The Written World: Using Fantasy Literature To Understand Culture
By Dana Burton Close your eyes, don’t read another word, and imagine the scene of your favorite fantasy book. Think about the details that make it vivid –…
New Book! Kathryn Furlong: Leaky Governance: Alternative Service Delivery and the Myth of Water Utility Independence
Material below copied from book site at UBC Press here. Municipalities face important water supply challenges. These are widely attributed to local government politicization. Neoliberal reforms have …
A Tempest in a Digital Teapot
It was hot, but that was not unusual. We woke up at the first call to prayer to be on site at sunrise. I would trudge through the…
Picture of a House – toward the ethnography of the academia
There was a time when universities were modelled after churches. Today their designs echo temples of different kinds – namely corporate headquarters. In light of what is going…
Have a peek at peeps magazine!
If I were to describe the first issue of peeps magazine that the editorial team kindly had sent to me in one word I would go for ‘unpretentious’.…
Why Does Everyone Hate Martin Shkreli? by Danya Glabau
The investor-boy-wunderkind-turned-pharmaceutical-CEO Martin Shkreli was the end of the year’s emblem of schadenfreude. Shkreli has been in the news regularly since September 2015 when his company, Tu…
Opportunity Awaits! Apply for the AAA 2016 Summer Internship Program!
Do you have an interest in marine archaeology or African art? Maybe you just want a productive way to spend your summer getting hands-on experience working in anthropology…
Message from the AAA President: Member Engagement Alert!
In closing my first AN President’s column, I declared AAA a safe, accessible and shared space that welcomes anthropologists to come together to discuss, deliberate, agree, disagree, and…
Practicing Anthropology in User Experience, Design and Business (AAA Webinar)
Last week I did a presentation for the American Anthropological Association about applying anthropology in user experience, design and business. There are ample career opportunities for anthropologist…
US Anthropology is Imperial, not Universal
Part Two of: “Canadian Anthropology or Cultural Imperialism?” Read Part One “today numerous topics directly issuing from the intellectual confrontations relating to the social particularity of Ameri…
Top 10 (or thereabout) of 2015
As we embark on yet another Allegra year, let’s take a look back: what were your favorite posts for 2015? Reading this list of our ‘Top 10 or…
Herd overproduction and star overproduction
I’ve been thinking about certain scholars who have written, for lack of a more precise way of putting it, a lot. The sort of people who seem to…
Southern Provisions
Ellen Messer Tufts University Shields, David S. (2015) Southern Provisions. The Creation and Revival of a Cuisine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Did you ever wonder where Carolina…
David Bowie, Anthropology, and the Pleasure of Difference
I’m hardly the biggest David Bowie fan in the world, but when I heard he had passed away I knew I the news would make waves in social media.…
The Shah of Snakes
Why Shahmaran Matters Shahmaran. Photo courtesy Aynur Ocak-Gundogan Within the cultural fabric of Anatolia and the plains of Mesopotamia lies the story of Shahmaran, a beautiful woman with…
Listening to Physical Geology. PART 2: The ecopoetics of data, a few lessons from Björk
More drinks. This time in the midst of a madding crowd, soon after returning from Krakatau, with an Icelandic artist known as Shopflifter. She was wearing a remarkable…
Anonymous Reviewer – we need to talk! #rejection
A while back I experienced bitter disappointment as yet another funding application was rejected. The fact that I was only one of thousands of disappointed applicants did little…
Storytelling and Worldbuilding in The Force Awakens
By Nicholas Mizer Last month Salon posted an insightful article by Gerry Canavan, an assistant professor of English at Marquette University. Canavan talks about similarities between Star Wars:…
Listening to Physical Geology. PART 1: Noise, disaster, and plastic thoughts
Over drinks with a seismologist, I recently learned that you can hear the ocean anywhere on the planet. Anywhere. Did you know that? No matter where you are…
San Bernardino
San Bernardino, National Forest, from Space. The raw satellite imagery shown in these images was obtain from NASA and/or the US Geological Survey. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons Long…