#Review: Do Muslim Women Need Saving?
Lila Abu-Lughod’s book, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, expands on her thoughts from an earlier article similarly titled. As she explains, this book is “a long answer to the…
Buses in South and North Teheran: Education and Schooling #Fieldnotes
The bus I was riding on my way to Tajrish (north Tehran) was beyond maximum capacity with its passengers. We were cramped and people stood and sat in…
Good bye (and good riddance) to Human Terrain System
Both Counterpunch and Inside Higher Ed ran stories recently on the end of Human Terrain System or HTS. What was HTS? A program run by the army and employing…
Community-Based Ebola Care Centres: A Formative Evaluation
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa differed from others in its unprecedented size and the high proportion of human-to-human transmission occurring in the community. This report presents an…
Thinking About Liminality in Tahrir Square
I have a chapter on the Egyptian revolution in this new book. As I struggled to make sense of the dramatic changes in Egypt from January 2011 forward,…
Why the #HackingTeam hack should be a wake-up call for the #globaldev community
You may have seen the #HackingTeam hack story emerging in your networks and thought it to be some strange, fringe tech-hack whatever issue…think again! As first insights from…
Unleashing the Chaîne Opératoire: Students’ experimentation with an old methodology.
Ludovic Coupaye, UCL Anthropology Over the last five years, undergraduate and postgraduate students enrolled in the course emphatically called “Transforming and Creating Worlds: Anthropological Perspe…
Canada’s Waste Network Launched!
Canada’s Waste Network has just launched! It aims to connect social science and humanities researchers interested in Canadian waste issues. Join now!
Food Banks: Canned Justice or Fuel For activism?
By Aaron Vansintjan. How the food industry made waste ‘benevolent’. Food Banks: Canned Justice or Fuel For activism?
From Edgware Road to Brixton on 7/7
This piece was first presented as an academic paper at the 9th EASA Biennial Conference: Bristol, UK. September 18th – 21st, 2006. Introduction This paper focuses on observations…
On real problems
I came across a confrontational moment in one of my interview transcripts. We had been talking about philosophers’ metanarratives about “truth.” But my interlocutor found my question…
NEW!—Theodoros Rakopoulos: Of direct and default democracy: The debt referendum in Greece
Thessaloniki, 4–5 July 2015 Default has a twofold meaning: it means both “taken for granted,” or the known path, and an economic halt on someone’s debts. Greece has…
Kocku von Stuckrad, “The Scientification of Religion: An Historical Study of Discursive Change, 1800-2000”
Science and religion are often paired as diametric opposites. However, the boundaries of these two fields were not always as clear as they seem to be today. In…
Around the Web Digest: Week of June 28
Savage Minders, was your Sunday ruined by the absence of the Around the Web Digest? I’ll have to cast the blame on my intermittent Internet access here in…
The US Army’s Human Terrain System Bites the Dust
….some argue that HTS was a good idea that was badly mismanaged. It would be more accurate to say that HTS was a bad idea that was badly…
Links & Contents I Liked 149
Hi all, Who do anthropologists think they are?! was my question last week. This week we have new links on the humanitarian economy, a growing number of children…
Children’s Ebola Recovery Assessment: Sierra Leone
Nearly half the population of Sierra Leone is under the age of 18 years and the impact of the Ebola crisis on their lives now and on their…
Africa APPG inquiry: Community led health systems & the Ebola outbreak
The Ebola crisis of 2014-15 has brought questions around the roles of communities and health systems into sharp relief – both in relation to crisis response, and to…
“The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.”
“The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.” – Ruth Benedict (1887-1948)
Encased: Plotting Attentions through Distraction by Melissa Biggs
Cases set boundaries; cases draw you in. Often imagined as they appear in traditional museums – archipelagos of order in ordered spaces with carefully placed markers for larger…
Disability: A Sister’s Ambivalence
I have a confession: there are many days when I wish I was anything but a disability researcher. I think wistfully to my high school aspirations of becoming…
Cultivating Childhood #EmergingDigitalPractices
Samira and Amna visit me in the afternoon after finishing Quran school (madrasa). After they have taken off their buibuis (long black overdress) and head scarves Samira continues…
Antropologie: een kansloze discipline? (2)
Griekse burgers in discussie met elkaar. Door Herbert Ploegman. Meer dan drie jaar geleden schreef ik een blog op Standplaats Wereld met bovenstaande titel. Ik was net afgestudeerd, en…