Night Soil and the Metabolic Rift
Our latest article is out, which examines the history and cross-cultural management of human waste (or “night soil”) as an agricultural resource. The paper grew out of a…
Category: English
Fact in Fiction: Examining archaeology’s influence on the speculative genre
By Catherine Hill Anyone who has a passable knowledge of the works of novelist HP Lovecraft is probably aware of the prominent role that archaeology and intrepid archaeologists…
Stone Age Myths We’ve Made Up
When most members of the general public think of the Stone Age, they probably envision an adult male hominin wielding a stone tool. That picture is laughably incomplete.…
John D. Hawks, “Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story” (National Geographic, 2017)
John D. Hawks talks about new developments in paleoanthropology – the discovery of a new hominid species Homo Naledi in South Africa, the Neanderthal ancestry of many human…
#Review: Out of “love” and “solidarity”
Out of “love” and “solidarity”, an ethnography written in Greek, is Katerina Rozakou’s insightful study of two volunteer organizations that helped refugees in Athens in the early 200…
A Call for Transformation: Dismantling Extractive Partnerships
After introducing my call for transformation within museums and the wider academic-industrial complex, and presenting the first part of my call, ending the myth of neutrality, I am…
How Skirts Are Changing Bolivian Wrestling
Martha La Alteña (right) and Susana La Bonita (left) wrestle in El Alto, Bolivia. Aizar Raldes/Getty Images This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republis…
Jennifer Reich’s Calling the Shots Why Parents Reject Vaccines by Travis Chi Wing Lau
Calling the Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines Jennifer Reich NYU Press, 2016. 336 pages. A timely intervention into recent anti-vaccination controversies, Jennifer Reich’s Call…
Urban decay and how HGTV can fix it
I was reading Axios today and came across an article that describes the desperate conditions of some American neighborhoods. Working with data collected by Lincoln Institute of Land Policy,…
Not knowing as pedagogy: Ride-hailing drivers in Delhi
*A note from Co-PI Noopur Raval: The arrival and rise of gig-work globally has ushered in a new wave of conversations around the casualization of labor and the precarious…
A Counterfeiting Guide To Preventing Your Business from Falling Victim to Fake Money
The Counterfeiters Guide to Spotting Counterfeit Money Counterfeit money is a problem that is not going away anytime soon. It affects everyone from the average consumer to governments…
No Country for Anthropologists?
The conference No Country for Anthropologists? Ethnographic Research in the Contemporary Middle East, which we co-organized and hosted at the University of Zurich in November 2018, addressed major…
Review: Organic Sovereignties
Organic Sovereignties. Struggles over Farming in an Age of Free Trade. Guntra A. Aistara. University of Washington Press. 2018. ISBN: 9780295743110. Laura Kihlstrom (University of South Florida) Gunt…
Alaska Grown
Abigail Adams Central Connecticut State University Our plane descended for landing in Anchorage, which was fully visible at 10 pm in June’s Alaskan midnight sun, and I stored…
Book Review: Theory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology by Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer
In Theory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer argues that speculative fiction offers a rich vein to theorise catastrophe and crisis in ways t…
Video interview by Alan Macfarlane
Starting already in the early 1980s, Prof. Em. Alan Macfarlane of Cambridge University has produced a great number of interviews with thinkers and theorists in anthropology, history, philosophy…
#REVIEW: An Anthropology of Nothing in Particular
Do the efforts to avoid meaningful action among young Nihilists in an undisclosed location make sense in a time where everything seems to be saturated with purpose? Does…
Review: Eating Tomorrow
Wise, Tim (2019) Eating Tomorrow. Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food. New York: The New Press. ISBN 9781620974223 Ellen Messer, Ph.D. (Tufts University…
Life/NonLife: a forum by Ann H. Kelly
This Somatosphere forum features essays written in the wake of a debate held at the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the United Kingdom…
SpW summer break & summer readings!
It’s the end of another academic year and time for a break. We would like to thank all the writers of this last year: we appreciate your contributions!…
Students as laboratory labor
What is the role of students in universities? There are ongoing contentious debates and campus protests about whether graduate students should be considered employees with the right to…
The end of negotiations!?
Whereas the 1990s were still marked by a certain globalisation euphoria in which there removal of barriers in social processes of negotiation appeared to be achievable on a…
Is Data Always Right?
For several years now, data has been a master key unlocking many doors in marketing. The days are long past when large data volumes were the…