COVID-19: Views from the Field
COVID-19, or the vernacular “coronavirus,” hardly needs an introduction. By the time of this writing, there are over 1.2 million active cases spread across nearly every country worldwide.…
Category: English
Another Day In Quarantine: The Transmutation Of The House
MARÍA FLORENCIA BLANCO ESMORIS La Matanza, Buenos Aires, Argentina I didn’t wake up that day like all the others. I had slept badly. My only peace of mind…
The overview effect
When astronauts gaze upon the Earth from space, they experience powerful feelings of global interconnectedness. This blog explores what this phenomenon, called ‘the overview effect’, contributes to un…
The Sleeping Bull in a China Shop
Exploring how Covid19 elucidates exploitation along the crosshairs of the occident vs the orient, and class stratification, in a neo-liberal age. LOUIS A.G. WILKES Night and Day; East…
Carlo Caduff, “The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger” (U California Press, 2015)
Carlo Caduff’s The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger (University of California Press, 2015) is an ethnographic inquiry into pandemic anxieties in the mid-2000s…
Waukikum Treaty of 1851
Treaty between the Waukikum tribe and the United States, negotiated by Anson Dart, Superintendent of Indian Affairs. The treaty negotiations at Tansey Point on the Columbia River were…
Holocaust Archaeology Proves Deniers Wrong
At the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland, an estimated 800,000 Jews were murdered by Nazis and their collaborators. Richard Radford/Getty Images This article was originally published…
COVID 19 in the life of elderly people in rural Russia: A crisis of confidence, backed up by fear by Konstantin Galkin
At the heart of this ethnography are two stories of my informants, Ekaterina and Marina, who live in the countryside, in Karelia (a province in north-west Russia) and…
Homecoming From The City: Covid-19 & Dhaka
MOHAMMAD TAREQ HASAN Due to the outbreak of Covid-19 in Bangladesh, the government has announced a countrywide shutdown. The declaration of “public holiday” came on March 24th in…
‘Too Close for Comfort’: Public Health, Private Zeal and the Corona Pandemic in India (#WitnessingCorona)
Hide Press Release (2 Less Words) Samata Biswas These are my preliminary thoughts during the first two weeks of being at home from work, in Kolkata (formerly…
Pandemics/ Epidemics and the Social Body in Bangladesh
MOHAMMAD TAREQ HASAN Outbreak of Covid-19 virus in Bangladesh has forced the government to shut down all private and public offices except the emergency service providers. The shutdown…
University is anything but universal: How to apply to graduate school in three different countries
(For the past year or two, I’ve been contemplating writing a “missing manual” for university that explains the tacit skills and knowledge for getting by in university that…
Ramesh Sunam: The Precariousness of Migrant Workers in Japan amidst COVID-19
Ramesh Sunam, Waseda University, Tokyo Suraj (name changed), arrived a year ago from Nepal to study at a Japanese language institute in Nagoya, Japan. He was working part-time…
Coronavirus Brings Back Memories: Indigenous priest reflects on the global pandemic [excerpt]
Justino Sarmento Rezende, a Salesian priest of the Tuyuka indigenous people from the upper Rio Negro in Brazil, reflects on the coronavirus pandemic from the perspective of his…
Getting Online / Becoming Misaligned in the American Midwest
Data Threshers “Data Threshers” is a simulation portrait that experiments with the representation of metabolic conflicts in multiple scales of time, space, and perspective. Formally, the video takes…
Getting a Fake Shaligram, Intentionally
So, I got a fake Shaligram. But don’t be indignant on my behalf, it was on purpose. One of the most pervasive fears many Shaligram devotees (or would-be…
Kebalen Malang Traditional Market
90 km south of Surabaya, a Nice, cool, clean city in the hills. Well-laid out square and parks. Trees everywhere. Big Villas with large glass windows; old Dutch…
Responding to the pandemic of 21st century : Dynamics of power, intersections and the ‘Imagined Corona’ in India
The current times have seen a surge of concern around the soaring cases of the global pandemic of COVID 19. The novel nature of the virus has pitted…
Yoik
Deep in the Arctic Circle, in the far north of Scandinavia, people belonging to the Sámi ethnic group herd reindeer. Nowadays only a minority of Sámi people still…
Protecting The Boundaries, Keeping A Strong Heart In Laos
ELIZABETH ELLIOTT The first cases of Covid-19 were recorded in Vientiane on March 24th; until then, Laos had been the last country in Southeast Asia to be officially…
Green Shoots
KATHARINE DOW ‘We’re in an incredibly unsettling period, globally, nationally. Can I allay some of my anxieties about what this means for me and my kids by buying…
Caring in times of COVID-19 by Patrícia Ferreira
“Will this be the same story with every new virus emerging on the global horizon, every year?” The question that Vincanne Adams asks in “Disasters and capitalism…and COVID-19”…
Commissioner Brunot Lectures Tribal Chiefs on Moral Living, 1871
In 1871, the BIA had just gotten some direction from President Ulysses S, Grant to go ahead and train the Indians to be civilized so that they may…
Kimberly Chong on her new book, Best Practice
Interview by Johannes Lenhard https://www.dukeupress.edu/best-practice Johannes Lenhard: Your book is continuing a so far relatively short line of monographs in anthropology started by perhaps Caitli…