William Leap’s Reflections upon Retirement
William Leap August 13, 2018 William Leap is retiring after being a professor of anthropology at American University for 46 years. Ilana Gershon asks him to reflect on…
Category: English
Bonnie Urciuoli’s Reflections on Retirement
SLA INTERVIEW WITH BONNIE URICIUOLI August 15, 2017 Bonnie Urciuoli. Nancy L. Ford What article or book that you wrote are you most pleased with? Could you talk about…
UNDERTONES: Leiris, Lévi-Strauss and Opera
By Jean Jamin Translated by Simon Torracinta Editors’ note: The editors of the History of Anthropology Review are delighted to publish this essay by Jean Jamin. As readers…
Care – a Christmas Carol
The inadequacy of charitable care as an international cure is evidenced despite the widespread propagation of philanthropic intervention. Bill Gates dedicates millions towards eradication of less glam…
Teaching Anthropology through Sequential Art (Part II)
By Andrew Gilbert In Part I of this essay, I discussed the design and goals of a new course I had developed on graphic novels in an upper-year…
Miriam Driessen, “Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia” (Hong Kong UP, 2019)
I met Dr Miriam Driessen at Oxford University where she works at the China Centre. We spoke about her wonderful new book Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness:…
Is Artificial Intelligence Magic?
Artificial intelligence can perform feats that seem like sorcery. AI can drive cars and fly drones. It can compose original music, write poetry that isn’t too awful, and…
Safdar Hashmi
So, in 1988 I was evading fieldwork or whatever it was – frankly, I had abandoned the very idea – and was hanging around with a writer whose…
Thomas Yarrow, “Architects: Portraits of a Practice” (Cornell UP, 2019)
What is creativity? What is the relationship between work life and personal life? How is it possible to live truthfully in a world of contradiction and compromise? These…
Reciprocity in Silicon Valley: The prominent role of gift giving among tech entrepreneurs in the Bay Area
‘Marcel Mauss applied to Silicon Valley’ – by Vivienne Schröder During my three months of fieldwork in the Bay Area on the work/private life situation of early-stage tech…
Why the Earth Must Be Mapped
A lidar scan of a site in Mexico reveals the boundaries of a ceremonial area. Chris Fisher The climate crisis represents humanity’s greatest threat. Our daily news is…
Sharing Polar Cultures and Knowledge: Perspectives from Libraries and Archives
Our colleagues from the library have alerted us to their colloquium, which is this year about the participation of knowledge-holders in the sharing and archiving practices that have…
Ethnography and the Internet – what´s next?
The Internet has been attracting researchers’ attention for long. As a relatively new territory, it presents a methodological challenge. For anthropologists as well. On the one hand, it…
#events: Let’s Get Geographical!
They say ‘the early bird catches the worm’. Would you like to catch that worm? Or, perhaps, that worm isn’t so enticing! How about a short course on…
Nichaqwali Watlala peoples at Blue Lake
The Nichaqwali people, a Cascades/Watlala Chinookan band, lived at the juncture of several cultural groups that lived in the larger region of the lower Columbia and who interacted…
Neanderthals: Body of Evidence
As every fan of crime drama television knows, the human body holds a wealth of information about its once-living owner. Flesh and bugs may tell of time of…
The Server Souvenir: Taking Home Remnants of Virtual Worlds
“It’s amazing to think those little circuits that we can carry around were an entire world to us.” –Diana*, interviewee “We might say that this capacity of objects…
Trade
Issues of trade have come to renewed attention, as the global trading system has been rocked by upended agreements and cries for economic populism. Anthropology has long been…
In the search of a school for Nancy: stories of disability, inclusion and care by
Procura-se uma escola para Nancy: histórias de deficiência, inclusão e cuidados. For English, click here. Com pouco mais de três anos, chegou a hora de Nancy – a…
Links & Contents I Liked 348
Hi all, I was in Armenia last week & enjoyed a fantastic final seminar at Yerevan State University with our internationalization project-so that explains the slightly unusual time…
Carrie Clanton takes the page 99 test
My PhD thesis, Uncanny Others: Hauntology, Ethnography, Media, started out as an ethnographic study of people who pursue ghosts as a hobby in the U.K. As a visual…
Book Review: Anatomies of Revolution by George Lawson
In Anatomies of Revolution, George Lawson offers a new account of how revolutions begin, unfold and end through a dynamic amalgam of in-depth sociological theory, multiple historical narratives and po…
Maziyar Ghiabi, “Drug Politics: Managing Disorder in the Islamic Republic of Iran” (Cambridge UP, 2019)
Iran has one of the planet’s highest rates of addiction. Maziyar Ghiabi‘s Drug Politics: Managing Disorder in the Islamic Republic of Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2019) offers a fascinat… Visit…
William D. Lopez, “Separated: Family & Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)
What happens to families and communities after immigration raids? William D. Lopez answers this question and more in his new book Separated: Family & Community in the Aftermath…