Wednesday Round Up #32
Anterior cingulate inputs to nucleus accumbens control the social transfer of pain and analgesia Distinct Anterior Cingulate neural circuits mediating the social transfer of pain/analgesia & fear…
Category: English
Insurrection, Accountability, and Reconciliation
Note: This piece is merely a stream of conscious as I watch and think about the impeachment. Last week, we Americans watched a violent insurrection unfold at the…
Photo Essay: Finding a place for historical nostalgia in Postcolonial Anthropology
by Yatou Sallah I have long been intrigued by the anthropological framing of Africans in the context of postcolonialism. As scholars and theorists in the field attempt to…
Doing and Seeing: Cultivating a “Fractured Habitus” through Reflexive Clinician Ethnography by William Schlesinger
Introduction The tension between critical theoretical innovation and on-the-ground, practical application has animated intense debate in medical anthropology (Scheper-Hughes 1990). Epistemological…
Evolutionary Foodprints
*This essay includes a photograph of a replica Paranthropus boisei skull and a replica human skull. New approaches to the dental remains of early hominins and the diets…
Tasting Independence
Maggi instant noodles are a treasured favorite among India’s young people. Their banning in 2015 conjured youthful memories of rebellion and revealed the uncertainties of our global food…
Farmer Talk
Facing language problems in Peru’s new coffee economy During a recent trip to the Andean-Amazonian foothills of Southern Peru, I hiked out to a remote corner of the…
How to Build a Sandwich
A degree in sociocultural anthropology may not be the most obvious background for a food stylist, yet it was a love for hands-on, detailed fieldwork that led me…
Embodied Taste
A student-curated exhibition offers an immersive exploration of food and the connections, stories, and memories we consume each time we eat. Image description: A small, neon yellow…
Twitter bans Sci-hub: Interests of the publishing mafia more important than access to science
When Twitter announced that it had suspended Donald Trump’s account, Twitter also censored the voice of Alexandra Elbakyan, the 32 year old creator of the probably most cherished…
Clara Han, “Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War” (Fordham UP, 2020)
Intertwining autobiography and ethnography, Clara Han’s touching new book Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War (Fordham University Press, 2020) asks how scholarship can be transform… Visit New Books…
Comparativism
In an essay last term, students Làu Cẩm Tú and Hồ Phạm Ngọc Trân brought out the problems and possibilities inherent in Ruth Benedicts work style – though there is…
The Coastal Edge
New technologies are refortifying our coastlines against anthropogenic climate change, drawing our water edgelands near and making them tangible and perhaps valuable. Edgelands, those ignored yet sym…
2021 at Platypus
Pixabay The first weeks of 2021 brought no relief, even though so many hoped otherwise. Instead, the first twelve days clearly demonstrated that exclusion, inequity, violence, and multiply…
Do Twins Share a Soul?
I have a clone. He’s an identical twin brother, really. But as monozygotic twins derived from one fertilized egg, we share the exact same genome. Since birth, we…
Book Review: Deporting Black Britons: Portraits of Deportation to Jamaica by Luke de Noronha
In Deporting Black Britons: Portraits of Deportation to Jamaica, Luke de Noronha weaves together the personal histories of four men who have been deported from the UK to Jamaica. Showing…
‘Darwinism, Democracy, and Race’ by John P. Jackson Jr. and David J. Depew
John P. Jackson Jr. and David J. Depew. Darwinism, Democracy, and Race: American Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology in the Twentieth Century. 240pp., index. New York: Routledge, 2017. Concurre…
Two Lessons I Learned about the Transfer of Power while Living in Africa
1. The moment that any transfer of power occurs from one individual or regime to another is fraught—ritually, sociologically, emotionally. Why? This is a liminal period–“betwix…
Review: Food Festivals
Food Festivals and Local Development in Italy: A Viewpoint from Economic Anthropology. Michele Filippo Fontefrancesco. London: Palgrave MacMillan. ISBN #978-3-030-53321-2. Xli + 179 pp Dav…
September 2020
Volume 12 | Number 2 | September 2020 AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC AirwaysMary Louise Pratt Making Meat in the Tim…
Kregg Hetherington discusses Government of Beans
Interview by Indivar Jonnalagadda https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-government-of-beans Indivar Jonnalagadda: What inspired the book’s central idea of ‘agribiopolitics’, which enco…
Anthropologist counters Zoom-fatigue: "Your next video conference might resemble a video game"
Why can we spend hours playing video games while many of us get exhausted by much shorter video-conferences? That is without doubt no bad question that the magazine…
Troubled Togetherness: Visually Impaired People’s Unsettling and Tiresome Journey towards Community Belonging
ANNAMARIA DALL’ANESE The word ‘community’ has heart-warming connotations of mutual support and reciprocal understanding. The sense of belonging that stems from being integrated into a social world…
Barbara Dennis, “Walking with Strangers: Critical Ethnography and Educational Promise” (Peter Lang, 2020)
In this episode, I speak with Dr. Barbara Dennis of Indiana University on her new ethnography, Walking with Strangers: Critical Ethnography and Educational Promise, published in 2020 by Peter…