Reclaiming Reciprocity in Video Sharing Environments
By Patricia Lange, California College of the Arts in San Francisco [In this new series, part of the Digital World category, we publish author commentaries on recently published…
Category: English
Meet Our 2020 Contributing Editors!
As we begin another exciting year here at Platypus, we’d like to introduce you to our new group of Contributing Editors. Contributing Editors are responsible both for producing and…
Marcel Danesi discusses his book on memes and pop culture
https://brill.com/view/title/54309 Interview by Leila Mzali Leila Mzali: How did you initially become interested in the study of youth and pop culture? How did you realize that memes, while…
Unhealthy at the Health Fair: A personal account of chronic illness and disability in the field
Bio: Samantha Streuli is a PhD candidate at University of California, San Diego. Her research centers on a vaccine-promotion health intervention taking place within the Somali refugee community…
Brands and the Business of Relationships with Bill Fleming
Bill Fleming stops by to chat with Adam about branding, marketing and design. Bill is a Boston-based Independent Brand & Marketing Strategist, and Business Consultant for Designers. On…
Narges Bajoghli, “Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic” (Stanford UP, 2019)
Narges Bajoghli’s gripping new book Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic (Stanford UP, 2019) presents a riveting ethnography of pro-regime media networks in Iran, and…
Sending surplus food to charity is not the way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
While giving food that would otherwise go to landfill to hungry people may be a convenient part of a solution to reduce greenhouse gases, it will do little…
HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT is available for pre-order now!
My new book, HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT, comes out April 7! You can preorder it now: HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT is a history of the past forty years…
The Start of the Kosovo War and its Defilement of the Everyday
AUTO-PAGE-TITLE Anduena[1] looks affectionately at her son sitting snugly in her lap, and says, “For him the war is like a fairy tale. He often asks, ‘Mother, tell…
Naked Anthropologist News for Radio Ava: Jan 2020
Since last spring I’ve been providing Naked Anthropologist News to Radio Ava, a sexworker project in London. Something between tweeting and blogging, these news-bits are meant to be…
Decolonizing or Recolonizing? The (Mis)Representation of Humanity in Natural History Museums
Every Indigenous Peoples’ Day since 2016, members of the activist group Decolonize This Place have gathered at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City,…
The Gift of a Bicultural Upbringing
The author, Sandhya Fuchs (center, at age 6) spent much of her young life in India, where Bharti (left) and Aarti (right) became like sisters to her. Today…
Gediminas Lankauskas, “The Land of Weddings and Rain: Nation and Modernity in Post-Socialist Lithuania” (U Toronto Press, 2015)
Gediminas Lankauskas’ new book The Land of Weddings and Rain: Nation and Modernity in Post-Socialist Lithuania (University of Toronto Press, 2015) is “an ethnography concerned with the ambigu……
Centrifugal Citation Conformity Machine
I was recently in an information briefing (which was very useful) about Web of Science and citations/searches. Here are some thoughts on how the system at present breeds…
A few thoughts on cultural attraction
As I am finishing the work on the submission of a modelling paper about cultural attraction theory (the preprint, quite different from the current version, is here), I…
What FoodAnthropology Is Reading Now, January 9, 2020
David Beriss After a long hiatus, FoodAnthropology returns with a brief digest of food and nutrition-related items that caught our attention recently. Got items you think we should…
Interview: Nation at Play by Ronojoy Sen
Covering sporting activities from ancient times right up to the modern day, Ronojoy Sen’s Nation at Play: A History of Sport in India (Columbia University Press, 2016) is…
Teaching Intersectionality intersectionally: two different cups of tea?
BY KAY MARS Intersectionality has become somewhat of a buzzword in contemporary social sciences. It provided a short-hand term for a more complex and comprehensive understanding on identity,…
Neil McArthur, “Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications” (MIT Press, 2017)
Sexbots are coming. Given the pace of technological advances, it is inevitable that realistic robots specifically designed for people’s sexual gratification will be developed in the not-too-d… Visit…
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, “Aerial Imagination in Cuba: Stories from Above the Rooftops” (Routledge, 2019)
In her new book Aerial Imagination in Cuba: Stories from Above the Rooftops (Routledge, 2019), Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier looks up at the sky, and from there she begins her…
Interview: The Darjeeling Distinction by Sarah Besky
In this wonderful ethnography of Darjeeling tea, Sarah Besky explores different attempts at bringing justice to plantation life in north east India. Through explorations into fair trade, geographic…
ANZAC Parade in Adelaide: a tough nationalist monument with soft edges
BY FREEK COLOMBIJN More than two decades ago I published an article on the urban symbolism of Canberra, the national capital of Australia (Colombijn 1998). When Australian states…
What Modern Extremes Taught Me About Noise in the Ancient World
Today the cacophony of modern life makes it difficult to find, much less achieve, true silence. In our electrified world, there is always a rattle or hum somewhere.…
Society for American Archaeology writes a letter to President Donald Trump protesting threat of destruction of Iranian cultural sites
On January 6th, 2020, Joe E. Watkins, president of the Society for American Archaeology, wrote to U.S. President Donald Trump to protest the latter’s threat of military action…