 to 11 September in the village of Csehétfavla/Cehetel in Harghita County in Transylvania, Romania, with around 30 participants present.…
Links & Contents I Liked 456
Hi all,I have to start this week’s post similar to last week’s one-thanking Monica Mukerjee, Tara Todras-Whitehill & Ben Chesterton for taking the time to talk at our…
Johanna O. Zulueta, “Okinawan Women’s Stories of Migration: From War Brides to Issei” (Routledge, 2022)
The phenomenon of “war brides” from Japan moving to the West has been quite widely discussed, but this book tells the stories of women whose lives followed a…
Waleed Ziad, “Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints Beyond the Oxus and Indus” (Harvard UP, 2021)
Today, we speak with Waleed Ziad, about his book Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints beyond the Oxus and Indus, published in 2021 with Harvard University Press. Ziad is an assistant…
The politics of nerves
The politics of nerves “All of us are nervoz since the war.” “How can we not feel nervoz after what we went through?” Women who had survived the…
Nuchatlaht First Nation fights to reclaim territory in landmark court case
Global BC reporter, Kylie Stanton, interviewed me for her story on the Nachatlaht rights and title case. Here is her story. The full transcript of my comments,…
Paper: Infrastructural sustainability?
I did prepare the paper “Infrastructural sustainability?” for the Vienna Anthropology Days (VANDA) 2022 and the session “Infrastructure and the Built Environment in the Anthropocene…
Study Study Study – then read like Bhagat Singh
Most interesting post of the day, and by far, has been this attached article on Bhagat Singh and anarchism, shifting to socialism. A few points fist though. I…
Sliding through life
On a chilly afternoon in April of 2016, Lana and I were about to embark on a ride through Saint Petersburg’s bustling downtown, so she was instructing me…
Merrick Daniel Pilling, “Queer and Trans Madness: Struggles for Social Justice” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
In Queer and Trans Madness: Struggles for Social Justice (Palgrave Macmillan), Merrick D. Pilling urges those invested in social justice for 2SLGBTQ people to interrogate the biomedical model of mental…
Robinson Crusoe – 1902
This version of Robinson Crusoe, by the immortal Georges Méliès, was made 1902. This 12 and a half minute hand-coloured nitrate print was rediscovered and restored in 2011.…
With So Few Farmers, Why Are Video Games About Farming So Popular?
An archaeologist considers what farming simulators reveal about humanity’s ancient and evolving relationship with agriculture. ✽ “I hate when I have to harvest at night,” my husband complained…
Domestication and the new mythology of human “perfectibility”
In 2007, a psychiatrist, Martin Brüne, wrote an essay “On human self-domestication, psychiatry, and eugenics” published in the journal Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, in which he…
CFP: Visual Anthropology panel on Photography at RAI 2023 (deadline: 31 October)
It is with great pleasure that conveners Richard Fraser, Christian Vium and Peter I Crawford invite you to submit a paper to the upcoming RAI 2023 Film Festival…
The dark humor of PhD life
Dark humor internet memes on Twitter show some of the emotions PhD students experience during their trajectory. This digital ethnographic blog reflects on these memes and what they…
Reflecting on misconceptions about conservation
21 September 2022. It was an intensive day at the storage facility of the Museum am Rothenbaum – Kulturen und Künste der Welt…
Zachary Levenson, “Delivery As Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City” (Oxford UP, 2022)
In Dispossession as Delivery: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City (Oxford University Press; 2022), Zachary Levenson explains why post-Apartheid South Africa continues to evict land occupations. Levenson shows…
Wendy Simonds, “Hospital Land USA: Sociological Adventures in Medicalization” (Routledge, 2016)
In Hospital Land USA: Sociological Adventures in Medicalization (Routledge, 2016), Wendy Simonds analyzes the wide-reaching powers of medicalization: the dynamic processes by which medical authorities, institutions, and ideologies impact our everyday…
Was Our Skin Meant for the Sun?
An anthropologist examines the history of human skin under the sun, revealing how evolution and culture conspired to shape our outermost organ. This article was originally published at…
Life Last Week
via Wikimedia Commons Happy new year everyone! Here are Things That Happened in the last week or so: Celia Tichi is writing the history of the US through…
Platypod, Episode Three: Disability, Toxicity, and the Environment
Platypod In this episode, Platypod presents a conversation between Elizabeth Roberts (the University of Michigan) and Sophia Jaworski (the University of Toronto). They discuss the complexities of corp…
What Is Cultural Anthropology?
Cultural anthropologists seek to understand the dizzyingly diverse ways people live today, including how they think, act, create, struggle, make meaning, and organize their societies. WHAT IS CULTURAL…