On The Social Life of TBI
A Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is a common injury that occurs when a physical blow or force to the head damages the brain inside the skull—full stop. As…
Category: English
The ‘truth’ about ALS: Reconciling bias, motives, and etiological gaps by Chelsey Carter
In February of 2019, I was giving a talk in New Haven, Connecticut. My paper was an overview of my research, titled “Is It a ‘White Disease’? ALS,…
Water #Failures and Social Housing
Public and media discourses about housing estates are replete with highly problematic narratives of failure, riddled with classed and racialised tropes that cast estates, and especially modernist high…
Robert M. Geraci, “Temples of Modernity: Nationalism, Hinduism, and Transhumanism in South Indian Science” (Lexington, 2018)
What is the relationship between science, religion and technology in Hinduism? We speak with Robert M. Geraci about his research into religious ideas and practices in Indian science…
Ruben Enrique Campos III takes the page 99 test
Destiny again. It had to be El Legendario Bombay. It had to be page 99. Upon entering, I immediately saw why the place was called legendary. It oozed…
Atmospheric Failure
Fog catchers (atrapanieblas) are fairly simple constructions. They consist of large plastic or nylon nets stretched between two vertically positioned poles, perpendicular to the direction of the incom…
Ronit Ricci, “Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon” (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Lanka, Ceylon, Sarandib: merely three disparate names for a single island? Perhaps. Yet the three diverge in the historical echoes, literary cultures, maps and memories they evoke. Names…
Fabio Rambelli, “Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
In Japan, a country popularly perceived as highly secularized and technologically advanced, ontological assumptions about spirits (tama or tamashii) seem to be quite deeply ingrained in the c……
The Dirt
To keep practitioners up-to-date, Discard Studies publishes The Dirt, a monthly compilation of recent publications, positions, opportunities, and calls for proposals in the field. Here is The Dirt…
Shit’s getting real in more than one language
Back in March, I wrote a short piece analyzing the COVID-driven toilet paper hoarding phenomenon from an anthropological perspective. Since then, it’s become my most visited post, and…
Called to the Torah: Navigating Feminism and Jewish Law in Modern Orthodox Communities
The synagogue – a deeply symbolic cultural space – is a place where feminist congregants are increasingly seeking equality. These women wish to read from the Torah (a…
The Power of Photography: The Miracle of Survival
AUTO-PAGE-TITLE Slap “Here you see the mourning family of two brothers who died…” Slap “This is a real mass grave…” Slap “In this mass grave you can see…
Adventures with Peccaries pt. 2
I spent time out in the Hill Country, north of San Antonio ,Texas. The clan that I worked with on this trip was made up of 8 total…
From the Margins to the Mainstream: Black and Indigenous Futures in Archaeology
Widespread protests against police violence and anti-Black racism have recently swept the globe. In the wake of protests in May and June, specifically, many citizens and communities looked…
Cuban Food Security in a Time of COVID-19
The pandemic has created new opportunities and barriers to food access in Cuba’s two largest cities. Even before Cuba’s first case of COVID-19 was detected on March 11,…
Interview: On COVID-19 & digital technologies in everyday life
In May 2020, I was asked by the European Science-Media Hub of the European Parliament to participate in a short written interview about COVID-19 and digital technologies in…
Loretta Ieng Tak Lou: Freedom as ethical practices
https://matskut.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/1270/audio_only-%5bAudioTrimmer.com%5d.m4a Loretta Ieng Tak Lou (University of Macau and LSE) gave a virtual tal…
When Colorblind Parenting Meets Anti-racism
Author Zeray Alemseged and his daughter attend a Black Lives Matter protest in Chicago. Peter Stamos I watched the uniformed White policeman kneel on the Black man’s neck…
Links & Contents I Liked 377
Hi all, Did you have enough Zoom meetings this week? Yeah, me too… Before I’m logging off for the weekend I’m happy to share some great #globaldev readings,…
Urban Anthropology job, research in Nuuk
This comes pretty late, but who knows, maybe they extend the deadline? Colleagues want us to spread the news of PhD jobs funded at Tromso and Oslo and…
Opposing Views for a Shared Mission
On the website of Zuiderlicht (one of the organizations I researched): the angle and scenery of this picture implies that the wind turbine rises up from nature itself.…
Narratives of dysfunction and success stories in e-waste recycling in India
There is a growing consensus that India is going through a waste crisis, and this awareness unfolds parallel to an increasing awareness of the beyond-human time it takes…
Nicholas H. A. Evans, “Far from the Caliph’s Gaze: Being Ahmadi Muslim in the Holy City of Qadian” (Cornell UP, 2020)
A sustained and compelling critique of the doubt/belief binary in the anthropology of religion and Islam, Nicholas H. A. Evans’ Far from the Caliph’s Gaze: Being Ahmadi Muslim…