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…
Distance learning opportunity in cultural anthropology research methods from the University of Florida
Registration: Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology Registration for courses in the Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology program at the University of Florida is open. Four courses (listed be…
Celebrating Allies – ALL WEEK! Glimpses from behind the scenes!
Over the past few weeks, Allegra has been deeply engaged with a theme that is both topical and urgent: human smuggling. Close observers may have noticed that with…
Anthro in the news 4/11/16
Sex trafficking and tea CNN carried an article following up on a series of videos it did last month about how girls growing up on tea plantations in…
Das Parfüm im Kontext geschlechtlicher Subjektivierungsprozesse
Diesen Text als PDF herunterladen Einleitung Geschlecht kann, neben Rasse, als die Kategorie zur Klassifikation von Menschen gesehen werden, welche in den letzten Jahrzehnten grundsätzlich in Frage ge…
The Brussels attack and liberal Islamophobia
“WICHITA, KS – MARCH 5: A group of Muslim students take selfies before Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump made a speech at a campaign rally on March 5,…
Abortion and Human Rights in Mexico
Feminist Approaches within and Around the Law At a recent Mexico City training session in her organization’s model of abortion accompaniment (the provision of emotional and logistical support…
Nutrient Rifts
The nineteenth-century critique of the emerging “metabolic rift” between city sewers and country farms lamented that with the rise of the sanitary metropolis and the emergence of input-intensive…