Anonymous and trolling in context
What does the Guy Fawkes mask (from the 2006 film V for Vendetta, based on David Lloyd & Alan Moore’s 1981 graphic novel) mean to Anonymous and their…
Anonymous and trolling in context
What does the Guy Fawkes mask (from the 2006 film V for Vendetta, based on David Lloyd & Alan Moore’s 1981 graphic novel) mean to Anonymous and their…
Why Do We Share Viral Videos?
Why have cats taken over the Internet? — Read more on ScientificAmerican.com
Celebrating Allies – part 2: Combating stereotypes with Rusty Radiators – REDUX
Yesterday we highlighted one important development that took place for the Allegra team in March of 2014, namely that we were joined by Ninnu Koskenalho who for the…
Why do we share viral videos?
Why have cats taken over the Internet? — Read more on ScientificAmerican.com
ASAP 2016 Graduate Paper Prize
An award announcement from the Association for the Anthropology of Policy, of possible interest to graduate students: The Association for the Anthropology of Policy (ASAP) invites submissions for…
Tools We Use: Aeon Timeline 2
There are a lot of things in life that can be solved with a good timeline. While most people tend to think of them as a specialized way…
Dancing “My Humps” in Rural China
Every evening in Anshan Town, a rural village in China’s Shandong province, around 25 middle-aged women gather in the small public square to dance to the Black Eyed…
Water, democracy, neoliberalism
Sidney Mintz’ classic work on sugar illustrated how “following the thing” can tell us about deeper cultural and political issues. Now, Anthropologist Andrea Muehlebach’s recent work “finds water…
How ‘Maintainers,’ Not ‘Innovators,’ Make the World Turn
I have been hearing a lot about ‘disrupters’ and ‘innovators’ in tech and marketing industries lately, and something about that language has always irked me. Lee Vinsel (an…
Uzbekistan 2015: Year in Review
It was another rough year for Uzbekistan, with entrenched corruption, forced cotton labor, and an economy weakened by the Russian remittance crisis among the key trends. My report for Nations…
How to manage many stakeholders
A note on style: I wrote this in a hotel room somewhere. I used Scapple from Literature and Latte to do it. It was really just a note…
Coming to #SCA2016: Infrastructures of Collaboration
I am excited to announce with my co-organizer, Amy Robbins, that our panel for the biennial meeting of the Society for Cultural Anthropology has been accepted and is…
The state of indigenous language and culture in Canada
The Canadian government’s program of cultural genocide in residential schools included the erasure of aboriginal languages. In Undoing Linguicide (an hour long audio documentary for CBC Radio’s Ideas…
Chris Hann: On Saxony-Anhalt bashing
Regional elections in Germany have seldom if ever attracted as much attention as they did on Sunday, 13 March 2016. This was the first opportunity for the electorate…
Algorithmic Intelligence? Reconstructing Citizenship through Digital Methods
In the next post for ‘The Person in the (Big) Data‘ edition, Chris Birchall @birchallchris talks us through a variety of methods – big, small and mixed – that he used…
A Tale of Two Syrias
A view of Damascus. Photo courtesy Faedah M Totah The human misery and destruction created by regime forces bombarding Syrian cities and towns has reinforced the unique status…
Keep uploading papers to ResearchGate so its founder can pursue his beach volleyball ambitions
It is an interesting coincidence that just as I am finishing Dan Lyons’ book Disrupted-My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (review in the New York Times, my own…
Silo as System: Infrastructural Interventions into the Political Economy of Wheat
Ateya Khorakiwala, Harvard University § This post underscores how the seemingly straightforward and yet iconic American silo evolved into a different kind of storage infrastructure when it encountered…
Because we’re #HAPPY? REDUX
Today we have, once again, witnessed the arrival of the World Happiness Reports – reports that claim nothing less than to offer a neatly quantified, ‘objective’ measurement of just…
Flüchtlinge als Herausforderer tradierter Grenzziehungen
Es gibt eine wirkmächtige Erzählung über die Funktion nationalstaatlicher Grenzen: Sie sind zentraler Ort der Überwachung von Migration und ihre Stärke und Schwäche stehen und fallen mit der…
Racist Mascots
Alongside all of the excitement and fanfare that accompanied the recent start to the 2016 MLB season (go Jays!), seeing sportscasters (and twitter users) discuss the team in…
“Anthropology for peace”
In the Communications Unit at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) where I work, there are posters from an old engagement campaign that read “_____ for peace.” The…