Reclaiming a Broken Future for the Past
The revolution in information and communications technologies, which had so much promise for broadening access and participation in scholarship, certainly seems much darker and more ominous now. Socia…
Susan Squier’s Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawing as Metaphor by Rebecca Rahimi
Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawing as Metaphor Susan Merrill Squier Duke University Press, 2017. 280 pages Susan Merrill Squier’s Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawing as Metaphor is positioned at t…
Dis/ability to do Fieldwork
Rine Vieth is a PhD candidate at McGill University in Tio’tia:ke/Montréal, Canada. They are currently researching how UK asylum tribunals consider religion and conversion, with a focus on…
Real-time rituals of elite male privilege
The late September 2018 public testimony of Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh before the US Senate Judiciary Committee gave the world an opportunity to observe the real-time…
Peter Harries-Jones, “Upside-Down Gods: Gregory Bateson’s World of Difference” (Fordham UP, 2016)
The work of polymath Gregory Bateson has long been the road to cybernetics travelled by those approaching this trans-disciplinary field from the direction of the social sciences and…
WE NEED YOU! Fundraising campaign
Allies, friends, colleagues, It’s this time of the year again… and we’ve had to make essential maintenance on the website. As the repairs were somewhat more extensive than…
Auroville: Stadt der Zukunft – Das gelebte Experiment
Pionier sein, Ödland in blühendes Paradies verwandeln, mit Gleichgesinnten an einer Stadt bauen, die auf ökologischer Nachhaltigkeit, Basisdemokratischer Organisationsform und Spiritualität gründet. U…
Encoding Value: What is cryptocurrency, and what does it mean for society?
Author: Stephanie Betz, PhD candidate at the Australian National University and a digital anthropologist researching the intersections between people and technology. Her doctoral research is an ethno…
Time, Regained by Kevin Karpiak
The following is taken from the forthcoming book, The Police Against Itself: Reassembling French Liberalism “After the Social,” an ethnography of French police administrative reform, the vicissitudes …
Why Don’t Westerners Eat Off One Plate?
The Hadzabe share food and daily tasks. Ryan Jarvis “Why don’t your students love each other?” asked Kaunda, a Hadza hunter, as we sat around the campfire overlooking…
What Makes the Human Foot Unique?
Adding a chapter in the story of what makes us human. — Read more on ScientificAmerican.com
Selfhood in flames? Imprisonment and Cauterization in Arizona’s Prison Wildfire Program
By Lindsey Raisa Feldman, PhD The United States, self-mythologized for centuries as a paragon of freedom and liberty, now serves as an ironic…
“Assisted Freedom”: Carceral Transmutation and Juvenile Offenders in Brazil
By Sara R. Munhoz In 2012, during my fieldwork in a semi-open socio-educational center on the outskirts of the city of São Paulo, I participated in a meeting…
Inside Out: Confinement, Revolt and Repression in Nicaragua
By Julienne Weegels Since 18 April 2018, the force deployed by the Sandinista state against a surge of popular protest has left over 400 dead, over 2,000 injured,…
Teaching Anthropology in 2018
Recently, a colleague contacted me with a very interesting and specific question. At the time, I was on the road and too busy to address his inquiry. I…
Art, neuroscience and ethnography
Neuroscience The brain is a wild and wonderful thing. Even in a damaged, broken, or diseased state, it performs wonders. Oliver Sacks, neurologist and prolific writer, knew this…
Book Review: British Social Theory: Recovering Lost Traditions Before 1950 by John Scott
In British Social Theory: Recovering Lost Traditions Before 1950, John Scott revisits the history of social theory and explores the works of many obscure, overlooked or neglected theorists born in…
Bill Ivey, “Rebuilding an Enlightened World: Folklorizing America” (Indiana UP, 2018)
Bill Ivey’s Rebuilding an Enlightened World: Folklorizing America (Indiana University Press, 2018) advances the idea that we are entering a post-enlightenment world increasingly characterized by alter… Visit New…
Welcome to the Authoritarian Kleptocracy, Part XXVIII
Apologies for the very long delay in website updates! We are now really on “Welcome to the Authoritarian Kleptocracy, Part One Billion”. Here’s what happened on a personal…
Book Review: Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles by Imaobong D. Umoren
In Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles, Imaobong D. Umoren traces the lives of three black women activist-intellectuals—Una Marson, Paulette Nardal and Es…
Thinking pain by Annelieke Driessen
Care worker Annika announces that she does not want to go to Mr Moran. “He always complains.” “I’ll go”, says her colleague Robin, and turning to me he…
Taking part in and being part of giving birth: Enacting participation in a midwife-led birth situation by Annekatrin Skeide
According to her midwife Jana, Mira’s was a textbook birth: it was quite fast, even for a second birth, and proceeded without any complications. In reflecting on her…
Opening up shrinking life-worlds by Maarten van Westen
Lives change dramatically as dementia progresses. Using observations of people suffering from obsessions and compulsions, I will analyse this change along three dimensions. Obsessive-Compulsive Disord…
Peripheral participants: Thinking through distortion, displacement, nullification by Henrik Vigh
Warm haze As I spoke, people looked at me worriedly. The kindness in their eyes was mixed with curiosity and concern. Rather than answering me, they turned to…