The Evolutionary Enigma of the Human Eyebrow
[no-caption] Pexels This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. Eyebrows. We all have them, but what are they actually for? …
Projit Bihari Mukharji’s Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences by Marshall Kramer
Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences Projit Bihari Mukharji University of Chicago Press, 2016. 376 pages. In a sequel to his 2009 Nationalizing the Body,…
Dan Bendarz, “East German Intellectuals and the Unification of Germany: An Ethnographic View” (Palgrave, 2017)
In his new book, East German Intellectuals and the Unification of Germany: An Ethnographic View (Palgrave 2017), Dan Bednarz, Assistant Professor at Bristol Community College, examines the impact of…
An Anthropologist’s Obsession with Outlander
I have been on hiatus from blogging for some time, mainly due to two factors. First, I launched a public anthropology podcast, Anthropologist on the Street (huzzah!), which…
Web Round Up: Clinical Trials on Trial by Moira Kyweluk
This month saw breaking news web-wide on one aspect of medicine that has drawn critiques and support from both social scientists and biomedical experts: clinical trials. Drug trials…
Talking in Silences
Elizabeth has an agency all of her own, albeit one that we might not be familiar with, and so to reduce her experience only to the ties of…
American culture* and the story of OJ
[This post was originally published on Medium and LinkedIn.] This is a series of posts that examines how and why American culture matters to American business. The opening…
How a Eurasian Steppe Empire Coped With Decades of Drought
[no-caption] Tuul & Bruno Morandi /Getty Images The bitterly cold, dry air of the Central Asian steppe is a boon to researchers who study the region. The frigid…
Humanitarian diagnostics for sleeping sickness in Uganda by Jennifer Palmer
Map of sleeping sickness RDT availability (red dots) in the north-western region of Uganda hosting refugees from South Sudan. In 2015, the majority of refugees in this region…
The Magnificent Indians: Sebastião Salgado’s studio in the Amazon forest
The Javari Valley has always attracted cameras and documentarists. The beauty of the Indians living in this high forest is irresistible. As I learned from Txema Matis, such…
party -stay or go?
Rosa writing to Henriette Roland Holst, August 2011 is firm, chastising and correct, and it seems effective, Holst forms a new group which later enters the SPD, although…
Rosa on Lenin p298 Mimi’s Critique
Laugh out loud passage in Rosa Luxemburg’s letter of April 2 2011 to Kostya Zetkin (Clara’s son) about Lenin’s visits and the sharp dialectical criticism of Lenin by…
Chemeketa Creek Becomes Mill Creek
A creek in Salem, Oregon, presently named Mill Creek (GNIS 1163145), was named such in the 1850’s. To aid the flow of the original creek, that had been…
Latino Memphis
By Simone Pierre Delerme Memphis’ Summer Avenue has become an enclave with a concentration of Latino-owned restaurants and small businesses. Along the corridor, one will find some…
American culture* and the Harvard Business School discovery
[this post was originally published on Medium and LinkedIn] When the Harvard Business School invited me to teach a few years ago, I had one question. “Why?”…
Gun Violence in American Schools
There is something terribly wrong going on in American schools today. A silent epidemic is spreading throughout the country like a cancer. What does it say about a…
Indigenous Women’s Engagements with Technology: From Anomaly to Autonomy
Introduction: Satellite Túpac Katari Editor’s note: this post is also available in Spanish, from the link in the sidebar. In 2013, Bolivia became the last of South America’s…
Gun Cultures Reflect Broader Changes in American Society by Joseph Henderson
Author’s Note: I originally wrote this article for my institution’s student-run literary magazine after the Parkland shooting. Our little community was engaged in passionate debate about “gun culture”…
Why do people not leave Facebook?
Last week – April 25 – Facebook posted the 2018 first-quarter data on revenues and users (here the original post from Facebook.) The perhaps unexpected take-home message is…
Mark Liechty, “Far Out: Countercultural Seekers and the Tourist Encounter in Nepal” (U of Chicago Press, 2017)
How did Nepal become synonymous, in the minds of many Westerners, with the idea of a mystical paradise and a place to find enlightenment? How did Kathmandu become…
Erica Lehrer, “Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places” (Indiana UP, 2013)
Sometime in the very early 1990s, while I was in grad school, I got a call from a student at Grinnell College, where I myself had graduated asking…
Interview: Religionswissenschaftler Michael Blume wird Antisemitismus-Beauftragter Baden-Württembergs
Michael Blume ist nicht nur mit diesem vierten Interview Rekordhalter im REMID-Blog – es ging um sehr verschiedene Themen wie Evolutionary Religious Studies, Yeziden in Kurdistan-Irak und Krise…
Interview: Religionswissenschaftler Michael Blume wird Antisemitismus-Beauftragter Baden-Württembergs
Michael Blume ist nicht nur mit diesem vierten Interview Rekordhalter im REMID-Blog – es ging um sehr verschiedene Themen wie Evolutionary Religious Studies, Yeziden in Kurdistan-Irak und Krise…
Pacific salmon declines and the thread-bare promises of modernity
By Neil Nunn, University of Toronto§ At every turn in my research examining the politics of mine-waste, salmon have spoken to me. They speak through a groundswell of…