Gruesome TV: dumb culture returns?
The thing that strikes you about The Frankenstein Chronicles is how gruesome it is. This was true too of The Alienist. In both cases, the series begins with…
Why This Paleolithic Burial Site Is So Strange (and So Important)
Ivory beads and ochre—affixed to the pelvic bones of a child—likely decorated the burial clothing of this 10-year-old interred at Sunghir some 34,000 years ago. E. Trinkaus/Trinkaus and…
LSE Festival Beveridge 2.0 Feature: Introducing 5 Key Items in LSE Library Exhibition ‘A Time for Revolutions: Making the Welfare State’ (8 January – 13 April 2018)
Image Credit: A Time for Revolutions: Making the Welfare State exhibition, LSE Library, 8 Jan – 13 Apr 2018 (© London School of Economics and Political Science) In…
Lazy PowerPoint (Working With Text 4)
We all know we should bike to work, but sometimes the weather is bad, or we are late, or just feeling lazy, and so we take the car.…
Appeal to politicians: Italian anthropologists demand that more scientific information be made available to the public, in order to combat racism
Presse release of 6 February 2018: Scientific knowledge as an important tool in the social and political battle against racism: this proposal put forward by anthropologists will be presented Thursday,…
Orixás in den Alpen: Eine teilnehmende Beobachtung innerhalb von Umbanda-Gruppen in Brasilien und Europa
Inga Scharf da Silva (Humboldt-Universität Berlin) arbeitet zu “Trauma als Wissensarchiv. Postkoloniale Erinnerungspraxis in der sakralen Globalisierung am Beispiel der zeitgenössischen Umbanda”. Man…
Orixás in den Alpen: Eine teilnehmende Beobachtung innerhalb von Umbanda-Gruppen in Brasilien und Europa
Inga Scharf da Silva (Humboldt-Universität Berlin) arbeitet zu “Trauma als Wissensarchiv. Postkoloniale Erinnerungspraxis in der sakralen Globalisierung am Beispiel der zeitgenössischen Umbanda”. Man…
Black Dogs – följeslagare, demoner och hundlika varsel
Hunden har genom människans historia haft en ganska speciell roll som vän och följeslagare, vid sidan om rollen som sällskapsdjur . Hunden är inom många kulturer en viktig…
The Three Faces
Since taking a course on The Philosophy of Religion with Dr. Wendy Farley, I have developed an interest in studying death and suffering. Naturally, I began to pay…
What Would You Do?
Equality. A term flaunted in many public circles, political campaigns, and social justice movements. In these instances, “equality” refers to fairness and justice in life; the act of…
Book Forum––Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega’s Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject by Todd Meyers
Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega’s Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject is a fine-grained account of the “neuro-” in a range of disciplines, and, importantly––crucial…
Anthropological Reflections on a Family Death
Comparing my own experiences of death to those of the Tiwi culture that I learned of in my anthropology studies, the void that I felt in the months…
Rejecting the Solutrean hypothesis: the first peoples in the Americas were not from Europe
A recent Canadian documentary promoted a fringe idea in American archaeology that’s both scientifically wrong and racist Last month’s release of The Ice Bridge, an episode in the…
Rejecting the Solutrean hypothesis: the first peoples in the Americas were not from Europe
A recent Canadian documentary promoted a fringe idea in American archaeology that’s both scientifically wrong and racist Last month’s release of The Ice Bridge, an episode in the…
Ammara Maqsood, “The New Pakistani Middle Class” (Harvard UP, 2017)
The relationship between class and religious piety represents a theme less explored in the study of modern Islam in general, and in the study of South Asian Islam…
LSE Festival Beveridge 2.0 Reading List: 7 Recommended Reads on Housing and Urban Development
Image Credit: Mumbai, India, 2010 (Sunghwan Yoon CC BY SA 2.0) 75 years after the publication of the Beveridge report, LSE Festival Beveridge 2.0 (Mon 19 Feb – Sat 24 Feb…
Grief Can Make Us Wise
A candlelight vigil on February 15 honored the victims of the recent mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida. Jim Rassol/Getty Images In the first hours…
1968 – was ist geblieben?
Die 68er sind in die Jahre gekommen – und mit ihnen ihre Ideale. 1968, das ist lange her. Seither hat sich in der Schweiz viel verändert. Wir können…
in Madagascar, caring is a community affair
Professor Douglas Hume with his research assistants in Mahatsara, Madagascar, in summer 2012; they were conducting an ethnographic interview with an informant (not pictured). Provided by Douglas Hume…
Lecturer in Digital Anthropology
The UCL Department of Anthropology has a new position, a lectureship in Digital Anthropology. Open to anyone with a strong ethnographic foundation to their research into the digital.…
DragNet: February 1 – February 15, 2018
Image from ACLU.org For this dragnet update we have several fascinating articles to highlight. Among the stories from the United states was an article on the NYPD’s unofficial power…
‘Realizing the Witch’ by Baxstrom and Meyers
Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers. Realizing the Witch: Science, Cinema, and the Mastery of the Invisible. 296pp., 64 b&w illus., filmography, bibl., index. New York: Fordham University Press,…
How Bad Is Food Insecurity for Disabled Americans? It’s worse than the Census data show
Elaine Gerber With the 2020 Census around the corner and proposed changes to it highly politicized , I want to hold up to everyone – especially my fellow food ethnographers…
Book Review: Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence by Rachel Sherman
In Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence, Rachel Sherman undertakes 50 in-depth interviews with rich New Yorkers to consider how they navigate their anxieties and the negative connotations surroun…