Smartphones and public anthropology
Sanderien Verstappen* Report on the RAI conference panel “Critical play: Smartphones as a mode of creative engagement with crisis” during the RAI Film Festival 2021. Anthropology students Jacob…
Category: English
From Mink to the Wild: COVID-19 through the Mirror of Sylvatic Plague by Jules Skotnes-Brown
Even as pandemic response is focused on understanding, controlling and preventing COVID-19 among humans, a ghost haunts epidemiological concerns about the disease: reverse-zoonotic sylvatic Covid. Or…
Links & Contents I Liked 401
Hi all, For many of us these will be a few quieter Easter holiday days. Before I’m logging off & take a proper break (so no newsletter next…
Smriti Srinivas et al., “Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds” (Routledge, 2020)
Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds (Routledge, 2020), coedited by Smriti Srinivas, Bettina Ng’weno, and Neelima Jeychandran, breaks new ground by bringing together multidisciplinary approaches t… Visit New Books in Anthropology…
Edward Ashford Lee, “The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines” (MIT Press, 2020)
Are humans defining technology, or is technology defining humans? In The Coevolution: The Entwined Futures of Humans and Machines (MIT Press, 2020), Edward Ashford Lee considers the case that… Visit…
Richard C. Jankowsky, “Ambient Sufism: Ritual Niches and the Social Work of Musical Form” (U Chicago Press, 2021)
Ambient Sufism: Ritual Niches and the Social Work of Musical Form (University of Chicago Press, 2021) by Richard C. Jankowsky (an Associate Professor of music at Tufts University) is…
Resisting Psychiatric Temporalities in “Post-Conflict” Colombia
Post-traumatic stress disorder fails to account for the psychosocial issues that arise in the wake of peace. We need nonpathological frameworks to give FARC ex-combatants the support they…
Why Are Black People’s Remains in Museums?
Many U.S. museums, including those housed at Harvard University, collected and currently still store human remains. Smith Collection/Gado/Archive Photos via Getty Images This article was …
Googling Ibn Majid
One of the most famous Arab navigators is the Omani Ahmad b. Majid, who flourished in the latter half of the 15th century. If you google his name…
Making the cut – who gets to be an appointed governor at UBC?
In December of 2020 I was interviewed by a Ubyssey reporter about UBC’s Board of governors and who appointed governors were selected. In March of 2021 the article was…
Trump’s attack on American “democracy” – Part 2 by Keith Hart
Is the United States a racist theocracy? As the last of three generations of Northern Irish Protestant descent settled in … More
Eugenia Cheng, “x + y: A Mathematician’s Manifesto for Rethinking Gender” (Basic Book, 2020)
From its more mainstream, business-focused and business-friendly “Lean In” variants, to more radical, critical and intersectional understandings of feminism, the past decade has seen a flouri… Visit New…
Lucas Bessire, “Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains” (Princeton UP, 2021)
The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer…
The Pandemic Shift: The School for Advanced Research Annual Report
Historian C. J. Alvarez came to SAR to work on a project exploring the US-Mexico border as a bioregion and to challenge, through his writin…
Witnessing Disappearance in China during the Global Pandemic
The landscape of Islam within China has been changing rapidly during the pandemic. Ethnographic fieldwork can map these erasures and disappearances in everyday life. It was an unusually…
Stop Erasing Transgender Stories From History
A Peruvian actress impersonates the ancient Moche Lady of Cao, whose biologically female body was buried alongside artifacts typically attributed to elite male warriors. Reuters/Alamy Stock P…
Wonder Woman – Leader, Superhero, Anthropologist
Wonder Woman – Justice League “You can be anything you want to be” Diana Prince AKA Wonder Woman , Justice League (Zach Snyder Cut, 2021) Today marks the…
Wednesday Round Up #43
How Whiteness Works: JAMA and the Refusals of White Supremacy What makes this story worth telling is not the drama of an editorial shakeup at one of the…
Victoria Shmidt and Bernadette N. Jaworsky, “Historicizing Roma in Central Europe: Between Critical Whiteness and Epistemic Injustice” (Routledge 2021).
In Central Europe, limited success in revisiting the role of science in the segregation of Roma reverberates with the yet-unmet call for contextualizing the impact of ideas on…
Oldest Beer Site
Check out this report in The Guardian on what may be the oldest site for producing beer in the world. Of course it was discovered by archaeologists…
Motivation and Apathy in the Time of COVID-19
For many graduate students, the pandemic has postponed fieldwork and changed research plans. How do we keep going and cope with these challenges to our academic careers? …
Sustaining Bilingual Education Amid School Choice Expansion
Students, parents, and educators in Milwaukee continue a tradition of bilingual education activism and resist choice schools’ scaling up of linguistic subtraction. At La Escuela Bilingüe Foster’s (Fo…
Reviews: Theorising Media & Conflict
This post compiles extracts of published reviews of the edited volume Theorising Media & Conflict (eds. P. Budka & B. Bräuchler, Berghahn Books, 2020). Younes Saramifar (Free University…
Why a Mexican Village’s DIY Cellphone Network Matters
A campesino checks his cellphone while working in the fields outside of Talea de Castro, Mexico (the mountain village in the distance on the upper left). Agustine Sacha…