Written in Blood
How my research on DNA ancestry tests became fake news. When I was sent a link to a Snopes article asking, “Did DNA Testing Companies Admit to Altering…
Category: English
In praise of the scaffolding
In my experience, when the ethnographic mission collapsed, this scaffolding remained standing, rich and complex, in plain view. There, the net into which I fell. (Rosaldo 2014: 112)…
Marx’s Library
From Old Beardo’s library (as listed in the MEGA), the following books related to India or the East India Company have underlining or marginalia by Marx, in blue…
Hominins Likely Left Africa Earlier Than Believed
Our ancestors may have been on the move out of Africa 300,000 years earlier than we originally thought — Read more on ScientificAmerican.com
Pee-You Kalapuyans of the Southern Willamette Valley
In the 1850’s, settlers came to Oregon and renamed many valleys, features, and places. Many of them brought names from the eastern states, place-names like Portland, Springfield, and…
Land, Labour & Society in Aceh: Chandra Jayawardena’s unpublished fieldnotes
This post is a little outside our usual mandate, but we are intrigued by the idea that Professor Robinson proposes: an interactive online project she is working on…
Why Eradicating Polio Is More Complicated Than It Seems
A health worker in Karachi, Pakistan, delivers polio vaccine drops to a child. Rizwan Tabassum/Getty Images In a rapidly urbanizing sector of Karachi, Pakistan, dry and dusty hills…
On Permissionless Innovation
Many libertarians in Silicon Valley are advocates for permissionless innovation. They eschew waiting around for permission from a nanny state. They are impatient and see themselves above the…
Destruction of weavers
Their bones will, Marx says, end up bleached on the plains of Bihar. Here Ranajit Guha in 1956 examines how colonial policy and corporation demands destroy livelihoods and…
#Review of Odudwa’s Chain
This seamless compilation of essays has the feel of a life’s work. Through the lens of his scholarship on the Yoruba, Andrew Apter tackles debates in anthropology of…
Bringing anthropologies of the state to Mainz: A workshop report
With #anthrostate, allegralab seems to suggest that there is a distinct subdiscipline of anthropology that studies the contemporary state. However, following Bourdieu (1994), Navaro-Yashin (2002) or m…
Consulting, Big Data and Social Justice w/ Dr. Tricia Wang – This Anthro Life
Dr. Tricia Wang sees her work consulting as sitting at the crossroads of data and social justice. As a global tech ethnographer, Dr. Wang is obsessed with how…
“Laying the Cards on the Table”
Michel Leiris. Phantom Africa. Translated by Brent Hayes Edwards. Africa List Series. 720 pp., 37 halftones, 3 fascimiles, 1 map. Calcutta, London, and New York: Seagull Books, 2017.…
Cancer Culture avant la lettre by Vincent Bruyère
Figure 1. Two views of Clara Jacobi (Netherlands, 1689). U.S. National Library of Medicinehttps://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101392944-img In the class I teach on illness narratives, c…
The Elysium Effect: Space Law and Commercial Space Disparities
By Savannah Mandel Have you ever seen Elysium? It’s a 2013 science fiction movie directed by Neill Blomkamp about a future Earth where the elitist upper echelon of…
Thomas Hylland Eriksen on Australia’s Boomtown and its ecological sustainability: Interview
Thomas Hylland Eriksen is professor of social anthropology at the University of Oslo. He is the author of numerous books, including Fredrik Barth: An Intellectual History; Ethnicity and Nationalism; A…
Modern Lives and Stone Age Minds: The Ambiguous Rhetoric of Evolutionary Mismatch
Over the last three decades, popular science authors have used evolutionary mismatch theory to shed light on a vast number of modern social problems, pointing to differences between…
Senegalese Football’s Impossible Dream
After a sixteen-year absence, Senegal’s football team returned to the World Cup, but their sporting success belies the risks and uncertainties of an unequal global sports industry. A…
anthro in the news 7/9/18
Relatives of the soccer team members and the coach pray at a shrine for their rescue. Credit: Sakchai Lalit/Associated Press a goddess is watching over them As reported…
Kiwi, the imaginary ethnographer
this is, you know, pretty great. Please visit the show on the theme of Imaginary Ethnography in Experimental Music and Sound on the web space of Jeu de Paume: Fourth Worlds…
Bruce Kapferer: The Hau complicity: An event in the crisis of anthropology
Hau is a phenomenon. It burst on the scene of the relatively small academic scholarly world of anthropology capturing scholars from around the globe into its spirit. Hau…
Damien Stankiewicz on his new book, Europe Un-imagined
https://utorontopress.com/us/europe-un-imagined-2 Interview by Ilana Gershon Ilana Gershon: You open Europe Un-Imagined by suggesting that while the television channel you studied aimed to fashion a …
Anthropology of Coptic Christianity Since 2012
I was having dinner in Seoul recently with an old friend who taught in Egypt back around 2000. Living in East Asia for the past decade, he hasn’t…
Masterplan Migration: Aktionismus, der viel Schaden anrichtet
Gastkommentar zu geplanten Maßnahmen Autor: Prof. Dr. Werner Schiffauer Lange wurde spekuliert, was genau Horst Seehofer (CSU) mit dem “Masterplan Migration” vorhat. Nun sind die Inhalte bekannt. In…