2021 round-up and happy new year!
By Danny Miller and Laura Haapio-Kirk 2021, despite its difficulties, has been a key year for the ASSA project. The high point for us was in May with…
Category: English
The year 2021 on Closer – Salafism, Racism and COVID19
Welcome on my annual overview of the most read posts on Closer. It was another year with COVID19 and lots of discussions on race, security and Salafism. Here…
Alison Hope Alkon, “A Recipe for Gentrification: Food, Power, and Resistance in the City” (NYU Press, 2020)
A Recipe for Gentrification: Food, Power, and Resistance in the City (NYU Press, 2020), edited by Alison Hope Alkon, Yuki Kato, and Joshua Sbicca, is a collection of essays examining…
Starting CLEAR, maintaining CLEAR
I get a lot of emails asking how I started the lab, how junior scholars might start labs, and how to transform existing labs. This post outlines how…
The best and raise awareness of Minamata Post Credit
It sometimes happens that you just know…You have a feeling that things are coinciding, and that they operate and work on a number of levels – obviously visual…
Mark Bender and Aku Wuwu, trans., “The Nuosu Book of Origins: A Creation Epic from Southwest China” (U Washington Press, 2019)
The Nuosu people, who were once overlords of vast tracts of farmland and forest in the uplands of southern Sichuan and neighboring provinces, are the largest division of…
Andrew Zitcer, “Practicing Cooperation: Mutual Aid Beyond Capitalism” (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
Have you ever stopped to think about your local grocery cooperative and what makes it different than, say Safeway or Giant or Whole Foods? That is, if you…
Tamar Katriel on her book, Defiant Discourse
Interview by Irit Dekel Irit Dekel: Your recent book Defiant Discourse helps readers understand the relations between speech and action, revisiting important questions concerning the performat…
Infrastructures of inequality: Caring tweets, public health, and COVID-19 in Delhi by Emilija Zabiliūte
One tweet asks for help finding a hospital bed in Delhi, India’s capital. Another asks where to find oxygen. These tweets joined a sea of similar pleas for…
Smitha Radhakrishnan, “Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India” (Duke UP, 2022)
In Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India (Duke UP, 2022), Smitha Radhakrishnan explores India’s microfinance industry, which in the past two decades has come to saturate the everyday ……
Protecting the Pandemic from the People: Perpetual Panic, Permanent Emergency
There are some suggestions that the Omicron variant could well end “the pandemic”. And that is a problem. It is a problem on two fronts. First, a variant that…
Gabriel Yoran, “The Interfact: On Structure and Compatibility in Object-Oriented Ontology” (Open Humanities Press, 2021)
Objects in object-oriented ontology (OOO) are mysterious and inexhaustible entities. But since OOO grants ontological priority to objects, it should have an easy time referring to objects. Bu……
Lucie Fremlova, “Queer Roma” (Routledge, 2021)
Lucie Fremlova’s book Queer Roma (Routledge, 2021) offers in-depth insight into the lives of queer Roma, thus providing rich evidence of the heterogeneity of Roma. The lived experiences of qu……
Hatim El-Hibri, “Visions of Beirut: The Urban Life of Media Infrastructure” (Duke UP, 2021)
In Visions of Beirut: The Urban Life of Media Infrastructure (Duke UP, 2021), Hatim El-Hibri explores how the creation and circulation of images has shaped the urban spaces and cultural imagi……
Farha Bano Ternikar, “Intersectionality in the Muslim South Asian-American Middle Class” (Lexington Books, 2021)
In Intersectionality in the Muslim South Asian-American Middle Class: Lifestyle Consumption beyond Halal and Hijab (Lexington Books, 2021), wherein Ternikar theorizes the everyday consumption… Visit New Books in Anthropology for…
Daniel M. Knight, “Vertiginous Life: An Anthropology of Time and the Unforeseen” (Berghahn Books, 2021)
Vertiginous Life: An Anthropology of Time and the Unforeseen (Berghahn Books, 2021) provides a theory of the intense temporal disorientation brought about by life in crisis. In the whirlpool…
Draining Wapato Lake
In Oregon, we have the well-known Wapato Lake, near Gaston. The lake originally was the center of seasonal activities of the Tualatin Kalapuyans (Atfalati) who lived near and…
Chris Knight: Wrong About (Almost) Everything
A review article on The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Allen Lane, 2021. The Dawn of Everything’s central idea…
Loti on Palestine
First English translation of ‘La Galilée’, an account of Pierre Loti’s travels in the Holy Land from Jerusalem to Beirut, via Damascus and many other interesting places, in…
Ian Reader and John Shultz, “Pilgrims Until We Die: Unending Pilgrimage in Shikoku” (Oxford UP, 2021)
Ian Reader and John Shultz’s Pilgrims Until We Die: Unending Pilgrimage in Shikoku (Oxford University Press, 2021)” explores the Shikoku pilgrimage by focusing on the themes of repetition and… Visit…
Opening ceremony of the 2nd International Conference on Innovations in The Social Sciences & Humanities 2021
From TDTU – https://www.tdtu.edu.vn/en/news/opening-ceremony-of-the-2nd-international-conference-on-innovations-in-the-social-sciences-humanities-2021 On the morning of December 17, 2021, th…
Maka Suarez: Thinking about debt with David Graeber and La PAH
Let me begin by saying “this is a thought experiment”; a phrase David often used, and I find useful. In this talk I’d like to propose an approach…
Fuel Maps: Digitizing Grass and Sensing Fire in Brazil
Guilherme M. Fagundes, Princeton University § Part and parcel of the technological repertoire in wildland fire management, fuel maps invite us to reflect on the everyday life of…
Trinidad – The Potential of ‘Online Only’ Ethnography
By Daniel Miller and Sheba Mohammid The ASSA project runs until October 2022. Mostly the last year of the project is dedicated to publishing our results, for example…