Links & Contents I Liked 433
Hi all, The absence of real snow is only one of the many problems as the worst Winter Olympics just kicked-off in Beijing, headed by the IOC, an…
Category: English
Heritage out of Control: Present Gods, Absent Nation
The sun had already set when the night-long live broadcast of a kohoḿbā kankāriya ritual in a Sri Lankan town begins. A larger-than-life image of the leading national…
A King of King Tides
In December 2021, several places in the Western Pacific concurrently faced extreme weather events in the form of king tides. Vandhna Kumar offers here an analysis of the…
Renny Thomas, “Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment” (Routledge, 2021)
Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment (Routledge, 2021) provides an in-depth ethnographic study of science and religion in the context of South Asia, giving voice to Indian scientists…
Vincent Joos, “Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships: Housing, Memory, and Daily Life in Haiti” (Rutgers UP, 2021)
Vincent Joos’ book Urban Dwellings, Haitian Citizenships: Housing, Memory, and Daily Life in Haiti (Rutgers UP, 2021) explores the failed international reconstruction of Port-au-Prince after the devastating 2010 earthquake. It…
Travels in Arabia
One of the books I picked up over the years was a summary of early travelers to Arabia by Bayard Taylor, a noted traveler and poet. The 1892…
How “Wilderness” Was Invented Without Indigenous Peoples
Anthropologist Spencer Greening, a member of the Gitga’at First Nation, maps 2,000-year-old fish traps in an intertidal area as part of his graduate studies in Indigenous resource management…
Heritage out of Control: When Heritage Turns to Rubble
In December 2017, Toungouma was stolen, the famed stone said to render justice in the Département of Dogondoutchi, Niger. When it was found a few days later, the…
Karen Jaime, “The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Loisaida” (NYU Press, 2021)
In The Queer Nuyorican: Racialized Sexualities and Aesthetics in Losaida (NYU Press, 2021), Karen Jaime argues that the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe has always been a queer space. While acknowledging elements…
Colin McFarlane, “Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds” (U California Press, 2021)
Cities are becoming increasingly fragmented materially, socially, and spatially. From broken toilets and everyday things, to art and forms of writing, fragments are signatures of urban worlds and…
Robin G. Isserles, “The Costs of Completion: Student Success in Community College” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021)
America’s community colleges are facing a completion crisis. The college-going experience of too many students is interrupted, lengthening their time to completing a degree―or worse, causing many to…
Redrawing the Boundaries
For many, archaeology means digging up historical artifacts from beneath the ground. But to some, that framework is also violent and colonialist. What would it mean to leave…
Miner Riotinto is rotten and racist to the core.
From Crikey today : “DISTURBING” CULTURE AT RIO Tinto Mining giant Rio Tinto have released the shocking details of a company-wide cultural review, which found sexism, bullying, and…
Environment, Labour and Capitalism at Sea (Book Review)
by Connie Scott “Fish simply appear in supermarkets” (p.209), writes Penny McCall Howard. Most consumers have little or no awareness of where their fish comes from, or of…
Egyptology Has a Problem: Patriarchy
Ramses II built many temples to his own divinity, like the Ramesseum in Luxor, originally called the Temple of Millions of Years to imply his reign would never…
What Egyptian Pharaohs Can Tell Us About Modern Tyrants
Using religion to justify his rule, King Taharqa is shown nestled protectively between the legs of the god Amen in his animal form, implying the king knew the…
Heritage out of Control: Inheriting Love – Sensing in The Museum of Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi (1207-1273)
“Muslims go to Mecca once, if they are not unnecessarily wealthy (laughing), but people of all kinds come to visit Mevlana [‘s musealized tomb] every year. Why? Because…
Jane Lilly López, “Unauthorized Love: Mixed-Citizenship Couples Negotiating Intimacy, Immigration, and the State” (Stanford UP, 2021)
For mixed-citizenship couples, getting married is the easy part. The US Supreme Court has confirmed the universal civil right to marry, guaranteeing every couple’s ability to wed. But…
Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers, “American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York” (Princeton UP, 2022)
Settled in the mid-1970s by a small contingent of Hasidic families, Kiryas Joel is an American town with few parallels in Jewish history—but many precedents among religious communities…
Reactions and Ruptures: Ethnographies of Nuclear Life
Recording of Reactions and Ruptures This browser does not support HTML5 audio In one sense, nuclear materials direct our attention to the vibrancy and reactivity…
Liberal Revolutions and the African Future: An Interview with Keith Hart
Economic anthropologist Keith Hart (KH), one of the leading figures in African studies, spoke to Social Transformations editor Lisandro Claudio … More
What online learning taught me about (online) teaching, by Andrew Walsh
Andrew Walsh is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Western University, London, Ontario. He is the author of Made in Madagascar in the Teaching Culture series. What more…
Viral Waste, or Covid Down the Toilet: Post-Colonic Pandemic Biopolitics by Warwick Anderson
Within days of discovering SARS-CoV-2, laboratory scientists and epidemiologists were speculating on whether the virus might take fecal passage, and thereby spread through contamination with bodily w…
Russel Kaschula on his book, Language, Identities and Intercultural Communication in South Africa
Interview by Jennifer Cox https://www.routledge.com/Languages-Identities-and-Intercultural-Communication-in-South-Africa-and/Kaschula/p/book/9780367364359 Jennifer Cox: Your book fo…